Running Commentary: Famine Relief (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Famine Relief

In a hangar at Khartoum airport in the Sudan, an aeroplane sits loaded with milk powder, butter oil, high protein biscuits and medical supplies. Elsewhere in the same city warehouses contain enough food to meet the basic needs of several thousand people for a number of months. Lorries able to transport the food to where it is needed also stand idle.

Meanwhile on the outskirts of Juba, several hundred miles south of Khartoum, at least 50,000 refugees are camped with a further 40,000 expected to arrive from the countryside in the ensuing days and weeks. There is food in Juba's shops but the refugees have no money with which to buy it. They are dependent on emergency food supplies handed out by the aid agencies which are now almost exhausted.

The plane in the airport at Khartoum cannot take off and air-lift the food supplies into places like Juba in the south because no company can be found that is willing to insure it. No company will insure it because the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) has said that it will shoot down any plane that tries to land in the towns of Wau, Malakal or Juba. This is no idle threat: the SPLA claims to have shot down 24 planes over southern Sudan in the past three years. The trucks cannot move the food because it is feared that they will be attacked or diverted by fighting between Ugandan government troops and Sudanese rebels.

So while politicians and the military play their war games, while insurance companies haggle over premiums, innocent refugees must die of starvation — unwitting victims of power struggles in which they play no part.

Political circus

As another summer season drew to a close and the holiday entertainers packed their bags and headed for home, some seaside towns prepared for the arrival of the circus. Not the usual big top and sawdust affair but a collection of clowns, jugglers and illusionists who make up the political circus, each group demonstrating that no one party has the monopoly of political ignorance.

Possibly, with the media providing saturation coverage, many workers were deluded into believing that these events should be taken seriously. But whatever importance a minority of the working class attached to these proceedings for the vast majority the speeches, interviews and standing ovations were of little significance. After all, once you have seen one circus you have seen them all.

How many times have we watched the juggler with the unemployment figures. Up they go higher and higher, out of control then suddenly they drop when a new set are plucked out of the magician's hat.

Year in, year out it is the same old material. Even when it is borrowed or stolen from one of the other parties, it is always presented as something new. Dress an elephant in a tutu, parade it around the ring and it will still be an elephant. Do the same with some forgotten economic theory and in the crazy world of the political circus it becomes a wondrous new idea capable of solving all manner of problems.

To some people a man with a red nose and baggy trousers who talks nonsense, squabbles with his partners and makes rude noises is a clown, but to others he is an elected representative entrusted with the responsibilities of running the country. A figure of fun he may appear to be but his contribution to the greatest illusion of all is no laughing matter.

For the famous "Make Capitalism Operate in the Workers' Interest" trick is one that has kept the clown and other buffoons employed for a long time Like all good illusions this one relies heavily on deception and the willing participation of the audience. It is not in performing the trick that the deception lies but in convincing the audience that it can be done. For their part the audience has possibly assisted in the deception. Duped into supporting the very system that causes the problems around them the answer must lie with themselves. Because of their acquiescence capitalism continues. In a world of potential abundance this sickening farce should have no place.

It is up to the working class to bring down the curtain on the present economic system and introduce socialism. Only then will the world be able to live in peaceful co-existence freed from the constraints of the profit- motive and the absurd posturings of a small band of professional idiots will be as out of place as a one-legged cyclist in a present day circus.

Independent It’s Not

The new "quality" newspaper the Independent is, we are told, politically, financially and editorially independent. So is this the breakthrough we socialists have been waiting for? A chance to put across our ideas to workers through the columns of a newspaper that claims to be politically non-partisan?

Well, this socialist hasn't actually tried submitting an article to the Independent putting the socialist viewpoint, but then I haven't much confidence in the "independence" of a newspaper whose editor. Andreas Whittam Smith, previously worked on the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Investors Chronicle and who is described by those who claim to know as a "wet Tory or Social Democrat". An editor who had relatively little trouble in raising the £18 million necessary to start the new paper because he enjoyed the confidence of City investors with whom he had developed extensive contacts when working for the FT etc.

It is hard to believe that a newspaper that has such close ties with the capitalist class can really be taken seriously as independent. If the Independent gives good factual news coverage on a wide range of issues so that people can make up their own minds about those issues, then that would be a small step forwards. But the question will still remain which facts are we being given; on what basis are they being selected; and by whom? The Independent may be politically unaffiliated and editorially independent, despite the editor's personal political views; it might even be financially independent in that a number of investors have bought shares in it rather than just one member of the capitalist class owning it outright; what is extremely unlikely is that it will offer us anything like an alternative perspective on the world around us.

Running Commentary: Plenty (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plenty

Just as the news came in of yet another desperate famine in Africa, it was reported that the EEC are about to try to reduce their 1,360,000 tonne butter mountain by selling the stuff, at 3p a pound, as food for calves. EEC officials argue that this is the best way to dispose of the butter — best because it is cheaper than stockpiling it.

You did not need to be exceptionally perceptive to work out that what is being suggested is that the butter, after being kept in store for some time, be fed back to the animals who produced it in the first place.

There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about this. It fits in perfectly well with the assumptions and needs of commodity production — the turning out of wealth for sale on the market so as to yield a profit for the class who own the means of life. In this system the market — not human needs — decides when there is a shortage or a surplus. That the EEC is grappling with the problem of mountains and lakes of stuff which could feed human beings does not mean that everyone in the world is properly fed. It simply means that the market has more than it can profitably deal with, which is a very different matter.

It is by no means uncommon for food to be stockpiled or, if the market demands it, destroyed while there is an urgent human need for it. Sometimes — like the butter — it is returned where it came from. Vegetables are ploughed into the earth or fish thrown back into the sea. A neat, circular solution you might think — just what all those highly trained experts and economists are paid to think up. Until you look at the pictures of those people starving; the children only hours away from death staring out from shrunken, fly-swarming eyes, the emaciated adults squatting in their final apathy.

Then you know that something is wrong, that somewhere there is an obvious answer which is being evaded. And you are right. But think about it a bit more and ask yourself, who is doing the evading?

Cut price ignorance

Anyone who is thinking about buying a few shares in newly privatised concerns like British Gas, Jaguar and the National Freight Corporation had better brace themselves to receive a letter from Norman Tebbit. The Tory Party chairman, presumably believing that the most impoverished of workers can be kidded that owning some shares makes them a capitalist, will be trying to scare them with bogeyman stories about Labour snatching their dividends to give to lazy dole-queue scroungers.

If you think this smacks of desperation, what about the other scheme at Tory HQ. to attract new recruits by offering them a clutch of cut-price offers? Sign on the blue dotted line and you'll be eligible for a cheap subscription rate to the Countdown discount organisation; the chance to buy gift hampers; membership of a wine society; copies of Jeffrey Archer's books, personally signed by the world's greatest living writer (it is not clear whether this is intended to persuade people into the Tory Party or the Workers' Revolutionary Party).

Of course Labour supporters are having a great time poking fun at all this, on the lines that the Tory Party which was once a marriage bureau is now a mail order company. Well, nobody can argue with that but they should remember that all capitalist parties use a variety of tricks and inducements to get workers to join them.

You can join the Labour Party, for example. by simply signing a form brandished at you by some canvasser on your doorstep. A few minutes later, if you were getting a lot of attention from canvassers, you could join the Conservative Party in the same way. Your opinions need not come into it; the capitalist parties are interested in your support — your vote, your money, your membership.

It is difficult to understand, or to empathise with, workers who fall for this, who allow their intelligence to be insulted in this way and who regard so lightly their political power to transform society.

