World View: Global inequality is getting worse (1996)

From the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

News that 358 people own as much wealth as half the world's population will come as no surprise to regular readers of this journal. Neither will socialists be alarmed at similar findings published in the 1996 Human Development Report prepared by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

What is at first remarkable, however, is that the report's findings come during the International Year of Poverty. Yes, this is the year—a year set aside by those who set years aside for special problems—in which we are supposed to be solving the problem of global inequality and, yes, you’ll be forgiven for thinking that socialism is the panacea recommended by the report.

“There was plenty for the pessimist," wrote Martin Jacques of the report (Observer, 21 July)—though we would have preferred the term "realist”—having pointed out that since 1980 over 100 countries have had stagnant or declining incomes that have reduced living standards for 1.6 billion people.

Presumably we are supposed to feel "optimistic" about the 15 countries that have experienced economic growth during this period, even if, like Singapore, freedom of speech has been outlawed.

The report also reveals that whereas the world’s richest 20 percent were 30 times as wealthy as their poorer counterparts then, they are now 61 times as wealthy.

What the Observer found "encouraging” was the report’s use of a human development index, whereby not only GDP per capita, but also illiteracy, enrolment in education and life expectancy are also taken into consideration. By which measure “virtually every country in the world has improved its lot since 1980. In sub-Saharan Africa life expectancy rose from 46-51 ’’. But the downside is that, if followed to its logical conclusion, your average sub-Saharan African was enabled to be exploited for a further five years by the master class, enduring, en route, poverty, starvation, disease, civil war and the certainty that at death their dependants would fair no better.

Interestingly, the UNDP administrator, James Speth, believes "the world has become more economically polarised" and that "if present trends continue, economic disparities between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman" (Observer, ibid.).

In spite of this assertion, in spite of the simple fact that global inequality is so inextricably linked to the present insane profit system. Richard Jolly, the compiler of the report, and special adviser to Mr Speth, reasons that the problem can be tackled within the context of capitalism and has put forward a three-pronged strategy to reverse the trend: ". . . a target of 3 per cent capita growth in the poorest countries, an emphasis on making expansion sustainable and more equitable, and action to avoid the five forms of undesirable growth”. Which the UN describes as:

"jobless growth, ruthless growth where only the rich benefit, anti-democratic voiceless growth, unsustainable futureless growth, and rootless growth, which tramples on cultural identities" (Guardian, 16 July).

Of course, there is about as much hindsight and foresight here as an IMF structural adjustment programme. Growth is dependent, for instance, on investment and the building up of the industrial, private and public sectors in poor countries—all of which becomes impossible because of debt repayment schemes and because any country wishing to speed up development will become competitive and import less, which runs counter to the interests of the larger and wealthier capitalist nations who can easily out-compete and consequently halt the ambitions of their poorer counterparts.

Neither can expansion be really sustainable. Sooner or later a point is reached that capitalism cannot accommodate. “Too much” is produced and profits fall. Hence global booms and recessions.

In truth, the only way capitalism can be run is as it is now. This is the raison d'etre of capitalism, profit at any cost, in the interest of the minority and at the expense of the majority. And just as it is an unavoidable fact that capitalism creates the exploiter and the exploited in any given country, so it is the case that if some countries are to thrive, others must face ruin at their expense.

There can be no strategy or plan or panacea to remedy what is, after all, the logic of capitalism, within the context of capitalism. The only solution remains to abolish the system entirely and to establish socialism. The abolition of the profit system, money, wages, frontiers and borders, social classes and leaders, and the establishment of a global system based on community ownership and democratic control of productive wealth is the only way to end a system where one Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, can purchase six of the world’s poorest countries.

Commenting on the UNDP report, Victor Keegan, writing in the Guardian (22 July), said: “Never in the history of the world have they [the rich] been present in such quantities and in such flamboyant contrast with the poor as now." We might add: “and never has the case for world socialism been so pressing". 

John Bissett

The Rise of Sir John Ellerman: The Rewards of Capitalism (1933)

From the August 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month the richest man in England, Sir John Ellerman, died. He was reputed to be worth about £30 million at the time of his death, and a few years ago he owned properties estimated at £55 million. His income was upwards of £1 million a year, about £20,000 a week, equal to the wages of eight or nine thousand workers.

Those who profess to believe that capitalism distributes rewards, according to ability, diligence, thrift and other so-called virtues, hastened to point out what a splendid example Sir John Ellerman set to all of us. Was he not abstemious, they said, spending only a small part of his income ? That is true. He was in the habit of spending on his own personal needs a mere 4 per cent. or 5 per cent. of the sums coming to him day by day from his investments, but that 5 per cent. meant £50,000 a year—a mere trifle of £1,000 a week.

It was inevitable that the slush-writers of the daily Press would tell us of a romantic rise from poverty to fabulous wealth; of how their hero started with nothing. He did indeed—if we can describe as “nothing” a bagatelle of £20,000 or so, which he inherited from his maternal grandfather.

The frenzied lunacy of modern capitalism can be illustrated in certain of its aspects from the life of Sir John Ellerman. We may believe that a sure £1,000 a week could provide a very pleasant existence, although in this case it included such eccentricities as frequent pleasure cruises on his own liners, Sir John Ellerman being the only occupant, travelling in magnificent solitude on a boat equipped to carry 250 or 350 passengers. Perhaps the journalistic apologists for capitalism will try their hand at discovering some ethical or economic justification for this appalling wastefulness when there are thousands of over-worked and undernourished working men and women, to whom such a cruise, which they cannot afford, might mean restored health and happiness.

Yet, in spite of his wealth, those who knew him said that he had no interest in life outside financial operations and the control of his wealth— “his work was his hobby and his hobby was his work."

We defy the capitalist economists and the capitalist Press to give a reasoned defence of a system which gives to one self-centred individual, obsessed with the single pleasure of exercising his financial skill, complete control over the means of life of tens of thousands of men and women. He controlled nearly 300 ships. He owned £3 million of house property. In Earl’s Court alone he recently sold an estate of 1,150 houses and nearly 200 blocks of flats. Yet he used only one house himself. He was ground landlord of a large part of Oxford Street. At one time he had a large interest in The Times and was proprietor of The Financial Times and several other papers. He took no interest in the journalistic side, but regarded them simply as means of piling up money. He had extensive brewing interests. At one period he had no less a sum than £10 million on deposit with London banks. In the last twelve months he made two separate loans of about £1 million to public companies.

On an occasion like this, the newspaper writers boast about the stupendous wealth of the multi-millionaires as if it belonged to them. Yet this will not prevent them in a few weeks' time from asserting that “we are all capitalists now," that “wealth is becoming more and more equally divided," that companies are owned by small shareholders only, and so on, ad nauseam. By coincidence the man who is particularly notorious for keeping these false notions in circulation by his speeches and letters to the Press (Mr. Walter Runciman) is himself interested in shipping and cannot be unaware of the great fortunes made by Sir John Ellerman and others in that industry.

The reality of the contrast between the riches of the few and the poverty of the many was brought out in an advertisement issued last year by the Confederation Life Association as part of a campaign for popularising insurance. The Association claimed that carefully compiled statistics show that out of an average group of 100 men aged 25, 58 will be alive at 65. Of these 58, one will be wealthy, two fairly well off, five able to live on their savings, and 50 without enough to support them.

That is one side of a picture, the other side of which is the £30 million fortune of Sir John Ellerman.

