*LIFE AND TIMES OF THE SOCIALIST STANDARD*
*Speaker: Howard Moss*https://zoom.us/j/7421974305
‘The twelve richest people in the US now have a combined worth of over $2 trillion (inequality.org, 3 December); that’s a 2 followed by twelve zeroes. The newest member of this exclusive club is Jensen Huang, boss of the software company Nvidia, whose wealth is now $122bn, over twenty times what it was four years ago.
This is at a time when there are over 36 million people in the US living in poverty by the official definition, including nearly ten million children. Over 650,000 are homeless, a figure that has increased for each of the last six years.
That’s capitalism for you: unbelievable wealth for a very few, varying degrees of poverty for many.’
The
below is from the Socialist
Standard
December 1965
‘Christmas,
we shall be told again and again during the next few weeks, is for
the children. There is, of course, another side to it, represented by
the flood of gaudy rubbish which fills the shops, the big campaigns
to sell it, and by the tinsel of nonsense with which the whole thing
is embellished. This is not so romantic a vision as that of innocent,
starry-eyed kiddies hanging their stockings by the chimney—and it
suggests that, whatever enjoyment children may get out of it,
Christmas is for a few other people as well.
As
the City columns, the advertising agencies, and the trade statistics
make clear, Christmas is that thing so beloved of a section of the
capitalist class—a spending spree. Millions of people save up,
perhaps for the entire year, for this one great splash-out. This is
the time when savings vanish, bonuses are blued, hire purchase debts
cheerfully taken on. These debts have partly replaced the old loan
clubs, which used to have their big pay-out at Christmas. In fact,
hire-purchase does no more than the clubs—it simply moves the
payment date from one part of the year to another, but this is enough
to make it one more piece of evidence for those who are trying to
prove that we are all so much better off nowadays.
Christmas
is responsible for an amazing expansion of the retail market, lasting
for about a month at a time when trade would probably otherwise be
slack. For example, the sales of one suburban branch of a famous
retail chain bound up to around thirty thousand pounds on Saturdays
during December; the manager can almost forecast what his sales
figure will be for each weekend. These sales are in the established,
non-seasonal goods such as clothes, which simply become more hectic
during the Christmas rush. There are plenty of other examples, as
people determinedly smoke more cigarettes, eat more food, and of
course drink more alcohol during the space of a couple of days than
they do in a normal week.
Apart
from the established trades, there are the seasonal sales, with an
appeal confined exclusively to the Christmas period. Christmas
crackers, for instance, are being turned out all the year round; even
the men who compose those dreadful jokes and mottoes are hard at it
months in advance. The result of all this is that about one hundred
million crackers are sold at Christmas, some of them abroad.
We
must not forget Christmas cards. The first of these was sent in 1843;
the idea did not catch on for about twenty years and since then the
market has steadily expanded until now something over six hundred
million cards, worth about 15 million, are sent each Christmas. This
is good business for the firms which make the cards (one of whose
executives said a little while ago “We are in the sentiment
business”) and for the Post Office, who rake in something like £8
million in postage on the cards, not to mention the extra revenue on
Christmas parcels, greetings telegrams, 'phone calls and the
rest.
It
is anyone’s guess, how much of the spending at Christmas goes in a
genuine effort to have, or to give someone else, a good time. A lot
of the drinks, presents and smokes are sent as bribes (there is no
other words for it) from the directors of one firm to those of
another which, they hope, will buy their products. A host of
calendars, diaries, packs of cards, are produced as advertising
material. Some Christmas cards are sent out by firms as reminders
that they are still in business—and magnificent pieces of work some
of them are.
Apart
from the business world, there is no doubt that a lot of money is
spent at Christmas in an effort to impress other people. We have all
seen—perhaps some of us have actually received—those Christmas
cards which have so obviously been selected with the motive of
convincing us that the senders are more wealthy and important than
they actually are. We have all read the advertisements which say that
no card is really gracious unless it has the senders’ name and
address printed on the inside. It is an unpleasant fact that the
acquisitive nature of capitalism gives strength to this sort of
appeal; for those who fall for it, sending Christmas cards is a
highly competitive business, in which a defeat has to smoulder for a
whole year before the chance for revenge comes round again.
