Ubiquitous Marr (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A History of Modern Britain. Bt Andrew Marr. Macmillan, 2007, £25.

Some readers will find much to like about this book, written by the ubiquitous teleMarr, radioMarr and Daily Marr and based on his recent TV series on BBC2. It is entertaining, witty, good-humoured – and never boring. Others will be less keen, seeing its 630 pages as obese and garrulous, stuffed with descriptive detail but light on discussion of ideas (do we really want to pay good money to learn about Churchill “sitting in his hospital bed wearing pale blue pyjamas with a silk shirt and cardigan?”)

The book has five parts, each covering about a decade from the end of the World War II to the present time. Marr sums up the 1945-51 period: “Labour had made Britain a little more civilized and certainly fairer. But it had accomplished nothing like a revolution.” He write of “a certain vision of British socialism” and the word socialist (as noun or adjective) is used dozens of times in the book. But always it refers to Old Labour people or policies like nationalisation.

Part Two, titled “The Land of Lost Content” (meaning happiness) is about the 13 years of Tory government, (1951-64). Marr drops a few top political names (Macmillan, Home), rakes some sexual muck (Profumo, Vassall) and celebrates miscellaneous celebrities of the time (Ernest Marples, the Beatles, Sir Bernard Docker). Domestically, manufacturing industry and shipbuilding were in decline and “the growth of car mania” was under way. Internationally, Suez was a disaster, and British Empire was reducing to Commonwealth of nations.

 

Part Three takes us on to the years 1964-79. Andy calls this part “Harold, Ted and Jim”, meaning Heath’s Conservative government was sandwiched between the Labour governments of Wilson and Callaghan. Economics is one theme: the balance of payments crises, the pre-Thatcher rise of the free market, the overflowing rubbish winter of discontent (1979). Internationally, Rhodesia broke away from British rule, and the “troubles” in Ireland got worse. But Marr seems most enthused by cultural issues: legalising homosexuality, reducing censorship, the growth of the pop music and celebrity industries.

The author calls Part Four “The British Revolution” (1979-90). He means Thatcherism. It “heralded an age of unparalleled consumption, credit, show-off wealth, quick bucks and sexual libertinism.” Marr believes that Thatcher was “extremely lucky. Had Labour not been disembowelling itself and had a corrupt, desperate dictatorship in South America not taken a materialistic gamble with some island sheep-farmers, her government would probably have been destroyed after a single term.” Maybe – probably not. It’s idle speculation. More solid is Marr’s account of why Labour lost power after and took 18 years to regain it: briefly, failure to deliver on promises.

Marr lingers for six crocodile-tear splashed pages over Thatcher’s political death. The poll tax was a disaster for her. “One by one the inner core of true Thatcherism fell back.” She eventually resigned, but not before fixing John Major as her successor.

Part Five, oddly called “Nippy Metro People”, brings us up to date. First there are seven Major years and then a Blair decade. The blurb for the book talks of “the victory of shopping over politics… a culture of consumerism, celebrity and self-gratification.” Marr reviews recent economic and political events: the pound not going in with the euro, the modernisers of Labour who moved it away from the “unelectable” left. But again he gives prominence to cultural matters: the Diana cult, New Age spiritualism, celebrity glossy magazines, the costly Dome.

On the last page Marr shows his inegalitarian hand on leadership. “[We] need those optimistic politicians, the next leaders, the ones whom we’ll laugh at and abuse. And we need them more than ever now.” Speak for yourself, Andy – only sheep need shepherds!

Stan Parker

Getting the betrayal in first (2022)

From the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘One day, it seems, Tony Blair is likely to be in Number Ten and, therefore almost certainly, will be in confrontation with public sector workers. He has, in Neil Kinnock’s rueful phrase, got his betrayal in first’ (Andrew Marr, Independent, 19 April 1995).

Marr was writing about Tony Blair when Leader of the Opposition, but he could just as well have been writing about Sir Keir Starmer today.

We can’t claim that Labour leaders have learnt nothing from the experience of the various Labour governments that there have been. Elected to power on promises to improve the lot of workers and to help trade unions achieve this, every single Labour government has ended up opposing strikes and insisting that priority be given to profit-making (some have done worse, imposing wage freezes and prosecuting strikers). In that sense they have betrayed the unions who supported them and workers who voted for them.

