News in Review
Los Angeles erupts
For a few days the spotlight was switched from the ever present horror of Vietnam and focussed on the United States itself.
Los Angeles, that most modern of cities—if such an outdated word as city can be used to describe a sprawl of over 452 square miles—erupted into violence. In an orgy of looting, arson and killing the Negro population, so often the victims of mob violence, themselves became the mob. The savage details were too well reported to need repeating, but many thousands of troops were needed to crush what amounted to a rebellion. When it was over, needless to say the Negroes were the worst-hit victims.
The suppression of the Negro, lasting for a hundred years after their “liberation,” ranging from murder to petty discrimination, and running through all strata of society, has produced a distrust and hatred that will take a very long time to overcome. At every moment and in every possible way, the Negro is made to feel inferior.
Such a situation, and the fact that it could be changed, must lead to an explosion. Los Angeles has been a modern legend, that personifies the so-called affluent society, the world of mass-produced commodities in profusion. Brash and ugly, a mass of sprawling suburbs and six-lane freeways where public transport has practically disappeared, the Watts-Willowbrook area where the explosion occurred is known as the Black Ghetto. Can anything illustrate the plight of the American Negro more than the use of this medieval word to describe the conditions of workers in an ultra-modern city?
The riot was crushed, but as long as hatred between workers remains on such a scale and is added to the normal tensions and frustrations of capitalism, such eruptions will continue.
Priorities in Kashmir
How cruelly does capitalism itself expose the innocent delusions of its own supporters !
Consider the case of the host of organisations which collect charity with the professed object of lightening the enormous burden of hunger and destitution in the world.
These charities have an extensive library of photographs of pitiful children, swollen-bellied near skeletons. They campaign with pictures of refugees and victims of natural disasters. Many people find this appeal irresistible, and the money flows in.
India and Pakistan are among the favourite subjects for this sort of charity; both countries have literally millions of starving people, and the problem is periodically intensified by famine and calamities like floods and cyclones.
Yet among the indescribable suffering of their peoples, India and Pakistan can afford to go to war. What does this make of the appeal of the charities?
A few months ago these same two countries were fighting over the Rann of Kutch. While this was going on a cyclone hit East Pakistan, killing thousands of people and making millions homeless. The Pakistani Forces could have been used for rescue and recovery work; they had the manpower and much of the needed equipment. But they could not be spared from the fighting.
This sort of inconsistency does not prevent the charity-mongers appealing for aid for India and Pakistan. What they overlook is that over the past few years aid has been pumped into those countries on a scale which mocks the charities’ wildest dreams.
According to India’s Information Minister, Mrs. Gandhi, Pakistan has received one and a half billion dollars worth of aid from the United States. Mrs. Gandhi also admitted to India having received “only” two million dollars’ worth, but, of course, she did not mention the other aid, open and disguised, which her country has had from the other side in the Cold War.
The point is that the aid was not meant to feed starving people. It went into the two countries’ military machines; Mrs. Gandhi has complained—and she may be right — that American equipment which was supposed to be directed against the Russians was in action in Kashmir.
The Indo-Pakistani conflict has highlighted one of capitalist’s most blatant scandals. It defies all reason, all sense, all humanity, for the world to pour its resources into a massive destructive effort when there is so much to do in the way of feeding and protecting the human race.
This will not be altered as long as capitalism lasts. The war in Kashmir was only the latest example of capitalism’s priorities, which have always counted human interests and comforts as of little importance.
To capitalism it is in the natural order of things that millions should starve and that a battle should rage all about them.
TUC through the hoop
What were trade unionists expected to make of this year’s TUC, when its General Secretary one day argues in favour of a certain policy and the very next day describes that same policy as a “shabby compromise”?
Confusion is inevitable. The connections between the unions and the Labour Party were once supposed to benefit the unions, but they are being used against them.
It is now possible, for example, for a Minister of Labour to use his speech as a fraternal delegate to declare that the time has come for the unions to accept legal restrictions on their freedom to negotiate. It is possible for General Secretary George Woodcock disconsolately to argue in favour of his “shabby compromise,” of forcing individual unions to refer their wage claims to the TUC for vetting, because this was their only hope of avoiding legislation to force them to refer their claims to a Govern-ment board.
The unions still seem determined to support the Labour Government, although its professed policy is, as Woodcock put it, to “. . . put some restraint on the growth of incomes”—a policy which Minister of Labour Gunter justified because without it “We shall fail to hold our place in a fiercely competitive world.”