The
fact is that Christmas is in some ways a time for people to show
their less attractive side—and for the massed forces of
commercialism to cash in on the situation, ruthlessly and to the
full, with the only justification they need—in the end they have
more profit than if they had not played up to peoples’ snobbery,
their insecurity and their distorted conception of the world in which
they struggle to live.
In
other ways, too, commerce turns the screw at Christmas. A walk around
any department store reveals an astounding variety of junk which is
being sold at equally astounding prices. There are toys which are
dangerous, or which will not last from Christmas to Boxing Day in the
hands of any child. There are cakes of soap and bath cubes, stuck in
a fancy box and covered in cellophane, selling for much more than
their usual price. There is a bewildering mass of tinsel, plastic and
coloured paper—and all the time there is the drive to sell, sell,
sell for a Merry Christmas.
Yes,
this is an enormous, briefly inflated, market; each year the note
circulation leaps up to accommodate it. (Last year it increased from
£2,583 million in the first week in November to £2,766 million in
Christmas week.) The firms which hope to cash in on the boom lay
their plans a long time ahead. From the summer months onwards, they
are discussing and deciding on their advertising campaigns, their
special wrappings and what they like to call their “presentation”.
There is always the temptation for them to try to get in first, which
they have to resist for fear of opening their campaign too early. But
none of them can afford to leave it too late—they have such an
awful lot to sell. So it is not uncommon for us to be able to buy
Christmas decorations, wrappings, cards and so on in October; and
before Guy Fawkes night there are not a few big stores with their
Father Christmas, usually an unemployed stage extra, to induce people
to buy by working on their children.
Many
people complain that the Christmas sales campaign starts too early.
But as the market is stimulated to grow, and as it grows, so will the
effort to exploit it. This might mean an even longer sales drive in
the future—wasn’t there a story about a business man who said
that Christmas was good business as long as they kept religion out of
it?
He
must have been an ungrateful fellow; religion, after all, does him
many a good turn. In any case, as we
point out elsewhere in this issue,
Christmas has nothing to do with Christianity; the Christians simply
pinched it to suit their own purposes. What more natural, then, than
that the capitalist social system, which is so faithfully supported
by Christianity, should itself adopt Christianity’s most important
festival for its own ends?
It
was the Industrial Revolution which was responsible for reducing the
old twelve days’ holiday at Christmas to a single day. The rise of
capitalism meant that masses of people sold their working ability to
the master class by time—and time spent on holidays was time not
spent producing the masters profits in the factory or the mill or the
mine. Capitalism, with the help of its religious lackeys, built up a
massive condemnation of what it called idleness. And among other
things it destroyed the ancient Twelve Days of Christmas.
More
recently, capitalism has reduced the opposition to Christmas to a
handful. Nobody now holds the opinion expressed in a Puritan pamphlet
of 1656, that Christmas was ". . . the old Heathen’s Feasting
Day . . . the Papists’ Massing Day, the Superstitious Man’s Idol
Day . . . Satan’s That Adversary’s Working Day” but until
fairly recently there was a solid, articulate opposition to it. This
is now all but silent, as the festival has been blown up into a vast,
commercialised orgy of selling and consumption, one of the many
working class Festivals of Delusion.
The
great Delusion of Christmas is that dormant within us there is the
Christmas Spirit—a gentle compound of benevolence, co-operation and
goodwill which is roused at this time of year by the appeal of
religion. When we are possessed of the Spirit we are wise and
generous and loving; if only (says the Delusion) we could keep it up
all the year round the problems of the world would be solved. If we
would only cast out the Scrooges among us (and we all have our own
idea of who Scrooge may be) and live by the Christmas Spirit there
will be no more poverty, or war, or oppression.
