The Passing Show
The Congo
U.N. officials report that 300,000 people are slowly starving to death in the Congo, with two hundred dying every day. This is still further proof, if it were necessary, that it is not enough to be merely against capitalism, or colonialism, or the rule of a particular imperial power; one must have constructive proposals as to what is to replace the system to be destroyed—one must, in short, work for the achievement of Socialism, not merely for the destruction of any other economic and social system. A year ago, there were those who criticised the Socialist Party because it would not join in movements for “colonial freedom”, such as the one that aimed to throw the Belgians out of the Congo. We pointed out that this would only entail the Congolese people exchanging one set of masters for another. And this is what has occurred. It would be hard to argue, in face of the mass-starvation, in face of the pictures of Congolese children who are nothing more than skin and bone, that the Congolese people are better off today than they were a year ago. In fact the new Congolese masters, to whom the Congolese people were exhorted to give their support, cannot even agree among themselves. And in the squabbling and fighting among the various sections of the new Congolese ruling class—each of which calls in help from foreign states, Russia, America, Ghana, and Belgium among them—it is the ordinary Congolese who suffer. The system of food-growing and food-distribution has in some parts (notably Kasai) almost entirely broken down. And every day more people starve.
Land of opportunity
Feeling depressed in a monotonous job? Worried about the endless struggle to keep the weekly budget down to the size of your pay packet? Thinking about emigration—perhaps to Canada, land of opportunity?
Before you go, have a look at MacLean’s magazine (it calls itself Canada’s National Magazine) for November 19th, 1960. It carries an article telling you about Canada’s rich. A favourite place for their holidays is Frenchman’s Creek in Jamaica, where millionaires and their wives can have peace and privacy for two thousand dollars a week. Last year a Calgary oil millionaire flew a party of his friends to England to watch his horse run in the Derby; the bill he paid covered a week’s stay at the Ritz for the party and Rolls-Royces for his friends’ trips. A Toronto manufacturer had two swimming pools put in his backyard, complete with lighted fountain, hi-fi music and Japanese teahouse, for 30,000 dollars. A Montreal construction business tycoon often flies to Florida or the Caribbean for weekends in one of the family’s two private planes (a DC-3 and a flying boat); once he couldn’t get a favourite Chinese dish in Miami, so he rang up his usual restaurant in Montreal and got them to make it and fly it down to him. A multi-millionaire distiller had his house festooned with fifteen thousand lilac blooms for his daughter’s wedding; the total wedding bill was reported at 100,000 dollars. Twenty-five upper class wives dress entirely in Paris and London creations at an annual cost of up to forty thousand dollars.
The other side of the coin
You’re keen to? Have a look at the next page. This carries the stories of some of the families of Canada’s 327,000 unemployed workers. (If we had the same percentage of unemployment in Britain there would be nearly a million out of work.) It tells of the bitterness of men trying to make ends meet on unemployment pay. “Today the boss wants a twenty-year-old man with forty years’ experience”, some of them said. A fifty-three-year-old steamfitter suggested, “Why don’t they shoot us old men? Digging graves for us would make jobs for the younger men”. The stories are much the same—mounting bills which cannot be paid, threatening letters from hire-purchase companies as the payments fall behind, the despair of men combing the town every day for jobs and being everywhere refused.
Still, there it is. In a system run by the capitalists you would expect the capitalists to be well off. And you would expect the workers to be badly off. In other words—capitalism in Canada works out much the same as capitalism in Britain. Emigration will give you a change of scenery, but it can’t change your class-position in society.
Unfair to the rich
In the current number of Oxford Tory, the Conservative undergraduate journal, there was a surprising item. One writer commented “To say that we have a just society would be, to say the least, an exaggeration”. Clearly a true statement, but what a place to find it. However, the very next words dispelled the astonishment. “Look”, the writer goes on, “at Schedule A, and the absurd level of death duties”. So it isn’t the ownership of all the country’s factories, and mines, and land by a small ruling class that this Tory finds “unjust”, nor the fact that the workers have to labour to support idlers in luxury: he was only concerned with the arrangements made by the capitalist class to pay for the State which looks after their interests. Perhaps if he examines the nature of society a little more closely, he will be able to find some more penetrating criticisms of the “just society”.
Flogging
Sir Thomas Moore, the Conservative M.P. for Ayr Burghs, is again agitating for the introduction of flogging for crimes involving violence. Sir Thomas said that “peace and justice” were the “keywords” of Hitler’s policy, and also that “Herr Hitler is absolutely honest and sincere,” at a time when Hitler had already set up a dictatorship and begun his campaign to “solve the Jewish problem” with every circumstance of brutality. Socialists do not join in the debate about how criminals should be punished: we go to the root of the problem, By attempting to end the society which gives rise to crime and to criminals. But if Sir Thomas thinks that a man who injures a single other man ought to be flogged, what does he think should be done with political leaders who support dictators whose declared policy is the “liquidation” of millions of their fellow human beings?
A.W.E.