The London Referendum (1998)

Editorial from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The referendum in London on 7 May is a farce. For a start, full details of what is involved were only made public in March, so there has not been enough time for a proper debate. Second, there is no provision for equal time to be given to both the “yes” and the “no” sides. So the media will be free to give an unfair advantage to the government case for voting “yes”, as they shamelessly did during the referendums in Scotland and Wales. Third, the question is rigged. If you want an elected assembly for London (as most people do since this is an elementary democratic measure) you can’t vote for this without at the same time voting for an elected mayor who will have more power than the assembly. So you don’t have the choice of saying “yes” to an elected assembly but “no” to an elected mayor.

This neo-Tory Labour government talks a lot about democracy and democratic reform but in practice resorts to the same underhand tactics to get its way as do governments everywhere. It has linked the two questions so as to be sure to get its dubious proposal for a London City Boss through on the back of popular support for the restoration of an elected London council.

We in the Socialist Party are well aware that in the end whatever arrangements are adopted for local government in London won’t make much difference. This is because such arrangements are to be implemented within the context of the profit system, whose economic mechanisms require all levels of government, however structured, to trim their spending so as not to endanger profit levels whatever people may want–or vote for.

Even so, an elected mayor is not a good idea. As the title of the government’s Green Paper–New Leadership for London—proclaims, this is a proposal to elect a Leader for London. This Leader will not just have more power than the elected assembly but will be paid a fat cat salary (so as to remove, it is said, the temptation to be corrupt) and have the remit of managing London as if it were a capitalist enterprise. The whole proposal is a travesty of democracy.

Democracy means participating in the running of affairs, not following leaders. The proposal for an elected mayor is a proposal to endorse what passes for democracy under capitalism: a choice not of alternative social systems or even policies but of rival leaders who are all packaging and no substance. Tony Banks, David Mellor, Chris Patten, who has the best smile? Who cares? But worse, it encourages people to think that some Leader can solve society’s problems for them, whereas these problems can only be solved by people refusing to follow leaders and acting for themselves. The only kind of politics that is going to work is a do-it-yourself politics aimed at abolishing the profit system.

Who Said It First? (1998)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years ago Joe Biden fancied himself as the next president of the United States but his candidature came to an abrupt end when it was discovered that he had repeated word-for-word parts of a speech by Neil Kinnock. We can assume that Biden was not penalised because he lifted someone else’s words but because it was clear that anyone who thought Kinnock even said anything worth repeating must be too mad to be trusted in the White House.

This sordid incident came to mind last month when William Hague was accused of pirating parts of speeches made by Tony Blair and in his turn charged Blair with lifting phrases from John Major (which would be even more insane than plagiarising Neil Kinnock). In what seemed a leaked version of a speech he intended to make in Australia, Hague was to have said:

“We can say to the elderly person who is afraid to go out at night for fear of being attacked–we are on your side.”

Which was rather like Blair at the Labour Party Conference in 1994:

“To the pensioners who fear to go out of their homes, let us say–we are on your side.”

There were plenty of other examples because it seems that Hague and Blair are both on the same side of all sorts of people–parents, students, people who run small businesses–in fact almost anyone who could suppress their anxieties at being at one with Blair and Hague long enough to vote for them.

Europe

If the charge against Hague was true it can be said that at least he showed a keen sense of timing because Blair made that speech four years ago and we all know what can happen to politicians’ promises over that kind of time lapse. In his past, for example, Blair spoke up for the trade unions and for CND. His election address in 1983 declared:

“We’ll negotiate a withdrawal from the EEC (EU) which has drained our natural resources and destroyed jobs.”

But in April 1995 he told the Royal Institute of International Affairs that:

" . . . Europe is today the only route through which Britain can exercise power and influence. If it is to maintain its historical role as a global player, Britain has to be a central part of the politics of Europe. so Labour will be strong in Europe.”

What this means is that if Hague is really so short on ideas that his speechwriters are reduced to plundering Blair’s speeches, he has a lot of choice. And the same would apply to Blair. Because what has been overlooked, as the accusations and counter-accusations over the speeches flow backwards and forwards, is that there is a simple, established reason for any similarity between what the two leaders say. They basically agree with each other. In terms of the policies and the promises they offer the voters there is really nothing to choose between them. It is, obviously, difficult to keep spouting the same tired arguments without occasionally repeating yourself, or using phrases which have already been used by the person you call your opponent.