This
is no joke; the Delusion is powerful. It brought both sides out of
their trenches to fraternise in No Man’s Land in 1914 (officially,
that was the last time they did it). It inspires countless maudlin
speeches at office parties and family gatherings. It runs through the
entire Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day. It is powerful—and it is
dangerous.
For
the Delusion fosters the idea that the troubles of capitalism are
caused by anything but the essential nature of the system. It
promotes the nonsense that the world today is a fearsome, disturbed
place because people are bad and that if only people were better the
world would be a better place. It encourages people to think in terms
of good and bad spirit, when they should be asking themselves why
they behave as they do, and why the world is as it is. And as a final
irony, the Christmas Delusion even encourages some people to think
that there is something inconsistent in the determined way that
capitalism exploits Christmas for all it is worth.
To
start at the right end of this problem, we should first of all
realise that there is nothing essentially wrong (or right, for that
matter) with most people. It is the conditions of living and working
under capitalism which largely make them what they are. Capitalism is
constantly working out ways of exploiting us more efficiently, which
means more intensely. It is always pushing us that bit harder,
crowding us in that much more, making us into that much more of a
cut-throat in the competitive scramble for the better job, the bigger
house, the easier money.
In
these conditions, people live at an intense pressure. Events which in
themselves are trivial—a telephone which rings, a child who behaves
like a child—are an intolerable strain. It is only when we relax,
when we put aside the worry of making ends meet, when we try to live
like human beings, that we begin to get a better perspective on it
all. Perhaps this is what a lot of people do at Christmas. Some of
them, for a couple of days at any rate, actually succeed, and they
put it all down to the Christmas Spirit.
The
big laugh about this—if anyone can stand another joke at this time
of year—is that if the working class really grasped the
implications of this they would take a hard, sober look at capitalism
and see it for the wretched way of living that it is. That old chap
Scrooge had a word which aptly describes the delusions of capitalism,
its cynicism and its hypocrisy. Humbug.’
Ivan
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2019/12/christmas-great-delusion-1965.html
The Unmasking of Tyranny
The tyrant
feels secure in his redoubt
Amidst his
cabinet of sycophants,
Where all
his cold calculations and rants
Are
applauded. He has the power to flout
Even
pretences of democracy.
None oppose
him who’re generously treated,
The few who
do are swiftly deleted,
Or at least
they’re detained indefinitely.
Yet aquifers
of resentment and fear,
Build
pressure, underground initially,
While the
surface seems superficially
Stable, a
violent rupture’s always near.
The brute
once felled, might circumstance recruit
Not a liberator,
but another brute?
D. A.
Like many other people the writer has been notified that utility bills are to rise on 1st January 2025.
This is a repost from SOYMB October 2013. We're still waiting to put an end to the current iniquitous capitalist system.
'Thirty
days out to sea and the weather was fine
The wind that we'd prayed
for and making good time
The honour of first home was soon to be
mine
To homeland and to Queen'
Honour and Praise, a song by John Duncan Richards, covered by Fairport Convention, tells of a Victorian sailing ship, possibly a goods transporting clipper, whose captain is intent on being the first ship to arrive back at England with its cargo. But in racing across the ocean the ship is capsized in a storm and all the crew die except the narrator, the captain.
'And
I've lived with the thought for the rest of m' days
That I'd given
the lives of the crew just to pay
In search of the garlands of
honour and praise
And I wish that I'd drowned in the storm'
'Mayor of London Sadiq Khan is reportedly being lined up for a knighthood in the New Year honours list after securing a historic third term as London mayor in May. He is expected to be awarded the gong for his political and public service, having previously served as the MP for Tooting before he left the Commons in 2016. Mr Khan is first Muslim mayor of the capital also served as a minister under Gordon Brown. Sources told the Financial Times he is expected to receive the honours alongside a number of Labour veterans, including Islington South MP Emily Thornberry.'
Greasy pole indeed.
