Sting in the Tail: Capitalism obscene? Never? (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism obscene? Never?

Although the European Union still has its butter, beef and grain mountains, it destroyed nearly 3 millions tons of perishable food in 1993.

According to the Daily Mail (7 August), this consisted of apples, peaches, oranges, cauliflower, tomatoes and many other fruits and vegetables which were pulped as part of the EU’s policy of supporting farm prices.

Labour MP for Wallsend Stephen Byers declared “this is obscene”, a sentiment echoed by the Mail's editorial. But what both found “obscene” was the cost of this policy to “the British taxpayer”, which is only their way of describing British capitalism, and never, never the social system in which such insanity is rooted.

Pragmatism down under

The fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War Two was called VJ Day in Britain and America but not in all of Japan's wartime enemies:

“In many countries ‘Victory-Japan or VJ Day, has been quietly transformed into ‘Victory-Pacific’, or VP Day. In New Zealand and Australia the celebrations will be muted by the realisation that Japan is now the major trading partner and must not be offended. Elsewhere in the Pacific there is a reluctance even to acknowledge the victory " (Guardian, 7 August).

Australia changed the name because it “did not want to ruffle feathers with their greatest export market” while New Zealand was “concerned that the huge numbers of Japanese tourists who flock to its golf courses might take offence and disappear”.

In future, when Binyon's familiar "Lines" are spoken at remembrance services Down Under they should be changed to:

"They shall not grow old as we 

who are left grow old, nor the

 years condemn

   But at the going down of the

profits from exports and tourism

We shall remember on which side 

our bread is buttered."

They won't go away

During the Thatcherite 80’s we were assured that large chunks of the working class were being absorbed into an ever-expanding middle class which could look forward to a secure and prosperous future, and that the old conflict between capital and labour was dead.

Now, Larry Elliott has debunked this theory in the Guardian (21 August):

“Certainly popular capitalism seems to have lost its lustre. The middle classes, who believed their loyalty to the corporation meant a job for life, are living in fear of the sack. The skilled working classes have seen their homes repossessed. ”

He also notes that:

“There is no sense that management and workforce are on the same side, and why should there be, given the disparities of income and the knowledge that the redundancy notices will be handed out at the first sign of trouble. ”

Elliott concludes that all this, plus a growing awareness that most workers are “just one pay packet away” from penury, is fostering the belief that “we’re all working class now”. To paraphrase Mark Twain; reports of the death of the working class and the class struggle are greatly exaggerated.

Breathless business

If you ever wondered why it is that in a society capable of great scientific innovations and medical advances, some disorders never seem to be cured and, in the ease of asthma, become more widespread, then ponder the priorities capitalism puts on medical research. Rhone-Poulene-Rorer, a French/American enterprise that markets steroids, a second-line attack against asthma, plans to spend £1.7 billion, not in research to combat asthma but to buy out Fisons, a firm that produces a first-line attack, namely inhalers. Why this mammoth expenditure?

“Asthma is big business—a £6 billion world-wide market. It is growing rapidly, faster than the industry as a whole. And there is no cure. Just treatments’’ (Observer Business, 27 August).

So while asthma kills one Briton every five hours and more than 9 million suffer from it, including 2 million children, the big players are much more anxious to get a bigger slice of the “big business” than research means of beating the disorder.

Football and capitalism

The origins of football are obscure. Some claim that it was played in the Americas by the Plains Indians before the European invasion; others that it originated in Britain in the 14th century. But, whatever its origin, it is generally agreed that it was a healthy, enjoyable social activity. It was fun.

However, inside capitalism, a good example of what it has become is provided by Barry Hearn, the millionaire snooker and boxing promoter, who recently bought the football club Leyton Orient.

“I'm coming in with a great deal of experience in how to exploit sport, commercially and through the media. And I find this very motivating. Thats why I am in it: for me. You see I am not a football fan. I don't think I can sit through 90 minutes. It’s the business that's the buzz ’’ (Independent Magazine, 19 August).

Greasy Pole: New word, old trick (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirty years of hurt haven’t stopped them dreaming . . . Well actually it’s a little more than 30 years since Labour Party supporters could stop dreaming, when the first Wilson government put an end to a long spell of Conservative rule. A lot of the people who will vote in the next general election had not been born then but they will have heard, many times, the kind of declaration which Labour was making in their 1964 manifesto, that ". . . the ending of economic privilege, the abolition of poverty in the midst of plenty, and the creation of real equality of opportunity . . . have now become immediate targets of political action". Labour 1964 would transform Britain because they would plan the economy into a smooth expansion and use the opportunities of the scientific revolution which had been "disastrously wasted" by the Tories.

