The Stern gag – capitalist policies for capitalism’s problems (2006)

From the December 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production . . . in our whole contemporary social order”

You could be forgiven for thinking the above quotation came from a modern-day ecologist or environmentalist, commenting on impending global ecological catastrophe and drawing upon the myriad reports currently in existence, written by concerned scientists, that portend cataclysmic changes to our life-styles if we don’t stop abusing our natural environment immediately. The quote is in fact 131 years old and is taken from Dialectics of Nature, written by Frederick Engels (1875).

Let’s get one thing straight from the outset. Socialists have been warning about the effects of capitalism’s penny-pinching production methods and how they impact on the wider environment for well over a hundred years, and it is often with despair that we reiterate Engels’ message from the later 19th century, more so now that state-of-the-art technology exists that provides hard evidence as to the exact effects of capitalist production.

Global disaster

It was, therefore, not with any great sigh of relief, or with shock and disbelief, that socialists received the findings of the much-trumpeted Stern report on climate change and indeed the government’s reaction to it. It does make for grim reading, suggesting that time is running out to really address the environment question previous opportunities having been pathetically squandered at the Hague and Kyoto Summits and that the possibility of preventing a global disaster is “already almost out of reach”.

The 700-page report, commissioned by the Treasury and carried out by the former World Bank chief economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, argues that environmental problems will be “difficult or impossible to reverse” unless something is done now. It paints a disturbing picture of the future of the planet if overall global temperatures rise by just two degrees Centigrade. It suggests that four billion people could face water shortages, that sixty million Africans would be exposed to malaria and that forty percent of the world’s species would face extinction.

Two-hundred million more people, it goes on, could be exposed to hunger and that figure could rise to 550 million if the temperature rose one extra degree because of a knock-on 34 percent drop in crop yields across Africa and the Middle East. Australia’s arable land would become simply too hot to sustain cereal crops. Another couple of degrees rise in temperature would, according to the report, see the ice glaciers of the Himalayas melt, depriving 300 million Chinese of a water supply. Rising sea levels would inundate half the world’s major cities, creating more homelessness, and increased ocean acidity would result in a serious decline in fish stocks.

The report further informs us that “changes in weather patterns could drive down the output of the world’s economies by an amount equivalent to up to £6 trillion a year by 2050, almost the entire output of the EU.” But all is not lost, believe Chancellor Gordon Brown and Environment Secretary David Miliband. They point to the ‘positive message’ arising from the report; this being that the world has the means to avoid the awaiting cataclysm. Money can be thrown at the problem – the earth-shattering sum of one per cent of Global GDP should suffice; a figure, incidentally, which is dwarfed by global military spending.

Whiff of profits

Responding to the report, Miliband sounded quite optimistic. Interviewed by the Independent (30 October), he said: “The second half of his message is that the technology does exist, the financing, public and private, does exist, and the international mechanisms also exist to get to grips with this problem – so I don’t think it’s a catastrophe that he puts forward. It’s a challenging message.”

What we are offered are capitalist remedies, and to make it all the more attractive there are profits to be had – well, the master class has to have some damned incentive before they act. As the Independent reported: “Combating climate change could become one of the world’s biggest growth industries, generating around $250bn of business globally by 2050.” Providing, that is, that we still have a planet worth saving in 50 years time.

Environmental disaster and the best capitalist politicians can think up is to tempt the master class with the whiff of profits to come if they agree to mend their ways! Indeed, the report is punctuated with terms such as “cost-effective” and “profitability”. Well, Stern is after all a leading world economist so his thoughts are naturally with his associates in big business. The very people who have disregarded the effects of their production methods on the natural environment for hundreds of years are now being asked to show it some mercy! Global environmental catastrophe can be halted by throwing money at the problem!

The simple fact is that businesses will not take the risk of falling behind in the struggle for profits and nor will any government enforce policy that will result in a drop in the profits of its respective capitalist class. This is exactly what President Bush cited when he pulled the USA out of the Kyoto Agreement. He is no doubt aware that the USA consumes more than one quarter of global oil production and is accountable for one quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, while being home to only 4.5 per cent of the world’s population, but his remit is not to protect the environment, nor the millions who would suffer as a direct result of environmental chaos. His job is protecting US interests all over the world, interests which are inseparable from profits.