The piece below from the Socialist Standard May 2006
'We have been here before. We were here when New Labour were gleefully exploiting the Tories’ embarrassment over episodes of sleaze like Neil Hamilton and his cash for questions, while Tony Blair was encouraging the voters to believe that everything would be better, more open and honest, when he was at the head of the government. The party rosettes and the election manifestos had hardly been pushed down into the waste bins when that particular deception was exposed by the Bernie Ecclestone affair. Since then there has been a steady trickle of similarly discomforting events. And now there is the engulfing flood of revelations of “honours” being awarded in exchange for donations and loans to the party or to finance some of Blair’s desperate sticking plaster reforms of hospitals, schools… It is serious enough to involve the police, with one person arrested.
This raises the question of why there have been no prosecutions for something which has been illegal since 1925. It was Lloyd George who, as might be expected, was most infamously involved in what he described to a Tory MP as “… the cleanest way of raising money for a political party. The worst is that you cannot defend it in public”. In line with this he defended and promoted it in private, by appointing an agent, Maundy Gregory, to arrange the sale of honours – for, of course, a suitable commission. Gregory operated from a dauntingly expensive office in the heart of Whitehall, complete with uniformed flunkey. His price list varied from £80,000 to £120,000 for a viscountcy to £10,000 to £15,000 for a knighthood. Less affluent clients were also looked after; for them Lloyd George invented the OBE, which cost about £100. The Labour MP Victor Grayson, perhaps in an effort to revive a flagging political career, denounced the sale of honours through the work of “a monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall”. Soon afterwards he was mysteriously beaten up and then disappeared in suspicious circumstances, leading to the assumption that he had been murdered. Apart from such regrettable lapses Lloyd George and Gregory ran a civilised and profitable business, quite unthreatened by the fact that Lloyd George had sneered at the Lords as “… five hundred men, ordinary men chosen accidentally from among the unemployed”.
Retirement
So blatant was the racket, from which Lloyd George made about £1.5million (about £150 million today) and Gregory about a fifth of that amount, that in 1925 it was deemed necessary to pass the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which should have landed a whole clutch of politicians, Tory as well as Labour, in trouble. In fact the only person to have been prosecuted was Gregory himself, who in 1933 was sent to prison for two months. After this “punishment” he retired comfortably to France on a generous pension as the price of his silence. The Tory MP who brokered that deal was awarded with a knighthood by the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who whinged that the Tory Leader Baldwin had involved him “… in a scandal by forcing me to give an honour because a man has paid £30,000 to get Tory headquarters and some Tories out of a mess”. Was this, we may wonder, the same Ramsay MacDonald who had once described himself as a socialist?
And that was not the end of the affair, because since Gregory went about his odious business the sale of honours, under many guises, has continued to thrive. The Wilson government created Lords Sainsbury and Hamlyn, both of them contributors to party finances. Notoriously, the owner of the company which manufactured the Gannex raincoat so beloved by Wilson was ennobled as Lord Kagan; he was later jailed for corruption. Then there was Sir Eric Miller, who avoided further attentions from the Fraud Squad by committing suicide. That many of the peerages arranged by the Wilson government were rewards for donations to Labour Party funds was confirmed by Joe Haines, who was a kind of predecessor to Alastair Campbell in Wilson’s Downing Street. Although there is evidence that Wilson was not entirely happy about his awards, feeling that he was under pressure from party fund raisers, his retirement nominations (the infamous “lavender list”) was full of party donors and cronies. Haines refused to be included in it because he “…did not wish to appear in the kind of list which had Joe Kagan and Eric Miller and others whom I regarded as undeserving”.
Heath
Among all these double dealings Ted Heath was something of an aberration. Although he reversed Wilson’s decision to stop giving out political honours he was so sparing in his awards that he thought he had “… caused some grumbling among party members”. During his three and three quarters years in office he nominated 34 new life peers, in contrast to the following five years of Labour government under Wilson and Callaghan when 144 “suitable” candidates were put up. The payback for what Heath called “grumbling” came when he was confronted with Thatcher in the 1975 leadership contest. A number of backbenchers seemed likely to have taken revenge for their disappointment at being overlooked for a comfortable, unchallenged seat in the Lords which they saw as the just reward for their long abasement to the needs of the party.
