The News in Review
Budget for Defence
One of the big debates which British capitalism is currently having with itself is over what it likes to call Defence.
Independent, or American controlled, missiles? Airborne, or carried in submarines? Conventional, or nuclear forces? Big or small?
The latest government White Paper on these questions, the Statement on Defence, 1963 shows what capitalism in this country wants in the way of armed forces during the next twelve months.
The Royal Navy is to get some Polaris submarines, nuclear powered, to stay submerged for weeks on end and armed with deadly missiles which they can fire from under the water.
The Air Force is to get a new nuclear weapon to give its bombers more hitting power (although some correspondents doubted the existence of a really new weapon).
The guns of the army are to have greater fire power.
Fine. All the Forces, in other words, will be able to knock down more buildings, make bigger holes, and kill more people, in the future than they could in the past. Fine.
Perhaps this is value for money; £ 1,837,700,000 will be spent on the Armed Forces and their weapons during the nest year, which is £116,640,000 up on last year.
We can all think of things which, even under capitalism, could avoid some of their problems if they had a bit more money. Some charitable appeals, for example, often tell us of the surprisingly long time they can feed somebody like a hungry refugee child for a pitifully small sum.
But these arc only human beings— definitely not priority for capitalism’s expenditure.
Never mind. Aren’t you glad they’re making so many big, busting weapons to defend you with? Aren’t you glad so much of society’s wealth and brains and talent is being poured into things which can only harm society?
Don’t you think it’s time you called a halt to this madness and organised a sane world, which will not have the conflicts which need armed forces to settle them?
Two things are needed for a “defence” budget—weapons and money. The world would be a better place without both of them.
Labour and Nationalisation
With the crown barely settled upon his head, Mr. Harold Wilson has found himself under heavy fire from the Conservative propaganda machine.
Tory M.P. Gerald Nabarro inveigled Wilson into confirming, with the House of Commons for an audience, that Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution — the bit about standing for “. . . the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” is in fact still the policy of the entire Party.
Perhaps it was coincidence that at that very moment the Conservative Ccntral Office had just got ready a new pamphlet, Entitled to Know, which suggests on the flimsiest evidence that the Labour Party has its nationalising eye upon no fewer than 104 firms in this country. Naturally, Wilson’s affirmation of Clause Four was rushed into the front page of the pamphlet.
No sane person can really believe that the Labour Party wants to nationalise firms like Boots and the Prudential. Some of the other companies in the Tory pamphlet—aircraft firms, for example—are already deep in the government’s pocket anyway. Nationalisation, as an attempted solution for some of British capitalism’s difficulties, was never designed to go as far as the Tories make out.
So Wilson could comfortably dismiss the charge as “childish” and, more bluntly, The Economist could accuse the Conservative Party of “. . . telling lies in its propaganda. . .” Altogether, the scare fell very flat, not like the 1959 campaign about the famous 600 firms.
But wait a minute. Why do the Labour Party agree on the one hand that they stand for wholesale nationalisation which is what Clause Four means—and yet deny it when their opponents bring them face to face with it?
Labour once told us that nationalisation was the answer to our problems, that it was the quick road to Socialism; they can hardly drop it entirely now. But the working class have become dubious enough about nationalisation to make it a vote loser. This is what forces the Labour Party into their double act, so that Wilson must actually be trapped into admitting that it might be his policy.
If nationalisation were the road to Socialism the Labour Party should be proud to stand up for it whatever the consequences. But in fact it is only another makeshift of capitalism.
The chances are that the Labour Party will fight off the latest Tory stunt. They may even win the next election and give us a bit more of their brand of state capitalism.
One thing, though, they will not be able to give us. That is Socialism.
Prices
One of the favourite tricks of Labour M.P.s is to get up in the House and ask, innocently, to be told the present purchasing power of the pound compared to what it was in October, 1951, when the Conservatives came back to power.
They get some illuminating replies.
The latest of these, from the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, shows that the pound of 1951 is now, in the same terms, worth only 13s. 11d. Presumably these figures were carefully recorded by Labour members and have by now been used in countless speeches up and down the country.
To be sure, it was a big Tory promise in 1951 that they would stop prices rising and so maintain the buying power of the pound. At the time, because the working class had seen so many wage increases wither under the heat of rising prices, the whole thing was something of an election issue. The Tory boast went down well.
But like so many other issues, this one is a great illusion. Workers are too easily misled into thinking that their fortunes are permanently affected by things like price levels. They rarely take the trouble to remember the history of prices and wages, which teaches exactly the opposite. Whatever they may earn, and whatever the level of prices, workers always have the same old struggle to balance their budget.
Perhaps this is too much like hard thinking. Perhaps the workers find it easier to moan about the latest price rise or—in other times, maybe—the latest wage cut.
Prices are for the moment a dead issue as far as vote catching goes, but they could come to life again.
If they do, the working class will do well to remember that voting for the parly which promises to put wages up or bring prices down—or both—can bring them no benefits.
Russia and the Oil Business
Oil is one of the commodities which Russia is anxious to export. This has been an expanding business; according to a United States House of Representatives report, the Soviet Union was overall an importer of oil in 1950, but by 1951 was exporting the stuff at the rate of 40 million tons a year.
This has worried some of the established oil interests in the Western world; Russia has a surplus of oil and in the recent past has gone out to capture some of their cherished markets.
So the recent “oil for ships” offer which Moscow seemed to be making was bound to ripple the surface of international trade.
The Americans and the other international oil companies were worried because the Russians were likely to upset the market by selling their oil at about twelve per cent. below the current price. On the other side of the deal, Washington does not favour its allies exporting to the Eastern bloc things like ships, which they classify as being of strategic value.
These reactions we might have expected. One capitalist power will always squeal when another pinches one of its markets.
So might we have expected the British shipyards, hungry for orders, to press for the acceptance of the deal. No business willingly passes up the chance of selling its products, especially when it is as depressed as shipbuilding is at the moment. So three yards on the Clyde combined to put in a tender for six fish-meal factory ships for export to Russia.
Unusual allies for the shipyards were the shipbuilding unions. And a strange ally for the Americans was the National Union of Mineworkers, which took up its customary hostile attitude at the very mention of the word oil.
This muddle is typical of those which crop up when deals like this are in the air. Capitalism is a mass of different groups of investment, with intricately opposed interests. We should leave these interests to fight out their deals themselves.
Workers usually think that they have a stake in the outcome of such situations But experience says that they do not. Whoever gets the ships and the oil will make not enough difference to working class lives to worry about.