CONSPICIOUS CONSUMPTION

"One of the many stresses of being a billionaire is the difficulty in choosing between purchasing a yacht or an island. Happily, designers this week unveiled plans for a "moving island" that renders the conundrum redundant. Designs for WHY 58x38 were unveiled at the Abu Dhabi yacht show this week. ... The motor yacht is", as the name suggests, 58 metres long and 38 metres wide, providing a total guest area of 3,4oo sqare metres, and weighs in at 2,400 tonnes. It boasts a maximum speed of 14 knots, and a price tag, when built, of $160 million." (Guardian, 3 March) RD

DOUBLE EXPLOITATION

"More workers are taking on a second job to make ends meet. A survey for the law firm Peninsula suggested that the proportion having two jobs had risen from 26 to 28 per cent in the past year." (Times, 1 March) RD

THE PRICE OF GARMENTS

"Several hundred people protested in Dhaka and Gazipur yesterday after locked gates were blamed for the death of 21 people in a fire at a Bangladeshi factory that made sweaters for H and M. Most of the victims of the blaze were women who suffocated on the top floor of the seven-storey Garib and Garib factory. The nephew of one of the victims said that the gates had been locked, trapping them. The National Garment Workers' Federation said: "These workers were killed by the factory's blatant disregard for worker safety." (Times, 27 February) RD

WHILE MILLIONS STARVE

"Two comic books sold for more than a million dollars this week, shattering world records. Rare comics are now posed to join Old Master paintings as favourite purchases for the super-rich looking for safe investments, experts predict. On Monday, a copy of the first comic book to feature Superman, Action Comics No1 from 1938, sold for $1 million (£657,000) in private sale arranged by the New York auction site ComicConnect.com. On Thursday the first appearance of "The Batman", in Detective Comics No27 from 1939, sold at auction in Dallas for a little under a million dollars, but with buyer's premium, the price reached $1075,500 ($703,000)" (Times, 27, February) RD

Driven to Suicide

Three immigrants facing deportation died after jumping from the 15th floor of a high-rise flat. Two men and a woman tied themselves together before making the 150ft suicide leap. Locals said they may have been Kosovans who faced being kicked out the country.

Socialist Courier can only regret the price they felt they had to pay for being victims of capitalism .“Illegal” remains a class-based description that politicians, through their two-faced cant and deceit, will continue to attach to asylum seekers entering the UK for “economic reasons” rather than “genuinely fleeing persecution”.

We are all asylum seekers.

THE SAME OLD BNP

The British National Party has found it necessary for legal reasons to soft pedal its racist basis, but recent event have shown that this is only window-dressing and it remains the same old BNP. Their leader Nick Griffin recently illustrated this dilemma. "While Mr Griffin once called for a defense of white rights with "well-directed boots and fists", the party began changing course in 1998. He told the BNP, "We must at all times present (the public) with an image of reasonableness." (Times, 16 February) The forcible ejection of Dominic Kennedy, the Times journalist from a BNP meeting and their defense of such strong-arm tactics shows the reality behind the fine words. "The BNP chairman told members: "Millions of viewers ... will have seen the report of us ejecting a lying Times journalist from the press conference. That's not the action of a sniveling PC party, but of an organisation that has had enough of being lied about." Same old Griffin, same old BNP! RD

Reading Notes

Although containing many oxymoronic statements, as far as socialists are
concerned, the Spanish Republic (1931) prepared a draft constitution that
is interesting, at least, "Spain is a democratic republic of workers of
all classes, organized in a regime of liberty and justice. Government
emanated from the people and all citizens were equal. The country would
renounce war as an instrument of policy. No titles of nobility would be
recognized. Both sexes would vote at twenty-three. All education was to be
inspired 'by ideals of human solidarity'. Religious education was to
end…divorce was to be granted as a result of mutual disagreement between
the parties…Civil marriages were to be the only legal ones." (The Spanish
Civil War by Hugh Thomas, p72.) John Ayers