The Labour Government is, in other words, rallying the TUC in support of its efforts to salvage the international trade of the British capitalist class. This was also the aim of past Conservative Governments, but they were never able to persuade the unions to jump through the hoop so easily. It is worthwhile to ponder how the TUC, and the Labour Party, would have reacted had it been a Tory Government which was threatening to take legal powers to restrain wage claims.
How Mr. Wilson would have thundered his denunciations of dictatorship from the grouse moors! What depths of cliché-ridden oratory Mr. Gunter would have reached! What a riotous assembly this year’s TUC would have been!
But it is a Labour Government which is now moving towards a clash with the unions. These regular, hysterical denunciations of strikes and wage claims are coming from the mouths of Labour Ministers. And this policy—much tougher than the Tories ever tried—is justified with the last-ditch argument that whatever a Labour Government may do they are better than the Conservatives. This argument, which, in fact, allows the Government to get away with anything, is of course quite unsupported by any evidence.
But it is an argument which we are probably going to hear a lot more of Woodcock himself said that prices and incomes have actually gone up more since the Labour Government started trying to keep them down than they did before.
The unions may be like David Low’s famous carthorse—slow, patient, even a little stupid. But they have thrown a few riders in the past and they will do so again.
Recession ?
The Labour Government are going one better than keeping their election promises by claiming that they are giving us something which was not in their programme last October.
They did not promise that within a year of their winning the election we would be in an economic recession, with many industries on short time and the prospect of more to come.
Some of the firms on short time—for example, Ford and Hoover—as well as many City Editors, blamed the recession on to Government policy. While this may be a convenient explanation, it ignores certain facts of capitalist life.
Slumps, like booms, happen when conditions are ripe for them. A big boom overrides any attempt at official control and a slump does not respond to Governmental efforts at revival.
Juggling with interest rates and restricting credit are not policies which fashion events, but largely reactions to those events. British capitalism is not alone in its present difficulties; many other countries are also experiencing them, which indicates that the recession may get deeper yet.
But if we accept the Government’s claim that the closing down of the economy is all their own work, there is a massively awkward question for them to answer.
What happens, in a slump, to their vision of an automated Britain? They came to power on a promise to build a British industry humming with the very latest and most expensive computers and automatic production equipment.
They spoke (in fact they still speak) of a Britain in the forefront of the technological age, driving for its markets under the impetus of massive investment and a fearless determination to innovate.
But in a time of recession industry is definitely not interested in investing in expensive equipment designed to make more of the very things which, because of the slump, cannot be sold. At such times industry is not inclined to innovate; it tends to pull in its horns and to wait for the danger to pass.
Wilson’s Britain of scientists and technologists was, in fact, one of Labour’s more horrible ideas. There need be no regrets that it has joined the long list of pledges, given solemnly but now forgotten, knowing no grave but their own inconsistency.
Things to come
Time, as they never tire of telling us, marches on.
The first men to fly were famous for their daring; the aeroplane was a glamorous marvel of the Edwardian age.
But the First World War showed that the sky was a battlefield, into which each side sent its balloons and aircraft to observe the enemy and to direct artillery fire.
It was not long before other aircraft were developed, to shoot down the observers. Then others were sent up to protect the balloons from attack and later came the fighters and the bombing ‘plane to improve on the artillery shell.
This was the birth of the military aeroplane. The sky is now becoming outdated as a battlefield; the daring young men of the future will probably fight it out in space.
The two Cosmic powers—Russia and the United States—now make no secret of the uses to which their space ventures are being put. Both countries admit that they have observer satellites aloft and America plans to send up a space laboratory to carry out experiments in what they call defence.
The nature of these experiments is not, of course, known but it seems that we are witnessing the opening of another battlefield.
The next step could be a space ship designed to knock out the observer satellites, then another to prevent them being attacked—and then perhaps dog-fights in space.
There is nothing fanciful in this. The military possibilities of space flights have always been obvious and there was never any cause to believe that they would be ignored in capitalism’s constant arms race.
This may rub some of the glamour off the astronauts, which will not be recovered by blatant propaganda dodges like President Johnson’s proposal to send them on world-wide goodwill tours. There is no goodwill in planning to destroy millions of people.
Space war adds another dimension to capitalism’s terrors. It is not a pleasant prospect, but nobody should be surprised that once again society’s resources, and the courage and skill of its people, are being perverted.