History as propaganda (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s probably more history published today than ever before. As with every genre sold as a commodity most of it is of little value

At its very best history is one of the most important of all disciplines. It seeks to present a narrative explaining not just who we are and how we got here but also why we use these very concepts to understand ourselves. A chronicle of events is of little interest without interpretation; and it is through this that an analysis has any chance of achieving significance.

The interpretation of motivation is seen as important in understanding events but their significance can only be calculated by the effect on later generations. Often the motivation for action is given to be this or that hoped-for effect on later generations. This was part of the stated aim of many historical figures including Caesar, Napoleon and Hitler. It is doubtful whether they were successful in achieving such aims but what cannot be doubted is the need of the support of thousands, sometimes millions, of others to even make the attempt. It is in this support that the real social power resides.

Hitler’s rise was no less dependent on the Treaty of Versailles and the Wall Street Crash than on any characteristics he may or may not have possessed. The ideological values, which evolved within the German state and made millions believe they needed ‘a strong leader’, should be the focus of any historical analysis of the Third Reich. The origin of social power and its relationship with, and expression by, individuals, groups and the masses is the real business of historians.

The conventional definition of history (as distinct from prehistory) is the study of the written record from and about the past. It is no coincidence that this record begins during the so-called ‘Neolithic revolution’ when humans were making the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to that of the private property city-state. Such settlements were made possible by the discovery of sustainable crop growing and animal husbandry. This not only brought an end to the nomadic lifestyle but also dramatically changed the social relationships that went with it.

The production of surplus food changed the basis of power within society forever. It meant, amongst many other changes, that some parts of society were freed from subsistence living to pursue other activities. Foremost amongst these was the development of a warrior elite to protect this surplus from raiding nomads. It was not long before they restricted access to other members of their own settlement.

Those who created the wealth were only granted access to the surplus if they produced more of it. In this way social elites evolved, their power derived from the ownership of the wealth created by others. To this day social power derives from a group or class’s relationship with the means of production and the surplus it produces. Many historians would object to this characterisation of social power and would point to theories of morality, justice and reason as explanations of capitalist ‘civilisation’. Such theories ignore the possibility that the origin of these concepts derive from ‘rationalisations’ of social relationships which seek to justify their existence without reference to their historical source.

Of course the examination of the ‘mode of production’ as a way of understanding historical development is identified with Marxism. To attempt to dismiss it as mere political propaganda is to ignore the ideological content within any historical perspective. Although Marxist historians can with some justification claim that at least their bias is conscious, does this mean that all history is propaganda (conscious or not)? To answer this let’s examine those who create history  –historians.

Blinkered

Most of us do not have the time or resources to become historians. The intellectual division of labour within our culture means that most of them are created by and financially dependent on universities.

Living in Cambridge I have encountered many through the years. They are immersed in a life of study and intellectual rigour with usually only their peers to provide debate and criticism. Specialisation (knowing more about less and less) gives them the right of interpretation.

A memorable conversation with a noted scholar on the Crusades provides a sense of this. When asked about the motivation of the leaders of the first crusade he replied he believed it was an attempt at redemption. Europe’s knights hoped that their God would forgive their violent life style if they ‘liberated’ the holy land. This was so reminiscent of many historians who believed that Lenin, Mao and Castro were socialists because they proclaimed themselves to be so.

The sincere motivation of an individual does not give us any understanding of the origin of the concepts involved or their acceptance by those who are led into any action. The English revolution was not dependent on Cromwell’s belief in an obscure Jewish prophet who lived some 1600 years before. Likewise the English reformation was not caused by Henry VIII’s lust for a young Anne Boleyn. Napoleon was quite possibly not the inheritor of ‘the age of reason’ he supposed himself to be.

The distinction between any proclaimed ideology and the actions of those who profess it seem lost on many historians. Perhaps it is because they themselves are immersed within a deeply ideological culture – from public school to university the cult of individualism is universal. How could it be otherwise within one of capitalism’s oldest establishments?

The elitist ethos is the cornerstone of any authoritarian social structure like ours. I use this to illustrate how ideology permeates historical interpretation. As stated earlier, Marxists do the same in a more conscious manner. But can we ‘prove’ that some historical interpretations are of more value or even of more significance than others?