Wilson had outlined the policy of promoting Labour as the party of science in a conversation with Richard Crossman early in 1963. If he was elected leader, he said, the party would be able to “ . . . liberate the frustrated energies of thousands of young scientists, technologists and specialists, who feel there is no room for them under the present anti-scientific old-boy network in industry and Whitehall". The result of the planning and liberation would be an enormous increase in productivity and profitability, which would benefit all of us. (This is not particularly original thinking; it was another version of the Tory one-nation policy, the delusion that all people of whichever class have a common interest in making the ruling class richer. Nowadays it is called the trickle-down theory.)

Grouse moors

The Conservatives, of course, were not the party of science but of the stultifying privileges of the aristocracy. They were the party whose leaders ran the country during short breaks from the organised slaughtering of helpless birds on the grouse moors. By a stroke of luck (for Labour) the Tories had just chosen as their leader Lord Home, a rich amiable Scottish landowner who, apart from an admitted bewilderment over the economics of capitalism, bore a striking resemblance to the birds he ritually brought down with his guns.

So it was all set, when Wilson ousted Home from Number Ten. The journey to the Promised Land could begin. Except that it quickly became clear that things weren’t so simple after all. Soon after taking over Wilson was appearing on television to warn us about the ". . . extremely serious situation which the country is facing" and to declare "We cannot afford attitudes anywhere, on either side of industry which stand in the way of higher production or lower costs. The old fashioned restrictive practices have no place."

It was not necessary to be overly incredulous of politicians’ promises to understand Wilson’s message. In order to protect the competitive position and the profits of the British ruling class we would have to work harder and face up to a reduction in our standard of living. In this cause, trade unions should not use any bargaining power they had through what were called restrictive practices.

This opened the way to a long struggle between the workers and the Labour government, in which the high-flown plans and concepts of 1963/64 were virtually forgotten in the cause of boosting exports, saving the pound, getting the balance of payments right . . . But of course this provoked much bewilderment and disappointment in Labour Party ranks, where they had suffered those years of hurt but had thought they did this to build the revolution. What about, they asked, Labour’s principles? What about socialism—or rather what they thought of as socialism?

Pragmatism

The response of the Labour leadership to these doubts was not oozing with sympathy and understanding. There was, rather, a certain asperity in dealing with the hopeless ideologues who were foolish enough to think they were in a party which aimed to change society. Among the impotent denunciations of those who still thought of themselves as the true keepers of the faith a new word was heard, again and again. Pragmatism.

This word was used not only to defend the basis of Labour government policy but also to verbally flog all those who questioned what they were doing. Such people were alright to do the party donkey work—stuffing envelopes, delivering leaflets, canvassing—but if they thought they were doing this in order to abolish poverty and privilege or whatever, they were irritating dogmatic theorists. While the theorists argued over the finer points of an irrelevant dogma the pragmatic people got on with the real work of running capitalism. "Mr Wilson,” wrote John Cole in the Guardian in March 1966, "defends aggressively his pragmatic approach to politics. All government, he says, is pragmatic."

In fact pragmatism was another of the words which are called into use to divert attention from a government’s failure to keep its promises to do the impossible—to run capitalism as if it were not a class-divided society of riches and poverty, avoidable disease, war, crime, human despair . . . There have been quite a few such words since then and the latest of them is the one almost ceaselessly on the lips of the hopeful next prime minister Tony Blair.

New

That word is New. Blair is unable to speak in public (we don’t know whether it extends into his private life) without using the word. New Labour. New Britain. What is implied is that anyone who disagrees with Blair’s ideas is old, worn out, irrelevant. What New really means is that a Labour government will go back on its 1992 promises to give pensioners a hefty increase, to fix a National Minimum Wage of half male average earnings, to legalise some secondary picketing and so on. If they were to implement some of those old policies it would have made no real difference but the point here is that already, even before they are in power, they are frantically backtracking in an effort to attract votes. There is nothing New in this, just as there was nothing pragmatic in Wilson’s policies. Futile and decadent would be better words.

Ivan

Editorial: All realists now (1983)

Editorial from the November 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago Labour MPs elected a young leader who described himself as a pragmatist. When Wilson became Prime Minister, it was quickly made clear that pragmatism had a particular meaning for him — that his government would try to run the affairs of British capitalism in accordance with the needs of its owning class and not by any reference to inconvenient, grass roots theories. Under Wilson and later Callaghan Labour was indeed pragmatic, for they fought the British working class over wages, they broke strikes with troops, they cut services, supported the American war effort in Vietnam, they introduced racist immigration laws . . .

