Fear, Hate and Greed (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is riddled with fear. Fear of its ever present wars. Fear of crime and criminals. Fear of being alone. Fear of being consumed by personal debt. The divisive fear of immigrants. And the fear common to all who are compelled to work for wages – the fear of unemployment.

Fear and hate are frequent bedfellows and Josef Goebbels, the master of Nazi state propaganda, knew exactly where to exploit those emotions when he affirmed: ‘Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play’. Where state benefits are concerned the media has peddled hate to the fearful – pounding the keyboard with glee. Cutting back on benefits when capitalism is in crisis is nothing new. During capitalism’s last depression those workers who had paid into the scheme received the dole for 15 weeks. The National Government, another coalition, cut the benefits of those on the scheme who were unemployed by 10 percent leaving them to rot alongside the other millions relying on poor law relief. In August of 1931 means testing the unemployed was implemented. Underpinning the poor laws and its sibling, the dole, are the deeply entrenched ruling class ideas of making claiming benefits so, ‘unpleasant that, people would not claim it, stigmatising relief so that it became an object of wholesome horror’ (wikipedia.org). Governments, whether claiming to be left, right or centre have been cutting benefits since the post-war boom of the 1970’s ended. And the reason why? Because they are a charge on profits, and thus detrimental to the real orchestrators of the tune and the owners of the keyboard – the capitalist class.

Handouts and handouts

The words benefits and scrounger have become conjoined. Goebbels would have been proud of the media hacks who have slavishly followed his guidelines: ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over’. Thus the fearful have been given their slogan and its corollary is revealed in, ‘a YouGov survey which shows: Up to 212,000 have been physically attacked because they’re on benefits’ (mirror.co.uk, 8 September).

Benefits, dole, and handouts are what is made available to the unemployed, and those surviving on low wages. Subsidies, funding and support are invested by the state in corporations. A report written for the TUC entitled ‘The Great Train Robbery’ showed, amongst other things, that the, ‘train operating companies are entirely reliant upon public subsidies to run services. The top five recipients alone received almost £3bn in taxpayer support between 2007 and 2011. This allowed them to make operating profits of £504m – over 90 per cent (£466m) of which was paid to shareholders’ (tuc.org.uk, 5 June 2013). Publicfinance.co.uk can report that the total government subsidy to the railway businesses now stands at £4bn per year (16 April). With just a small slice of the subsidy benefitting ‘a top executive from Network Rail who will become head of construction. . . on an annual salary of £750,000, making him one of the country’s best paid public servants’ (ft.com, 17 January).

‘The private finance initiative (PFI) is a way of creating public–private partnerships (PPPs) by funding public infrastructure projects with private capital’ (wikipedia.org). Benefitting from this is a clique of banks, builders and service providers who build, and sometimes run, schools, hospitals and related public projects. And the benefits to the clique: state payouts over a 20 or 30 year period. However, ‘PFI has been controversial in the UK; though the National Audit Office felt in 2003 that it provided good value for money overall’ (wikipedia.org). Not so thought the disenchanted Treasury Secretary Vince Cable six years later: ‘The whole thing has become terrible, opaque and dishonest and it’s a way of hiding obligations. . . PFI has now largely broken down and we are in the ludicrous situation where the government is having to provide the funds for the private finance initiative’ (bbc.co.uk, 3 March). And the funds continue to flow to those that benefit: ‘As of 2013, it was forecast that 725 PFI contracts for public facilities across the UK, with a total capital value of £54bn, will cost the Exchequer more than £300bn by the time they are paid off’ (newstatesman.com, 20 February).

Mindfulmoney.co.uk’s headline asked the question, ‘What is the cost to the UK taxpayer of supporting our banks’? It answered itself by referring to The National Audit Office’s estimate: ‘it peaked according to the NAO at £1.162 trillion’ (17 July, 2013). Support? Obviously, this isn’t the same as Income Support, which currently is awarded, after means testing, to a couple aged over 18 at £113.70p per week. Some commentators are more impolite and call it a bail-out. One of the main beneficiaries in the UK was the Royal Bank of Scotland which is labelled by the media as ‘our bank’. ‘We’ own 82 per cent of it after the state invested £37 billion of its funds in October 2008. But, dear oh dear, ‘our’ investment has lost a few quid even after more funds were invested. That scourge of the benefits scroungers The Daily Mail could run the headline, ‘RBS has lost all the £46bn pumped in by the taxpayer’. The editor got out his calculator to let his fretful readers know that, ‘In total, the lender has since paid out £4.6 billion in bonuses – £1 billion for every £10 billion it has lost’. Also included in the £46 billion was, ‘a £3.8bn bill for customer mis-selling’ (27 February). Note the word bill. That couldn’t be a fine like those slapped on a benefit scrounger and imposed by the state law courts could it?

Swindlers and swindlers

Such as the case against, ‘ a mother of three who was jailed for five months for swindling more than £70,000 in benefits… DWP Minister Lord Freud said: In addition to the sentence imposed by the court, the department always seeks to recover the benefits falsely obtained, to ensure that fraudsters do not benefit financially from their criminal activities’ (Bristol Post, 6 June 2011). Or a man who gained notoriety via the BBC news site for ‘falsely claiming £28,332 in disability benefits. . . Judge Recorder Richard Booth said the offences were disgraceful and so serious that a prison sentence was necessary (3 November). Or, ‘a man who stole to eat after his benefits were stopped. . . admitting stealing three packets of casserole steak. . . after changes to his benefits left him hungry. . . he pleaded guilty to stealing the food, worth £12.60, and was sentenced to six weeks in prison (The Northern Echo, 22 October).

RT.com on the 28 October reported on a speech by the BoE Deputy Governor, Nemet Minouche Shafik who, ‘denounced the actions of UK traders in foreign exchange, currencies and bonds markets, warning financial misconduct in these sectors goes well beyond a few rogue financiers. . . the BoE’s deputy governor said the tired argument that financial misconduct relates to the behaviour of a ‘few bad apples’ is no longer credible. Shafik suggested UK financial regulation lacks efficacy and robustness, and a regulatory overhaul is needed to fix the barrel and to get rid of the bad apples’. This statement acts as a sop to a very long list of so-called financial misconducts amongst an elite that has made the news, albeit unsensationally, since 2008. Misconduct such as the extremely beneficial practice amongst banks of mortgage selling about which Dean Baker, economist and director of the Centre for Economic & Policy Research said, ‘Knowingly packaging and selling fraudulent mortgages is fraud. It is a serious crime that could be punished by years in jail’ – However – ‘No senior bank executive has faced criminal charges following the mortgage crisis’. William D. Cohan, a former senior mergers and acquisitions banker, wrote in the New York Times that ‘not only has the government barely punished those on the hook for Wall Street crimes, the Justice Department has also offered ‘sanitized’ versions of events that led up to the crimes in its accounts given to the public following investigations (rt.com, 22 August). So Nemet, looks like there might be a few barriers in place when it comes to fixing the barrel. Or maybe that’s just on Wall Street?

It’s easy under capitalism, given all of its contradictions, to see the whole thing as some sort of lunatic asylum. But a better comparison is a prison run by the most proficient thieves. The media is utilised like the pickpocket that directs your attention elsewhere whilst another robs you. One of the things that is stolen is your capacity to think like a human being. Fear, hate and greed permeate the prison walls. But the prison isn’t escape-proof. All it takes to get out is to decide that is what you want to do, and join with others working to bring down the prison walls.

Andy Matthews

Joking Aside (2016)

From the October 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 9 September North Korea carried out yet another nuclear test. The further spread of nuclear weapons is inevitable while capitalism lasts.

It is now ten years ago that North Korea joined an exclusive octet of the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India and Israel when it detonated a nuclear device which its neighbour South Korea recorded at 3.6 on the Richter scale. The group’s leader, a serial hypocrite and liar, responded immediately, with the White House braying: ‘an explosion would constitute a provocative act in defiance of the will of the international community’. The ‘international community’, being the name of the group, is very protective of their instruments, and the music they play, and new players can expect a discordant welcome. Thus the White House expected one its groupies, the UN Security Council, to ‘take immediate actions to respond to this unprovoked act’ (Guardian, 9 October 2006). Exclusion from the group meant North Korea was now a soloist intent on further developing its instrument. The leader of the group though felt reasonably secure as North Korea didn’t possess a nuclear warhead small enough to be mounted on a long range rocket, and thus capable of devastating targets as far away as the United States.

