Never say oil (2004)

From the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Truth, it seems, is not just the first casualty of war. It’s also the first casualty of preparations for war. In the days of open imperialism, if a state felt that its “vital interests”, i.e. the economic or strategic interests of its capitalist class, were at stake it simply went to war. Certainly, at least if another major capitalist Power was involved, certain minimum diplomatic niceties had to be met such as sending a 24 or 48 hour ultimatum, to allow embassy staff to withdraw  but that was the only requirement.

After the Second World War the victorious Powers decided to establish a legal framework for future wars. They hadn’t been so rash as to promise, as they had during the first world slaughter, that this had been a war to end all wars and so the UN Charter was drawn up. Basically, this makes war as an instrument of foreign policy illegal under international law unless certain conditions are met. States are still allowed to go to war if they consider that their “vital interests” are at stake (that’s the main let-out clause; the other is “self-defence”), but they have to demonstrate this to the UN.

So, when the Bush/Cheney regime in America decided that the vital interests of its capitalist class required the overthrow of the Saddam regime in Iraq, they had to come up with a more internationally acceptable reason than the real one of wanting to control an alternative source of oil should the Saudi princes be toppled and to control territory where they could install bases near to both the Middle East and the Caspian oilfields. Other UN members, some of whom had their own imperialist reasons for not wanting America to take over Iraq, would not have agreed. So the would-be aggressor states decided to play the “weapons of mass destruction” card.

The US  and British  governments probably knew very well that Iraq didn’t have such weapons and that the primitive ones it had once possessed had been destroyed after the last Gulf War. After all, Bush and Blair would hardly have sent their troops in to face certain death from chemical and germ warfare if they thought that Iraq really had such weapons. The Iraqi regime helped their case by dragging its feet over the matter, but it had probably concluded (rightly, as it happened) that America and Britain were going to invade anyway and presumably decided that allowing some doubt as to whether it might have some weapons of mass destruction was the only chance it had of dissuading the attackers.

The Bush/Cheney regime couldn’t care a fig about the UN  in his State of the Union address. In January Bush baldly declared that the US didn’t need permission from anybody to go to war to protect its “vital interests”  but Blair, ever the unctuous hypocrite, does.

Revelations by Claire Short, who was a cabinet minister at the time and supported the attack on Iraq, show that the British Labour government was prepared to go to great lengths to try to secure UN approval, including listening in on the Secretary General’s phone conversations. When Short revealed this, the whole Establishment turned on her: how dare she reveal the dirty tricks of “our” brave secret service! They must be allowed to do such things to protect Britain’s (read: the British capitalist class’s) vital interests! No doubt, they did other things too, such as trying to bribe or blackmail African or South American ministers and ambassadors but we’ll never know. Under capitalism where a democratic principle such as the right to full information conflicts with “vital interests“, it’s the democratic principle that is ditched.

In any event, it didn’t work. The UN did not back the US/British attack on Iraq, so they had to make do with invoking the other let-out article in the UN Charter, relating to “self-defence”. Bush let the US media put about  the lie that there was some connection between the saddam regime and Al Qaeda even though Bin Laden hated Saddam as much as Bush. Blair let the British media put it about that Iraq had missiles that could be filled with lethal germs and sent to rain down on British troops in Cyprus (all the papers printed maps showing this possibility).

It now turns out that this claim about missiles was untrue and people are demanding an enquiry into whether or not Blair and his ministers knew it was untrue and on whether or not Blair “took Britain into war” on the basis of false or falsified information. But this is all a side-show. It was not missiles of mass destruction that was at issue in the war, but oil. In fact, all this fuss about the (non-existent) weapons of mass destruction is a diversion from the real reason why America and Britain attacked Iraq. Lord Hutton never even mentioned the word “oil” once.

In this sense it is irrelevant whether the information supplied and given out about weapons of mass destruction was accurate or not. This was just the reason invoked to be seen to be complying with the UN Charter. It was not the real reason for the war.

Of course when you don’t tell the truth there’s always a strong risk that you’ll be found out. Blair has been. From his point of view, it might have been better if he had told the truth from the start  that America and Britain went to war for economic and strategic reasons related to oil; that it was a threat to their vital interests that the second largest oil field in the world should be controlled by a unpredictable and hostile regime such as Saddam’s; and that they wanted to install a more compliant set of rulers in Baghdad.

Once Iraq had been invaded and easily conquered (peashooters aren’t very effective against machine guns, since that was the scale of the difference between the two sides), and the Saddam regime toppled, Blair, Shaw, Blunkett and the other Labour leaders came out with another justification for the war: to overthrow a nasty dictator. Saddam was indeed a nasty dictator but, quite apart from the fact that this wouldn’t have made the war any more legal in terms of the UN charter (the UN charter doesn’t outlaw dictators), this too can’t have been the real reason as there are plenty of other nasty dictators around. The Saudi prices for instance, but America and Britain did not propose a war to overthrow them; they are allies and friends, nice dictators. A nasty dictatorship is alright provided it poses no threat to the vital economic and strategic interests of the capitalist class in America or Britain.

