A plague on both their houses (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

This issue is published before the US presidential elections on 5 November so we are unable to comment on the result. But we can analyse the campaign and what is at stake.

Most elections under capitalism are simply about which band of professional politicians shall occupy executive and ministerial posts. In other words, about a change of personnel to continue with the same basic policies. This was the case in the recent UK elections. On some occasions, however, the capitalist class are split on some key economic issue and the only way this can be settled is via the ballot box.

In Britain, this was the case over whether or not the British state should remain part of the European Union. One section of the capitalist class wanted to withdraw to avoid EU regulation of their financial activities while another section, the majority, wanted to stay in.

In a capitalist political democracy the only way of settling such conflicts of interests within the capitalist class is to put the matter to the electorate to decide, an electorate overwhelmingly composed of workers. The rival sections of the capitalist class each spend millions in propaganda to try to get workers to vote for their candidates. The section that wins gets its way. The government is formed by their political representatives who have a mandate to implement that section’s policy. In Britain those in favour of leaving won a referendum and a subsequent general election, so Britain left. Had the vote gone the other way Britain would have remained in the EU.

In such elections there is something more than a mere change of personnel at stake — for the capitalist class, though not for the working class, whose interests are opposed to all sections of the capitalist class and who are not required to take sides.

The current presidential election in the United States is one such example. The basic split in the capitalist class there is the old one between those who favour free trade and those who favour protectionism, which has foreign policy implications. Harris represents that section which favours the status quo and support for existing international bodies set up to promote freer trade. Trump represents those who want to protect US manufacturing industry from outside competition by imposing a tariff on all imports. Harris wants to continue the war in Ukraine and bombing Gaza. Trump just wants to bomb Gaza.

If the election was a contest as to which candidate has the least unpleasant personality Harris would be the lesser evil. But that’s not the issue. It’s which section of the US capitalist class shall get its way, a matter of indifference to workers and of equal opposition to both by socialists.

Because it is the working class electorate that will decide, both sides have to spin their policy in a way that will dupe workers into supporting them. Thus Trump courts the Christian right and other social conservatives while Harris presents herself as a champion of liberal values. Trump’s appeal is mainly to whites, Harris’s mainly to voters of colour. Trump mainly to men. Harris mainly to women. But none of these is the real issue, even though how voters react to them will decide which section of the US capitalist class gets its way.

The US system for electing the president is peculiar. In other countries with elected presidents, the candidate who wins is the one who gets the most votes, whether in a first or second round. In the US this is not necessarily the case — it is the candidate who wins the most votes in an electoral college composed of members representing the states that make up the union, whose number broadly reflects the electorate of each state and who (except in a couple of small states) vote as a bloc. When Trump won in 2016 he got fewer votes than Hilary Clinton but more in the electoral college. This was because Clinton won easily in California and New York but this didn’t increase her representation in the Electoral College. Who wins here is decided by who wins in a number of key ‘swing’ states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia but also smaller ones like Arizona. This is not fully democratic but is the procedure that has evolved in the United States for deciding who shall chair the executive committee of its ruling class.

Under the US constitution, the president cannot get their way unless their party has a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is elected on a normal democratic basis from constituencies of roughly equal size. Only one-third of the Senate is elected every two years, a constitutional arrangement put in place by the Founding Fathers to prevent a majority for any radical proposal (such as land reform) getting its way for at least six years.

The Democratic Party leaders got Biden to withdraw as they were afraid that, if he stayed as their candidate, they risked not winning a majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, and so not being in a position to block what Trump might do that would be against the interest of the US capitalist class as a whole. In fact, their strategy is just as much aimed at this as at electing Harris as President so that, if she loses, they will still be able to block Trump doing something the section of the US capitalist class they represent doesn’t want, such as abandoning Ukraine or starting a world tariff war.

Trump is portrayed by some of those who support Harris as a ‘fascist’ who wants to install himself as dictator. This is an exaggeration for vote-catching purposes. A more sober assessment is given by one of Trump’s economic advisers, Stephen Moore of the notorious right-wing think-tank The Heritage Foundation. When asked what Trump would do if elected President again, he said that ‘Trump would be pragmatic in office and focus on the needs of business to drive economic growth’ (tinyurl.com/2n4ftxp3). Perhaps not so different, then, than what the new Labour government here has said is its approach.