North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and by association the country he rules over are often depicted as comical, something we can safely laugh at, and thus swiftly dismiss. Two years after Kim Jong-un assumed supreme leadership of his country the 2014 film ‘The Interview’ was Hollywood’s shot at lampooning him that ends happily with a rescue for the movie's hero, a US talk show host, by an American Seals unit and a de-nuclearised North Korea advancing towards the American model of democracy. The trio of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao whose state policies were directly responsible for the murder of tens of millions of people were also early targets for satirists. Charlie Chaplin, who lampooned Hitler in the 1940 movie ‘The Great Dictator’ said later: ‘that had he known the true extent of Nazi atrocities, he could not have made fun of their homicidal insanity’.

Is it insanity – or just normality?  Killing people is big business. Developing and manufacturing weapons to kill is an everyday activity under capitalism.  Using them likewise. Whether it’s the evil dictator or the conventional elected leader neither has had any qualms about unleashing ‘blitzkrieg’ or ‘shock and awe’ or any of its deadly ilk when the circumstances demand it. Mass murder is ingrained in the social system as is the means to deliver it. North Korea’s own key arms dealer is the innocuously named Korea Mining and Development Agency (KOMID), and their military has its own little weapons enterprise called Hap Heng known to have provided missiles and nuclear technology to Pakistan and Iran. Syria has bought North Korean anti-tank guided missiles and KOMID has also been responsible for the sale of equipment, including missile technologies, gunboats, and multiple rocket artilleries, worth a total of over $100 million, to Africa, South America, and the Middle East’ (wikipedia).   North Korea doesn’t make it into the Top Twenty of arms dealing countries, but it probably rates highly in the Top Ten of international smugglers of nuclear and ballistic missile technology. Business as usual – just by other means.

The hydrogen bomb is the biggy. You can do a whole lot of killing with just one of these. Consequently all leaders desire one. Kim Jong-un is no exception. On 6 January, following on from three previous smaller nuclear tests, his dream may have become a reality. At the underground Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site a detonation was carried out that the United States Geological Service measured as a 5.1 magnitude earthquake. The  South Korean government  played down North Korea’s declaration that it was a hydrogen bomb –unsurprisingly –because a back of an envelope estimate was that the ‘impact of such a weapon ‘detonated 1,000 meters over downtown Seoul would produce 78,000 fatalities and somewhere around 270,000 estimated injuries’. US ‘experts’ including those in the White House agreed with the South Korean scepticism.  However John Carlson, ‘a member of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission and former head of the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office declared that previous North Korean tests were purely a primary stage, that is, a nuclear explosion, 'and fairly low yield at that'. However, in the case of this test, he added that 'if it’s true, it means they have made something  smaller scale, capable of being put on to a missile' and that North Korea would be aiming to develop a weapon 'small enough and light enough to put on to a missile, and the usual parameters are something less than one meter in diameter, and less than a tonne in weight’ (wikipedia).

On 24 August Reuters ran the headline ‘North Korea fires submarine-launched ballistic missile towards Japan’.  The Daily Telegraph reported that ‘the launch of the missile, which the US Strategic Command believes was a nuclear-capable KN-11 Nodong-D, came less than 48 hours after Pyongyang threatened to carry out a 'pre-emptive nuclear strike ' unless South Korea and the US cancelled joint military exercises’. The Japanese response to the launch came from the its Prime Minister Abe: ‘It is the first time that an SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) has fallen inside Japan's air defence identification zone. . . It is a grave threat to Japan's security and an unforgivable threat to regional stability and peace’.  It’s believed that this successful test firing followed two recent failed ones.

A South Korean military official told Reuters: ‘North Korea's SLBM technology appears to have progressed' and ‘South Korea believes the North has a fleet of more than 70 ageing, limited-range submarines. . . Acquiring a fleet of submarines large and quiet enough and with a longer range would be a next step for the North’. Moon Keun-sik, a retired South Korean navy officer and an expert in submarine warfare added: ‘they keep conducting nuclear tests and SLBMs together which means they are showing they can arm SLBMs with miniaturised nuclear warheads.'  The Telegraph also printed a quote from those that wield the biggest stick: ‘The US Strategic Command issued a statement in which it said the launch posed no threat to North America, but added that US forces remain vigilant in the face of North Korean provocations’.

As yet the US mainland isn’t under threat. But the empire’s tentacles encompass the planet and ten years of North Korean weapons development is reaching a crescendo. We have lived under the threat of nuclear war since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Pundits who tell us a nuclear attack will never happen forget that it already has. Other experts tell us it’s just around the corner. An insider, Robert McNamara, who worked as Defense Secretary for capitalism’s pin up boy, President Kennedy, during the Cuban missile crisis revealed how close we came to nuclear war when he ‘wondered aloud whether he 'would live to see another Saturday night,' and later recognised that 'we lucked out' – barely’(tomdispatch.com).

Art Buchwald reflected that ‘you can’t make anything up any more. The world itself is a satire’. Henry Kissinger, Yasser Arafat, and Barrack Obama winning Nobel Peace prizes wasn’t a comic invention unlike Kim Jong-un’s treatment in The Interview. Nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them aren’t a joke. Neither are Kim Jong-un and the elite that rule North Korea.  

Andy Matthews

The global profit system (2011)

From the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you know the only thing that gives me pleasure? It's to see my dividends coming in.” So said John D Rockefeller founder of Standard Oil. 

Rockefeller's wealth was gained through the exploitation of worker labour power to turn a free resource, oil, into a commodity for sale on the market. That in a nutshell is how he kept those dividend payments rolling in. What applied then just as surely applies now.

Standard Oil’s rapacious business methods laid the foundations for today’s oil conglomerates. Throughout its existence Standard Oil was the target of disgruntled politicians and newspapers. Rockefeller’s PR people and lawyers were as busy then as their modern day counterparts. In 1880 the New York World wrote that it was “the most cruel, impudent, pitiless, and grasping monopoly that ever fastened upon a country” (John D. Rockefeller: Anointed With Oil, p.60). A decade later Rockefeller controlled 88 percent of the United States’ refined oil. In 1911 the Supreme Court found Standard Oil in breach of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Its trading practices were ruled illegal and it was ordered to be broken up into 34 new companies. Rockefeller still held a 25 percent stake in Standard Oil. This was transferred proportionately into shares in the new companies. Although Rockefeller’s direct control of the oil market was somewhat diminished, his personal fortune in 1920, which was estimated at $900,000,000, translated into plenty of influence. And a great deal of personal pleasure.

Another capitalist who was to derive plenty of pleasure from oil was William Knox Darcy. He was the son of an English solicitor who emigrated to Australia where he began to speculate in land. He became a partner in a syndicate in 1883 that uncovered a large deposit of gold at Mt Morgan. Darcy returned to England with a considerable fortune in his knapsack. His thirst for pleasure still unquenched he cast his eye east to Iran.

In 1901 Darcy negotiated a contract that gave him the rights to drill for mineral resources over a significantly large area of Iran. The contract was signed by the landowner, the Shahanshah, king of kings. Darcy handed over £20,000 cash. The rest of the deal involved £20,000 in stock and a 16 percent share in the net profits if any transpired. In 1908 oil on a significant scale was discovered. Darcy never once set foot on the Iranian soil that would give him and a small elite considerable pleasure in the years to come. Out of this deal the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed. In 1935 its name was changed to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC); its new owner was the British government.

At the core of all conflict under capitalism are markets and profits. Iranian instability haunted the owners of AIOC. That paltry 16 percent share stuck in the throats of Iranians. As was AIOC’s refusal to allow the Iranian government to check their books to see if that legendary British fair play was being practised. In 1951 the pro-AIOC Prime minister was overthrown. The Iranian parliament nationalised the oil fields. AIOC was ousted from Iran and it squealed its way through boycotts and high courts. In 1953 operation Ajax was initiated. The CIA and British government conspired with the King of Kings and the Iranian military to effect a coup. However AIOC had to forego its earlier monopoly and make do with only a 40 percent share of the spoils. American oil companies received 40 percent and the French 20 percent. The fountain of pleasure was re-activated.