Since those pragmatic days we have had another government, which assures us it is realistic. There is, the Tories assert, no other way than to behave roughly like their Labour predecessors in office — hold back wages, cut social services, fight a war in the Falklands. . .

And now the Labour Party, in the first contest under its new system of popular voting in the party, has elected a leader who says that he also is a realist, although he has coupled the word with patriotism and socialism, which shows that he has a truly pragmatic disregard for the dictionary of politics. The battle between Thatcher and Kinnock promises to be a clash in which victory — which means the majority of votes of politically ignorant workers — will go to whoever can lay claim to the greater degree of hard-headed realism.

Well if they are all to be realists now it is fair to ask what the word means. For the Labour Party, after its crushing defeat in June, there is one obvious and immediate interpretation. “We can’t” right-wing realist John Golding shouted to their Conference. "afford any more to fight elections on a like it or lump it basis”. Golding was not the only speaker to urge the delegates to consider first the need to win votes; Labour is a party which forms its policies, not on political principles or on confused pioneer notions about a radically different society, but on what the voters will support. Power is their priority. This might upset some of the party members who joined under the delusion that Labour stood for socialism and it would certainly confuse workers who voted Labour on the promise that it would lead to a more equal social system and who find their living standards under attack. But all that is a small price to pay in the cause of realism.

Kinnock is not just a realist but a realist of the Left, which means that his “realism” has dawned only after he has trodden a familiar path from left-wing bluster to the point at which he must concede that a more "moderate" attitude is likelier to win power. Like pragmatic Wilson in 1963, Kinnock’s first announced priority is to be Prime Minister, as soon as posssible. In his first speech as leader he talked of the need to “produce our way to prosperity” (alliteration is a habit of Kinnock’s; it is in fact popular with a lot of politicians — it often goes down well with reporters and helps to conceal the emptiness of the words) as if the poverty of capitalism’s peoples has something to do with the level of production. In deference to his waning reputation as a firebrand of the Left, he needed to mention the word socialism, describing it in typical obscure fashion as “. . . real patriotism. when the sick, old and young and poor have their just share of the wealth of this massively prosperous country” — as if socialism is not a world society of free access but a re-adjustment of some workers’ poverty.

Behind these fine words and ringing declarations, and beyond the sycophantic ovations they provoke, the gruesome reality of capitalism persists. As only one expression of poverty, in this country during the coming winter old workers, whose usefulness to the ruling class is at an end, will die from hypothermia. Thousands of workers in this country are homeless, millions live in festering slums, millions more in homes which are slums but escape the official definition of slumdom, millions live in cramped and jerry-built neurosis manufactories which are called homes. War is a continuing threat, backed by an international nuclear arsenal which could quickly paralyse human society. Tens of millions die each year because they can’t get enough to eat to stay alive. The "realism” of Thatcher and Kinnock has no relevance to these problems. To assert, in the face of all the evidence, that capitalism can be made to work in the interests of the majority is not realistic; it is to propagate a cruel fantasy.

The efforts of socialists to expose that fantasy are hampered by the workers’ reluctance to recognise where their interests lie. In the last general election, for example, the best manifesto was that produced by the Socialist Party of Great Britain; it was the only one to analyse the problems of modern society and to point to the conclusion that socialism is the only solution. Yet fewer than one hundred workers voted for the case in that manifesto; the rest preferred the discredited fantasies of the Tory, Labour and Alliance parties.

The vital work of the socialist movement is to encourage the workers to face the reality that their problems can be solved, and they can live a full, humane life, only through a social revolution which will overthrow the society of class ownership of the means of life. When these are the property of the entire human race there will be a world free of war, poverty, repression, of the tensions and ugliness which we live with today. In socialism human beings will work and live together in harmony for the common well-being. Social relationships will be fashioned by the basis that wealth will be produced for its usefulness to people and not for the profit of a minority. In an unprecedented freedom, humans will be able to discover their true abilities; there will be a veritable explosion of creativity and people will look back on capitalism, with its wars, its poverty, its fear, its posturing leaders and its compliant, suffering people, as a black nightmare.

To attain that condition, the world’s workers must look beyond the deceits of the leaders, to confidence in their own ability to run society in the interests of the majority. They must grasp the fact that capitalism is decadent, reactionary and repressive and that progress lies with the revolution for socialism. All the evidence encourages this conclusion; the ideas of socialism fit in with what we know of history, with the facts of our experience now, with all reasoned prospects for society tomorrow. Socialism will work and bring a humane world because it is based on reality. Socialists are the true realists.