Starmer sees himself as the Prime Minister of a ‘government in waiting’ and knows that, in government, he too will have to resist wage demands that threaten profit-making. In sacking one of his shadow cabinet for going on a picket line without permission, he was sending out a clear message that he was fully prepared to do this.

Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite, reacted by declaring that the sacking incident showed that ‘the Labour Party was becoming more and more irrelevant to working people’. But was it ever relevant? The question that should be asked is not ‘What has the Labour Party done for us’ but ‘What has the Labour Party done to us?’

Starmer is going to behave in office as previous Labour Prime Ministers have. So what did they do to us?

In 1964 after what the Labour Party called ‘thirteen years of Tory misrule’ they got in and Harold Wilson became Prime Minister. His government started by honouring some of its promises. It abolished prescription charges and a national plan was drawn up. Then an economic crisis broke out. The pound was devalued; it maintained its face-value in people’s pockets but its purchasing power diminished due to the prices of imported goods going up. Prescription charges were re-imposed and the national plan became a scrap of paper.

From then on, it was downhill all the way as these contemporary headlines illustrate (Ray Gunther was the Minister of Labour and George Brown the Secretary of State for Economic Affairs):

• Mr Gunther Condemns Dock Move by Strikers (Times, 20 October 1964)
• Britain’s Attitudes Outdated—Premier. Country ‘cannot afford strikes’ (Guardian, 25 February 1965)
• Profit Motive as Test of Efficiency. Mr Brown’s Reply to Directors. “Government Not Anti-Business” (Times, 22 May 1965)
• Wilson Hits at Rail Go-Slow (Observer, 18 July 1965)
• Wage Restraint Vital in 1966—Premier (Financial Times, 1 January 1966)
• Folly To Press For Big Wage Rises—Chancellor (Financial Times, 18 May 1966)
• Ministers Hint At Permanent Pay Curb (Observer, 18 September 1966)
• Government Embraces Profitability (Guardian, 23 November 1966)
• Standard of Living ‘Must Fall’. Mr Gunther on Last Chance (Times, 29 March 1968)

While the need for profits was accepted, wage demands were opposed. The Labour MP, Harold Lever (later a minister and then a Lord) explained very cogently why:

‘Labour’s economic plans are not in any way geared to more nationalisation; they are directed towards increased production on the basis of the continued existence of a large private sector. Within the terms of the profit system it is not possible, in the long run, to achieve sustained increases in output without an adequate flow of profit to promote and finance them. The Labour leadership know as well as any businessman that an engine which runs on profit cannot be made to move faster without extra fuel’ (Observer, 3 April 1966).

This is still the situation today. A future Labour government under Starmer will have to work (as one under Corbyn would have had to) within the same framework of ‘the commanding heights of the economy’ being in the hands of private profit-seeking enterprises, whose necessity to make a profit must be recognised. And will be.

The Wilson Labour government was voted out of office in 1970 but Labour came back in 1974, briefly under Wilson, then under James Callaghan. The 1974-79 Labour government was just as much a disaster, provoking the notorious 1978/9 Winter of Discontent. Troops (let alone agency workers) were called out to break strikes by Glasgow refuse collectors (1975), air traffic control assistants (1977), firefighters (1977), naval dockyard workers (1978), and, finally, NHS ambulance workers (1978).

In 1979, as a reaction, the Tories under Thatcher were elected and 18 years of Tory rule followed. Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party in 1994 and immediately set about making it ‘electable’. This involved abandoning even the long-term paper commitment to changing private capitalism into state capitalism (Clause IV) and fully accepting the profit-seeking market economy. As Blair told the Financial Times (11 June, 1994):

‘We want a dynamic market economy. It is not merely that I, as it were, with hesitation acknowledge that this is the way we have to go. I say that it is positively in the public interest to have a dynamic market economy.’