US LABOUR PAINS

Barrack Obama's election to the US presidency was supported by many American trade unionists, but as unemployment rises much of that support is evaporating.  "Richard Trumka does not mince his words. The former miner now leads America's largest union body, the AFL -CIO, describes George Bush's language as: "stolen elections, ruinous tax cuts for the rich, dishonest wars, financial scandal, government sponsored torture, floodedalism has periodic slumps and booms and governments cities and finally economic collapse." Barrack Obama is a huge improvement, of course, but unemployment is close to 10% and the government must do something, reckons Mr Trumka." (TIME, 13 February) Mr Trumka like many supporters of capitalism thinks by government intervention of $400 billion of what he calls "immediate job-creating investment" the problem of rising unemployment can be solved. He is living in cloud cuckoo land. Capitalism has periodic slumps and booms and governments know that getting the capitalist class to invest during a slump is near impossible. RD

THE TERMINATOR TERMINATED?

In the big budget movies of some years ago Arnold Schwazenegger often played the all-action hero. Today he is the governor of California and is finding that in an economic downturn capitalism isn't so easy to manage. One of the causes of that state's economic  deficit is the growing number of prisoners and the consequent growth of economic deficit in the  state's budget.  "The fact that 9.5% of spending now goes to prisoners while only 5.7% goes to universities - 25 years ago, prisons got 4% and universities 11% - is indeed a harsh indication of California's fall from grace." (TIME, 13 February) Schwazenegger has proposed three different ideas lately to deal with the problem. One is to pay Mexico to build prisons and have US prisoners in them, another is to spend more of the state's budget on prisons and finally he proposes to privatise prisons as a cheaper way of running things. Twist and turn as they may capitalism's politicians are finding that capitalism throws up problems that are incapable of easy Hollywood solutions. RD

Food for thought

On the environmental front, the Canadian government, like the US, has
announced that carbon emissions will be reduced 17% over the next ten
years. Unfortunately, as environmentalists were quick to point out, this
will increase emissions by 2.5% over the 2006 targets already announced.
It's like the pas de deux, two steps forward, two steps back, two steps
forward, three steps back, and round and round we go. This bunch of lying
sycophants, managing the capitalist system in the interest of the
capitalists, had the gall to state, " Throughout the Copenhagen
negotiations, we maintained that our clear policy was to support the
outcome of Copenhagen…" (Toronto Star, Jan 31 2010).

What outcome are they talking about, I wonder?

Talking of liars, Tony Blair, testifying at the Iraq enquiry in London,
said, "When you are the prime minister and the Joint Intelligence
Committee is giving you this information (weapons of mass destruction),
you have got to rely on the people doing it, with the experience and with
the commitment and integrity as they do…Of course now, with the benefit of
hindsight, we look back on the situation differently." (Toronto Star, Jan
30 2010). Strange how he was able to dismiss the evidence of the UN
weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq, then.

Are the Olympics worth it, asks the Toronto Star? The Vancouver games
have an 'operating budget' of $1.76 billion but,  cleverly, does not
include the construction of venues, $580 million. The Montreal games cost
$1.5 billion and took until 2006 to pay off; Sydney cost $6 billion and
has facilities that are too far out to be used efficiently; Athens cost
$14 billion and most of the facilities are not getting the use envisioned
for them; Beijing's spectacular facilities cost $15 billion and are laying
empty. Any idea how many houses, hospitals, schools we could have built,
how many lives we could have saved by providing free food, etc? Crazy
system! John Ayers.

Food for thought

A recent wildcat and violent strike by Chinese workers producing mobile
phone panels was over exposure to hethane, a toxic chemical that
hospitalized 47 workers last year. The appalling thing about the article
(Toronto Star, Jan 30, 2010) was the revelation that, in 2008, 91 000
Chinese workers died in work-related accidents. Workers do have rights in
China, "but in reality, enforcement tends to be lax and it's almost always
up to the workers themselves to take matters into their own hands." If
that last part were true, there would be a minimal number of accidents.
It's the pressure from authority that prevents worker control. With these
lax laws and low wages, China, of course, is a veritable toyshop for
capitalist production and its investors. John Ayers

Food for thought

Regarding the current recession, we are not out of the woods yet by any measure. The European Union is staggering as Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland are in danger of defaulting on their debts.

