Review

At Home
The big question raised by the OZ trial is of course: what is pornography? What is it in society that depraves and corrupts to such an extent that those responsible need to be punished and shut away where they can do no more damage? Any adult who has ever been a child, remembering their own sexual fantasies and confusions, must wonder whether they would be corrupted by the kind stuff in OZ and the rest of the underground press. It might even be argued that such matter, by its very blatancy, is the very opposite of corruptive. But what about other forces in society whose pernicious influence is undeniable? We are not discussing here anything which even appears in any magazines, but the real, everyday experiences of life under capitalism. How else can we describe the men responsible for incidents like the My Lai, if not corrupted by the war? What effects does poverty and repression have on our lives, if not to deprave us? Is bad housing the kind of environment calculated to solidify or to destroy human relationships? What has happened to the ‘morals’ of a man who debases himself to the boss for the sake of a bit of promotion or a pettyfogging rise? Capitalist society is essentially depraved and it corrupts everything in it, including its people. No court with the wigged judge will ever try the system but it has been examined, found wanting and condemned. We should lose no more time in locking it away into the prison of unpleasant memories.

One of the great tragedies of capitalism is in the fact that, again and again, workers are misled into believing that they are doing something to end the system when in reality they are doing nothing of the kind. Faced with the reality, the incident usually becomes written into historical myth, which dies very hard. Such were the Spanish Civil War, the General Strike, the successive Labour Governments. The latest candidate in this dismal line is the so-called workers’ take over of the Upper Clyde. Part of the delusion here is that the shipyards collapsed as a result of a Government failure to subsidise them, when in fact they collapsed because they could not live up to the basic capitalist requirements of making a profit. Whoever runs them will be faced with that reality. And if the ‘take-over’ fails the workers will also face the greater bitterness stemming from the promise and the delusion. Yet we know from experience that failure will only strengthen the myth; It will be explained in terms of accident or treachery or the like. The ‘take-over’ of Upper Clyde is tailor-made for the fairy tale story books of the left wing.

Abroad
President Nixon, it is reported, is disappointing many of the people who backed him in 1968 for the presidency by his policy of negotiations with China. It is no new thing for a politician to win power on promises, both explicitly and implied, which he goes back on after he has won. Very often the promises are easily seen, at the time of making them, to be impermanent and impractical. In the nature of the thing, we are more accustomed to leaders of the left being involved in this sort of double cross, but there have been notable exceptions from the other side. In this country, there was Macmillan after Suez and with his policy on Africa. Abroad there was the classic case of de Gaulle, who so outraged the people who helped him to power that they tried several times to kill him. And now Nixon is upsetting his friends by fashioning his policy to meet the real demands of capitalism rather than political theories. There is some amusement to be had from observing the reaction of the disappointed supporters, who in each case thought about betrayal and turned for salvation to another leader. The left wing are of course well familiar with this tactic. Nixon’s angry followers are now thinking about supporting Ronald Reagan for president in 1972, as if he would be able to run American capitalism on assumptions other than those applied by Nixon—and as if he is any more consistent and had in any case not already been straightened by the President. The search by capitalism’s supporters for the honest, consistent leader who will never go against his word is never ending—until capitalism itself ends.

Politics
As the months go by the government of Edward Heath is increasingly shown up as equally bankrupt and impotent as its predecessors. As each successive blow falls — Ulster, Upper Clyde, Unemployment, Rising prices to name only a few — the Labour Party’s excitement heightens, with its hunger at approaching power. One report has it that constituency parties have been alerted to face a general election in the near future. This may be wishful thinking, a generous dose of which is essential to keep any capitalist party ticking over. What can be said now is that any general election will be presented to us in familiar, lying terms. The Labour Party will claim to be able to make capitalism work in our interests when they can’t. And we will be told that the issue of the election is something like the Common Market or law and order or nationalisation versus free enterprise when it fact it is, as always, capitalism or Socialism.