Spotlights on Capitalism (1936)

From the July 1936 issue of the Socialist Standard

China—Scene of the Next War?

Now that the whole of Africa has been parcelled out, there remain very few areas of the world’s surface which are not subject to the political domination of advanced capitalist countries. China, however, is one of them, and so we find the birds of prey gathered around for the final picking. The one secure source of revenue in China is the Customs, and the Daily Telegraph mentions (May 14th, 1936), that they are the one point of economic security for Chinese loans, which are largely held by British capitalists. The Japs, however, have established a demilitarised zone in the north of China, where Chinese troops are not allowed to penetrate, and set up a local Government, known as the “ Independent East Hopei Anti-Communist Autonomous Council.” As a result of this, they are able to obstruct the Chinese Customs in such a way that goods can be brought across the Great Wall of China, or landed on the coast, either duty-free or on payment of only a quarter of the normal duties. This naturally diverts goods from such ports as Shanghai, where full duties have to be paid, and so the amount of both trade and duties at these ports declines, and the actual loss to the revenue has amounted in one week alone to as much as £120,000. As the interest on the loans has hitherto taken “only” one-fifth of the Customs dues, there is still ample cover for the service of the loans. Nevertheless, the bondholders are very much upset, and so the Governments of both Great Britain and the United States have made strong official representations in Tokio.

For nearly a hundred years now, the capitalist powers have been nibbling at China; one of the most notorious occasions was the Opium Wars, fought with the object of forcing the Chinese to buy Indian opium—a harmful drug which they were quite capable of producing themselves. Twice have British troops marched on Pekin, and as long ago as 1860 they burnt the magnificent Imperial Palace, just outside Pekin, to the ground. The French pinched Annam and Tongking—once Chinese provinces, Japan long ago stole Taiwan, and more recently Korea, whilst her present intrigues are setting the teeth of the other capitalist powers on edge. Great Britain holds Hong Kong, whilst land in the vicinity has been obtained for fortification purposes. At every available opportunity the Chinese have been forced to agree to the opening of certain of their ports—called “treaty ports”—to foreign trade, and these even extend to the interior of China up to the limit of navigability of the Yang-tze-Kiang. Modern internal transport is now almost entirely in foreign hands. The majority of the railways are owned by British capitalists, whilst in the latest sphere— that of aviation—a new scramble has commenced. Here the British are behind—due doubtless to the British Government's present embargo on loans to foreign Governments and companies—and so we find the more important towns in this vast country —16 times the size of the British Isles—linked by a network of regular services, the most important being the American (China National Aviation Corporation), whilst the Germans have not been slow and their Eurasia Aviation Corporation flies from Shanghai to Hanchow and from Pekin to Canton. Chinese capitalism is, however, fast developing, and so we find the national South-Western Aviation Corporation operating American machines from Canton to Hangchow and Pakhoi in the southwestern extremity, and even now a dispute has arisen with the French and American lines over the carriage of mails.

Those who watch for the next war may well turn their eyes to China.

#    #    #    #

Beauty in the Stores

F. W. Woolworth & Co., Ltd., who last year made a profit of over £5,000,000, believe in leaving no stone unturned to increase their turnover, and so we find them issuing The New Bond. Unlike Chinese bonds, which produce a revenue for the purchaser, this “Bond" costs twopence and is designed to benefit the seller, rather than the buyer. The buyers are Woolworths' girl slaves, and the purchase of The New Bond is quite optional. We understand, however, that it is a brave girl who would refuse to buy. Like all “house” publications of this nature, the object is to produce a “team spirit” amongst the employees and to make them feel that they are at j one with the firm.

An issue before us contains a beauty chat— . “ Our Beauty Chat ” it is called, and we read— 

“It is the discreet touch of Rouge and Lipstick that makes or mars a face. The lighter shades of Rouge, such as Orange or Cherry, make your skin appear clearer—eyes brighter; but should you have blue-black hair and brown eyes, a slightly darker shade is necessary, such as Rosée.”