President Obama's recently tabled budget would raise American debt to $28 trillion (twice the size of the US economy) by the end of the decade. Seems we are awash in debt, mostly unsustainable.

The squabble over arctic rights (there's money under that thar' ice!) is simply capitalism operating as normal. All the arctic countries are scrambling to assemble data to grab as big a share as possible.

Canada has launched a six-metre torpedo-like device to map the ocean floor to support its claim and the competition is on.

Spying, rhetoric, lies, reprisals, and bullying, if not outright war, will be the order of the day for some time to come.

John Ayers

Slums and Migrants

Govanhill sits between the Gorbals and Queens Park on the south side of Glasgow. It is a place of traditional tenements and has been home to various migrants for generations. The latest come from Eastern Europe's Roma community. It is estimated that about 2,000 to 3,000 have moved to this part of Glasgow.The BBC reports

A report by Oxfam into the Govanhill migrants found:

"On arrival, Roma without exception find themselves either without employment, or with a temporary 'position', and sharing small flats in conditions of extreme overcrowding and squalor. Having paid weekly 'fees' to 'gangmasters', Roma find they are unable to change their situation. Indeed, to break away from this exploitation puts them at extreme risk, not only of unemployment, but also homelessness and destitution in the absence of benefit entitlement."

EU migrants like the Roma are not entitled to housing benefits. They are also unlikely to satisfy the credit checks expected by most landlords.This means they group together in order to afford rents and accept properties in conditions that others wouldn't. Oxfam concluded that in Govanhill:

"There appears to be high availability of poor quality, private rented accommodation provided by landlords prepared to turn a blind eye to overcrowding providing the price is right. Issuing no formal tenancy agreements means tenants have limited notional rights and therefore cannot easily protect themselves against unregulated landlords."

Mike Dailly, from the Govan law centre said: "People are coming from Eastern Europe and they are coming to work. They arrive in Glasgow with the promise of work having paid £450. They then discover there is no job for them and they have been ripped off.So what we've got is gangmaster agencies working abroad, working hand in hand with landlords in Govanhill and ripping people off."

Who Owns the North Pole - Part 19

Further to our continuing Arctic saga we now read that China has decided it too cannot be side-lined.

China has no Arctic coast and therefore no sovereign rights to underwater continental shelves, and is not a member of the Arctic Council which determines Arctic policies.Officially, the country's research remains largely focused on the environmental challenges of a melting Arctic.

"However, in recent years Chinese officials and researchers have started to also assess the commercial, political and security implications for China of a seasonally ice-free Arctic region," Linda Jakobson , a Stockholm International Peace Research Institute researcher, said."The prospect of the Arctic being navigable during summer months, leading to both shorter shipping routes and access to untapped energy resources, has impelled the Chinese government to allocate more resources to Arctic research,"

Last year Beijing approved the building of a new high-tech polar expedition research icebreaker, to set sail in 2013. China already owns the world's largest non-nuclear icebreaker.

Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States are already at odds over how to divvy up the Arctic riches, claiming overlapping parts of the region -- estimated to hold 90 billion untapped barrels of oil -- and wrangling over who should control the still frozen shipping routes.
"Despite its seemingly weak position, China can be expected to seek a role in determining the political framework and legal foundation for future Arctic activities" Jakobson said.

Food for thought

The costs of the recession are becoming due. Whose paying, the capitalists or the workers? In Canada, our 'prorogued (suspended) parliament is getting set to return with a monster budget of punishment for the workers to balance the budget put heavily into deficit by the billions given to corporations as bail-out money. "Tories target Civil Service Pensions" is the headline in the Toronto Star (Feb 20 2010). The pensions are described as 'gold plated' mainly because workers in other sectors have none.

Thus we have a deliberate attempt to get one section of the working class to see public servants as the villains. Those 'gold plated pensions" actually amount to an average of $23442/year and for recent retirees, $33519. Neither amount would enable one to buy anything gold plated!