Capitalism's problems can be solved only by a social revolution. That needs mass consciousness. leading to a deliberate act by the world working class. That is fundamentally different from the sordid grubbing for votes which absorbs so much of the energy of the likes of the Labour and Tory Parties. The question is — how long will the workers allow themselves to be seduced away from their historic role by tawdry offers of cheap wine, food and political thrills? How long will they abandon their revolutionary function for a mess of Jeffrey Archer?

Kick off

Every schoolchild brought up on Henry Newbolt's foolish poem about playing the game knows that the British are great ones for courtesy and sporting behaviour. It is something to do with character building on the playing fields of Eton, and the historic mission of the British Empire to bring civilisation to the lesser breeds without the law.

The snag is that most of the people of this country did not go to Eton, or to any school like it. Their character was built in the sort of neighbourhoods and schools which Newbolt did not care much to write about. They get their living in ways which essentially deprive them of the satisfaction of a sense of affinity with what they must devote most of their waking hours to.

This alienation extends beyond the workplace. into every part of our lives. In a world which is owned and controlled by "them", what does it matter if the saplings which were planted to give a little relief to the eyes amid a wasteland of concrete are tom up? Or if the street lamps which are there to make the pavements safer to walk along are smashed? Or if the ugly slabs of building which they call home are defaced with spray- can graffiti?

It also permeates what might be called their leisure time activities, when for a brief time they may forget their lowly status in society and the aridity of their social prospects. Where better to do this than on the terraces at some football game, with its excitement, glamour and its aura of quick riches?

British followers of the game are famous, not for their sporting attitudes but for such activities as running riot (although not as wildly as the media would have it) in one of the plushest of those floating duty-free supermarkets which ply between this country and the Continent.

This sort of behaviour has now reached the status of a ritual without which no self-respecting football (and soon, perhaps, cricket) match is complete The responses, too, are ritualistic, spurred on by headline-hungry journalists. The popular assumption, for which evidence is conspicuously lacking, is that sterner punishment and more vicious judicial violence are the only measures which can be trusted to bear in on the minds of the riotous football fans.

The people who call for hooligans to be beaten into servility forget those times when worse than yobbishness against foreign workers is officially encouraged — when, for example, the habit of Ghurka soldiers in the Falklands to kill any Argentinians who surrendered to them was gloatingly reported as good, clean, military fun.

It is capitalism which alienates us all — a social system of privilege and repression which is maintained with ritualistic support from the working class: "I vote Labour because my father always did '; "My husband's a Conservative and I can't go against him. can I?"

All this viciousness and self-destruction is protected in swathes of cynicism, from the beginning of our lives until the end. That is why schoolchildren are still being encouraged to absorb patriotic ravings like Newbolt's. Play up. and play the game? Ugh.

Running Commentary: Human nature (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human nature

We watched them go about their daily affairs as the television narrator quietly described aspects of their way of life. “Here”, we are told, “No man or woman has authority over any other man or woman . . . wealth is shared communally, if one person manages to catch many fish the whole community benefits including those who are not able to work. or who have not worked on that particular day . . . they operate on the basis of 'from each according to his hunting ability, to each according to his hunger' . . . the land, forests and rivers are owned by nobody and no one works for anyone else." Worlds Apart (BBC2 10/9/ 82) was examining the lifestyle of the Panare Indians of Venezuela, with a lot of well presented evidence to repudiate the myth that it is “Human Nature" to be acquisitive, uncooperative and to wish to live in societies with hierarchies of wealth, power and status.

Here were people, physiologically the same as everyone else, who displayed none of the behavioural characteristics which have sometimes been labelled as immutable features of human beings. Through its historical stages, property society has cultivated people to think and behave in selfish and acquisitive ways. Although cooperativeness has always been a striking feature of mankind — as people are social animals and we cannot organise any society without working with each other — in capitalism we have had to cooperate with each other under coercive conditions.

In some parts of modern society with a long history of property, vicious aspects of human behaviour like the barbarism of war are offered as proof of brutal human nature. But war, and people’s behaviour in it, are products of a social environment not a natural propensity to violence. Property society pits people against each other.

An owner can say “This is mine, it is not yours, we have different interests". If the object is a factory the owner can say, “Because this is mine, you will have to spend your life working in it to produce wealth for me, and because the levels of my profits are inversely related, we will be in a constant struggle". The Panare have no notions of property and consequently no notions of competition. They have no competitive sports and those which are played in neighbouring areas, which do put people or beasts against themselves, are looked on as meaningless.

The Panare live in a small tightly-knit community which is a little suspicious of outsiders and does not use much modern medicine or technology. Such communities illustrate the behaviour that homo sapiens are capable of enjoying.

However, civilisation is marching into the forests of Venezuela with its Deeds of Land Ownership in one hand and its police forces and prisons in the other. New roads and a huge bauxite mine will soon disfigure the regions inhabited by the Panare for, as the television narrator observed, “to the investors and entrepreneurs the communities who presently occupy the forests are obstacles to progress". Curiously, in The Investors' Dictionary, the word “progress" is spelt profits.

Parker’s pen

The bookshops will not be troubled by long, disorderly queues of people desperate to buy a copy of Father of the House — the political reminiscences of John Parker, Labour MP for Dagenham. Parker is the longest-sitting Member — he has been in Parliament for 47 years — and that is how he qualifies for this fatuous title. And he has become a strangely tedious man, liable to pass over events of historic importance in some ill-considered laconism.

But it was not always so. Parker was once at the centre of an incident vital enough to reveal the true unsavoury character of the Labour Party. In 1945. Attlee appointed him Under Secretary at the Dominions Office which, as the Secretary of State was in the Lords, put Parker in charge of the affairs in the Commons.

His ministerial career did not last long. Parker refused to intervene over the death sentence passed on a Boer farmer in the (then) South African protectorate of Swaziland who had killed his girl friend. Of course only black people were hanged in South Africa: at that time a white man had not been executed for 15 years. The South African Prime Minister appealed to Attlee to help maintain this racist version of “justice" and the Labour Prime Minister was ready to oblige. Parker was sacked and never offered a job in a Labour government again.

This episode did nothing to reduce Parker’s ardour for the Labour Party. A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain. His defence of the Labour government’s desperate attempts to organise British capitalism was unconvincing but no matter how many times he was floored by the SPGB, Parker persistently got up for more.

In his old age. does he reflect now on these instructive experiences in his political life — on the practical and theoretical destruction of the case for the party to which, through thick and thin, he gave his misguided loyalty?

Jaws

A ten-year-old boy was recently killed by an automatic exit barrier at an underground station in Newcastle on Tyne. It happened very simply and very suddenly. The boy jumped, or tripped, into the barrier, which snapped its jaws about his neck. It took a long time to free him and he was dead by the time they got him to hospital.

Anyone who has had a thoughtlessly trailing piece of luggage bitten by these barriers knows how aggressive they are, with that malevolently watchful eye to trip them into action. The barriers are installed, in places like Newcastle and London, to stop people travelling without paying a fare — to stop them using the railways as a means of travel instead of as a means of yielding a profit to the owners. They are not designed to distinguish between those who are evading paying a fare and those who are just not totally alert to the instantaneous demands of electronic ticket checks.

The cause of profit making is greater than all others, in the morality of private property society. Truly, it is greater than any human being, or of any collection of them. In this cause it is permissible to herd long suffering workers, probably trying to get to and from the places where they are to undergo the indignities of being exploited by their masters, into canyons of electronically controlled discipline. To stray deliberately from the canyon could mean that they are punished — fined, imprisoned — and if they do this by accident they may even be killed.