Why are socialists disgusted but not surprised by the activities of Bush and Blair any more than we were by the crimes of the Bolsheviks and their fascistic ‘Soviet Union’? Because an analysis of history based on an understanding of the relationship between the mode of production and the values and concepts that it creates can only come to one conclusion: people make history but only within the constraints of their historical context. Blair may proclaim himself to be ‘New Labour’ but what is new about worship at the altar of the ‘free market’ to answer all of capitalism’s problems? Can a moral crusade against one’s enemies that means the murder of thousands of innocent people be considered ‘new’?

Neo-conservatives use the same failed ideological excuses as their 18th century counterparts to maintain their wealth and status. Despite all of the socialist rhetoric the Bolsheviks and their subsequent purges and militarism was symptomatic of all regimes that orchestrate the transition between agrarian feudalism and industrial capitalism. China’s ‘cultural revolution’ had infinitely more in common with the ‘terror’ of the French revolution than it did with the Paris commune.

We know this to be so because of the lack of a majority to oppose such actions of the elite (and indeed to be complicit to make them possible). Today it is still this lack of historical knowledge that makes it possible for our rulers to continually repackage their reactionary ideology using the media and helped in no small measure by historians.

Fukuyama, Starkey, Sharma and countless others have and continue to propagate capitalist ideology through their history. Good history is an ideological battleground. Two people present at the same event can give opposing interpretations of its meaning and significance. Most of us were not present and are not historians but we have a political duty to decide which perspective is more likely in the light of our own experiences. Our future depends on the understanding of our past.

Wez.

Paying for air – why not? (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Introductory note. As a researcher, I am swamped by a constant stream of Working Papers, Discussion Papers, Position Papers, Occasional Papers and Miscellaneous Papers that all sorts of schools, networks, institutes, foundations, and centres are kind enough to send my way. Most of them go straight on a pile for later transfer to the green recycle bin, but now and then one catches my eye. I was so impressed by the sheer brilliance of this “Thought Paper” by a junior economist at the Centre for Research, Analysis and Policy (CRAP) that I decided to share it with readers of the Socialist Standard. The author wishes to remain anonymous. — Stefan

Optimal efficiency in the use of any resource requires the functioning of an effective market in that resource. Everyone (that is, everyone who matters) accepts this thesis in principle, but proposals to put the principle into practice still run up against irrational fears and prejudices, hidebound attitudes, and vague moral reservations. This applies especially to the still controversial issue of establishing and regulating a market in air.

That no doubt explains why the published literature on air marketisation and privatisation is so scanty, although these topics have been the object of lively discussion among economic policy specialists, and not only at our centre.  And yet, as people are beginning to realise, the air in the Earth’s atmosphere is a limited resource like any other.

If its use is to be rationalised, the consumption of air must be subject to the discipline of the market. As in the case of wood, water or any other resource, free access to air is a flagrant invitation to profligacy and waste. Studies by physiologists in several countries have revealed that surprisingly large proportions of individuals breathe more deeply and/or at more frequent intervals than strictly necessary for adequate body maintenance.

Many of these irresponsible “free riders” encourage their children to follow their own bad example. Indeed, there are even misguided physicians who in deference to the latest health fad promote “deep breathing” practices among their patients. In the past, the purely technical difficulties of controlling air consumption confined discussion of air markets to the realm of futurological speculation.

Thus, the writer Herbert George Wells, in a story that has for some reason been considered “dystopian,” imagined a future in which the majority of the population live and work underground and, in addition to rent, pay private companies to ventilate their quarters. If they fall into arrears with their air payments the air supply is turned off until the next tenant resumes payment.

Recent developments in pharmacology give reason to hope that in the not too distant future it will be feasible to control air consumption above ground. In the most plausible scenario, a legally mandated annual dose of a paralytic agent makes respiration impossible without subsequent weekly injection of an antidote, the market in which serves as a proxy air market. Of course, the first dose of the paralytic agent has to be combined with the first dose of the antidote; it is only from the second dose that the consumer starts to pay for the antidote – that is, for air access.