Real issue

This is the nub of the matter; it is the real issue which should concern all those people who allow themselves to be carried away in their interest in the trivial spats between the parties of capitalism. Read the manifestoes, listen the leaders’ speeches–and what do you find? First of all there is a great deal of broad-ranging but empty assertion of “principles”. Both will tell you how courageous, industrious and ingenious the British people are. Both will say that all those qualities are being, or have been, held in check by the policies of the other party. Both will offer sweeping, generalised pledges to make things better. There will be a few memorable sound-bites.

If you have managed to last this long you will then come to the more detailed plans for the management of British capitalism. Here again you would need a microscope to see any real differences. In many examples you could exchange one set of detailed proposals for the other. No-one would notice. And when, after all the reading of manifestoes and listening to speeches, a government is elected you will find them in their actions they are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from each other.

That is why Blair’s government is upsetting so many of its supporters, who thought they had seen the end of almost 20 years of Conservative government and that after 1 May things could only get better. That is why, as Blair and his ministers attack our living standards and crack down on the poorer and weaker among the working class, they tell us that this is really for our own good because its our fault if we’re poor and weak in the first place–just as Tory ministers used to tell us.

That is why, as they speak in the same terms, what they say is interchangeable. So that they can imitate, or steal, what each other say. If we do notice, we will have gone a long way towards treating these incidents as seriously as they deserve–not as minor spats about who said what first but as the exposure of a social system and its cynical propagandists.

Ivan

Great Stuff (1998)

The TV Review column from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is so much crap on TV that deserves the severest criticism by socialists that when a rare, inspiring programme appears on the box, those of us who spend too much of our time in front of it are more than justified in celebrating the event.

Just such an occasion was the last series of the “The Mark Thomas Comedy Product” (Channel 4). If nothing else, this show achieved something absolutely vital: it was both meaningfully political and very, very funny. Scorching, bang-bang-bang studio stand-up was mixed in with film of Mark and his mates pulling situationist-style stunts at the expense of members of the establishment, the capitalist class, and their shabby hypocrisy.

Those who enjoyed the previous series–gas fat-cat Cedric Brown refusing to meet Thomas and receive a cheque for five grand “we’ve just proved that Cedric Brown is now so rich that he won’t even walk down a flight of stairs for £5000!”); Mark sticking ice cream cones on a tank and inquiring of William Waldegrave about sending it to a “mate in Iraq”–were not disappointed this time out.

In an unforgettable TV moment Mark drew out of a Church of England investment manager that the Church wouldn’t make money from companies concerned with drink or porn on “moral” grounds, but weaponry was fine. He then rolled up with a missile launcher of the type the Church profits from, decked out with the slogan “CHURCH OF ENGLAND–KILLING FOREIGNERS FOR PROFIT AND JESUS”, as a helpful suggestion of how the god squad should publicise their activities. In doing this Thomas was able to reveal “the great and the good” as the callous money-grubbing bastards they often are. And the reaction of the (mostly male) anti-abortion moral fascists he so accurately sent up really was unmissable.

As for the straightforward comedy routines, the anti-work song in the penultimate episode (more “fucks” than you could shake a boss at) had this socialist reaching for “rewind” time after time–a really funny, bitingly accurate ballad against wage slavery.

But any criticisms? Lack of a proposed social alternative, for instance? Not really, because it’s amazing just how much a man so obviously from a libertarian political background was actually able to get away with. In his own postscript to the series Thomas summed up by saying that if the show had been about anything, it was that there is no reason why we should have to put up with the sort of shit he had been tackling.

This wasn’t the political and social action needed to get rid of that shit certainly, and didn’t pretend to be, but the more or this sort of TV there is to combat the lies and dross our class is forever bombarded with the better. Great stuff!

Ben Malcolm

Crisis in Indonesia (1998)

From the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1965, General Suharto came to power in a military coup in Indonesia that had the full backing of Britain and the US. During a Cold War arms build-up and a world focusing on the Vietnam War and the "communist threat", Suharto became a welcome ally as he massacred 600,000 of his opponents. In the years that followed, Suharto would consolidate his power, corruption would take on a whole new meaning and Indonesia would become a by-word for human rights abuses, most notably following the annexation of East Timor and the massacre of a further 200,000. All the while, the West turned a blind eye, supplying him with arms and training his military staff--interested only in the vast oil reserves Indonesia straddles.

