Voice From The Back: Child’s play (2003)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Child’s play

It sums up the madness of capitalism’s market system that at a time of falling stock exchange prices and the dismal results of fund market experts, we can learn of the following in the Observer, Business Section (25 May). “Despite falling equity prices, a group of schoolchildren from Oxfordshire put the professionals to shame by reaping a 140 percent profit from shares over seven months. The competition, sponsored by ProShare, shows you don’t have to pay through the nose for advice from experts earning six-figure salaries.” It also shows that we live in a mad house society.

Keep taking the tablets

The government’s medical advisers have agreed to hold an independent inquiry into the risks associated with the antidepressants known as SSRIs, or selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors. This is the result of reports of suicides among patients taking the medication, as well as users describing nightmares, tremors and feelings of violence. These drugs have been widely prescribed for 10 years, so how come nothing has been done about it? “The Medicine and Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority, which oversees drug safety, has been criticised for not holding a proper investigation into SSRIs. An earlier expert group had to be disbanded last year after it emerged that some members were shareholders in the companies involved.” The Observer (25 May) Perhaps the following sales figures would tend to colour the shareholders’ findings. The manufacturer Glaxo-Smith Kline has more than £100 million sales a year in the UK alone. What’s a few suicides to shareholders compared to those figures? Truly, capitalism is a sick society.

Band aids for poverty

Almost 20 years ago Bob Geldorf organised “Band Aid” concerts in London and Philadelphia to help the starving millions in Ethiopia. So what is happening in that country today? Local musicians are organising similar concerts to aid the starving. “Aid agencies estimate 14 million Ethiopians are at risk of starvation after the worst drought in nearly two decades. The United Nations said Ethiopia needs 1.5 million tonnes of food aid this year.” Herald (26 May) In 1984 Ethiopia was devastated by a famine which killed one million people. In 2003 we have 14 million at risk of starvation. So much for charity, so much for well-intentioned reformers. What we need is a complete transformation of society not an elastoplast on a gaping wound.

Body parts for sale

Inside capitalism even items that are not produced for sale take on the form of commodities. Thus a man’s honour or a woman’s body are bought and sold. Perhaps the nadir of this commodification is the sale of human body parts. “Organ harvesting for the black market is most prevalent in India, Turkey and Central and Eastern Europe. Kidneys, lungs, pieces of liver, even corneas, bones, tendons, heart valves and skin are all available for purchase. A donor will be paid about £1,500 for a kidney, but a “broker” can expect to make £150,000 for the same organ. An auction of a human kidney on eBay in February 2000 drew a bid of $100,000 before the company put a stop to it.” Times (27 May) CONTRASTS The following two quotations illustrate the strange values of capitalism. “6,ooo children a day die from unsafe water and sanitation – equivalent to 20 jumbo jets crashing every day – according to the UN.” Observer (1 June) Contrast that with the fashion writer Lucia Van Post in The Times (6 June) prattling on about designer handbags. “One I lust after is the Asprey “race companion” – and have done so ever since I first saw a prototype some two years ago. It is a slim pochette, made of lizard skin, with a clasp that makes a nice, crisp, closing sort of noise. It holds not only a purse and mirror, but also a tiny notebook and a pen – perfect. … Not cheap at £1,250, but delicious.” Does the “nice, crisp closing sound” drown out the sound of those 20 jumbo jet loads of childish death whimpers?

Gongs for the gormless

The fiftieth anniversary of the Coronation was marked by the usual nauseating sycophantic brown-nosing of the press and TV. There is one exception in the Independent (5 June) by John Walsh that we think is worth recording here, if only to assure future generations that the world was not completely insane in 2003. “Then Her Madge decided to give knighthoods to Prince Andrew and Prince Edward. Along with being a Duke and an Earl, they’re now Knight Commanders of the Royal Victorian Order. Don’t ask what feats of intrepid public service justified these glamorous rewards (getting the wife pregnant? Womanising on yachts? Playing a lot of golf? Going bald?), because answer is there none.”

Letter: Reply to the BNP (2003)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reply to the BNP

Dear Editors,

Regarding your article “No Asylum from the Wages System” (Socialist Standard, June), the BNP now has 16 elected councillors. Yes, we consider that wherever native people of the world live, their genetic ancestry in that region, often going back many 100s, if not 1000s of generations in those regions, make them pre-eminent in those regions. Just as individuals work to buy their own homes and leave them to subsequent generations (and not to strangers), we acknowledge that our forebears created the UK, its infrastructure, roads, towns, villages, ancient buildings and institutions, many fighting, some giving their lives, in wars to protect our native land. i.e. we own the UK. We welcome strangers and people from alien lands but only on the condition that our proprietorship is paramount, an idea branded as “racist” by the enemies of Britain. No doubt the anti-racists and lefties in the UK would complain if whites went out and colonised parts of the Third World (Rhodesia is a prime example where white rule was beneficial and now the native blacks are reverting to type and the country goes to the dogs South Africa the same).

You say: “For example, the report Migration: an Economic and Social Analysis from the Research, Development and Statistic Directorate of the Home Office, demolishes a great many of the myths around immigration observing that migrants tend to have higher incomes than natives (on the whole, although they occupy a great range of income brackets), and that there is ‘little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration’”.

This is a distortion – the report does not refer to “migrants” but immigrants who have been here for more than one generation, and it goes on to say that of the immigrants who have higher incomes than natives and better qualifications, 48 percent of them are from “white” countries (USA, Australia, EU etc). The remaining have lower economic activity and worse qualifications. (Alan Travis in the Guardian made the same mistake). I think you are confusing the report with the Home Office report “The fiscal effect of migration” (January 2002) where it shows that migrants pay £1.5bn more in taxes than they receive in benefits, again if you look at the detail you will find that 1 percent of tax payers pay the highest 20 percent of taxes – i.e. once migrants such as US and Japanese financiers etc are taken out of the equation, the remaining migrants (i.e. refugees, asylum seekers etc) are a net loss. Still, never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

The idea of abolishing national borders is crackers.