In 1954 AIOC changed its name to the British Petroleum Company. Expansion from their base in the Middle East to Alaska followed in 1959. Adding substantially to the profits and the dividend cheques was their oil strike in the North Sea in 1965. Thatcher sold off the British government’s holding in BP, but not their interest in its fervent pursuit of profit. When the Kuwait Investment Authority, essentially the Kuwait government, saw an opportunity to gain control of BP through market manoeuvres, the Thatcher government didn’t hesitate to block their attempts; despite the free market rhetoric of its members.        

BP continued to grow through the capital generated from its exploitation of natural resources excavated by human labour power. Along the way those profits allowed BP to swallow up several of the offspring of Standard Oil. ExxonMobil and Chevron snapped up the rest of its most profitable siblings, and the trio came to form the backbone of the ‘Seven Sisters’ who in 1973 controlled 85 percent of the world's oil reserves.                    

BP nowadays ranks as the fourth largest company in the world measured by its 2009 revenues of $239 billion. It has acquired 22,400 service stations worldwide, and pumps 3.8 million gallons of oil in to the market place every day. Its profits, and thus its power, are culled from throughout the world. A source of pleasure for a few, but one of deep discontent to many.

The costs of doing business can often seem strange to the uninitiated. The Guardian (12 April 1976) reported that BP handed over £500,000 to a “slush fund which dispensed money to the ruling Italian political parties in return for favours over oil taxes and prices”. BP’s own documents showed that this type of payment was “calculated as a percentage of the money the company could expect to make as a result of favourable legislation”. Profits are all about maths. Is doing a thing one way more profitable than doing it another? That is the logic of capitalism, and consequently the logic of what follows.

In September 1999 a subsidiary of BP in Alaska paid a fine of $22 million for the illegal dumping of hazardous wastes from 1993-1995 on the Alaska North Slope. In August 2006 BP were forced to shut down their operations as over one million litres of oil had been spilt over the North Slope. The Guardian (1 July 2007) reported that “a US congressional committee has uncovered evidence of ‘draconian’ cost cuts at BP”, and demanded documents “suggesting that managers considered turning off the flow of anti-corrosion chemicals to save money”.

Maintenance and safety cuts were also linked to an explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery resulting in 15 deaths and injuries to 180 people. Refineries based in Texas City and Toledo U.S accounted for 97 percent of all flagrant safety violations (829 of 851). The Centre for Public Integrity reported on 16 May last year that “most of BP’s citations were classified as ‘egregious and wilful’ by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and reflect alleged violations of a rule designed to prevent catastrophic events at refineries”.

In April 2010 the offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon exploded in the Gulf of Mexico killing 11 people and creating an oil slick that covered at least 2,500 square miles. BP, Halliburton and Transocean, the three companies that expected to carve up the profits have ended up blaming each other for the disaster. This is a common occurrence when thieves fall out. BP’s chief executive at the time has since left the company pocketing a £2 million severance deal, £100,000 a year as a payoff from a Russian joint venture with TNK-BP and a £600,000 per year pension. But the news isn’t all good though, along with Lord Browne of Madingley he’s been cited in a multi-million dollar lawsuit linked to the bribery of government officials in Kazakhstan.

The Guardian (2 February) reported that BP is under investigation in the US over its “alleged manipulation of the gas market”, and “in a separate case in 2006, BP paid $300m to settle charges that it had manipulated the propane market in the US”. Another report in the same issue that would have made Rockefeller proud of one of his heirs is that “the administrator of BP's $20bn (£12.3bn) Gulf spill compensation fund was accused last night by Mississippi's attorney general, Jim Hood, of sweeping deficiencies and violations of law”.

In South America BP has been equally busy pursuing dividend payments. They stood accused in the European Parliament in October 1996 of colluding with the Columbian army in gross human rights violations and of wilful destruction of the environment. Evidence supplied by a report commissioned by Colombia's President Samper’s human rights adviser alleged that “ BP passed photographs and videos of local protesters to the army, which human rights groups say led to killings, disappearances, torture and beatings” (corporatewatch.org). Likewise, a group of Colombian farmers won a multimillion pound settlement from BP after they were “ accused of benefiting from a regime of terror carried out by Colombian government paramilitaries to protect a 450-mile pipeline” (Independent, 22 July 2006).

Africa hasn’t escaped BP’s grasp either. In Southern Sudan BP have been linked to a civil war that it’s alleged has the central goal of depopulating the oil regions and the protection of pipelines. The people of the Niger Delta have been suffering from the oil cartel’s calculated exploitation of the land for the past 40 years. Its 606 oilfields supply 40 percent of all the crude that the US imports. Pollution from oil spills is endemic and dwarfs every other such disaster. As the Guardian reports “more oil is spilled from the Delta's network of terminals, pipes, pumping stations and oil platforms every year than has been lost in the Gulf of Mexico”.

Nnimo Bassey, Nigerian head of Friends of the Earth International said “There is an overwhelming sense that the big oil companies act as if they are beyond the law… It is clear that BP has been blocking progressive legislation, both in the US and here. In Nigeria, they have been living above the law. They are now clearly a danger to the planet. The dangers of this happening again and again are high. They must be taken to the international court of justice” (30 May 2010).

Many people believe that companies like BP are the problem. Well-meaning people like Bassey see court rulings, legislation and even the break-up of companies as a solution. So did well-meaning people during the reign of Standard Oil. Nothing changed then except some names. The problem is the global profit system. The, dog-eat-dog, unquenchable compulsion to acquire earnings and dividends. Pollution, corruption and death are the symptoms of a disease. The disease is capitalism. Only major surgery can cure the disease.

When will the naive finally realise that the problems faced by people and the environment cannot somehow, magically, be solved by methods that have failed abysmally for decades? How long do we, the overwhelming majority, sit on our hands while a tiny minority derive their pleasure at our expense?

Andy Matthews

Africa – Starvation and Speculation (2011)

From August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Starvation – the inability to buy the things to sustain life – is still stalking Africa.

George Soros is one of the great men of capitalism. He’s the Chairman of Soros Fund Management, a Hedge Fund that is estimated to have assets of approximately $27 billion, and the vehicle that has enabled him to become the 35th richest person in the world. He’s admired in the financial world as the “The Man Who Broke the Bank of England” when he pocketed a reported $1 billion in 1992 from the Black Wednesday UK currency debacle. He’s renowned for his philanthropy and as a supporter of liberal ideas. He has been described as a “distinguished thinker”. Consequently people take notice when he asserts that: “Most of the poverty and misery in the world is due to bad government, lack of democracy, weak states, internal strife, and so on” (www.woopidoo.com).

It’s fortunate that Soros decided to become one of capitalism’s speculators rather than a doctor, because his diagnosis of poverty and misery is simply a list of a few of their symptoms. The business Soros is a “respected” member of, and his charitable interest in Africa through the Soros-affiliated organisation, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, coincided with a BBC report last year (8 June) that: “Hedge funds are behind ‘land grabs’ in Africa to boost their profits in the food and bio-fuel sectors… Hedge funds and other speculators had, in 2009 alone, bought or leased nearly 60m hectares of land in Africa – an area the size of France”. The word ‘profits’ in the BBC’s report is the cause of ‘poverty and misery’.

Global food prices have hit all-time highs during the past year, which is the driving force behind the African “land grab”. The BBC reported (23 June) that: “The World Bank says that since June last year, rising and volatile food prices have led to an estimated 44 million more people living in poverty, defined as under $1.25 (£0.77) a day. It estimates that there are close to one billion hungry people worldwide”. The G20 ministers two-day meeting in Paris in June did nothing to resolve any of these problems, as the same BBC report went on to say: “They have agreed to look at new rules to tackle food price speculation. However, it remains to be seen whether these will be adopted. This is because any moves to target speculators in the food commodity markets will have to be agreed by G20 finance ministers at a later date.” Not very good news then if you’re starving now.

Duncan Green, Head of Research for Oxfam GB gave his appraisal of the G20 meeting on his blog (www.oxfamblogs.org): “Verdict on G20 food summit? Dismal, please try harder.” And Deborah Doane, director of the World Development Movement said: “The UK government’s stance in defence of excessive speculation is untenable. It must put its weight behind European plans for regulation, putting the needs of hungry people before the profits of banks like Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital”(wdm.org.uk).

Africa

Africa is the embodiment of capitalist exploitation. For almost four centuries it has been systematically plundered for its raw materials and human labour. Although the African slave trade dates back to the 7th century with the Muslim conquest of the southern Mediterranean basin, and was also a well-established part of the institutional structure of African society, it never gained any real economic momentum until it came into contact with European traders. 