The right to sell the antidote to different sections of the population could be sold at auction to the highest bidders.  Those who feel that such an arrangement is morally repugnant usually justify their stance in terms of the naive idea that a person’s access to a vital necessity like air should not depend on how much money he or she has. Presumably it is acceptable to regulate access to luxuries by means of money, but not access to the necessities of life. But this idea makes no sense in the real world. Consider what absurd conclusions would follow if we applied it consistently.

It would mean that there should be free access to food just because we have moral qualms about people starving to death. It would mean that there should be free access to housing, heating, and warm clothing just because we shrink from the sight of people freezing to death in the winter cold. It would mean that there should be free access to medical care just because we feel people should not die for lack of the money to get treated. After all, besides breathing, people need to eat and drink, keep warm, and so on. To be sure, asphyxiation is a quicker way to die than most. But that makes it more humane, not less.

What has this sort of fuzzy thinking got to do with economic rationality?

Stefan

Bogdanov, Technocracy and Socialism (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The terms "Bolshevism" and "Leninism" are usually treated as synonyms. In view of Lenin's enormous influence over the Bolshevik party, that might seem fair enough. But in fact Lenin did have political and intellectual rivals inside his own party. The most important of these non-Leninist Bolsheviks was Alexander Bogdanov (1873—1928).

Bogdanov was a man of many talents and interests. His formal training was in medicine and psychiatry. He invented an original philosophy that he called "tectology" and is now regarded as a precursor of systems theory (synergetics). He was also a Marxian economist, a theorist of culture, a popular science fiction writer, and of course a political activist. Even today most of his work is not available in English. The only book devoted to him is Zenovia Sochor's study of his ideas about culture (Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy, Cornell University Press 1988).

A volume of Bogdanov's science fiction has, however, appeared in English (Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, translated by Charles Rougle and edited by Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites, Indiana University Press 1984). Here we have two novels set on Mars (Red Star and Engineer Menni), a poem "A Martian Stranded on Earth," and interpretative essays by each of the editors. Red Star recounts how Martians take the Russian Bolshevik Leonid to their home planet to learn about the communist society there and act as a link between earth and Mars.

Engineer Menni is also set on Mars, but at an earlier stage, shortly before the transition from capitalism to communism. Menni's mission in life is to design Mars' great canals - it was widely believed at the time that there are canals on Mars - and organize and manage their construction.

Cult of the engineer?
Both Russian and Western commentators have called Bogdanov an advocate of "technocracy" and the promoter of a "cult of the engineer."

Thus Richard Stites speaks of his "celebration of technocratic power [and] the technical intelligentsia." On the surface this assessment seems justified. Engineer Menni was popular among Soviet planners at the time of the first Five Year Plan, and Menni is certainly a heroic figure with whom any aspiring technocrat might readily identify.

But you do not have to search very hard to find evidence that suggests a different assessment. In Red Star Bogdanov presents communist Mars as a society beset by serious problems - by no means a utopia. Technology is a major source of these problems. Leonid discovers, for instance, that some workers are so mesmerized by the machinery they operate that they refuse to stop working and have to be forced to rest. And Nella, Menni's abandoned lover, sings a song in which she complains that for all his virtues Menni is lacking in compassion:

"His heart is of ice, no pain does it feel
For the creatures brought low by Fate . . .
The tears of the wretches cast into the fray
Warm not his heart of stone."

The Martian political system portrayed in Red Star - little explicit detail is provided - does indeed seem to be technocratic rather than democratic. Thus, the speakers at a conference convened to consider Martian colonization of earth are an astronautical engineer, a physician, and a mathematician (who argues in favour of annihilating all earthlings and is later killed by a distraught Leonid). Martians in managerial positions move around in flying "gondolas" that do not seem to be available to ordinary Martians. (If they were, air traffic control would be a nightmare.) This is not a society that I would wish to call socialist or communist even though the exchange of commodities has been abolished and production is for use.

In Engineer Menni we find a clue as to why the revolution has given birth to a technocratic society. A workers' delegate at a trade union congress bemoans the fact that the workers' ignorance prevents them from judging matters for themselves and puts them at the mercy of experts, whom they have no choice but to believe.