Dr Phil Edwards, 

BNP National Press Officer

P.S. do you support the anti democratic activities of the ANL?

 

Reply:

1. The link you try to draw between a particular part of the globe and the “genetic ancestry” of the people living there is just nonsense. You talk about this often going back “100s if not 1000s of generations”. But, taking a generation as being 30 years, just going back a hundred generations (not hundreds) is going back 3000 years, i.e. to 1000 BC. You’re not seriously contending are you that the island of Britain should belong only to the descendants of those Iron Agers who were there then, whoever they were (and their ancestors will have come from various parts of the continent of Europe)? In which case, most people living in Britain today, being descendants of later settlers (such as the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons – yes, the English language will have to go, too –,Vikings, Normans, Flemings, Irish) fall into your category of “stranger” and “alien” to be offered grants to go and resettle “where they came from”.

And, if we go back a thousand generations, i.e. 30,000 years, there’s probably weren’t any humans living in Britain. Go back another thousand generations and all humans are still living in Africa, where the common ancestors of all of us humans evolved. So, the logic of the argument from genetics points rather to the view that the whole Earth should belong to the whole human race.

In any event, from what you say about Africa and from the BNP’s street-level propaganda, the only genetic difference you are concerned about is skin pigmentation. Which is as stupid as wanting to distinguish between people on the basis of the colour of their hair. Neither skin colour nor hair colour gives the slightest indication of what a person is capable of or thinks or is likely to behave, or anything else, except, that is, how they are going to react to exposure to the Sun’s rays.

2. You are quite right that the infrastructure of the big island off the North West coast of the Eurasian landmass was built up by the labour of generations of serfs and wage-workers, many of them the ancestors of a large proportion of the current population, but this does not mean that their descendants therefore “own” Britain. Far from it. You yourself quote figures which show the unequal distribution of income in Britain (at least 20 percent going to the top one percent). This reflects the uneven distribution of profit-yielding assets, where the top 10 percent own as much as the remaining 90 percent. The ownership of land in Britain is even more concentrated, with aristocratic families such as the Queen and the Duke of Westminster owning vast tracts of it. No, Britain is not owned by its “native” population, but by a tiny minority of rich property owners. It’s their country not ours. We only work here.

3. The Home Office study was about “migrants”. We only paraphrased what it said, which was: “Migrants have higher average incomes than natives, but this average masks the polarisation of experiences, with migrants over-represented at the top of the income distribution but also highly concentrated at the lower end of the income distribution, and experience lower activity rates” and “There is little evidence that native workers are harmed by migration” (p. viii). But, whatever the study says, we still say that migration – out of as well as in to Britain – has not harmed people born in Britain. In fact, it hasn’t made any difference, either way. The problems we face are not caused by workers from other parts of the world migrating to this part, but by the capitalist system of class ownership and production for profit instead of the common ownership and production geared to satisfying people’s needs which will be the case in socialism.

4. We are not advocating the abolition of frontiers here and now under capitalism, if only because we know it’s not going to happen: the capitalist states, into which the world is currently divided, will always prefer to be in a position to control the labour force within their frontiers. What we envisage is that when the resources of the Earth have become the common heritage of all the human race then the world would no longer be divided into separate states, and people would be free to travel anyway in the world without needing a passport or visa and whether to live or to work or simply for pleasure.

5. We do not support the Anti-Nazi League and its undemocratic policy of seeking to restrict freedom of speech. We are in favour of free speech for everyone, not excluding fascists. And we practice what we preach, having debated in the past with Mosley’s BUF and the National Front. Not because we have any sympathy for their views, but because we think that the best way to deal with these views is to expose them for the dangerous nonsense they are. We’d be prepared to continue this debate with you at a public meeting, but we know that the “anti-fascists” would employ bully-boy tactics to stop it taking place. Pity. Since we would have welcomed the chance to publicly expose the BNP, before an audience of interested workers, as the peddlers of divisive and irrational nonsense that you are.

Editors.

Fat Cats: creaming off profits (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of June, the Trade and Industry Secretary, Patricia Hewitt, unveiled a discussion document which was spun as dealing with the issue of city “Fat Cats” – that is, directors of firms who receive bloated salaries and immense pay rises.

Her document Rewards of Failure. Directors’ Remuneration – Contracts, Performance and Severance: a consultative document is ostensibly concerned with directors whose pay schemes are disproportionate to the performance of the company under their tenure. However, it was linked by “Old Labour”-sounding concern with directors’ pay.

“Fat Cats” were on the news agenda already – the shareholders of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had voted the previous month to not allow a £22 million severance scheme for the director of their company. News items had been filled with images of the little people standing up to the corporate monster – complete with tweedy little old ladies and retired majors venting their frustration at the iniquity of directors remuneration packages growing as the value of their shares dwindled.

Similar resolutions at the general meetings of the HSBC bank and Corus, the steel firm, failed, with large institutional shareholders voting down the myriad small-holders. In the latter instance, the TUC noted in a press release that the workers at that company are under threat of pay freeze or even redundancy.

The trade unions have been banging on for years about “Fat Cat” pay. During long years of wage restraint the TUC and trade unions have complained about “inflation busting” pay rises for top executives. How, they ask, can freezes on the wages of a company’s employees be justified when directors are merrily awarding themselves massive pay packages, at many times the going rate of inflation (which is what most workers’ pay rises are held to)?

Many see condemnation of the “Fat Cats” as an old left, radical position, a useful bit of demagoguery. Clearly, it doesn’t hurt Labour every now and again to voice concerns over “Fat Cats”, especially so long as they hedge it, as the Trade and Industry Secretary did, in terms of supporting the rewards of success. All of this is a gift to the Tories, who are no doubt preparing “politics of envy speeches” at this very moment.

The problem, as can be seen by anyone who takes a moment to examine the way in which capitalism works, is that taking on the “Fat Cats” is emphatically not a radical position. It is, rather, taking sides in a dispute between capitalists and their lackeys on the boardrooms of their corporations. That is, there is no gain to be had from any of this for the workers – were the “Fat Cat” fees to be slashed, the ones to gain would not be the workers, but the shareholders, the capitalists who actually own the companies.