By the middle of the 17th century capitalism was throwing off the fetters of European feudalism. Britain was at the forefront of that change. The agrarian capitalist of the past few centuries was giving way to the industrial capitalist, and the African slave trade played a leading role in the growth of that embryo.

At the start of the eighteenth century the British trade in slaves was dominated by London-based merchants, but after 1730, Bristol and finally Liverpool saw the majority of slave ships sail from their ports to acquire their human cargo. The returning cargoes were the product of the slaves’ labour: sugar, tobacco and the industrial input – raw cotton. This set in motion a dramatic expansion in intercontinental trade, vital to the development of capitalism. The importation of sugar, tea and tobacco were the foundations of consumer expansion, as was their re-export. As was to a larger extent the production of cotton, which was a significant factor in America's primitive accumulation of capital and their advance towards a capitalist state.

The trade in human labourers thrived until the early nineteenth century. Throughout this period the death knell for slavery was steadily being rung by the growth in wage labour. With slavery the slave is the commodity, with wage labour the labour-power of the worker is the commodity, the buyer of which is the capitalist and the seller is the labourer. The price of that labour-power is the wage paid to the labourer. 

The emergence and expansion of waged labour was the defining element in the growth of capitalism. Within the space of a few centuries a substantial segment of global society had undergone a transition from one means of feeding, clothing and sheltering itself to another. The trade in African slaves and the concomitant growth in consumer commodities created new capital, new markets, new technology, new mercantile methods, and helped to bring about the exponential growth in waged labour.  However, the conclusion of the legalised trade in African slavery simply led to a new quest for profits. 

Empire

The historian J R Seeley argued in 1883 that “Britain acquired an empire in a fit of absence of mind”. Germany, France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium must also have been visited by the same malady, and at exactly the same time. Most of Africa was colonised by the European powers by the time of Seeley’s book. New markets and new materials to profit from have to be continually sought. When located they must be protected by the state. That is the logical solution to an economic imperative integral to capitalism. State-backed capitalists and speculators, like Soros, throughout Europe had common aims in the late nineteenth century – expansion into Africa.

The natural resources freely available in Africa were a prize that most capitalists would logically covet. An illiterate and unorganised labour force was an added incentive. Draconian work methods were imposed on the workforce to extract those resources that made contemporary European factories seem almost genteel.

There’s an Ibo saying “when two Brothers fight, Strangers always reap the harvest”. That encapsulates the aftermath of European imperialism in Africa. From Algeria to Zimbabwe almost every African state has been affected by war for decades. The control by small elites of natural resources remains the prime cause for much of the slaughter, poverty and misery which are by-words for the daily lives of many, many Africans. Western capitalists and speculators, remain as firmly entrenched in Africa today as they were during Cecil Rhodes’s era who summed up the capitalist view of Africa: “We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labour that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories” [brainyquote.com].

Modern land grabs

A new impetus is driving capitalism’s elite – how they can profit from mass hunger. The Observer reported last year (7 March) that a “land rush” in Africa: “ has been triggered by the worldwide food shortages which followed the sharp oil price rises in 2008, growing water shortages and the European Union's insistence that 10 percent of all transport fuel must come from plant-based biofuels by 2015… Leading the rush are international agribusinesses, investment banks, hedge funds, commodity traders, sovereign wealth funds as well as UK pension funds, foundations and individuals attracted by some of the world's cheapest land.” But it isn’t just land that’s of interest: “the Saudi investment company Foras, backed by the Islamic Development Bank and wealthy Saudi investors, plans to spend $1bn buying land…but is also securing for itself the equivalent of hundreds of millions of gallons of scarce water a year. Water, says the UN, will be the defining resource of the next 100 years”.

Even the academics are not shy when it comes to turning a profit, as the Guardian reports (8 June): “Harvard and other major American universities are working through British hedge funds and European financial speculators to buy or lease vast areas of African farmland in deals, some of which may force many thousands of people off their land, according to a new study.” 

China began its search for raw materials much earlier as the BBC reports. “In almost every corner of Africa there is something that interests China. The continent is rich in natural resources that promise to keep China's booming, fuel-hungry economy on the road. There is copper to mine in Zambia, iron ore to extract in Gabon and oil to refine in Angola.” But like all such reports the writer is compelled to include the benefits for the workers: “Many Chinese firms employ large numbers of local workers but wages remain low. However, there is evidence that workers are learning new skills because of the availability of Chinese-funded work. Taking advantage of low labour costs, the Chinese are also building factories across Africa. Observers say Beijing appears ready for the long haul in Africa” (26 November 2007). And why wouldn’t they have every intention of staying? Cheap, unorganised labour, and an abundance of nearby natural resources is the fulcrum that creates new capital. A few Chinese capitalists will enrich themselves, but the African workers who produce those riches through their labour power will live out their lives in poverty and misery.

Slavery is still with us or what is nowadays termed “forced labour”. The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are at least 12.3 million people in forced labour worldwide; 660,000 of those in Sub-Saharan Africa. As much as slavery is alive so too is the slave mentality – imploring the master to be kind. However, the master is capitalism and it is out of any organisation’s or individual’s control. It cannot be legislated away. There is no lever to be pulled or button to be pressed that can make it more humane. 

The World Development Movement asks its supporters to become involved by cycling from London to Paris, recycling your phone, putting WDM in your will, getting green energy, and investing ethically. I’m sure that George Soros and his class are trembling in fear at their proposals. 

Starvation caused by poverty – the inability to be able to buy the commodities that can sustain your life – seems to be looming large for a great many of our fellow human beings. Anyone who genuinely wants an end to poverty has to confront the cause. The cause is the profit system. Capitalism. The only cure is a socialist revolution, not a bicycle ride to Paris. 

Andy Matthews

Sugar: Sweet for Some (2015)

From the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’, sang the angelic Julie Andrews to a pair of wide-eyed children in the movie Mary Poppins. Julie’s advice must have enthralled the sugar industry, and set the hearts of marketers everywhere fluttering. Children as consumers represent a massive global market, and spearheading capitalism’s drive for the minds and money of children is the sugar and related sweeteners industry. At stake is an estimated global market projected for 2017 at $97.2 billion. A large slice of the forthcoming profits will be pocketed by the Fanjul Brothers, owners of Fanjul Corp, ‘which in 2010 comprised four raw sugar mills and 10 refineries in six countries, making them the world's largest refiner of cane sugar, producing 6 million tons of sugar annually' (en.wikipedia.org/).

Perhaps even Mary Poppins would have baulked at administering 20 spoonfuls of sugar in one go, but not Sainsburys. Their Orange Energy Drink has, ‘5.9g per 100 ml of sugar – which is the equivalent of 20 teaspoons for every 500ml’. As ever there are reformers demanding activity. In February, Action on Sugar, ‘has called for the sale of ‘energy’ and sports drinks to youngsters to be banned. They also ‘warned that children were being duped into thinking that the products would boost their performance on the sports field or at school’ and that, ‘The products served no purpose whatsoever except to make children addicted to caffeine and habituated to sugars, it claimed, while in the longer term they were fuelling the obesity epidemic’ (theguardian.com/26 February).

Even doting parent and thoughtful Prime Minister David Cameron disclosed to Parliament how he was ‘trying to stop 'excessive' amounts of Coca-Cola being consumed in the Cameron household’ (Daily Mail.co.uk, 16 January, 2013). This admission, albeit two years later, seemed to resonate with Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, chair of the Health Select Committee, when she confided to BuzzFeed News that she and her committee wanted to ask experts if it would, ‘work if we had a price differential between sugary carbonated drinks and unsugary ones, low sugar? So if you’re there at a supermarket shelf and one product is 10p cheaper than the other, would it help you to think – Well, I’ll go for the non-sugary one?’ Wollaston, a onetime GP, also posed an ideological question in a sugar-coated Mary Poppins-like way when she asked: ‘Are there ways we can take calories out of children’s diets in ways that doesn’t feel like a big nanny bossy state coming in with a big stick’ (3 February)? Something tells me that the naughty corporations aren’t going to have to take any nasty medicine, even from those who supposedly wield a big stick.