Capitalist businesses survive by forcing out their competition, by cutting costs and sidestepping policies that hinder their expansion. They seek new outlets for their wares, to sell more and more, because this is the law of capitalism, and it is a law antagonistic to ecological concerns. It is the crazed law of capitalism that compels the big oil producers to pay teams of scientists to prepare reports that refute the findings of environmentalists who forewarn of the dire effects of current production methods.

The market economy demands that businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interests. Pleasing shareholders takes far more priority than ecological considerations. The upshot is that productive processes are distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits. The result is an economic system governed by anarchic market forces which compel decision-makers, whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste. They may well be loath to contaminate ecosystems, but the alternative is closure should they invest in costlier eco-friendlier production methods. Little wonder then that nature’s balances are upset today, and that we face problems such as melting glaciers, rising sea levels, acidic oceans and the like.

All Greens now

The Greens have long insisted that things could be put right with a change of government policy, which is exactly what Labour now proposes. The problem, they believe, can be rectified by governments forcing through laws and imposing green taxes on air travel, motoring and high emission vehicles – to protect the environment. Even the Conservatives, with their new infantile eco-logo, and the Liberals have jumped on board the green bandwagon. Shadow chancellor George Osborne promises a whole swathe of green taxes. All are seemingly convinced the problem facing the environment is an economic one insofar as the world’s governments can spend their way out of environmental catastrophe.

Governments, to be sure, exist to run the political side of the profit system and, no matter how well intentioned, do not have a free hand to do what is sensible or desirable. They do not control the market-driven profit system it controls them and shapes their policies. Which government is going to tell its oil companies to produce less oil, when these same oil producers are under constant pressure to pump more out of the ground and as cheaply as possible? Within three years annual car sales are set to hit 60 million per year, 10 million up on 2004. Which government will dare threaten these car sales with its eco-policies? At the very best their eco-policies can only slow down the speed of environmental decay, not halt it in its tracks at some future date.

Socialists are no different from others in desiring an environment in which the safety of all animal and plant species is ensured. Where we differ from our political opponents is in recognising that their demands have to be set against a well-entrenched economic and social system, based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding law of profits first.

It has long been our case that human needs can be satisfied without recourse to production methods that adversely effect the natural environment, which is exactly why we advocate the establishment of a system of society in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit. We are not talking about nationalisation or any other tinkering with the present system, but rather its entire abolition and replacement with a global system in which the Earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled; a society in which each production process takes into consideration not only human need but any likely effect upon the environment.

One does not need a mastery of Earth sciences to envisage types of farming that preserve and enhance the natural fertility of the soil, the systematic recycling of materials obtained from non-renewable energy sources while developing alternative sources that continually renew themselves (i.e. solar energy and wind power); industrial processes that avoid releasing poisonous chemicals or radioactivity into the biosphere; the manufacture of solid goods made to last, not planned to break down after a period of time.

Once the Earth’s natural and industrial resources have been wrested from the master class and become the common heritage of all humanity, then production can be geared to meeting needs in an ecologically acceptable way, instead of making profits without consideration for the environment. This the only basis on which we can meet our needs whilst respecting the laws of nature and to at last begin to reverse the degradation of the environment caused by the profit system. The only effective strategy for achieving a free and democratic society and, moreover, one that is in harmony with nature, is to build up a movement which has the achievement of such a society as its objective.

John Bissett

Cooking the Books: Market failure (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Businesses never spontaneously take into account the interest of the capitalist class as a whole, let alone that of society in general. They have always acted on the basis that, as Thatcher put it, there is no such thing as society. One result has been the current global overwarming, which Nicholas Stern, in his report to the Labour government on the economics of climate change, described as the biggest market failure ever.

Businesses leave it to governments to represent the overall capitalist interest but, even here, they are reluctant to let governments interfere with their freedom to make profits in the way they want. Not that, these days, governments want to impose coercive restrictions on capitalist businesses. Environment minister David Miliband has openly declared:

“Climate change is, according to Sir Nicholas Stern, the greatest ever market failure, but the answer is not to replace markets. Instead, we need to price pollution into markets and extend market mechanisms so that they work more effectively” (Times, 12 February).

In other words, calling on Beelzebub to cast out Beelzebub. But some supporters of Beelzebub are not content even with this light touch. In an article entitled “A free market solution to global warming” the US business correspondent of the Times, Gerard Baker, put it ironically:

“Man-made global warming is, if the critics are correct, the biggest example of market failure in the history of the planet. It makes Marx’s critique of capitalism look like nitpicking. Inequality and labour alienation we can live with. Global warming is a bit harder” (20 February).

