Who's on your back? (1985)

From the June 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the course of the coal strike last year. Margaret Thatcher was quoted as saying that "the country will not be held to ransom by a tiny minority — 200.000 at the most — who are trying to impose their will on the other 55 million. Everyone in Britain tonight knows who the job-wreckers are" (Sunday Times, 15 July 1984). For once she spoke some truth. In Britain today, a "tiny minority" — one per cent — own more accumulated wealth than the poorest 80 per cent put together (Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, 1980). This parasitical minority own and control the productive machinery of society, in industry and in agriculture. If we work, it is for them, and on their terms. When they decide that it is no longer financially profitable to employ us — whether in a pit or a polytechnic — they have the legal and social right, within capitalism, to bar us from even setting foot in these places of work.

Since a small minority own the means of wealth production while the rest of us merely operate its machinery, there is a conflict of interests throughout the world between bosses and workers, employers and employees. This conflict exists just as much in countries such as Russia, where exploitation has been nationalised. Arising out of this conflict of interests between those who have to sell their ability to work in order to live and those who buy it in order to profit, there is a class struggle. We should make no mistake about this: the class struggle involves all of us, however much some may try to turn their back on it. And as in any other conflict where two sets of interests cannot be reconciled, it is vital to establish beyond doubt who or what our real enemy is.

The real enemy of workers is not to be found among the smugly arrogant Thatcher and her cronies, or in their pathetic counterparts who compete with them from the opposition benches in the House of Commons. Neither is our true enemy to be found embodied in "the butcher” himself. Ian MacGregor. These are only representatives of the real sickness in society — the market system. It is the capitalist system of society, which exists in different forms throughout the world, which must go, taking all of its stooges with it.

What is capitalism? Firstly, it is a global system, as will be the socialist system which replaces it. The price of diamonds is fixed regularly on a telephone hot-line between Moscow and Johannesburg, in spite of the hot air spoken by politicians in those cities against one another. Secondly, capitalism is defined by the fact that in each country a minority class own and control the productive machinery — the industrial and chemical plants, the land and farms, the transport and communications . . . Whether it is private or state ownership, ownership through shares or through government bonds, whether this minority class is made up of businessmen or bureaucrats, makes no difference. Production is everywhere geared towards profitable sales in the world market, not towards human need.

Capitalism, then, is based on a power relationship between the boss and the worker. The worker produces wealth for the employer, and on the employer's terms, since production involves the use of the raw materials and machinery which are monopolised by the owning class. But no capitalist can live on a diet of one thousand cars or thirteen thousand video recorders a week. These goods are only of use to him or her if they can be turned into cash, by being sold on the market. The employer has to convert these products into cash in order to be able to reinvest it and expand the scale of operations, and also of course for the purposes of private consumption. This means that employers will only allow production to take place at a level which allows the products to be easily sold. As soon as the market will not bear any further output, production is halted. So from the point of view of the working-class majority in society, there are two things wrong with the present class-divided system. Firstly, it is a system of legalised robbery, in which the wealth we work so hard to produce does not then belong to us. We have to struggle to buy back the shoddy, cheap, second-class goods with ration cards called wages. Secondly, this domination over society by the parasitical minority serves to restrict production, particularly for basic needs such as food and clothing, because the market system dictates that production must cease as soon as it fails to be profitable. And each factory closure signals that the material interests of the employing class are imposing themselves on the rest of us, in the most stupid way. At the moment their "trade cycle" happens to be running through one of its periodic lows and the rest of us are expected to brave out, and even take the brunt of, this "recession", as if it was sent down from heaven to test our mettle.

We should not be fooled for one moment by all of the nonsense about class being a thing of the past. According to the Labour Research Department Fact Service (Vol.45, No.44). the richest 3.2 per cent in Britain today own 84 per cent of listed shares, 90 per cent of private companies and 88 per cent of land. In reality there are two sides to industry, whether workers are militant or moderate. On the one hand is the power of capital, of reinvested profits, which represents the congealed labour of generations of workers, and on the other there are workers, known in business circles as "unit labour costs", units of productivity whose role is to generate a surplus over and above the living costs which workers rudely insist on consuming, so that this surplus can be accumulated by those who already monopolise resources. As workers, we have feelings, problems, human relationships. In the eyes of our bosses, we are unit labour costs, whose living expenses must be cut to the bare minimum and whose productivity must be stretched to breaking point.