The Guardian reported that, ‘an investigation by the British Medical Journal revealed that health officials and ministers had 130 meetings with alcohol and supermarket lobbyists while they were considering imposing a minimum price per unit of alcohol. The proposal was dropped in July, allegedly because of a lack of concrete evidence’. Protecting corporate profits through political connections is nothing new. ‘In 1979, Margaret Thatcher set up the National Advisory Committee on Nutrition Education, chaired by Professor Philip James, a powerhouse in the drive to improve diet. It produced a seminal report, suppressed until it was leaked in 1983, that warned the British diet was connected to the major diseases of our time. Its targets to reduce sugar, fat and salt were ignored’ (12 February, 2014).

And in the U.S Bloomberg’s reported that, ‘Hawaii lawmakers killed a proposed tax that would have added 17 cents to a single-serve bottle of soda. It was the second failed attempt, even though Governor Neil Abercrombie had pushed the proposed levy… PepsiCo Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and the American Beverage Association have spent as much as $70 million on lobbying and issuing ads… Efforts to enact such levies have foundered in 30 states’. Judith Phillips, a Mississippi State University research analyst who studied the issue for lawmakers,summed up how things generally work under capitalism: ‘Whoever is loudest tends to control the discussion and, generally speaking, you buy your microphone with money’ (13 March, 2012).

Addictive

Action on Sugar suggests that sugar could be addictive. Dr. David Reuben, author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nutrition agrees: ‘White refined sugar is not a food. It is a pure chemical extracted from plant sources, purer in fact than cocaine, which it resembles in many ways. Its true name is sucrose and its chemical formula is C12H22O11... The chemical formula for cocaine is C17H21NO4... For all practical purposes, the difference is that sugar is missing the ‘N’, or nitrogen atom... Through heating and mechanical and chemical processing, all vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, enzymes and indeed every nutrient is removed until only the sugar remains... During the refining process, 64 food elements are destroyed. All the potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, manganese, phosphate, and sulfate are removed. The A, D, and B, vitamins are destroyed. Amino acids, vital enzymes, unsaturated fats, and all fiber are gone. To a lesser or greater degree, all refined sweeteners such as corn syrup, maple syrup, etc., undergo similar destructive processes... Studies show that ‘sugar’ is just as habit-forming as any narcotic; and its use, misuse, and abuse is our nation’s number one disaster’ (macrobiotics.co.uk/ 3 March).

So too thinks Robert Lustig, the University of California’s professor of paediatrics who is, ‘well-known for his research into the effects of dietary sugar. He believes that sugar is addictive. In a recent interview he said: ‘There are five tastes on your tongue: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Sugar covers up the other four, so you can't taste the negative aspects of foods. You can make dog poop taste good with enough sugar’. Lustig goes on to reveal that, ‘table sugar known as sucrose, which is a made of two sugars (glucose and fructose) chemically bound to each other, is identical to high fructose corn syrup – which he describes as a chronic toxin’ (Independent, 4 October 2014).

Like the wolf eying the lambs, children are viewed as a primary target for the sugar industry. Spinning lies to them is accomplished by just a few multi-billion dollar advertising corporations. As Juliet Schor writes, ‘These corporations not only have enormous economic power, but their political influence has never been greater. They have funneled unprecedented sums of money to political parties and officials... The power wielded by these corporations is evident in many ways, from their ability to eliminate competitors to their ability to mobilize state power in their interest’. Straight from an arsehole’s mouth comes this truism: ‘No one’s really worrying about what it [advertising to children] is teaching impressionable youth. Hey, I’m in the business of convincing people to buy things they don’t need’  - an advertising executive, in Business Week, August 11, 1997, quoted by Richard Robbins’ (www.globalissues.org/article/237).

Enough is not enough

Advertisers are simply the unimaginative lackeys for an elite that includes people such as the Fanjul brothers. They’re fourth generation sugar capitalists. Their great grandfather was reportedly the wealthiest man in Cuba. Under Batista’s dictatorship life was uncomplicated for the family. The profits built off of the backs of their workers rolled in. Extravagant parties were thrown for other parasites like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but in 1958 Castro overthrew Batista’s dictatorship under the guise of socialism. The Fanjul’s sugar empire was seized and Castro now luxuriates in one of the family’s palatial mansions in Havana. Under capitalism the narrative repeats ad nauseam: The old king’s dead - long live the new king.

Palm Beach, Florida, welcomed the Fanjuls and their money which was quickly re-invested in land, plant and labour enabling a speedy return to capital accumulation. Hungry labour usually returns fatter profits so the Fanjul brothers were quick to exploit the US governments H-2 foreign worker programme, enabling, ‘the Fanjuls to bring in thousands of migrant workers, mostly from Jamaica, to cut their cane... Only the desperately poor cut cane and, without the farmworkers program, the Fanjuls may not have been able to harvest their fields. In the Fanjul fields, workers who did not cut fast enough were labeled ‘Code One’, which means 'refused to work – do not rehire’. Code One workers were sent home’.

In 1974, sugar prices rocketed and, inevitably, overproduction resulted. But, help was at hand for the kings of sugar: ‘The government rushed to their aid, and the current sugar program of government subsidies and price supports took hold. The government guaranteed to sugar farmers a price double that of the world market and placed quotas on sugar imports. Such a policy produces a windfall for the Fanjuls at the expense of American taxpayers’(eyeonmiami.blogspot.co.uk, 29 May, 2010).

For capitalists ‘enough’ doesn’t exist in their vocabulary. ‘According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2010), sugar is produced with forced labor in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar (Burma) and Pakistan and with child labor in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Kenya, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines and Uganda’.

How much medicine you, your children and grandchildren have to swallow from the Fanjuls and their class is up to you. Life couldn’t be sweeter for them - and it’s at your expense.

Andy Matthews

Supermarkets and Their Slogans (2013)

From the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Adulterating food for profit isn’t a new story. 'The Old Testament' first alerted its readers to it with the shrill warning that there is, ‘death in the pot!’ (II Kings chap.4, verse 40). At the turn of the twentieth century The New York Evening Post even penned an ode to it:

Mary had a little lamb,  

And when she saw it sicken, 

She shipped it off to Packingtown, 

And now it's labelled chicken.

David Cameron revealed his thoughts on the subject when he stated that it was a 'very shocking story, it's completely unacceptable. . . people will be very angry to find out they have been eating horse when they thought they were eating beef.’ So will those that sold it to them—the supermarkets. They’ve been caught out at their own game by their suppliers: horsemeat costs £300 per ton and beef £700 per ton.

‘Every little helps’ chirps the Tesco slogan, and your helpful cash brings in around £3+ billion in pre-tax profits per year for Tesco from a market share of 30 per cent. About £1 in every £10 spent in British shops ends up in Tescos’ tills. Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons share a further 47 per cent of the total market. With the UK grocery market worth more than £163 billion, the big four are engaged in a constant battle to out manoeuvre each other for a juicier helping of the profit pie.

Sainsbury’s ask you to ‘try something new today’. That’s not too difficult giventhat almost 80 per cent of the food sold in supermarkets today didn’t exist 15 years ago. The majority of these new items are packaged junk food distinguished by their significant lack of nutrients thanks to the pioneering work of the food processors. Like many modern technologies, food processing was developed over the past two centuries to serve military needs: junk food is the lucrative spin-off. People didn’t suddenly demand spicy burgers or chicken nibbles. The market was created because cheap raw materials could be converted into much more expensive, and thus extremely profitable, items to be sold through supermarkets and other retail outlets. Fresh food has its pecuniary advantages too. Researcher Tania Hurt-Newton revealed that the income derived from pineappleswas shared out in these ratios: 4 per cent was earned by the workers; the plantation owners pocketed 17 per cent; 38 per cent went to the multi-national traders; and the supermarkets scalped 41 per cent. A survey conducted by the NFU in 2002 discovered that abasket of food (eggs, milk, bread, tomatoes, beef, and apples) costing £37 in the supermarket returned just £11 to the farmers. Today it is less.

Morrison’s slogan, ‘More of what matters’, will obviously include what in America is called ‘pink slime’, and in the UK the food industry calls ‘filler’. Pink slime is the scraps left after butchering that has been cleaned with ammonia. In 2012, ABC News claimed that of the ground beef sold in American supermarkets around 70 per cent was composed of pink slime. Filler is fat and collagen; derived from the ligaments and tendons of butchered carcasses. This is what bulks out mince meat. New EU rules want to limit this to 19 per cent fat and collagen. But The Telegraph (3 February) revealed that, ‘Supermarkets will be able to sell minced meat containing more than 50 per cent “filler” under Government plans to avoid EU limits’. Similarly, the pressure by supermarkets to force down suppliers’ prices has driven manufacturers to concoct ever cheaper ingredients. Thus the BBC (28 February) can report that European meat suppliers are: ‘using a loophole in the law to sell a banned low quality material to UK sausage makers. Called desinewed meat . . . it’s retrieved from animal bones using low pressure water. Visually it is said to be similar to a fine mince, and closer to meat than the more liquid ‘mechanically separated meat’ (MSM) ‘slurry.’

