Voice From The Back: Our unelected bosses (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our unelected bosses

We are often told that we live in an egalitarian, democratic society, where we can tell our leaders what to do, and if they don’t do it, sack them. In a political sense there is some truth to that, but, when it comes to wealth and control, capitalism leaves us all powerless. A good example of this was recently supplied by a survey conducted by the Times (15 October). They analysed the personnel of the FTSE 100 boardrooms and showed the immense power that these unelected men and women have over our lives.

“None of the people included in the Power 100 is a household name. Few are all that well known among close followers of business and stock market affairs. The most powerful man, Sir Robert Wilson, is more likely to elicit a response of ‘who he?’ than sage nods of familiarity.”

Here are some of the entities under his control (with his salaries in brackets). Chairman of Rio Tinto (£1,410,000), non-executive director Diageo (£68,000), BG Group (£35,000). Such people decide where factories and offices are built and where they are closed. They decide whether you work or not and inside capitalism you are powerless to do anything about it. Some democracy. Some equality.

The killer system

In 2000 the UN pledged to cut the death rate for the under five year olds by two-thirds and halve the number of people suffering from hunger, but now concede that these targets are unlikely to be realised because of the import of subsidised Western food with the consequent ruin of under-developed countries’ farmers and cuts in aid programmes. In the most scientific survey held to date Unicef have revealed a heart breaking picture.

“More than one billion young people in the developing world are now living in conditions of severe deprivation, according to a report for the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef). Tens of millions of children in developing countries still do not have access to basic human needs such as food, water and sanitation, the study found. …. Professor Dave Gordon from the University of Bristol (one of the repor’ts authors) said: ‘Many of the children surveyed who were living in absolute poverty will have died or had their health profoundly damaged by the time this report is published, as a direct consequence of their appalling living conditions’” (Independent, 22 October).

One billion reasons for getting rid of capitalism. One billion reasons for organising for socialism.

Market in misery

The misery that is capitalism is summed up by the desperate plight of workers in Moldovia selling their kidney in order to survive.

“’Every month someone walks into my office begging to sell an organ,’ says Dr Adrian Tanase, of the Renal Transplant Section in the City Hospital of Chisinau. ‘This has not been done for a long time in developed countries but here you buy or sell everything.’ …. The demand for kidneys is as strong as ever and the poverty in this virtually lawless main donor country is deepening” (Times, 25 October).

A rotten system

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation so it is hardly surprising that those respectable men in suits on Wall Street are up to their elbows in fraud and deception; but don’t take our word for it here is one of their top dogs on the subject.

“Mutual-fund managers have suddenly joined the long parade of suits in handcuffs that began with Enron two years ago and has led to monster fines, complex trials and a video of at least one multimillion-dollar toga party. It was bad enough when mutual-fund returns were pummeled by a two-year-long bear market that started to thaw only this spring. Then, in September, a few funds came under fire from New York State attorney general Eliot Spitzer for allowing big, sophisticated investors to game the system. The abuses are turning out to be so prevalent that regulatory officials predict a big shake-out. ‘There are going to be criminal cases brought in considerable number down the road’, Spitzer told Time. ‘It’s not one or two bad apples. The whole crate seems to have gone rotten’”(Time, 17 November).

High anxiety

We all have to face the problems of mortgage payments, credit card debt, fear of redundancy and just the day to day grind of working inside capitalism; so the following is probably no great surprise.

“Britain is becoming a nation kept artificially happy by pills, with doctors handing out eight million more prescriptions for depression, anxiety and stress than five years ago. About two million people are estimated to be taking anti-depressants every year, costing the NHS more than £380 million, according to government figures” (Times, 20 October).

Capitalism seems to be driving an awful lot of us round the bend.