Before Bin Laden was ever heard of (except by the CIA operatives training him for guerrilla warfare in Russian-occupied Afghanistan), two nasty dictators were running neck-and-neck for the most evil person in the world. One was Saddam Hussein. The other was Colonel (though, surely, he must be a Generalissimo or Field Marshall by now) Gaddafi. He’s done all the things Saddam did, and perhaps more. But now that he’s agreed to call off his challenge to US world domination (no doubt he doesn’t want to end up living in a hole in the desert), he’s OK. It’s against Britain’s “vital interests” now to call him a nasty dictator. It is even rumoured that Blair’s next foreign trip is going to be to Libya, so he can shake Gaddafi’s blood-stained hands  or rather so they can both shake each other’s blood-stained hands. What hypocrisy!

But what’s so special about Gaddafi? Yes, you’ve guessed it.. He’s not just any old tin-pot dictator. The power and wealth of his regime derive from sitting on an oil-field, which US capital is anxious to modernise so as to increase the world supply of oil.

The fact is that the foreign policy of capitalist States isn’t, and can’t be, based on “ethical” considerations. It is based on what the old 19th imperialist Lord Palmerston called “interests” and what his counterparts on the Continent, Metternich and Bismarck, called “Realpolitik”.  The UN Charter is just a scrap of paper. All it has done is forced governments to be even more dishonest about the reasons they go to war.

Adam Buick

The Lessons of Madrid (2004)

Editorial from the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The explosions in Madrid have brought home the truth about the so-called War on Terror

The victims, workers of eleven different nations, had their lives blinked out of existence by the simple deadly efficiency of modern chemical explosives carefully applied to devastate the complex systems upon which modern humans rely for survival.  Their assassins had been able to move freely in their midst to unleash their chaos and carnage.

In his speech following the bombings, Tony Blair was forced to admit that such atrocities cannot be prevented.  In modern industrialised society, too many people are moving and crowding together to control.  Explosives are too small and concealable.  He went on, that alone in history, the likely perpetrators ─ Al Qaeda, or their sympathisers ─ are immune to reason and rationale and that they cannot be defeated except by main force.

The likes of the trotskyist Paul Foot see terrorism as “the weapon of the weak”.  To many leftists, weakness and being the underdog is ennobling.  Indeed, John Pilger and Tariq Ali, whilst professing to be in favour of  “Stopping the War” actually are fully in favour of it, only they favour the side that now uses bombs to kill crowds of Iraqi workers with the same sort of technology as murdered the Madrid workers.  They support the “Resistance”. They support it because America is big and powerful, so it must use the vicious weapons of the weak, to defeat the great power that is immune to reason and cannot be defeated except by main force.

Of course, weakness is not of itself ennobling, still less does it make its possessor deserving of support.  The perpetrators of many of the atrocities of modern terrorist war are not the starvelings from the slums, the children struggling beneath the occupying soldier's boot.  Osama Bin Laden is a Saudi Arabian capitalist ─ waging war on his homeland's government and its American backers.  His followers are college-educated professionals, usually from well-off families, the aspirant ruling classes of Middle Eastern states.

They would use the same weapons all ruling classes have historically used to climb to power ─ brute force, mayhem and murder.  That the resources they possess to do this with are small does not change that underlying intent

They seek to use their weapons to maximum effect: imposing costs, in terms of chaos, fear, disruption and increased security, on their foes - chiefly the American government and its allies - to the point at which they will find the cost too great to continue with their current policies.

Those governments themselves, of course, have a tremendous abundance of the sort of means of destruction which the terrorists deployed in Madrid.  They have themselves, with a year, used those resources for terrorist purposes - or for “Shock and Awe” as they termed it.  They too have slaughtered workers in pursuit of their ends.

Of course, the politicians that run those governments try to make out that they are different to the terrorists, they have values.  They did not target civilians deliberately though they did unleash destructive power in the full knowledge that “bystanders” would die.

The truth of Madrid is that there is no essential difference, that the victims of that bomb were as equally human as those dead Iraqis as the bombs that killed them were equally bombs.   As human as the deluded workers who form the potential supporters that the terrorists are trying to win to their cause.  They died amidst the pass and fell of warring powers, even if those powers are “asymmetric”.

While Blair would attempt to cover this truth with his call for everyone to take the side of the tiger against the fleas, socialists declare that the only way for the workers to defend themselves against the prospect of the permanent threat of obliteration is to wage war against the very causes of the conflict - the division of the world into property.

Our weapons though, are not those of destruction.  The workers are the force of creation, and can build a better world.  The truth and the message of Madrid is that the war on terror must be transformed into a battle between the free association of producers, versus the nihilistic battalions of destruction.

The Great - Are They Any Good? (2004)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Interposing themselves among the various layers of hierarchy and the ravages of capitalist society there is a peculiar human stratum which goes under the name of the Great and the Good. Their function is largely self-defined; in their own estimation they serve, they instruct, they resolve. Many - but not all- of them were fashioned in expensive schools, followed by years of devoted study in prestigious universities, to prepare them for membership of exclusive clubs and intimidating professional societies. Every so often they descend to our level to tell us what we are doing wrong and urge us to trust them to put it right. They assume that their very eminence will persuade us to heed their advice.

