Anyone want to buy a dozen statues of Lenin? The recent recession in the Lenin-statue works is terminal. Now that Sir Nikolai Ceauceascu and his mates have bitten the dust or headed off to their holiday homes in North Korea, only a few fossilised Chinese and Cuban academics are still paid to sing the praises of dead Russians.
In the 1920s Lenin-worship was all the rage. Naive leftists from Tottenham to Turin would dutifully repeat the Bolshevik liturgy to whoever could be persuaded to listen. Russia, it was said, had had the first ever socialist revolution. It was led by Lenin who had translated Marx’s theories into practice. If you wanted to see socialism in all its living glory, look no further than the centralised hell-holes of the Kremlin-ruled state dictatorships. That was “the line””. Here was the leading Labour politician, George Lansbury, returning from Moscow as a born-again Bolshevik:
Latest Pentagon estimates of casualties which would follow an assault on Iraqi forces in Kuwait have now risen to at least 50,000 dead and five times that number injured.
Iraqi forces are now dug in behind two defensive lines inside the Kuwaiti border, with tanks buried in up to two feet of sand and extensive trench systems supported by mines, artillery and formidable anti-aircraft arrays. But these forces did not just appear from the desert sands. They were supplied to the dictator Saddam Hussein by 30 countries, and the three biggest were all permanent members of the UN Security Council – Russia, France and China. Others included Sweden and Switzerland, North Korea and South Africa.
Within hours of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the Emir had fled to safety in Saudi Arabia in an armoured-plated Mercedes. He was soon joined by his ministers, and by the following day they were able to hold a cabinet meeting. The first item on the agenda was the safety of their colleagues and families still in Kuwait. Within days these, too, had been evacuated to safety.
Meanwhile, thousands of people who worked in Kuwait had to make their own way to safety in grueling heat only to find themselves ending up in refugee camps in Jordan, where they lived in squalid conditions, queuing in temperatures of over 100 degrees for their one meal a day and living in constant fear of a cholera epidemic.
The Prussian militarist Clausewitz declared that war was “nothing but the continuation of politics by other means”. He would have been nearer the truth if he had said that war was the continuation of economics by other means. Since the onset of capitalism five hundred years ago wars have been caused by conflicts of economic interest over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets, investment outlets and strategic points and places to secure and protect these. The threatening war in the Middle East is no exception to this rule, and in fact strikingly confirms the socialist analysis of the cause of war.
Banks cannot be “socialised.” They are part of capitalism and will end with the coming of Socialism. Under Socialism the functions performed by the banks will not have to be performed at all. The provision of the needs of life will be simplified once the means of production and distribution are made the common property of Society as a whole. At present the workers may not go to work producing and distributing food, clothing, and so on, without obtaining the permission of the owners of the land, factories and railways. Under capitalism we have to enter into a complicated and wasteful system of negotiating wages between workers and employers, negotiating for the purchase of raw materials, and then organising for the sale of the goods, and the allocation of the proceeds as rent, interest, profit and taxes. Underneath it all is the essential feature of capitalism, that the capitalists own the means of production and the goods produced by the workers they employ.
(Concluded)
Prosperity in America
Major Douglas was rash enough in his evidence before the MacMillan Committee to give instances of “prosperity” having been achieved in various countries abroad by the adoption of what he regards as a more or less satisfactory financial policy. One country he mentioned was France, where, according to him, “there is no unemployment.” It is true that at that time unemployment was not so heavy in France as in England (Major Douglas was quite wrong in saying that there was no unemployment there) but he said nothing of the great poverty which existed in France in spite of a more or less “correct” financial policy; and even Major Douglas must be aware of the enormous unemployment which exists in France at the present time.
(Continued from May issue)
How Major Douglas Discovered Capitalism
The origin of the Douglas theory has been explained by Major Douglas in this way. Out in India, before the war, he was struck by the way in which building operations were held up from time to time by “financial considerations.” It appeared to him that if raw materials, human labour, tools and machinery, etc., are available it ought to be possible to go ahead with production to meet human needs. He was led to examine this problem and eventually put forward his theory of a permanent deficiency of purchasing power. In its simplest form the proposition is that a factory, or other productive organisation, makes payments under two heads : —
(a) “All payments made to individuals (wages, salaries, and dividends),” and
After Marx died there grew up a legend that his theory of social causation was too narrowly mechanistic to provide accommodation for any sort of ethics. No doubt Marx, in combating the sentimental “moralising” of certain Utopian contemporaries who called themselves “the True Socialists”, had leaned so far backward as to give semblance if not substance for fathering on him views whose alleged paternity he would have disclaimed.
Nine bloody years after their intervention in Afghanistan, the Russian army is finally pulling out. The government of Nahmud Berri is to be left to fend for itself against the Mujahadeen guerrilla alliance, which successfully tied down 155,000 troops for almost a decade. How are we to explain this abandonment of a “communist” ally to such an uncertain fate, given the scale of Moscow’s past support for the Afghan regime? The answer can be found in the operation of economic pressures on Russian decision makers.