Western eyes are now looking cautiously at Indonesia. In July of last year, the economy began to collapse and reached real crisis point during January of this year. Inflation rocketed and bankruptcies followed. Basic foodstuffs have more than doubled in price and thousands have died of hunger.

That much of his happened during January--a month of self-restraint (Ramadan) for Indonesia's moslems--perhaps explains why food riots born of country-wide discontent did not erupt fully until February, with Chinese food stores and restaurants taking much of the impact. The Chinese, who make up five percent of the population, were readily perceived as being the cause of the food shortages. That they own 70 percent of Indonesia's wealth was reason enough to convince angry crowds that they had grown rich off the backs of the masses.

Media analysts fear more trouble ahead, indeed a total meltdown of the Indonesian economy within the next month, particularly in light of a recent IMF decision to delay disbursement of the next tranche of a $43 billion bailout.

The IMF agreed to the $43 billion lifeline on condition that Suharto reformed a structure of monopolies, tariffs and subsidies--in other words, the targeting of the interests of his cronies and six offspring.

Suharto accused the IMF of trying to impose a liberal economy on the country, which he claimed was not in line with Article 33 of the Indonesian constitution, which stipulates that the economy should be developed along "family principles and which stresses 'regulated cooperatives' rather than the 'free market'".

Back to basics

"Family principles" takes on a whole new meaning in Indonesia. Not only is nepotism rampant, with Suharto's relatives up to their necks in all manner corruption, but Suharto himself is estimated to have assets worth over $40 billion (coincidentally the size of the IMF loan he is haggling over).

Having promised to give Indonesia's central bank full autonomy over monetary policy, Suharto then sacked its governor and directors for objecting to his plans for an "IMF-plus measure"--the setting up of a currency board charged with pegging the Indonesian rupiah to the US dollar. Not only was this opposed by the IMF, the World Bank, the US and the EU, but his own critics in Indonesia lambasted it, pointing to the country's limited foreign reserves and corrupt bureaucracy.

Having just been elected president for the seventh time, to rule for another five years, by a 1,000-member electoral assembly he vetted himself, Suharto is taking economic advice from his schoolfriend Professor Jusuf Habiba. Habiba's economic competence has long been questioned--even by Western economists who still dream up futile models of how capitalism can best work--at least since his "zig-zag" theory which professed that rising inflation is best offset with low interest rates.

It is highly likely that a state of emergency will be declared shortly. Riots have been widespread, often urged on by students less inclined to the rhetoric of scape-goating. Panic buying has emptied shelves and forced many shops to close and the military is becoming edgy, fearful for its own interests. With a restless population of over 200 million, split into 300 ethnic groups, Indonesia faces a precarious next few months.

If the worst does come, we can well imagine the front page analysts pointing to Suharto's corruption and poor economic insight as a cause, and others to the "bursting bubble" of the Asian economic miracle and its wider dimensions. None, we predict, will point out that this is how capitalism functions, that capitalism is an archaic, chaotic and ungovernable system. And we are not being churlish in suggesting that nothing out of the ordinary is happening Indonesia--for this is capitalism working normally, according to its own insane logic.

Our sympathies go out to the millions destined to suffer in the madness, the millions who will in fact lend their support to the same system that has impoverished them, and who will always suffer until it dawns on them there is an alternative and that it is they alone who can bring it about.

John Bissett

Artificial scarcity (1998)

From the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Technological capacity to produce enough to satisfy everyone's needs already exists globally and has done so for many decades. Yet needs continue to remain unmet on a massive scale. Why? Quite simply because scarcity is a functional requirement of capitalism itself.

Production today is not primarily geared to satisfy human needs but "effective demand"--when "consumers" are able to buy goods at a price which will enable enterprises producing them to realise a profit. If what people can afford falls short of what they need, increasing output to satisfy the latter would cause prices to fall--to the detriment of profit. So the need for profit conflicts with the satisfaction of human needs.