In passing, it is worth while pointing out once more the absurdity of the assertion by Major Douglas, that all property belongs to the bankers. Sir John Ellerman was not a banker. The richest living man in England is the Methodist, Mr. Joseph Rank, who is also not a banker but has vast interests in flour milling. Other recent big fortunes disclosed at death have been Sir David Yule, £25 million—Anglo-Indian merchant; the Earl of Iveagh, £11 million—head of Guinness brewery; Sir George Wills, £10 million—tobacco; and Sir Joseph Robinson, £10 million—diamond magnate.

Facts, however, appear to matter little to the blind defenders of capitalism, or to the one-eyed critics of certain features of capitalism who belong to the Douglas school. 

Edgar Hardcastle

Slings and Arrows: Famine, Death and Poverty (1953)

The Slings and Arrows column from the October 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Famine, Death and Poverty

Has a millionaire ever died of starvation ? Among all the thousands of corpses cleared from the streets and villages of India during the great famines was there one of an emaciated capitalist ?

It is commonly held that when famine occurs in any part of the world all the inhabitants of that region suffer from its effects. Its causes are attributed to everything from floods to drought, from bad agricultural systems to the vengeance of God upon man’s wickedness. That this vengeance is wreaked always and only upon the poor would appear to be unjust, unless, of course, poverty is a crime and its victims are also its perpetrators. But the rich do not suffer the pangs of hunger during famine. While tens of thousands of Indian workers and peasants were dying in the streets of hunger; while Government transport was sent round to pick up the corpses to prevent the outbreak of disease, food speculators in Bombay and Calcutta, like obscene blow-flies, waxed fat on the profits they made out of the deaths of their fellow-countrymen.

The poor do not get fat When there are surpluses of food it is because of poverty and not because there is too much. The Observer, in its issue (6/9/53), writing a leading article, entitled “ Food,” says

". . .  if the efforts to raise living standards in the underdeveloped countries make headway, food surpluses will disappear: they exist because of poverty, not because everyone has enough to eat."

The latest report of the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations estimates the proportion of the world population subject to malnutrition to be 59 per cent. an increase of 50 per cent. on the pre-war figure. This, in spite of the fact that there have been exceptional harvests, even in India, the classic home of famine.

Further evidence of this comes from the Daily Express (26/8/53), whose reporter, Mr. James Leasor, writes: “For the first time in as long as anyone can remember, India has no food problem. If we were to conclude from this that all would be fed and all hunger satisfied, we would be hopelessly wrong. Mr. Leasor means that there is no failure of crops, although from the concluding remarks of his article he seems to be aware of the basic problem, that of poverty.

We could tell him

Mr. Leasor makes some very interesting revelations. He reports having met the Indian Food Minister, “a worried man . . . two years ago at the time of the Bihar famine ”on his tour of the country telling people that he has so much wheat" we don't know what to do with it.” Unfortunate Food Minister to have his worries over too little replaced by worries over too much. There is a simple solution to his problem, he could give the surplus away to those who need it, but, of course, so easy a way out would not occur to a Food Minister. And there are countless numbers who need it. Mr. Leasor concludes his article with the following

“It is a strange, sad irony that while for the first time India has a food surplus, probably just as many people will be as hungry as ever. Food is there in plenty, but the money to buy it is not Unemployment and the cost of living are still rising. And what satisfaction do full warehouses give if your stomach is empty ?"

Giving away the surplus would alleviate the temporary needs of the people, but it would not solve the problem. Charity is no substitute for Socialism. But this solution which would wipe out these anomalies and sufferings is not likely to commend itself to politicians and other apologists for a system which condemns millions to death for the sake of a ledger entry, a piece of appropriately printed paper or suitable embossed disc of metal

“A dog’s life”

In the same issue of the Daily Express, in an adjoining column to Mr. Leasor's article, and under the above heading, appears the following item. Comment would be superfluous

“In a Soho restaurant yesterday a woman put a plate of chicken down on the floor for her Pekinese.

“A peke’s nose is naturally well tumed-up. This peke managed to turn his up a bit further. The manager looked on, shrugged his shoulders, and commented: 'No salt, no pepper, no mustard, no wonder'. "

Weep for the Suffering Rick

Landlords are always complaining that they are losing money, yet none of them offer to change places with their tenants. Store magnates are always muttering about “overheads,” yet none of them will give up their "troubles” to lead the life of a mere worker. Nevertheless, the rich do have their troubles of which the poor have no conception and for which they have little sympathy. For example, which worker after buying a yacht, painted sapphire blue, has to spend two years seeking for a pair of sapphire earrings to match, as an American millionairess had to do ? Which docker, for instance, has had the bother of suing the Casino at Monte Carlo because he has been barred from there ? Not a single one, we dare to suggest

As if this were not enough trouble we now learn from a Dr. Reuben Kahn (News Chronicle, 12/9/53) that the rich are more prone to disease than the poor. In a series of experiments carried out by the doctor he has discovered that in poor countries people have more "natural antibodies—resistance—in the blood.” He refuses to speculate on the implications, but "some bacteriologists thought his research may give a medical reason for the decline of a civilisation.” The report continues: "As a nation grows richer, the bacteriologists argued, its population may grow less disease-resistant and the nation decline.”

Although Dr. Kahn may refuse to speculate, we will. If his theory is correct then by reducing standards of living, employers are bestowing great benefits on the workers by increasing their "resistance.” What self-sacrifice do the rich perform! They deny themselves the benefit of good health so that the poor may continue to enjoy that rich glow of well-being that “resistance to disease” brings. On the other hand, if they decide to be selfish, police will be required to control the queues of rich people waiting to sell what they have and give to the poor. One could hardly blame them.

The fact that disease flourishes in the poorer countries, as all statistics on the subject show, must be disregarded. It is true that sickness carries off more poor people than rich; it is true that the expectation of life among the poor is less than amongst the rich. But this does not matter. So long as they have more “natural antibodies" than the rich, then every poor man can die happy, if prematurely.

Bernard Shaw, in his preface to “Doctor’s Dilemma,” tells of a man who conducted an experiment to decide how long a horse would live if it had a leg amputated periodically. The horse died before the experiment was completed. The poor will go on dying, perhaps, before Dr. Kahn's experiments are completed and another scientific discovery will founder on the obstinacy of its subject 

 S. A.

SPGB Snippets: Whoever has will be given more (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

July 8, 2026

A report on wealth inequality graphically illustrates the class divide in 2026.

Apparently, the 56,000 wealthiest adults on the planet – who could fit inside a single football stadium – own three times as much wealth as the poorest 2.8 billion adults (add their families, that’s HALF of humanity).

Those 56,000 must have really worked their arses off…

Just kidding! That wealth has been sucked from the world’s working class and, as Marx predicted in Capital, the nature of capitalist economics has resulted in increasing concentration of real wealth.

The report’s suggestion? Higher taxes for the rich and spend more on education (!!). In other words, tinker around at the edges and leave the cause of the problem alone. Sad or what?

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Global real worker pay fell 12 percent while real CEO pay surged 54 percent between 2019 and 2025. At least four CEOs of major corporations each pocketed over $100 million in pay and bonuses last year. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan led the pack at over $205 million. Billionaires were paid $2,500 per second in dividends in 2025. The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Oxfam are calling for urgent action to rein in extreme wealth, including higher, fairer taxes on the richest and binding limits on CEO pay.