Concluding, they say—“ We shall recommend the well-known cosmetics which can be obtained at 'your' Store, so let us vote for a Bigger, Brighter, Beauty Movement!M

And, of course, Bigger and Better dividends. In return the firm will give the employees a paltry Christmas box and a vote of thanks!

  R. M.

Blogger's Note:

Original spelling in the article retained. A year to the day, Japan invaded China in the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Back to no work (2009)

From the March 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

As unemployment spreads more workers will experience the harsh new regime at their local Job Centre.

“British jobs for British workers” was certainly a catchy phrase for Gordon Brown to use, even if he did use it without thinking first. He has done this on a number of occasions now, using unguarded words that in the end have come back to haunt him, such as his oft-repeated claim to have ended the boom-bust cycle.

Our Gordon views protectionism as “the greatest danger the world now faces”. For sure, his British worker remark was never meant to offer a jobs guarantee. But as unemployment soars towards three million and beyond, so understandably workers will want to take this Prime Minister’s words at face value when many are becoming fearful of joining the ever growing and overflowing reservoir of unemployment.

What started off as a trickle following the much spoken about and on the face of it a new addition to the international vocabulary and language of economists, ‘The Credit Crunch’, has now evolved into a fast flowing river that around the world is sweeping millions into an ocean of uncertainty.

Rising unemployment in China has seen 26 million internal migrant workers from the countryside lose their jobs due to the economic slowdown, and in an almost a copycat move this state capitalist government announced a 4 trillion Yuan stimulus last November to prop up the weakening economy and spur on domestic consumption as the demand for its goods flags in Western countries. By focusing on the country’s 700 million rural residents with a campaign to persuade them to spend more, along with other measures announced such as state subsidies for farmers to buy electrical appliances, the government hopes these efforts will help rejuvenate flagging economic growth at a time when increasing unemployment has raised concerns about potential social unrest.  

          

In a clear manifestation that the economic crisis is rapidly heading into a severe global clinical depression, US employers purged 598,000 jobs in January, the most job losses in a single month since 1974. January’s firings in the US raised the unemployment rate there to 7.6 percent, the highest level since 1992. Unemployment rose in Germany by an additional 387,000 in January compared to the previous month, for a total of 3.49 million without work. This pushed up the jobless rate by 0.9 percent, to 8.3 percent. Unemployment in the former East Germany, with a rate of 13.9 percent, is still twice as high as in the West, which stands at 6.9 percent.

In Britain likewise, workers have been sent off to the dole office in their thousands. Since Christmas we have all seen and read the reports of the 27,000 Woolworths workers laid off in the opening weeks of the New Year, and all indicators pointing to things getting far worse. Over the past year more than 3,000 UK firms went into administration – some 1,006 companies in the third quarter alone.

There have been a number of high profile casualties of which the retail chain store Woolworths, with some 800-plus stores nationwide, is the most notable. But it has been followed by the furniture retailer MFI, music chain Zavvi, furniture and home accessories store The Pier, menswear retailer The Officers Club, tea and coffee merchant Whittards of Chelsea, children’s clothing retailer Adams, fashion retailer USC and women’s clothing retailer Viyella. In total, some 40,000 jobs have been lost or are at risk.

As this economic crisis deepens at home and aboard, its human toll becomes even more evident. Thousands are facing job losses or being offered an enforced shorter working week as this malignant disease spreads. Ford, General Motors, Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Tata Steel have all announced job cuts or temporary shutdowns at UK plants. BT has said 10,000 posts are to be slashed – many of those in the firing line will be agency and contract workers, some of whom have worked for BT for years. In Construction, workers in an already battered Industry have been warned to brace themselves for an ‘avalanche of job losses’.

On 6 February, it was widely reported in the Times and other newspapers that Royal Mail intends to shed 16,000 jobs as it strives to cut costs. This new threat to jobs comes despite record profits, the proposed job losses — amounting to almost one in ten of the company’s workforce in a drive to reduce the wage bill by £470 million — come as unions prepare to fight the introduction of a commercial partner to the business.