As Marx pointed out in Volume III of Capital, shares are not real capital, but “a share of the stock is merely a title of ownership to a corresponding portion of the surplus-value to be realised by it”. That is, share certificates represent a title to a share in the profits to be derived from capital that has already been invested in the form of the assets of a given company. These shares have no intrinsic value themselves, but can be assigned one based on the amount of income they represent. That is, the dividends – payments due to share holders – amount to a specific return on the magnitude of the share value, and should that income rise or fall, the nominal value of the shares will rise and fall accordingly.

Large companies are in competition with one another to attract new shareholders (through the issuance of new shares), and existing shareholders want to see the value of their initial investment rise. Thus, companies have to ensure that the size of their dividends is competitive compared to the general market. If the returns on the shares in a specific company are higher than in the general market, demand for them will rise, and their putative value will rise accordingly. Thus, the ratio of return will remain roughly the same as that on shares in other companies.

This means that, to stay in business, the board of directors of a firm must pay dividends on a regular basis. A good example of this was the failed Railtrack railway owning company in Britain, which managed to find funds for its shareholders dividends, despite not raising a commercial profit. It managed this largely by selling off assets, mostly land and facilities. The board of directors also has the unfortunate responsibility of setting the pay for its members.

Share in surplus value

As Hewitt’s consultative document shows, this process is regulated by legislation on the pay of directors. The members of boards of directors are chosen by, and normally from amongst, the shareholders to administer their affairs for them and in their interest. That is, they act of behalf of the absentee owners, who have now become utterly redundant to the supervision and reproduction of their own capital accumulation let alone to the actual process of production. Someone does not become a capitalist purely by dint of being the managing director of a capitalist firm. However, the possibility exists – through the position of being in practical control of the companies – for the directors to arrange affairs so that they may cream off some of the profits that would otherwise go to the absentee shareholders.

In the case of most directors it is not a free market that sets their “pay”, i.e., their share of surplus value in return for managing the affairs of the other shareholders. They apply networks of association to restrict access to the jobs, and then set one another’s pay. They have a number of means by which they can supplement the appearance of receiving a set salary. They pay each other bonuses for performance, which they get automatically, no matter how they have performed. They get share options, the right to buy shares at a future date at a set price, which will usually be less than the going market price (giving them an instant windfall). They get, as they tried to get at GSK, severance packages that ensure massive payments on departure.

These directors use control over the process of exploitation to secure a share in the surplus value produced. The source, ultimately, of capitalist profits is the difference between the price of product of labour, and the cost of hiring the specific types of labour involved in realising it. That is, between the value of the work we do, and the cost of maintaining and reproducing our capacity to do that work. That is, the profit falling to capital is set by the conditions in the labour market which regulate how hard they can make employees work, and how much they can pay them. Once that profit has been realised, there is no essential mechanism determining how that profit is divided among the various members of the capitalist class.

This becomes a matter for legal and contractual relations between capitalists, as they use a variety of rights to secure their share of the profit, with landowners securing rent, financiers securing interest, etc. Each takes a profit from the total of surplus value extracted. In the case of stock held companies, the shareholders take their share in the form of dividends. The board of directors are able, in this circumstance, to use their position, to secure whatever profit remains after the dividends have been paid out.

In effect, the directors are swindling the shareholders, taking a share in their profits, based on the fact that they aren’t in a position to control the directors effectively. Hence why it is shareholders who are leading the attack against “Fat Cats” – they understand that it is their money that is paying those salaries, it is their profit that is supporting the half million pounds or more a year for a top corporate director. It is, for all its apparent radicalism, a spat over who gets the booty, who gets what share of the unpaid labour of the working class.

These facts are reflected in the craven pro-shareholder outpourings from the TUC on this subject. In their press release “TUC join with Dutch and German unions against excessive executive pay”, they maintain that “business legitimacy is being eroded as Europe’s citizens are shocked by further examples of this new creed of greed” and that “too often in recent years it has seemed that executives regard companies as vehicles for self-enrichment rather than for the creation of wealth for all stakeholders” which they interpret by asking “are these excessive executive pay arrangements in the interests of shareholders, and likely to lead to wealth creation?”

Socialists look at this trend and stand by their contention that it is the workers who produce the wealth, and the capitalists who make their profits from our unpaid labour. Further, we look upon this squabbling between the capitalists and their agents, and see how redundant the capitalist has become to the whole economic process. The “Fat Cats” question is a matter of a spat among parasites. Rather than seeking to hold down the pay of the directors, we should be seeking to take control of the productive process for ourselves, so that the immense riches it produces can be directed toward our benefit not theirs.

Pik Smeet

Lies, half-truths and weapons of mass destruction (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Every day Saddam remains in power with chemical weapons, biological weapons, and the development of nuclear weapons is a day of danger for the United States.” Sen. Joseph Lieberman, September 4, 2002

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” George Bush, March 18, 2003

“I have no doubt we’re going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.” Kenneth Adelman, US Defense Policy Board , March 23, 2003

“Saddam’s removal is necessary to eradicate the threat from his weapons of mass destruction.” Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary 2 April, 2003

“For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” Paul Wolfowitz, May 28, 2003

In the months leading up to the US-led invasion of Iraq, the Bush-Blair regimes produced reams of documents to prove Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam could realistically fire them within 45 minutes. As they geared up for war they reiterated time and again that their intention was solely to rid Iraq of its WMD and make the world a more stable place for decent and god-fearing people to live in. They campaigned long and hard for their war – for the support of their peers in governments and for the backing of the US and British electorates and, convinced they had the mandate for war, invaded Iraq in March. Two months after the end of the fighting no “illegal” weapons have been found and the odds of finding any diminish greatly as the days go by.

The recent admission from a British security chief that the 50-page “intelligence” report on Iraq’s WMD presented by Tony Blair to Parliament on 24 September last year – and used as the Labour government’s evidence for Iraq’s illicit weapons inventory – was spiced up on the government’s instructions came as no real surprise for those who have scrutinised the unfolding of the US-UK war with Iraq and the Labour government’s desperation to be part of it. Since the transatlantic plan to invade Iraq was hatched it was apparent that Truth would again be the First Casualty of War.