[Common Dreams]

In 2011, he spent 81 days detained in China for criticizing the government following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which 90,000 people died. Ai Weiwei worked with hundreds of anonymous volunteers to identify and publish the names of more than 5,000 children who died under the rubble of poorly constructed schools, information that the government sought to censor. 

[El Pais]

…. the Housing and Land Rights Network, have argued that the real numbers are significantly higher and estimate at 3 million…Shelters, where available, are frequently inadequate, overcrowded, unsanitary, unsafe for women, or located far from work opportunities. Instead of treating shelter as a right linked to dignity, many city administrations treat it as temporary charity. During mega-events such as the Commonwealth Games 2010 or the G20 Summit gatherings hosted in India, homeless people are often subjected to eviction drives in the name of beautification. Pavements are cleared, encampments removed, and poverty hidden so that cities may appear modern to visitors.

[Countercurrents]

The right to life in Kenya is often treated as if it begins at conception and ends at birth. As in much of the world, self-described ‘pro-lifers’ claim to defend life at all costs – yet too often stop short of defending the lives already being lived, and those cut short too early.

[openDemocracy]

…the central question of his book, which is built around a concept Marx called ‘disposable time’—the time left over after workers have completed the labor necessary to sustain themselves and their families. Marx traced this idea back to an obscure 1821 pamphlet he discovered in the British Museum, in which the author argued that a nation’s true wealth lies not in gold or goods but in free time: ‘Wealth is disposable time, and nothing more’.

[People’s World]

The communist revolution, if it arrives in the nick of time to prevent humankind’s suicide, is a seismic event that changes everything. It is difficult to imagine it but it will leave nothing untouched. People will change. In the heat of the struggle for survival, proletarians will come together and become the self-conscious collective worker, which he/she already was but didn’t know it. All human relationships (between producers, family members, men-women, young-old, teachers-students and more) change in the process. The entire way in which society reproduces itself changes. Work changes. It no longer means labor.

[Internationalist Perspective]

(These links are provided for information, Target sites don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

But not fighting capitalism (2026)

Book Review from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fight Oligarchy: Where We Go from Here. By Bernie Sanders. Penguin £9.99.

Oligarchy, the opening sentence states, ‘is a system in which a small number of extremely wealthy individuals control the economic, political, and media life of a nation.’ Plenty of examples are given of inequality of wealth. For instance, Elon Musk is worth nearly $400 billion, more than the bottom half of US households. In Mexico, Carlos Slim is worth over $96 billion, while the Sultan of Brunei has wealth of $30 billion and owns 600 Rolls Royces.

Nor is it just a matter of individuals. Three Wall Street firms, Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street, are major shareholders in nearly all the largest American corporations, including Ford, ExxonMobil and Pfizer. Media ownership is extremely concentrated too: ‘Billionaires own and control virtually every major newspaper and radio network in the country.’ Moreover, there is massive oligarchic influence on politics, with gigantic donations and threats to run candidates against politicians who are the least bit awkward. Super PACs (Political Action Committees) can spend millions of dollars to defeat, for instance, members of Congress who oppose US aid to the Israeli government. The Democratic Party offers little resistance to Trump and the oligarchs, having supposedly ‘turned its back on the needs and suffering of America’s working class’ (but when did it ever support the interests of workers?).

At the same time, American workers are on average less well off than fifty years ago, adjusting for inflation. Eight hundred thousand people in the US are homeless, and over sixty thousand die each year because they cannot get to a doctor on time. Suicide rates have increased, especially among young people.

Sanders, an independent senator who has been involved with the Democrats, presents a vivid and harrowing picture of inequality and poverty in the US. He has been on a Fighting Oligarchy tour around various states, talking to audiences about what can and should be done to fight back. What he advocates is, however, the usual reformist fare: raise taxes on the rich and on large corporations, cut military spending, enact Medicare for all, make housing affordable, raise the minimum wage, improve pensions. But, even if made a reality (which is unlikely, given capitalism’s need for profits), this would leave the class division of society unchanged, with workers still subject to the unpredictability of markets and being exploited by their employers. A discussion of Sanders’ views in the April 2017 Socialist Standard noted that the so-called revolution he stood for then ‘leaves capitalism firmly in place’ . Clearly nothing in his views has changed since that time. The book is also quite expensive for such a slim volume.

Paul Bennett

Material World: The closed world of billionaire power (2026)

The Material World column from the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

You can’t throw a brick these days without hitting one… philanthropic billionaires. One of them has been in the capitalists’ news cycles: Bill Gates has been in the news recently not so much for the atrocious spyware-laden Windows 11 operating system, but for his business ties and friendship with serial child exploiter Jeffrey Epstein. Yet Gates is still treated by the media as a kind of global saviour. A benevolent technocrat. A trusted voice on health, population, food, and development.

Philanthropy or social currency of ‘soft power’

Gates’s relationship with Epstein reveals the closed world of billionaire power. According to recently released documents, Epstein first contacted Gates in 2013 to propose a ‘donor-advised fund’ that would serve as ‘cloud computing for the giving world’, a vehicle to attract ‘the most money any charity has ever had’. Over 18 months, Gates’s family office head and foundation general counsel engaged in extensive correspondence with the convicted sex offender about this charitable vehicle.

But here’s the thing: why did the world’s second wealthiest individual require introductions to wealthy donors from a registered sex offender? The answer lies in understanding that billionaire philanthropy operates not as charity but as a mechanism of class consolidation an exclusive club and you’re not in it. Where the extraction of surplus value is celebrated through tax advantages. Barry Josephson and Epstein revelling through criminal interactions. Bill’s conundrum: what to do about the poor.

And we know exactly what they discussed. In an email exchange, Epstein wrote to an associate: ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about that question that you asked Bill Gates ‘how do we get rid of poor people as a whole’ and I have an answer/ comment regarding that for you’ (from the document provided, dated 3 February, 2011, showing correspondence between Jeffrey Epstein and Barry Josephson). This is what they talk about on the island. This is what billionaire philanthropy really means.

The population … problem?

Gates believes that the problem isn’t over-extraction, capitalism or the profit motive. Greed or billionaires don’t concern him, instead he sees African birth-rates as a threat to global capitalist progress. He has stated in a TED talk that he wants to reduce global population by 15 percent.

The Gates Foundation’s 2024 budget totals $8.6 billion, with family planning separate from the $8.3 billion for ‘fertility management’. Gates pledged $100 billion for this on World Population Day, not International Women’s Day. Fertility management in the Gates Foundation has its own budget and targets: $150 million for 2024 and $143 million for 2025. Not through maternal care or with improving material conditions like clinics that could continue afterwards. The money does not flow from charity to women; it flows from tax sheltered wealth to pharmaceutical corporations.

The Depo-Provera scandal

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), backed by hundreds of billions, claims moral authority to influence the health, agriculture and family lives of millions across Africa and the global south. This is about Sayana Press, Pfizer’s injectable contraceptive, a reformulated version of Depo-Provera that was previously subject to over 2,000 brain tumour lawsuits in Florida. The UK and US government both subsidise the use of this drug.

A 2024 study in the British Medical Journal revealed that women using Depo-Provera face a 550 percent increased risk of developing intracranial meningiomas, AKA brain tumours, requiring invasive surgery, radiation, and often causing permanent neurological damage. Pfizer knew of these risks for decades while failing to warn patients. European and Canadian labels now carry meningioma warnings; the US label was only updated in December 2025 after litigation began.