Joel Harden, the Canadian Labour Congress' pension specialist commented," We can't solve this problem by beginning a race to the bottom. We will solve this problem by emulating the pensions of the public sector, not destroying them."

The public servants also point out that those who want to reduce their pensions, the members of parliament, (for the benefit of the capitalist class) do quite well, e.g. former PM Martin (already a wealthy shipping magnate) qualifies for $167 051/year and NDP MP, Bill Blaikie, who never held any ministerial position, will get $122 224.

John Ayers

Socialist Standard March 2010 ,Vol.106 Issue No.1267.

Socialist Standard March 2010 Vol.106 Issue No.1267. Contents Editorial Letters Available also as PDF Features Tony Blair and the Chilcot inquiry Does it matter whether the Iraq War was legal or illegal? Read > Tilting at windmills with a banjo Pete Seeger is now in his 90th year. His songs have always been better than his politics.Read > What is Real Democracy and How Do We Get It? In a month or so the people of Britain will be asked once again to decide which representatives of the ruling class will rule over them for the next four or five years.Read  > Capitalism breeds inequality A recent report shows that the reformist actions of the Labour government have not been able to reverse the inequalities that capitalism generates.Read >

Let's end charity

An article from the Socialist Standard 1981

 

What do you do when someone comes to your door and say,  It's for the blind" or "I'm collecting for Cancer Research" or "we're asking people to give to Oxfam"?

The easiest thing is to dip into your pocket, put a few coppers in their envelope and get back to whatever you were doing. That way you get rid of your unwanted caller and at the same time put at rest any conscience that may have been pricked. Harder by far is it to refuse those few coppers, and indeed few people do.

But does the money you've given really serve a useful purpose? Well first of all, although you may wonder how much of it actually gets to the unfortunates in whose name it was collected, you're fairly sure that the benefit of your donation will be felt at least in some small way by a needy person somewhere. Secondly you're reassured that the world isn't such a bad place after all, that there are people doing something about its problems.

Not many people get further than this in their thoughts on charities, and very few indeed get as far as asking whether charities ever actually solve basic problems like hunger, homelessness and disease. In fact charities never do; think of any one you like and you'll find that, despite the funds it's collected in the past, its need for funds is greater-than ever. And although charities occasionally pack up, they hardly ever do so because the cause for which they were collecting has ceased to exist. On the contrary, new causes are springing up all the time.

The sad thing is that charities, despite the enormous amount of human energy and goodwill that go into them, can rarely do more than touch the surface of the problems they were set up to deal with. They can never get to the root of these problems. Only political action aimed at revolutionising the whole structure of society and abolishing its profit system can wipe out the problems that give rise to charities. Yet, in law, the

benefits and privileges (like tax exemption) of a recognised charity are conditional upon its abstinence from political activity. In other words to be recognised as a charity you are forbidden to do anything which might conceivably tackle the problems of need and. suffering at their root.

Another irony is that, while for most people charity seems to be a sacred institution, the world we live in could not be more uncharitable. Apart from such large-scale horrors as food being dumped or left to rot in some parts of the world while people starve in others and human beings engaging in or turning a blind eye to the mass slaughter of other human

beings, our day-to-day existence is based on the assumption that we will try to get as much as possible for as little as possible. So we will squeeze our employer for the highest wage or salary we think he can afford and he will squeeze us too, to produce as much for him as possible for as little money as he thinks we will to accept. When we go shopping we would never dream of paying double the marked price for the goods we need. On the contrary we usually try to find places where we can get the goods we need for

as low a price as possible. And most of us spend time comparing prices and complaining about how little we get for our money. All this is the exact opposite of charity. None of it could be further from the ethic of "giving to help others".

What it amounts to is that in a society which is bound to be overwhelmingly uncharitable because of the shortages and rivalries built into its buying and selling system, charity can never be more than a small closed compartment of life.