The boundaries of the Great and the Good are murky, difficult to set. It is probably easier to say who is not one of them than who is. They are unlikely to be found battling their way to work in a bus queue or a sardine tin tube train. Typically, among their ranks are newspaper editors, expired politicians, media personalities, university big-wigs, ex-civil service mandarins and lawyers, especially those who have graduated onto the Bench. They are often on call to newspapers or TV programmes to cobble together some empty pontificating on a current event. Their names are among the first to be thought of when it is necessary to populate some quango or official enquiry charged with blanketting some nasty reality relating to property society. So they infest organisations like the Parole Board, the Press Complaints Council, hospital boards of management. Some of them might find themselves sitting as a governor of the BBC. (When the chairmanship at the BBC fell vacant after the precipitous departure of Gavin Davies an ambitious queue of the Great and the Good formed, hopeful for the job, which yields a pay off of £81,320 a year for a four-day week).

Ryder and Radley

At this point we introduce Lord Ryder of Wensum, who is plainly among the Great and the Good because he is a governor of the BBC and  its vice-chairman, acting chairman until Davies’ successor is appointed. The Wensum bit of Ryder’s name is a river which provided a natural defence to the unwalled side of the city of Norwich. When Ryder was raised to the peerage he took the title of Wensum because he comes from that part of the country; it is where his family reaped the kind of profits to send him to a public school to begin the education necessary for someone destined to be among the Great and the Good. In fact he went to one of the more modern, less prestigious, public schools - Radley, which was established as recently as 1847 and which may have tried to assuage the shame of not being on the same level as Eton or Harrow by imposing a notably abrasive regime on its unfortunate scholars. One who went there described at as an “arriviste” school where “+I was regularly withdrawn from everyday life for months on end, as if abducted by aliens, and brought here instead. At the time, I blamed the parents”. After participating in Radley’s compulsory Rugby football, its cold baths and punishing long runs in the early morning darkness, Ryder must have found relief in one of the more famous of Cambridge colleges where he could unspectacularly graduate in history.

After that there was an appropriately seamless progress into journalism (at the Daily Telegraph of course) and life as a farmer. But it seemed the urge to give all this up in order to serve the rest of us unfortunates was strong enough to persuade Ryder to opt for a career in Tory politics. Like any new seeker after the higher reaches of the greasy pole, he had to prove his motivation by trying his luck at some hopeless seat. He took two batterings at the impregnable Labour stronghold of Gateshead East in the general elections of 1974, until in 1983 he was ushered into the comfort of Mid Norfolk - which was not only solidly Tory but his home area as well. This agreeable ending was made even happier when, soon after arriving at Westminster, Ryder was singled out for promotion - well, his wife was private secretary to Margaret Thatcher, who was at their wedding - holding some minor jobs before moving to Economic Secretary to the Treasury in 1989. In 1990 he disappointed Thatcher, who had done so much for his career, by adroitly switching sides in the Tory leadership struggle to support John Major, who in his turn rewarded him with the job of Chief Whip.

Bastards and Sleaze

But Ryder’s luck was out for that was not the best time to be a Tory Whip, what with John Major’s  battle with the Euro-sceptic “bastards”, including the unlamented Iain Duncan Smith. (Another of the rebels, Teresa Gorman, complained in her book Bastards about how ruthless the Tory Whips were with them). And that was not the end of the discipline problems, as the party’s MPs seemed to be queuing up to discredit Major’s unwise call to get Back to Basics with a succession of exotic embroilments and underhand deals which have collectively gone down in history as Tory Sleaze. Nothing he had endured at Radley had prepared Ryder for this and in 1997 he decided that enough was enough. He left active politics, became a director of Ipswich Town Football Club (which proved that the Great and the Good did not lose the common touch) and founded and became chairman of two local private radio stations. As he did this he may have congratulated himself on his timing for in the 1997 election his 1983 majority of 15,515 shrivelled to just 1336. In a traditional show of gratitude for Ryder’s devoted labours in lubricating the process of capitalism’s deceptions Major elevated him into a Life Peer, with an appropriate gong - the OBE - to go with it. >From here it was a short, predictable step for him to become a governor of the BBC and, in January 2002, the Corporation’s vice chairman.

It was from that vantage point that Ryder made his grovelling apology to the government over the Andrew Gilligan affair. “On behalf of the BBC,” he snivelled, he had “No hesitation in apologising unreservedly for our errors”. Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell - who have yet to apologise for their “errors” over the 45 minutes Weapons of Mass Destruction distortion - were delighted at Ryder’s fulsome toadying. They overlooked the fact that Ryder was not speaking “on behalf of” the workers at the BBC, who staged an immediate mass protest, nor for the thousands who were outraged by the government’s cynicism and Hutton’s readiness to brush it all aside.    