Technocracy or socialism?
Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings as presented by Sochor suggest that he expected the coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society. This was because the workers lacked the knowledge and initiative to seize control of social affairs for themselves. One reason fort his situation was the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the capitalist production process. Another was the hierarchical and authoritarian mode of organization of the Bolshevik party, although Bogdanov considered such organization necessary and inevitable - he was a Bolshevik, after all.

This, however, was not a prospect that Bogdanov welcomed or idealized. He knew that real socialism (or communism) could only be a fully democratic society. And he knew that only a highly cultured and knowledgeable working class could achieve real socialism. That is why questions of culture and education were so central to his thought and work. The emphasis on knowledge and understanding as prerequisites for real socialism (as opposed to technocratic pseudo-socialism) is common ground that he shares with us in the world socialist movement.

While Bogdanov remained loyal to the Bolshevik regime in Russia until the end of his life, his ideas were deeply subversive of the society over which that regime presided. Bogdanov's ideas were the inspiration for a dissident group called "Workers' Truth" that was active for a time in the early 1920s (although it appears that Bogdanov did not have personal ties with them). In their manifesto, "Workers' Truth" declared that the old bourgeoisie had been replaced as masters of production by "the technical intelligentsia under state capitalism"; the Communist Party had become the party of this intelligentsia, which was the nucleus of a rising new bourgeoisie.

Stefan

Sound Bites and Soldiers (2007)

From the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently there have been a number of sound bites, profiles and coverage of NATO soldiers in Afghanistan and US soldiers in Iraq on CNN and BBC. Rank and file at 19/20, sergeants at 23/24 and officers in their late 20s /early 30s. My first response is generally emotional and angry - look at them, boys, just boys and young men.

What are they doing? Who are they doing it for? And then, simmering, I turn to the same old questions, trying to rationalise, to find the answers to stop the terrible slaughter going on around the world in the non-stop battles for resources and/or control.

How is it that year after year, war after war, the military establishments around the world are able to either conscript or (even worse?) persuade volunteers to join up? Young, impressionable, mostly male, suckered in by the projected macho image of recruiting videos and sophisticated video games. You've mastered the game, now how wonderful to be part of a non-virtual, real-life, grown up skirmish, battle, war! Are they really appealing to the sense of excitement, adrenalin rush, the biggest rush of your life? Even at risk of your life? And then, how is it, whatever you stand for, there's always an enemy ready to fight you? An enemy with recruits just as passionate about their cause as you are about yours? Can you always be in the right and your various and varied enemies always in the wrong? It's not statistically possible, is it?

Being a volunteer, i.e. choosing to join up, presents several other questions. Is it for the pay? To learn a trade? Because father and grandfather did it before you? Because there's nothing else on offer? As a show of patriotism? Or is it support for a particular cause? If the latter, then what if you agree with the current engagement but are opposed to the next? The main business of the leaders of the armed forces of all sides is that of instilling a sense of morality, justice, rightness about the fight, of invoking patriotism, nationalism and a whole lot of image building and supporting myths.

Aside from numerous combatants, willing or not, civilians, innocents, young, old, male, female continue to be killed both deliberately and accidentally as collateral damage on most continents of the world on a daily basis and there is absolutely no indication that this can ever change under the capitalist system.

The sound bites are part of the business of convincing the general public to support or have sympathy for the troops in achieving the capitalists' goals. For me the sound bites succeed in reinforcing the socialist principle that all warfare is destructive of human values, simply pitting one section of the working class against another with the sole aim of furthering the capitalist cause. The young men of the world are worth more than that, much more.

They are part of a world society which collectively could choose to work for peace, justice and prosperity for all in our time, putting aside the divisive issues of capitalism and recognising at last that with socialism unity is strength.

Janet Surman

The Rebel Sell (2007)

Book Review from the April 2007 Socialist Standard

Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter: The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture.

I finished this book wondering just what I'd been reading. It's largely aimed at the 'counterculture', a notion which seems to encompass everything from anarchism and the Sex Pistols to Naomi Klein's No Logo and the Situationists.