Labour, under Blair, was returned to office in 1997 and, external conditions being relatively favourable, did not make such a mess of presiding over the operation of capitalism as Wilson and Callaghan had. The main reforms that the Blair Labour government introduced were constitutional rather than economic and so did not impinge on the operation of the profit-driven capitalist economy. The anti-union laws enacted under Thatcher were not repealed and are still in force today.

There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that a Starmer Labour government would be any different from previous Labour governments. The reason why these failed and ended up giving priority to profits over wages was not because its ministers were dishonest or incompetent or not resolute enough. It was because they had set themselves an impossible task. The very nature of capitalism means that it cannot work, or be made to work, in the interest of those obliged to work for wages. It is a profit-making system that can work only in the interest of the profit-takers, whose source of income is the unpaid labour of the wage-working class. Prior to the Blair government, Labour leaders had to learn this the hard way. Starmer, like Blair, knows that, for the reasons explained by Harold Lever in 1966, a future Labour government would have to let capitalism work this way. At least he is being candid about his intentions. Workers and unions should take heed.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Original Sin (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Original Sin 

In 2012, broadcaster and current affairs pundit Andrew Marr wrote and produced a BBC/Open University documentary series called Andrew Marr’s History of the World, a lively saunter across 70,000 years of human history which helpfully included the invitation to download a free ‘How do they know that?’ booklet from the OU website, in case you wanted to check any of the facts presented (bbc.in/3EwNvF1).

Unfortunately, in the very first episode Marr somewhat marred his own enterprise with the extraordinary claim that homo sapiens drove the Neanderthals to extinction by hunting and eating them. How did Marr and the OU know that? Well, they didn’t, and the booklet didn’t mention it. Indeed the OU’s own published research instead ‘suggests that climate change was the primary factor in the extinction of Homo species, despite their great ecological plasticity and cognitive abilities’ while ‘in the case of Neanderthals, the climate-driven increased extinction risk was probably exacerbated by competition with H. sapiens’ (bit.ly/3JRkiWw).

Why did Marr make this odd and sensational claim? Perhaps in the absence of hard facts, a racy narrative won out instead. But why did the respectable OU let him get away with it? The thing is, it’s part of the ‘Original Sin’ apology for capitalism, the gist of which is that, like it or not, we need to be ruled by powerful elites because we’re all murderous psychos at heart. This view, popularised by Thomas Hobbes and latterly by his fanboy Steven Pinker, is baked into the foundations of capitalist ideology so thoroughly that it is usually the first objection to socialism that people reach for. This is also why anthropology continues to be such a hotly politicised area of study (see pages 14-16 and 20-21 in this issue).

In the case of Neanderthals, the circumstantial evidence did initially seem damning, with Neanderthals dying out in Europe around 40,000 years ago, just around the time humans from Africa were supposedly first smuggling their bone Neander-bashers through customs. But now new evidence points to H. sapiens already being in Europe around 54,000 years ago, meaning there was a potential overlap of 14,000 years, which in turn hardly suggests wholesale genocidal mayhem (bbc.in/3vrLmGz).

So the hunter-killer scenario, with one species as ruthless restaurateur and the other as regional plat du jour, is almost certainly a caricature. In fact, given the small and sparse populations in early Europe, the two may not even have had much to do with each other, though Neanderthal traces in the human genome do attest to some contact. According to Prof Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, ‘we don’t need to invoke violent causes for [Neanderthals’] demise. There are already two main factors they had to contend with.’ The first of these was rapid climate change: ‘Most of the north Atlantic was switching from bitterly cold to nearly as warm as the present day every few thousand years, sometimes in less than a decade, and so Neanderthals had to deal with an extremely unstable climate in western Europe before modern humans arrived there’ (bit.ly/3KWs171).

The other factor was humans’ competitive success, due to the fact that, as Prof Stringer says, ‘we were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better and we built on that knowledge’.

This is not to say that early humans were eco-friendly hippies. Early modern humans very likely hunted most megafauna to extinction, and certainly deforested huge areas of land, contrary to those romantics who impute mystical communion with and respect for nature to all aboriginal populations. But let’s not allow shameless apologists for capitalism to get away with misrepresenting the past for their own propaganda purposes.

Last year’s models

‘We’ve been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books’ (bbc.in/3MgSTik).