The Maxwell precedent: intelligence and institutional power

Robert Maxwell, press tycoon, scam artist, and former Labour MP too knew how to create institutional power. He had intelligence contacts in Mossad and with the KGB and did work for British intelligence. He also hobnobbed with the queen, (prince) Charles, Thatcher, Mother Teresa, George Bush and so on. He was the go-to guy for dirt on the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

The Epstein-Gates nexus is modelled on these earlier networks of elite control. Epstein’s own operations, his ‘black book’ of contacts, his mysterious wealth, his lenient 2008 prosecution, suggest similar intelligence community protections. The ‘Lolita Express’ flight logs and island visitors represent not merely criminal activity but the mechanisms through which ruling-class loyalty is ensured through mutual incrimination.

The socialist alternative

Socialists do not oppose access to contraception, nor deny the importance of reproductive choice. On the contrary, we insist that women must be free from economic compulsion in deciding whether and when to have children. The Gates Foundation model, in which pharmaceutical corporations, backed by billionaire ‘donations’ and government co-funding, experiment on vulnerable populations, represents the antithesis of reproductive freedom.

True reproductive freedom requires the social ownership of pharmaceutical production, democratic control over healthcare priorities, and the elimination of economic coercion in all its forms. When contraceptives are developed through producer-controlled research, distributed through publicly accountable health systems, and provided as genuine choices rather than population control measures, then we will have achieved something worth calling family planning.

Until then, we must recognise billionaire philanthropy for what it is: the velvet glove of the ruling elite sanitising exploitation while the iron fist of king capital maintains its grip.

A.T.

The Passing Show: The Congo (1961)

The Passing Show Column from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Congo

U.N. officials report that 300,000 people are slowly starving to death in the Congo, with two hundred dying every day. This is still further proof, if it were necessary, that it is not enough to be merely against capitalism, or colonialism, or the rule of a particular imperial power; one must have constructive proposals as to what is to replace the system to be destroyed—one must, in short, work for the achievement of Socialism, not merely for the destruction of any other economic and social system. A year ago, there were those who criticised the Socialist Party because it would not join in movements for “colonial freedom”, such as the one that aimed to throw the Belgians out of the Congo. We pointed out that this would only entail the Congolese people exchanging one set of masters for another. And this is what has occurred. It would be hard to argue, in face of the mass-starvation, in face of the pictures of Congolese children who are nothing more than skin and bone, that the Congolese people are better off today than they were a year ago. In fact the new Congolese masters, to whom the Congolese people were exhorted to give their support, cannot even agree among themselves. And in the squabbling and fighting among the various sections of the new Congolese ruling class—each of which calls in help from foreign states, Russia, America, Ghana, and Belgium among them—it is the ordinary Congolese who suffer. The system of food-growing and food-distribution has in some parts (notably Kasai) almost entirely broken down. And every day more people starve.

Land of opportunity

Feeling depressed in a monotonous job? Worried about the endless struggle to keep the weekly budget down to the size of your pay packet? Thinking about emigration—perhaps to Canada, land of opportunity?

Before you go, have a look at MacLean’s magazine (it calls itself Canada’s National Magazine) for November 19th, 1960. It carries an article telling you about Canada’s rich. A favourite place for their holidays is Frenchman’s Creek in Jamaica, where millionaires and their wives can have peace and privacy for two thousand dollars a week. Last year a Calgary oil millionaire flew a party of his friends to England to watch his horse run in the Derby; the bill he paid covered a week’s stay at the Ritz for the party and Rolls-Royces for his friends’ trips. A Toronto manufacturer had two swimming pools put in his backyard, complete with lighted fountain, hi-fi music and Japanese teahouse, for 30,000 dollars. A Montreal construction business tycoon often flies to Florida or the Caribbean for weekends in one of the family’s two private planes (a DC-3 and a flying boat); once he couldn’t get a favourite Chinese dish in Miami, so he rang up his usual restaurant in Montreal and got them to make it and fly it down to him. A multi-millionaire distiller had his house festooned with fifteen thousand lilac blooms for his daughter’s wedding; the total wedding bill was reported at 100,000 dollars. Twenty-five upper class wives dress entirely in Paris and London creations at an annual cost of up to forty thousand dollars.

The other side of the coin

You’re keen to? Have a look at the next page. This carries the stories of some of the families of Canada’s 327,000 unemployed workers. (If we had the same percentage of unemployment in Britain there would be nearly a million out of work.) It tells of the bitterness of men trying to make ends meet on unemployment pay. “Today the boss wants a twenty-year-old man with forty years’ experience”, some of them said. A fifty-three-year-old steamfitter suggested, “Why don’t they shoot us old men? Digging graves for us would make jobs for the younger men”. The stories are much the same—mounting bills which cannot be paid, threatening letters from hire-purchase companies as the payments fall behind, the despair of men combing the town every day for jobs and being everywhere refused.

Still, there it is. In a system run by the capitalists you would expect the capitalists to be well off. And you would expect the workers to be badly off. In other words—capitalism in Canada works out much the same as capitalism in Britain. Emigration will give you a change of scenery, but it can’t change your class-position in society.

Unfair to the rich

In the current number of Oxford Tory, the Conservative undergraduate journal, there was a surprising item. One writer commented “To say that we have a just society would be, to say the least, an exaggeration”. Clearly a true statement, but what a place to find it. However, the very next words dispelled the astonishment. “Look”, the writer goes on, “at Schedule A, and the absurd level of death duties”. So it isn’t the ownership of all the country’s factories, and mines, and land by a small ruling class that this Tory finds “unjust”, nor the fact that the workers have to labour to support idlers in luxury: he was only concerned with the arrangements made by the capitalist class to pay for the State which looks after their interests. Perhaps if he examines the nature of society a little more closely, he will be able to find some more penetrating criticisms of the “just society”.

Flogging

Sir Thomas Moore, the Conservative M.P. for Ayr Burghs, is again agitating for the introduction of flogging for crimes involving violence. Sir Thomas said that “peace and justice” were the “keywords” of Hitler’s policy, and also that “Herr Hitler is absolutely honest and sincere,” at a time when Hitler had already set up a dictatorship and begun his campaign to “solve the Jewish problem” with every circumstance of brutality. Socialists do not join in the debate about how criminals should be punished: we go to the root of the problem, By attempting to end the society which gives rise to crime and to criminals. But if Sir Thomas thinks that a man who injures a single other man ought to be flogged, what does he think should be done with political leaders who support dictators whose declared policy is the “liquidation” of millions of their fellow human beings?

Alwyn Edgar

Blogger's Note:

"A year ago, there were those who criticised the Socialist Party because it would not join in movements for “colonial freedom”, such as the one that aimed to throw the Belgians out of the Congo. "

This is in reference to the 'Hackney 13' who resigned from the SPGB in 1960. Hackney is in reference to the fact that they were members of the Hackney Branch of the SPGB. From 'Kaz's paper on SPGB disputes down the years:

The Hackney thirteen, 1960 (13)

Thirteen members of Hackney appended their names to a circular, dated 25th May 1960, announcing their resignation. The letter noted that those listed were “deeply concerned about racialism, about South Africa, about the hydrogen bomb, living standards and other things” and that the resignations were a protest against what they saw as the “unconcern” of the Party with these issues and its “refusal to consider…the welfare of the working class.” 