Weirdo and Watches

So what kind of politician, journalist, farmer, Life Peer, BBC governor, is the Great and Good Lord Ryder of Wensum? A fellow Tory MP - not one, it must be said, famous for being discreetly considerate - described him as weird, quiet and secretive, wearing his watch upside down because the time of day was not a matter for public disclosure (whatever that means). Edwina Currie, perhaps making comparison to John Major, thought him “skinny and youthful-looking+hiding behind owlish glasses, drinking Diet Coke+” He did have one fervent admirer though, at least for a while, in the odious, fascistic Alan Clark, who said he was “+such fun. So intelligent, and has the right views on practically every topic” (although Clark did not make it clear whether these “topics” included Nazi Germany). But as Clark became increasingly bitter about being out of Parliament (ignoring the fact that it was by his own decision to stand down) Ryder ceased to be a subject for his admiration. “I am ‘put out’ by my friends ignoring me,” whined the tediously egocentric diarist of Saltwood Castle; “Especially wounded by Richard. I did think that he was a friend, and I a confidant of his”. Clark’s final opinion, contemptuously approving his wife’s waspish appraisal, was that Ryder was “+just a little accountant+on the way out he scuttled away through a side door”.

But if Ryder was an accountant he was clearly one who could do his sums, as he proved in 1990 when he calculatedly deserted Margaret Thatcher in the hope that he would be better off supporting Major. Thatcher wailed at his treachery:

    It was a personal, as well as a political blow to learn that

    Richard, who had come with me to No. 10 all those years ago

    as my political secretary and whom I had moved up the ladder

    as quickly as I decently could, was deserting at the first whiff

    of grapeshot.

With his kind of credentials, Ryder fits comfortably in the ranks of the Great and the Good. His grovelling apology about “errors” at the BBC and everything about his amputated career in politics implied that the fault lies with the rest of us, for our scepticism when we are confronted with the likes of him and their pathetic defence of capitalism. We might ask, what gives him the right to behave in that way? What gave Thatcher and Major the right to foster him in what they hoped would be his faultless journey up the greasy pole? Such “rights” spring from the basic class structure of capitalism with its minority privileges and will endure with the system. Lord Ryder of Wensum is living witness to the cruel cynicism inherent in that system as well as the confusion among those who speak loudest in its defence.  

Ivan

What’s wrong with capitalism? (2004)

From the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

We could fill several issues of the Socialist Standard with details about the problems caused by capitalism, but let’s see how much we can say within the confines of a single article.

One pervasive aspect of capitalism is poverty. By this we do not mean destitution, as when people literally cannot afford food or clothing or a place to live. There are certainly plenty of homeless people in Britain, but poverty is far more pervasive than this. It involves people not having access to what they want or need, and having to make do with second- or third-best. Shopping at a cheap supermarket,  waiting for the sales to buy what you want, telling the kids they can’t have what they’ve set their hearts on - all these are examples of poverty. So is living in a house that’s too small for your family, or booking the cheapest holiday you can find. And so is working after your anticipated retirement age because your pension will not be big enough. Another illustration is the amount of debt with which people get landed, an average of £16,000 for each man, woman and child in the UK, and therefore much more than that for many individuals. Every day around a hundred people become bankrupt - the ultimate expression of how poverty causes people to live beyond their means.

It’s not just that the vast majority are forced to go without; it’s also that a relatively small number of people live in the lap of luxury. This inequality is not a matter of your neighbour having a bigger car than you or being able to afford two yearly holidays abroad. Instead we are referring to the millionaires and billionaires who own land, companies or shares, and don’t have to worry about two-for-the-price-of-one offers or whether they can afford a night out on Saturday. These people live in grand mansions, probably have a holiday home or two as well, own their own private jets, and employ armies of servants to look after them. Moreover, it’s not they who do the useful work in society: those who drive the buses, teach the children or work in factories or offices are the ones who suffer poverty. Socialists argue that there are two classes under capitalism: the working class (who work for wages and always struggle to make ends meet) and the capitalist class (who receive their income from rent or profit and get the lion’s share of wealth). Belonging to the working class is what makes you poor.

It also means you are likely to suffer from stress of one kind or another. This is partly the result of the daily fight with poverty, but there are many other sources of stress for workers. Many jobs are boring or dangerous, and many more offer little satisfaction to those who do them. Worrying about deadlines or targets, or feeling at the whim of your boss’s moods - all these increase the stress due to employment. And the farther you climb up the “career ladder”, the chances are the more responsibility you will bear and hence the more stress you will encounter. Add to this the insecurity of many jobs and the consequent fear of unemployment. Then there’s the stress of the daily journey to work, whether by car or public transport. Life under capitalism means worries and more worries.

A term sometimes used for people’s general feeling of unhappiness and rejection is alienation, a notion intended to cover the idea of rootlessness, of not belonging to a community, of being isolated, of seeing no real goal in life, of being powerless under the wheels of the capitalist juggernaut. Capitalism views people not as human beings with feelings and desires but as economic units, only useful if you can create profits. So people far too often relate to each other by means of money or comparable considerations (what’s in it for me?), rather than by cooperating with other humans. We are essentially viewed as individuals, not as part of a society. Many social ills can be attributed to alienation, from casual violence to suicide. The pressures of capitalism are not just financial but permeate all aspects of a dog-eat-dog social system.