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Billionaire wealth has risen by more than 1,000 percent since 1989, with the number of billionaires tripling to 164 since 2010. Over the same period, the average worker lost £10,200 through wage suppression enforced through record-low strike activity policed by the trade union bureaucracy. One-fifth of people in the UK live in poverty, and 25 percent of all children. Nearly 3 million rely on food banks. For the poorest 10 percent of UK households, living standards have fallen by 20 percent compared with 2019–20—a drop in income of £4,600. 

(WSWS, tinyurl.com/mjajcj6m)

Pastor Mboro is a self-styled prophet with thousands of followers across South Africa. He has claimed to perform miracles such as healing people during sermons and delivering a fish from the womb of a pregnant woman. 

(BBC tinyurl.com/58t68xuj)

The book begins with a poignant reminder that we are all migrants: ‘Even if you are not a migrant, your ancestors were. If they had not migrated, you would not be alive’. 

(Impact Investor, tinyurl.com/4xuemy6c)

I meet Najwa Abdul Awa, holding an image of her dead son. I ask her if she’s scared about what might be around the corner. ‘Of course not’, she replies with a smile. ‘I sent my first son for martyrdom with pride. And I’m willing to send my second and my third son too. We will not stop, she says, until Israel vanishes’. 

(Sky News, tinyurl.com/mxx8rm33)

The pro-Palestinian organizers gathered for ‘coffee with comrades’ …The main speaker, a University of Massachusetts Amherst PhD candidate, took the stage. He donned a keffiyeh and a Cuban Communist Party cap emblazoned with a red star, and began discussing readings by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Leila Khaled, a former Palestinian militant and first woman to hijack an airplane. ‘Our political system is falling apart’, William Chaney, the PhD candidate, said in an interview just before his lecture began. ‘If we want to leave the world better, we have to look back and learn lessons’.

 (Boston Globe, tinyurl.com/5ductrb3)

In America, 1 in 4 cancer patients go bankrupt or lose their homes because of the outrageously high cost of care and 68,000 die a year because they can’t afford healthcare. 

(Common Dreams, tinyurl.com/wptkejj2)

… the great lie of nationalism: the fact that there is no organic bond between an ethnic group and a specific terrain, that no stretch of soil belongs by divine or natural right to those who speak a particular language or have a certain skin-colour. The country was never yours to claim back. Immigrants haven’t robbed you of what was never your property in the first place. 

(UnHerd, tinyurl.com/2d8a9ah2)

In general, human beings are remarkably altruistic. Rather than feeling destructive impulses, most of us feel a natural impulse to help others, to nurture their development and alleviate suffering. 

(The Conversation, tinyurl.com/2u85xn4w)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Halo Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russian priests have joined a long list of various clergymen of various nations in their channelling Bob Dylan’s With God On Our Side. Giving a blessing to a nuclear weapon is possible even though such arms ‘have tremendous destructive power’, Konstantin Tatarintsev, an archpriest of the Russian Orthodox Church, and first deputy head of the Synodal Department for the Armed Forces and Law Enforcement Services, told RIA Novosti (August). Sanctifying something that ‘sows death’ might normally be considered ‘unacceptable,’ [not normally, always], he said. Nuclear arms are also ‘the weapons of containment’, he explained. Their purpose is to ensure that no other nations that possess such weapons could use them against Russia, adding that ‘it is a guarantee of peace’. Mutually Assured Destruction.

According to Tatarintsev, the prayer used to bless a weapon goes back to the Middle Ages. It places a personal spiritual responsibility on its wielder not to misuse it for evil ends. He also said that pretty much any weapon, including the nuclear triad, can be considered ‘sacred’ when it is used to protect ‘our fatherland and the holy sites located on its territory’.

#    #    #    #

Worshippers in Ohio have been left stunned after a 75 year-old statue of the Virgin appeared to blink as they gazed upon her – with photos capturing the mysterious moment. The International Pilgrim Virgin Statue of Our Lady of Fatima was making its way across the region as part of a tour when it allegedly shut and open its eyes on 2 August while on display at the Basilica of St. John the Baptist. [Allegedly being the operative word.] The statue has visited more than 100 countries, including Russia and China, and is believed to be the closest likeness of a documented apparition of Mary in 1917 said to be ‘worthy of belief’ by the Catholic Church. Many who have visited the statue have since claimed they’ve witnessed medical miracles, including a young boy some believe was cured of malaria (Daily Mail, 10 August 2024).