You might think this is a socialist talking about the revolution to abolish capitalism. In fact it’s a scientist referring to the fact that the fundamental W-boson particle appears not to weigh quite what it ought to. It’s only a small difference, but as Prof Brian Cox once observed about a study purporting to show neutrinos travelling slightly faster than the speed of light, to a physicist that’s like saying that you’ve done the sums and found that 2 + 2 don’t quite equal 4. It fractures your whole world like a thunderbolt.

Instead of being horrified at this prospect, physicists are as excited as kids on E-numbers. They have no stake in the current ‘standard model’ of physics because they already know it’s wrong in at least three ways. There’s a whole bunch of anti-matter that should be out there but isn’t. There’s a whole bunch of dark matter and dark energy that shouldn’t be out there but is. And gravity haunts it all like the ghost in the machine, inexplicably analogue in an otherwise digital quantum reality. There are all sorts of theories to account for these problems, and the race is on to find evidence for a winner.

How different from the world of everyday affairs, whose social organisation also has its own ‘standard model’, currently known as capitalism. In this case too, there are all sorts of things systemically wrong with it, and many people can see this, not just socialists. But, unlike physics, some people do have a huge financial stake in the status quo, and that doesn’t just skew the debate, it prevents it taking place. So whereas physicists are looking excitedly for a better and more coherent model that they know must be out there if only they can figure it out, the rich are making sure that no such endeavour is taking place in the social realm.

Which is unfortunate, because whereas in particle physics the most that’s probably at stake is a Nobel prize and some departmental funding, for human society the consequence of not having a constructive debate about the future might be not having any future at all.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: How scientific are scientists? (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is Andrew Marr, a well-known political commentator, doing presenting a BBC2 science programme about Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’? Evidently, having  used up their stock of one biologist the previous month when they trundled  David Attenborough out of retirement, the BBC are now reduced to pilfering  from the politics office. The first thing our ex-Presbyterian Andy does in  his new role of science correspondent is issue a dire warning that we  shouldn’t treat Darwin as a deity or Darwinism as a religion (The Danger of  Worshipping Darwin, BBC Online, 5 March).

Socialists have heard this sort of criticism before, from people who equate any system of organised thought with religion, in wilful disregard of the difference between organised thought and organised fantasy. Scientists do have their heroes, but they don’t worship them as infallible gurus because it is recognised that argument from authority is inferior to argument from evidence. Socialists take the same view of Marx and other revolutionary  thinkers.

It’s a pity Marr couldn’t direct his uncalled-for advice where it might do some good – at real rather than imaginary religious folly. Someone who does  think he’s an infallible guru has just lately been going round Africa telling the locals that wearing condoms will make their AIDS problem worse, not better (BBC Online, 18 March). Yes folks, the Pope pulls another blinder, advocating ‘fidelity and abstinence’, straight after criticising  his own US division for last year’s record-busting 800 sex-abuse cases, which cost the Catholic Church $436m in 2008 (BBC Online, 14 March). Mind  you, this is the guru who told us recently that Darwinian evolution is consistent with the book of Genesis.

Socialists are opposed to all religious superstitions but don’t often  trouble to condemn them because their advocates seem to do that better themselves. In Tanzania, the latest get-rich-quick scheme is to round up albino humans, murder them, cut them up, and sell their body parts as magic potions promising to make the owner wealthy. Meanwhile in South Africa there is an epidemic of what is called ‘corrective rape’, where lesbian women are gang-raped in order to make them ‘girls’ again. The fact that the women are often murdered afterwards suggests the rapists are not too interested in the ‘corrective’ aspect of it all. Unless they’re thinking of the afterlife.

Someone else keen to send women to an early afterlife is Samira Jassim, aka ‘the Mother of Believers’, who tells us how she recruited 80 female Iraqi suicide-bombers. Her clever trick was to have the women raped by her pious and devout male assistants and then tell the victims they would never get into heaven unless they committed a ‘purifying act’ to expunge their  ‘shame’. What this shows is not only the folly of ignorant belief and the despicable manipulation that ‘gurus’ can exercise, but also that these ‘gurus’ don’t believe this hokum themselves. It has often been observed that the higher one goes in any religious organisation, the less belief there is.