In many ways — some trivial, some substantial — capitalism informs the working class that they are socially inferior, exploited, degraded. This information is sometimes emphasised in episodes of bitter tragedy, which would not have happened but for the class divide of capitalism, or for the production of wealth as commodities, or for the poverty of the majority of people, or for some other essential feature of capitalist society.

Such an incident was the death of the boy in Newcastle. There will be an inquest, which may decide that it was an accidental death. A better verdict — simpler, straighter, more accurate — would be that Capitalism Kills.

Blogger's Note:

"A quirk of his was that he often agreed to take part in public debate with the Socialist Party of Great Britain." 

According to the SPGB debates wiki page, Parker only debated the SPGB once, in June 1948 at Fulham Town Hall. (The SPGB speaker was Clifford Groves.) My guess is that the wiki page is incomplete, and that Parker did debate with the SPGB on more than one occasion. He was a Fabian intellectual in his early political career, and such types had a tendency to debate again and again with the SPGB.

Running Commentary: Catch ’em young (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Catch ’em young

Everyone knows that all state schools are short of resources. Strathclyde Regional Council have found a way to alleviate the problem. Following in the footsteps of national and local press, programmes for charity, sports events or whatever, they are selling advertising space in the exercise books used by their 422,000 schoolchildren. For 500,000 books. £2.250 will buy the back page, inside covers are slightly cheaper, and a bargain £5,400 buys all three covers and a logo on the front.

Of course, not just any advert is accepted. Cigarettes, alcohol, sweets and BMX bikes are out. (So, we are sure, would be The Socialist Party or The Socialist Standard). Road safety and health education are in. So far, so good. "We also want to encourage thrift" said the Head of Public Relations and to this end they have approached banks and building societies.

The report appears in Super Marketing 11 July 1986. It is therefore no surprise to read a little further on that Lyons Tetley are "very happy with results" of their pilot scheme, which was "very cost effective" and intend to take further space. Of course, using exercise books in school at £2,250 a throw to persuade half a million mums to send their offspring to school filled up with Ready Brek is obviously a lot cheaper than those TV commercials where kids light their way through the fog with their Ready Brek induced halos. What better way to condition the workers of tomorrow to be receptive to the siren calls of consumerism — and after all, without those advertisements there mightn't be any exercise books . . .

More on poverty

In the August Socialist Standard we pointed out that at that time the last published official figures for people living at or below the government's poverty line were based on a count taken in 1981. Another count had been taken in 1983 and this should have been published last year but the government were prudently delaying this.

Just as that Socialist Standard was produced the later figures became available; in fact they were placed in the library of the House of Commons, just as the library conveniently closed for the summer. However, details have seeped out and are not comfortable reading for those who think that life in Britain under the Tories is as happy and abundant as we were promised it would be. when the alleged monetarists were let loose in Whitehall.

In 1981, the official figures showed 7.7 million living on or below the poverty line; by 1983 this had risen to 8.8 million. A House of Commons library estimate is that by 1986 this total has risen again, to 11.7 million

This comes at a time when the Child Poverty Action Group are celebrating — or perhaps it should be mourning — their 21st birthday Formed under another name in 1965. at the time they did not bother to arrange to bank any funds because they were sure that their campaign to abolish child poverty would succeed within one year A lot of their hopes rested in the election of the 1964 Labour government, of which one Labour MP (Frank Field, Guardian, 4 August 1986) now says: "At the end of the 1964-70 Labour Government the charge was that the poor had got poorer under Labour' ". The CPAG soon learned a little about the reality of working class poverty and what Labour governments are in power for By the end of their first year they had opened a bank account and had changed themselves from an advisory group into an action group.

Like so many apparently well-intentioned reformist bodies. CPAG have probed, exposed and agitated. But, typically, they overlooked the fact that working class poverty is basic and unavoidable under capitalism, whichever party is in power. When they were formed in 1965 there were less than 400,000 people living on Supplementary Benefit; now there are some thing like eight million dependent on it. The numbers out of work, grappling with the increased burden of poverty which unemployment brings, has risen during this time from 330,000 to over three million.

Working class poverty cannot be dealt with by piecemeal reforms, treated as if it were separate from the other problems produced by capitalism. The facts point to the irresistible conclusion, that the CPAG has devoted a lot of energy and a lot of ingenuity to raising hopes only for them to be clashed against harsh reality. It would have been better for them to have assessed the true nature of the problem they were facing and then campaigned for the abolition of the cause of poverty. For if capitalism is allowed by its poverty-stricken people to continue there will still be a CPAG, or its equivalent, in another 21 years time. And another. And another.

South American headache

"One of our team's first problems there was what to do with almost 100 orphaned children who had been trained in torture. Their speciality was pulling out eyes". These chilling words by Dr Nacho Maldonado Allende. psychoanalyst and co-ordinator of an international team of mental health workers in Nicaragua are reported in the June/July issue of Open Mind, journal of the National Association for Mental Health.

Getting across basic elements of mental health care in Nicaragua is a much more primitive and elementary matter than even the disgracefully inadequate facilities in this country allow. The team exchanged ideas and shared knowledge with the local peasants they were training, rather than trying to impose professional expertise. Alcoholism is a problem in Nicaragua as almost everywhere else. When asked what should be done about it. the locals replied "Do nothing. We are deprived and for the moment we need it to help us ". If they paused to work it out, workless, homeless and at times hungry workers in Glasgow. Belfast and Birmingham would give the same reply.

Dr Allende's team found many Nicaraguans suffering from what he described as "frozen grief". People who had. for instance, suffered the loss of a close relative, appeared cheerful but their suppressed sorrow and frustration surfaced in headaches, insomnia, numbed limbs.

While there are degrees of deprivation and suppression, workers throughout the world face the same problems of capitalism. Those who dispute this might well ask themselves the real reason the next time they suffer a headache or sleepless night.

Running Commentary: Profit interfering (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Profit interfering

Sanofi, the pharmaceuticals division of the French Elf Aquitaine oil group, is suspending production of Interferon, the experimental drug used in cancer treatment. The reason they have given for this decision is that sales levels have been disappointing and there has been a steady build-up of stocks. Even the usefulness of trying to develop a treatment or even a cure for cancer cannot escape the law of all production under capitalism — that without the prospect of profit, production must cease.

Last year, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund collected about one million pounds in charity for further research into Interferon. In the same year, the governments of the world spent about the same amount every two minutes on the production of armaments.

Scientists investigating Interferon in different countries have not combined their research data, because the separate corporations who sponsor them each hope to monopolise the enormous profits which might become available if the formula were perfected.

Sales of food, electricity and many other goods and services have been "disappointing” lately, resulting in widespread cutbacks in production. In none of these cases is there a lack of demand, of real need. Last year, thirty million people starved to death. What is lacking is “effective” market demand, that is, needs backed up by money. As usual, the world profit system is failing to meet human needs.

Gay power

The gays of Britain should beware. They are about to be hounded and harassed with an intensity which will make the attention they receive from Chief Constable Anderton of Greater Manchester seem aloof and apathetic.

As W. H. Smith agree to a wholesale distribution of Gay News, an apparently startling — although actually obvious—fact emerges. Gay workers are more than a deviant, oppressed, discriminated-against minority. They are also a market. The new publisher of Gay News has been specific about this. Consulting a recent detailed survey (see what we mean about being hounded?) he puts “. . . the spending power of gay men and women conservatively at about £5,000 million. It's a virtually untapped market”.