This recalls a piece in the September 2023 Halo column which bears repeating:

Does anyone remember the Only Fools and Horses episode, The Miracle of Peckham, where Del Boy scams money from exploiting a weeping statue of Mary in the local church? The ‘miracle’ occurs because the lead of the church roof has been nicked and when it rains the water drips down and off the face of the statue. Has the Pope seen this episode and is it one of his favourites?

Miracles don’t happen! The pontiff has been berating his flock for believing in ‘miracles’ and weeping Madonnas in particular. ‘Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, he said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.’ ‘The Madonna has never drawn [attention] to herself,’ he said (Guardian, 4 June 2023).

Who are the biggest charlatans? The Catholic church or those preying upon unthinking believers?

DC

Labour landslides: then and now (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was to no one’s surprise that a Labour government was elected in 2024. The Tory administration was falling apart, the opinion polls were deafening, and Labour presented itself as ready to take over. On the other hand, it was to everyone’s surprise that a Labour government was elected in 1945. Britain was one of the allied powers that had defeated Hitler with its highly popular Conservative prime minister ready to continue in office, there were no opinion polls to take into account, and the only experience the Labour Party had previously had of power was brief and bitter. And yet, in the July 1945 election, what happened would nowadays be called a landslide – for Labour. Can what happened to Labour then and in the years that followed be compared to what is happening to it now and may happen in the future?

Welfare state

It is often said that Labour’s triumph in 1945 shocked its leader, Clement Attlee, who claimed that he had seen reducing the Conservative majority as his best hope. But rather than depending on the views or hopes of political leaders, election results, as has often been demonstrated, hinge more on what has been called ‘a readiness for change’ among the electorate. And this is the likely explanation here. The report drawn up by the Liberal Party’s Sir William Beveridge in 1942 proposed what it called ‘social insurance’ for the British population, a plan for the state to provide social security (eg, sickness and unemployment pay, old-age pensions, free healthcare) for everyone. This was followed in 1944 by a government committee recommending the nationalisation of services such as gas and electricity.

The Labour Party was enthusiastic about the programme, calling it a new ‘welfare state’, while the Conservatives were lukewarm. And this may well have been the main driver of the electorate’s preference for Labour. The way George Orwell put it, in an article published in late 1945, was that Labour had seized an opportunity it did not create. At the same time Orwell expressed doubt that Labour would end up delivering on all of its manifesto, which proclaimed:

‘The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it. Its ultimate purpose at home is the establishment of the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain—free, democratic, efficient, progressive, public-spirited, its material resources organized in the service of the British people.’

What then happened when Labour came to power is a matter of historical record. Coal, gas, electricity, iron and steel, railways, civil aviation, telecommunications and the Bank of England were nationalised with full compensation to their previous owners.

General state benefits for the unemployed, sick and aged were brought in. A National Health Service was established supplying health care free of charge with staff at hospitals becoming government employees. There is no doubt that these represented significantly beneficial change for the vast majority of British workers.

However, even though the Labour Party had proclaimed itself to be ‘a Socialist Party’, this was certainly not socialism in the sense we understand it as a society of free access to all goods and services. In fact Labour now in office made no attempt to challenge the existing social order of capitalism, whereby the vast majority of the wealth was owned by a tiny minority and production and distribution of the means of life took place on the basis of profit rather than need. What it sought to do in fact was to make that order more secure by suggesting to workers that, via nationalisation, they had more of a stake in it and that, with ‘social security’, protest and challenge to the existing system were unnecessary since, whatever their circumstances, they could rely on being looked after ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

Downhill

In reality the unspoken rationale of Labour’s ‘welfare state’ was to try to make production more efficient and more cost effective by the state having more control over it and to remove unnecessary hindrances to workers’ productivity by trying to create a more benign form of capitalism. Yet none of this could prevent the usual crises that beset the market system from presenting themselves. After an initial ‘honeymoon’ period, prices began to rise causing workers to press for wage increases and to industrial unrest. Labour’s response was a policy of ‘wage restraint’, which brought it into collision with striking workers, leading, for example, to the use of troops to replace dockers for unloading ships.