Perhaps, at bottom, religious people don’t really believe, but they force themselves to pretend to. There are signs that this is the case. One piece of evidence was the huge outpouring of obviously genuine grief among Catholics when the last pope shuffled off his mortal coil. Since, according to doctrine, he had gone off to sit on the right hand of God and enjoy perfect bliss, one might have expected them to celebrate. But they don’t, and in fact new research suggests they fight against death harder than  non-believers, demanding every treatment and medication in the book, even when prolonging the agony actually increases their misery (Pious ‘fight  death the hardest’, BBC Online, 17 March). Again, this is the opposite of  what you’d expect if religion was giving these people any real comfort. It seems that the Pope and his ilk aren’t very keen to check out themselves, although they’re often happy enough to speed other people on their way, through murder or murderously bad advice.

So how does Andrew Marr have the effrontery to equate science with religion? It seems utterly daft. But does that mean science is a noble endeavour and a  paragon of value-free rationality?

One man who doesn’t think so is the physicist Lee Smolin. He is scathing about the ‘sociology’ of the science community, which he invokes to explain why physics has languished for the last thirty years in the doldrums of unverifiable string theory rather than investigating any more promising avenues of thought: ‘Good ideas are not taken seriously enough when they come from people of low status in the academic world; conversely, the ideas of high-status people are often taken too seriously’ (The Trouble With Physics, Allen Lane, 2006). For Smolin, the old-boy culture of risk-averse conservatism is so strong that it has brought physics to a crisis where one must ask fundamental questions about what science is.

It is a shame that Smolin, following Popper, carelessly brackets ‘Marxism’ with witchcraft and Intelligent Design. He would be surprised to know that  socialist theory (rather than the state-capitalist parodies of North Korea etc that he has in mind) actually accords very well with the principles of scientific enquiry he himself sets out, and that socialists could help to contextualise the problems besetting physics.

Smolin points out that there are more scientists working today than in the whole history of science, however he doesn’t consider that many of them are doing things which are utterly useless or downright destructive because science, like any industry, has to operate within the priorities and limitations dictated by the capitalist system. He recognises that the scientific method suffers because science is organised hierarchically, but doesn’t see that the same criticism can be applied to all branches of human  activity. He demands democratisation and diversity in physics as if physics alone is the problem and these things are already established in other fields.

What sets science apart from religion is not that it works perfectly, but that it has the capability to be self-correcting. This is also the crucial distinction between capitalism, which is unable to correct its own suicidal blunders because it is in thrall to uncontrollable economic laws serving a powerful elite, and non-market, non-hierarchical socialism, which has no such agenda and which can therefore collectively determine the best course of action based on the available evidence.

Paddy Shannon

The Full Fruits of their Industry (1995)

From the March 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party leadership has embarked on a course which it hopes will end in the abandonment of its Clause Four. Those in the Labour Party who see themselves as socialists are up in arms with the familiar chant of "betrayal", but, what exactly is being betrayed?

Tony Blair’s campaign to get rid of Clause Four has had one unfortunate effect from his point of view: to initiate a discussion on what exactly it means, indeed on what Socialism is. The full version of the Clause has appeared a number of times on the front pages of the broadsheets. It reads:

 “To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that maybe possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production. distribution and exchange and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”

As we have pointed out, if it wasn’t for the reference to the common ownership of the “means of exchange”, ie of banks and insurance companies (which, ironically, wasn’t in the original 1918 version), this would be a passable, if somewhat wordy definition of Socialism. Socialism does mean “the common ownership of the means of production” and it does mean “the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service” But the reference to the means of exchange shows that the intention was not to commit the Labour Party to Socialism but only to establishing State Capitalism, or the nationalisation of capitalist industry which would continue to be run on capitalist lines only by a state-appointed board rather than by private capitalist firms.

