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Within the System

by Richard Montague

187 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-1498; ISBN 1-4120-1119-1; US$19.00, C$22.00, EUR16.00, £11.00

A collection of short stories aimed at exposing the contradictions of modern capitalism. Combines humour, drama and economic insights to present an alternative to our present way of life.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book In the main, the stories that make up Within the System are overtly political. That is to say that to a greater or lesser extent, their plots are concerned with the awful contradictions of the capitalist system. That said, however, the stories themselves must measure up to the criteria demanded of good short stories. In this collection, the reader will find history, economics and politics all woven into situations that are engaging, dramatic and humorous. All the stories are set at some level "within the system", the system which, whether we like it or not, dominates the lives of all of us. Only the final story, "Contrasts", is "outside" the system and it attempts to depict a world where much of the content of other stories could not exist. I believe that the reader will find the stories interesting, hopefully, both amusing and entertaining. Additionally, as a passionate democrat, I would hope that the stories may provoke some critical analysis on the part of the reader - because democracy can become an instrument of real social freedom only when it is complemented with knowledge. BOOK REVIEW Richard Montague is well known as a contributor to the Socialist Standard on both events in Ireland and the wider case against capitalism and for socialism. Now a collection of 24 of his short stories has been published. The author believes that the creative arts, including short story writing have, have an important role in exposing the grim reality of global capitalism. Few socialists would disagree. The star of the show, for this reviewer at any rate, is the longest and arguably the most imaginative story, 'General Immunity Serum'. GIS originates in a small drug research laboratory in London and is marketed as a fortifying agent to reinforce the body's resistance to minor ailments. The makers produce leaflets, but the most effective promotion turns out to be local radio. Callers swear that GIS has solved their health problem: baldness, migraine, asthma, allergies, arthritis - even cancer and AIDS. Soon the huge popularity and success of GIS around the world causes problems for the capitalist economy. Shares in drug and chemical companies plummet, followed by insurance shares. Hospitals close; doctors, nurses and auxiliary staff become unemployed. GIS's conquest of human sickness and disease destroys millions of jobs in industries unconnected with medicine - the building trade, motor manufacture and marketing, and so on. Millions of home owners with mortgages are thrown into hopeless negative equity. There is much unrest and civil strife on a world scale. The British government sets up a Royal Commission. Its majority report urges "bold initiatives to kick-start the economy"; its minority report wants GIS to be declared an illegal substance. At a rally in Hyde Park a speaker reveals the real problem and its solution. Because of the way society is organized, GIS can be regarded as a terrible catastrophe. The answer is a society based on co-operative production for needs and free access to the means of satisfying those needs. The 'Last Story' concerns a newspaper editor about to retire who confronts his employer with a front page story he knows won't get published: "Economy murders 40,000 kids! ...Yesterday 40,000 children died because economics, the way we order production and distribution in our world, could not afford £5,000 for food and medicines to keep them alive!" 'Maggie's Dream' is an amazing tale about how Margaret Thatcher has a nightmare that she is in a strange new world without money and the market. Dennis complains that his money won't buy him even a nip. A companion with an outsize briefcase containing £15m in paper money finds that this won't by him a lump of bread. Maggie, shocked but undeterred, says "They'll have to learn to appreciate the magic of the market." On a more somber note, 'Pieces of Paper' is a moving account of how a war-damaged man ("not crazy, just a bit...peculiar") copes with a life of poverty. George is employed, Saturdays only, as a cleaner and gardener for £10 a week. His far-from rich employer has a wife who wants a second-hand car. So they can no longer afford to pay George the £10. On learning this his reaction is remarkable but not angry or self-pitying: "It's all mad, isn't it, sir? ... There's the world out there, a veritable fairyland of everything, far more for everybody that needs or wants more ...And, y'know, few would really want more if everybody had enough." The last story, 'Contrasts', is the only one outside, rather than within the system. It describes a radio broadcast by a historian on 3 June 2077. The Revolution - free access democracy - had swept across the entire planet in 2046. Elections, one spurring the other, brought down the entire world capitalist political structures like a vast domino trail. The old system was considerably modified in the period preceding the Revolution. The capitalists themselves became frenetic reformers as they tried to hold off their own downfall. "The new way of life entailed a great 'openness' between people that was utterly alien within capitalism . . . What was a fragmented, vicious and secretive world of internecine greed and strife became a ...a family, a human family of equals." SRP Socialist Standard - May 2004

