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What
is the public's opinion?
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In the
vicious world of capitalist competition, opinion polling finds a
vital and profitable niche not for the laudable purpose of discerning
or complying with the public interest but with the manipulation of
public opinion in the interest of profit.
As in all previous stages of human social development, today wealth is
produced and can only be produced by the application of human labour
power to the resources of nature. Capitalism complicates the process of
wealth production by the separation of these two productive essentials;
a relatively small minority of human beings claim a right to the
ownership of nature’s resources, which are effectively the means of
life of the whole of humanity, while the great majority are obliged to
sell their physical and mental abilities to these owners. The wealth
that results from this combination of resources and labour power
becomes the property of the owners who give those who have expended
their labour power tokens which are called wages with which they can
purchase the part of the vast aggregation of wealth they have created.
That is the basic nature of capitalism. However, in effect it is much
more convoluted and wasteful than this might suggest. In today’s world
all the goods and services needed by people are produced mainly in the
form of commodities against the background of their real or imagined
use value. But the shareholders who own the enterprises that produce
these goods and services and the usually richly-rewarded directors who
organise the enterprises are not philanthropists concerned with the
public good.
Their interest is not primarily the use value of the commodities they
produce; it is the exchange value of those commodities; the price for
which they are bought and which contains, in normal circumstances, that
surplus beyond the cost of production (including the cost of sale)
which enriches the shareholders and allows for continued economic
viability.
So the kernel of this complex and extremely wasteful exercise is profit
which is yielded only when purchasers are persuaded to buy specific
goods or services from among the competing suppliers. It is important
for capitalist enterprises to ascertain public attitudes either to
adopt their products or prices to prevailing modes or to influence
change in those attitudes by product design, price or advertising.
Politics
and public opinion
In the last British General Election, the Labour and Tory parties spent
some £18 million each and the Liberal Democrats spent £4.3
million. These large sums were additional to what might be called their
’constant capital’ in the form of existing organisation,
publicly-funded offices, salaries and equipment; vast sums that must
surely conflict with the notion of ‘free’ elections.
These amounts are being dwarfed by the massive sums currently being
invested in the US primaries, where the two candidates for the role of
capitalism’s political office manager are being selected. In
contradistinction to the nonsense about ‘spreading democracy’ in areas
deemed of consequence to US interests, the American variety of that
system reveals a monumentally expensive and cynical exercise between
two politically indistinguishable groups concerned with sculpting
politics in the general interests of capital. As in Britain and the
rest of the developed world, other aspiring politicians, denied real
public exposure by a pensioned media, will be permitted to enter the
hustings to make up the numbers and reinforce the fiction that the
public are offered a fair and informed choice.
Obviously Public Opinion in both politics and commerce is of
considerable importance; but it is politically innocuous in that it
never questions the fundamental way in which the needs and requirements
of the human family are organised. Politicians, the business
fraternity, clerics and journalists may criticise some aspect or
aspects of the system: show a preference for making some adjustment in
planning or administration or suggest a different political or economic
strategy but always within the framework of the existing social system.
Such people may display courage, energy and enthusiasm in campaigning
for a cause but always they do so on the assumption that there is no
alternative to the present order of things; that the old political and
economic fundamentals of capitalism are as inevitable as the seasons;
that they have always existed and that there is no other way of running
society.
Dominant
ideas
Karl Marx made the obvious point that the ideas that dominate in
society are those of its ruling class. It doesn’t follow that in our
present society the majority of people like capitalism. On the
contrary, the mere want or dire poverty of capitalism, the frightening
destruction of the biosphere, the increasing disparity of wealth
between rich and poor, the permanent threat of war, violence and crime,
these things are too pronounced, too close to the lives of the people
to escape being the daily staples of news and public concern.
The point was well made by a contributor to the World Socialist
Movement’s website (WSM_FORUM@yahoogroups.com)
who quoted a University
of Michigan opinion poll showing that some two-thirds of Americans
believe government is being “run by big interests looking out for
themselves”.
We do not need an opinion poll to confirm this finding; ask those you
work with or the people in the pub or in the club. It is no secret that
a small minority of people are millionaires and billionaires or that
such people do not actively participate in producing goods and
services. Unfortunately, despite claiming that they live in a
democratic society, most people’s reaction to their own condemnation of
the system is likely to be something like. “Yes, it’s true but,
unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about it!”
continued on next page
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