Among the first to try to exploit this is a give-away newspaper, Capital Gay. which goes out through gay pubs, clubs and the like. In common with other free papers — which are usually local in their scope — Capital Gay is little more than advertisements garnished with a few news items. Of course, some gays may object to being treated as a separate market, with special appeals to their sexual preferences. They may prefer to be lumped in with all the other workers who trawl their depressed way through the sub-standard goods in their local supermarkets. But being a lucrative market may do more for gays than any amount of protest and propaganda. In a society which produces all its wealth as commodities, the market has the power to overwhelm the most maniacal police chief or other self-appointed guardian of public morals.

Perhaps this will be called progress. Anyone with an awareness of the structure of capitalist society, and of what this does to human beings, will know that discrimination against gays is another aspect of class-based humiliation. Sexual freedom, like all other freedoms, can be secure only in a social order based on common interests.

Asbestos awards

When considerations of human well-being, even of life and death, come directly into conflict with the needs of capital to accumulate profit, the latter generally wins. There are countless examples to demonstrate this. When such conflicts occur, the companies involved are curiously adept at evading the implications.

Two hundred and fifty insulation workers in Illinois are reported by doctors to have died or become seriously ill after working with brown asbestos, amosite, supplied by North American Asbestos. An American court found against the British parent company, Cape Industries, for having knowingly supplied an extremely dangerous substance without warning, and fined them for £32 million damages.

Cape will not pay this money, since the award is not enforceable in Britain, where they face many other such charges, having been named in 900 cases. In the American case, however, they took more elaborate precautions than ever to avoid having to pay money out of the profits made from those workers' deaths.

Cape’s parent company. Charter Consolidated, is the London associate of the Anglo-American Corporation of. South Africa, with mining interests in America. In January 1978, after paying out one million dollars in an asbestos case in Texas, Cape liquidated its North American Asbestos Corporation, which had also supplied the amosite used by the workers who died in Illinois.

But Cape continued to own shares in the Liechtenstein-based Associated Mineral Corporation, which supplied asbestos to Continental Products, who operated from the same Chicago address which had been used by the North American Asbestos Corporation. (Guardian, 6 July 1982; World in Action, Granada TV, 5 July 1982.)

Running Commentary: Man of Steel (1979)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Man of Steel

Is your boss a bastard? Does he refuse to accept anything but the highest standards and does he berate you when you produce, as you often do, less than the best be it engineering, sales or documentation?

If he is, then do not be too hard on him; he may only be doing as he is told. Perhaps he was present at the September meeting of the Steel Industry Management Association when Sir Charles Villiers, chairman of the British Steel Corporation, advised all managers to be “bastards” to any of their workers who turned out sub-standard work.

It may be that Villiers is a sensitive man. BSC is not famous for being a vastly profitable concern and he, as its £30,000 a year head, is often under fire from the press. A little aggressiveness towards his employees, he may have calculated, could do his reputation no harm.

Or perhaps he meant it. Villiers is not just a representative of the capitalist class—he is a member of it. Educated at Eton and Oxford, a member of the exclusive Beefsteak Club (where none of his steel workers would be allowed past the doorman), living in Eaton Square (where none of his steel workers could afford much more than the space for a garden shed) and, before taking over at BSC. chairman of merchant bankers Guinness and Mahon.

Yet his speech was a curious thing. Firstly, what if all workers took him at his word and refused to turn out anything less than the best? What then would happen to capitalist industry, which turns, out mountains of trash when it is trash which pays?

Secondly, what was a member of the capitalist class doing, being so frank about class relationships under capitalism? The idea that we all live in a happy, united society of common interests is hardly best served by such a hard headed attitude.

He who lifts a comer of the truth about these matters will not be popular with the other members of the ruling class. Will Villiers soon be crying all the way to the Eaton Square dole office?

Pym's number one 

Another member of the ruling class to be offering some urging to workers recently—although with a rather different attitude—was Sir Francis Pym and all his friends will hope to see this ambitious politician's keenness rewarded.

Pym also went to Eton, then on to Magdalen College, Cambridge. He belongs to Bucks, the Cavalry and the Guards which are not brands of cigarettes but expensive West End clubs. He has a stately home in Bedfordshire. Clearly, he knows on which side of the bread is the capitalists' caviar.

So it is natural that Pym should be anxious to see the working class, who don’t go to posh schools or join exclusive clubs and who live in council fiats or mortgaged semis, readily accept the cuts in their living standards which the Tory government is so busily planning.

But of course Pym is a gentleman so he does not use coarse language. Instead, he hopes to inspire us all; speaking at the recent Manchester Central by-election, he said he thought we are “. . . fighting another Battle of Britain, only this time it is to the Many that we need to turn."

Politicians often use the trick of persuading workers to accept their lot by referring to former military events which are described —at least in British history books — as triumphs. Harold Macmillan was fond of ruminating tearfully on the agonies of the 1914/18 trenches. Harold Wilson, at a time when he seemed to be convinced that he was Winston Churchill, once urged us all to have a little of the Dunkirk spirit.

Both were playing the same game. Both were making pretty speeches about poverty, which is not pretty and which no worker should willingly accept.

It is likely that Pym was not aware of one very important implication of his speech, when he talked about the Many. It is, in fact, the Many who really matter. He did not appeal to the the capitalist minority to fight another Battle—to look up their shares in the Financial Times more assiduously, to buy extra large estates in the country, to lounge with greater intensity in the tropical sun. He addressed his plea to the majority, to the people who count because they produce everything and who run capitalism from one end to the other. He was talking to the working class.

And the workers, who are on the receiving end of government policy should beware. They should look with complete scepticism on all politicians' blandishments and know that—like Passchendaele, like Dunkirk—there is something nasty in store for them.

China syndrome

It must be very difficult being a supporter of the idea that socialism exists in China, when you get so little help from that country to back you up.

One after another, news from Peking indicates that, far from being a place where the means of production are owned in common, where there are no classes, no money and where there is free access to wealth (not that such a state of affairs is possible in any one part of the world), China is steadily seeking a prominent place among the powers of world capitalism.

Recently, for example, the Chinese government has signed some big trade agreements with the Western capitalist states; symbolic of this has been the normalising of its relations with the United States.

Now comes the news that China is trying to join the International Monetary Fund and in line with this is making what are meant to be reassuring noises to any capitalist thinking of investing in that country.

Chinese Vice Premier Gu Mu said in Peking recently that China is preparing new foreign investment regulations which would make it more attractive to investors. He added that overseas investors need not fear another “cultural revolution”—in other words that there will be political safeguards for such investments.

If China gets into the IMF it will be able to borrow from the World Bank, something it may see as essential if it is to expand its export trade into new areas. This comes as an emphasis to the fact that China is a rising threat to the more established capitalist powers—and may one day assert this threat, like Germany and Japan, by emphatic military means.

It also comes as an embarrassment to those who cling to the unsupportable idea that there is something different in China, something worth working class support, even sacrifice. The facts say otherwise; capitalism exists in China and increasingly makes no bones about it.

Running Commentary: Clerics’ confusion (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clerics’ confusion

Are we all god 's children, or are some of us — women — rather more distant relations of his — nieces perhaps? Are we all made in his immaculate image or are those of us in the female sex less capable than those of the male gender?

The Church of England, which purports to instruct us in morality and keeping our place as docile wage slaves in the capitalist order of things, is having difficulty in deciding whether to allow women the same opportunity to be ordained as men. The recent vote of the Synod, to refer the issue to a panel of 53 bishops, was not so much a decision as a deferment, in the hope that the slickest religious brains in the church can use the next six months or so to cook up a face-saving compromise.

This is all rather curious. The church has been operating for centuries as a bunch of intellectual storm-troopers (although latterly rather more like a company in Dad's Army) for class society. Do they think they might perform better, on behalf of the ruling class, if women were allowed to dress up in those silly clothes, perform the same meaningless rituals and preach to us about the rewards waiting in heaven for all who do their duty for capitalism?