For their part, the CIA and their British counterparts have tried to distance themselves from their respective governments these past few weeks, with unprecedented briefings and leaks to the press, desperate to avoid the backlash that has lead to some serious questioning in London and Washington.

On a visit to Poland on 30 May, Tony Blair told a press conference that finding the weapons in Iraq was “not the most urgent priority”. And yet, according to the claims of the dossier that he defends, Saddam Hussein “has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability” and that his “current military planning specifically envisages the use” of these weapons. For months we had the Blair government ramming the WMD issue down our throats, pleading for our support for his war with Saddam, who threatened the civilisation we cherished. Yet as Saddam and his military top brass, who presumably know about these WMD, which are yet to be found, are still on the run we are told that finding the weapons is not an urgent priority!

Also now discredited by the CIA is the evidence US Secretary of State Colin Powell eagerly displayed to the UN Security Council at the beginning of February. Powell provided explicit particulars of the key players in Iraq’s WMD programme as well as the sites that are now under US military control. Nevertheless, the biologically-armed “missile brigade”, which he claimed was situated outside Baghdad has proved to be a figment of his imagination and the weapons scientists he informed the world were afraid of talking because of Saddam’s reach have not yet disclosed any secrets. As with the alleged “poison camp” near Khurmal, its labyrinth of tunnels and complex chemical communication network, so too with the photos of twenty or so Baghdad-based al-Qa’ida members the UN was presented with. No evidence whatsoever.

In spite of every quality newspaper demanding answers from him in the wake of the secret services admission, Blair, it seemed, was learning nothing. Rather than running for cover he began blurting more lies, claiming that Iraq tried to purchase uranium from the African state of Niger. The documentary evidence this fresh allegation was based on has since been confirmed as forgery by the International Atomic Energy Authority. Indeed, the Bush administration was aware that this evidence was bogus a year earlier – something Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have since admitted. Moreover, early last year Vice President Dick Cheney sent a former US ambassador in Africa to Niger look into the story. Although the latter brought back word that the documents were not genuine, this was not sufficient to prevent the use of these documents as part of Bush’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq.

The sorry situation becomes more pathetic. US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld has lately offered that the reason Saddam’s WMD can’t be found is because they were destroyed before the war started. In other words the US-Britain invaded Iraq to rid the region of weapons Saddam never had and indeed that Saddam claimed he never had and which the UN weapons inspectors suggested he never had. If this was the case, then Saddam could never have been in breach of the famous resolution 1441, which was the justification for war.

Critics might consider that in light of recent revelations Blair should resign and that Bush should be impeached. Surely politicians should not be allowed to lie like this! But hold on.

Lying is the trade of politicians under capitalism.

Back in 1925, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf: “This broad mass of a nation . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Blair and Bush are fully aware of the power of the big lie, so little wonder they thought they could get away with it. Moreover they are fully aware their support base swallows lies every living moment of the day. For the workers’ part they are lied to from the cradle to the grave: at school with distortions of history and the myth about a God up above; in the workplace, as producers, lied to by their bosses and at home as consumers bombarded with the myths perpetuated by the advertising industry.

To be sure, the entire capitalist edifice depends for its continued survival on the promotion of lies, half truths and the distortion of facts. So powerful is the capitalist distortion machine that it takes all our powers of concentration, memory recall and skills of research just to separate the simplest of lies from fantasy. This constant digest of misinformation perhaps explains the amnesia the majority of workers appear to suffer from. And what is exasperating is that in spite of all the evidence revealing the architects of war to be the conniving and scheming rapscallions we always knew them to be, it is a fair bet that many workers will again be ready to believe their lies when Iran is found to be stockpiling WMD and harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists.

It may well be that WMD will be found in Iraq – but the assumption now will be that will have been planted there by corrupt Western regimes desperate to justify their invasion. And this evidence will likely be used not only to prop up the discredited Messrs Bush and Blair but also to malign the anti-war movement – which claimed this was a war for oil – and to further strengthen their case for a continuation of the “war on terror”.

In the months ahead be careful what you swallow.

John Bissett

Food for profit: food for thought (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The work of growing and preparing food should involve pleasure, not exploitation of those engaged in it. The environment should not be damaged by profit-seeking, short-term policies for “marketing” food. The consumption of food should be a healthy activity based on need, not ability to pay.

Capitalism cares little about the working conditions of the people who produce food, the effects on the environment of how it is produced, or the well-being of its consumers. Socialism will mean a fundamentally different set of priorities regarding food – no exploitation of producers, proper regard for environmental consequences, need not profit as the motive for distributing and consuming it.

Exploiting producers

There is ample and growing evidence that workers engaged in the food industry are among the most exploited and poverty-stricken producers of a vital “commodity”. This is especially so in the Third World. The Guardian (17 May) gave details of the working conditions and daily lives of wage-slaves in just one African country, Kenya. The general picture, if not the details, could be repeated in many other parts of the economically underdeveloped and developing world.

A group of Kenyan women are picked up by the company truck from their homes at 4 am to arrive at the workplace in time for the 4.30 am shift, which lasts until 3.40 or 4 pm, as laid down by Kenyan law. Their job is to top and tail beans for the English market. They work in refrigerated packing sheds next to Nairobi airport, standing at stainless steel benches. They work “flexitime”, depending on the amount of orders they have to complete each day. Sometimes they can go home early, but if the orders are big they have to work until they are finished.

Gladys (not her real name) is dead on her feet after a 12-hour shift with only one break. She lives with her husband and three children and works to earn enough money to send them to school. In the block where she lives 100 people share a lavatory and outside tap. She has no choice about the hours she works or the way she is paid. There is no overtime, but performance-related pay instead. The employer’s representative is candid about this: “We’ve found that by introducing PRP we can reduce the number of the workforce.”