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About the Author RICHARD MONTAGUE is a well practiced political writer who has written extensively in socialist media. He believes that the creative arts, stories, poems, songs, et al, have an important role in exposing the grim realities of global capitalism. Given the cynical political posturings of both the Left and Right wings of modern capitalism and the abuse of democracy by what has become an entire political industry, millions of people have become indifferent to both politics and democracy. Ultimately, such people will require persuasion by a more direct process but other forms of cultural expression can and should be used as pointers to the nature, practicability, and feasibility of democratic social revolution to the end of establishing a genuine system of free-access social democracy. Some of the shorter stories in this collection have appeared in socialist journals and, in an earlier novel, Frank Faces of the Dead, Montague explored the economic roots of 20th century conflict in Ireland.

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Sample Excerpt

GENERAL IMMUNITY SERUM

Who invented the wheel? Was it the person who first discerned that a tree trunk, shorn of its branches, would facilitate the movement of other branchless tree trunks? Or was it the person who conceived of an axle carrying at either end circular pieces cut from a tree trunk?Or was it ...?

It was, of course, all those who contributed to the primitive discovery and the subsequent evolutionary refinement of the wheel we now know in all its diverse forms. That is the way with all ideas and it is something that one side was anxious to avoid during the lengthy legal battle over GIS.

Originally there were seven people involved in the claim to the discovery of what has come to be known as GIS or General Immunity Serum. Three were medical doctors two of whom had been engaged in research work at the Brussels laboratories of Ziglap International and one who had been employed in a research capacity by Kwelph Medical in their Zurich headquarters, Two were research chemists both of whom had, at different times, been employed by Ziglap and by Kwelph. A sixth man, Ernest Kroller, later said to be the brains behind what the papers presented as a monumental piece of fraud and industrial espionage, had no obvious direct connection with the venture while the seventh man was a laboratory assistant who was employed by the other six and not, therefore, directly involved with the alleged scam.

The facts, as they began to emerge, started with the establishment of a small drug research company in an industrial unit in north London. The share capital of the company was £ 120,000 only half of which was taken up in equal shares by Kroller, the three doctors and the two chemists. The Company was named simply GIS Limited.

It was several years before the Company's one and only product, GIS was granted a licence by the Ministry of Health despite the fact that it was to be marketed only as a fortifying agent intended to improve the body's resistance to a number of minor ailments. In fact GIS was a cocktail of several well-known and well-tested drugs bonded in a secret permutation with several natural products most of which could be purchased over the counter in the average health shop.

Because the preparation contained no toxic agents or elements with known or suspected side-effects the licensing authority allowed a general licence which meant that GIS could be sold as a non-prescription preparation
ny pharmacy. The recommended dosage for both children and adults was one teaspoonful each day. The manufacturers stressed that there was no danger of overdosing but that using more than the recommended dose would not confer any additional benefit.

GIS Limited was not in a financial position to mount the sort of advertising campaign that the launch of a new product of its kind would normally require. They did take small advertisements in the local newspapers announcing:

General Immunity Serum
reinforces the Immune System
STOPS DISEASES STARTING!

The Company, also, produced coloured leaflets which were distributed from door-to-door in those areas where they had supplied a number of chemist shops. The Serum retailed at £1 per bottle containing 'in excess of two month's supply'.

