The Passing Show (1960)

The Passing Show Column from the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

If our civilisation perishes, as others have perished, and leaves behind very little in the way of written record, any future historian might still get a reasonably clear picture of our society by reading an account of the “towpath murder,” as it has come to be called, at Twickenham. He would read how four youths attacked one young man, whom none of them had ever seen before, and against whom they had no personal grudge, in order to rob him of any valuables he might have on him. He would read how when the victim was lying on the ground moaning, one of the assailants (in his own words) “kicked him twice on the head to keep him quiet.” The assailant made this statement in evidence, without apparently any admission that such behaviour was much out of the ordinary. The future historian would then read how the victim had died, and how the trial ended with sentences of hanging and imprisonment.

Violence

Anyone from a future era who read this would be horrified, and rightly so. What kind of society was this (he would ask himself) that bred such men? Anyone who supports our system of society might well ask himself the same question. For this brutality didn’t happen among the Hottentots of Africa; nor did it happen in an enemy country in time of war (if it had done, we should not have lacked people to tell us how terrible the nation must be where such a thing could occur); it happened right here, in this society, in this country in the suburbs of the capital, London. Can we be surprised? In our society the great god is the acquisition of wealth, and a minor god is its ostentatious spending, which assures us of the admiration of our fellows. Violence, which is required by our ruling class when it engages in war, is portrayed and glorified by the press, the cinema, the television. Anyone who refuses to engage in violence when his rulers demand it is shunned by society, sneered at, perhaps imprisoned. Inevitably the more impressionable natures come to look on violence as admirable, especially if it leads to that great end of our morality, the gaining of money. And so we have violent crime. Then society seeks a solution in hanging the individuals responsible. Society thinks it is hanging its own failures, but that it cannot do. To find a solution, society must re-organise itself on a civilised basis.

Republic

Dr. Verwoerd has won his majority for the creation of a South African Republic. True, he did it by restricting the right to vote to those whose faces were the correct shade of greyish-pink, and barring those whose skins had colours in the range from light brown to black. Even then he had to ensure his success by counting in the votes of the greyish-pink minority who live in South-West Africa (which is not part of the Union of South Africa at all). Nevertheless, he won. The landowning class, which has always been opposed to the connection with the British crown, has triumphed; and the capitalist class of South Africa has lost. How long will the South African capitalists endure this? Wherever they look in the world today, they see the capitalists ruling supreme. Everywhere they see the workers voting for the one capitalist party (in totalitarian states) or for one of two or more capitalist parties (in democratic states). Because of the race fears carefully fostered by the South African landowners, many South African workers must have given their votes to the landowners instead of to the capitalists. How greedily the capitalists must cast their eyes on the nine million voteless inhabitants of the Union! Surely, the capitalists reason, if these were enfranchised, most of them would vote for us. It must only be a question of time now before the South African capitalists, their power growing steadily as trade and industry grow, make their bid for political as well as economic power.

Retail Technicians

The Bridlington Chamber of Commerce doesn't like the sound of the words “shop hands” and “shop assistants.” It thinks other names should be substituted—“retail tacticians,” “sales staff,” or “ counter public relations officers.” We don’t put so much emphasis on names: we are concerned with realities. As workers, we don’t care what we are called. We believe it is time that society was no longer divided into two classes, capitalists and workers (whatever the latter may be named); it is time that we became simply, and fully, human beings.

Thanks to Him

The People (14/8/60) printed an article about the fraudulent claims which have been made by some advertisers in the United States. It quotes many examples from a book called The Operators, by Frank Gibney. The prize one is perhaps an advertisement offering shares in “the world's richest undrilled oil field.’’ It waxed lyrical: “Thanks to Him from Whom all the joyful things of the earth flow forth—a Divine Guidance without which this exceedingly great joy could not now be ours. . ." This line was a great success, and the money rolled in. The advertisers were a million dollars to the good-before it came out that this particular bit of Divine Guidance had only indicated a barren patch of land in Utah; so the law intervened.

Phoney Claims

No doubt it occurred to The People that this and similar advertisements quoted in the article would hardly encourage its readers to put much faith in its own adverts. Which, in turn, wouldn’t encourage its advertisers—and newspapers make their profit out of their advertisement revenue. Hence repeated assurances that this kind of thing couldn’t happen here:

British newspapers believe in protecting their readers against exploitation. The Advertising Association maintains an advertisement investigation department to ensure that any advertisement which makes phoney claims, exaggerates, tries to frighten you. or is in any way unethical, never reaches print. National newspapers like The People investigate every new advertiser thoroughly to make sure that his company is reputable and that his product can do all he claims of it.

Well, there it is in black and white. So all those soap powders and detergents that claim to wash cleaner than all the others, and all the petrols that say they have more power than all the others, and all the cigarettes which insist they are made of better tobacco than all the others—well, they are all correct. No “phoney claims’’ or “exaggerations” would ever be permitted—The People says so. Each manufacturing line is like a race, in which each competitor beats all the others.

Luck on Purchase

In view of The People's statements an advertisement appearing in its stable-mate, the Daily Herald, is particularly interesting. It offers a "Lucky Welsh Lady Key Ring" for 2s. 6d. It apparently consists of a simple metal key ring, plus a mascot attached to it. The advert states boldly "Luck on Purchase." Are we expected to believe that the Daily Herald has "investigated this advertiser thoroughly” to make sure that the “product can do all he claims of it ”? Or are The People's sweeping statements merely to make sure advertisers aren’t discouraged from paying for space in its columns?