We want to persuade people of the severe limitations of organised charity and also of the unfortunate effect it has in wrongly suggesting to people that, by giving money, they are doing something about solving the world's problems. What charities never suggest is the plain truth that

the perpetual calamities and suffering they exist to cope with are due

not to any inevitable defects in man's capacity for organising the world but to a social system which puts profits-and armaments to guard these profits-before human welfare.

Charity will end when we get socialism. People won't need it then. It's

something worth thinking about next time you slip those coppers into that envelope.

HKM

Language, class and nation

This article is from the Socialist Standard 1981

 

One of the most remarkable things about human beings is their possession and use of language. Within a few shorts years, every person acquires a knowledge of their native language, including a vocabulary of thousands of words, enabling them to express original ideas and communicate to others on all sorts of topics. Language is also one of the most specifically human attributes, for no other animal possesses a communication system anywhere near as flexible and useful as human language. Animals such as bees and sticklebacks can convey a united range of information to each other but cannot, for example, refer to events in the past or future. The languages of the world, with their rich structures and histories, are a fascinating subject of study. But in the class divided society of capitalism, language is a basis for hostility, prejudice and discrimination.

Our impressions of other people are partly formed by the way they speak. Too often people are regarded as ignorant or unintelligent because they pronounce

Their r in a word like cart, say they was ,or use a double negative (as in I ain't done nothing): they are condemned for speaking a "sub-standard" dialect. But from a linguistic point of view, there are no such things as sub-dialects, only non-standard ones which is very different. In the course of a language's development, one particular form of it, usually that spoken in. a particularly powerful or important area, becomes the standard dialect. This means that it is taught in schools, used in literature, and then spread by radio and television. Becoming powerful and "successful" in such a society usually entails becoming proficient in the standard dialect, so that speakers of other dialects are looked down on as backward and uncultured. But prejudices of this kind are social, not linguistic, judgements. Every dialect of a language, standard or otherwise, is linguistically as good as any other; I ain't done nothing conveys the same meaning as the standard I haven't done anything. Speaking a non-standard dialect does not make a person stupid, untrustworthy, or whatever.

Prejudice against non-standard speakers is taken even further when it is said that they have no proper language at all. In particular, some psychologists have argued that black children in the United States have no grammar and speak merely by stringing a few words together. This type of misconception arises from a failure to realise that the children in question simply have a different grammar from standard English. For instance,

when a black kid says they mine, is not simply putting two words together

(in the way that young children may do).  Instead, this is his equivalent of standard they're mine, both being reduced forms of they are mine (in standard speech, are is "contracted", in non-standard it is deleted). The claim that black children have practically no language has been put forward as explaining why they do so badly in American schools, justifying a

"Compensatory education" designed to make the child fit into the school system. Obviously, this avoids the less comforting conclusion that the children do badly because of the appalling conditions they live in!

A slightly more sophisticated version of this verbal deprivation theory is associated with the name of Basil Bernstein. Bernstein draws a distinction between elaborated and restricted codes, the elaborated code being less tied to the specific "here and now" context than the restricted code. It is claimed that "middleclass" children have access to both codes,

while manual working-class children have access to the restricted code only. Allegedly (and Bernstein is none too particular about citing actual data) a "middleclass" child will tend to describe the

scene in a picture by saying Three boys are playing football and one boy kicks the ball, while a working-class child tends to describe the same picture by saying They're playing football and he kicks it. From anecdotes like this, he leaps to the conclusion that, as the elaborated code is expected to be used in school, working class children's lack of access to the elaborated code is the reason for their comparatively poor scholastic performance. Quite apart from the incorrect view of class, this is unacceptable. All children are able, outside the artificial experimental situations referred to by Bernstein, to use a range of styles, from formal to informal. All speakers of a language,

whatever their social status, speak a language which is as flexible and creative as that of any other speaker.

It should also be stated that there is no such thing as a primitive language. No language which exists today, or for which past records are available, consists of just a few words and no true rules of grammar. Nor are there a people, however primitive their way of life, which does not possess a language which is perfectly adequate for all the uses to which its speakers put it. Even where a language lacks a particular concept because its speakers do not need it, they are not cognitively unable to handle it. For

instance, some Australian aboriginal languages have no words for numbers higher than two (just words for a few and-many), but when their speakers learn English they have no difficulty in mastering the English numerical system and counting as high as you like. There are no such things as backward races speaking primitive languages.