Take the example of United Biscuits. Their annual report for 1984 shows a profit of about £75 million and a return on capital of about 19 per cent. Earnings per share (the amount by which the share price had risen) were 15.8p. and a dividend was paid in addition to this of 7.5p per share. Sir Hector Laing, the chairman, has over 2 million shares in the company, so his dividend last year was £156,176 and the overall value of his shares rose during the year by a further £329,011. This gave him an unearned income of over £9,000 a week. The average pay of his wage-slaves was less than that in the entire year. This unearned income would continue to go to Sir Hector even if he left for the Bahamas and was never seen again. For actually turning up to work he receives his "earned" income or salary of £96,000, a mere £1,800 each week. Worth chewing over next time you have a McVitie's digestive biscuit, some KP nuts or visit a Wimpy bar, all of which are in Hectors stable. Meanwhile, his chairman's report does make some reference to his hirelings:

Unit labour costs showed a decline over 1983 and we are now back to 1980 levels. . . In summary, 1984 was a particularly successful year for the Company (page 11).

Another very grateful man who has also increased his hold over the lives of the rest of us recently is Lonrho's Tiny Rowland:

The Lonrho chief executive. Mr Tiny Rowland, splashed out £1.2 million to increase his shareholding in the business yesterday as the international trading conglomerate over which he presides reported a record £135 million profit for its past financial year. The purchase of almost 661.000 shares at 182p each lifted his personal stake in the group to 45 million shares. At current stock market prices the holding representing 17.1 per cent of the equity — is valued at £82 million. (Guardian, 1 February 1985)

The dividend paid out by Lonrho of 11p per share would therefore have given Rowland an unearned income of about £100,000 a week. He expressed his attitude of appreciation for the thousands of people this wealth is squeezed out of in his full-page statement published in the same day's newspaper:

Finally, I would like to thank all employees worldwide for their hard work, loyalty and enthusiasm, without which we would not have been able to report such fine results this year.

This small-print credit, such as is given to the extras who appear in a film extravaganza. is small compensation for the people who are being milked in order to fatten the many bank accounts of this smug parasite.

In fact, on an average wage, the total amount we will receive in an entire lifetime is less than the amount received by some of these employers every two or three weeks. If we put by a fiver a week as savings, then by the time we had saved an amount equalling the current estimated £4 billion fortune of the thirty-year-old Duke of Westminster, 15,000,000 years would have passed.

So much for the claim that we are living in a classless society. But the aim of establishing a classless society is still the only aim which is politically worthwhile. How can it be done? Class is not a question of how you speak or dress, but of whether you own the factory or have to work in it because somebody else owns it. And this can be extended to the office, the schools, the railways, the hospitals and every other field of work. To abolish class division is to abolish the private and state ownership of the world’s productive resources, and to replace this with genuinely communal, democratic control by us all. The active force in creating a classless society must be the working class itself. We are the living, thinking, suffering part of the productive machinery of industry. When a factory is closed down, it does not let out a cry of despair. But the workers who are thrown on the rubbish heap at the same time have the ability to organise for an alternative way of running society. And those who do have jobs, whether they are manual, clerical or "professional", have the same interest as one another and as the unemployed, in working together for such a change.

In a socialist society, the population will not be divided by class. Obviously, some people will be delegated to perform organisational or administrative tasks, but they will not have a socially privileged status or a condition of life dependent on the deprivation and subordination of others. It is in any case a fact that the current owners of the world at present rely on their employees to perform all such tasks on their behalf. The social role of the employer has become entirely redundant, so that all a socialist transformation will involve is changing the basis of production itself. Instead of organising production to be geared towards market sales, as they reflect the minority interests who profit from such sales, we shall instead gear production towards satisfying human needs, without the hindrance of the profit obstacle and its demand for profitable "viability".

It is only on this basis that we can even begin to solve the absurd contradictions which have been a hallmark of capitalist society, such as the market "surpluses", the mountains of butter and the lakes of wine, in a world in which millions die of hunger. But before we can get rid of capitalism and replace it with the sane alternative based on common ownership and democratic control of resources we must first understand capitalism clearly enough to firmly reject it in all of its many guises. We must unite in a clear recognition that the employing class is on our backs, holding society back through their outdated system of the market, of profits and prices. They are suffering bouts of indigestion from their indulgence in the proceeds of our work, but it is we who pay the price. We must not expect the employing class to behave otherwise. Workers must, in the words of the first Socialist Party Manifesto, published in 1905, "give up the superstition that the robbers can be friendly to the robbed".

Clifford Slapper

Cooking the Books: Acceptable capitalism? (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Addressing a press dinner in London in November, the head of BMW in Britain, Jim O’Donnell, attacked the behaviour of the four businessman who BMW sold Rover to in 2000 for £10. Apparently, they paid themselves an average of £3 million each in 2002 as well as setting up a generous pension scheme for themselves, despite MG Rover still making heavy losses. This, said O’Donnell, was “the unacceptable face of capitalism” (Times, 12 November).