Environmental consequences

The capitalist food industry is bad for the environment as well as for the workers. In many parts of Africa and elsewhere, land where people were growing food for local consumption has been turned over to land growing food for export – cash crops. The greenhouses and tunnels of the intensive farms shrink the lakes and blight the shores with algal bloom. There is excessive extraction to water the crops, pollution from pesticide run off, deforestation caused by the logging industry and workers having to cut wood for cooking fuel.

In the last 20 years or so there has been much controversy over the introduction of genetically modified crops. There is nothing inherently damaging to people or the environment about genetic modification. For thousands of years the seeds of plants with more desirable characteristics have been selected for planting the following year – in effect, a form of genetic modification. What is harmful is not the technique but its use in the pursuit of profit. Agribusinesses have sought to patent the “terminator” gene introduced into plants. Crops are harvested normally, but the germ of the grain is sterile and seeds have to be purchased each year. Only in capitalism, where the prime aim is not human welfare but profit, could such a mad idea be put into practice.

Bad for consumers

Food today is bad for consumers in a number of ways, all connected with the market system. On a world scale there are crises of starvation and obesity happening at the same time in different places. Peasants who were once self-sufficient can no longer earn a living from their produce. Increasing numbers of people in the economically developed world grow grossly fat and unhealthy on the heavily promoted commodities of the junk-food industry.

Capitalist methods of food production have led to a number of outbreaks of food poisoning resulting in deaths and serious health damage. In the 1980s it was the injection of hormones into calves to fatten them quicker that led to birth defects. There followed salmonella, E coli, BSE and a spate of more recent food scandals. The causes are a mix of misuse of GM technology, pesticides that induce cancers, animal maltreatment, no or inadequate labelling, and abysmal hygiene standards. Market forces always value profits above human welfare. Whatever remedial measures are taken are usually too little and too late.

Food in socialism

Marx famously dissuaded us from writing recipes for future cookshops. We can speculate about the future, but would be wise not to go into too much detail. However, since socialists advocate the replacement of capitalism with socialism we are obliged to outline, at least in principle, how the new system will work. Without majority agreement and action on these principles some form of capitalism, reformed or unreformed, will continue.

Socialism means a classless society – no working class employed and exploited to produce food among other commodities, no capitalist class to own the means of food and other production and distribution. With no workers required to be employed in activities useful only in capitalism – banking, insurance, the war industry, among many others – more of us will be able to devoted more time and energies to producing and distributing food. With profit no longer the spur to activity, short-term policies leading to environmental damage will give way to long-term and sustainable policies.

Probably there will still be big eaters and small eaters, vegetarians and carnivores, even those who like fast food once it is rid of its capitalist connotations. In our pamphlet Socialist Principles Explained we discuss how food production and distribution may be organised in a socialist world. To some extent existing bodies like the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the UN may be converted and used for socialist purposes. But it may be that other and novel arrangements will be called for.

Socialists today lean towards being technophiles or simple-lifers, or somewhere in between. Some of us look to a future of socialist restaurants and hotels and less home cooking – others like the idea of having more time for artisanal rather than industrial food production and preparation. All tastes will be catered for.

Stan Parker

The dotcom bubble (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1990s, with the world’s economy and stock markets driven largely by the dotcom internet telecommunication advances, it was claimed by capitalist spokesmen that this would result in ever-increasing productivity along with rising prosperity. This was the view propagated by Greenspan in the United States and by Gordon Brown in the UK.

House prices soared, along with internet stocks, to record levels. Borrowers already highly in debt borrowed even more against their assets in what has become known as the feel-good factor.

In spite of the optimistic forecasts by Greenspan and Gordon Brown the boom ended, in a slump as socialists had forecast. Capitalist politicians struggled to adopt measures to halt the economic deterioration by juggling with interest rates and money supply, attempting to avoid the inevitable downturn. The fact of the matter is that we are in an environment which is now inevitably accompanied by rising business failures and unemployment. Hardly a week passes without the announcement of some pension scheme being unable to meet its obligations, Marconi and Equitable Life to mention only two.

It is not uncommon for workers to lose not only their jobs but a large part of their pensions as well. Due to the greater life expectancy it is doubtful whether pensions as we know them will survive. How the funding of pensions conflicts with adequate pensions schemes was explained in the August 2002 Socialist Standard (“Pensions, pay and poverty”). Members of Parliament will have no worries, however, as they regularly vote for generous increases in salaries and pensions.

In France recently there have been large demonstrations against the extension of the contribution period to 41 years in order to qualify for a full pension as a government employee. Pension funding problems in Italy and Germany greatly exceed those of the UK. Why has this happened? Why did the dotcom internet “revolution” fail to produce the lasting upsurge in production, profits and prosperity that the official spokesman promised?

To claim, as do present-day economists, that new inventions in production based on faster communications increasing turnover are novel developments of capitalism is fallacious. Marx and Engels were well aware of this but, unlike the present-day politicians, were aware of its consequences.

In chapter 4 of Volume III of Capital, Marx (in fact Engels from Marx’s notes) describes how in his day the introduction of wireless telegraphy, the Suez Canal, and the resultant reduction in shipping time led to a reduction in the time of circulation of capital and refers to “the entire globe being girdled by telegraph wires”. Marx was aware of the effect of improved communications on circulation of capital and its period of turnover and the resultant effect on profits. But in no sense did he see it as producing a permanent social change for the better in the form of steadily rising prosperity. He pointed out that the resultant decrease in the period of turnover leads to a rise in the rate of profit. The dotcom “revolution” had this same effect, which led to capitalists investing in the new technology attracted by the prospect of bigger profits. As usual, there was too much investment leading to what is commonly called a “bubble” which inevitably burst.

The claims of orthodox economics to be a science is dubious. To be so it would have to have measurable units just as chemistry, for instance, has atomic and molecular weights. Having no precise units of measurements, they resort to terms such as “confidence”, “market outlook”, and “aggregate supply and demand factors”. Central to their theories is the belief that the capitalist economy can be managed without periodic economic crises. Clearly, history shows that this does not happen.