But different people do speak different languages. In a rational society, there would be no reason for this to cause problems, but in capitalism it is the cause of much misery. Nearly every country in the world has more than one language spoken within it (even excluding recent immigrants). Great Britain, for example, has English, Welsh and Gaelic, while Spain has Spanish, Catalan and Basque. Where one language is spoken by an overwhelming Majority of the population, that is likely to be the country's official language. Members of a linguistic minority may be discriminated against in various ways: no books or newspapers may be published in their language, it may not be the medium of teaching in

schools, and so on. Speakers of a minority language will often need to learn

the official language in order to "get on". Resentment against such treatment may lead to the demand for political autonomy, as a means of converting a linguistic minority into a linguistic majority, for instance the aim of an independent Basque state. Let it be said that discrimination on the grounds of language is as odious as discrimination on grounds of race. Nevertheless, the call for independence as a means of ending linguistic oppression is not one that workers should support.

To start with, people do not live in blocks consisting of speakers of only one language (there is no part of Wales where no English is spoken), so that independence would create new linguistic minorities. The demand that speakers of each language should have their own nation also overlooks the consideration that the distinction between a language and a dialect is by no means clear-cut. The standard definition is that, unlike different languages, dialects of the same language are mutually intelligible, but this raises a number of problems. Intelligibility is a matter of degree, may go in one

direction only, and is not transitive (which means. that dialects A and B may

be mutually intelligible, and also B and C, but not A and C). Between Paris and Rome there is a chain of dialects, each intelligible with its neighbour, even though the end-points, standard French and Italian, are not mutually intelligible; on purely linguistic grounds, it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between dialects of Italian and of French, or between those of Dutch and German. In practice, language and dialect are defined in cultural and political terms, and any attempt to define a nation or state in terms of language is circular. As one American linguist aptly put it, "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy".

But above all, independence does not solve the economic problems of the speakers of a minority language. A separate Basque state would not free Basque workers from unemployment, insecurity and exploitation. These are caused by the economic set-up of society, not by the wrong placement of political frontiers. Capitalism is a world-wide society, and no part of it can escape from world trends and crises. Separatism, whether motivated on linguistic or other grounds, offers precisely nothing to the working class.

Socialism, too, will be a world society, but one without states or frontiers. The concept of linguistic minority will then have no meaning. A language with comparatively small numbers. of speakers will not be discriminated against, and there will be no problem about arranging education in that language, if its speakers so wish. Publishing material in that language will not be restricted by considerations of profit, but by the needs of its speakers. It is possible that an invented auxiliary language, such as Esperanto or Ido, will be used to facilitate communication between speakers of different languages. We look forward to a world in which learning another language will not be the drudge it so often is today, but an

enjoyable adventure. All children could be brought up bilingual, and then travel to other parts of the globe to learn a language in its native environment. Becoming multilingual in this way would be the best way of becoming a true citizen of the world socialist community. Socialist society will mean the liberation of all mankind, without distinction of race, sex or language. We ain't seen nothing yet.  P.B.

Does capitalism work?

An article from the Socialist Standard July 1972

 

"Professor Champions Capitalism" ran the gleeful headline in the Financial and Business supplement of The Scotsman (24 May). The story which followed told us that Professor H. B. Acton, who holds the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, has written a paper for the Foundation of Business Responsibilities titled "The Ethics of Capitalism" in which he glorifies the capitalist system and its beneficiaries, the capitalist class.

The Professor's paper contains a statement on the historical contribution of the early capitalists:

The bourgeoisie, more scrupulous and pacific than the aristocracy and less deferential than the peasantry, so , improved the arts of production that the system of warrior lords and dependent serfs was replaced by one in which large " populations of free citizens enjoy a scope of living which goes beyond what the aristocracy formerly disposed of.