Connolly, Leo (5929)

Coster, Mrs M (5075)*

Crome, Jack (5735)

Dane, S (5551)

Gleason, J (5856)

Ivimey, AW (5572)

Ivimey, F (5573)

Jarvis, R (5885)

Lawrence, JW (5835)

Temple, MF (5008)

Walby, Dennis (5906)

Walby, S (5292)

Wood, AH (4724)

One name missing from that list was Robert Barltrop ('R. Coster'), who was part of the same dispute within the Party, and resigned from its ranks around about the same time.

Proper Gander: The luxury gap (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a hint of pornography about Channel 4’s documentary series Inside The World’s Most Luxurious… in that it presents an idealised version of something in order to titillate. The first three episodes each show off the highest of high-end vehicles: cruise ships, motor-homes and yachts. These are the most extravagant and technologically advanced ways of getting from A to B available, albeit only to those who can fork out £8,000 a night for a voyage on a liner. On the Seven Seas Grandeur, this would get you one of their ‘most exclusive’ suites, which comes with its own butler. The ship boasts seven restaurants (with Versace-designed crockery), a 470-seat theatre and an art gallery containing 1,600 exhibits, including a doted-on Fabergé egg. More compact are the motor-homes featured in the second episode. These are ‘jaw-dropping palaces on wheels’, one of which even includes a garage in which you can park your Ferrari. A hi-tech cockpit leads on to a sleek seating area, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, even a roof terrace. The Element model of motor-home sells for over £2 million, although this sounds like a bargain compared to the £12 million cost for a flat of the same size (732 square feet) in Knightsbridge, London. The third episode showcases ‘the super elite’s ultimate status symbol’: yachts. We’re told that ‘these floating palaces redefine the meaning of opulence’, with one example being the £80 million Titania, which runs to 73 metres long and has six decks (containing a massage room, jacuzzi, gym and grand piano) joined by a glass lift. This ‘pinnacle of bespoke luxury’ is only rarely used by its owner, the billionaire founder of Phones4U John Caudwell, and otherwise can be hired out for £600,000 per week.

The series describes rather than attempts to analyse the extravagances, not that this means it gives an objective or neutral account, as illustrated by the gushing adjectives used in the narration. While the monetary value of the vehicles is often mentioned, more emphasis is placed on the attention to detail and the skills involved in manufacturing them. The motor-homes and yachts are made to order, with the specifications chosen by the beaming couples who commission them and built by hand by specialist firms. The talents of the designers, welders, plumbers, electricians, and hundreds of others are evident, and the yachts and motor-homes are certainly inspiring as technical achievements. The positive impression the programme engenders also extends to the owners, who seem personable enough, and the creators and crews who want to do a good job in making and running the craft. We are only shown the staff while they’re on duty and on camera, though, so we don’t hear if their opinions are always so committed. Despite the occasional wry inflection in the voice over, the programme’s affirming tone doesn’t encourage us to question the context in which these lavish objects exist. Still, it’s obvious that the lifestyles depicted in the programme don’t bear much relation to those of its audience. The extraordinary feats of design and engineering are tainted by the elitism which the vehicles represent.

In a socialist world, maybe more people will want to live in yachts or motor-homes or their future equivalents? Without the financial and bureaucratic constraints which in capitalism usually tie us to a particular location whether we want to be there or not, the freedom to travel around would be one of the principles of a socialist society. Some people, groups or communities may prefer to spend time travelling with or without a fixed home, and why not do this in the most comfortable way possible? This leads to the familiar argument against socialism that it is unrealistic and unsustainable because ‘what if everyone wanted their own luxury yacht or motor-home?’. An assumption behind this is that given the opportunity, people will tend to choose the most full-on option. Personal greed is an attitude encouraged by the relative scarcities of capitalism, whereas socialism wouldn’t create the conditions for an outlook as narrow. Wanting better isn’t necessarily the same as wanting more, and even in capitalist society, our aspirations are varied. If an individual or group in a socialist world wanted to produce a top-notch yacht or motor-home, they wouldn’t be able to make this happen through financial clout, but only by engaging the cooperation of many others. With resources and manufacturing capabilities owned and run in common, people will have to decide how to allocate them using whatever decision-making processes are most democratic, representative and practical. Without the wasteful production which comes with propping up capitalist infrastructure, a socialist society would be able to focus on satisfying people’s needs and wants. Whether or not this would involve behemoths like those featured in the documentary would depend on what provision and motivation are available at the time. A socialist society’s early period would have to prioritise ensuring the global population’s basic needs are met in a sustainable way. Maybe motor-homes and yachts or their future equivalents could be available on a pool-type basis, with people booking them to use for a while and then being available for someone else. This kind of arrangement would no doubt be alongside networks of more communal travel by land, sea or air. The technology and skills to create efficient, pleasurable means of transport are already here, as demonstrated by Inside The World’s Most Luxurious…, even if our current society limits this to the super-rich, as the programme also reminds us.

Mike Foster

Tiny Tips (2026)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you make $60,000 a year after taxes, in order to make $700 billion, you’d need to work for nearly 12 million years. ‘The richest 1% own half the stock market (49.9%), while the bottom half of the U.S. owns just 1.1% of the stock market’. ‘The richest 0.0001% control a greater share of wealth than in the Gilded Age, an era of U.S. history defined by extreme inequality’. 

[Consortium News]

The toilet, by Maurizio Cattelan — the provocative Italian artist known for taping a banana to a wall — went up for auction Tuesday evening at Sotheby’s in New York. The starting bid for the 223-pound, 18-karat-gold work was about $10 million. Cattelan has said the piece, titled ‘America’ satirizes superwealth. ‘Whatever you eat, a $200 lunch or a $2 hot dog, the results are the same, toilet-wise’, he once said. 

[Yahoo]

Mother Teresa is still praised around the world for her charity work, but her legacy is deeply controversial. Reports from former volunteers and medical professionals claimed that many of her care homes were unsanitary and neglectful, with patients denied pain relief because she believed suffering brought people closer to God. Despite receiving millions in donations, her organization frequently failed to provide proper medical treatment or transparency regarding the use of the funds. She also accepted money and praise from dictators and was firmly against abortion, contraception, and divorce, even in extreme cases.

[Yahoo]

There are still people who say that Marx is outdated because Russian socialism collapsed … In Russia, capitalism was interpreted as being about private property and private ownership of the means of production, and the Soviets’ proposal was, ‘What if we nationalize everything?’ Then they found that state control ended up being absolute. If you look at the situation of the workers, it didn’t change that much from one system to another. In capitalism, it’s the employers who exploit the workers. During Soviet socialism, the workers were exploited by the Communist Party or by the bureaucrats. 

[ara]

The Russian communist party has awarded North Korean leader Kim Jong Un the “Lenin Prize” for his outstanding contributions to ‘socialist construction’, praising him for standing up against ‘imperialist aggression’ by supporting the invasion of Ukraine. 

[NK News]

The cobbled streets of Newport in Middlesbrough survive from the Victorian era. The staggering levels of child poverty here also feel like they belong in a different time. Six out of every seven children in Newport are classified as living in poverty. 

[Sky News]

It’s time to stop settling. ‘The working class is going to have to look at itself as a whole and say, “Our divisions in race, politics, religion, sectors of the workforce — all that will have to be laid aside,” he says. “It’s a ‘workers of the world, unite’ situation. We’re all in it together against the billionaire class, and it’s going to take that in the fight to win”’. 