Later things went further downhill when there was a financial crisis and a run on the pound led to devaluation and further price rises. And, with the ‘free’ health service becoming unpredictably expensive, plans were made for charges to be brought in for prescriptions as well as for NHS dentures and spectacles. As it all unravelled, it became increasingly clear, if it had not been already, that no Party committed to running the buying and selling system of capitalism in any form could adjust it to work in the interests of the majority class in society, those obliged to sell their energies to an employer for a wage or salary in order to survive. Yet this was evidently not clear enough to most members of that majority class – the working class – when in 1951, if with no great enthusiasm, they voted capitalism’s other team, the Tories, back into office. Never more than on that occasion did the words of the old socialist dictum ring true: ‘Governments are not elected, they are dismissed’.

Landslide to where?

That’s something that can also be said of the outcome of this year’s election. No one would claim that that there was any great love among the electorate for Keir Starmer and his Labour Party, yet this time too, as in 1945, Labour gained a landslide victory over the outgoing Tories. What this showed is that, as ever in capitalism, governments – in this case the Tories – do not control the system they are meant to manage. The system, or to be more specific, the market, which is its beating heart, has a mind of its own, an unpredictable one, and all governments can do is tinker at its edges and hope that somehow such tinkering will keep the pieces in place. If they try anything too drastic, it is very likely to make the situation worse, as Prime Minister Truss found to her – and her party’s – cost just a short time ago.

So how is Starmer who, like his Labour counterparts did in 1945, has called himself a socialist, planning to tinker? His election manifesto, ‘Our Plan to Change Britain’, held out such promises as ‘a rebuilding of our country, so that it once again serves the interests of working people’, ‘to drag my Party away from the dead end of gesture politics and return it once more to the service of working people’, and ‘to kickstart economic growth by reforming Britain’s economy’. It’s obviously quite unclear what all this means – if anything. But in stating that ‘the economy is about things like money, businesses and buying and selling things’, it is clear what kind of society he’s wedded to.

And what does another of his promises, to ‘focus on long-term strategy, not short-term distractions’, mean? How, in fact, in the hurly-burly of capitalist politics, can any party focus on much more than ‘short-term distractions’? After just a few weeks in power, in fact, Labour are already finding themselves having to face a whole cluster of ‘short-term distractions’ – race riots and a dearth of places for offenders in prisons already full to bursting, a potential ‘run on the pound’ leading them to scrap the winter fuel allowance for pensioners who may already struggle to put the heating on, and cash-strapped universities on the verge of bankruptcy. They’re blaming the previous Tory administration for leaving ‘a black hole in the economy’, and they’re saying, despite all the fine rhetoric in their manifesto, that ‘things will get worse before they get better’ and that we must ’accept short-term pain for long-term good’. They are clearly not about to have the same ‘honeymoon’ period’ as their counterparts in the 1940s.

Alternative team

So how do the two Labour governments – the 1945 one and the 2024 one – compare? The earlier one came to office in the shadow of the 1930s’ economic depression and then six years of war, and so virtually any steps it took were perceived as representing more stability and security than Britain’s workers previously had. But after 3-4 years of what has been called ‘rebuilding space’, the reality of capitalism’s priorities set in and led to it losing the favour of the electorate and being dismissed from office in 1951. The current Labour government, as we have seen, seems to be running into trouble more quickly than its post-war predecessor, again under the pressures of needing to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. Yet it would be premature to predict that it will be less or more long-lived than the 1945 government, since we cannot foresee the precise effects that the twists and turns of the market system will have on the alternative team for managing British capitalism that is currently in office.

Howard Moss

New translation of Das Kapital (2024)

Book Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capital. Critique of Political Economy, volume 1. By Karl Marx. Translated by Paul Reitter. (Princeton University Press. £24.50.)

The fruit of five years’ work, Paul Reitter’s new translation of Das Kapital was published last month. It lives up to its claim to be a translation into colloquial (American) English, especially as regards the descriptive and historical parts. It really does read like something written this century as opposed to the now rather clunky original 1887 translation by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling under Engels’s direction.