He then went on to point out that the sort of measures envisaged by Stern and Miliband wouldn’t be enough:

  “Despite reassuringly low-cost estimates from the likes of Sir Nicholas Stern, attempting to arrest and then roll back carbon emissions by relatively mild taxation and regulatory measures over decades looks a tall order. If you are really serious about it, you need to be thinking in terms of an internationally mandated programme of regulation and control over economic activity that will surpass anything ever seen in human history”.

Capitalism, he implies, just couldn’t afford this: “The real present-day cost of reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere substantially below where they are now is almost certainly prohibitive and ruinous to economic growth”.

As an alternative to what he calls “the leap into the socialist abyss” he advocates “measures to limit the effects of global warming – improving sea defences for example”. One better than King Canute but likely to be just as ineffective in the long run.

Not that socialists advocate “an internationally mandated programme of regulation and control” over capitalist businesses. What we want is for the production of the useful things that people need to live and enjoy life to be taken out of the hands of profit-seeking enterprises altogether. We want the means of production to be owned in common by the whole community as the only basis on which production can be organised to take account of the overall interest of all the members of society.

In socialism there won’t be any profit-seeking capitalist enterprises to regulate; just democratically-run productive units producing, in an ecologically and socially acceptable way, what people need.

Voice From The Back: Reformism Fails Again (2008)

The Voice From The Back Column from the April 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Reformism Fails Again 

It is a basic socialist principle that no programme of reforms can solve the problems of capitalism, but here is an example where well-intentioned reformism has made the situation worse. “Hospitals were last night accused of keeping thousands of seriously ill patients in ambulance ‘holding patterns’ outside accident and emergency units to keep a government pledge that all patients are treated within four hours of admission. … An Observer investigation has also found that some wait for up to to five hours in ambulances because A & E units have refused to admit them until they can guarantee to treat them within the time limit.” (Observer, 17 February)

Capitalism And Euphemism 

Capitalism has got to have euphemisms to cover up the sordid nature of the system. Thus children maimed by napalm bombs is called “co-lateral damage” and troops blowing up their own troops is called “friendly fire”. A recent addition to this sorry catalogue is “extraordinary rendition”. “David Miliband has admitted two US ‘extraordinary rendition’ flights landed on UK territory in 2002. The foreign secretary said in both cases US planes refuelled on the UK dependent territory of Diego Garcia. He said he was ‘very sorry’ to have to say that previous denials made in ‘good faith’ were now having to be corrected. The renditions – the transport of terror suspects around the world for interrogation – only came to light after a US records search, he said.” …”Amnesty International UK director Kate Allen said extraordinary rendition was ‘a polite way of talking about kidnapping and secret detention’”. (BBC News, 21 February)

Jobs For The Boys 

When in opposition, Gordon Brown criticised the last Tory government for the “revolving door from the cabinet room to the board room”, but he has remained silent about a similar ploy by his own party members. “Twenty-eight former Labour ministers have cashed in on their connections in government and Whitehall by taking jobs in the private sector in the past two years. It represents the biggest exodus of ministers into the private sector since Labour came to power and is worth at least £10M a year in salaries and fees.” (Sunday Times, 24 February)

  

A Ray Of Hope 

Socialists are often told that socialism is impossible because human beings are innately war-like and aggressive, but this report seems to suggest otherwise. “More and more Israelis are avoiding mandatory military service— something long viewed in this country as a proud rite of passage. “In the past, it is true that not serving in the military was considered the exception,” said Dr. Rueven Gal, author of A Portrait of the Israeli Soldier and former chief psychologist for the Israeli military. “In more recent years it became more tolerable and more acceptable to people.” In 1997, according to army statistics, fewer than one in 10 Israeli men avoided their mandatory three-year military service. These days, it’s closer to three in 10. Women, too, are opting out at a faster pace: Over the last decade, the number of women avoiding military duty rose from 37 percent to 44 percent.” (Yahoo News, 2 March)