According to the Independent, “unemployment “could easily reach three million by Christmas next”. The hardest hit will be workers with large mortgages, soaring utility bills and the mountain of debt accumulated during the so-called ‘boom years’ when many of us were pushed and persuasively encouraged by banks and others into using loans and credit cards to maintain a half-decent lifestyle.

And now as unemployment and the fortnightly visit to the local Job-centre-plus looms, it will undoubtedly become a routine and habitual preoccupation for many; the experience may have a profound impact on some who have never as yet sampled the devised arm-twisting of this government service increasingly given over to persuading the unemployed to take up low paid employment. Indeed how the times have changed, and are changing, even for the unemployed, and the way they are treated at the local job centre. If you are one of the unfortunate unemployed you may be familiar with its ambience these days, it’s a far cry from Charlie Drake’s television show The Worker. Most job centres employ uniformed security guards equipped with radios to control clamant progression within the building and some display wall posters forbidding the wearing of baseball caps and hoodies. From day one of a new claim the claimant is forced into signing an agreement that sets out what he/she will do to find work, with the threat of sanctions for any ineffectual claimant’s failure to provide enough evidence of actively seeking work.

Commentators have forecast that young people in particular will be pushed out of the labour market by the global downturn. With many anticipating an increase in youth unemployment—to levels last seen in the early 1980s, when riots swept many inner-city areas—the Guardian reported that “Brown was concerned by the recent youth riots in Greece, and feared something similar could develop in Britain.”

The recent ‘reforms’ introduced by New Labour’s Work and Pensions Secretary, James Purnell, in the last Queens Speech, represent an attack on some of the poorest people and their families in our society. They are more evidence that the poor will be made to suffer for an economic crisis that is not of their making. Purnell claims that the changes will “transform lives”, but it may prove in the long run to be a transformation for the worse. Even the Tory leader David Cameron heaped on praise, saying that he is “thrilled” with the plan.

All those currently on ‘out-of-work benefits’ will be affected, as benefits will be renamed (Employment Support Allowance) and altered. The main aim of the changes is to force at least one million people on out-of-work benefits into low paid jobs.

The draconian measures include forcing people to work for their measly dole money. After one year of unemployment, claimants will have to do four weeks of work. After two years, they will have to work continuously for their benefits, doing work “such as community work”, previously only undertaken by people with criminal convictions.

Incapacity claimants will face harrowing questioning and more frequent tests and a medical check from someone other than their own GP. Single parents will have to seek work when their youngest child is seven. Drug-reported addicts will be required to have treatment.

The proposals originally set alongside plans to increase private sector delivery, consequently reducing jobs in the public sector and ensuring that rich pickings for private enterprise come before all else. The government’s flagship policy to revolutionize welfare by paying private companies to find jobs for the unemployed has since been thrown into crises as firms said there were too many people out of work – and too few vacancies – to make it viable. Responding to warnings that his reforms will not work without major changes, James Purnell, has abandoned plans to announce the preferred bidders for the multi-million-pound contracts. This follows demands from the firms involved for hundreds of millions more in “up-front” cash payments. The government have dressed up the proposals as part of its fight against poverty, sometimes using the slogan ‘work works.’ But over half of children living in poverty are in working households with millions of people on low wages that make them little better off than being on benefits.

The world global economic downturn could see 40 million people lose their jobs by the end of the year with worldwide unemployment hitting between 210 and 230 million, with the inevitable consequences of more of the world’s population cascading down into poverty.

Unemployment is encrusting and besetting the world as workers in every industrialized county are made to pay the price as companies downsize operations in order to survive a crisis of capitalism of its own making. Workers the world over, have more in common with each other than the state frontiers and fostered patriotism of race hatred. It’s a mistake to fall for the theories or racial connotations which capitalism’s apologists use to excuse the many failings of the social system. The only protectionism that needs to be dismantled is that which still denies workers a shortfall of life’s essentials. By removing exploitation and the human suffering arising from both poverty and war socialism will enable men and women to be set free, living lives in the security of world community.