One reason why people feel stressed and alienated is the lack of democracy which obtains under capitalism. It is true that in Britain there is more or less free speech and the opportunity to elect councillors and MPs. But there is no real democracy in the sense of people having control over their lives. Rather, we are subject to the decisions of others, both within and outside our workplaces. Decisions about shutting factories or moving an office to another part of the country are taken by a small group of bosses rather than the people most closely affected. Often it is the impersonal force of the market which determines what happens. Companies may be closed down or merged because they do not make “enough” profit, not because they do not produce anything useful. All political and economic decisions, whether about the siting of houses or quarries or new roads or whatever, are made within the context of a social system that puts profit above human need, and in such a system there can be no proper democracy, however many democratic institutions exist.

We mentioned above that many jobs are unhealthy and even dangerous. The violence inherent in capitalism is yet another problem thrown up by it. Industrial accidents and the violence perpetrated by many of those on the receiving end of capitalism’s oppression are vivid illustrations of the system’s shortcomings. There is also the ever-present danger of full-scale war. In the course of the twentieth century the nature of warfare changed, from a situation where victims were primarily combatants to one where it is now overwhelmingly civilians that are killed or maimed. Consider too that wars are fought in the interest of the capitalist class, as in the quest for sources of raw materials - oil wars are just a particularly clear case of this. Workers therefore kill and are killed on behalf of a bunch of wealthy parasites.

It is true that capitalism has had a tremendous transforming impact on the world, and that workers nowadays live longer and more rewarding lives than those in the days before the development of industry. However, comparisons should be made not with the distant past but with the present and future potential of Socialism. Judged by this yardstick, and on its own terms, there is so much wrong with capitalism that it is more than high time it was done away with.

Paul Bennett

The need for socialism (2004)

From the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx states: “No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself” (Preface to A Critique of Political Economy).

It is difficult to show that this claim is correct, but that does not make it irrelevant. It provides us with a starting point to consider whether the material conditions for a socialist society exist today. It also suggests we look at whether capitalism has outlived its role as a progressive economic force in history. For if there is a solution to the problems we face today, certainly it is desirable to implement that solution. And if capitalism is not that solution, and has outlived its usefulness, then surely we are obliged, for our own sakes, to abandon the only economic system any of us has ever known. That is obviously a serious undertaking, and perhaps a frightening one, but one which has been successfully undertaken before, for example, to establish capitalism.

Does the current mode of production ─ capitalism ─ act as a fetter upon production? Are the material conditions which currently exist, sufficiently mature to support new, higher relations of production: socialism?

In 1992, Professor Vulimiri Ramalingaswami, Chair of the World Health Organization medical research committee, told the world that we have the ability to produce enough food for everyone. The ability and technology currently exists to feed, clothe, and house every human being on the planet. However, that ability and technology cannot be used to feed, clothe, and house billions of human beings. Even in supposedly wealthy countries such as Canada, about eight percent of the population had difficulty putting food on the table at least once in 1998-99, according to Statistics Canada. Yet Canada is a net exporter of food. And people freeze to death in the streets because they have no home. Yet Canada is a net exporter of lumber. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

According to the World Health Organization, one child dies, and another is disabled, every twelve seconds, day and night, because they cannot afford vaccines costing about $10 (£5.25). The World Health Organization also tells us that in the United States, tuberculosis, an easily-cured disease of the poor, is increasing. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

Although capitalism cannot provide necessary food and medication for our children, it  spends more than $350,000 (£184,000) every twelve seconds on arms (guns, bombs, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, landmines, etcetera). Socialists do not suggest that the arms budget should be used to feed and care for children and the rest of us. As desirable as such diversion may sound, we know that capitalism must spend that money to protect capitalists from other capitalists, and from the working class. Military spending under capitalism is not optional, it is an absolute necessity. Redirecting the money from war, to help the starving, the homeless, and the sick, is impossible. Something is wrong with this picture: capitalism.

The current material productive forces are in conflict with the relations of production. We should clarify these terms. “Material productive forces” refers to the things actually involved in production, such as workers, land, factories, mines, and transportation. The “relations of production” is somewhat more difficult to explain. It involves such things as whether production occurs, who owns the material productive forces, and who owns the results of production. Currently, the relationship between people and land, factories, mines, and transportation, divides people into two groups. One group owns those things. The other group must use its physical and mental labour to turn raw materials into finished products. Workers produce everything from food to education, from automobiles to hammers, from houses to hospitals, and from shopping malls to factories. We even produce the weapons used to kill each other in capital’s wars.

Those who own the means of production (basically the material productive forces excluding workers), control when, where, and how production takes place. If a factory owner decides to shut down a factory, the workers have no say in the matter. If the owners of an automobile manufacturing company decide to move their factories to Canada, or Mexico, or the United States, or Japan, or Taiwan, it is their choice. They own the means of production. If the owners of a food processing plant believe that they cannot sell their product for a profit, they have the right to shut down the plant. That right is theirs even if the processing plant produced all of the food in the world.