Pathfinders: Why the minus 16.3 percent happy face? (2008)

The Pathfinders column from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

In today's science lesson, boys and girls, we are going to discover that if you put a Mentos mint into a large plastic bottle of cola, you get a huge explosion that sends a geyser rocketing into the sky. Then, when you have wiped fizzy rain off your school blazers, we're going to debate whether the Mentos mint company are using this curious fact in their school programme, Put the Fizz Back into Science, in order to advance scientific interest among you little ones because none of you like science anymore (New Scientist, Dec 1) or whether they are shamelessly marketing their sugary sweets through the school back-door, under the disguise of education (The commercialisation of our classrooms, BBC Online, Dec 9). And don't you listen to silly old NUT teachers who got the government to ban junk food ads on children's hour TV last year. We don't want to spoil all your fun, that's why we left in a 'spike' of alcohol ads between 4pm and 6pm instead, because we know that one in five of you little darlings under 15 regularly gets drunk.

Our science head believes in telling you the facts of life, which are that advertisers spend 300 million pounds a year targeting the classroom, because they know you clever little boys and girls will recognize 400 brands before you are 10, and that brand loyalty starts young (Adverts impact on children, BBC Online, Dec 9). In fact, you young 'uns are so foxy and grown-up that ASDA have been naughtily selling black and pink lace lingerie for children and Tesco have been saucily selling pole-dancing kits in their toy section (BBC Online, April 6).

But it's not all pants, poles and paedophilia, children. Next we're going to show you some serious programmes from the BBC Learning Zone which tell you all about how wonderful and safe nuclear power is and how much money you can earn if you work for the industry when you grow up. Don't pay any attention to grumpy old independent nuclear consultant John Large when he says "It's a blatant piece of propaganda, that's not an educational tool." What does he know? And don't worry if the BBC say it was a mistake and they didn't mean to do it. Well honestly, they put the programme out twice, didn't they?! (BBC Online, Dec 9).

Oh look, and now poor Ann-Marie is crying big wet tears because she just failed her SATS, the little loser. Well, children, science can do anything now. So let's have some fun and measure how sad she is!

If you want to see a picture of the world of tomorrow, look at a child of today, and you're looking at an ideological war zone. Leave aside all that has been written about child poverty across the globe, and the UNICEF estimate that 9.7 million children under 5 die every year because of completely preventable causes, half of them related to hunger (Link). Leave aside armed children in wars, and child prostitution, and child slavery. Leave aside child abuse and torture. Leave aside even underperforming poor black children in richer countries. Just how happy is the modern, 'western', well-adjusted child of an advanced capitalist country, the focus of all well-meaning social endeavour, of state laws of protection, of cultural and social sanctity, and increasingly, the target of ruthless commercialism, of Christian or Islamist fundamentalist brainwashing, and of pressurised vocational harassment? And while you're asking that, is it possible to measure it scientifically?

A hint of an answer to the first of these questions can be glimpsed from a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research in Nov 2006, which stated that the UK, one of five countries in western Europe with a trillion dollar economy, hosts the worst-behaved youth in Europe, and concludes: "Commentators fear that British youth is on the verge of mental breakdown, at risk from anti-social behaviour, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse" (BBC Online, Nov 2, 2006).

"The true measure of a nation's standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born." With these words, UNICEF prefaces its new report entitled Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries 2007 (http://...com/3yvz8b). It is a statistical survey, an approach explained in the introduction: 'To improve something, first measure it.' 40 indicators are spread across six categories, namely: material well-being, family and peer relationships, health and safety, behaviour and risks, and children's own sense of well-being (educational and subjective). Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the UK finds itself overall bottom of the league, at number 21 out of 21 countries. The UK and the USA find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings for five out of the six categories.
UNICEF concludes: 'There is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita' (p.5)' And indeed, looking at the figures, no such relationship stands out. Moreover, taking into account surveys of children themselves, contained in the report, one might think material conditions had nothing to do with it: "Material goods and leisure activities were not, in general, seen as top priority by children. Relationships with family were seen as the most important determinant of well-being, followed by friends, school and pets" although children's understandable lack of grasp of certain hard realities was indicated in the next phrase: "the fact that 'health and safety' did not feature highly in children's priorities shows that there is still a place for adult input in the selection of indicators." (P.43)