Alwyn Edgar

Pathfinders: More Tales from the Crypto (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In autumn last year youthful fintech whizzkid Sam Bankman-Fried, proprietor of FTX, one the hottest crypto-exchange companies in the world, was boasting about pouring billions of dollars, yes billions, into the Democrat war chest to fight the 2024 US presidential election. Then his chips got fried in ‘one of the largest corporate collapses in history, including the implosion of Enron in 2001’ (nyti.ms/3FhREgH). FTX stock value went from billions to nothing in the blink of an eye. Hundreds of thousands of customers lost their money. The aftershock hit other crypto exchanges like Swyftx and Bybit who immediately laid off nearly half their staff (bit.ly/3haWNiR). And all this followed a gigantic crypto market crash in May after South Korean firm Terra-Luna went down, resulting in two thirds of global crypto value – about $2 trillion – being wiped out including for market ‘bluechips’ like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Though the currencies were virtual, the disaster was real enough. 20 people reportedly committed suicide and South Korean police were ordered to patrol known suicide bridges in Seoul to stop more people jumping.

To borrow a crypto phrase, the worldwide trade in crypto ‘went to the moon’ in 2021-2, with $275bn traded daily in over 16,000 currencies on more than 400 exchanges and platforms (tmsnrt.rs/3Br1oEi). Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), crypto art tradables considered a nerdy joke a year before, ballooned into a $40bn global market, not far off the $50bn value of the total fine-art market (Bloomberg, 6 January, 2022). How did all this happen? Essentially it’s Tulipmania or the South Sea Bubble, based on ‘next sucker’ logic, where people invest in ‘assets’ on the assumption that they will be able to sell on to the next sucker at a higher price. Forget the original rationale of crypto as digital money alternative, that was never very practical anyway and is now irrelevant. Forget the silly notion that speculator commodities ought to have some intrinsic value. That matters not one jot. One of them, Dogecoin, was created by software engineers as a joke solely to poke fun at Elon Musk, but was subsequently endorsed by Musk and wound up becoming the world’s fourth-largest crypto, valued at $80bn. The runaway momentum behind this global Ponzi scheme is not real wealth, but that it can make some people fortunes. Until, one day, it doesn’t.

The May 2022 crash should have been to crypto what the R101 was to hydrogen airships, but market disasters never dent the faith of the capitalist faithful. And crypto traders have a vested interest in not letting crypto die. Instead they’re desperate to keep promoting it in order to draw in the next consignment of gullible buyers, so they’re not left holding the bag in their own multi-level marketing trap. Meanwhile governments have been slow to regulate this crazy casino despite it being a gift to money laundering, smash-and-grab hackers, ransomware and organised crime. Indeed even the politicians have got pound signs in their eyeballs. In December the UK government introduced a set of gloves-off banking deregulation measures including a ‘nod to developing the UK as a centre for crypto assets’ (bbc.in/3FEJfph ).

But crypto advocates aren’t just about the money, they are ideologically motivated, hailing crypto as the future of money and even the future of the internet. While real revolutionaries ask the big question, what if we abolished capitalist trading and money entirely, crypto fans obsess over the pseudo-radical question, what if we have a money system that’s not mediated through any centralised state agency, and what if we roll that peer-to-peer architecture out to other centrally controlled systems like the web. They are essentially techno-libertarians, in love with the screw-you-Jack premise and get-rich-quick promise of capitalism, but with a deep-seated animus against the state regulatory apparatus that normally goes with it. They want football without the referee, the Wild West without the sheriff, trusting in invisible Adam Smith woo-woo to make it all work. Now they also want Web3, a decentralised blockchain version of the web which supposedly frees it from the power of the Big 4, Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon, who reap the benefits from user-generated content while cutting the artists and creators out of the revenue stream. The fact that the Silicon Valley venture capitalists behind the Big 4 are the same ones now backing Web3 should be a big clue that the technology might be decentralised but the power certainly won’t be. If anything it will be the opposite, as Web3, just like the crypto casino, is based on using blockchain tokens. As web blogger Molly White points out, in a podcast series by Financial Times journalist Jemima Kelly, ‘When there’s a token involved, there is a speculative financial component’, to which Kelly adds ‘Web3 isn’t really about making the internet any fairer, or less easy to exploit by fatcat Silicon Valley investors, it’s… about introducing yet another layer of financialisation to the web’ (apple.co/3HyRhB8). None of this apparently matters to crypto ideologues with their warped notion of freedom. To them, the blockchain has become a fetishistic emancipatory totem.

To recap, the blockchain is simply a ledger system distributed across multiple computers that records digital transactions. All participants have a copy of this ledger, making it theoretically (though not actually) impossible to alter afterwards. The point of this is to prevent double accounting without relying on some central checking mechanism. What use is this in capitalism, a system entirely built around centralised hierarchical control? Many would say none at all, given that the technology is currently grotesquely inefficient in terms of energy use, requiring at least eight orders of magnitude more energy than a standard centralised alternative (bit.ly/2Kew9QE). Might it be useful in socialism, perhaps as a way to reduce the load on central administrative hubs involved in production and distribution? It’s possible, because the heavy power consumption involved is mainly caused by the current need for crushing layers of encryption, hash functions, public-private keys and all the rest of the paraphernalia of capitalist secrecy. Socialism, being a trust-based sharing cooperative, wouldn’t need any of that. Even then, blockchains might still be seen as overpowered, over-engineered and overcomplicated in a society that may set more store by keeping it simple, stupid.

Paddy Shannon