sively stripped to their poor coal resources.
It is not difficult to see the seeds of endless bloody struggles in this desperate competition.
A final word should be added about alternative energy sources. As far as electricity is concerned, it is mostly generated in any case by the burning of fossil fuels, and hydroelectric power supplies only a small portion of the total; " ... it is probably best to think of electricity as a means of distributing energy, rather than a source... " (J. P. Cole:
Geography of World Affairs, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 87). Nuclear energy, of course, is one of the promised panaceas in the pantheon of the technocrats and their blindly believing faithful. Apart from the elementary fact that the problems of economic and practical utilisation have proved very much more intractable than had at one time been thought, Professor Nicol has pointed out that " ... should nuclear fusion bring to actuality the dream of lighting a whole city by power derived from the atomic nuclei in a cupful of water, those, and like projections of fancy upon knowledge or theory about phenomena, relate solely to energy obtained as heat and electricity: which have no nutrient value and must incur a heavy cost in fuel to win them. So far from their making a contribution to food-gathering, the fuel spent in realising them will have subtracted from stocks of fuel potentially available for producing food later." (The Limits of Man, Constable, 1967, pp.182-183). Pofessor Nicol has been in the forefront of those wha have pointed out that ahead of us there lies a progressively intensifying struggle for the diminishing resources of finite inputs essential to the kind of industrialised and semi-industrialised societies we have produced throughout the world. The conclusion of his life-long research may be given in his own words: "So far from there being grounds for the prevailing euphoria about indefinite progress in food-supply or with any other application of technology, it is shown that population of the world, as a whole and locally, must within foreseeable time undergo a decline, in company with every form of comfort and amenity. All forms of technologyincluding the provision of food-now depend on the availability of diminishing stocks of fossil fuel, for which there is, and can be, no substitute." (ibid, p.1).
The implications are necessarily sobering, and require careful consideration by socialists. It would seem, at the outset, that a truly socialist strategy for the industrialised countries, regardless of their present social system, must necessarily involve complete discarding of commodity fetishism, abandonment of economic growth, and concentration upon equitable distribution of a give given social product. This would leave the maximum possible resources of the crucial finite minerals available for the presently rural societies to bring their living standards up to acceptable general minima. It would also involve an active international policy of resource conservation, and careful work on determining possible maximum sustainable levels of world population on the basis of the "income" energy resources (wind, rain, etc.) for the post-fossil fuel future. Obviously, however, the priority task. is to halt imperialism in its plunder and ravishing of the tricontinents. For there is a point of no return in this process: a point of catastrophe, after which a second industrial revolution would be impossible in the event of cataclysmic war (see, for example, H. Brown, J. Bonner and J. Weir: The Next Hundred Years, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957, pp.147 et seq.).
If my argument above is substantially correct, I have no need to elaborate here upon the re-thinking it demands from socialists Terry Seago throughout the world. The debate is overdue, and ought to be joined in high seriousness, free from dogmatism. However, everything I have said argues for the intensification of the struggles of peoples throughout the world against imperialism-and in particular the imperialism of the United States of America, incomparably the richest, the most ruthless, and the greediest imperial power in the world and in human history.
Africa Debate-continued from page 5.
As usual I bought my copy of the latest edison of the Black Dwarf at the demonstration ver the weekend. I was amazed and speechless hen I read your feature article "Southern AfriBetrayal". What was shocking and surpriswas not the fact that the Black Dwarf did support the ANC, or that it had some critins, but the manner in which the article was esented.
Firstly, let me point out that your article vas not a scoop. This is a document which was culated by some deserters from Umkonto We zwe, who first took refuge in Kenya, and then | Belgium. (Which liberation movement in the orld has not had its deserters, etc., who have blished attacks on the movements? The test any revolutionary press is that unlike the imrialist and gutter press it studies all such docuats very clearly, and its publication, even of racts from such documents, let alone a verbapublication is dependent on the role it will and the forces it will assist.) When this cument first appeared, it was given prominice in the South African press and used by SA propaganda machinery to undermine the eratory movements both internally and oad. Recently a SA police paper reported m it and it has once again become propaganda terial for the SA regime. However, what is prising is that it is only your paper that saw fit publish this document in full, a document ich even the SA regime and mass media did t think worthy of full publication. Could you sibly be thinking that the SA regime had ed a "golden opportunity to undermine and credit the liberatory movement" and that you re going to remedy this situation? I must here that the publication of this and other material in SA has had no effect on the sands of people who have for years been ling the SA regime. The people's support for liberatory movement grows all the time.
people are not "sheep" who are being ed (a bourgeois and imperialist argument)
ecause they are involved in a struggle under erous conditions and they are aware of the of members of the ANC. Incidentally, simiarguments against the leadership have always in used in SA, and today these same leaders languishing in the SA jails, many for life.
