Runnung commentary
Russia yawns
In face of the conspicuous indifference of the Russian working class, the weeping news-reader announced that their leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was dead. Within a week the non-weeping masses were told to mop up their tears, for a new Tsar (official title: General Secretary of the Communist Party) had been appointed by the Politburo. Like the dictator who preceded him. Yuri Andropov. ex-KGB chief and Russian ambassador in Budapest in 1956, will preside over the Russian state capitalist empire. All leaders, be they elected like Thatcher and Reagan, or installed by totalitarian regimes, like Andropov and Jaruzelski. can only rule within the limitations of the anti-social profit system. Brezhnev’s tyrannical policies, which sent dissidents to the freezing wastelands of Siberia or the mind- manipulating confines of psychiatric asylums, were not the expression of his own hatred of the working class, but of capitalism’s inherent inability to satisfy working class needs and still produce maximum profits.
The new leader of Russian capitalism lives in a luxury apartment at Kurtuzov Prospekt — a home which is said to compare favourably with any owned by the richest capitalist parasites. How does he get his privilege and luxury? Simply by being one of the class of Party bureaucrats who control the state, which formally owns the means of wealth production and distribution. In short, Andropov and his fellow Communist Party dictators over the proletariat, live off the fruits of the labour of the Russian working class. To speak of such a system as socialist — as do certain gullible folk on the Left — is to totally distort the meaning of the word.
Capitalism is characterised by wage labour and capital, social phenomena which clearly exist in Russia. The only difference between Andropov’s capitalism and Reagan’s is that in the latter capital tends to be privately owned and controlled and workers have some opportunity to choose their leaders, whereas under the former the state owns and controls most capital and workers have very limited democratic opportunities.
Within the field of capitalist politics, the so-called Left wing favours state capitalism and the Right wing prefers private capitalism. Both are prepared to accept either form of capitalism when the needs of profit-making dictate: for example, for all his rhetorical commitment to “the Soviet system” (state capitalism) Brezhnev was always happy to trade with the West. Whatever new policies Andropov may introduce, the capitalists of the West may rest assured that he will not cease to involve the Russian state in international commercial competition in which the wage slaves always lose.
Socialists oppose capitalism in ail its forms; we oppose it for the simple reason that it has outlived its usefulness as a way of organising society. Opposing the idea that there must always be leaders and led. socialists regard the passing of Brezhnev and the inauguration of his successor as of no consequence to the working class. The class which produces all social wealth need not mourn the death of one of those who legally steals that wealth from us.
SC
Costly votes
History was not made by the high level of debate, nor by any prescience of the voters’ decisions, in the recent American elections but records were broken by the amount of money laid out in the candidates’ campaigns.
Something like £150 million was spent in this massive effort to persuade the American workers, against what should have been their better judgment, that capitalism would be good for them under Republicans or Democrats. Some staggering sums were afforded by the candidates themselves.
A Democrat in Minnesota spent a total of $8 million, half of which he paid himself. In Texas a Republican spent $12 million — and was not elected. But most spectacular of all. in the battle for Governor of New’ York State, Republican Lewis Lehrman’s election expenses came to $15 million, half of it from his own pocket.
Lehrman was another loser, at least in the election. In other ways he is a winner; “I will.” he announced, “go out to work and make the money back.” He was only fooling because his millions came not from his own work but from that of his employees, whose exploitation yielded the profits which enabled Lehrman to make his flamboyant bid for power in New York.
Expensive election campaigns, which imply that only the rich can mount an effective contest, make a lot of people fear for democracy. Such anxieties miss the point, which is essentially in the fact that millions of New Yorkers voted for the big spending Lehrman and millions more for Cuomo, the Democrat victor, who also spent millions of dollars in the election.
Workers who are enlightened about capitalism, who are aware of the impotence of its politicians to run the system in the interests of the people, are unimpressed by gaudy, costly electoral stunts. Such workers are. in the end, the only certain guardians of democracy.
The fact that at present working class voters are so misled as to support candidates like Lehrman and Cuomo is not a measure of how much money was spent in their campaigns but of the low level of workers’ consciousness.
On the gridiron
When the baseball players of America went-on strike in the summer of 1981, we pointed out the similarities between their action and that of industrial workers trying to defend their standard of living. Most American workers, with a fair bit of prompting from the media, took a cynical attitude to the dispute, which was seen as a squabble between two sets of rich people. Now the players of the National Football League, who perform in steel helmets and liberal amounts of padding and look more like spacemen than footballers, have also taken “industrial action”.
Normally games are televised live on Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings but since the middle of September the networks have been showing instead Canadian Football, old “classic” games, or baseball, now in the last days of its season. None of this satisfies National Football League addicts.
Television income is one of the points at issue. The players have asked for fifty per cent to be allocated to them, to be divided on a seniority scale, and changes in the system of medical checks. They are unhappy about the way drug testing is conducted, want each player to have the right to a second medical opinion and a surgeon of his choice, and to be told all pertinent information about his injuries. The very fact that these medical demands have to be made shows how dissatisfied the players are with the present situation. At the time of writing, labour and management remain deadlocked on all these points.
The point about the players’ high wages deserves some further comment. In a number of cases high salaries can be the front behind which surplus value reaches the pockets of wealthy capitalists. However, the American brand of football is hard, bruising work and the great majority of players come from the working class, often from the desperately poor. Under capitalism wages represent the value of labour power — that is. the average cost of producing and reproducing the worker. American football is such a dangerous game that even in a deep recession — with welfare checks (dole) a probable alternative — it is only the high pay and other lucrative trappings that induce men to make a living of it.
American football is well able to pay such wages: with only a few top clubs widely scattered over a large country, even the unsuccessful play in front of near capacity crowds. On top of this is the large income from television. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Britain where a large number of clubs are in competition and many are near to bankruptcy. Recently the Rugby League players in England threatened to strike, but this dispute has been smoothed over. The threat of being driven out of business is often used by capitalist spokesmen, sometimes in defiance of the truth, in order to dissuade workers from pursuing pay claims. In the case of the Rugby League, however, a prolonged stoppage may well have closed many clubs. The Rugby League game is only part professional anyway, the players’ main income deriving from other jobs when they are lucky enough to have one. There is no suggestion however of the NFL clubs going to the wall, even though a long strike is considered possible.
To dispel any lingering doubts about whether the issues in the footballers’ strike are indeed the same as in an “ordinary” industrial dispute, we give two quotations from the International Herald Tribune of 2 and 3 October 1982. Gene Upshaw , Union President, said:
“It is a tragic situation to be dealing with these people. They don’t care about you. We’re replaceable parts. We asked them what gives them the right to give 1500 players a physical examination. Then we said “what if 1500 players refuse to take them?” They said they would get 1500 other players.”
Jack Donlan, director of the League’s Management Council, presented the management view:
“Their proposals, we perceive, are designed to control the game. They’re always talking about their wage scales, their medical program. They’re trying to take away everything that has made this game and this League great.”
There you have it; we have been wrong all the time. The crowds don’t turn up to see the players play. They don’t even go to see the managers manage, which can be a spectaclc in itself in the United States. They go to see the owners own.
E C EDGE
The dispute was settled shortly after this piece was written. None of the players’ demands was met and they returned to work.