Edward Heath, when Prime Minister, had famously said the same thing about Tiny Rowland and Lonrho in 1973. But this criticism implies that there is an acceptable face of capitalism. If so, what is it? Is it acceptable that capitalist firms (such as BMW, for instance) make a profit out of the difference between the value of what their workers produce and what they are paid as wages and salaries? Is it acceptable that capitalist firms should direct their investment to producing what is the most profitable, while essential human needs are left unmet? Is it acceptable that governments should support and encourage all this?

Apparently so. Supporters of capitalism only get worked up when some capitalist lines his pockets at the expense of other capitalists. But the four businessmen can easily reply that they did nothing illegal, and that in fact they were following the economic law of capitalism by taking money out of an unprofitable line of production and investing it, or making it available for investment, in some line that is profitable.

As far as Socialists are concerned, capitalism has no acceptable face. Everything about it is unacceptable. Its accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Its exploitation of wage-labour. Its putting of profits before satisfying people’s needs.

The Face of Capitalism (1977)

Book Review from the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lonrho — Portrait of a Multinational by S. Cronjé, M. Ling and G. Cronjé. (Pelican)

The book attempts to document the growth and activities of the Lonrho Company over the last decade or so. Lonrho has more than 500 subsidiary and associate companies and the range of its overall activities is huge. The ownership of mines, cattle farms, railways, newspapers, pipelines, sugar refineries and commercial properties are some. This makes the writing of a coherent account a difficult task and added to this the authors appear to have derived a great deal of their information from the mass media. Their Notes section at the end of the book quotes articles from several hundred periodicals and newspapers as sources, and their Introduction states that they found it largely impossible to obtain information direct from the highly secretive Lonrho board. For these reasons the book never attains more than that level which interests newspapers, particularly the financial pages.

The result is a complicated record of years of wheeling and dealing which Lonrho and its associates have engaged in, both with other companies and with political leaders — notably in Africa. The increase in profits which Lonrho had shown, from £14.44m in 1969 to £46.44m in 1974 for example, is explained in terms of astute deals, successful takeovers, clever share manoeuvres and so on. There are vague references to the output of various subsidiaries increasing, or of others expanding significantly and becoming more profitable, but the credit for this is placed firmly on the Lonrho board’s foresight, and on occasion, their luck. The chief executive director, “Tiny” Rowland, is given particular prominence and much of the company’s success is attributed to his ability to make personal contacts with men in high places, who in turn gave Lonrho preferential treatment. They quote Roland's own statement:

  When I’m abroad, I am entertained and do business with Rulers, Presidents and Prime Ministers, who entertain me and look after me. (p. 242)

Virtually no attention is focussed on the fact that while Rowland and his board members are busy being entertained, they, and their hosts are supported in their privileged position by thousands of property-less workers. One idea that this is the case is given on the cover design where a cigar-smoking model of Rowland is seen astride a black man and a white man who have both been harnessed. Rowland is holding the reins. When the book was published recently he was annoyed at the inference.

The issue which was provoked by the more hypocritical shareholders over the low wages paid to workers in Lonhro’s South African mines is dealt with briefly. The official Lonrho line was deliberately evasive; though the parent company owned almost 97 per cent. of the offending mining companies, fixing of wage levels at the mines was a matter for the local puppet company, Lonrho South Africa Ltd. The book notes that “South Africa was not the only place where Lonrho paid low wages” and gives the example of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) which in 1974 was the subject of a War on Want pamphlet stating that severe cases of malnutrition were common among its workers. Lonrho’s personnel manager “admitted that conditions were a matter for ‘concern, but said that the company was making hardly any profit in Sri Lanka' ” (p. 86).

The authors repeat the suggestion that Lonrho has been engaged in “sanctions busting” through subsidiaries in Rhodesia — a suggestion leading to the resignation of Angus Ogilvy, and claim that the Rhodesian and South African interests have proved embarrassing to Lonrho when they have been courting “black” African governments — they give several instances — for franchises, concessions and contracts, because of an alleged ideological difference. Again the Company line was ingenious if nothing else; should they sell up these interests the! new owners might prove to be simply a gang of ruthless capitalist exploiters — unlike Lonrho themselves! In this connection the authors casually refer to African states “with a commitment to some form of socialism” (p. 248) who are going to pose what the book concludes is the issue, “whether capitalism is going to have an acceptable face in Africa at all”. The suggestion is that the emerging black leaders who wine and dine men like Mr. Rowland and his “respectable” cohorts have something else in mind, although they offer no evidence for this.