Secondly, this article, as well as its reappearin SA, comes at a time when there is a sused and unprecedented campaign against the regime. Thousands of people are being ght into political activity against the racist me and we are witnessing demonstrations protests on an unprecedented scale. All attempts to minimise this international ure have met with no success. Internally, ground activities continue. Hundreds of le age being arrested, and many are to be in December, after having been kept in confinement for at least six months.
e are all members of the ANC, and many people that you have seen fit to slander and ermine. Last week thousands of leaflets and dcasts were heard in five major cities in SA;
ou have any idea of working underground in ascist state, then you will be able to get some i of the significance of this. Just to mention the minimum sentence for handing out • leaflets is three years, and that it is even egal to read them. In this period when even right-wing forces and the imperialist press ane finding it difficult to come to SA's support, the Black Dwarf which regards itself as a revoluionary organ has seen fit to publish "A South African Betrayal". This article can have no other onsequence than to cause confusion and disonment in the ranks of many progressives, ny of whom are not very aware of the situain. It can only be an attempt to bring disunity sonally-yet give no evidence to support their charges. The general tenor of the article is that of whining kids deprived of a treat. The objections to the ANC's strategy in combining with ZAPU to liberate Zimbabwe are ludicrous-even a casual glance at the map of Africa will show that the result of the liberation of Zimbabwe, together with that of the Portuguese colonies, is essential to the eventual liberation of Anzaniaif Anzania was liberated first it would be vulnerable to counter-revolutionary attacks from Mozambique, Angola and South-West Africa.
To claim that ANC is only a means of lining the pockets of the leadership is to ignore the South African situation, where a black man can become rich by working with his white baas more easily than by working against him.
If you are truly interested in the liberation of South Africa, and wish to expose those things which militate against that liberation, I suggest that you investigate the financing of the PAC and its relationship to the South African Security forces.
Yours sincerely, Christopher Sanders, 5 Ifield Road, S.W.10.
DWARF At the moment, you may be sure of one thing, the private Tandlord is the failed capitalist. Any property man worth his salt sold off his residential assets a long time ago, and got in on the office boom which we outlined in this column in the last issue.
A succession of rent acts, an enormous, if chaotic, Government housing drive, and, until very recently when the economic climate has reduced its rapid growth, an ever-swelling army of owner occupiers have drastically reduced the profitability of renting out housing accommodation.
In 1914, there were 8½ million houses in Britain. A staggering 90% were rented privately, and 10% were owner-occupied. Local authorities, of course, owned no houses at this time.
In 1957, the number of privately-rented homes had fallen to 4½ million, and last year, of a total of 17,950,000 dwellings in Great Britain, a mere 3,300,000 were privately rented; 8,550,000 were owner-occupied, 5,250,000 rented from Local Authorities, and 850,000 occupied by virtue of employment.
It would appear that the private landlord is a dying species.
One might have thought that this would not worry the higher reaches of the property world: after all, commercial property and office development have lined the pockets of the developers so well that whatever fiscal controls are imposed, they still manage to come out on top.
The majority of those who are now extravagantly rich as a result of property speculation were only too anxious to sell off their residential developments after the war, as soon as they realised that they could never get as much money from them as they could from office property.
However, there is at present enormous pressure from vested property groups to make the Cyril's family hotels serve alcohol (on a matter of principle), that he is Chairman of the Moral Law Society, and head of the Temperance Building Society, Sir Cyril's career in property is not above suspicion.
Playing for astronomical sums, he used taxavoidance techniques which have subsequently been made illegal, and to facilitate this, entered into dealings with an ex-convict financier, Martin Harman.
Briefly, Black and his brother Sydney joined the family business immediately after the war. At that time it consisted largely of flats in the Kensington area, and had done very nicely thank-you by exploiting the need for London hotel rooms during the war.
Black went straight into development, borrowing at 5% to put up buildings with an 8% yield.