Then follows a list of benefits which the capitalist mode of production brought in its wake:

Free speech, free movement of trade, free thought, exploration of the earth and oceans, 'an ideal of peaceful domesticity, etc.

There can be no question that the Professor's summary is more or less correct. Capitalism was a definite step forward for humanity. Capitalism did abolish the productive methods of feudalism, took away the power of the aristocracy, decimated the peasantry and replaced it by a class of wage-slaves to operate the technology which makes possible modern living, standards – and more.

So, preceding any of capitalism's benefits, was the forcible removal of millions of these "free citizens" and their children from their means of living to be herded into the industrial hells and slums of the towns and cities. There is no indication that the Professor mentioned this in his paper but possibly the, study of Moral Philosophy doesn't include a reading' of, say, Gibbins' industrial History of England or Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England, and whatever the benefits of capitalism they were most definitely not what motivated the bourgeoisie when they set about carrying through their revolution.

Certainly the Professor could claim that all this was yesterday. Nowadays the children have been banished from the mills, mines and factories while in the same issue of The Scotsman Mr. Julian Amery, the Housing Minister, did state that the slum problem could at long last be solved within the next ten years. A likely story, for whatever excesses of the system capitalism does manage to curb it can never eliminate the glaring contradictions and divisions it has given birth to in society. Capitalist is ranged against capitalist over the share-out of the spoils; the workers are periodically at one another's throats over the available jobs and cheap housing. More important, the workers are at constant war with the capitalists over wages and conditions of work. Indeed The Scotsman carried other reports on such conflicts as the war in Vietnam, a 1,000 lb. bomb explosion in Belfast, a possible strike of BEA pilots, a strike by 200 workers at Rosyth Dockyard, and a squabble between Roxburgh County Council  and Scottish Omnibuses over subsidies for 26 uneconomic bus services'

Even more pointed was the story concerning the discovery that Ford Motor company in Detroit have conducted faulty anti-pollution tests on its entire engine line for all l973 passenger models. Should the Environmental Protection Agency insist on the letter of the law then Ford would be forced  to carry out new lengthy tests, or be barred from selling their 1973 cars as  scheduled. Officials of the EPA have hinted, however, that the law might be bent to avoid such a disaster, for the article says;'

The situation brings into sharp, focus the potential conflict between government safety and pollution regulations and the practical alternatives when big industry says it cannot meet these standards; the usual approach has been to change the rules.

So in order that capitalism's day to day functioning isn't interfered with too much the atmospheric poisoning (and Ford's profits) may continue. Truly an excellent example of the "ethics of capitalism"'

Presumably all this strife and turmoil has eluded the professor's notice. He is far too busy currying the capitalists' favour by telling them to be proud of their role and to have confidence in fulfilling their prime function:

to see that the things people need for life and civilisation are produced, modified, multiplied, protected, . stored, moved and delivered.

Do bombs, napalm, defoliant and pollutants come into the category of "things people need for life and civilisation"? Certainly the capitalists see to it that these are "produced, modified, multiplied, protected". And do they see to it that the necessary food is "stored, moved and delivered" for the starving and ill-fed millions throughout the world? No, Professor, the "prime function" of the capitalist is to increase his capital and everything else including human need must take a back seat.

Undoubtedly the coming of capitalism was a progression in social development since it provided the technical impetus for solving the problem of production. Now it stands as a barrier between man and his product and has split humanity from top to bottom. We now need to abolish the private (including state) ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and introduce instead a new society based on their common ownership and democratic control. The Professor's defence of capitalism is, in the light of all this, as justified as advocating horse-drawn transport in the jet age because it's an improvement over walking'

v.v.

The cuts - the real meaning of cutting back

Clare Simpson, project manager, Parenting Across Scotland , said: "The results of our survey show that the recession is having an adverse effect on families.Some people are losing their jobs, others have less money to spend because hours are being cut or overtime is no longer available while, for many, there is fear and worry about what the future might hold."

A survey carried out by PAS found that 55% of families reduced their spending on food and heating as a result of the recession. Parents were also less likely to spend money on their children, the survey found.One third of parents also claimed the recession had put a strain on their relationships.