Labour Theory of Value

In an article in the Independent (1 December) Andrew Marr submitted the Clause to a line-by-line analysis. Commenting on the opening passage about securing for the workers “the full fruits of their industry”, he wrote:

  “Full fruits implies hostility to all profits, indeed to joint-stock companies as such; it relies on Marx‘s discredited labour theory of value. ”

“Full fruits” does indeed imply hostility to all profits, seen as a deduction from what labour produces. But this view goes back well beyond Marx to . . . Adam Smith, who wrote that “labour is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter V). Smith also wrote:

  “As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in selling to work industrious people, whom they will supply with materials and subsistence, in order to make a profit by the sale of their work, or by what their labour adds to the value of the materials . . .  The value which the workmen add to the materials, therefore, resolves itself in this case into two parts, of which one pay's their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced” (Book I, chapter VI).

This is clear enough: in transforming raw materials into some commodity that can be sold, labour adds value to them; this value is the source of both the wages they are paid and the profits of their employer. Profits, in other words, are produced by labour. So said Adam Smith, the apostle of free-market capitalism, though this is so embarrassing to the fanatics of the Adam Smith Institute that they never mention it.

So the labour theory of value has a pedigree which ought to be unimpeachable for defenders of capitalism. It has to be said, however, that Adam Smith and his successors, precisely because they were supporters of capitalism, got themselves into all sorts of contradictions. They wanted to justify the capitalist profit system as the best possible, indeed as the only natural economic system, yet the labour theory of value which they accepted out of intellectual honesty implied that profits were a deduction from what labour produced and that capitalism was therefore based on the robbery of the producers.

There were only two ways out of this contradiction. One was to abandon the labour theory of value. The other was to accept that the capitalist system was based on the exploitation of labour and should therefore be abolished.

Ending exploitation
Supporters of capitalism chose the first course, so that by the middle of the last century the labour theory of value had become “discredited” in respectable circles. Supporters of the workers — while Marx was still in short trousers — chose the second course. But they didn't quite get it right. They argued that the alternative to capitalism was a system that would ensure that every individual worker got the “full product of their labour”; this was to be done by pricing goods according to the amount of labour-time required to produce them and giving the workers who produced them a quantity of labour notes that would enable them to acquire the full labour-time equivalent of what they had produced. Under this scheme there would be no profit; all that was produced would go, in one form or another, to the producers.

What Marr in his profound ignorance of Marx’s views is unaware of is that Marx is on record as attacking the idea that each worker could be ensured the “undiminished proceeds” of their labour. A whole section of his Critique of the Gotha Programme adopted by the German Social Democrats in 1875 was devoted to exposing the absurdity of the idea that each individual worker could be given the “full product” of his or her contribution to the co-operative labour of the whole labour force (even supposing this could be measured).

In a socialist society deductions from this would have to be made for such things as the resources to be devoted to the replacement and expansion of the means of production, the general administration of society and the maintenance of those unable to work because of youth, old age, sickness or disability.

The only context, in fact, in which the phrases “full fruits" or “full product” or "undiminished proceeds” make sense is that of the whole community enjoying the full fruits of the collective co-operative labour of its working members; which in practice means allowing every member of the community an equal right to satisfy their own personally-decided needs. And, to be fair to Clause Four, this is quite compatible with the phrase “full fruits of their labour and the most equitable distribution thereof’.

Blair of course is not in favour of the workers by hand and brain getting the full fruits of their industry, whether individually or collectively. He is all for profits as a deduction from what labour produces going to shareholders and other parasites. May we, then, suggest the following amendment to Clause Four to accommodate him:

 "To secure for the workers by hand or by brain only enough of the fruits of their industry to maintain their working skills in a fit state to continue producing profits for their employers . . . ”

Blair, however, has come up with his own new version, including an alternative theory as to how wealth is produced. His discussion document Labour’s Objects claims that “a competitive market economy, with a strong industrial and wealth-generating base is in the public interest”.

No Socialist could make such a statement but quite how the market can “generate wealth" is not explained. As far as we know, there is only one way in which wealth can be generated and that is by human beings applying their mental and physical energies to materials that originally came from nature.