The products of the factories are owned by those who own the factories. The owners may have never been on the same continent as the factory, but they nonetheless own everything produced in the factory. Those who do the actual work have no legal right to the products they have produced. Those who own the means and the products of production, and who control production, are capitalists. The rest of us are the working class. With that understanding of material productive forces and relations of production, we can continue our examination.

We have developed our ability to produce to a level which easily enables us to meet everyone’s needs. But the relations of production-capitalism-disable us. Capitalism cannot accommodate that necessary production. By and large people do not go hungry because there is no food, but because they are, from the unalterable perspective of capitalism, unworthy: they cannot afford to eat. They cannot afford to eat because from capitalism’s perspective there is no reason to employ them and pay them. We have developed the material productive forces to such an extent that fewer and fewer workers can produce more and more of the things we need to live. But still, people cannot get the necessities of life.

Those of us who haven’t been hungry, who’ve always managed to scrape together enough money to purchase clothing and housing and medical care, may think that they are somehow excluded from these negative effects of capitalism. Don’t be so sure. Some of those people in Canada who had difficulty putting food on the table where members of what Statistics Canada euphemistically calls the “middle-class.” Canadian workers used to wonder why Japanese workers would not take all of their holidays. Now Canadian workers are doing the same thing, for the same reason. They are afraid for their jobs. More and more, workers are working an extra half-hour or an hour or more, before they leave work for the day, or they take work home. They are producing extra profit for the capitalists, but no extra pay for themselves. Even though fewer workers produce more, it isn’t enough for the capitalists.

For years we have been told that improvements in production should mean reduced working hours. Instead it means that many of us work longer hours for the same pay. Many others are not permitted to work because capital does not require their labour. This is more evidence that our productive ability has outstripped the ability of capitalism to accommodate our ability to produce.

The apologists for capital would have us believe that Karl Marx was wrong about (almost?) everything he said and wrote. But it is clear that “the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production.” Marx was right.

Most workers do not believe that capitalism itself is the problem. The media, which is a propaganda outlet owned and controlled by capitalists, encourages us to blame anything but capitalism. Most of us do not see through the propaganda, but most of us complain of capitalism’s effects. We attempt to subvert its actions for our own good, and we direct our dissatisfaction in a million directions. We grumble and complain about our lot in life. We busy ourselves with hobbies so that we don’t have time to think about our problems, or solve them. We try to change the laws; we see beauty in things which are not; and we philosophize that humanity is incapable of solving the problems of production. We invent religions which denigrate our humanity, and which offer a solution in the mythical, never-never land of the future. And sometimes we change religions, hoping for better.

We are encouraged to do all of these things because it blinds us to the source of our problems. But even with all the diversions, there are strikes and riots in the streets. As Marx wrote, all of these things are how we “fight it out.” Even the riots are used by capitalism. People are so frustrated by capitalism’s obvious failure that they lash out blindly with riots and terrorism. Rioting workers and terrorist workers make it easy to justify further repression of dissent. The rioters and terrorists are easy to attack, because they really have no solution, only rage.

Workers have good reason to be angry. Workers have no good reason to destroy useful things produced by other workers, or to hurt other workers. But in desperate anger, can one be surprised that some occasionally do? However, rage and desperation rarely clarify the facts. To solve the problems we need to understand why society does not work for us. We need to understand the structure of society, and the real enemy. Workers are boxing with shadows, and paying for the “privilege.”

Socialists are accused of ignoring the obvious improvements capitalism has wrought since it defeated feudalism. Our accusers are wrong. Socialists have clearly stated that capitalism was a necessary stage in human development. At its outset capitalism was progressive: it freed the burgeoning productive forces from the restraints of feudalism, and forced workers to produce wealth which would have been unimaginable before capitalism. Capitalism has evolved from an agent for development of the productive forces, into a roadblock. It is time to remove the roadblock.

The material conditions for new, higher relations of production have been carried in the womb of capitalism for too long. It is time for a birthing. It is time to release our ability to produce and to solve our problems, by providing the appropriate relations of production: socialism.

Steve Szalai

John Crump's Nikkeiren and Japanese Capitalism (2004)

Book Review from the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Crump: Nikkeiren and Japanese Capitalism. (Routledge Curzon)

Nikkeiren is the Japan Federation of Managers’ Organisations, the rough equivalent of the Confederation of British Industry. Here former Socialist Party member John Crump traces its history in the second half of the last century, against the background of developments in Japanese and world capitalism and working-class resistance.

After defeat in the Second World War, Japan was under US occupation, and the occupying authorities were at first not prepared to countenance a strong organisation of employers. This was because they did not wish to see a powerful Japanese capitalist class in the short term, especially one linked to militarism and companies that had profited from the war. But in 1947 General MacArthur, head of the Allied Powers, prohibited a general strike called by public sector trade unions, which clearly showed on which side of the class struggle the occupiers stood.