US poultry meat and cattle exports reached almost $10 billion in 2011, and a total of 33.5 million head of cattle were slaughtered. A few novel ingredients were added to boost profits: around 80 per cent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are gobbled up by factory farming. Cows, poultry, fish and pigs are routinely dosed up by U.S producers. In 1946 the food industry discovered that using antibiotics in livestock feed increased their growth by as much as 3 per cent. It also allowed livestock to be incarcerated in overcrowded and filthy conditions that under other circumstances would have spawned rates of disease and death that would have made it entirely unprofitable. The US Food and Drug Administration has finally acknowledged it as a, ‘mounting public health problem of global significance’ (inthesetimes.com). And a New England Journal of Medicine study found that ‘20 per cent of ground meat obtained in supermarkets contained salmonella. Of that 20 per cent contaminated with salmonella, 84 per cent was resistant to at least one form of antibiotic’ (pbs.org/).

Asda’s slogan asks: ‘Why pay more?’ And why should they?The National Beef Association recently accused supermarkets of ‘short-sighted, price-led, purchasing tactics and a bullying culture.’ When you control around 86 per cent of the market you can use that buying power to put tremendous pressures on suppliers to deliver goods to you at extremely low prices under terms and agreements dictated by your monopoly of the market. Unsurprisingly, those pressures are then exerted downwards on those that actually grow, pick, pack and deliver the food through low wages, long hours, and piss-poor conditions of work.

The Telegraph(27 April 2008) disclosed one of the many tactics used by supermarkets, coined The Flaming Lamborghini. ‘Supermarkets ship in young, hungry graduates in their mid-20s. They send them to be trained to learn a particular buying strategy and then send them out to do battle with the suppliers. Pay is linked to performance. Squeeze another half penny out of the supplier and the buyer's pay will rise. . . Buyers' lives are often short-lived and they are shuttled from pet food to beer to toiletries. The goal is to ensure they never build up close relationships which might tempt them to treat suppliers more kindly.

The Co-operative Group stands at number five in food retailing controlling 9 per cent of the UK market. Its slogan is: ‘Good with food’. The question is: good for whom? Beginning with inputs like seeds, to fertilisers and agricultural machinery, to the processing, transportation, and finally the retailing of food, each area is now dominated by a handful of extremely powerful multinational corporations. Over the past 20 years, through a series of deals and corporate takeovers, names like Monsanto, Syngenta, Unilever, Diageo, Nestle, Kellogg’s, through to Sainsbury’s, Asda and Tesco have gained control of their respective market sectors, thereby escalating their profits to once unthought-of levels. This process is the embodiment of capitalism. Dynamic—fully tuned and optimised—generating a brimming pot for division amongst a faceless class of parasites.

David Cameron considered that the horsemeat saga was a 'very shocking story’. A so-called ‘fraud’ in a global system built and maintained on fraud. Here’s another story: UNESCO acknowledges that there is ‘Abundant supplies of food for 100 per cent of humanity’. But over 16 million people are dying from starvation and 800 million are seriously malnourished, whilst billions live a hand to mouth existence - and all too often very little making it to the mouth. This ‘other’ story will continue to run until a majority of us adopt the slogan: One World—One People. Only then will we gain control of what we produce.

Andy Matthews

Armed and Dangerous (2014)

From the September issue of the Socialist Standard

On 14 July jets led by Air Marshal Thierry Caspar-Fille-Lambie flew over the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, Paris, to commemorate the storming of the Bastille 225 years ago that triggered the advance of French capitalism. Soldiers led by Brigadier Henry Bazin, closely followed by motorised troops led by General Marcel Druart paraded past the President of the French Republic. This celebration of the bourgeois revolution tellingly illustrates the enduring bond, and historical significance, between the capitalist class and militarism. The theme for 2014 was of course: ‘The Centenary of the First World War’. Ten million dead. The President remarked ahead of the parade, ‘we owe them gratitude.’

Meanwhile, 200 miles away a tiny gathering of protesters took place outside the Science Museum in West London. Inside, in the museum’s Making of the Modern World Gallery, arms dealers from around the world congregated for what the organisers described as the ‘most important event during Farnborough week offering an unparalleled opportunity for industry networking’. Farnborough, for the public, is renowned for its Airshow, but behind the glitz and red, white and blue jet trails lies a marketplace where the world’s weapons salesmen court military delegations. The consequent marriages invariably end in multiple deaths.

The Museum’s director responded to a petition by over 2,000 signees, who view the Museum as supporting the arms trade, by stating: ‘The revenue generated by bookings such as this plays an important role in the funding mix that enables us to remain free to millions of visitors.’ Yes, of course. It’s all about money. Museums need cash, as does science, as do scientists, who can’t dine on principle pie. A large proportion of science’s funding comes from the military. It’s a symbiotic relationship under capitalism. The arms trade is as elemental to capitalism as are banks and insurers. States need weapons to defend profits, gain access to new markets, and to acquire raw materials. Typically as the big stick wielded for show, or simply as a veiled threat in negotiations with competitors. And when all else fails they need weapons—to wage war.

The killing business

War is a fundamental consequence of capitalism; since 1900 there have been 247 conflicts with over 77 million fatalities (www.war-memorial.net). Yes, the killing business is always brisk. Since the First World War the character of conflicts has altered. Around 50 percent of those killed in wars in the first half of the last century were civilians. Towards the end it had risen to 90 percent. Vast profits for the manufacturers accrued from these deaths. A handful of capitalists have filled their boots, whilst the workers in the industry received a wage packet. Amongst these were capitalism’s scientists.

Radar, space exploration and communications satellites, nuclear technology, microchips, digital photography, the internet and GPS all have their origins in the killing business. Much earlier mathematics had a role to play in the development of the siege catapult. Even Galileo touted the telescope as a military aid in an effort to gain funds from the Medici court in Florence. In general, though, inventors and craftsmen worked independently from the military developing weapons and then sought their patronage once the product was ready to market. Research and development directed by the military was minimal until the dawn of a new war at the turn of the 20th century.

As much as the civilian population was recruited for the First World War so too was science. Trench warfare, with its use of strongly fortified positions, supported by heavy artillery and machine guns, caused millions of deaths but little strategic advantage. The military minds and their political masters sought new killing technologies and scientists and engineers were employed to deliver them. Tanks and aeroplanes roamed the battlefield but with limited effect. Poison gas however did have an impact—a terrifying psychological one.

Capitalism’s ideologies that had successfully mobilised millions of ordinary civilians and turned them into front line killers also worked on scientists. Why shouldn’t it? Thus scientists like Fritz Haber, described as the ‘father of chemical warfare’ and a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918, developed and organised the use of chlorine and other toxic gases employed extensively throughout the First World War. His adversary was the French Nobel laureate chemist Victor Grignard. Haber considered himself a patriot. Decorated and given the rank of captain by the Kaiser even though he was too old to enlist, Haber exposed the poison of nationalism when he penned his rationale: ‘During peace time a scientist belongs to the World, but during war time he belongs to his country’( Science: A Many-Splendored Thing, 2011).

The 20th century saw the development of new weapons. Thousands of scientists have, and still are, recruited and involved in programmes that have only one end product—killing en masse. In 1939, Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, argued his way up and down Whitehall for the research, development and use of biological weapons. Banting was an advocate for total war as was Winston Churchill. Thus his plans found willing listeners leading to work beginning on an anthrax bomb at Porton Down under the guidance of microbiologist Paul Fildes. Banting justified total war, in his writings: ‘eight to ten people working at home are now required to keep one man in the fighting line. . . so, it is just as effective to kill or disable ten unarmed workers at home as to put a soldier out of action, and if this can be done with less risk, then it would be advantageous to employ any mode of warfare to accomplish this’ (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov).