The countercultural critique of capitalism, so Heath and Potter argue, is far more wide-ranging than that of Marxism, which is concerned with abolishing exploitation and establishing common ownership. In contrast, the counterculture aims at a society without institutions and regulations, though it's usually very vague as to what a free society would actually be like.

But, the authors continue, countercultural rebellion is in practice counterproductive: it distracts attention from initiatives to bring about real improvements in people's lives and even encourages contempt for such changes.

To the extent that attacking such an ill-defined set of ideas makes sense, there is a fair amount here that Socialists could agree with. The whole notion of 'fair trade', for instance, has become itself part of the competitive selling industry, as has other merchandise produced by various countercultural organisations. If you buy from the Body Shop because it makes you feel morally superior, then you're just being driven by a desire not to conform.

However, it's in their positive prescriptions that Heath and Potter go wrong. You might interpret their critique of countercultural rebellion as applying also to the Socialist insistence on advocating revolution and opposing reformism. Their case for this rests on two pillars. The first is that it's better to 'plug the loopholes, not abolish the system', i.e. they advocate reforms of capitalism. But the measures they advocate are pointless, such as introducing a progressive income tax on the grounds that lowering income would lower consumption.

The second pillar is, in effect, the impossibility of a socialist society. Of course, the authors never actually deal with the idea of a society based on production for use, since they consider that the only alternative to a market system is centralised production of the type formerly seen in Russia. But they regard a market system as inevitable, and advocate the kind of ideal market described in economic textbooks (presumably because these only exist in books, not in the real world).

Writers like Murray Bookchin (author of Post-Scarcity Anarchism) are criticised on the grounds that 'in our society, scarcity is a social, not a material, phenomenon'. Scarcity therefore cannot be overcome through increasing production: fast cars and 'cool' clothes, for instance, are necessarily scarce because their value depends on providing a distinguishing feature to those who consume them. But a society of free access will work on a very different value system and so won't involve people trying to look or live differently from their friends and neighbours.

So perhaps the answer to my wondering about what the book is would be that, though the authors never use the terms directly, it offers an unconvincing defence of reformism and criticism of socialism.

Paul Bennett

The Great Global Warming Swindle' Swindle (2007)

A Pathfinders TV Review from the forthcoming April 2007 Socialist Standard

'The Great Global Warming Swindle' Swindle, Thurs, March 8, Channel 4

Increases in atmospheric carbon don't cause global warming, global warming causes increases in atmospheric carbon. So what is heating up the Earth? The sun. So why are the vast majority of climate scientists claiming it's carbon, not the sun? Because they're on a $4bn gravy train of funding and they aim to ride that sucker until the end of the line, even though their phoney Carbon Crusade is killing the poor little children in the Third World who are not allowed to have electricity like the rest of us.

This, in case you missed it, was the argument behind 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' broadcast on UK's Channel 4 on March 8. An impressive array of paleoclimatologists, oceanographers and other assorted professors was wheeled on to assure us that everything we thought we knew about global warming was upside down and back to front, and that the present warming phenomenon was entirely natural, and no different from previous warm spells in Earth's history. What was really going on was a gigantic conspiracy to pervert science, distort the facts and condemn developing countries to perpetual misery by creating an entirely bogus panic about atmospheric carbon. They gave us the figures, they showed us the charts, they answered the questions, and it was all utterly convincing.

And nonsense, unfortunately, as a stroll through various online blogs and articles soon revealed. The experts on the programme, with one exception, turn out not to be quite the scions of honesty they appear to be, but rather well-known Denial Monkeys who have agendas of their own and whose theories have already been falsified repeatedly. The exception, oceanographer Carl Wunsch, after seeing the show, sent an apoplectic letter to C4 saying he'd been conned into appearing, thinking he was taking part in a balanced and critical analysis. This is almost certainly true, and he wouldn't be the only one. The producer, Martin Durkin, has a history of making contentious programmes accusing environmentalists of being 'proto-nazis', and from which his researchers have walked out in disgust and his interviewees have wailed afterwards that they've been had. In Durkin's experience, when the BBC reject his programme synopses as junk science, he can always rely on Channel 4 to produce them instead.