NL

Running Commentary: Honest John (1981)

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

Honest John

The Sunday Express is one of those newspapers which is deeply proud of the organisation of mass murder by the British government between 1939 and 1945 to “keep the fascist huns from the door”. So it is rather curious to find the following rather “illiberal” sentiments in the edition of that newspaper for 27 September, in John Junor’s “Current Events” column:

  They are part of the same band of fist-clenching comrades who are active in every riot, every demonstration, every picket line. They are the rats attacking our society from within. And in the end they will destroy us if we do not destroy them. The IRA-loving, poof-loving Marxist leader of the GLC Mr Ken Livingstone was prophesying the other day that the time was coming when a right-wing government would send militants to the gas chamber. I wouldn't go as far as that. But might we not all be a lot safer if at least half of them were in clink?

Junor is right that there is a fierce struggle going on which will lead to the end of what he calls “our” society, that is “their” society of capital and profit. But the real challenge to him and his anti-social prejudices does not come from Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn or any of the parties of the left. The threat to the misery and insecurity of the present social order lies in the working class developing the idea of dispossessing the parasitic minority we work for.

War for what?

The conventional explanation of the causes of the Second World War was further discredited by the recent publication of Auschwitz and the Allies, by Martin Gilbert (Michael Joseph, £12.00). It explains how Churchill's plan to bomb the railway lines to the German death camps was frustrated by the Foreign Office and the RAF. A. R. Dew, a senior official of the Foreign Office, noted at the time: “A disproportionate amount of the time of the Office is wasted on dealing with these wailing Jews.” J.S. Bennett, the senior civil servant for Jewish immigration at the Colonial Office, read eye-witness reports from concentration camps and remarked: “Familiar stuff. The Jews have spoilt their case by laying it on too thick for years past.” Britain declared war on Germany for principally economic reasons: Hitler’s policy of German expansion and imperialism directly threatened the previous European power structure and the trade interests of the British and French capitalists. In the final analysis, it was to defend propertied interests, and not democracy, that the Second World War was fought.


It’s their country

Patriotism is not natural. You may have been born in Britain but it is unlikely that you, or anyone else, came crying into the world with an innate, instinctual admiration for the Pennines, Prince Philip, fish and chips or the English language. However, if by the time you are adult the schools, churches and mass media have done a good job, you will have been persuaded to show great loyalty to “your” country, sometimes to the point of dying for it.

Perhaps it can be said that if a child is weaned on a particular style of food, acquires a single language and grows up in a particular national environment with particular customs, it would be natural to expect it to wish to continue living in that culture. Obviously in a democracy people would be able to opt for this sort of a life; the point is that now most people have this lifestyle—cramped with poverty foisted upon them.

What do they mean when they say we should have a loyalty to our country in preference to others? Workers have no country; we own none of Britain. We have nothing here worth fighting for. The only significant division between people does not relate to where they are born but to whether they are part of the small minority who together own and control almost all of the wealth of society, or whether they are part of the vast majority who produce and service all social wealth but own and control next to nothing of it.

Patriotism is inculcated into members of the wealth producing class to create an illusion that all inhabitants of a certain, arbitrarily delineated area of the earth, owners and non-owners alike, have a common “national” interest. This way, whenever the owners based in one country wish to have their economic interests protected against the expansion of their rivals, or perhaps when they want some enforced expansion themselves, the majority class (whose lot, apart from running society from top to bottom, includes the dirty work of war) will be prepared to fight “for the national interest”.

According to a Defence White Paper recently released by the Japanese government, “the Japanese people should cultivate a greater patriotic awareness and willingness to support the armed forces”. It says that it should be the duty of the government to instil in the Japanese a sense of patriotism which is defined as “a willingness to cooperate in defending the country in a national emergency”. That is, to butcher other workers if there is to be a show down between Japanese industrialists and their foreign rivals. While the Defence Ministry is repeating these exhortations the government is revising the school textbooks so that they contain greater emphasis on patriotism.