[In These Times]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

TV Review: Winner Takes It All (2004)

TV Review from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Panorama on 7 November dealt with the UK super-rich, under the label of a ‘winner-take-all’ culture. The wealthiest one percent of the population receive 13 percent of the national income (compared to 6 percent in the days before Thatcher) and own almost a quarter of the total personal wealth. They can easily afford to spend upwards of £500 on a haircut, and £2 million on a ‘starter home’. The gap between these millionaires and the rest of the population is getting ever greater:  most workers earn less than £19,000 a year, and personal debt for ordinary people has shown a big rise.

   

The programme had a few dissenting voices, who thought that such vast fortunes were objectionable on various grounds. Not Tony Blair, though, who was seen in an interview saying that there was nothing wrong with people receiving such sums and that he was opposed to a cap on anyone’s income. Mostly, though, it was a celebration of this top one percent, who supposedly create wealth and advance the state of technology. “Everyone has benefited,” said one property millionaire. One individual was said to be ‘building a boat’ – actually a luxury yacht to be rented out to other parasites for £200,000 a week – but of course he was paying workers to do the actual building, and he was just going to rake in the profits.

   

Much was also made of the fact that many of the millionaires had started out as ordinary workers and had made their own way into the elite, originally through their own efforts. But there was no mention of the fact that the vast majority of workers toil throughout their lives for little reward. And it really does not matter if a capitalist came from humble circumstances, for they live off surplus value created by exploited workers. But it’s hardly surprising that Panorama failed to point this out.

Paul Bennett

Deals and Lawyers (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth. By Tom Burgis. William Collins £10.99.

In December 2022 we reviewed Burgis’ Kleptopia, which examined the machinations of the super-rich to acquire and hide their wealth, with special attention to Kazakhstan. Here he looks at similar activities in a variety of countries. The idea behind the title is that a cuckoo has to get another bird to think that the cuckoo’s egg is its own, thus relying on an illusion, similar to the way in which some people present two versions of themselves.

Others are mentioned, but the focus is on Mohamed Amersi, who is a ‘dealmaker’ in the telecommunications industry. In an emerging market (which Burgis defines as a country where lots of poor people live) there are plenty of opportunities for selling mobile phones for the first time. In former USSR provinces, such as Uzbekistan, telecom licences can be obtained through contacts of various kinds, and Amersi charges a Swedish corporation a ‘success fee’ of half a million dollars. Never mind that the company later paid a massive fine because its partner in Uzbekistan was in fact the daughter of the country’s dictator (all hidden in a shell company in Gibraltar). Amersi did very well out of all this, as the company paid him $63m dollars over six years. As Burgis says, recessions do not happen to the rich.

The second part of the book deals with how the wealthy make and maintain links with politicians and other powerful people (‘access capitalism’). For instance, the Conservatives’ Leaders Group provides monthly lunches with ministers for a mere £50,000 a year. Or you could pay to attend a cheese-tasting session with Liz Truss (no longer available, perhaps). A company called Quintessentially satisfies the whims of the global elite, such as a football signed by Lionel Messi. But things do not always work out as planned. Amersi became involved in a dispute with Charlotte Leslie, a former Tory MP, over which organisation should be in charge of Conservative relations with the Middle East. He sued her for ‘disseminating false and misleading information’, but his suit was dismissed, the judge saying that his actions ‘give real cause for concern’.

This is an example of what is sometimes called ‘lawfare’: the rich and powerful intimidate those who write about them by means of lawsuits which may involve incredibly high legal fees. Even if the lawsuit fails, those who have been subject to it will have undergone a period of anxiety and stress, fearful of being bankrupted, and so may in future decide it is easier not to ruffle the feathers of the elite. Newspaper editors may prefer that their journalists not get involved in such cases. The term used is SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). So, as in the book’s subtitle, the truth is a matter of legal and financial power rather than actual facts on the ground. (Another example would be Trump’s recent attempt to sue US newspapers for billions of dollars.)

A well-argued insight into some of the ways in which some rich people acquire and protect their wealth.

Paul Bennett

Voice From the Back: A Society of contrasts (2008)

The Voice From the Back column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Society of contrasts

Everywhere you look today the contradictions of capitalism become more and more obvious. Great wealth alongside great poverty, starvation amidst plenty and a technology that makes space travel possible yet is unable to stop the destruction of war. Two recent examples of the obscenity of capitalism leapt from the pages of the media recently. “Caviar House & Prunier, on Piccadilly, has taken delivery of the Almas, a rare golden caviar once reserved for the Tsars of Russia. Despite the price – £920 for limited edition 50g tins – the shop claims a four-year waiting list.” (Times, 19 August) “The price of rat meat has quadrupled in Cambodia this year as inflation has put other meat beyond the reach of poor people, officials said on Wednesday. With consumer price inflation at 37 percent according to the latest central bank estimate, demand has pushed a kilogram of rat meat up to around 5,000 riel (69 pence) from 1,200 riel last year.” (Yahoo News, 27 August) Does this system not disgust you? We must abolish it.

Marx and modernity

Away back in 1867 Karl Marx in Das Capital explained how the so-called primitive accumulation of capital was based on robbery and murder. In Peru today a similar process is taking place. In Britain we had the highland clearances and the enclosure acts, in Peru it is the expulsion of the indigenous population. “Peru is considering sending in the army to break up protests by Amazonian Indians who claim the government is preparing a massive land grab in the country’s remote jungles. … The government has responded to an appeal for talks by declaring a state of emergency in three states and threatening protesters with military action. “Indigenous people are defending themselves against government aggression,” said an Amazon Indian rights campaigner, Alberto Pizango. “This is not an ordinary or everyday demonstration. The Indians have told us they are not afraid. If the government declares a state of emergency they prefer to die there and show that this government violates human rights.” Relations between indigenous groups and the President Alan Garcia have become increasingly hostile as the government has sought to exploit what are thought to be rich oil and gas deposits in lands owned by Amazon Indians. Energy companies have pushed deep into supposedly protected areas in the past year, leading to clashes with some of the most remote tribal peoples left in the world.” (Independent, 21 August)

US gap widens

Socialists often meet with the argument that while capitalism may have been a terrible system in the past, with the awful gap between rich and poor, today we are gradually improving things and such inequalities no longer exists. So what do the anti-socialists make of these recent statistics? “The rich-poor gap also widened with the nation’s top one percent now collecting 23 percent of total income, the biggest disparity since 1928, according to the Economic Policy Institute. One side statistic supplied by the IRS: there are now 47,000 Americans worth $20 million or more, an all-time high.” (San Francisco Chronicle, 2 September) Eighty years of reform and now the gap is even wider.