Wealth is not created by market forces; at most it is only distributed by them — unequally and to the benefit of those who own the means of production If Marr — or Blair — think that this view of the origin of wealth is “discredited" let them explain precisely how. Let them offer a satisfactory alternative explanation. In the meantime the labour theory of value, and its corollary that profits result from exploitation, stands unrefuted.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Oh No He Didn't (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Andrew Marr, in his 7 May Sunday morning show on BBC1, interviewed Labour's Shadow Chancellor, John McDonnell. One of the questions Marr put to him was about his alleged 'Marxism'. McDonnell, who has moved in Trotskyist circles, fended off the question by saying that many non-Marxists thought Marx's Capital worth reading. Then, the following exchange took place:

'Marr: The great prediction in Capital ….is that capitalism as a system will come down with an enormous crash. There will be a crisis and the entire system will fail.

McDonnell: That's where Marx got it wrong.'

Marx never predicted any such thing. So where did Marr and McDonnell get the mistaken idea that he did? Marr himself used to move in Trotskyist circles too, and one possibility is that they got it from the time in the 1980s when the both of them were members of a Trotskyoid front organisation, the 'Socialist Campaign for Labour Victory'. Trotskyists have been known to hold some strange ideas about what Marx thought.

This exchange made Marx a minor election issue and prompted BBC journalist, Brian Wheeler, to write an idiot's guide to Marx's Das Kapital (Link.). He didn't explain why Marx should have become an election issue, though something he wrote hinted at it. Marxism, he wrote, 'also became a byword for totalitarianism – as one-party states and dictators proclaimed Marxism as their guiding philosophy'.

This was why sections of the media brought Marx in. They wanted to smear the leadership of the Labour Party, Corbyn and McDonnell in particular, as 'Marxists' seeking to establish in Britain something similar to what used to exist in Russia, with for example cartoons showing them sporting hammer-and-sickle badges.

It is unlikely to work these days. Wheeler himself went on to point out that 'some argued that this was a perversion of Marx's ideas and that the Soviet Union … was really just a form of state capitalism, where the factory owners had been replaced by government bureaucrats.' Some did indeed.

Wheeler summarised Marx's views:

'In simple terms, Marx argues that an economic system based on private profit is inherently unstable. Workers are exploited by factory owners and don't own the products of their labour, making them little better than machines. The factory owners and other capitalists hold all the power because they control the means of production, allowing them to amass vast fortunes while the workers fall deeper into poverty. This is an unsustainable way to organise society and it will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, Marx argues.'

Marx did see capitalism as based on the exploitation of the workers for profit, but not that under it workers would 'fall deeper into poverty' (only that the capitalists would get richer relatively to the workers). He did also see capitalism as an unstable system under which production continuously veered from boom to slump and back again. But Wheeler seems to have been influenced by the exchange between Marr and McDonnell about Marx allegedly being wrong to say that capitalism will eventually 'come down with an enormous crash'.

Marx certainly thought that capitalism was riven by contractions, the two main ones being that between the already socialised nature of the process of production and the sectional ownership of what was produced and the class struggle between the producers and the owners. It was this struggle, ending in the 'expropriation of the expropriators' (as he put it in the last-but-one chapter of Capital) by conscious political action, that would, he thought, bring about the demise of capitalism, not some catastrophic economic collapse.

Greasy Pole: Blair bites the hand that fed him (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It must have taken a considerable effort of amnesia for Blair to attack the very media he has courted and manipulated"

Among the associated discomforts of the event, the process of dying is said - by some who have yet to experience it - to activate a flash review of the more guilt-worthy episodes in one's life. So was it that Tony Blair, as he clung on in the dying days of his prime ministership, became moved to look back on the style of, and his government's relationship with, the media. Astonishing though this was it was made more so by the distortion which Blair applied to his recall of certain events and his disregard of others.

About a fortnight before he was due to hand over to Gordon Brown Blair revealed to the waiting world the fruits of his meditation about the media. They were not those of a satisfied, reassured man:

"The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out . . .  the media has become dangerous because of its desire for stories with "impact" that will allow it to stand apart from the rest of the media. This comes second to accuracy."