Profit is not essentially a measure of technical efficiency. It is sometimes argued that the market's "hidden hand" guides enterprises towards the most efficient allocation of resources by bankrupting those failing to respond appropriately to its price signals. According to this argument, resources are inherently scarce and the market provides the best, if not the only, available mechanism for ensuring they are not wasted (which would aggravate scarcity). But the yardstick of "efficiency" used here is not something external to capitalism but intrinsic to it. An enterprise is judged to be "efficient" to the extent that it is profitable.

That means its revenue exceeds its cost. However, this can create the illusion that profits are made in the market--by raising prices to more than cover costs. But capitalists cannot just arbitrarily raise their prices--that could mean losing business to their competitors. In any case, one enterprise's price increase would constitute another's cost increase (insofar as enterprises supply each other with the inputs they require), with the resulting reciprocal losses and gains balancing each other in the long run.

In fact, profits are made in the sphere of production (but only "realised" in the market). The source of all wealth is human labour applied to natural resources. Those who apply their labour to create this wealth today (the workers) are employed to do so by the owners of the means of wealth production (the capitalists). The value of the wealth workers create necessarily exceeds the value of their working abilities for which they are paid a wage (or salary)--the difference between these two values being "surplus value", the source of the capitalists' profit.

So profit depends on restricting workers' consumption to what is needed to develop and maintain their working abilities at the level required. More than that only adds to the wages bill without producing a commensurate increase in productivity. But what is so vital about profit that makes this necessary? Not only does it afford capitalists a lavish lifestyle; more importantly, it is the source of their capital. The more capital they can accumulate out of the profits accruing to them the more effectively can they compete--by investing in more productive technologies to undercut their competitors--and thus claim a larger share of the market for themselves. If they did not do this then their competitors would, and could knock them out of business.

So economic competition between enterprises fuels the drive towards capital accumulation. This in turn necessitates profit maximisation which expresses itself as a continuous downward pressure on wages (reinforced by competition between workers on the labour market), insofar as these constitute costs which subtract from the capitalists' profit. This downward pressure on wages was once widely thought by Leftists to lead to a chronic and ever-deepening depression. According to this theory of "underconsumption", the development of the productive forces would result in increasing quantities of consumer goods swamping the market which workers would be unable to buy back, thus precipitating capitalism's collapse.

However, any decline in the workers' share of total wealth must represent an increase in the share appropriated by the capitalists and hence also their potential demand for consumer goods. It might be argued that rather than increase their consumption of consumer goods the capitalists could divert more of their wealth into investment instead, thereby enhancing the productive capacity of industry. But since such investment will only proceed when there is the expectation of profit this presupposes the existence of consumer markets capable of absorbing the potential increase in output.

Nevertheless, while growth in productive capacity and market demands tend to balance out in the long run their normal state is one of "disequilibrium". This generates a continuous process of mutual adjustment which takes the form of the capitalist "trade cycle". In the run-up to a boom enterprises expand their productive capacity to meet the surge in market demand. However, blind competition between them leads to overproduction in some sectors of the economy at first, resulting in falling prices and a squeeze on profits. Workers are then laid off in these sectors thereby reducing their demand for the goods provided by other sectors. A ripple effect is thus created which takes its toll on an expanding range of industries resulting in a generalised recession which only comes to an end when the conditions for profitable production are restored. As Marx put it: "the last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as compared to the tendency of capitalist production to develop the productive forces in such a way that only the absolute power of consumption of the entire society would be their limit" (Capital III, p.30).

Artificial needs

As well as desiring things we need, we are also encouraged to desire things that we do not need. Indeed, insofar as there is theoretically no limit to what we are capable of desiring this allows pro-capitalist economists to argue that scarcity is the "condition of the world". To question why we should desire such things over and above what we need is to encroach on territory that falls beyond the scope of traditional economics; it is thus deemed inadmissible from the blinkered perspective of the economists themselves.

Not that that prevents them from adopting the assumption that human beings are fundamentally driven by insatiable desires. In fact, the attempt to universalise that assumption by grounding it in the very nature of human beings was, as Marshall Sahlins argues in his Stone Age Economics, the ideological by-product of an emerging bourgeois society. Not coincidentally, it went hand-in-hand with the attempt to downgrade and dismiss earlier cultures as "primitive" and "backward" for not exhibiting the insatiable desires characteristic of bourgeois society itself. As Sahlins points out, the bourgeois axiom of scarce resources and unlimited wants can be neatly reversed in the case of our hunter-gatherer forbears for whom an excess of possessions was not merely disapproved of but viewed as a positive encumbrance to their nomadic way of life.

