Cooking the Books 2


No growth area

On Wednesday 22 April, Alistair Darling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, took his snout out of the trough for a while to deliver the budget speech. He ended it with what he must have thought was a brilliant soundbite:

“You can grow your way out of a recession. You cannot cut your way out”.

Well, er, yes. A recession is a period when there is no growth, when in fact there is a fall in production, what the spin-doctors called “negative growth”. So, obviously, a recession comes to an end when growth resumes. The big question is: can a government do anything to make this happen?

But what is “growth” anyway? For government statisticians it is an increase in the Gross Domestic Product. GDP is made up of what capitalist firms invest + what consumers spend + what the government spends. For Marxists, the key part of this is capital accumulation, the part of profits that capitalist firms re-invest in production, the motor of the capitalist economy and which determines the level of consumer spending.

While governments can influence GDP – if only by increasing their own expenditure – they cannot do anything to increase capital accumulation. That depends on the amount of profits that capitalist firms expect to make, which in turn depends on market conditions, which governments can’t control.

An increase in GDP brought about by an increase in government spending – which is the government’s plan to get out of what Darling delicately calls “the recession” – can only come in the long run out of profits, the source of funds for capital accumulation. In the short run it’s only a statistical illusion. It doesn’t increase capital accumulation and so doesn’t result in growth in actual production..

Even here, though, Darling is not expecting GDP to go up until some time towards the end of next year. In the meantime, he estimated, GDP would have fallen by 3.5 percent. Not everybody agrees on this figure. In its latest quarterly Inflation Report published in May, the Bank of England “now expects that this year’s slump will lead the economy to shrink by up to 4.5 per cent on its main view, marking the most brutal drop in GDP since 1946” (Times, 14 May). The 1946 drop was caused, it should be noted, not by an economic crisis, not by any actual fall in production, but simply by the government no longer having to spend money on fighting a war. Three monthly earlier, however, the Bank had been ever more optimistic than Darling, expecting a fall of only 3 percent.

Basically, they don’t know. As Mervyn King, the Bank’s Governor, put it:

“We may well get a recovery that proves to be sustained, then again, we may not” (Times, 14 May).

True. And how very profound.
The price of “freedom”

Sean Hodgson sits in his room in the hostel where they are doing their best to help him recover from the past twenty seven years. Before he was sentenced for a murder which, it was eventually conceded, he did not commit, he stood a robust six feet tall and weighed in at 13 stone. Since then the years of “treatment” for a turmoil of conditions – angina, prostate cancer , schizophrenia  as well as the global, persistent, untreatable stress of being locked up although innocent - have rendered him into this fragile, bewildered man . An unhappy man whose experiences tell a lot about this social system, how it responds to its characteristic tensions and does not easily contemplate the possibility that it has got anything so barbarously wrong.

“Freedom? It's lonely” headlined a recent article about him. He misses the congestion on the prison wings and he is disorientated by the abrupt absence of the repressive demands – so essential to an orderly prison – of going to bed, or wherever, when he is told and for all his actions to be conditioned with the same hostility. If he now wanted, he could spend all night on the streets. Except that all he can manage emotionally is a trip to the nearby 24 hour shop, or an unplanned visit to his solicitor. His symptoms are typical – like the man who on release went to live with his girl friend but spent most of his time in the one bedroom which for its size and shape most closely resembled a prison cell.

If Sean Hodgson ever recovers in the sense of conforming to the life style commonly required of employment (which is doubtful – he says that his previous behaviour was such that “If I hadn't gone to prison  I'd have been dead now, from the drugs”) he will find that the disciplines he conforms to voluntarily are as demanding and arduous as many he contended with behind the prison walls. And, as the evidence of the emotional deprivations of everyday working life attests, being a “free” employee does not imply any access to a gregariously fulfilling lifestyle. There are tragically many people who live and work in  the busiest of cities and are desperately lonely.

One type of company now available to Sean Hodgson which he is not grateful for was the attention of the tabloid press. His conviction, for raping and murdering a woman, was very  media-attractive. With DNA sampling he should have been released eleven years earlier but the records which could have been used in this were mislaid and it took a lot of work by his solicitor to unearth them. Which is probably why a reporter has been following Sean Hodgson around, talking to other people about him, trying to get a story – or make one up if need be. This, Sean said, made him feel “rotten“. But he will have to learn, in his new “freedom”, that the media is as motivated to sell its products profitably as is any other business, no matter what the cost of human suffering.

Sean Hodgson's time in prison was a comparatively placid interlude in a tumultuous life of addiction, crime and vagrancy. One who has been involved in many discharged prisoners with similar problems gives a gloomy prognosis: “...they all follow a pattern. I haven't known any who haven't either been suicidal or wanted to go into jail after a year”. A great deal of capitalism's resources have been expended, over a very long time, to moderating such problems through what is called the criminal justice system. Sean Hodgson is only the latest example of the obdurate failure within that assumption.