However, there are some words that cannot be said to be colloquial, in particular valorization, metabolize and subsumption which don’t appear in the 1887 translation and, in the case of the first two, could not have done. They first appeared in the 1976 Penguin translation by Ben Fowkes. Reitter has added a fourth — thingly. The 1887 version translates them as, respectively, ‘production of surplus value’, ‘material change (or circulation)’, and ‘subjection’. These are clearly more colloquial. As to thingly, this was translated as ‘material’, but most people will probably read it as ‘thingy’, which won’t be too wide of the mark.

Reitter has taken great care and there can be no doubt that his translations here are an accurate literal translation of the native German words, but, as with all translations, the question is who is the translation for. At one time Capital was read and studied in the working class movement. Now, unfortunately, it is read mainly by academics in the field of Marx studies. For them, such words present no problem and interpreting their meaning provides ample room for learned disputations, and, for those whose first language is English, puts them in a position to follow the arguments by those whose first language is German. Fair enough, but they don’t make it easier for ordinary working-class militants who want to understand how capitalism works and how they are exploited.

Metabolism is now acceptable and perhaps subsumption too but not valorization. It hardly existed in 1887 and is now used, in economics, to mean the same as ‘monetarization,’ making money out of something. Of course this is what capital is used for too but so are many other things that have nothing to do with workers being used to produce surplus value for capitalists (and all to do with putting a price on everything). The word ‘valorization’ blunts, even obscures, that what’s involved is the exploitation of workers.

For example, in Reitter’s (and Fowkes’s) translation, the title of the chapter which introduces the concept of surplus value is ‘The Labor Process and the Valorization Process’. In the 1887 translation it’s ‘The Labour Process and the Process of Producing Surplus Value’. Further, even of itself, ‘valorization’ doesn’t bring out in a clear and immediately comprehensible way what Marx was getting at. The 1887 translation defines capital as ‘self-expanding value’, which conveys the idea of capitalist production as a spontaneous process of producing surplus value. For Reitter, it is ‘self-valorizing value’. Thus, Reitter’s ‘capital’s life process is nothing but its own movement as self-valorizing value’ (p. 280) compares unfavourably, in terms of easier understanding, with 1887’s ‘the life-process of capital consists only in its movement as value constantly expanding, constantly multiplying itself’ (end of the chapter on ‘The Rate and the Mass of Surplus-Value’).

This is not to dismiss the usefulness of Reitter’s work. Not at all. You just need to read ‘expansion of value’ every time the words ‘valorization’ or ‘valorize’ occur. His translation reads well and is accompanied by 50 pages of very useful end-notes to explain his choice of words as well as Marx’s citations (in Latin, Greek, French and Italian) and references to now obscure persons. It will stand the test of time and can be recommended for those who want to read in modern English Marx’s own exposition of his abstract-labour theory of value and his description, from a working-class point of view, of how the working class in England came into being, its working and living conditions in and up to the 1860s, and struggles to limit the working day.

It is unfortunate that the publishers haven’t let readers simply read Marx in his own words. Instead they have chosen to introduce the new translation with both a 15-page Foreword and a 30-page Editor’s Introduction, both claiming to set out what Marx meant. Both are decidedly unhelpful and undermine the rest of the book. The Preface is mainly gibberish by someone who dismisses as ‘fantasy’ what she calls ‘a perfectly rational, controlled and transparent communist political economy on the far side of a capitalist epoch’; according to her, Capital is a work of philosophy, a ‘deep ontological and epistemological critique of capitalism’. The Editor, too, sees Marx as basically a philosopher and opines that in Capital ‘nowhere really does Marx condemn the capital system or call for revolution’. But, then, both of them are philosophers who only want to interpret the world.

Reitter’s translation is of the 2nd German edition (1873), the 1887 translation is of the 3rd German edition (1883) while Fowkes’s was of the 4th German edition (1890). So now all three German re-editions are available in English. Not that there is any significant difference between them. One inconvenience, though, is that the chapter numbers in Reitter’s translation don’t always correspond to those in the other two which readers in English of Marx have become used to.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

The April 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard carried a review of Ben Fowkes' translation of Capital by the same reviewer.