It was with the appearance of private property, particularly in its individualistic capitalist form, that the ideology of scarcity took root. In his perceptive book To Have or To Be, Erich Fromm notes that private property derives from the Latin word privare meaning "to deprive of" because "the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full powers to deprive others of its use or enjoyment". It is such deprivation that engenders the pathological desire to possess. For within this individualistic world-view it is through one's possessions that one attains the power and freedom to be oneself; one's sense of self-identity and self-worth--in short, one's social status--is tied up with, and expressed through, one's possessions. This is what Fromm means by a "having" mode of existence as opposed to a "being" mode.

Crudely speaking, this means that the better-off one is materially speaking the more status one accrues. However, since it is not the absolute amount of one's material possessions as such that determines one's position in this status hierarchy but rather what one has compared with what others have, it follows that economic inequality is a basic precondition for such a system of status differentiation to effectively operate. In this respect, capitalism not only provides the yardstick by which this concept of status is measured but also works to ensure an unequal distribution of wealth, enabling such a system to operate.

So it does not matter how modest one's real needs may be or how easily they may be met; capitalism's "consumer culture" leads one to want more than one may materially need since what the individual desires is to enhance his or her status within this culture of consumerism and this is dependent upon acquiring more than others have got. But since others desire the same thing, the economic inequality inherent in a system of competitive capitalism must inevitably generate a pervasive sense of relative deprivation.

What this amounts to is a kind of institutionalised envy. This is ironic inasmuch as socialists are often accused of being motivated by the "politics of envy". Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, such envy is merely the flip side of the same coin as greed. And it is the idea of greed which underwrites the myth of scarcity which, in turn, serves to justify the existence of a market which socialists oppose.

Socially useless production

Socially useless production constitutes a large and growing proportion of economic activity within capitalism and, as such, contributes significantly to the perpetuation of artificial scarcity--in this case from the standpoint of supply rather than demand.

Of course, capitalism does not and cannot distinguish between socially useful and socially useless production. The reason for this is that both are functionally necessary for the realisation of profit. So for anyone not looking beyond the parameters of capitalism such a distinction will remain obscured.

If socially useful production comprises any form of activity that goes to satisfy real human needs, socially useless production represents any activity that does not satisfy such needs. The needs that the latter satisfies are the system's needs. These include not only status needs but operational needs arising from how the system operates. There is a tendency for capitalism to develop towards ever-increasing complexity with the consequence that over time its operational needs tend to soak up ever-larger quantities of resources and human labour. This is exemplified by the growth of money-based activities to facilitate market transactions (from banking to retailing), reactive/remedial activities to cope with the social problems thrown up by capitalism (from social workers to trade unions) and coercive activities to protect or promote the interests of capital (from weapons research to security firms).

Estimates vary as the proportion of total labour and resources devoted to systemic needs but there can be little doubt that, particularly in the advanced capitalist economies, well over half the total labour force is involved in one or other form of socially useless production. This represents a massive waste of human effort and resources which, if redirected towards socially useful production, could effectively eliminate scarcity as far as the satisfaction of real needs is concerned. To eliminate scarcity, however, requires a fundamental switch from production for profit to production for use--from capitalism to socialism.

Robin Cox

Revisiting Marx (1998)

Book Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reflections on Marx's Critique of Political Economy. Collectivities, Faridabad, India, 1997

This 48-page A4 pamphlet produced by a "council communist" group in India focuses on five elements of Marxian economics although the authors prefer to use the term "Marx's critique of political economy". This is specifically what Marx wrote as the subtitle of Capital and is in large part what he set out to provide. However, in elaborating this critique he went beyond a mere criticism of bourgeois economics and developed his own analysis of how the capitalist system actually works--or, as he put it--of "the laws of motion of the capitalist system of production". The five elements discussed here--each with its own chapter--are Marx's basic characterisation of capital; the extent of the domination of the capitalist mode of production; the significance of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall; the problem of extended reproduction; and monopoly capitalism and imperialism.