Nikkeiren was founded in 1948, as part of a reassertion by Japanese capitalists of their control over the workforce, and spent its first decade helping to establish a clear ‘right to manage’, becoming involved in a number of bitter industrial disputes. For instance, in the dispute with power workers in 1952, it undermined the union by encouraging companies to enter into regional negotiations, and in other ways supported class solidarity among the capitalists, such as helping to spread the cost of anti-strike measures. In other disputes, it helped in the formation of company unions and persuaded rival employers not to take advantage of the difficulties of the firms where strikes were taking place. Crump depicts its role in this period in dramatic terms:

One could do worse than think of Nikkeiren as pro-capitalist Bolsheviks who shared many of the authoritarian assumptions, belligerent attitudes and manipulative practices of their Communist Party opponents. The difference was that Nikkeiren’s leaders were resolved to consolidate the power and privileges of the existing ruling class, whereas the Communist Party sought to supplant them and become the dominant and privileged class itself.

The 1960s saw an economic “boom”, with sizeable wage rises (though lagging behind the growth in productivity). Nikkeiren urged employers to keep wage increases as low as possible - not that they needed much encouragement. Inter-union rivalries, and the growth of unions prepared to stop their members from ‘disrupting’ production, helped in this. Strikes continued to occur, of course, though on the whole employers were less confrontational than previously. But 1974 saw an economic crisis, resulting from a massive rise in oil prices, with a growth in unemployment. Nikkeiren supported increased resistance to wage demands, so that workers rather than capitalists should pay for the economic difficulties. This hard line continued through the 1980s, a period further marked by cooperation between Nikkeiren and the trade unions.

Then in 1992 a drastic economic downturn arrived, essentially caused by ‘overcapacity’ (e.g. Nissan had the capacity to produce 2.3 million cars a year, but could only sell 1.5 million). There were now fewer industrial disputes but increased unemployment, and greater insecurity for those in work. In 2002 Nikkeiren merged with another employers’ organisation, partly because there was no longer such a need for a capitalist club that dealt specifically with ‘labour problems’.

Besides its narrative of a half-century of Japanese capitalism, Crump’s book is concerned to examine how capitalist dominance is maintained. He identifies coercion, manipulation and mystification as three techniques employed at various times. Coercion was particularly to the fore in the 1948-60 period, when militant unions were deliberately smashed. Manipulation involved the promotion of compliant unions, setting worker against worker, and playing on their sense of insecurity. Mystification included the claim that there was a distinctively Japanese way of running capitalism, and hence pushing the view that workers had a stake in ‘their’ country. In fact, as this book amply demonstrates, capitalism in Japan has run on lines little different from those elsewhere.

There is one noteworthy aspect of Japanese capitalism: despite its relative poverty of natural resources, it has (as noted above) often been plagued by overcapacity - a sign that it is just part of global capitalism. And as Crump says:

“the productive resources located in the poorly endowed corner of the globe called Japan illustrate that there are no technical impediments to the world as a whole equipping itself with the means to satisfy the needs of all people.”

While his book does not itself present a case for Socialism, it certainly reveals a lot of what is objectionable about capitalism.

Paul Bennett

Impossibilism in Canada (2004)

From the April 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

This month we begin a series of articles on socialist ideas and organisation in other parts of the English-speaking world

The first political party in Canada claiming to be socialist was the Socialist Labor Party, an offshoot of the Socialist Labor Party of America. The Canadian SLP was formed in 1896 and was thoroughly reformist, as was a breakaway United Socialist Labor Party of British Columbia, founded in 1899. During 1898, former members of the SLP, together with supporters of  John Ruskin’s “Christian Socialists” and a number of Canadian Fabians, founded the Canadian Socialist League. It soon made rapid progress; but it was a loose federation of locals (branches) and, like the SLP, was a reformist organisation.

In the summer of 1901, members of the Canadian Socialist League, together with some former SLPers, founded the Socialist Party of British Columbia. Its Platform contained a long list of reforms and palliatives. In 1902, a Socialist Party of Manitoba was formed; and in 1905, a Socialist Party of Ontario too. Both advocated reforms, as did a Socialist Party of the Yukon founded some time later.

Early in 1902 (it may even have been late in 1901), members of the Socialist Party of British Columbia, mainly from Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, who objected to the SPBC’s reform platform, resigned and, shortly after, formed the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Canada. Its members included Eugene T. Kingsley (a former member of the Socialist Labor Party of America who had fallen out with Daniel De Leon), Parker Williams, and James Pritchard (a former member of the British Social Democratic Federation who had, at one time, worked in the Ermen and Engels textile mill). The Revolutionary Socialist Party of Canada was different from all the other aforementioned parties: its sole object was the abolition of capitalism and the wages system - and no immediate demands or reforms. On December 1, 1902, a writ for a by-election was issued for North Nanaimo. Parker Williams contested on behalf of the RSP on an anti-reformist platform, He received 155 votes against 263 for the Conservative candidate. Some old-time Canadian socialists have claimed that Parker Williams was the world’s first revolutionary socialist parliamentary candidate, and the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Canada the world’s first genuine anti-reformist, “Impossibilist” political party. It probably had about 60 members.

