News in review
What do they stand for?
It is obviously time for somebody to remind the nuclear disarmament movement what they are supposed to stand for.
Remember the days when, they only inscribed upon their banners slogans about banning the bomb? When they appealed that everyone, regardless of their political views, could co-operate in the appeal to save us from nuclear destruction? When they trotted out tame Tories (in much the same way as the Tories trot out tame trade unionists) to try to prove this point?
You do remember? Well, forget it.
The recent demonstrations organised by the Committee of 100 against bad housing, and against the Greek government, show that the unilateralists are going the same way as the other reformist organisations which have sprung up full of fire, have had their day and have vanished.
This process has followed a familiar, wearisome pattern. As unilateralism has failed to have any impact upon that great mass of working class votes which so faithfully support capitalism, the movement has found itself confronted with a choice.
It could have stuck to its original purpose and declined quickly into the ranks of the organisations whose objects may sound very desirable, but have no relevance to the needs of capitalism. Or like any other reformist group, it could have looked out for fresh fields to exploit.
This is what the unilateralists have done, which is not to say that their new preoccupation with issues like democracy in Greece will win them any more support than they gained from advocating banning the bomb. Here, once again, is evidence that, even on their own terms, reformist organisations are seldom logical.
It was not from any notion of superiority, nor any wish to detach ourselves from the problems of capitalism (if that were possible) that we said from the beginning that the nuclear disarmament movement would go the same way as the rest. We have seen so much of this in the past. There is no satisfaction now in seeing our forecast proved correct.
Because as each reformist movement rises and dies, it absorbs the energies and the enthusiasm of the very people who should be working for the new social order which will settle the things they fear and dislike once and for all.
Rachman, a scapegoat
As a scapegoat, Peter Rachman had just about everything. Fat. Balding. Property speculator. Keeping women. Just the man, in fact, to vent a little spleen on if you have been kicked out of your house or if you envy somebody else’s ability to buy feminine favours.
And a scapegoat Rachman has been made, not least by the Labour Party in their transparently clever attempt to win votes by using what they know of Rachman’s affairs to attack the Rent Act.
So perhaps a word or two to put Rachman in his place will not come amiss.
First of all, it is nonsense to suggest that it was the Rent Act which gave Rachman his chance. As the papers have pointed out, the heavy glove boys operated against precisely the people who were still protected under the Act.
What Rachman did was to exploit the loopholes in the housing laws and to hide his transactions in a maze of legal complications. This is something which will happen, provided it is profitable, whether there is a Rent Act or not.
Capitalism has always been interested in the cost of housing, because working class rents can have an explosive effect upon wages and upon an election. The shady operator knows that it can often be very remunerative to probe for the weak spots in the law and when he has found them to exploit them to the full.
If Rachman had not cast his shadow in the field of properly speculation he may well have made his pile in some other way. Or indeed, if Rachman had never lived there would have been somebody else to do exactly the same sort of unsavoury deal.
In any case, was not Rachman, in a way, one of capitalism’s heroes? A penniless refugee who became a self-made man of riches? Who is to say that, if his gamble on the oilfields in the North had come off, he may not have become a nationally respected man, his racketeering days forgotten, and ended his life with a title?
Why not? It has happened before.
If the Rachman story is sordid, if it shows up a sort of human behaviour which is unpleasant, if it evokes some of the most regrettable of human reactions—it is only typical of capitalist society itself.
Criminal waste
The trains which, packed to suffocation, are pulling out of the big cities, and the roads to the coast wedged tight with traffic, tell us that holiday time is here and with it one of capitalism’s silly seasons.
High summer is the time when all sorts of fruit and salad is liable to be produced in such abundance that the price falls to the point when it becomes economical for the farmers to plough the stuff back into the ground or leave it rotting on the trees.
But now here is another, even sillier, example of the waste which the profit motive brings with it—one which need not happen only at the height of summer.
The Times of July 31st last reported that Cerebos Ltd., of Hartlepool, plans to dump a hundred tons of meat and fish paste into the sea because they are changing the shapes of their jars.
Hartlepool is in the stricken North-East; perhaps some of the unemployed up there would not say no to a few free jars of fish paste. Or perhaps the stuff might help out with some of the underfed children of the world.
Never mind. Presumably some accountant somewhere has worked out that it will be cheaper for Cerebos to sink the pastes. Just like any other company, they have to keep a close eye on their balance sheet.
Silly is too mild a word to describe the social system which not only allows the criminal waste of the world’s resources but actually, at times, requires and encourages it.
Mail Train robbery
The two-and-a-half million pound mail train robbery was audacious and glamorous enough to have come from the pen of the most imaginative crime fiction writer.
In that, it was typical of a recent strengthening trend in crime. The big, well planned robbery is becoming increasingly profitable for the crooks and so more and more of a headache for the police.
This is hardly surprising. The existence of private property elevates money into the key to a secure life. The moneyed man is always the privileged man and he does his best to make sure that he keeps both the money and the privileges.
There are plenty of such privileged— and honoured—men whose wealth has been amassed from the exploitation of the other class in society. Or perhaps they inherited it from their ancestors’ historical equivalent of the Cheddington hold-up.
This sort of wealth is respectable—it has come from what has been well called legal robbery, which conforms to capitalism’s needs and so its moralities.
Robbery, forgery, embezzlement, and so on, do not conform and the men who try to get rich by practising them are anything but honoured.
Be that as it may, crime is inevitable as long as capitalism lasts; offences against property make up die overwhelming majority of crimes today. Capitalism without crime, in fact, is simply impossible.
Ironically, it is capitalism itself which asks for some of its crime. Do not the armed forces, so essential to capitalism, encourage just the sort of knowledge and the mental attitudes which are useful in a desperate, quick-fire robbery?
The driver of the Cheddington train said that one of the gang advised him to keep quiet because there were some “right bastards” there. Well, it is the “right bastard” who makes an excellent Commando or bomber pilot.
All of this is not to justify nor to condone the criminal. Indeed, any one who tried to take away from the Cheddington gang any of the money they have stolen would soon find that, in their own unmistakeable way, they are as firm in their support of property rights as any bank boardroom.
Capitalism is an unpleasant social system and crime is only one of its many excrescences.