The coherence of the analysis offered in each chapter varies. The best is the last one where the position of revolutionaries is taken up unequivocally against the Leninists who have attached themselves to the Marxian framework this century while in reality abandoning the working class viewpoint and supporting "anti-imperialist" states against imperialist powers and proclaiming the so-called "right of nations to self-determination".

Unfortunately some of the specifically economic analysis in the other four chapters is less good. There is an odd chapter denying that there is any tendency at all for the average rate of profit to fall in capitalism, argued principally on the strength of a misreading of a passage in Volume Three of Capital about the effect of the growth of joint-stock companies on the rate of profit. This is a point answered comprehensively enough by another council communist type group called Internationalist Perspectives in the latest edition of their journal.

The main problem though with this pamphlet is its seeming insistence that the cause of capitalist crises is the inability of the working class and capitalist class combined to buy back the entire product of industry. This is a dangerous theory to hold, on two grounds. One is that it explicitly leads to the view that capitalism is somehow going to collapse as a mode of production, thus encouraging crude determinism and a fatalism within the working class movement. The other is that it is simply, and demonstrably, incorrect.

In essence the view Collectivities put forward here appears to be the one elaborated by Rosa Luxemburg in her work The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1914. In this theory, the growth (and survival) of "pure" capitalism is impossible as it is unable to realise on its markets all the value that has been added in the sphere of production; hence capitalist growth is only possible when a non-capitalist periphery exists for the system to use as a source of additional markets. This is an argument based on a complete misreading of Marx's reproduction schemas for both "simple" and "extended" reproduction. Indeed, Marx himself furnished the theoretical disproof of this view that growth in "pure" capitalism would be impossible, in Chapter 49 of Volume Three of Capital.

However, fundamentally the disproof of this theory is practical rather than just theoretical, based on the actuality of capitalist development this century. If growth in "pure" capitalism or at least something near to "pure" capitalism is impossible, the system just wouldn't have been able to expand the forces of production in the way that it has been doing. If capitalism has been in a state of market saturation for decades (and according to Luxemburg as far back as 1914) its long-term growth in the years since would have been impossible. And, although its rate of expansion has slowed in recent years, it has still continued to enjoy considerable long-term growth ever since Luxemburg wrote--and without selling sizeable quantities of commodities to undeveloped non-capitalist areas of the planet (if anything the opposite has been the case--it has attempted to plunder the small remaining non-capitalist periphery, rather than attempt to sell products to people with no money to buy them anyway).

Frankly, the idea that a serious revolutionary organisation locating itself in the Marxian tradition can still hold this view is more than faintly ridiculous. But it does illustrate another key problem with this pamphlet. Though there is much to commend it, from its definition of capitalism as a world system based on the exploitation of wage labour through to its largely excellent analysis of imperialism, it tends to lack a grounding in some of the realities of contemporary capitalist production. There are, for instance, in several thousand words of text, very few statistics or references to back-up what are sometimes rather grandiose and sometimes over-confidently stated claims. Interestingly, Collectivities claim that "obsession with the significance of the rate of profit and its tendency to fall in the present results in very sad and shabby attempts in force-fitting data to outdated concepts". Unfortunately, this equally applies to Collectivities own "market saturation" view of capitalist crises, for which--conveniently--they do not bother to provide any data at all.

DAP

News from Mars (1998)

Book Review from the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Stone Canal by Ken MacLeod. Legend £5.99.

Here is an unusual novel, and not just because one of the major characters is the son of life-long members of the Socialist Party. It is a political science-fiction novel (like MacLeod's previous book The Star Fraction), with scenes ranging from recent student politics to a future "anarcho-capitalist" Mars.

Let's look as some of the passages relating to the Socialist Party. At one point the narrator meets his parents at that old Socialist stomping-ground, Speakers' Corner:

" . . . they were doing a respectable trade in a pamphlet. In between keeping half an eye on the demo and chatting to whichever of them wasn't in full flow, I flipped through 'Is a Third World War Inevitable?': its cover as lurid as any peace-movement propaganda, its contents a frosty dismissal of two centuries of peace campaigns—all of which had failed to prevent (where they hadn't actively endorsed) increasingly destructive wars."