However, he was not happy with that sort of money for long, and when the Tories came back to power, and gave the developers a free hand, he sold off as much as he could of the residential property belonging to his several companies.
He began to make so much money with his When he bought it, it had £300,000 in tax losses: Sir Cyril paid £40,000 for it. The advantage of buying a company with such an appalling balance sheet was simply this: Sir Cyril's first £300,000 profit, trading with this company, could be written off against its theoretical paper losses-which, of course, he had not incurred and which had nothing to do with his deals.
At the time when Sir Cyril employed this technique, it was already suspect. He was only brave enough to show a profit of £1,000 in the Company's first year of trading to see what the Inland Revenue reaction would be. Subsequently, he took full advantage and used up the whole reservoir (£300,000) of tax-free profit.
It was not Sir Cyril's first venture in these murky waters. As early as 1950 he had bought another such tax-loss company, known in the business as a "shell" company, the Rock Invest. ment Company, from the ex-crook Harinan.
This kind of deal amounts to public theft. It is simply acquiring very cheaply indeed somebody else's losses and claiming tax relief on the full amount-a purely hypothetical figure as far as one's own trading is concerned His hypocrisy is limitless: the wine may not flow at his hotels, but it is there in abundance at his annual House of Commons Luncheon for City men-a kind of capitalist exploiters' rally, whose main purpose seems to be to lament the reduced possibility for making money under "socialist" rule Sir Cyril, then, was a copy book case: the man who left the provision of homes for the richer rewards of office development.
The State took over when the developers went after bigger gains; but now, it seems that the developers want to get back into residential property. They are put off by rent controls: these lay down rental levels which cannot be exceeded, and compel landlords to accept independently assessed rents.
The situation now is dangerous. After reaching a peak in 1967 of 203,918 houses, Local Authority homes fell to 191,722 last year, and are likely to be lower again this year. Meanwhile, at the end of 1969 there are likely to be some 20,000 homes intended for owner occupiers on the market, unsold. In the present economic climate people cannot afford to buy them. These figures should be seen in the light of a very acute overall housing shortage, and the continued existence, verified by the Ministry of Housing, of 1½ million homes unfit for habitation.
One result of this problem could be the resurrection of the private developer-landlord. This will not happen as long as rent controls exist. However, one of the most powerful pres sure groups in the property world, ALPO, the Association of Land and Property Owners, is campaigning for their abolition, and the return to a completely free market in rents.
The particularly worrying feature of this is the fact that this group, under the guidance of its militantly capitalist Chairman, Gordon Dashwood, successfully pressurised Parliament into accepting an important amendment in the *Leasehold Reform Act, to allow greater profits from the sale of flats.
What they have done before they can do again. In an obnoxious little book, Homes to Rent, which may be obtained from ALPO's offices at 14-16 Bressenden Place, Victoria, London S.W.1. they state quite clearly that rent controls should only exist in times of war, and they draw a parallel between the abolition of rent control and the "boom" in free market office lettings. They would like a similar situation in homes to rent: "By 1964 there was little if any shortage of shops, factories, warehouses and office accommodation. Property developers investing in commercial buildings took every opportunity to create new development. And of course, while this is true, the only people who made inordinate profits out of the situation were the developers themselves, and it is clear that they want to be allowed to do the same for residential property.
The report goes on to discuss political açtion: "What is required is a definite pledge, followed by early action, to abolish rent control", it says, and goes on to suggest a pernicious phasing programme by which this might be done.
It ends up with a footnote: "Hardship caused by the elimination of controls must be prevented by providing assistance for those, but only those who need it.
With a declining number of Council houses (nowhere near the Government's 400,000 per annum target) and no money for new owner occupiers, if rent control was abolished the private developer-landlord would have the kind of free-for-all he enjoyed with offices in the '50s-rents up to f12 per square foot per annum in central London, and all that.
The Conservatives are more likely to repeal rent controls than the "Socialists". The situation is critical.
A final warning note: in Oldham, the local authority will build just 27 houses this year, compared to 1,500 three years ago. Up in Church Street, Oldham, in an almost dilapid. ated terrace block is the registered office of Oldham Estates, the company of tycoon Harry "Centre Point" Hyams, If rent controls are to go, men like him who made more than £50 million out of office speculation, will not be avers to doing the same thing with homes. Percy Ingrams DANY WORL