Just why Channel 4 thinks bad science makes good TV is a total mystery. Pathfinders does not often stoop to sending whingeing letters, but the memory of C4's disgraceful championing of the charlatan Graham Hancock is still raw and rancid, so a quick blister to the C4 complaints department seemed appropriate for once, to whit: "I appreciate that C4's brief is in part to be 'controversial' but to extend this brief to making programmes that are based on deliberate and easily verifiable lies is not only immoral and indecent, I'm surprised it's not illegal as well. I just don't see how you can justify the dissemination of nonsense in any programme but especially one in which the issues at stake - the future of the planet - could hardly be more important. Judging from the resulting blog discussions there are any number of gullible people who are now completely convinced by your programme that global warming is not a problem, and who will never see any rebuttal unless another channel takes responsibility. There are people out there who claim (with lots of evidence, naturally) that Jews cause AIDS, that blacks are racially inferior, that rape and violence are genetically-based, and that the CIA is putting nanoscale monitoring devices in our drinking water. No doubt these people would do anything for the oxygen of a Channel 4 publicity hype, so I'm bound to wonder just how far your lust for controversy takes you and where you draw the line." A pre-transmission statement from Channel 4 gives you some idea of their probable response to this:
"It is essentially a polemic and we are expecting it to cause trouble, but this is the controversial programming that Channel 4 is renowned for." (LSE UKNews, March 4)

They will doubtless not be worried, even though in the past they have had to broadcast an unreserved apology for one of Durkin's other documentaries.

And what of the programme-makers themselves? Several of the interviewees are known to have right-wing free-market sympathies with links to the anti-environmentalist Foresight Institute, and their attack on human-derived global warming is seen by many to be a response to their fear that political action to prevent climate change will entail greater government intervention in the capitalist marketplace. So, a free-marketeer plot to loosen the grip of state governments and let the corporations take control? But wait, the plot thickens. The producer, Durkin, and some of his colleagues, are associated with the Revolutionary Communist Party, aka Living Marxism, aka the Institute of Ideas, aka Spiked Online, aka Sense About Science. So, a left-wing plot by a sect of multiple identity, media-cuddly Bolsheviks? Are the right and left-wings of capitalism now climbing into bed together to breed Son of Denial Monkey? What for? According to SwindleWatch.org, the RCP's master plan could be to foment total environmental complacency in an effort to bring capitalism to early disaster, thus inciting a revolt by the proletariat, if any of us are still left alive to revolt, that is. Either that, or they are just plain bonkers. Nobody knows.

In the wake of the Stern report, Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, and the recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, it's easy to see that the small minority who deny human responsibility for global warming are feeling somewhat ganged-up on. It's just not like the good old days, when natural scientific caution by researchers allowed gainsayers all sorts of loopholes to exploit. Even with the reservations among scientists about the IPCC pulling its punches (New Scientist, last week), their report is damning enough to be conclusive as far as most policy-makers are concerned. Whether this programme has damaged the climate debate or merely Channel 4's already shaky reputation on factual reporting remains to be seen. What is worrying is that there is an extraordinary enthusiasm on the part of many people to believe that the world of science is as corrupt and dishonest as the world of politics, and that the 'brave' heroes who stand up against it are to be admired and believed implicitly. It's not just those who inhabit the twilight world of paranoia who believe this. Even realists can succumb to cynicism. This is a world, after all, where money doesn't just talk, it smooth-talks, and nobody can really trust anything anybody says when there's a dollar behind every answer. Are people wrong to distrust the scientific community, and therefore believe every nutjob with a theory that same community has loudly disowned? Generally yes, but when it is well known that science chases the money and that money doesn't chase the science it doesn't like, it is not hard to see how these conspiracy theories get started.

Interestingly, the only real attack on the global warming lobby which has had any real merit is the report (BBC Online, Feb 27), that the Oscar-winning Al Gore has a 20-room house and swimming pool which uses twenty times the national energy average. Gore's spokesperson shamefacedly admitted this, and responded rather lamely that the family were looking at low-wattage light-bulbs and solar panels to reduce their consumption. Hooray for the press. Nobody likes a smart-alec.

Paddy Shannon