This presents a reasonable description of the pamphlet in question, and gives a good idea of MacLeod's basic attitude to the Socialist Party: poking gentle fun at us, but in a basically friendly way. Elsewhere, the same character recalls some of his childhood memories:

"The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father's, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful."

A chance finding of the Russia today pamphlet Soviet Millionaires in a bookshop leads to the observation that "It hadn't stayed in circulation long, not after the SPGB had seized on it as irrefutable proof that behind the socialist façade the USSR concealed a class of wealthy property-owners."

In an article in the science-fiction journal Matrix, MacLeod has discussed his political activities and ideas. He was for many years a Trotskyist, but also acknowledges that he was influenced by "thinking about the implications of the 'non-market socialism' associated with the few but persistent propagandists of the Socialist Party of Great Britain". And he mentions with approval William Morris's idea of Socialism as "a world-wide classless, stateless, moneyless society", using language rarely found outside the pages of the Socialist Standard. It is plain, too, that he now has little time for the traditional left.

However, he also refers to having learned from the so-called libertarians, professed advocates of capitalism with a "free" market and a minimal state. These are the ideas that have influenced the Martian society depicted here, though it still has room for authoritarian legal structures but "privatised" ones, so perhaps that's OK.

MacLeod describes The Stone Canal as "a communist novel about libertarians", but frankly its communist/socialist viewpoint is not explicit enough for this. Despite his apparent sympathy for the Socialist Party's view of the world, he has not written a communist/socialist novel. But he has written a highly-interesting one that may get some readers interested in knowing more about us. Read it—and hope that in future novels he may write more about the moneyless, classless society he states he wants.

Paul Bennett

Never a follower be (1998)

From the April 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Greek phrase "an-archon" or "no leader" gave us the word "anarchy". Yet "anarchy" to most people is another name for chaos, or disorder. The assumption is that without leaders, there can be no civilisation. Our contention is the opposite. Leaders, and the followers who create them, are holding us back from any real global civilisation.

Think what some of these leaders have accomplished for humanity. Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Margaret Thatcher, Mao Tse Tung, Saddam Hussein--it would be perverse indeed to claim that such leaders have benefited the human species, and yet stubbornly the leadership cult persists. Anyone can write a long list of "bad leaders". But try writing a list of "good leaders" and see how far you get.

The world is obsessed by leaders and leadership. Corruption charge may follow sex scandal in the halls of power, and it doesn't seem to matter how many political, religious or other leaders are exposed as liars and frauds, nothing seems to dent the idea of leadership as a practical and reliable method of organising human affairs. The evidence may say differently, the individuals in real life may be as bent as a rubber shilling but the principle of leadership is still considered perfectly valid. Is this because we believe that some (mostly) men are just superhuman, or because we are over-rating the few and under-rating the many?

The comic-strip character "Superman" has to save the human race so often he must get really bored with it. In most adventure stories, books and films, and in true heroic form, one or other man usually saves us all. With this plot, write your own blockbuster. We have a "hero" fixation, perhaps shaped in a modern form by Nietzchean ideas of perfectibility, but born originally in the vacuum left by the death of old gods and antiquated religions, and justified by a rather freudian view of history as the sequential biographies of great leaders and lords. All this continues to inform our art, our imagination and our politics. If only we had the right people in charge, everything would be better.

Or would it? In nature, any species which relied so heavily on certain "heroic" individuals to save it just wouldn't last a single sweaty afternoon. Human beings are far too inventive and adaptable to leave themselves in such a fix, and in order to persuade ourselves that we need leaders we somehow have to forget this fact, and keep on forgetting it.

Humans are remarkable. Our very diversity as a species is the key to our success, if that is the word, in dominating all other species. We have the most complex brain ever evolved in nature and by trading ideas through the medium of our collective diversity (that is to say, society) we have multiplied our latent ingenuity by many orders of magnitude. In a geological second or two we have climbed down from the trees, given ourselves a name, learned to produce food in abundance, and sent our spacecraft to explore our planetary system.

That's not bad going for an unpromising and rather weedy bald, deaf ape with bad eyesight and no sense of smell. Nobody would have put money on us back in the Pliocene.