Another Ray Of Hope

The awful carnage in the hate-filled Middle East and the religious brutality there fills socialists with gloom but this report would seem to suggest that all is not lost. “After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach. In two months of interviews with 40 young people in five Iraqi cities, a pattern of disenchantment emerged, in which young Iraqis, both poor and middle class, blamed clerics for the violence and the restrictions that have narrowed their lives. “I hate Islam and all the clerics because they limit our freedom every day and their instruction became heavy over us,” said Sara, a high school student in Basra. “Most of the girls in my high school hate that Islamic people control the authority because they don’t deserve to be rulers.” Atheer, a 19-year-old from a poor, heavily Shiite neighborhood in southern Baghdad, said: “The religion men are liars. Young people don’t believe them. Guys my age are not interested in religion anymore.” (New York Times, 4 March)

Cooking the Books: Capitalism and the Labour Party (2010)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I’ll make capitalism work for the people,” promised Ed Miliband in his bid to become Labour leader (Observer, 29 August). He explained:

“Britain’s big question of the next decade is whether we head towards an increasingly US-style capitalism – more unequal, more brutish, more unjust – or whether we can build a different model – a capitalism that works for people and not the other way round.”

Apparently, “in 2008, a consensus existed that we should understand the lessons of the financial crisis, not just about regulation, but about the kind of capitalism we needed to build”.

We’ve heard this before. The Labour Party has always tried to make capitalism work for the people but, every time that it has been in office, it has failed miserably. What is new is that previously Labour leaders never admitted that this was what they were trying to do. They said they were trying to gradually reform capitalism out of existence, not building a new kind of capitalism.

Still, an open recognition of what they are trying to do can only help clarify things. It is, however, indicative of how far Labour has changed that Ed Miliband was the candidate supported by the Left in the party. Even they have bought into the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism, only a choice about what sort of capitalism, and dropped the anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Ed’s brother David, the candidate supported by the Right declared that his Labour hero was Anthony Crosland (New Statesman, 30 August). He was the Fabian Society Labourite who argued that capitalism no longer existed. Which might explain why David Miliband, and Blair and Brown before him, refuse to use the c-word.

The reason Labour – and indeed the Tories who also talk of a “people’s capitalism” – fail to make capitalism work for the people is that this is an impossible mission. Capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interest of all. It is a profit-making system that can only work as such, in the interest of those who live off profits and to the detriment of those who live off wages and salaries or, in the absence of these, on state hand-outs.

The driving force of capitalism is the accumulation of capital out of profits. When this slows down, as at present, there is a crisis. So, governments must not do anything that might discourage the making of profits to accumulate as capital; in fact, even if it wasn’t their original intention (as perhaps, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it wasn’t with some Labour governments), they have to end up doing all they can to encourage this.

Inevitably, this brings them into conflict with the wage and salary working class whose labour is the source of profits, imposing wage restraint and/or austerity on them. This is not because the government’s members are nasty or incompetent or corrupt, but because this is how they are forced to act by virtue of being the government in the context of capitalism. They fail because they can’t act in any other way.

Instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism into something else, the experience of running capitalism changed the Labour Party – to the extent that today you are labelled a left-winger if you just mention the word “capitalism”, even to support it.

Puppets on a string (2010)

From the May 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Despite women-only lists and quotas for minorities does it matter who the politicians running capitalism are?

Capitalism, without a doubt, is unpopular. It would be strange if it were anything else. A system under which a small percentage of the people own just about everything worth owning, while everyone else has to spend his or her time working for the support of this small minority of owners, could hardly expect to win any popularity stakes. That is why everyone trying to seize power, whether in democratic countries or in despotisms, always proclaims that change is desperately needed. (When did you hear of any new leaders taking over a country with the slogan, “Let’s keep everything just as it is”?)

It is true that some changes, some reforms, may benefit some groups, though at the same time other groups may be worse off. It is also true that some changes may benefit some groups in some ways, but make those same groups worse off in other ways. One big change certainly is needed – a change from capitalism to socialism, that is to say abandoning a system organised for the advantage of a small minority, and introducing a system that works for the good of all: but since enormous propaganda machines are operating full-time to persuade people that any change like that is not possible, the result is that the reforms introduced with such fanfares are doomed to be futile, or at best merely cosmetic. If most of the people in Parliament, or in the government, are white, then the cry arises – let’s have more black people. If most of the people running the country are men – then let’s have more women. If most of the top politicians are Christian – then let’s have Muslims, or Buddhists, or Hindus, or atheists. Whatever they are now, let’s have the opposite. If most people in Parliament were women, the cry would probably arise for more men; if most were black, people might well demand more white faces; if most were Muslim, the cry would go up for more Christians, and so on.

