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The waste of competition
Supporters
of capitalism praise competition to the skies, seeing it as a means
of keeping prices down and of ensuring that “consumers” get what
they want.
Socialists,
on the other hand, have always seen economic competition as being
(besides the cause of modern wars) an inefficient and wasteful way of
distributing what people need and want. For a start, it involves an
unnecessary multiplication of productive units and distribution
outlets with all the extra resources this uses up. Then there are the
resources used up in marketing and advertising, which is aimed merely
at persuading people to buy from one firm or shop as opposed to
another and which adds absolutely nothing to the amount of wealth in
existence.
No
wonder Marx commented on capitalism’s “way of distributing
products through trade, and its manner of competition” being “very
wasteful of material resources” (Volume III of Capital,
chapter 5 on “Economy in the use of constant capital”).
So
it was rather surprising to hear the head of a profit-seeking
capitalist enterprise, Charles Allen, chief executive of ITV plc,
echo this socialist criticism of capitalism in the evidence he gave
on 7 June to a House of Lords committee looking into the renewal of
the BBC’s charter. Asked by the Bishop of Manchester (yes, it’s
part of the “democratic deficit” in Britain that bishops of the
Church of England are automatically members of parliament) about
possible co-operation with the BBC in the North-West, Allen replied
that he was all in favour of the BBC, ITV and others sharing the same
programme-making studios, adding:
“A
lot of money is wasted through duplication: we have our own studios;
they have their own studios; we have our own transmission; they have
their own transmission; we have our own infrastructure; they have
their own infrastructure. What I am really keen to do is actually get
the money on the screen rather than wasted in infrastructure”
(www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/ld/lduncorr/bbc0706.pdf).
Wasted
in infrastructure! True, but this applies across the board to all
manufacturing industry, services, shops and supermarkets. There’s
wasteful duplication (triplication, and more) there too.
What
Allen apparently wants in broadcasting is the same sham competition
as exists in the supply of electricity, gas and telephones. There’s
only one infrastructure here too – only
one national electricity grid, for example –
with competition limited to firms wasting resources on trying to
steal customers from each other.
In
socialism resources can be saved to produce needed and useful things
by only having one type of distribution outlet in neighbourhoods and
only one factory producing computers, cars, washing machines, etc in
any one region. Then, we really could concentrate resources on
producing best-quality useful things rather than wasting them on
duplicated infrastructures.
Cooking
the Books (2) 
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