Malicious Damage

Every working day, Bob drives down the long, straight arterial road to the big factory where he peels away from the rest of the swarming cars. He parks his new Escort in the car park which he is allowed to use by virtue of the small circular sticker on his windscreen which the firm give only to the staff. Sometimes the uniformed security man says “Good morning” or even salutes him, which makes Bob feel more like a member of the staff than ever. Through the side door of the huge building he climbs quickly up the stairs to the office which runs the entire length of the building and, although his desk and chair and filing cabinet are exactly identical to the hundreds of others, he finds his way unerringly to his place. He always arrives about ten minutes early so that by the official starting time his desk is perfectly prepared and he has actually started work.

From the filing cabinet he takes out a large bundle of invoices from other firms. Each invoice has an allocation tag stuck to its lower edge and Bob’s job is to sort them out into their various allocations. Some invoices are for production material; others for services like transport, maintenance and so on; some for customs duty or agency. Bob carefully sorts each invoice into its separate tray and every so often a girl comes up to his desk to clear out one of the trays and take away her share of the invoices for processing. And every so often another girl comes, from the mailing department, with another bundle of invoices to be sorted and labelled. The flow never stops and Bob often says, at lunch in the staff canteen which is separate from the works cafeteria where the factory workers and the lower office employees eat, that no matter how hard he goes at it he never goes home with an empty tray.

Sometimes there is a break in the routine; perhaps a question from another department about a missing invoice or a telephone call from a supplier about one which is unpaid. Bob is always meticulous in his investigations of such matters and if he finds that one of the girls has made a mistake he lets her know all about the trouble and extra work she has caused him.

At the end of the day he clears his desk into the filing cabinet and rejoins the swarm weaving down the big road. He is often very tired but usually finds the energy to do any gardening or decorating which is needed. He is an attentive husband and a caring father; a decent, dependable man who wastes the vast part of his waking life in thoroughly useless, monotonous, unproductive, degrading drudgery.

There are millions of others like him. They work in banks, insurance offices, merchant houses; they are salesmen, advertising men, accountants. Their job is to organise the commercial affairs of capitalism — its buying and selling, collecting and paying out money, processing its vast financial machine. To the capitalist system, which produces its wealth for sale, such jobs are very necessary but they contribute nothing to society’s wealth.

For capitalism, which claims to be the most rational social system known to man, wastes most of its productive resources in the field of human labour. Sometimes this takes the form of the slow, grinding waste, like Bob with his invoices. Sometimes it is more spectacular, even bizarre, as food is ploughed into the ground or burnt. For some time, governments have realised that, in the age of Oxfam, the open destruction of food can be politically unwise. From this realisation has sprung the better, more stealthy but equally wasteful, method of simply not producing the stuff.

From this it was only a small step for governments actually to pay food producers for not producing food. Of course this requires a certain amount of administration and somewhere there must be people like Bob who process paper showing how much each farmer who is in the great non-production scheme has not produced and how much he is to be paid for keeping his land idle. Then there must be some check on the few dishonest people (for this, remember, is capitalism) who are sufficiently mean and ungrateful to claim for not growing food when all the time they are growing it.

This is exactly what has happened in the case of the potato growers, who are proving so dishonest that a number of quite advanced checking methods have had to be applied against them. Now potatoes are a popular, nutritious food which might do something towards feeding people, even these like old age pensioners who can’t afford to spend too much on the tiresome business of keeping alive. But when potatoes are produced in plenty they come pouring onto the market, which causes their price to fall and, instead of making things easier for the pensioner, this only makes them harder for the farmer because his produce can’t be sold profitably. The government at present try to protect the farmers from too catastrophic a loss by guaranteeing a price of about £15 a ton but this does not prevent the kind of situation we had in August, when something like half a million tons were destroyed because the market could not absorb them profitably.

This guarantee comes into operation if another scheme, run by the Potato Marketing Board, fails. Under this scheme, growers are supposed to register with the Board the land they want to use for growing potatoes and the Board then decides how much acreage they can each be allowed for this production. In deciding on the land quotas, of course, human needs are not an influence; the size of the market and the expectations of profit are what count. A grower who exceeds his quota can be fined by the Board, who now have a light aircraft equipped with long range cameras spying out the countryside for pirate potato growers. Presumably, if the spying succeeds the price of potatoes will be kept stable — and profitable.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, people are dying of starvation and declining through malnutrition. The effects of the restriction of food production upon them are all too obvious; but what about the effect upon those, better fed, who do the restricting? In the case of the potatoes, for example, the aircraft brings back its photographs which are then marked with potato growing areas and compared with maps showing the areas covered by growing quotas. If the two don’t coincide, a pirate has been caught. What is the effect upon the people who process the photographs and compare them with the maps, who are doing a good job when they catch out a farmer who is producing food, who write up the reports for his prosecution?

Human behaviour is a matter of learning; we take in experiences and sensations which, provided we are capable of absorbing and processing them, modify and fashion our attitudes and our behaviour. This can, and ideally should, be a maturing process in which we acquire knowledge and skills but it can also be inhibiting, for example in the case of the battered baby who as a result of the cruelty it has experienced is withdrawn and mistrustful.

Extending this reasoning, we can ask what effect their work has upon people like Bob and those who work for organisations like the Potato Marketing Board. Is it maturing or inhibiting? Do they flourish or wither, under the burden of their socially useless drudgery? In many cases they respond with a fervent support for the capitalist society which condemns them to their drudgery. In the dormitory area where Bob lives the poor old Labour Party is regarded as dangerously revolutionary. These intelligent people take this unreasoned attitude not entirely in the conviction that in their semi, their insurance policy and their Escort they have something worth defending. Like the beaten child, Bob reacts with a defence mechanism; he denies his problems, denies that his job is useless and boring. He has to believe that he contributes something significant to the social wellbeing because the alternative is too horrible to face.

The erection of this defence may serve its immediate purpose but, again like the child, this is achieved only at some cost. Bob is a damaged person who can be absorbed, even obsessed, with trivia — the hunt for a missing invoice, the tidiness of his desk, the gleaming newness of his car. He is not fulfilling his potential as a person; indeed he would even deny that he had any and adapts himself to wasting his abilities and his very life seated between the in tray and the out tray. A decent man, rather than lower his defences he will accept and defend the obscenities which capitalism perpetrates in the name of profit — starvation, poverty, murder, repression, deceit.

The depressing fact about Bob is that he is representative of his kind; in one way or another capitalism damages all its people and one of the great advances which will come when the system is swept away will be their release. This will not be only a matter of them realising their potential to produce wealth, to design and to beautify. It is also a matter of their development as human personalities, as people. Under capitalism we can hardly guess at what a human being is really like and the world has yet to experience what we are capable of, in terms of co-operation and caring, when we are free.

IVAN