IVAN

Our thanks for some of the material in this article to Aida Edemariam and her report in The Guardian on 29 April

Prejudice

A true tale from a kebab shop

I was serving a regular customer; a person who is showing me a lot of respect. The boss of the kebab shop doesn't like it when I talk to the customers because he thinks I am his slave and that I should behave like a robot. He came over and he told me, "Serve him quick and don't talk to him; he's gay", but he spoke in his language so the man wouldn't understand.

The gentleman, he felt something is wrong and he said to me, "Is everything all right?" The Boss answered, "Yes Mike, everything is all right." The man, he said, "I'm not Mike, I'm Howard." I explained him that the boss means "mate" but he can't pronounce it. Howard smiled and said, "thank you" to him and he left a two-pound tip for me then went out, but he left his umbrella. My Boss took the tip and told me, "I'll buy a bulb for your room." I said, "This is my money. That man he always leave a tip." But the Boss is a hard man who treat his workers like slaves, so I say to him, "If you want to take it why don't you buy toilet paper? I have a bulb in my room." Then to patronize me he said, "Maybe you like to join Mr Howard tonight" with winking his eye.

At this point two people came in, each holding a bottle of beer. They were big chubby men with bald heads and they were so drunk that they couldn't control their movements. They are shouting, "Fucking foreigners" to each other so my Boss said to me, "Be very nice with them. If they said, 'Fuck you', your answer will be 'thank you very much, do you like anything else?'" I told him, "I can't do that and I can't serve them", so he said, "When they have ordered, you do the order - I'll speak with them."

The men came up to the counter and one of them said, "Why did you come here, fucking donkey shagger?" The boss in his pronunciation, said, "Calm down, mike." The man replied, "Fuck off, I'm not Mike, I'm Nick" and the other one he says, "They come here to shag young girls and marry them to get citizenship."

The Boss, who thinks he is a great important man, couldn't get rid of two bullyboys. He said, "No mike, I'm a religious person; it is not in my culture to shag girls." This makes the second man very angry and he shouted, "He's not Mike you c***." And then he says to the Boss, "So you're Muslim?" and he replies that he is. This drunk man then said, "I thought you lot weren't supposed to eat pork, why are you selling it then?" The Boss says back to him, "That's business."

Now the first man is more angry even than the other one and he threw his bottle and it breaks into pieces; spread over the shop, and he said, "You got a problem, Mohammed?" The Boss said to him, "I am not Mohammed, I am Mustapha, my friend". The first drunk man shouted, "He's not your friend, he's my friend." The boss, he replied to him, "Ok, mate." But he said "mike" again because he cannot pronounce, "mate". This man, he was very drunk, he said to him, "My name's not fucking Mike. Fuck you!" The boss he say, "Thank you very much, what you like?"

The second man say, "That's what he calls his donkey when he's shagging it!" Then he was holding onto the counter and he was pretended to be having sex that way; like Mustapha and his donkey, called Mike. He was saying, "Oh Mike, oh Mike". At this moment Howard comes back for his umbrella. He realised there is something wrong and he becomes a mediator between my Boss and them when he explained to them when he saying to you "Mike" he is means "mate".

Before the two boys leave the kebab shop one of them says to the Boss raising his voice, "The customer's always right Mike!" The boss said, "Yes, yes, yes". Howard advised him he should call the police. The Boss says "many times event like that happened to me - when I call police they come too late and when they come they accuse me instead of them." I said, "And we are all fucking illegal immigrants and by their police law we are the crime-makers."

Howard said, "I understand now. Good luck for you." and he left the shop. I say to the boss, "Now can you see?"

I.I.
Contents
Features

  • Not so honourable members
    The recent expenses scandal has confirmed that many politicians are just self-serving careerists but, even if they were all saints, it wouldn’t make any difference to the way capitalism works.


  • Problems and Solutions
    Socialism won’t be a problem-free society but it will allow problems to be dealt with rationally


  • Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Reformism
    Marx wrote a book 150 years ago that shows why money exists today and how we can get along fine with out it tomorrow.


  • Understanding history
    The materialist conception of history was first outlined publicly 150 years ago this month.


  • A simpler way of doing things
    Capitalism makes arranging production more complicated than it need be.


  • A different kind of politics
    Politics has become a dirty word, but that’s because we leave it to professional politicians.

  • The price of freedom


  • Prejudice
    A true tale from a kebab shop.


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    No growth area

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    Voice from the Back
    World Poverty; The Failure Of Reformism;
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    Socialist Standard Online edition                                         June 2009