We are now in a situation where rival capitalist powers cut their respective interest rates in order to lower currency values against their rivals. One of the main factors in determining a currency value is real interest rates (nominal rate minus the rate of price increases). Nominal rates rise with inflation but this does not mean that real interest rates do. However, if inflation falls and nominal rates remain the same then real interest rates rise. This effect can currently be seen in Germany with a soaring euro reflecting high real interest rates.

Nominal interest rates in the UK today are at their lowest for fifty years. As prices fall consumers do not automatically increase spending if they feel the goods will be cheaper in the near future. If goods are sold more cheaply to clear stock, this will result in a fall in profits. The result of this pushes the economy towards recession, the opposite of the brave new world we were promised as the result of the internet dotcom “revolution”.

At the same time the economy sees the unwinding of debt. As businesses are liquidated so the money goes out of the system. Those economic historians who base their opinions of the view that economic history commenced in 1945 have seen steadily rising prices as a permanent feature of capitalism. Many are now saying it cannot go much lower than it is now.

Because a downward pressure on prices, other things being equal, is an inevitable corollary of depressions, Greenspan has made if clear that he is prepared to buy US government bonds in order to maintain liquidity although interest rates are already 1.25 percent in the United States.

Gordon Brown, the King Canute of Economics, has even stated that, by balancing public expenditure and taxation, the economy could be managed without economic crises. GDP has failed to achieve the levels he forecast. When he and other world leaders congregate at their G7 and G8 meetings, as they did last month in Evian, their ruminations fail to come up with any measures to remedy capitalism’s problems. Its problems are inherent as are its inbuilt contradictions which cannot be managed away.

Terry Lawlor

A challenge to Leninism (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s frustrating that the terms “Marxists” and “Socialist” seem to get bandied around far too much these days, with their real meaning lost, and that we in the Socialist Party have to contend with other parties claiming to be socialist, when they most certainly are not. These various “Marxist-Leninist” parties (SWP, Militant, Socialist Alliance, Scottish Socialist Party, etc) claim they are socialists, but their conception of socialism has nothing to do with common ownership, production for need or Marxist economics. They appear to hold to the title of “Marxist” as some kind of badge of honour, but reject the actual real views of Marx and instead align themselves with the works of Lenin.

These parties often criticise us by claiming (as, recently, on the World Socialist Movement discussion forum) that our members don’t get involved in the class struggle, as in the issues of low pay and unemployment. For members to become more visible on these issues in their unions, etc would be a plus, but the danger must be avoided of getting too caught up in such issues and losing track of the actual aim of our party, the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a democratic association of peoples, world socialism.

Leninist groups pursue the tactic of trying to reform capitalism by concentrating on adjusting it, in order to become more popular among workers. This is a wasted effort, since the entire system is based on a minority exploiting a majority. To expend all energy in demands for a more amicable capitalism is not what socialists should aim for, as, even in the event of success, the primary evils of capitalism would still remain i.e. production for profit, extraction of surplus value and all the other unfair and sickening features of modern capitalism. The main effort of socialists should be aiming for socialism itself.

In any event, any gains made in the class struggle for better pay and conditions are still open to being eroded by the inevitable capitalist counter-attack, and without a socialist understanding, the workers will not be able to climb out of the rut of capitalism. So the cycle would continue, with workers making some gains, but then the capitalist class launches a counter offensive by either attacking the gain itself or attacking from some other direction. Workers do have to engage with the issues of pay and work conditions, but the main issue is the overthrow of capitalism, not picking away at it and then having your own gains eroded sooner or later. In thinking of the class war as an actual war, the drive for a socialist understanding in the working class and the creation of a socialist society should be the main front, demanding the most effort, while everyday issues of pay and conditions and defending the gains that have been made would be a secondary front.

It is open to speculation what many of these “socialist” groups are actually aiming for outside of immediate issues. Since they describe themselves as Leninist, it is perhaps worthwhile to take a closer look at Leninism in practice. Often little is known about Lenin by the rank and file of these groups, because he has been surrounded by an almost god-like mythic persona, but with a little research it’s easy to uncover his anti-socialist views and actions. Once the myths are dispelled from this man that these parties hold in such high regard, it can shed some light on what sort of society they themselves envisage.

Lenin was from a privileged family. His main passion seemed to be for the politics of Chernyshevsky, the author of a novel entitled What is to be done? which inspired Lenin’s work of the same title. He also admired the ways of the “Peoples Will”, an anti-Tsarist revolutionary group, known for its acts of violence against the established order, and its vanguardist ideas. So we can see here where his ideas of a vanguard party stemmed from. It is very likely that Lenin never cared for socialism in the real sense, simply desiring to harness the discontent of the masses into smashing the old social order that had rejected him and then placing him in charge of a new regime.

The very act that many of these so-called socialist groups hold up in reverence, the storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in November 1917, was not done by a mass of politically aware workers, but by a few hundred Bolshevik soldiers in the dead of night. While they claim that this was a spontaneous seizure of power by the workers, what can be seen is that it was timed to occur before the Soviet Congress could convene, and so guaranteeing Bolshevik supremacy in the soviets and little chance for a free democratic vote on the form any new government should take. This ties in with the Leninist notion of “democratic centralism”. It’s very plausible that if the Soviet Congress had had a free vote, the Bolsheviks would have had to share power with their arch-rivals the Mensheviks. It was also likely that Lenin himself would have been kept out of office due to the mistrust that many of the Mensheviks and other anti-Tsarist revolutionaries justly held him in. Clearly, Lenin could not allow this; to have had to share power with people who challenged and disagreed with him would have been intolerable for a man such as himself. To not even have any power in the event of other parties demanding he be left out of the new government was his nightmare.

So now, when we hear certain left wing parties praise Lenin and the USSR when he ruled it, and look with disdain upon our methods of seeking a democratic socialist understanding among the working class, let us remember the society their idol, Lenin, created, and ask ourselves “Was that Socialism? Is that what we want?” The answer is of course no. No worker should wish to relive the nightmares and mistakes of the past.