The theme emerging from the UNICEF report is that, essentially, money can't buy your child happiness. Interestingly, this rather anti-materialist theme has been echoed by various other statistical studies based around the new 'science' of measuring happiness. For example, the 178-nation 'Happy Planet Index' lists the south Pacific island of Vanuatu as the happiest nation on the planet, while the UK is ranked 108th. This survey, compiled by think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF), notes that Vanuatu is ranked 207th out of 233 economies when measured against Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and suggests that 'people can live long, happy lives without consuming large amounts of the Earth's resources' (BBC Online, July 12, 2006). Scientifically speaking, the NEF survey is probably worthless, given that Vanuatu has a population of just 209,000, which means that to get an equivalent rating the UK has to produce 300 happy Brits to every one happy Vanuatuan, a statistically unlikely achievement. If Vanuatu had a king, for example, Britain would have to find 300 kings.

Scientifically speaking, in fact, these surveys aren't very scientific at all. They involve the following in-depth analytical procedure: "It may sound silly but we ask people 'How happy are you?'" And in case this doesn't sound very clever, Ed Diener, Professor of Psychology at Illinois University, defends the approach thus: "The measures are not perfect yet I think they are in many ways as good as the measures economists use" (http://...com/ftkaw). To socialists, this is no recommendation at all, given that capitalist economics has roughly the same predictive power as astrology.

What further undermines the effort to make a science out of the pleasure principle is the fact that there is no agreement over categories or parameters, so that numerous surveys come up with different and sometimes contradictory results. The World Values Survey of 2005 cites Iceland as happiest country, at 94 percent happy, followed by most of Northern Europe, deteriorating the further south or east one goes, ending with Bulgaria at 'minus 24 percent happy' (http://...com/39awdb). If one feels minus a percent or two happy about this result, one could perhaps turn to the survey by the University of Leicester in 2006, in which Denmark emerges as happiest country despite having the second worst suicide rate in Europe (Independent, Aug 1, 2006).

Obviously nobody is suggesting that if wealth doesn't make you happy, try poverty. But the correlation of wealth and well-being ceases beyond a certain point. As Professor Daniel Kahneman of the University of Princeton puts it: "Standard of living has increased dramatically and happiness has increased not at all, and in some cases has diminished slightly. There is a lot of evidence that being richer... isn't making us happier."

Yet another survey in the UK found that 81% of the UK population agreed that the Government's primary objective should be the creation of happiness rather than wealth, although this looks suspiciously like a weighted response to a loaded question. Other studies have shown that the most reliable happiness indicators are friendship, marriage, life-meaning, and life-goals. But so as not to drift too close to common sense, pseudo-science must interject again. One economist, Professor Oswald at Warwick University, worked out a formula to calculate how much extra cash someone would need to compensate for not having friends. The answer was, apparently, 50,000 pounds (http://...com/2tafc9). The money would be tempting. Friends aside, most workers have to sell themselves for much less.

Children and adults are not all that different. As the various surveys show, extreme deprivation aside, they all want the same kinds of 'soft' reinforcements, not the 'hard' currencies of materialism. But capitalist culture inflicts a ruthless and reckless propaganda war on its people, aiming its sharpest spears at the young and defenceless. Then, in an effort to show that it cares, it invokes a parody of science, counting tears, measuring trauma, like a psychoanalyst with a pocket calculator. Governments don't mind if you cry, so long as you buy. If one hundred percent of children, and adults, reported being one hundred percent 'minus happy' with capitalism, it would not change anything. What will change things is when those people stop being statistics, and start being statistically significant, by showing one hundred percent minus cooperation with their tormentors.

Paddy Shannon

Opportunity Cost (2007)

From the forthcoming October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has always seemed strange to hear of Women’s Rights as if it were a minority issue.

Isn’t it a fact that it is actually the male population which is falling behind in numbers generally around the globe? Women are certainly in the majority in being the primary carer of children, usually unpaid at that. They ’bear the burden’ of bringing up children, being the ones who take time off from work in the early years or to tend to a sick child. In addition many also care for elderly parents, juggling the various responsibilities as best they can. In most parts of the world it’s accepted that women do the bulk of the household chores in addition to any other paid or unpaid labour. As for labour, statistics show that most low-paid, part-time work is undertaken by women and that there is still a wide gap in rates of pay in certain fields - unequal pay for the same work. Also not to be ignored is the perennial difference of work opportunities between the genders because of the ongoing negative female profile. This is a meagre attempt in a short space to encapsulate some of the elements which feed the need amongst women to pursue their own separate agenda.