With the virtual absence of Socialist understanding among African workers, and the determined action by the governments of rival nation states to exploit greater masses of the African population in order to accumulate capital for the ruling minorities, it is a naive suggestion to make.

Alan D'Arcy

New Zimbabwe—old story (1980)

From the March 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

After that great epic series, the Lancaster House Saga (sub-title the Zimbabwe-Rhodesia talks), with its deadlocks and diplomacy, its cliffhanging and imminent walk-outs, Rhodesia now faces the prospect of some kind of limited democracy for all and a build-up of the economy with a largely African government. Since the agreement was signed in December leaders of the Patriotic Front, Nkomo and Mugabe, and many of their guerrillas, plus many Rhodiesians who have been living in the UK, USA, Europe, USSR and other parts of Africa, have returned to ‘their’ country. Many of them are under the illusion that the forthcoming election will bring about changes which will enable them to live freely in a democratic society. The extent of the democracy rather depends, however, on who wins the elections, as some leaders appear to favour “one man one vote” only as long as they are victors. There are numerous reports of intimidation in some areas of the country by Mugabe’s ZANLA forces and Muzorewa’s auxiliaries.

Even though legally sanctioned discrimination by white against black—which for many years was enshrined almost along the lines of apartheid—will no longer exist, tribal conflicts are certain to continue. In any case the freedom to buy large, expensive houses in previously white areas will be of small consequence to the average African worker, except as an abstract notion. The returning heroes will be subject to the dubious privilege of being employed and therefore exploited by a predominantly black capitalist class rather than a white one or unemployed as the case may be. No doubt they will be urged by their leaders to work hard and harder, as are workers the world over. If things go badly they may be put in prison for disobeying capitalism’s laws or even for disagreeing with the ruling party—and it is hard for even the most avid enthusiast for black liberation to convince us that incarceration by a black government is more comfortable than by a white one. The 71 former supporters of Mugabe detained on his instructions in Mozambique until recently could perhaps enlighten us as to whether their imprisonment was more pleasant than that imposed on Nkomo and Mugabe by the white regime.

There is no doubt that the Africans of Rhodesia have suffered immensely at the hands of the European settlers, who have treated them as inferior beings with a vastly lower standard of living than the whites. So many Africans, wishing to rid themselves of their oppression, took to their guns in what they regarded as a legitimate war of liberation. It is tragic that so many have offered and given their lives for a vain cause; despite the belief that true liberation is round the corner (at least if their favoured leader wins the election), they face inevitable disillusionment.

The African population inside Rhodesia has also suffered cruelly from the guerrilla war waged over the past seven years. On the one hand, people have been tortured and killed, their shops and homes have been raided, and they have been forced to feed “the boys” regardless of their own sympathies and needs, with always the threat of a bullet to discourage them from informing the government forces. On the other hand, they have been subject to extreme pressure and violence from a Rhodesian Army determined to discover the whereabouts of the “terrs”. The appalling predicament of ordinary African people caught in this trap is aptly described in an article in the Evening Standard of January 22. A white farmer on police reserve duty describes how he

“. . . came on a village minutes after a party of terrs . . . had left it. Two girls were lying untended beside a hut, bayonetted in the chest . . . I worked on those girls for an hour, to keep them alive until a truck came. Nobody in that village spoke a word or did a thing.
   Then I turned to a man who was watching: ‘Who is this girl? Your daughter?’ ‘Yes’. ‘Where did the terrs come from? Where did they go to?’ ‘Don’t know’. ‘Don’t know?’ That man said nothing until we took him to the police station.
   We did the usual—left him without food until evening then beat the hell out of him. He told us where the terrs had gone but it was too late to track them. His daughter died. Tell me what kind of creature is it that will stand there and do nothing when his daughter is dying?”

All this is complicated by the existence of the Selous Scouts, a particularly brutal crack-force of the Army, who have often been suspected of perpetrating atrocities while posing as guerrillas. The situation has been so confusing and so horrific that thousands of people have been forced by the government into protected villages (like concentration camps) and thousands more have fled to the towns. Their abject poverty and over-crowding has been seen on British television—a particularly moving example, a few weeks ago, was of people picking over the municipal rubbish dumps in Salisbury with large sacks, looking for anything to sell, as a means of livelihood. Others, not lucky enough to be living in appallingly overcrowded houses in the towns, were living on the streets with only plastic bags as shelter against the rains.