Behind the rhetoric

Capitalist statesmen often speak of high ideals like freedom and democracy but behind the high-sounding rhetoric there is usually a harsh reality. A recent example was the US vice-president’s speech in Georgia. “Speaking in Georgia on Thursday, Cheney slammed Russia’s “illegitimate, unilateral attempt” to redraw the country’s borders and promised ongoing support for Georgia’s efforts to join NATO. The Vice President’s trip was accompanied by a $1 billion aid package announced in Washington Wednesday, for the purpose of rebuilding Georgia’s shattered economy and infrastructure. Upon arriving in Azerbaijan on Wednesday, Cheney told the people of that country and their neighbors in Georgia and Ukraine that “the United States has a deep and abiding interest in your well-being and security”.” Fine words indeed, but behind them was a more sordid reason than concern for the well-being of the Georgian citizens. “Vice President Dick Cheney, on a tour of former Soviet Republics, was working to shore up U.S. alliances in the wake of Russia’s military humiliation of Georgia – a mission whose outcome could have profound consequences for Washington’s efforts to maintain and expand the flow of oil and natural gas to the West while bypassing Russia. ” (Time, 4 September)

The Indian Rupee trick 

Many Asian countries are depicted as “third-world” where an undeveloped economy leaves millions starving, but here is an example of an Indian capitalist who has learned the trick of exploiting workers to make a fortune.” Vijay Mallya, the founder and chairman of fast-growing Kingfisher Airlines, launched his first international route yesterday linking Heathrow with India’s IT capital Bangalore – a daily service that puts the carrier in head-to-head competition with BA. …The father-of-three, ranked 476th in Fortune’s list of the world’s wealthiest people, has 26 homes around the world and 260 vintage cars. He made his fortune as chairman of Indian drinks group United Breweries, the Kingfisher-beer owner that last year acquired Scotch whisky maker Whyte & Mackay for £595m.” (Daily Telegraph, 5 September)

Filthy Rich (1976)

From the September 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the main points of the argument put forward by the SPGB is that capitalist society is divided into two classes; the working class, the largely propertlyless majority, and the capitalist class, those who own most of the wealth produced in the world and the physical means to make more of it. It is easy to identify the working class. For example you can see them at certain hours of the day pouring into the factories, offices, shops, mines railway stations etc. in order to work. That is why they are called workers. They receive at the end of their week or month’s work, a pay packet or salary cheque — the price at which they have sold their labour-power to the boss. Basically this will permit them to purchase sufficient to allow themselves and their families to subsist until the next pay packet. That’s simple.

But it is sometimes not quite so easy physically to identify the capitalist class. True you see the odd chauffeur driven Rolls with its owner frequently sprawled across the back seat, the assembly at Ascot, and those going in and out of Claridges, the Ritz etc. But some highly paid workers will use Claridges, so that can be confusing. And many members of the working class will go to Ascot to mimic the pastimes of their class exploiters. So identification lines can become blurred. In particular, when wealth ownership itself has become a most complicated and intricate network of title to deeds, bonds, shares etc. it all adds to the difficulty of identification It is no wonder many people are confused and ask the SPGB “Who are the capitalist class?” “Where are the capitalist class?” and so on.

Where there's a will

Well ironicaly, one of the easiest methods of identifying someone’s class position is not by the facts of his life, but by the effects of his death. When a worker dies, after funeral expenses have been paid, the H.P. company sorted out etc. there is not usually much left. Very often nothing at all. Born with nothing, the worker dies with nothing, leaving “not a rack behind” as Shakespeare put it. But the death of a capitalist is a different matter. For one thing it is noted in the papers — it is news. The Times for example runs a short daily column headed “Latest Wills”. Now these are not any old Wills — when you die, not only will they not bother to write your obituary in the Times, they won’t put in their latest Wills column how much you left to your family and friends. But a glance at the column for any day will show something interesting. The paper’s column for Wednesday July 14th 1976 (chosen entirely at random) is quite short. It reads as follows:

Lord Elphinsone of Drumkilbo, Meigle, Tayside, a first cousin of the Queen, has left estate totalling £890,907 gross according to his will published in Perth yesterday. It included £178,019 abroad. Other estates, include . . . Atkin, Mrs. Anita Constance Irene of Tonbridge £163,424; Bennett, Lady of Highgate, wife of Sir Thomas Bennett £143,390; Hawkin, Mrs. Levu Colin, of Caine, butcher, £345,293; Segravc, Mr. Charles Rodney of Chobham £515,275.

(The figures do not show the tax that will be payable on the deaths. Equally they do not show the amount the individual may have “disposed of” prior to death in part to avoid taxes. The true representation of the individual’s wealth may be much higher than the amount given.)

Another column which frequently pinpoints the capitalist at his hour of death is the obituary column. You don’t need to have done anything of note to merit an entry — provided you were very rich. J. Paul Getty died on 7th June this year. Some of the points about him which appeared from the Times of the next day are the following; at his death he was “estimated” (i.e. he was so rich they could not even count all his money and it had to be guessed) to be worth £1,000 million; he “lived simply amid considerable splendour at Sutton Place, near Guildford, the Elizabethan mansion set in 1,000 acres”; lest this home was not “simple” enough (how much more fawning can the capitalist press be than to say he lived “simply” — the reporter ought to visit some working class homes, or look round his own, and then see if Getty lived simply) he was having another house built for him at Malibu California where “he had built a museum to house his £100 million art collection”; by the age of 21 he had “made” 2 million dollars (but he had of course a rather good send off from his millionaire father), and by the same age he had had 2 divorces, (3 more marriages and divorces to follow); this displeased his “earnest Methodist” father, so much so that when the father died, he gave Getty only 500,000 dollars of his estate of 10 million dollars; but fear not, our hero was “not disheartened by the smallness of the legacy for he already had 4 million dollars of his own”; and on and on.

Thrift and Humbug

Like so many members of the class that has no social function whatever other than to accumulate the wealth produced by workers, Getty was fond of giving his opinions to all who cared to listen (and he was so rich many people did listen). The capitalist press repeat these pearls so that the swine before whom they are cast and who produced the wealth for him can be suitably impressed by the wisdom of their masters. For example; “The advice he was prone to give to others he had followed himself. This was to ‘be thrifty, save a little money and have a small surplus for investment’.” Or what about this gem: “He did not believe in charity. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, 'why I should distribute money right and left to people because they ask for it’”! well, quite right too! after all, if the world is so madly organized as to allow most people to live in want and provide Getty with such a crazy superabundance why should he be such a damn fool (as his methodist father with his religion humbug would no doubt have put it) as to give it back to them?

That’s one sadly deceased member of the parasite class. What about some living ones? The death of Getty brought forth speculations as to who was the richest person in the world now that both Getty and Howard Hughes are dead. As the Sunday Times reported (9/6/76) there is no shortage of candidates. Some of the most obvious candidates are to quote the Sunday Times “comparatively hard up”. Into that category they put people like Henry Ford, Woodruff of Coca Cola, Benton of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Forest E. Mars of Mars Bar fame and Dewott Wallace of Readers Digest. Some of the legendary wealthy American families (Rockefellers and the like) can’t compete for the title either because they have been too “busily giving their money away to distant members of the family in a desperate effort to avoid tax.” One possible candidate is Al Tajir. He is the ambassador to Britain from the United Arab Emirates and also their advisor on oil. He “has accrued his vast wealth from a variety of sources — mining in Africa, property in Western Europe, businesses in the Persian Gulf and Lebanon . . . he did once boast that whereas many governments would find it hard — if not impossible — to raise a billion dollars . . . it would take him only a morning” However the Sunday Times suggests that the man who must take the crown is currently little-known 78-year-old American, Daniel K. Ludwig.