With the advent of Thatcher things in the Tory party got back to what might be called normal. The Iron Lady established a reputation second only to Lloyd George’s for systematically using the honours system to raise money for the party or to reward or cajole restless backbenchers. Between 1979 and 1985 eleven industrialists were made peers after donating a total of £1.9 million to party finances; among them were Victor Matthews who gave £210,000, shipping magnate William Cayzer who gave £410,531 and Frank Taylor of the building firm Taylor Woodrow who donated £367,510. Then there were the knighthoods for the likes of Keith Showering (£424,000) and Nigel Broakes (£210,000). It was all summed up by the former MP, Chief Whip and Foreign Secretary Francis Pym who, undeterred by the fact that he himself had been ennobled as Lord Pym, told the Neill Committee on Standards in Public Life that “… a person had to put money where their mouth is to be considered for an honour”.
Labour
But all of that was supposed to have ended when New Labour arrived in Downing Street with their pledge to replace sleaze with transparency (politician’s jargon for motivated obscurity) and reward on merit (to be assessed on the size of a donation). In some cases big money has been given to support the new city academies, which are supposed to be an improvement on schools which were “failing” because their pupils were performing as might be expected from the area they live in, the depth of their family poverty and the bleakness of their life horizons. The latter-day Maundy Gregory with the job of organising these donations was Des Smith, a head teacher who was also a schools adviser to the government. Smith was persuaded to tell an under cover reporter from the Sunday Times that someone could expect to get one of a range of honours depending on how much money they put into the academies, from an OBE for one academy to a knighthood for two and a peerage – a “certainty” – for five. As a result of his venture into that particular branch of New Labour transparency Mr. Smith has been the subject of close interest from the police.
But in a sense donations to the academies are actually to the Labour Party, since they are designed to boost the party’s chances at the next election by financing one of Blair’s pet projects. Rather more straightforward were the loans from individuals, which the party has defended on the grounds that the money was lent at “commercial” rates – which raises the question of why they did not simply approach their bank instead of people who had rather a lot to gain through lending the money. For example there is Rod Aldridge, chairman of the company Capita which paid him £501,000 in 2004. He also has shares in the company worth some £60 million. Capita has contracts to supply “support services” to the Criminal Records Bureau (which was not among their finest achievements); it runs call centres for the BBC and the NHS and it collects the London Congestion Charge. Aldridge has lent the party £1 million; he got an OBE in 1994. Another lender is Barry Townsley, chairman of a stockbroking firm who was barred from the Stock Exchange trading floor in the 1980s after a scandal involving some share deals. He has lent the party £1 million. Townsley was recommended for a peerage by Tony Blair but he refused the offer, saying it was not worth the negative publicity.
Ironic
It is clearly misleading to refer to the baubles and titles dished out to venal business people and party hangers-on as honours. There is nothing honourable about them, except that they conform to the morality of capitalism. This is a society based on, and ruled by, the principle that sale and profit is a celebration while redundancy and loss is a tragedy. Yet the mouthpieces of capitalism, when it suits them, tell us that there are rewards for a finer morality where human service counts above the crudities of the balance sheet. It is ironically appropriate that even capitalism’s “honours” are for sale. Yes we have been here before and will be here again.'
Ivan
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/05/greasy-pole-honour-rooted-in-dishonour.html
‘Astonishing news for Syrians that the 50-year tyranny of the Assad butchers seems to have collapsed amid a lightning offensive by coalition rebel forces. They have seized the opportunity to exploit Assad’s weakness in the absence of support from his military backers Hezbollah, crippled by Israeli strikes, and Russia, distracted in Ukraine.