On the other hand, why should any of them oppose women priests? (Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, hinted broadly that he would leave the church if women are to be ordained. Not exactly a grievous loss to us if he did). Other churches have female priests, as does the Anglican church in some other countries. They don't seem to have any problems in doing the church's work of putting across the baseless, reactionary nonsense of religion.

This brings us to the most important question, of why women should want an equal right to become priests, especially if this means first being insulted by people like Graham Leonard. Of course, it's all part of the drive for sexual equality, for proving that women can do any job as efficiently as men. So far the jobs where this has been proved have included the armed forces (in some states there are female combat troops); the police (watch Hill Street Blues of a Saturday night to see how a girl can handle a truncheon); the prison service (there are now female governors of male prisons in Britain, making sure the prisoners are firmly locked away and punished appropriately); and of course there's the Prime Ministership . . .

Perhaps there are some women libbers who think it is a worthwhile result for their long campaign, that they can now do the same dirty work for capitalism as men. In fact, there are worthier aims to campaign for. Like a society free, not just of sexual inequality and repression but also of the religious hypocrisy which has helped to keep us all — and especially women — enslaved for too long.

Health service priorities

Another recent demonstration of the perverse priorities in capitalism is the statement by Norman Fowler, the Social Services secretary, that he has authorised health authorities to pay managers bonuses of up to £3.960 for making cuts in health service expenditure — cuts that are likely to entail the closure of hospitals.

Health service managers who don't mind acting as the government’s hatchet people can expect an extra £ 1.660 a year if they are general managers (five per cent on top of their annual salary of £33.200); for district managers £3,160 (ten per cent of their maximum of £31.600); and for unit managers. who run individual hospitals, an extra £3.960. or up to 15 per cent of the maximum salary of £26.400.

One of the ways in which the government seeks to justify its programme of hospital closures is through the cosy euphemism of "community care". This is the name given to the plan to remove many long-term sick, disabled and mentally ill from hospitals to be "cared for" in the community. Most people would accept that being looked after by loving friends, family or neighbours backed up by appropriate medical, nursing and social work support is preferable to incarceration in impersonal hospital wards. Unfortunately the reality of "community care" is often very different. Many long-stay hospital patients have remained in hospital precisely because they don't have family or friends willing or able to care for them; social services and community medical provision are already over-stretched and are unable to provide the support that would make "community care" a reality; there are insufficient resources being put into sheltered housing, group homes and day centres. The result is that the reality of "community care" for many people is a lonely, near-destitute existence in a depressing hostel; or homelessness or. for some, relapse into illness and a return to hospital.

Health service managers are being offered bribes to close hospitals, not because they are no longer needed but because meeting the needs of those who make up waiting list statistics is too expensive. Neither are hospitals being closed because "community care" is a more humane alternative. They are being closed because it is a cheaper alternative.

Policing pupils

Over the last few months the government has done its best to try to divert attention away from uncomfortable, but real, issues such as the continuing suffering caused by apartheid in South Africa, the failure of economic policies to stem the rise in unemployment, questions being asked about the nuclear power industry after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and so on. Instead we have had our attention focused on a series of pseudo-issues which can be "solved" easily. Litter in the streets: solution — call in capitalist entrepreneur Richard Branson to start a "Clean-Up Britain" campaign. Hippy peace convoys in the New Forest: mobilise an army of police at five in the morning to break up and disperse the camp. Sexual promiscuity among the young: introduce an amendment to the Education Bill to require teachers to stress moral values and family life in sex education classes.

This amendment to the Education Bill attracted considerable media attention and yet at the same time another two amendments were being tacked on to the Bill which, although they attracted less comment, are perhaps more insidious. They will require school governors to pay attention to the view of Chief Officers of the police when making decisions about school curricula and head teachers to take account of Chief Officers' views when organising lessons.

Are the police going to use their newly-acquired influence to ensure that children are taught about road safety, or the necessity of having lights on their bicycles, or what to do if they witness an accident7 So far the evidence suggests that this is not what the police have in mind. The 1983 report from the schools inspectors suggested that the value (to the police) of closer liaison between the police and schools would be that of "intelligence-gathering":

Police forces generally attach considerable importance to the advantages to be gained through unofficial contact with schools. Home-beat officers “drop in" at school during break for a chat with pupils or teachers . . . Most schools welcome and encourage this informal contact and may ask home-beat officers or juvenile bureau officers to have an unofficial "word" with pupils, or their parents, about whom they feel anxious in relation to criminal activity.

Of course there's an official term for this informal, unofficial contact between police and schools — "multi-agency policing". In practice this means that as many different people as possible are co-opted to do the dirty work of the police and inform on their neighbours and fellow workers through neighbourhood watch schemes and the involvement of social workers. Now it seems that the police, having got their foot in the door of school, are going to be allowed some input into the curriculum too.

Most teachers who attempt to talk about the morality of family life in sex education lessons will simply be laughed down by sophisticated teenagers who have their own moral code. But it's much harder to laugh down a police officer who enters the classroom to glean information through chats with pupils or teachers, or a Chief Constable who insists on his right to vet the curriculum.

Blogger's Note:

Though this Running Commentary column is unsigned, there's a strong chance it was written by Janie Percy-Smith. During this period, she was on the Standard editorial committee and was one of the journal's most prolific writers, and the 'Clerics' confusion' piece indicates that the author is female.

Running Commentary: Free speech (1985)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free speech

The ruling class in South Africa has imposed new censorship laws preventing foreign journalists reporting the current unrest and violence. The editor of the liberal (by South African standards) Cape Times, Anthony Heard, is to be prosecuted for publishing an interview with the banned leader of the African National Congress, Oliver Tambo, under a section of the Internal Security Act which prohibits the printing, publishing or dissemination without government permission of "any speech, utterance, writing or statement'' of a "banned'' person. Heard did not seek permission to publish the interview since he considered the public have a "right" to be informed about matters of importance. What he will discover is that in capitalism workers do not have "rights" except those legal rights granted by their political masters. Such legal rights are neither absolute nor inalienable. If the capitalist class feels that its interests are threatened by such "rights" as freedom of speech, a free press, freedom of movement or freedom to demonstrate then they will be suspended through Emergency Powers legislation, internal security measures or in the interests of "national security".

The white ruling class clearly feels itself under threat from the black nationalist movement, hence the tightening of the screw. But does it really believe it can conceal for long the contradictions inherent in the apartheid system, and the cruelty, poverty and inhumanity perpetrated in the name of white supremacy?

Race laws

Twenty years ago, in 1965, the first legislation was passed which attempted to outlaw racial discrimination in Britain, since when a number of other Acts have extended the scope of race relations law. So what is the position of blacks in Britain today?

As is well known, and as the Policy Studies Institute confirmed in its report Black and White in Britain, blacks are still relatively disadvantaged: they tend to live in worse housing than white workers, receive lower pay, get the worst jobs and are more likely to be unemployed. Increasingly they have been the victims of racial attacks and violence.

Various reasons have been given for this failure to improve the state of race relations but none has even begun to address the real problem. That is that it is impossible to legislate to change people's attitudes. They are shaped by the conditions of society in which we live. In capitalism conflict and competition between workers is inherent: competition for jobs, houses and other "scarce" resources. It is not surprising therefore that those who lose out in that competition frequently give vent to their frustration in the form of hostility towards blacks as an identifiable group.