If we are talking about the future of Britain, or of the world, then a person’s skin-colour, sex, religious or cultural background, or any other consideration, is of small importance compared with the question of what that person does. A person’s actions, which follow on from their ideas and their attitudes – these are the things that matter.

Take the case which is exercising the government, and the courts, and the newspapers, at the moment: the case of Binyam Mahomed, who is an Ethiopian who lived in Britain from the time he was fifteen. He was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of being a terrorist; he was then smuggled out by the Americans to Morocco and Afghanistan, finally being imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay in 2004, where he stayed for the next five years, without trial. During that time he was tortured by the Americans, or by their allies. Last year a US District Court judge accepted as accurate Mahomed’s account of his treatment, which “included being beaten with a leather strap, subjected to a mock execution by shooting, being punched and kicked, listening to other prisoners screaming and being cut on his chest, penis and testicles with a scalpel. He was also deprived of sleep and had drugs put into his food” (London Times, 11 February).

The UK Court of Appeal has agreed with “Mr Mahomed’s assertion that the UK authorities had been involved in and facilitated the ill treatment and torture to which he was subjected while under the control of the US authorities”. The Master of the Rolls, presiding at the court, also said in his draft judgment that MI5, the British security service, “operated a culture of suppression and disregard for human rights; that it deliberately misled a Parliamentary committee and that its assurances could not be trusted”. The Foreign Secretary sent high-paid lawyers to the court to get this criticism cut out of the judgment. The British government, indeed, has been trying to keep everything secret, on the grounds that the US government would be annoyed if these things came out – despite the publication of the judgment of the US District Court. The American government would not be so friendly and co-operative, thinks Gordon Brown, if everyone knew how they behaved; which raises the question, how friendly and co-operative do you want to be with a government that tortures its prisoners – and imprisons them without trial?

So we have the unedifying spectacle of a member of the Labour government, the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, defending the collaboration of Britain’s “security” services in the torture by the Americans, or their allies, of a “terrorism” suspect. This is justified by officialdom because of the need to preserve our democratic freedoms. In other words, Britain is justified in going along with torture, to make sure we are not overwhelmed by other states, which use completely unacceptable methods such as torture. It is justifiable to use torture in order to save us from – torture. If the Foreign Secretary really believes this, he is in line for a starring role at the next Clowns’ Reunion.

There are in Britain numerous racial or religious or cultural minorities: in fact everyone belongs to a minority of one kind or another. David Miliband is from a Jewish background; his forebears came from eastern Europe, with its grim history of racialism, of oppression, of pogroms against minorities. Who, in the past centuries in Europe, has suffered more than the Jews from despotic regimes which think you can justify torture if you look at from the right angle? But David Miliband has become Foreign Secretary by joining a party which in effect appeals for support at election times by declaring it will run capitalism better than the other contenders for the job. If it is thought that the interests of the British capitalist state demand kow-towing to the Americans, then the British government – including Miliband – kow-tows to the Americans, even to the extent of accepting and colluding in the torture of its own residents. Having a Foreign Secretary from one of the many UK minorities makes absolutely no difference to the final result.

Black people, too, have suffered horribly under the private-property system of society, to the extent that many Africans were actually violently seized and forcibly made into private property, slaves who were owned by – for example – the American and West Indian landed gentry. Surely if a black person was running affairs (it was once said), things must improve. Well, the President of the United States is now black – his father was a Kenyan African. Does anyone think American capitalism is now somehow less capitalist? And many African states which were once ruled by foreign white empires now have black leaders. In South Africa, for example, Nelson Mandela became president, and was succeeded by Thabo Mbeki and then by Jacob Zuma. Numbers of people with black skins appear to have done very well out of the change-over. “Last year South Africa overtook Brazil as the country with the biggest gap between rich and poor” (London Times, 11 February).

We also used to hear that capitalism would somehow be more tolerable – more kindly, more benign – to the vast majority of non-capitalists if a woman was running it. But in the last few decades we have seen numbers of women running countries – among those who have risen to the top of the political pile have been Isabel Peron in Argentina, Gro Brundtland in Norway, Sirimavo Bandaranaike in Ceylon, Indira Gandhi in India, Golda Meir in Israel, Angela Merkel in Germany, and of course Margaret, now Lady, Thatcher in Britain. What difference did it make?