Manhattan project

The discovery, in Germany, of nuclear fission in 1939 was the precursor of the Manhattan project which began in 1942. By 1944 the Project employed around 129,000 waged workers, 84,500 of whom worked in construction, 40,500 were plant operators and 1,800 were military personnel. Scientists were at the apex of this workforce. The Manhattan Project culminated in the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. About 70,000 to 80,000 people, 30 percent of the population, were killed immediately, and another 70,000 injured. The legacy of this project is what we now live under—a nuclear stockpile estimated at 20,000 warheads.

Albert Einstein’s 1905 paper on special relativity shaped the theoretical foundations for Hiroshima’s bomb. Is he to blame for all of the deaths? Or are, perhaps, the 84,500 construction workers? Are Habing and Banter to blame? Or the noxious ideologies that motivated them that creates human beings who are willing to murder other human beings simply because they salute a different coloured rag? Have the protestors at the Science Museum who caused the ‘Bahraini military delegation and a number of arms dealers to be turned away’ considered that the weapons peddlers and the military delegations are just a symptom of a corrosive disease? If one arms dealer is turned away ten others will fill the void. For every tyrant deposed five are evolving. It’s not the weapons, their peddlers, or the buyers that are the problem—it’s the system that spawns them. That system is capitalism. And all industries are governed by its priorities.

The killing business needs customers and capitalism’s impetus towards war always provides them: ‘Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said he will reduce the country’s ‘useless’ science programs to finance the production of drones and precision weapons. ‘There will be no more spending of billions of people’s money, taxpayers’ money on useless research programs, which were used as a tool for theft’, said a statement published on the president’s website early on Wednesday. ‘Today, Ukrainian production will be busy making precision weapons systems, Ukrainian drones, everything the Ukrainian army needs, starting with bullet proof vests and ending with thermographic cameras,’ he said’ (rt.com).

A clock is ticking. A scientist who understood how capitalism works and what it is capable of left this timely reminder for all of us: ‘I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones’ -- Albert Einstein

Andy Matthews

War, Weapons and Water (2012)

From the December 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Whisky is for drinking; water is for fighting over.’ (Mark Twain)

The BBC in November 1999 reported on a UN Development Programme which argued that potential ‘water wars are likely in areas where rivers and lakes are shared by more than one country’. Speaking in New Delhi in March 2001 the then Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, predicted that: ‘if we are not careful, future wars are going to be about water and not about oil.’ John Reid, Minister for Defence warned in 2006 that: ‘climate change may spark conflict between nations – and … British armed forces must be ready to tackle the violence,’ Independent (28/02/06).  And in March of this year in the Guardian Energy Secretary, Ed Davies stated that: ‘I have a fear for the world that climate instability drives political instability,’ and continued by saying: ‘The pressure of that makes conflict more likely.’ Mark Twain may have got it right then.

The Pacific Institute (worldwater.org) underline Twain’s words through their chronology of 225 entries from 3000 BC to 2010 of violent conflicts relating to water. Water and air are the two necessities of human life. Fortunately, only water has evolved into private property and only recently as a commodity for sale on the market. Fortune magazine extols its virtues as a commodity: ‘One of the world's great business opportunities. It promises to be to the 21^st century what oil was to the 20^th’ (CBC News, 02/03). Which might give Kofi Annan something to brood over.

The origins of conflicts over water developed with the ownership of domestic livestock and the growth of agriculture several thousand years ago. Water had gradually taken on an economic character. Thus, when grazing pasture and natural watering holes dry up, and farmers seem to be flourishing, then peaceful cooperation inevitably stops working. Latterly, under capitalism, the procuring, extracting, treating, storing and delivery of water has a cost and, as Fortune magazine points out, a profit is expected in return. If supplies of any commodity become short, it can be expected that the price will rise.

Growth is as important to capitalism as water is to a human being. And water is a crucial element in any future growth of capitalism. Global capitalists compete to harness and control water because it is an indispensable component for commercial fisheries, agriculture, manufacturing and tourism, and most importantly it is a source of energy through hydroelectric power, which at present supplies around 6 per cent of the world’s commercial energy. But this commodity is becoming scarce. A CIA report in 2000 predicted that ‘By 2015 nearly half the world's population –more than 3 billion people –will live in countries that are 'water-stressed' –- have less than 1,700 cubic meters of water per capita per year –mostly in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and northern China’ (sourcewatch.org).

In Africa, The Okavango Basin is a source of tension between Botswana and Namibia. Both countries are victims of drought and Namibia has already built a water canal and has proposed building a pipeline to divert water from the river back into Namibia. At stake for Botswana is its only source of water and an expanding income from tourism. Namibia argues that it is entitled to any water that flows through its country. Egypt’s economy is highly dependent on agriculture and thus the distribution of the waters of the Nile. Egypt claims to have a historical right to the Nile, but upstream, Ethiopia and Sudan see matters differently. The former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak threatened in 1989 to send demolition squads to destroy a projected dam in Ethiopia, and ‘The Egyptian army still has jungle warfare brigades, even though they have no jungle’ (aljazeera.com/).

In the Middle East just one per cent of the world’s water is competed for by five per cent of its population. Thus, the former Israeli Prime Minister, General Ariel Sharon, could state that, ‘People generally regard 5 June 1967 as the day the six-day war began. That is the official date. But, in reality, it started two- and-a-half years earlier, on the day Israel decided to act against the diversion of the Jordan.’ And in 1979 following the signing of the peace treaty with Israel, President Anwar Sadat said that ‘Egypt will never go to war again, except to protect its water resources’. Likewise King Hussein of Jordan stated that ‘he will never go to war with Israel again except over water’ (mideastnews.com). Israel maintains control over the River Jordan and has restricted supplies during times of scarcity as the people of the Palestinian Territories will validate.

The Euphrates River has been a regional flashpoint for a number of years. Minor skirmishes had been fought between Syria and Iraq over water rights. In May 1975 tensions were ratcheted up when both sides massed troops on their borders following Syria’s claim that Iraq had reduced the flow of water by 50%. In January 1990 Turkey shut off the flow of the Euphrates for 30 days by closing the gates of the Ataturk Dam. And in 1998 distrust, which some observers believed could lead to hostilities, arose because of Turkish plans to build dams that could be used to control supplies to downstream Syria. The escalating scarcity of water in the region has done nothing to improve this situation.

China and India’s economic growth is jealously eyed by other capitalist states. With the predicted consequences of climate change and faster glacial melt factored into the thinking of state planners, alternative methods for power, such as hydroelectricity, have been a strategic dynamic in their efforts to maintain future levels of growth. Power shortages are acting as a constraint on India’s factory output. Outages are frequent and for an economy that is already slowing a serious handicap. And, of course, the damming of rivers brings with it control: a useful adjunct to cheap power.

China and India boast two of the world’s mightiest armies who fought a brief border war in 1962. Both stand poised over tensions concerning upstream Chinese proposals to divert water from the Brahmaputra River. The Brahmaputra flows from its source in the Himalayas into Eastern India where it unites with the Ganges. To the east The Kishanganga River thunders down through Northern Kashmir to The Kishanganga Hydroelectric Plant, which was constructed to divert water from the river to a power plant in the Jhelum River basin. The Kishanganga flows on down past one of the world’s most heavily defended borders into Pakistan. The Pakistan state is concerned that the dam will have a detrimental effect on the flow of the river. Water has long been a source of strain between India and Pakistan.

Meanwhile China is also busy in Southeast Asia, along with Laos, in constructing dams over the Mekong River to the alarm of downstream states. Moreover China has built almost 20 dams, and around 40 more are planned, on the eight Tibetan rivers. It is believed that hydropower alone is not the only motive for China’s increasing control over the sources of rivers.

In a society that is awash with weapons that come in various guises, water might appear to be less menacing than many. However, water is now talked of as a ‘Political Weapon’, which is synonymous with the deceptive language conjured up by the school of wordsmiths who gave birth to the snappy idiom, ‘The Nuclear Deterrent’. Brahma Chellaney, the author of the book ‘Water: Asia's New Battlefield’ has asserted, ‘Whether China intends to use water as a political weapon or not, it is acquiring the capability to turn off the tap if it wants to – a leverage it can use to keep any riparian neighbours on good behaviour.’

Problems globally will be exacerbated with the expected rise in grain and oilseed prices as US crops suffer from the country's worst drought since 1936 and the farming regions of South America and Russia suffer similar water shortages (Daily Telegraph, 5 September). According to Rabobanks’ commodities analysts, ‘By June 2013, the basket of food prices tracked by the United Nations could climb 15pc from current levels.’ Rising food prices are always a source of social discontent and thus political instability.