We now we dominate the globe. And are we looking after it properly? Obviously not. The rest of the animal species are at our mercy, and we are making them extinct. Are we content? No, we're not. Can we stop destroying everything around us? No, we can't. What's wrong with us?

Post-scarcity era
It's because we can't let go of the past. Yes, we've had to fight all the way to survive. Yes, we've had slavery of one sort or another and, yes, we've been dominated by priests, kings and presidents for all our written history. We're in a new era now, the post-scarcity era, and we don't need to fight anymore, but we haven't woken up to the fact. We still think we have to dominate everything, including each other. Our social systems, our behaviour, the cast of our ideas are all predicated on the inevitability of competition for wealth and favour, on the need for leaders and followers. We are still hypnotised by the historic glare of power and domination, lulled and gulled by the soft insistent tones of our leaders that they and their ilk are as inevitable as the stars in the sky, that leadership, the power of it, and the competition for it, are as natural as birth, sex and death. That's the way the world is, people say, even Darwin said so.

But he didn't say so. There is nothing in the human brain that inclines it to subservience. Nor is there a "must-dominate" gland. Attempts by so-called Social Darwinists to justify our terrible oppression of ourselves as natural and correct have long been discredited, while efforts by some modern sociobiologists to do essentially the same have also been severely attacked. To imagine, as did the Social Darwinists, that evolution is entirely a process of merciless competition is to take no account of the alternative and co-operative tactics nature also employs, while to suggest, as do some sociobiologists, that our genes may dictate our behaviour and therefore our culture (including leadership culture), is merely to sit down very heavily on one end of that old see-saw, the Nature-Nurture argument, and hope the riders at the end fall off.

But although there is nothing "natural" about our social condition, there is nothing unnatural about it either. Where evolution calls forth one or another set of behaviour patterns in other species, we have the ability, and indeed, the obligation, to make our own conscious changes. We have changed in the past often enough as circumstances demanded. In the new post-scarcity era, we can and must adapt again, this time in the interest of the whole planet.

Each of us can be our own leader. The greatest command is that over oneself. Our capitalist world, controlled by a few rich people and their minions, has done its level best to school out of us the very things which make us such a great species in the first place--initiative, experimentation, imagination, diversity. But society can't reduce us, because it is attempting a self-inflicted wound. The rich need us to be smart to run their wealth-collection system for them, but they try to keep us in our place by browbeating us and treating us like children. It won't work for ever, even if it seems to be working at the moment.

The leaders we are asked to support, and sometimes choose between, are a myth, created and maintained by--leaders. They are poor examples of honesty, integrity, even of humanity. They are not interested in truth, justice, or any of the grand notions they spout about. They exist, have always existed, will always exist, for one purpose only: to line their own pockets and empty yours. They are parasites on the social body, unwanted, unnecessary and destructive. To follow leaders is to hand over your heart on a platter, with knife and fork attached. It is an admission of defeat, acceptance that you are inadequate, in and of yourself. It is an act of submission and indeed an act of cowardice unworthy of the human animal.

To refuse to follow leaders is a liberating step, one which the working class has yet to take. When we realise that the post-scarcity world can be run very efficiently and healthily by democratic co-operation, that our own lives would be vastly better without states, governments, police, and all the trappings of leadership, we will collectively be in a position to make that step. And then we will see a revolution unprecedented in history.

The Socialist Party has no leaders in fact or theory. Socialism wouldn't operate that way and neither do we. All decisions are made by common vote, all administration is above-board and open to inspection, and all work is voluntary. None of us is perfect, and that's why democracy works better than leadership. Mistakes by one person are not disasters for the many. Private interests don't count. Power doesn't exist. Socialists are their own leaders, and they follow nobody but themselves.

Socialism--common ownership in a leaderless global democracy--could not work with people unwilling or unable to think for themselves, to take responsibility, or to co-operate, but fortunately it doesn't have to. Human beings are better than that. We can think, and we can co-operate, and we don't need the bigots of the Right to tell us we're worthless, nor do we need rescuing by some "heroic" and entirely untrustworthy vanguard of the Left.

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Polonius advises Laertes: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." Socialists, having to truck with the money system in any case, would instead offer the following injunction: "Neither a follower, nor a leader be." So the next time you are asked to vote for a leader, do yourself a big favour. Don't.

Paddy Shannon