Morgan
The use of the word "feral" is interesting in that it does not chime in with the usual vocabulary of Blair's oratory. More often it is a word resorted to in panic-inducing media reports of offences by youth gangs in the frenzied centres or hopeless estates of the cities. Used in that way it encourages a concept of crime as a social ailment more susceptible to cure by harsh, confining penalties - behaviour to be tough on - rather than as a doomed response to conditioned alienation - a cause to be tough on. It recalls the time when Blair was eagerly grasping for power, showing a budding skill in using the very media he now condemns to stimulate the kind of impulsive, ill-considered response to a social problem he judged would yield him the support he needed to realise his ambition.

Among those under the lash of Blair's criticism there was one who cheerfully admitted to being a "feral beast". Piers Morgan, during a long, and not always reputable, media career, was editor of the Daily Mirror for about nine years until May 2004. At that time he was sacked after the Mirror had published photographs, on its front page as well as inside, which seemed to be of British soldiers assaulting and humiliating Iraqi prisoners of war. The Mirror hailed this as a world exclusive and there was an appropriate response, from the Chief of the General Staff ("…appalling conduct…contravenes the British Army's high standards of conduct"); Downing Street ("We expect the highest standards of conduct from our forces in Iraq"); and the then Defence Minister ("…behaviour clearly unacceptable"). Rival newspapers were sourly envious while much of the world media clamoured to be allowed to publish the pictures. Without a doubt, this was a story with what Blair later called "impact", designed to drive up circulation and thereby inflate profits. The problem - for Morgan and for the Mirror - was that the pictures had been faked. And a problem for Blair was that the Mirror and its embarrassing editor were Labour supporters; in the midst of the crisis over the photos, Blair sent a handwritten note to Morgan: "Thank you for the Mirror's renewed support, it's come at a good time". Although the "renewed" support did not include backing the Iraq invasion, which Morgan described as "a senseless, illegal war".

Marr
A media rival of Morgan, also thrown off an editor's chair, is Andrew Marr, whose amiable, interesting face has recently invaded our homes with his TV series The History of Modern Britain (in which some of his conclusions are open to debate). One of the upward steps in Marr's journalistic career saw him, in 1996, editor of the Independent, a newspaper apparently well-suited to his reputation as a centre left commentator on the seamy world of British politics. His design for the Independent was for it to be tough and serious, read by about 200,000 tough, serious people. Not, in other words, at all like Morgan's Mirror. This promised to be hard going in the ruthless broadsheet circulation war in which the victor was likely to be, not the best written, most courageous, widest informing, newspaper but the one able to compete for sales through cutting its price or with promotions like give-away CDs. Most to be feared in this struggle was The Times which, backed by Murdoch's riches, was able to sell below its market price.

At the time the Independent was almost half owned by the Mirror Group, which put it under the influence of the odious David Montgomery, who was himself struggling to resuscitate his employable appeal to newspaper proprietors after being fired by Murdoch in response to a disastrous launching of Today. Montgomery's vision of the Independent was very different from that of Marr; he saw it as a kind of yuppie version of the Daily Mirror, appealing to Rolex-wearing, Porsche-driving, "aspirational" (another word in present favour with New Labour) people. This style was supposed to raise productivity through savage budget cuts and sacking a host of people, especially those whose function was to report the news as distinct from composing a column about those "interesting" people. Marr did not see this as the way out for the Independent which was why he had to go, although he did have the consolation of the staff giving him a send-off which included the honour of "banging out" – an old ritual involving the wielding of printers' hammers. In fact, soon after being sacked Marr was enticed back but it was not long before he finally left.

Sucking Up
Like Morgan, Marr is no blind supporter of Blair and his party. In his book My Trade he comments on Labour's "sophisticated, endless media strategy" and its "ruthless discipline on its main figures". Tony Blair, he writes was "adept at telling people what they wanted to hear…Tough on crime with the Daily Mail; tough on the causes of crime with the Guardian" . And this was before New Labour had got into power. One of Marr's conclusions is that the party's "relationship with rich, and sometimes dodgy, characters was no purer than the Tories' had been in the bad old days of 'sleaze' ". Clearly, it must have taken a considerable effort of amnesia for Blair to attack the very media he has courted and manipulated, sucking up to Murdoch and his rags, playing on the neuroses of Daily Mail addicts. The media reflects the society it operates in, poisoned by the reality that its first regard must be for sales and profits, a society where feral beasts roam because only the most savage survive.

Ivan