In 1975 Isabel Peron ordered the Argentine armed forces and its secret services to “annihilate . . . subversive elements”, and there followed more than a thousand kidnappings, assassinations, and “disappearances” of people who either opposed the government or who it was thought might oppose it in future. (Isabel Peron’s allies abroad included the benign and kindly quartet Ceausescu of Romania, Gaddafi of Libya, Mobutu of Zaire, and the Shah of Iran; she fled to Spain after leaving office, and two years ago the present Argentine authorities tried, but failed, to get her extradited.) The history of Mrs Thatcher alone would explain why the so-called “feminist” argument – that a woman Prime Minister would somehow make capitalism softer, gentler, more acceptable – has now been exploded. In fact it is the accepted view now that the methods of the Thatcherite cabinet were tougher and harsher than those of most other governments which had men as Prime Ministers.

If you are running capitalism, the fact that you are a Jew or a Gentile, or black or white, or Christian or Muslim, or Hindu or atheist, or male or female, is completely irrelevant. Whoever you are, you can’t run a turkey farm for the benefit of the turkeys.

Alwyn Edgar

Voice From The Back: Capitalism is worldwide (2010)

From the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

CAPITALISM IS WORLDWIDE

Members of the working class are taught in schools from a very early age that the country they were born in is somehow special. We are taught to be proud of the country wherein for generations our family has been exploited. We wave flags, sing patriotic songs and are taught to mistrust workers from other countries. The owning class suffer from no such xenophobia. They are prepared to exploit workers of any nationality, creed or so-called race. To them profit is much more important than patriotism. Here is a recent example from the Brighton College newspaper. "Workers at a Sussex-based electronics firm were today left "devastated" after being told in a video message that manufacturing at their factories is to end and 220 jobs moved to Korea and the Czech Republic. Unite said Edwards planned to cease all manufacturing at its Burgess Hill and Shoreham factories. The announcement was made to employees via a video message, which the union said was "tactless"." (The Argus, 13 January)

A GRATEFUL NATION

Capitalist nations are continually in conflict with their rivals and inside capitalism economic rivalry leads to military action. During these actions the press praise "our boys" in uniform and regale us with tales of heroism. Nothing is too good for "our boys" they claim, but the reality is far different. "Britain's military veterans are too often descending into alcoholism, criminality or suicide because of a lack of support from the Government according to the Mental Health Foundation. Veterans under 24 are two to three times more likely to kill themselves than civilians of the same age. An estimated one in five veterans and Service personnel is said to have a drinking problem. The charity said: “More needs to be done to help veterans stay well." (London Times, 28 January) Having risked life and limb in pursuing the interests of their masters in these hellish conflicts the heroes of yesterday are thrown on the social scrapheap.

CLASS DIVISION

Socialists are often pilloried because we look at the world from a class perspective. We are accused of being outdated, old fashioned and living in the 19th Century. All that Marxists stuff about class division has been outdated by the new dynamic capitalism of the 21st Century we are told by our critics. A recent government sponsored health review seems to give the lie to that notion. "Healthy living is cut short by 17 years for poorest in Britain. The poor not only die sooner, they also spend more of their lives with a disability, an "avoidable difference which is unacceptable and unfair", a government-ordered review into Britain's widening health inequalities said yesterday. ... Not only is life expectancy linked to social standing, but so is the time spent in good health: the average difference in "disability-free life expectancy" is now 17 years between those at the top and those at the bottom of the economic ladder, the report says." (Guardian, 11 February)

MOTHER OF THE FREE

At the last night of the Proms exploited members of the working class like nothing better than to bawl out the words of Land of Hope and Glory. Poor, deluded workers image that there is something superior about being born on a piece of dirt thrown up on the Atlantic Ocean. They never realise that it is an accident where you happen to be born, and indeed that it was probably an accident that they were born at all. This misguided nationalism is fostered by governments and the media. Britain is superior to Johnny Foreigner with his deceitful regimes. No underhanded politics in dear old Britain says the patriot critical of foreign powers, but what is the reality? "MI5 faced an unprecedented and damaging crisis last night after one of the country's most senior judges found that the Security Service failed to respect human rights, deliberately misled parliament, and had a "culture of suspicion" that undermined government assurances about its conduct. The condemnation by Lord Neuberger, the master of rolls, was drafted shortly before the foreign secretary, David Miliband, lost his long legal battle to suppress a seven paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed." (Guardian, 11 February) Yet another example of how the quest for markets soon overcomes any ethical scruples. Not so much a case of Britain Rules The Waves as Britain Waives The Rules.