Dan Read

Stop All Wars (2003)

From the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wars never solved any problems of the ordinary people such as hunger, poverty, proper health care, access to education, housing, etc. In fact, they have brought the opposite – death, deprivation and the necessity to rebuild war-torn lands. That’s because wars are never about ordinary people. We have no quarrels with the common people of Iraq or Afghanistan or any other area. We actually have a lot in common. We all want peace and security for our families and a chance to participate in and share the production of wealth. Nobody wants to see starving or homeless people.

War is the natural and inevitable consequence of the economic system under which we live and toil. Its competitive nature, its greedy necessity to accumulate capital, to continually grow and expand wherever there is a chance to profit, leads to conflict over strategic territories, areas rich in resources and rights and routes of trade. This has created a series of armed camps with the boundaries of countries used as the line in the sand.

It has also necessitated huge expenditures on armed forces and their equipment – close to $800 billion last year—to protect the interests of those who own the means of production but do not produce – the capitalists. When those interests are sufficiently threatened, or perceived to be, war usually results. When we have a system that works for everyone, when the means of production and distribution of wealth are owned and operated by and in the interests of all, we will be able to use the huge sums that are now wasted on war for human needs.

www.worldsocialism.org

Leaflet distributed recently in Toronto by Socialist Party of Canada members

Obituary: Bert Mayes (2003)

Obituary from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to have to report the death in June of our comrade Bert Mayes at the age of 86. He was not in fact our oldest member but he was the one who had been a member the longest, having joined the old Battersea branch in 1934 while a teenager. He came from a told pro-working clan background with two of his uncles being members. As a socialist he refused to be conscripted to fight fellow workers in the Second World War. After the War he transferred to Ealing branch and took part in that branch's intense canvassing for the Socialist Standard in the 1950s and spoke from time to time on the outdoor platform as well as being a Conference delegate. He was an active member of the TGWU and in fact tended to think that socialists should take more interest in the short-term problems confronting workers under capitalism. For instance, he took the view, when the Tories brought in the notorious 1957 Rent Act that drastically reduced rent control that it was not enough to argue that in the long run this would not make much difference since if rents went up wages would follow. Right up to the end he used to call into Head Office in Clapham to pay his subscription to the Socialist Standard.

The Party was represented at his funeral in Morden and our condolences go out to his wife and family.

Greasy Pole: The Importance of Being Irvine (2003)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

It sounds like the kind of question which might have come in a sticky passage a few weeks ago in Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Who was the most senior and the highest paid member of the government? You want to ask the audience: most of them think it had to be the Prime Minister. So you want to phone a friend; they think it’s a trick question and it was the Chancellor of the Exchequer because he’s responsible for taxes. Bad luck; you’ve just lost a few thousand pounds because the correct answer was the Lord Chancellor, who technically – and traditionally – outranked the Prime Minister and earned a lot more because his pay was linked to what the judges got while common or garden ministers and MPs had to rub along on pay linked to that of senior civil servants. After a rise of £22,691 – a lot more than the basic pay of many people in a year – the Lord Chancellor trousered £202,736, compared to the Prime Minister’s £175,414 and other Cabinet ministers £127,791. For the Lord Chancellor it got even better: his pay was protected by what used to be called a differential – a whopping one, which ensured that he always gets a lot more than that other legal bigwig the Lord Chief Justice.

Of course some of the lucky recipients of that kind of money might be expected to be a bit bashful, especially as they earn some of it by telling the rest of the people to be satisfied with much, much less to get by on. But politicians are not famous for being bashful about their double, or treble, or quadruple, standards. One who went to great lengths to avoid a reputation for bashfulness or restraint in his self-indulgences is the man who was Lord Chancellor until Blair’s recent re-shuffle which not only got rid of him but abolished his job. An event which must have brought back memories for workers who were similarly treated in the steel industry, the coal mines, the shipyards . . . He answers to the title of Lord Irvine of Lairg – or Derry as he is known to any friends he has or to those who are trying to help their careers along by being seen as his friend. Early in the life of the new Blair government Irvine put down his marker when he made it plain that he had no intention of agreeing to forego the £16,000 rise which ministers were awarding themselves but which Chancellor Gordon Brown thought they should not have. Then there was the matter of the £650,000 spent on the refurbishment of his official residence, including the famous hand-blocked wallpaper, which at 300 pounds a roll pounds cannot be bought at the local B&Q, and the gothic beds at £16,000 each and the works of art which were “donated” by museums and the like.

Humble Origins

Clearly, Irvine regarded himself as something special. In fact he came from beginnings which were very much run of the mill of the working class. His father was a tiler and his mother a waitress. Young Derry looked beyond such a life: he won a scholarship to a posh school then took degrees at Glasgow and Cambridge Universities. He became a barrister and set up chambers where he employed a future Prime Minister, who met his future wife among the dusty law books and beribboned briefs in the Irvine chambers. Whatever favours Irvine may be thought to have done for the man he continued to call “young Blair” were amply repaid when the first Labour Prime Minister for almost twenty years signalled the end of the times of privilege and nepotism by appointing his old mate to be the highest judge in the land. Which suited Irvine to the tips of his elegant footwear because he was by then notorious for his arrogance and his bullying, a man who had to have a flunky peel his oranges for him, a man of whom a fellow peer could say “You have to think through carefully what you are going to say to him for fear of getting your balls burned off”.

The job of Lord Chancellor involved being both judge and politician, which was well suited to Irvine. Apart from his passion for the finer things in life he had a reputation for being swollen with his own importance. In October 1997, not long in the job, in a speech to the Reform Club he compared himself to Cardinal Wolsey, who basked in the favours of Henry VIII and who was also fond of a lavish life style, which was why he had Hampton Court built for himself. It was not an entirely happy comparison because Wolsey fell out of Henry’s good books and ended his days ducking and diving to avoid being tried (and almost certainly executed) for treason. Irvine’s pomposity may have been punctured when his son Alistair got 16 months in a Los Angeles prison for stalking and threatening the boyfriend of a woman who had dumped him. In any case young Blair has now decided that the solution to a number of questions is to move Irvine over and make room for another old chum in Lord Falconer, who is said to be as clever as Irvine but by no means as arrogant. There was the usual exchange of letters, which were unusually frosty in tone.