A growing number of environmental writers and strategic analysts view water as a potential trigger for future wars. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2007 stated that: ‘The consequences for humanity are grave. Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict.’

Socialists view war as the last resort for states. Scarcity of any resource that is vital for the production of profits could be, and has been, seen by states as a reason to go to war.

Andy Matthews

A Lack of Imagination (2014)

From the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at what a capitalist corporation imagines 2050 could be like. But will it if capitalism continues?

‘Imagine 2050’ is the title of a joint report recently dreamt up by the environmental services multinational Veolia, and partnered by a group of economists ensconced in the British citadel of capitalist ideology – the London School of Economics. Veolia’s vision of the future describes ‘one future city in which system-level planning has created a dense, resource-efficient society characterised by collaborative consumption, shared ownership and local self-reliance’. Vague; but sounds kind of nice.

Telescoping the reader’s imagination the storyline continues: ‘The 2050 home includes a kitchen where waste is sorted by nanoscopic robots and food packaging that is designed to degrade in line with sell-by dates. Waste from the bin-less home will be collected via a pneumatic network, by an underground network, and transferred to treatment facilities. This 24/7 waste collection service will reduce the presence of vehicles in the city, helping to cut greenhouse gas emissions.’

And it doesn’t end there for these lucky urbanites as their homes will also feature, ‘ultrasonic baths, self-cleaning surfaces and water purification based on systems found in plants and bacteria’. And they’ll also enjoy, ‘3D printers and new paints and materials optimising natural light and improving energy conservation’ (edie.net).

Enter the LSE economists and their unwavering quest for a ‘better capitalism’. One that is civilised, caring; even cuddly. Slightly shrewder now since Her Majesty’s 2010 visit to the citadel when they were at a collective loss to explain her probing question on why the prevailing depression had occurred, and why were they unable to predict it? A tad wiser now? Perhaps they’d flicked through a history book of the last century or two which would reveal that slumps and depressions are endemic to capitalism. As are wars, mass starvation amidst plenty, and gross social deprivation. So ‘Imagine 2050’ adds a one sentence rider that, ‘models a scenario in which disparate and unregulated development has led to a resource-hungry urban sprawl where private consumption and ownership is prioritised over long-term communal thinking’. Sounds familiar? Yes, that’s right; it’s where city-dwellers the world over live right now.

Veolia: profit from water
It’s wise under capitalism to give some thought to who you enter into partnerships with. The LSE’s partner, Veolia, has an interesting past. Its origins lie in an 1853 royal decree by Napoleon III creating its capitalist foundations in a company called Compagnie Générale des Eaux [CGE]. Turning water into a commodity through the human labour necessary for a network of reservoirs, filtration and piping, CGE initially supplied water to Lyon, and then obtained a 50 year concession to supply water to Parisians. Profits gained through surplus value gushed so that in 1976, a new, ambitious CEO, Guy Dejouany, branched out into other market sectors. Through a succession of takeovers of companies as diverse as waste management through to the media came the creation of Vivendi Universal, Vivendi Environment, and finally the catch-all name, Veolia. And there was a sound reason for the change of name. It’s wise to distance yourself from a bad name, and Vivendi had become synonymous with bribery and fraud.

During 1996, five out of 13 directors on the board of Vivendi were under investigation for corruption. In 1997, Vivendi executives colluded with civil servants to channel illegal commissions of up to $86 million- primarily to Jacque Chirac’s party (the RPR) from public contracts worth $3.3 billion. Italian courts sentenced the Milan City Council president to three years in prison for accepting a $2 million bribe from a Vivendi subsidiary during bidding on a $100 million contract. In 2002 a Vivendi CEO was convicted of fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (corporatewatch.org). There were several other high profile allegations, but when you have allies at the centre of financial and political circles accusations generally evaporate.

In 2003 Veolia Environnement S.A was created and headquartered in Paris. It had grown into the biggest water service company in the world. Waste management, energy and transport are its other interests in a business that in 2012 encompassed 48 countries, employed 318,376 people who provided takings set at €29.4 billion. Veolia’s business model was succinctly revealed when its CEO said, ‘Many of the best performing contracts are those where a private operator assumes the operational and commercial risks, but not the major capital expenditures’ (fwwatch.org). Underlying this is the unspoken, always denied, premise that corporations expect governments to pick up the bill for those capital expenditures. Ideological support from economists and an array of apologists for capitalism underpin the ease with which corporations like Veolia gain profitable contracts in the name of privatisation, market efficiency, and the ubiquitously touted ‘ownership society’. Avoiding major capital investment, leasing assets and simply collecting revenues ensures profits flow like water from a tap.

Like all capitalist enterprises Veolia’s principal goal is to maximise profits to ensure shareholder returns. Veolia’s strategy to attain that goal has a history of imposing, ‘lower wages and reducing retirement, health care and other benefits; break contracts; enforce lower work standards detrimental to workers and the community; and reduce the workplace environment to levels below safety standards’ (workers.org). Not content with that in the name of the ‘ownership society’ Veolia uses, ‘other cost cutting measures (inadequate testing, treatment and maintenance), illegal dumping and processing of toxic material. Problems range from service outages, to illegal sewage discharges, to safety hazards, explosions, neglected equipment, and lower water quality’. There are multiple incidents reported globally concerning Veolia’s corporate strategies. Mismanagement of the water supplies has seen scores of law suits and non-renewal of contracts. Even in Veolia’s own backyard of Paris, after 25 years, the city decided, ‘not to renew its contract with Veolia in order to stabilize water rates and save money – which it has’ (corporatewatch.org).

How many will benefit?
‘Imagine 2050’ ends with a piece of advice from LSE senior research fellow for LSE Cities Dr Savvas Verdis: ‘A circular economy cannot be built piecemeal, a systems-wide approach is essential’. Obviously, given their partnership with Veolia the LSE economists imagine that this nebulous circular economy is possible under capitalism utilising corporations like their partner. To encourage businesses to become involved in this business idea Circular Economy 100 has been founded. Knowledge of who they’re dealing with resonates with their mission statement: ‘The Foundation has created the Circular Economy 100 programme to support business in unlocking this commercial opportunity and to enable them to benefit from subsequent first mover advantages (ellenmacarthurfoundation.org). Which translates as: There are profits to be made, but you have to get in quick before they dry up.

Marketing and PR reports seek to hide the truths beneath the carefully worded gloss. Which is precisely what  ‘Imagine 2050’ does. Globally, 1.1 billion people lack access to clean water, 2.6 billion people have no access to basic sanitation. In addition, 2 million children die annually due to easily preventable water borne diseases, and approximately 5000 children die from preventable diarrhoea-related diseases every day. Veolia recently wrote to the Human Rights Council’s independent expert of its efforts to help poor areas of the world and ‘boasted about how it has expanded water access, particularly to those living in remote areas’. However one month later, ‘it told credit analysts on Wall Street that it prioritized ‘financially sound clients’ in dense urban areas’ (corporatewatch.org). And if the urbanite can’t pay Veolia’s bill? ‘An employee at Veolia in France has been sacked for refusing to cut off the water supply to poor families.The man, named in the French media only as Mark, had been employed at Veolia for 20 years but was handed his dismissal letter on April 4th for his refusal to implement the cut-offs following the non-payment of bills’(thelocal.fr/19 April).

UN-Habitats research reveals that the world’s slum population has already grown by 75 million in just three years. And by 2050, expectation is that one in three people will live in urban slums. How many do you believe will benefit from the technology described in Imagine 2050?

PR has another purpose. To create a ‘feel good factor’. To beef up confidence in the future. It doesn’t just try to sell you the commodities, it sells you hope. Fortunately, you can only stack bullshit so high before everyone realises it stinks. Ideologists like the LSE’s economists like to tell us that there is no alternative. Capitalism is eternal and everlasting. They seem incapable of unlocking their own imaginations from the prison of capitalism’s markets. But the technology that they describe in Imagine 2050 is helping to shape people’s thinking and provide the nails for capitalism’s coffin. Those technologies and many others are already in development. A barrier exists for the vast majority to those technologies. And that barrier is capitalism. Jamming its grubby little fingers into the dam are apologists like the LSE’s economists. And the nicest thing that can be said about them is that they lack imagination.

Andy Matthews