Greasy Pole: When You’re Smiling . . . (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is likely that a lot of people would be noticeably happier if Gordon Brown would stop smiling. Those startling, carefully orchestrated facial arrangements – inflicted on soldiers in Afghanistan looking after the oil supply lines, on Olympic athletes calculating how much their status as gold medalists will be worth when they get back home, on bewildered parents taking their offspring for a quite sea-front stroll in Southwold – are not a pretty sight and convince nobody that the Prime Minister is relaxed and happy with his ability to grapple British capitalism out of its present crisis. Less disturbing would be the funereal countenance recently so characteristic of him.

To take the question further – what is there for Gordon Brown to smile about? Among the “experts” who expect to be trusted to correctly prescribe remedies for the ills of capitalism, there is general agreement that the situation can only get worse and that we are about to be overwhelmed by a slump. A couple of months ago no less a person than the governor of the Bank of England warned us that “The nice years of the 60s are over” – an assessment which would have impressed only those whose memories of those years – the boom and slump economy, the Cuba missile crisis, the war in Vietnam – are anything but “nice”. More recently Alistair Darling, Brown’s choice to succeed him as Chancellor of the Exchequer rocked the governmental boat when he declared, in an interview with the Guardian, that “The economic times we are facing are arguably the worst they’ve been in 60 years and I think it’s going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought” and later, bemoaning Labour’s fall out of electoral favour “People are pissed off with us”.

Resilient
Chancellors of the Exchequer are not supposed to be so frank about what goes on in the economy, so that Darling’s comments were open to being dismissed as a “gaffe” – which was in fact an admission that his comments were nearer the truth than Brown’s persistent assertion that the government has so effectively strengthened the British economy that it will weather the storm – unless the voters are so ungrateful that they put in a Tory government to undo all his good work. His government, Brown said, is ”resilient” in the way it is dealing with the present problems (expect to hear more of “resilient” – it has all the hallmarks of a word essential to any Labour Party weasel with ambitions to slither up the greasy pole).

The best that Labour MPs can offer in this appalling situation is to grumble that it is all Brown’s fault; get rid of him, by whatever means, and things will get better. The most recent of these was, notably, the discarded, embittered ex-Home Secretary Charles Clarke. The intellectual contortions required in this come easily to the practised amnesiacs on the Labour benches but we should remember that it is not very long ago that these same representatives of the people were clamourous in their praise of Brown as the greatest Chancellor of the Exchequer in history. This was the leader whose superhuman powers had constructed an economy virtually free of unemployment, with an uninflatable price structure and interest rates so low that thousands were tempted to leap into the void of unaffordable mortgages. Now that those happy delusions have been blown away by cruel reality Labour is turning to the equally bankrupt notion that their party’s salvation lies in ridding itself of Brown. Adjustments like that are effective conditioning to the dishonesty inherent in trying to run British capitalism. The problem is that no leader can be any more successful, can cook the books, deny reality and deceive the voting people, any more effectively.

Miliband
This will not prevent them persisting in their endless search for the unobtainable. And while they do this, each one will harbour, somewhere in their feverish self-assessment, the ambition that they are the ideal leader the party has been waiting for – the one with the insight and the power to succeed where historically everyone else has failed. For their own peace of mind, it must be hoped that these delusions will not endure beyond one or two sleepless nights. David Miliband, possibly enjoying in his abrupt promotion to the heady, if cynically seamy, job of Foreign Secretary, recently let it be known that he is ready to accept the crown. In an article in the Guardian he began in the pose as a fearless confronter of reality – although perhaps unsettling more stubbornly myopic Labour supporters– with the admission that “The odds are against us, no question” but then mollified those he had disturbed with a generous measure of re-assuring platitudes: “Every member of the Labour party carries with them the simple guiding mission on the membership card: to put power, wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many, and not the few” and later he expanded on this platitude with some more “…the challenge to society – to build a genuine sense of belonging and responsibility on the back of greater protection from outside risks and greater control of local issues”. Perhaps, in spite of this, Miliband will succeed to the leadership. But it will not take long for the surge of capitalist society to expose him as just another discredited politician.

This doleful procession of ecstatic expectations followed by rumbling doubts then exposure and rejection, seems to feed on a self-perpetuating energy originating in an apparently limitless capacity for working-class self-deception. There have been many victims of this, of eminent leaders fallen into the dustbin of history. Gordon Brown looks like being only the latest in this dismal line. How long can he keep smiling?

Ivan