The Vancouver local of the SPC, circa 1913

During the latter part of 1902, members of the SPBC and the RSP came together to discuss the re-merger of the two parties, a new constitution, the scrapping of the SPBC’s reformist policy, and the adoption of a new, anti-reformist Platform. A convention of the new united Socialist Party of British Columbia, held on September 8, 1903, confirmed this action in a resolution, carried unanimously, that the party “absolutely opposed” the introduction of palliatives or immediate demands, and stood “firmly upon the one issue of the abolition of the present system of wage slavery for all political organisation”. A new Platform was drawn up which stated that labour produces all wealth; that the capitalists own the means of production, and are the masters; that as long as the capitalists remain in possession of the reins of government, the state will be used to defend their property; that the interest of the working class lies in freeing itself from capitalist exploitation by the abolition of the wages system, and that there is an irrepressible conflict, a class struggle, between the capitalist and the worker. The Socialist Party of British Columbia, therefore, called upon all workers to organise under its banner “with the object of conquering the public powers for the purpose of setting up and enforcing the economic program of the working class”. The SPBC called upon the workers to establish “as speedily as possible production for use instead of profit”. The Western Clarion of October 8, 1903, claimed that the SPBC “stands upon the clearest and most uncompromising platform in the world”. This was more than six months before the formation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Between the beginning of 1903 and the latter part of 1904, there was considerable pressure, mainly by the socialist parties of central and eastern Canada, to form an all-Dominion Socialist Party. The Socialist Party of British Columbia was less enthusiastic, however, as it had increased in size and influence; it also had three of its members elected to the British Columbia Legislature. Nevertheless, at the beginning of 1905 all the various parties united into one Socialist Party of Canada and, despite the obvious reformism of at least two of them, the new party accepted the anti-reformist Platform of the former Socialist Party of British Columbia. But the SPC had created problems for itself.

For more than a decade, the problem of reform versus revolution bedevilled the Socialist Party of Canada. The party was a revolutionary, “Impossibilist”, organisation, yet had many social democratic reformers within its ranks. Over the years, however, the majority of them either resigned or were expelled from the SPC. The Socialist Party of Canada’s official view on unions appeared to be monolithic, but in fact it contained a fairly broad range of views. The official SPC policy was that unions were products of capitalism, struggling against its inevitable effects. Some members were particularly critical of the American-controlled craft unions which dominated the labour movement at the beginning of the last century. Nevertheless, almost all members of the SPC were also members of unions and some became prominent union leaders.

Most immigrants to Canada came from Europe but as early as 1880 there were Asian workers in Canada, mainly in British Columbia and the west of the country. Hostility towards them occurred almost immediately, and there were riots against them for two decades. Many trade unionists objected to Asian workers, as they generally were prepared to accept lower wages than European workers. Reactions by members of the Socialist Party were mixed. The reformers and social democrats tended to be anti-Asian and racist; the revolutionaries, the “Impossibilists”, were generally anti-racist and argued that all workers, from Europe and Asia, were “all slaves together”. In April 1911 the Socialist Standard publicly dissociated itself from the anti-Asian stand taken by some SPC members:

“The Socialist Party of Great Britain is not identical with the Socialist Party of Canada. We are not sufficiently informed to be in a position to discuss in detail the action of their members on local Governing bodies, but remembering that the interests of the workers are the same the world over, we do not hesitate to condemn such actions as the advocacy, by members of the Socialist Party of Canada, of the exclusion of our Asiatic fellow-workers from British Columbia”.

As the reformists either resigned, or were expelled, from the SPC, the party was then able to declare unequivocally that it looked upon all workers equally, irrespective of their origins.

Some members of the Socialist Party of Canada, particularly former supporters of East and Central European social democratic parties, proposed that the SPC affiliate to the “International Socialist Bureau”, that is the Second International. The SPC, however, refused to affiliate, stating that the ISB admitted to membership non-socialist bodies such as the British Labour Party. The SPC never joined the Second International, which collapsed at the beginning of the war in 1914.

Socialists in Canada soon found themselves persecuted by the state. As early as 1903 the police prevented members of the Socialist Party of Manitoba from holding meetings in Winnipeg. In 1908, in Toronto, the police used clubs “in brutal Russian Cossack style”, to break up Socialist Party meetings. The party declared its “determination to fight for the right of free speech on the Toronto streets”. Meetings in Vancouver were broken up by the police. SPC and IWW speakers were arrested for refusing to move and a number were jailed for refusing to pay fines. The Salvation Army, however, was not subject to such harassment.

By 1911, the Socialist Party of Canada had rid itself of many social democrats and reformists, but a number of members in Toronto, influenced by a member of the SPGB living in the city at the time, Moses Baritz, did not consider that the SPC had moved away from reformism, in that part of Canada, fast enough. The entire Toronto local, therefore, resigned from the SPC and formed the Socialist Party of North America, which adopted the object and declaration of principles of the SPGB. The SPNA, however, did not grow and it dissolved after a few years with its members, or at least some of them, rejoining the Socialist Party of Canada, feeling that their original differences with the party did not justify a separate socialist party in Canada. In 1915  the SPC officially adopted the SPGB’s Socialism and Religion pamphlet as its own policy on religion.

(Next month: developments in Canada after the War broke out in 1914)

Peter E. Newell