Now note the spring 2007 UNICEF report regarding children in ’Developed Countries’, a report which set out primarily to measure child poverty in the world’s richest countries. The results showed the UK to have "the lowest level of child well-being among 21 of the world’s richest countries." Among the factors being cited were family break-up and growth in single parent and step-families. Another report recently revealed that (whatever the government might say to the contrary) an extra 100,000 children were lowered into poverty in the last year in the UK. Ongoing economic difficulties cause stress within families. Emotional and social problems are heightened putting added strain on relationships. Economic hardship compels both parents to seek work to keep pace with financial obligations. For one-parent families (mostly mothers) there is the added burden of no one to share responsibility for taking care of the children, so they are often forced into part-time employment with the consequential reduction in pay. Then there is the category of family, with one or two parents, with or without skills, seeking work in an opportunity-lite environment, living on state benefits and therefore belonging to an underclass of ’spongers and scroungers.’ Families are also degraded through lack of time, especially quality time. Children and parents both are trapped in situations not of their own making but born of a system that has evolved to ensnare the majority, male and female, to use them for its own ends, just another commodity from which to squeeze as much profit as possible. Trapped in situations they don’t understand, don’t even recognize that they can learn to understand. Somehow they think they are, even accept being, an unchangeable, integral part of the system and believe they’re just not doing very well out of it.

Some say living standards have been gradually improving but what’s the tangible difference between today’s - say 35-45 - age group with children and the generation of their grandparents who were raising their families in the 40s and 50s? Today’s families expect to possess or to be able to acquire all contemporary mod-cons for their own centrally heated home, suitable vehicle(s), to have holidays abroad, to shower their children with the latest fads and technology and to clothe them in the latest fashion trend. And they probably expect, nay need, both parents to work. Plus, they expect to live with an enormous debt burden, juggling mortgage, car(s) and credit card payments which include most regular purchases like food and fuel as well as Christmases and holidays. In the 40s and 50s material expectations were much lower; many more households rented property than owned (ownership being a clever trick of capitalism to create an illusion of the affluent working class); more people saved up enough prior to buying goods in order to buy at cost rather than with interest although hire purchase was also popular with some; there were few vehicle-owning families amongst the workers; holidays, if taken, were more simple affairs, travelling by train or coach; debt was considerably less and the family budget ran from Friday to Friday when the pay packet - of the (mostly) single wage earner - was paid. The mothers mainly stayed at home - there wasn’t the economic pressure to earn another wage - and worked as unpaid domestics.

(Another interesting phenomenon: job opportunities for women were fewer. In two or three generations work has opened up enough to occupy the majority of both genders and just enough to ensure a large pool of necessary unemployed to keep a cap on wage increases.)

So, today’s relative affluence brings more creature comforts, more comfortable homes, more exotic holidays --- for some. The downside is more debt, more time spent travelling to work in worsening conditions, less time to spend together as a family, in a word, more stress --- for most.

And did the promised coming of technological advances, at which time there would be well-remunerated employment for all, work to be shared giving us all ample leisure time to pursue our favourite pastimes, happen yet? Or has it been and gone in the blinking of an eye?

This is one of life’s enigmas. We all know that things should be better as a result of advances in technology, science, medicine etc. etc. but many see that they are working harder and longer to remain static or even go backwards. At the same time people want the best for their children but where do they look for the opportunities? Down the same road from which they have just come! Get a good education, get a good job, get into the same old rut, just make it a bit deeper and longer!

Children are the women and men of the future, the ones who will decide the inheritance of the, as yet, unborn generations. What shall our legacy be to them, our children - the same old well-worn path to nowhere or the clear vision of another way, inclusive of majorities and minorities alike, men and women, young and old, a way to a world of free access and for the benefit] of all?

Janet Surman