Irvine’s retirement had been copiously leaked; it was whispered that Blair was losing patience with his old boss because he was not living up to his promise to reform the legal systems. Perhaps more to the point, the tabloids were after Irvine – and if there thing which concerns Blair it is to appease the gutter press. In some ways the Lord Chancellorship was an open target for the tabloids, for of all the grand jobs in the government it was about the grandest. Apart from the mediaeval clothes and sitting on something called the Woolsack (which is in fact a sack of wool) he had more than one job. He was head of the judiciary, with the last say in the appointment (and the sacking) of the judges and the magistrates. He was Speaker of the House of Lords (where a previous man in the job, Lord Hailsham, would sit on the Woolsack muttering “bollocks” in response to the speeches of some of the noble lords). And he was a member of the Cabinet, in the chair of several committees. His style of running those committees was not universally popular because he was in the habit of acting like a prosecutor with ministers as the criminals in the dock.

Judges and Politics

Of course ministers often have multiple responsibilities. The unusual thing about the Lord Chancellorship was the apparent clash between being head judge and a member of the Cabinet, which at the least questioned whether the Courts were as insulated from political pressure as they were supposed to be. One of the problems with Irvine was that he used the combined roles to avoid disciplining judges. Hailsham, applying the kind of logic which is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals, argued that the very unity of the roles was an insurance that they would be kept separate. The Council of Europe took a different view, saying that the dual responsibility is a contravention of human rights; in February eleven members of the Council signed a resolution which said the arrangement called the independence of the judges “seriously into question”. This was widely welcomed and not necessarily in the tabloids, which are not expected to concern themselves with such arcane questions. Roger Smith, the Director of Justice, said “the political powers of the Lord Chancellor can no longer be combined with a role as a judge”.

But who says they can’t? Does anyone seriously believe that judges do their job, running a court case, summing up evidence, passing sentences, in ignorance of political influences? Consider the case of Lord Denning, once one of the most eminent judges in the land, who once bemoaned the fact that the Guildford Four had not been executed because it would have prevented all that fuss about their being innocent. Denning gave his opinion in another notorious case, when the Birmingham Six applied to sue the police. In refusing the application, which was based on evidence of brutality and falsification of evidence by the police, Denning said that the mere suggestion of police corruption was “. . . such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say ‘It cannot be right that these actions should go any further’”. And when it had to be admitted, even by the most stubbornly blind, politically motivated, judge that the police had been violent and had lied, Denning made a nauseatingly lame and partial apology: “As I look back I am very sorry, because I always thought that our police were splendid and am very sorry that in this case it appears the contrary.” By then the Six had spent another eleven years in prison.

Retirement

Denning’s doomed defence of the police was based on his assumption that they must be immune from such criticism because of the part they play under capitalism. This system is based on a minority class owning the means of life, which is another way of saying that the majority are denied access to those means and can get it only with the consent of the owning class – by being employed by them. Of course the majority could help themselves but this would be a basic assault on the system so there is a vast and complex structure, called the law and the legal system, which prevents them doing this. At the sharp end of that structure are the police. To challenge this is to take on the very weaponry with which capitalism asserts its essentially coercive nature. Irvine’s lucrative and self-ennobling career demonstrated the grim reality of this. His going and replacement will not change things. In any case he will be getting a pension package worth £2.6 million, he will continue to sit as a judge, and then there is always the chance of the odd directorship or consultancy, writing his memoirs, or joining the after-dinner speaking circuit. He will not want. It will be even better for him than if he had won Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

Ivan

The Persistence of Religious Ideas (2003)

Book Review from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Persistence of Religious Ideas in the 21st Century: a Contribution to a Debate, Revolutions Per Minute, number 10. £3

This short pamphlet is like the proverbial curate’s egg: good in parts, but addled by the political purpose this work is supposed to serve. There are references to working class liberation, but Lenin and assorted anarchists are quoted approvingly. Marx is also quoted and it is of course from him that we get the most famous quotation concerning religion: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” However, the basic assumption in this pamphlet that an anti-religious thinker is worthwhile as long as they oppose religion is open to challenge. Antony Flew, a leading light in the Rationalist Press Association (full contact details are given in the pamphlet) and past debater with the Socialist Party, is a vehement opponent of both religion and socialism. Mere opposition to religion is not enough, and a religion-free capitalism (as Flew wants) would not bring socialism any nearer.

So why have religious ideas proved so persistent? Religion, the pamphlet argues, “is the tool which helps to explain away fundamental inequalities which are rooted in material circumstances (that is, economic realities). It is in this sense that debates about whether God exists or not are irrelevant. Changing economic realities will inevitably lead to the redundancy of the religious imperative . . . God exists only for as long as the economic realities which created him exist; when these wither away, so will he.”

For socialists, the struggle against religion cannot be separated from the struggle for socialism. We fight religious superstition wherever it is an obstacle to socialism, but we are opposed to religion only insofar as it is an obstacle to socialism. We leave the atheist gospel to those organizations that specialize in the spreading of secularist reason.

Lew Higgins

Socialist Party Summer School: Whatever happened to the working class? (2003)

Party News from the July 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Party Summer School: Whatever happened to the working class?

Fircroft College, Birmingham 11th-13th July 2003

A weekend of talks, discussion and more on the theme of class politics, class identity and changes in the working class here and abroad.

Friday evening: "The working class in the West"

We begin the weekend by looking at the changes in the way we work.

Saturday morning: "The new working class"

Matt Vaughan-Wilson examines the growth of the 'new' working class.

Saturday afternoon: "Is socialism really a class position."

Considers whether we should increase the strength of the movement by putting forward a humanitarian case for socialism.

Saturday evening: "  . . . because you're worth it"

Mike Foster discusses the ingredients and effects of capitalist myth making, and considers what we can do to counter it.

Sunday morning: "Whatever happened to class politics?"

Until recently it was generally accepted that there was such a thing as the working class, Now, though class is rarely mentioned Vince Otter asks, has class politics gone for good?

£105 for the whole weekend, including meals and accommodation

(Concessionary rates available)