No amount of legislation can change such feelings. What is needed is the recognition amongst all workers, men and women, black and white, that we do have interests in common, that transcend racial, cultural or gender divisions, but those interests will never be fully realised so long as capitalism continues. What we don't need is another piece of legislation outlawing racial discrimination; what we do need is democratic, political organisation to abolish the root cause of racism—capitalism.

Queen’s speech

Although the next general election is probably another two years away, it looks as if the government's campaign has begun in earnest. Its programme for the new session of Parliament, outlined in the Queen's speech, includes a Bill to deal with Public Order (likely to be a big vote-catcher given the hysteria whipped up over events on miners' picket lines and in inner cities); more privatisation to raise money for tax cuts; further "de-regulation", including the removal of restrictions on Sunday shopping, a limitation on the activities of Wages Councils so that workers under 21 will no longer have their pay protected, more private management of council housing estates; and changes in social security benefits.

What will this programme of legislation mean to workers? Is there anything to persuade us that the government is indeed acting in our interests?

Sunday shopping

Although some people might think that unrestricted opening hours are in workers' interests. we should remember that the shop-workers' union. USDAW, at least, is opposed to such a change. They fear that it will lead to their already badly paid members working much longer hours without the benefit of overtime rates. It becomes clear whose interests the proposed change is designed to serve when "Open Shop", the pressure group in favour of Sunday trading, lists among its members such giant retailers as Asda. MFI. Habitat/Mothercare, W.H. Smith and Woolworth.

Social security

The review of the Social Security system was intended to look for ways in which benefits could be "targetted" on those most in need, or at least that's the story we were given. The changes are likely to affect pensions. supplementary benefit, support for the low paid and housing benefit. A report published recently by the Policy Studies Institute (The Examination of Social Security) states that if the government s plans go ahead, some of the neediest and most disabled claimants will actually lose money.

Privatisation

The government expects to realise £10 billion from its sale of British Gas. It also plans to sell off shares in airports owned by the British Airports Authority and introduce "commercial management" into the naval dockyards. All this, it is hoped, will not only provide some spare cash for tax cuts, but also give people the opportunity to buy shares in companies presently legally owned by the state. If the workers weren't conned by the Labour trick of nationalisation. then maybe they can be duped into believing that they can have a real stake in the capitalist system of society by buying a few shares. The truth is very different. It makes no difference to the working class whether the means of production are privately owned or state owned; whether or not we own a few shares, workers will never have access to the wealth that we, as a class, collectively produce. Plans to give tenants some say in the management of council estates are part of an attempt to create the same illusion. Who wants to be part of a "property owning democracy" when the only property we own is a tower block slum?

Public order

The proposed changes to the law relating to Public Order will give the police greater powers to restrict marches and demonstrations. and to decide how many people should stand where on a picket line. A new offence of "disorderly conduct" will be created and the old common law offences of riot and affray will be tightened up (no doubt because of recent failures to secure prosecutions of people charged with these offences). These changes will mean that the legal rights of workers to protest, demonstrate and picket will be curtailed.

So the Queen's speech seems to have left out one important statement. It should have read as follows: "My government will continue to support absolutely the capitalist system of society which concentrates ownership and wealth in the hands of the minority capitalist class, at the expense of the working class who produce all wealth through their labour. My government will continue to support the police force and the other coercive machinery of state, which acts to protect the interests of parasites like myself against any perceived threat by the workers".

Janie Percy-Smith

Running Commentary: Russia yawns (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In face of the conspicuous indifference of the Russian working class, the weeping news-reader announced that their leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was dead. Within a week the non-weeping masses were told to mop up their tears, for a new Tsar (official title: General Secretary of the Communist Party) had been appointed by the Politburo. Like the dictator who preceded him. Yuri Andropov. ex-KGB chief and Russian ambassador in Budapest in 1956, will preside over the Russian state capitalist empire. All leaders, be they elected like Thatcher and Reagan, or installed by totalitarian regimes, like Andropov and Jaruzelski. can only rule within the limitations of the anti-social profit system. Brezhnev’s tyrannical policies, which sent dissidents to the freezing wastelands of Siberia or the mind- manipulating confines of psychiatric asylums, were not the expression of his own hatred of the working class, but of capitalism’s inherent inability to satisfy working class needs and still produce maximum profits.

The new leader of Russian capitalism lives in a luxury apartment at Kurtuzov Prospekt — a home which is said to compare favourably with any owned by the richest capitalist parasites. How does he get his privilege and luxury? Simply by being one of the class of Party bureaucrats who control the state, which formally owns the means of wealth production and distribution. In short, Andropov and his fellow Communist Party dictators over the proletariat, live off the fruits of the labour of the Russian working class. To speak of such a system as socialist — as do certain gullible folk on the Left — is to totally distort the meaning of the word.

Capitalism is characterised by wage labour and capital, social phenomena which clearly exist in Russia. The only difference between Andropov's capitalism and Reagan’s is that in the latter capital tends to be privately owned and controlled and workers have some opportunity to choose their leaders, whereas under the former the state owns and controls most capital and workers have very limited democratic opportunities.

Within the field of capitalist politics, the so-called Left wing favours state capitalism and the Right wing prefers private capitalism. Both are prepared to accept either form of capitalism when the needs of profit-making dictate: for example, for all his rhetorical commitment to “the Soviet system” (state capitalism) Brezhnev was always happy to trade with the West. Whatever new policies Andropov may introduce, the capitalists of the West may rest assured that he will not cease to involve the Russian state in international commercial competition in which the wage slaves always lose.

Socialists oppose capitalism in ail its forms; we oppose it for the simple reason that it has outlived its usefulness as a way of organising society. Opposing the idea that there must always be leaders and led. socialists regard the passing of Brezhnev and the inauguration of his successor as of no consequence to the working class. The class which produces all social wealth need not mourn the death of one of those who legally steals that wealth from us. 

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Costly votes (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

History was not made by the high level of debate, nor by any prescience of the voters' decisions, in the recent American elections but records were broken by the amount of money laid out in the candidates' campaigns.

Something like £150 million was spent in this massive effort to persuade the American workers, against what should have been their better judgment, that capitalism would be good for them under Republicans or Democrats. Some staggering sums were afforded by the candidates themselves.

A Democrat in Minnesota spent a total of $8 million, half of which he paid himself. In Texas a Republican spent $12 million — and was not elected. But most spectacular of all. in the battle for Governor of New' York State, Republican Lewis Lehrman’s election expenses came to $15 million, half of it from his own pocket.

Lehrman was another loser, at least in the election. In other ways he is a winner; "I will." he announced, "go out to work and make the money back." He was only fooling because his millions came not from his own work but from that of his employees, whose exploitation yielded the profits which enabled Lehrman to make his flamboyant bid for power in New York.

Expensive election campaigns, which imply that only the rich can mount an effective contest, make a lot of people fear for democracy. Such anxieties miss the point, which is essentially in the fact that millions of New Yorkers voted for the big spending Lehrman and millions more for Cuomo, the Democrat victor, who also spent millions of dollars in the election.

Workers who are enlightened about capitalism, who are aware of the impotence of its politicians to run the system in the interests of the people, are unimpressed by gaudy, costly electoral stunts. Such workers are. in the end, the only certain guardians of democracy.

The fact that at present working class voters are so misled as to support candidates like Lehrman and Cuomo is not a measure of how much money was spent in their campaigns but of the low level of workers' consciousness.

Running Commentary: On the gridiron (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the baseball players of America went-on strike in the summer of 1981, we pointed out the similarities between their action and that of industrial workers trying to defend their standard of living. Most American workers, with a fair bit of prompting from the media, took a cynical attitude to the dispute, which was seen as a squabble between two sets of rich people. Now the players of the National Football League, who perform in steel helmets and liberal amounts of padding and look more like spacemen than footballers, have also taken “industrial action”.