The rebels have entered Damascus saying ‘After 50 years of oppression under Baath rule, and 13 years of crimes and tyranny… we announce today the end of this dark period and the start of a new era for Syria.’ At very best, Syrians can hope for the pseudo-democracy of capitalist wage-slavery. At worst, factional civil war as in Libya. They’re celebrating now, but the hangover is to come.’
https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/
The below is from the Socialist Standard April 2020
‘Last month’s Socialist Standard focused upon Turkey’s policy to grab a share of the Eastern Mediterranean gas fields. Turkey, once called the ‘sick man of Europe’, is endeavouring to confirm its role as a regional power. In the chaos of Syria, Turkey has been an active participant.
Recently there have been incidents where Turkish troops suffered numerous casualties caused by the Syrian government, which led to Turkey retaliating.
It was clear that working people in Syria started the uprising against the Assad regime because of the lack of freedom and social justice, the prevailing corruption and discrimination. Life for the majority was dismal with low incomes, a rising cost of living, homelessness, and unemployment, which all served to spark Syria’s ‘Arab Spring’. However, foreign powers and various Islamic jihadists became involved and changed the direction of the people’s uprising. The popular protests were diverted by neighbouring rulers into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Turkey with the support of the US and Western nations on one side with Assad’s government, Iran and Russia on the other. The Syrian civil war proceeded to develop into a series of sieges.
Way back at the beginning of Syria’s civil war, Turkish authorities facilitated the involvement of the Islamists by permitting the infiltration of jihadists into Syria via its borders. It also allowed commandeered oil that financed ISIS/ISIL operations to be transported through Turkey to be sold on the world market.
As the Syrian situation escalated it resulted in the mass movement of refugees, with Turkey hosting millions of displaced Syrians fleeing for safety. Turkey is also the route for refugees to reach Europe and it entered into an agreement with the EU to stem the flow of refugees. These desperate and vulnerable people have now become political pawns used by Turkey with Greece now ignoring international law and slamming the doors shut in the faces of refugees.
At first the Kurdish independence movement tried a third way in that it would side neither with the regime nor with the opposition. It would defend itself, but it would not wage war. Starting in mid-2012, various places in the Kurdish areas were one by one freed from Assad control. When Kurdish separatists created an autonomous region, Rojava, this was seen as a direct threat to the rule of Turkey and it led to a direct invasion of Syria to neutralise the PYG/PKK (Kurdish People’s Protection Units/Kurdistan Workers’ Party). It meant a military stand-off with the US who inserted its forces within the Kurds’ defences to assist the Kurds in combating the Islamist terrorists. This ended when Trump re-deployed US forces to secure Syria’s oil fields and it left Turkey along with Syrian mercenaries with a free rein to launch an assault against the Kurds who quickly then looked to the Syrian government and its Russian mercenaries for protection.
Added to this complex situation is the current Syrian regime’s advance to retake the last rebel-held territory in the country, the province of Idlib which is under the control of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a former al-Qaeda affiliate. Turkey is backing these anti-Assad rebels. This has brought Syria and Turkey into direct conflict and created a possible confrontation with Russia. If the Syrian government is victorious, there will be a new flight of refugees fleeing towards the safety of Turkey increasing the refugee burden Turkey already carries.
But Turkish military expansionism has not stopped the UK from selling Turkey weaponry. The UK has licensed sales of military equipment to Turkey worth more than £1bn since 2013, according to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, principally aircraft, helicopters, drones, grenades, small arms and ammunition. Leading armament manufacturers BAE Systems and TAI were awarded with an Open General Export Licence that makes the flow of weapons to Turkey easier. It wasn’t until October 2019 that the UK government halted new sales of weapons to Turkey while still honouring existing arms contracts.
In fact the world’s arms traders – the ‘merchants of death’ – are literally making a killing out of this war, with those in Turkey and Russia being able to test their weapons under battlefield conditions.’
ALJO
https://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2020/04/material-world-proxy-warring-in-syria.html