However, the most effective form of promotion resulted from men -they were always men- telephoning those local radio programmes where some unfortunate has to fill the space between tunes for an hour or more with interesting exchanges with members of the general public. 'I was losing my hair when a friend told me about this GIS, Marvellous stuff!' The problems were manifold, the answer was singular -GIS!

In time, literally hundreds of people were telephoning radio stations, prepared to identify themselves and swearing that GIS had solved their problem. Baldness, migraine, asthma, allergies, dermatological diseases, arthritis, heart trouble and then one day a man telephoned London City Radio with the claim that 'the doctors and the cancer specialist are mystified; they've been treating my wife for lung cancer and now they tell me the decease has gone into remission. My wife's back to her full health; its a miracle and its from taking GIS!'

The following day, Ed Keswick, who ran the Afternoon with Ed programme on London City, devoted the entire programme to GIS.

The man who had claimed the previous day that his wife was cured of cancer was again interviewed; the specialist who said she was in remission was contacted and he admitted that tests now showed no evidence whatsoever of carcinoma. He confessed that he was pleasantly mystified and, under questioning from Keswick, he admitted that several other patients were showing what he described as 'positive signs' and he agreed that all were claiming that their condition was a response to GIS. In the several days following this, other radio stations received calls from people claiming miracle cures for GIS. Among these were a number of angina sufferers who asserted that the serum had eliminated their symptoms and one cardiac surgeon contacted Midland Radio with the claim that his team had cancelled a coronary by-pass operation on a patient with a long history of acute angina after tests had revealed a complete normalisation of the arteries.

The television programme, Checking the Evidence, devoted its Monday night spot to the mounting claims for GIS and revealed that GIS had released their secret formula to small syndicates of pioneering researchers in France, Germany and the United States who had agreed to set up non-profit making producing units in those countries. Already, in France and Germany -the US unit was in course of setting up- similar claims of miracle cures for a whole host of problems, including coronary heart decease and various cancers, were being reported.

Health Matters on Friday evening, in a special programme called The Economics of Sickness dealt extensively with the drugs market and the fabulous turnover of the ten leading international drug companies. It dealt with the market for patent medicines and with the tens of billions of dollars accruing to the drug and chemical companies from sickness. Having partially looked at the sums, the programme then introduced Ernest Kroller of GIS Limited.

Frank Mathews, interviewing Kroller, went for the jugular:'How's it being done, Mr. Kroller? We all know that there is no such thing as a cure-all? Hasn't this hysteria been deliberately promoted to sell GIS to the public?'

'GIS has made no claims whatsoever.' Kroller came across as a severe man who used words sparingly and without embellishment.

'But, Mr. Kroller,' Mathews looked at his notes, 'the common cold, psoriasis, asthma, bronchiectisis, arthritis, heart decease and, now, claims that this serum has actually cured different types of cancer. Surely that amounts to a cure-all.'

'Who has made these claims?'

'Well ... members of the public, , doctors ...'

'But not GIS, Mr. Mathews.'

'Well ...no ...No. But obviously your company will make a huge profit from all this publicity.' Kroller's taciturnity was irking the interviewer.

'May I ask you a question, Mr. Mathews?' Kroller had moved forward in his chair, he spoke quietly and with great deliberation. 'If you had an illness, a serious illness, would you pay twenty pounds sterling for the means of being cured of that illness?'

'Well, yes, of course but ...'

'I think that is the answer most people would give even if I said hundreds of pounds. But we are insisting that the price of one hundred and twenty millilitres of GIS should cost no more than one pound. Obviously we are not overly concerned with profit.'

'Let's allow, then, for the purpose of making a point, that your company has developed this fantastic cure-all;that it is effective and that you can economically produce sufficient quantities of the stuff, have you thought of the downside of this alleged marvel?'