Normally games are televised live on Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings but since the middle of September the networks have been showing instead Canadian Football, old “classic” games, or baseball, now in the last days of its season. None of this satisfies National Football League addicts.

Television income is one of the points at issue. The players have asked for fifty per cent to be allocated to them, to be divided on a seniority scale, and changes in the system of medical checks. They are unhappy about the way drug testing is conducted, want each player to have the right to a second medical opinion and a surgeon of his choice, and to be told all pertinent information about his injuries. The very fact that these medical demands have to be made shows how dissatisfied the players are with the present situation. At the time of writing, labour and management remain deadlocked on all these points.

The point about the players’ high wages deserves some further comment. In a number of cases high salaries can be the front behind which surplus value reaches the pockets of wealthy capitalists. However, the American brand of football is hard, bruising work and the great majority of players come from the working class, often from the desperately poor. Under capitalism wages represent the value of labour power — that is. the average cost of producing and reproducing the worker. American football is such a dangerous game that even in a deep recession — with welfare checks (dole) a probable alternative — it is only the high pay and other lucrative trappings that induce men to make a living of it.

American football is well able to pay such wages: with only a few top clubs widely scattered over a large country, even the unsuccessful play in front of near capacity crowds. On top of this is the large income from television. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Britain where a large number of clubs are in competition and many are near to bankruptcy. Recently the Rugby League players in England threatened to strike, but this dispute has been smoothed over. The threat of being driven out of business is often used by capitalist spokesmen, sometimes in defiance of the truth, in order to dissuade workers from pursuing pay claims. In the case of the Rugby League, however, a prolonged stoppage may well have closed many clubs. The Rugby League game is only part professional anyway, the players’ main income deriving from other jobs when they are lucky enough to have one. There is no suggestion however of the NFL clubs going to the wall, even though a long strike is considered possible.

To dispel any lingering doubts about whether the issues in the footballers’ strike are indeed the same as in an “ordinary” industrial dispute, we give two quotations from the International Herald Tribune of 2 and 3 October 1982. Gene Upshaw , Union President, said:

It is a tragic situation to be dealing with these people. They don’t care about you. We’re replaceable parts. We asked them what gives them the right to give 1500 players a physical examination. Then we said "what if 1500 players refuse to take them?” They said they would get 1500 other players.

Jack Donlan, director of the League’s Management Council, presented the management view:

Their proposals, we perceive, are designed to control the game. They’re always talking about their wage scales, their medical program. They’re trying to take away everything that has made this game and this League great.

There you have it; we have been wrong all the time. The crowds don't turn up to see the players play. They don’t even go to see the managers manage, which can be a spectaclc in itself in the United States. They go to see the owners own. 

E C Edge 

The dispute was settled shortly after this piece was written. None of the players’ demands was met and they returned to work.

Running Commentary: Myths of equality (1981)

The Running Commentary Column from the September 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Myths of equality

Do not believe the common myth that we are no longer living in a class-divided society. Class is not about being “classy”. It is not something you can take on or reject. While there is still the institution of property in human society we are all born into families who either do or do not possess it. The Low Pay Unit has just produced Low Pay Review 4, which shows that the lowest paid workers today are relatively worse off than the lowest paid in 1886, when figures were first collected. More wealth is produced today than a century ago, but those who are born to no property and are therefore forced to go out and work, producing that wealth, now receive proportionately less of it.

Mr. Chris Pond, director of the Low Pay Unit, comments: “The government’s assertion that workers could protect their jobs by cutting wages is a cruel deception. It is in those industries in which wages have fallen furthest, precisely because of the reduction in demand for the goods and services produced, that have faced the biggest job losses” (Guardian, 2/6/81). And do not forget the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, which reported in 1979 (after five years of Labour government) that the richest one per cent in Britain own more wealth than the poorer eighty per cent.

Against this background, which is based on a minority class owning stocks and shares and other property, and deriving a vast unearned income from employing the rest of us, the “European Socialists” tell us to pull in our belts still further. On 28 April this year, an Amsterdam conference of the “Socialist International” agreed unanimously that “the time had come to promote wage controls firmly linked to economic democracy” (Guardian, 29/4/81).

Are you trying to escape from this wage-slavery which is imposed upon us? The Pearl Assurance Company has recently been advertising what they call the Capital Accumulator Plan. Basically, this means workers struggling to save up their hard-earned cash for them to spend on a few trinkets just before they die. We can be sure than Pearl shareholders, among others, will be profiting from the process.

But don’t they know there is a far more reliable “Capital Accumulator Plan”? It works like this. You inherit a few million pounds (be sure to choose the right parents) or, perhaps rob a few banks (be sure not to be caught and incarcerated). Then you employ (exploit) a few thousand workers (who chose the wrong parents) and accumulate a few million more. At the moment, there are dozens of annual Company reports being published which illustrate the process. Just take one example. Mothcrcare. Profit after tax: £8,634,000. Earnings per share: 13.39p. Dividends per share: 5p. Mr. S. Zilkha and Mr. E. Zilkha, both on the Board, have between them 11,478,776 shares. Their dividend will be £573,938.80. Their earnings will be £1,537,008. They are not employees, they are owners. They do not produce, they possess. “Profit per employee” is declared to be £4,422 for the year. Each worker, then, was paid just enough to keep them fit to work, and produced about as much again on top for the benefit of their masters. That is what is known as “Civilisation”.

Take power

The Child Poverty Action Group has produced a report. Poor and Powerless, showing how the gas or electricity is being cut off in more than 770 households each day because the families concerned cannot afford to pay the bills. This is in spite of the fuel industry’s Code of Practice introduced in 1976 supposedly to reduce the hardship of those very people. The reductions in the real value of child benefit, unemployment benefit, sickness and industrial injury, and maternity benefits together with cuts in the real value of wages, have contributed to worsen the situation since the onset of depression, For example, [ . . . ] disconnected 37,648 people last year, more than three times as many as in 1978. The report quotes particular cases, such as one low-paid family of six children, one of whom had just been discharged from hospital after a bone marrow operation, who were cut off for a gas debt of £17.

The piecemeal suggestions of the CPAG, such as forcing the fuel industries to obtain court orders for such cases, or raising benefits to low-income families, will not remove the problem. As long as people are dependent on employers or the state for a meagre income, poverty will remain an integral aspect of society. Only in a classless society, where everything is owned in common, and resources are freely available to all, will we be able to feel properly secure. As long as the profit system is retained, workers’ living standards will be cut down to the minimum that the employers can get away with it.

American fuel companies have a mechanism called a service limiter adapter. In most parts of America, it is illegal to cut off consumers’ power supplies, so they have found this simple way round it. The adapter can reduce the supply in varying degrees, so that particular appliances cease to function one by one. One New York official has said: “The great attraction is that defaulters face an uncomfortable time without lives being put at risk in freezing weather conditions”.

Sick society

The Office of Health Economics have reported that work days lost through sickness for March 1981 are 21 per cent below the average for the same month over the past four years. The drop coincides with a one million rise in unemployment and the report suggests that high unemployment has made people so afraid of losing their jobs that they may be going to work even when ill.

If not, however, perhaps they can become ill once they get there. The CBI, the Chemical Industries Association and the Association of British Pharmaceutical Industries have mounted a vigorous campaign against proposed regulations to protect workers from dangerous chemicals. Section Six of the Health and Safety at Work Act, if it is passed, would prescribe the testing of certain chemicals used in industry, such as Dioxin, used in pesticides, which causes miscarriages and deformed births. “Tightening controls will involve the chemical and pharmaceutical industries in added cost, and this is the core of their objection” (Guardian, 10/8/81). In a confidential memo to members in June, the CBI stated: “CBI is likely to challenge the philosophy underlying the new controls . . . Industry has consistently opposed over-regulation and unnecessary bureaucratic controls by governments in the field of harmful substances”.