Shopping with Woolies

Woolworths is normally thought of as the leading supplier of cheap, shoddy goods to those who produce all the wealth of society, and therefore, according to capitalist logic, must remain relatively poor. But the pennies in the cash registers soon add up, and when Woolworths goes shopping, it doesn't do it on the cheap. They have just spent £20 million buying the Dodge City chain of DIY stores. Of this, £17 million will go into the pocket of Richard Northcott. In 1974, Northcott inherited a chain of wallpaper and paint shops from his father. A few years later, by employing wage- and salary- earners who gave more than they got (like all workers do), he doubled his money and is now a multi-millionaire. We have just one complaint: the whole world is run expressly for the benefit of a minority. If something is not profitable to them (such as feeding hungry people who have no money to pay) then it will not take place; if something is profitable (such as pollution, thalidomide, neutron bombs and wage cuts) then such things will be produced. That is our only complaint.

Clifford Slapper

Just Once A Year (1948)

From the December 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

They come in their hundreds; they come in their thousands. Train loads, bus loads and coach loads, besides all those who make the journey on foot. Each town, village and suburb within a radius of miles, pours out its contingent.

It is the great annual trek to the shops of London. It is the prelude to the so-called festive season.

In Holborn and in Oxford Street; in Regent Street and in Piccadilly they jostle and push one another along the sidewalk, passing from shop window to shop window.

In this window there are fine coats made from the furs of rare animals, and in that one there are gorgeous gowns of rich materials. In the next are sparkling gems in gold settings and in the next are ingenious toys rivalled only by the mechanical wonders they are made to represent. And so on, passing windows tastefully displaying choice wines and expensive refrigerators, works of art and dainty lingerie, elaborate furniture and costly perfumes. At each window all heads are turned to gaze admiringly at the contents. But the crowds pass on.

At last a certain emporium is reached. Here we see a continuous stream of people passing in by one door and out by another. What is this place? Surely it must be a marvellous shop, or the many people who have passed all those other inviting stores, would not quicken their steps to gain admittance. Let us go in! It is indeed a large shop and it is crowded almost to suffocation. The goods displayed on the open counters are small and not as costly as those others we have seen. Had we looked before we entered, we should have seen the name of the store. Above the windows, in golden letters against a red background, we should have seen, “ F. W. Woolworth.” And, maybe, where the red background was a little faded, we should have seen, faintly showing through, the marks of figures that were removed during the war years: “3d.'' and “ 6d.”

But all these people; who are they? What are they ? They are the workers with their families. These are the men and women who have toiled to make all those costly comforts and luxuries that they have just been passing. These are the people who, for the last fifty weeks have delved and spun, hewn and drawn, fetched and carried and toiled to produce the best of food, the finest of clothes and the grandest of buildings.

These same people have scraped a few coppers each week from their meagre wages to pay in to clubs in order that for one brief period they may spend on luxuries. Now they seek their “luxuries” in Woolworths. The portals of Galleries Lafayette or Liberty’s do not invite them and the plate glass windows of other shops keep them at a respectful distance. Even here, in Woolworths, the shop detectives mingle with the crowds—just in case some individual temporarily loses his respect for the property of others. Workers who have plied needle and thread to make fine raiment may now gaze at their handiwork—that is their portion. Those who have sweated to produce choice viands may now stand in the smell from the kitchens of the Piccadilly Hotel and sniff—it is their share.

And on December the 25th they may possibly have one good blow-out. Chicken and pudding and port-flavoured wine. Just for one day in the year they may kid themselves that they are hitting the high spots. Then, back to the grind.

Some day they will awaken from this stupor. They will set about the task of ridding themselves of an obsolete social system; a system that prevents them from enjoying the fruits of their labours. They will take the land and “all that in it is” from those who now own it and will work to produce the necessities and comforts of life for all. No need then to produce cheap articles for the many and super goods for the few. No need then to taste the good things just once a year. The best can be produced for all for always.

W. Waters