'We have thought of people suffering; people who suffer the venial pain of a headache, people -and especially children- whose lives are made miserable by asthma, people who endure the mental and physical agonies of cancer. If there is a downside to these considerations then ...the -though, of course, it would not be our problem- the downside, as you call it might reveal yet another dimension to GIS. It might bring us the added social benefit of forcing society to look at why curing people -and that sometimes simply means feeding people- should have some sort of adverse economic effect.'

Later that night came the first reports of a hospital in Washington claiming 'startling' results with GIS in the treatment of two cancer patients. Simultaneously, the first claim of a cure came from an AIDS victim in Paris. The media went wild; reporters camped around the industrial estate where the modest premises of GIS Limited was located. From America, France, Germany, Russia, China and elsewhere, they came; camera crews, fast talking reporters babbling in an assortment of languages. Men and women with note books and recorders all vying with each other for an interview with anyone who could speak authoritatively about GIS. It was clear, however, that the Kroller interview was the last word that anyone from that quarter was going to say; meanwhile, the claims continued, becoming too repetitious to make hard news and several hundred men and women wandered about the miserable industrial complex all impatient for a story.

That evening they all had a story: an estimated thirty-five billion dollars had been wiped off drug and chemical shares in thirty-six hours. The big pharmacy groups also reported a downturn in their trading and this was reflected in a dramatic decline in share prices. The concerns of insurance chiefs was more muted; Sir Graham Kilfeather said that, in the short time, if reports concerning the miraculous qualities of GIS proved to be true, then there would obviously be a dramatic drop in insurance claims but, of course, long term, the effect would be disastrous and could well make a vital section of the insurance industry redundant.

In the House of Commons, the Minister of Health said there were no plans to make GIS available on the National Health Service. In reply to Mr. Penn, the outspoken MP for Baslee, who said that GIS could be the saviour of the NHS especially if it prevented the fatcats of the drugs industry from ripping off the taxpayer for billions every year, the Minister said, the nation owed a deep debt of gratitude to the drug companies and, if reports were true, though they were welcome, they were bound to raise concerns. The leader of the Conservative opposition, Mr. Dennis Vague, agreed with the Minister and trusted the government would monitor events closely.

The course of GIS became the main area of news in the weeks that followed. Every news item, every newspaper, had something to say about GIS. The more spectacular cures were reported, and the news that the show business charity had offered a large donation to GIS Limited which was refused made big headlines. Reports from across the world where, every day, new miracle cures were being reported, made constant fare for the media. Big names, in journalism, politics, industry, education, science and religion were being canvassed for their opinions and the governments in many of the African states, where GIS had brought a dramatic downturn in the prevalence of AIDS, created a central fund to ensure that free supplies of GIS would be made available to all AIDS sufferers. A theological controversy erupted when a prominent evangelist said GIS was 'the devil's work':disease was part of the divine plan and GIS was an unwarranted interference with the work of God. Obscure biblical quotations became ammunition in an acrid debate that caused division in the main churches and a critical comment from the Pope raised concerns in the ecumenical movement.

More than any other newspaper, The Times-Herald took up the case for GIS, seeking the help of the general public in learning about cures esulting from its use. Every day its two centre pages were filled with column after column of reported cures with half of one of these pages reporting on the more dramatic cases in other countries.

It commissioned articles from sociologists , philosophers, medical people, clergy, economists and it published some very poignant letters from relatives of people who had died and from those whose closest relatives had been cured. It was The Times-Herald which broke the story concerning an alleged offer of forty billion pounds to GIS Limited to transfer their manufacturing rights to a consortium of drug companies. The offer, the newspaper claimed, was coupled with a peculiar codicil expressing a willingness on the part of two members of the consortium -Ziglap International and Kwelph Medical- 'in consideration of GIS Limited being prepared to abide by the proposed transfer of the manufacturing rights'not to pursue legal action against the directors of GIS, 'jointly and severally' in respect of their 'alleged usurpation of information belonging to the said two companies and to which they became privy while in the employment of one or either Ziglap International or Kwelph Medical.'

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Catalogue Information

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