In a society of common ownership, production would be solely to satisfy human needs, and not for the profit of a minority. Under democratic control, work can become a pleasure in itself. But when it is owned and controlled by the likes of the CBI, the slogan is wealth before health.

Housing

Speaking of wealth, the Daily Mail did an interesting profile of Michael Heseltine on 17 July. It showed how the man who was sent to Liverpool to work out for his Prime Minister the puzzle of why people living in slums are frustrated, has four houses himself. One in Belgravia, worth £600,000, a country estate in Oxfordshire worth £750,000, a £100,000 “hideaway” in Exford, and a smaller place in Swansea, “not for personal occupation”.

He took some of his fellow capitalists on a bus-trip round Liverpool to see how the other sort live, and to work out how to buy off their discontent. The same issue of the Daily Mail reported on the court case involving Per Hegard, the “man who could buy everything”. His ownership of several companies allows him to live off the work of thousands, riding on their misery. He has six Rolls Royce cars, three yachts, two jet planes, half a dozen mansions and a £15,000 cigar bill.

Those who work to create Hegard wealth for him have least and suffer most, and it is in defence of the property of such people that millions die in wars fought over the control of markets; and his grasping need for profit causes pollution, industrial danger, poverty, destruction and waste.

The World Bank's World Development Report for 1981 refers to the millions living and dying in extreme poverty, and contains two predictions, one “optimistic” and the other less so. The optimistic forecast is that by the end of the century the number on the verge of starvation will fall from 750 million to 630 million. On the other hand, they say, it may rise to 850 million. But it is in our hands to make it fall to nought immediately, and to end all poverty and war, if we combine to end the profit system and create a community where wealth is produced freely for direct use according to needs.

Clifford Slapper

Running Commentary: Up, up and away (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Up, up and away

June is bursting out all over. And one of the biggest balloons fit to bust is that of Richard Branson, who is putting all his ego into one basket to fly in a hot air balloon across the Atlantic.

It's a strange thing for anyone to do. least of all him — surely he can afford a seat on one of the Virgin Atlantic flights. Of course it's being presented as a challenge. The media loves dramatic pictures of the rich wasting their money in ever more extravagant ways. The same reasons, the same "get up and go" mentality that is supposed to drive Richard Branson as a high-flying capitalist, breaking new markets, also apparently force him to break daft records (“Mr Branson, why do you exploit the working-class?" "Because it's there.").

The real basis behind the Atlantic crossing is as one part of the publicity for Virgin and Branson's plans to turn his £260 million business into a billion pound concern and from there make Virgin the biggest entertainments multinational in the world. That's all you'll be seeing on TV this month when the cameras cover the ocean crossing — one big advert.

Richard Branson is one of Margaret Thatcher's favourites. She originally wanted him to lead a campaign to encourage more adventurous entrepreneurial activity among British business, but he preferred the national litter brigade that is UK 2000.

As far as Thatcher is concerned never mind fly across the Atlantic, he could walk across it. His life reads like one of her speeches: he set up a small business running a record shop at the age of twenty and after fifteen years he had amassed a personal fortune worth £160 million (the average owner of a record shop would have to save their wages for ten thousand years to get that). What is not so widely known, glossed over in the life story, is that Branson found himself in a pickle early on when he tried to defraud Customs and Excise of £60,000 and was only saved from prison by his youth; and that his climb started with the help of £10,000 from a friend. Obviously the lesson for us all is that the only way to get on inside capitalism is to have the right friends and the right lawyer.

In fact, while Richard Branson is cooped up in his pressurised aluminium capsule 35.000 feet above the Atlantic for a week or so (it's his companion I feel sorry for), the profits from Virgin record company won't suddenly dry up. The money will keep rolling in — he may break records but you can be sure he plays absolutely no part in making any records. Richard Branson is not needed, he's redundant, like anyone who lives off ownership, off the work of others. It's bad enough having these parasites, but to have them parading themselves on TV . . .

Ministering to women

The Labour Party has promised that if it is elected to government it will establish a Ministry for Women with Cabinet status. A party policy document, Labour's Ministry for Women, refers scathingly to male domination within society:

With few exceptions, men make the laws, administer the laws, carry out ministerial decisions. control our industries, run our public services and negotiate pay and working conditions. Women are not in positions to articulate their demands or to ensure their needs are considered.

To overcome this male domination, Labour proposes that the Minister for Women should sit on key cabinet committees and have regular access to the Prime Minister. A House of Commons Select Committee would be set up to monitor the Women's Ministry which would be directly responsible for sex equality legislation and the updating of the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts.

For many women workers, dissatisfied with the double burden of (low) paid work outside the home and unpaid housework and childcare inside the home, fed up with the lack of good child-care facilities and concerned about health issues that particularly affect them, Labour's proposal may seem attractive.

And if Labour's analysis of the problem (as quoted above) were actually correct there might be a certain logic to setting up a Ministry for Women. But, while it is true that most (though by no means all) positions of power and influence are occupied by men, to say, as Labour does, that "men make the laws, administer the laws . . .", gives a highly misleading impression. It would be more accurate to say that a small handful of men and one or two women make the laws, and control industry and society while all the rest of us - men and women - never get a look in.

And while it is also true that in many areas of life women workers do get a worse deal than men workers and a Ministry for Women just might ensure a higher degree of equality with working men, that equality will be worth very little if it still means, as it will, that a handful of people own and control wealth and monopolise power while the rest of us are excluded from a share in either.

Persuasion

The look of scepticism takes a moment to register. You sense the turmoil going on in the mind. There is a short embarrassed laugh. "Well, of course, it's feasible, but unlikely ever to happen". Have you suggested something outrageously shocking? No, you have just presented the case for socialism. This initial acquaintance with socialism can cause severe shock to those who derive their attitudes toward life from daily helpings of the Express, or Telegraph.

Your interlocutor, still confused at having their illusions about society shattered, fixes you with a glittering eye and proceeds to catalogue reasons why socialism will remain a Utopian ideal. "We need leaders" . . . "Human beings are inherently aggressive" . . . "You will never convince the majority" . . . "The task is too daunting". A look of triumph replaces the previous incredulity as they bathe in the self-congratulatory assumption that your argument has been totally refuted.

Why should the concept of socialism prove such a difficult one to handle? For socialists the case is self-evident. The benefits of socialism are as obvious as the solution to yesterday's crossword.

However, as the prevalent ideas in society are those of the ruling-class, then the socialist propagandist has to contend with a lifetime's brainwashing. To many people, fed on a diet of carefully controlled misinformation by the media, the word socialism evokes a Pavlovian response — Reds under the bed. shortages and dull conformity — not forgetting the ultimate threat to civilisation, the replacement of Eastenders with an endless re-run of Politburo speeches. Socialism, of course, stands for none of these absurdities.

Socialists do not pretend that the transition to socialism will be perfect. However, when the world belongs to everyone and decisions are arrived at democratically by all involved in those decisions, who needs leaders? There are violent — sick — individuals in society, it is true, but contrast that with the massive, legalised, institutionalised violence committed by the state on behalf of its capitalist rulers.

The task of persuading the majority of the working class that wage slavery is not in their interests and that the means of creating a better society lie in their power, may appear daunting but to paraphrase Marx (Groucho); socialism is one club that should have us all as members.

Dave Coggan