Although it appears that Ludwig is somewhat coy about disclosing the extent of his interests (and he may not know — as Getty is supposed to have said, “you can’t be that rich if you know how much you have got”, it seems they include the following: “The American company National Bulk Carriers, a huge fleet of tankers, a shipyard in Japan, a large share in the National Mortgage Bank in America, a deep water port in Florida, a big interest in potash in Ethiopia, iron ore in India, oranges in Panama, a million acres of Venezuela, 3 million acres of Brazil and large chunks of Australia and the United States.”

A Bijou Nest

Another quietly comfortable family is the “Royal”. Despite the cries of poverty from them that have in recent years tugged at the worker’s heartstrings, the owners of the little home standing in the exclusive 40 acres of ground at Buckingham Palace (an estate agent’s dream) can’t be that hard up. They have recently bought a small present for their son-in-law and daughter. It is, according to the Daily Mail (24/6/76 a “730 acre property — complete with trout lake, a conservatory as long as a cricket pitch, 200 acres of mature woodland, a 530 acre farm, a folly and stables.” Mind you according to the report the stables probably need doing up, the kitchen (not that the dear couple can be expected to be doing that much washing up themselves) needs a coat or two of paint, the billiard room has a “dusty unused look and has been used as a store” (how low can you get?) and in general the 5 principal bedrooms, five secondary bedrooms (for the staff) and the four reception rooms clearly need tarting up. No doubt the locals will be able to see Anne and Mark on Saturday afternoon, their shirt sleeves rolled up to their royal elbows, scrubbing away for many years to come. No wonder the Queen only paid a bargain £750,000 for it.

Enough has been said to show that the capitalist class are still alive and well and thriving off the wealth produced by the workers. Though whether it is possible to identify them makes no difference to the system itself, or those that suffer from it. Whether you see your exploiter or not, he still exists. The workers in the so-called nationalized industries do not “know” their boss. Nonetheless they are still working for the sole benefit of a class other than their own, and it is from their work that all that wealth (only some examples of which have been mentioned in this article) comes. The wealth is produced not by the brains of the capitalist class but by the work of their employees. Quite simply what happens is that when the worker draws his wage, he does not receive from the boss the equivalent of what he has produced for him. He gets back just a proportion of the amount he has produced. The balance, i.e. the profit, is pocketed by the capitalist class and used to allow the Gettys and the ordinary rich to thrive. And they will continue to suck like the social leeches they are, until the working class as a whole say “Enough!" and decide to end property society once and for all.

Ronnie Warrington

The Passing Show: Agitators (1962)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agitators

It has been an accepted ruling-class myth for a long time now that strikes are caused by people called agitators. Whenever industrial trouble breaks out, the management’s bloodhounds set out to track down “the agitators”, the sinister background figures who are at the bottom of it all. The papers try to convince us that the workers concerned are perfectly happy with whatever wages and conditions the management sees fit to grant them, and that they would work away at their benches making ever greater profits for their masters without a single complaint — were it not for “the agitators". This must be one of the least convincing theories ever produced, even by a ruling class. It received another severe blow recently, at Ford’s Dagenham works. Here, as at many other factories, these powerful agitators who bring the men out on strike when they don’t really want to stop work are usually identified as the shop stewards. At the end of May the Ford Motor Company rejected outright a pay claim, not offering even sixpence a week more. So the shop stewards, ”the agitators”, called a one-day token strike in protest. But the men simply turned down this proposal, and continued work.

With the band in front

This underlined still further the obvious fact that workers come out on strike when they want to come out on strike, and not merely at the behest of agitators. No agitator in the world could make men strike if they didn't want to. Shop stewards, men who serve on strike committees, and so on, simply march with the band in front. Children love to run to the head of processions, and march in front of them, to pretend that they are the leaders. But if the band turns off down a side street, the “leader” has to go with it or be left marching on his own, a general without an army. And there is no sadder sight than that.

All day and every day

We are often treated in the press to learned articles about “the real reasons” for the trouble at any industrial plant where there have been a number of stoppages. But there is no need to go beyond the fact that the workers are exploited, plus the methods adopted by managements to screw out ever more surplus value. It is now agreed by almost everybody that the tasks which the workers have to do to stay alive are boring, monotonous, repetitive, soul-destroying, and offer no opportunity whatever for them to satisfy their basic human creative instincts, their need to do a job in which they can take a pride. The correspondent of the Observer (3-6-62) quoted one of the men at Dagenham:

The monotony of the work is another thing that gets you down. You take the Anglia handbrake. Putting it in involves turning four screws, 30 handbrakes an hour, all day and every day.

This particular job consists of putting in 120 screws every hour in every working day throughout the foreseeable future. The worker has to do every two minutes exactly what he did in the last two minutes. These newspaper articles, surely, are tackling the problem from the wrong angle. What causes astonishment to the impartial observer is not that there should be so much trouble at Ford’s, but that there should be so little elsewhere.

Salvation of souls

There is so little beauty in the lives of people living under capitalism, and such a large proportion of the few beautiful buildings remaining to us from earlier ages is destroyed every time we have a war, that one would think what we have is worth preserving. But some authorities in the Church of England believe otherwise, Not long ago the President of the Society of Antiquaries of London was protesting that the Chancellor of the Diocese of Ely had decided to demolish three ancient parish churches — Denton, built largely in the seventeenth century, and Woolley and Islington (Norfolk) which are mediaeval. In reply to this protest, a reverend gentleman from Worcester said that the purpose of the Church “is the salvation of souls and not the provision and upkeep of museums and ancient monuments.”

It is as if the worshippers of Athena Parthenos decided to knock down the Parthenon which was built as a temple for Athena, on the grounds that nobody now wants to pray to Athena in it—which of course nobody does. The fact that a particular superstition was once practised in a particular building doesn't make it any the less beautiful, but obviously the diocese of Ely sets more store upon the preservation of superstition than of beauty.

Cloisters

A similar instance of the benefits of private ownership is the case of William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish cloisters. Hearst, it appears, never even saw the cloisters, which dated from the twelfth century; but he heard that the monks in a remote part of Spain were prepared to sell their cloisters, so he sent along one of his employees to buy them. He then had to assuage the anger of the local villagers (real or pretended) at the removal of this relic by further large payments to them. Next he hired workmen to dismantle the cloisters stone by stone, had a sawmill built to make the cases to pack the stones in, and then had an extra twenty-one miles of railway constructed to transport the stones when they had been packed. They were taken all the way to Hearst’s gigantic fake castle at San Simeon in the United States, and there stored in enormous warehouses along with other art treasures which Hearst had bought from every corner of the world. This vast collection, not even unpacked, was still there when Hearst died years later.

Amber fountains

The next actor in this tragic farce is George Huntingdon Hartford II, an American multi-millionaire who has bought Hog Island near Nassau in the Bahamas, re-christened it Paradise Island, and is now at a cost of twenty-five million dollars turning it into a fantastically luxurious kind of Super-Cinerama playground for other multi-millionaires. A double room at the Ocean Club is said 'continued bottom left to cost up to £50 a day. It is not yet finished. Above the Ocean Club a “gently rising succession of terraces" is to be constructed, and at the summit, above the illuminated swimming pool, the purple creepers and the amber fountains, there will be erected, and floodlit, William Randolph Hearst’s twelfth-century Spanish cloisters. Huntingdon Hartford bought it. complete with packing-cases, from Hearst’s estate. But there is one small fly in the ointment. The plans for the cloister cannot now be found, and no-one knows how the stones are supposed to go together.

It seems that everything that capitalism touches, it defiles.

Alwyn Edgar