After 14 years of UDI, why has the British Capitalist class finally reached agreement round a conference table? Partly because the war has frightened out many white Rhodesians and had dire effects on the economy; partly because of pressure by “front-line” states on the guerrilla leaders to end the war and negotiate—since the economies of those countries had suffered from the effects of the war and of sanctions on Rhodesia. Machel of Mozambique, for example was reported in The Observer of January 20 to be

". . . anxious to see Rhodesia return to normality as soon as possible since a prosperous and stable neighbour would provide a much-needed boost to his country's lagging economy.”

while Zambia had

“. . . enough maize to last only until late February or early March, nearly three months before the first of this [i.e. 1979] year’s harvest will reach the millers.
   The problem might not be so serious had not the Rhodesians cut landlocked Zambia’s two lifelines, the Tazara Railway to Dar-es-Salaam and the southern line which runs through Zimbabwe-Rhodesia to South Africa.”

If the single-track line from Zimbabwe-Rhodesia to Zambia were to break down

“Dr Kaunda would then not only face a food crisis but would also have difficulty exporting the copper on which his country depends for more than 90 per cent of its foreign earnings.”

(Guardian, December 11 1979)

Also, it is possible that nationalist leaders like Nkomo of ZAPU and Mugabe of ZANU, who were detained for many years, may have felt that their chance of power might slip from their grasp if they didn’t act soon.

Who will benefit?

So who is really going to benefit from the newly established “democracy”, from the holding of elections, from the lifting of sanctions and the expected stability and boost to the ailing economy? There are rich pickings to be had: Rhodesia is the fifth producer in the world of gold; one of the few producers outside Russia of chromium; the top grower of Virginia tobacco after the United States; Rhodesia is also a main producer of asbestos, copper and industrial diamonds. It is clear, therefore, that Britain’s interest in Rhodesia’s independence is not merely a technical matter of “loyalty to the crown”. Different capitalist groups have lent their support to different leaders in Rhodesia according to which one they judge will best serve their own interests, and the business community in general is taking a keen interest in developments there. Tiny Rowland, for example, chief executive of Lonrho, has consistently backed Joshua Nkomo although, according to the Observer of November 11 1979, he would

". . ally himself with whichever nationalist politician eventually becomes leader of Zimbabwe Rhodesia. Lonrho’s enormous assets there include a million acres of ranchland, besides commercial and industrial operations. These are operated by independent companies, but will revert to Lonrho when sanctions end and the new State is internationally recognised.”

What of the politics of the politicians in Zimbabwe? Do they really plan to bring socialism to that country? Hardly. There are nine black parties fighting the election but effectively only three main contenders, none of whom offers a genuine alternative of any kind: the message from all of them seems to be a general list of platitudes about peace, prosperity and racial harmony. Bishop Muzorewa is openly committed to free enterprise capitalism; Nkomo has adopted a conciliatory, pragmatic approach without reference to either capitalism or socialism and talks of increased wages and redistribution of land. And Mugabe? His image has been that of a hard-line “Marxist”. Perhaps this is demonstrated by the rally of his supporters where he “gave triumphant clenched fist salutes to the crowd and led them in the chanting of nationalist slogans” (Times, January 28). According to the Sunday Times, January 27, Mugabe’s election platform, although cautiously phrased,

“. . . is still the nationalisation of industry, the radical redistribution of land, the introduction of sweeping state controls, and above all, what he terms ‘the collective ideal’, the public ownership of the country’s natural resources, land, minerals, water and forests.”

Whether or not he wishes to establish a “communist” regime such as that in China, it would seem that he is trying to be all things to all men, to be moderate and capable of compromise as well as a “genuine socialist”, for at the same time his party policy-makers

“. . . now encourage the continuity of private enterprise in Rhodesia and accept the need for a close commercial and logistic relationship with South Africa.”

(Guardian, 28 January) 

It has long been fashionable among some Rhodesian Africans to label their political opponents ‘sell-out” for cooperating with the Smith regime, for supporting Muzorewa’s opportunistic government, for making too many concessions to the British government at Lancaster House. But they fail to recognise that the whole thing is a sell-out and a sham. On one prognosis, a limited type of democracy, typical of the development of capitalism, will prevail; on another, civil war will rage. But whoever gains power, we may be sure he will be hell-bent on building up the capitalist economy and on training his citizens to become hard-working, obedient wages slaves, regardless of whether his advice, investment and technical assistance comes from the Soviet Union, Great Britain, South Africa or wherever. The hollow phrase “Victory to the Patriotic Front”, beloved by the left-wing, means for African workers the victory of a different style of exploitation.

Jack Bradley