Voice From The Back: Too Much Month At The End Of The Money (2009)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too Much Month At The End Of The Money

  When reporting poverty in the world the international media often assume that it is a condition that exists only in Africa or Asia but here is an example of its very real existence in the so-called developed world. “Nearly 60 per cent of Canadians would have trouble paying the bills if their paycheque was delayed by one week, a new poll suggests. The Canadian Payroll Association survey says not only are the majority of Canadians living paycheque-to-paycheque, but they have little ability to put money away for their retirement. The survey, released Monday, said 59 per cent of Canadians would have trouble making ends meet if they missed a paycheque.” (Canadian Press, 14 September) This paycheque-to-paycheque existence is the norm for most members of the world’s working class irrespective of where they live.

Famine and Feast

  Capitalism is a social system that produces all sorts of contradictions. Tremendous technical advances should mean a better society but inside capitalism it leads to better ways to maim, kill and destroy. Improvements in the production of food should lead to a happier world but it produces exactly the opposite. “The number of hungry people will pass 1 billion this year for the first time, the U.N. World Food Program (WFP) said, adding that it is facing a serious budget shortfall.” (Yahoo News, 16 September) While a million human beings suffer starvation producers of food are destroying it to force up prices. “An emergency meeting over the collapse in the price of milk will be held by Europe’s agriculture ministers. The crisis talks have been convened by Sweden as farmers in mainland Europe continue their ‘milk strike’, dumping hundreds of thousands of litres of milk on farmland…. In an attempt to end the milk lakes and butter mountains, the European Commission is unwinding its dairy support system.” (Times, 24 September) Butter mountains and milk lakes while a billion starve – capitalism has certainly outlived its usefulness.

Up in Smoke

  Every day in the newspapers and on the TV we are confronted by earnest politicians who assure us that they are doing everything possible to lessen the prospects of another nuclear horror story like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. A great deal of concern is being shown by these politicians as to whether Iran has a nuclear bomb. This concern seems a trifle ludicrous when the USA has 9,400 nuclear warheads and Russia has 13,000 of them. In fact when they are being frank, as the writer of this newspaper report is, they know that nuclear disarmament is an impossibility inside capitalism. “Later this month United Nations inspectors will visit Iran’s secret nuclear facility near Qom to find out if the Islamic republic is about to become the world’s tenth nuclear power. Whatever they find, the world already has enough nuclear weapons to destroy every single nation on the planet. With approximately 23,000 warheads, there is enough deadly material for 2.3 million blasts the size of Hiroshima. … The world is committed to nuclear disarmament in principle, in practice it will never happen.” (Times, 6 October)

Onward Christian Bankers

  Banking, insurance companies and the myriad financial off-shoots that make up the City of London are central to the running of modern capitalism. They produce nothing of course but then neither do the industrial capitalist class. It is probably a bit unfair to say the City produces nothing. It certainly produces nothing useful, but it certainly produces hypocrisy in large doses. “As bankers last month began gearing up for a bumper bonus season, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the Anglican church, bemoaned their lack of repentance. “We haven’t heard people saying, ‘Well, actually, no, we got it wrong and the whole fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, empty’,” Mr Williams told bankers in September. Such rhetoric echoes that of Lord Turner over the summer, when the chairman of the Financial Services Authority spoke in moralistic terms about the need for banking to become ‘socially useful’ again. Hector Sants, his chief executive, has even explained his move to a regulatory job in terms of a sense of Christian ‘duty’ to give something back to society after a 30-year career in money-making.” (Financial Times, 7 October) We expect Archbishops to utter hypocritical nonsense, after all it is their stock in trade, but when financiers rant on about “Christian duty” and banking becoming “socially useful” it is a bit hard to bear. Speed the day when banks and other financial institutes are part of the unlamented history of capitalism along with all its apologists, both religious and secular.

The Archbishop is Right (2011)

From the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“We are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted” (The Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams).

He is right. The government is implementing policies for which no one voted, or would vote for. No one voted to cut care services for the old and the disabled. No one voted to close hospital departments or to delay repairing schools or to close libraries and sports facilities or to reduce rubbish collection. Yet this is all happening as a result of what the government is doing.

It’s what governments always do when capitalism goes into one of its periodic crises. If nothing else this shows that capitalism is not a system geared to improving people’s lives. If it was, this sort of thing would never happen. As productivity went up (as it does slowly but surely each year) then society would be able to produce more and so be more able to provide better care for the elderly and better amenities for everyone.

That is what the increasing surplus of wealth over and above meeting basic needs would be used for. Under capitalism, however, it takes the form of profits, and competition between profit-seeking enterprises forces most of these to be reinvested in production rather than in improving people’s lives. Any government that tried to do this by diverting profits from capital accumulation would soon find itself in economic difficulties. Governments that have tried have been forced by capitalist economic reality to do a U-turn and give priority to “growth” as they call capital accumulation. But this growth is not a steady process but a series of fits and starts, of periods of booms ending in a crisis and a slump when amenities and living standards have to be cut as a way of creating the conditions for capital accumulation to resume.

Which is where we are now. People getting what they didn’t vote for also shows that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as an expression of “the people’s will”. This is not because there are no procedures in place for people to decide what they want, but because the way the capitalist economy works prevents some of these decisions being implemented. Capitalism is not geared to doing what people want. People want the problems they face to be solved but capitalism simply can’t do this. And no amount of making the decision-making process more formally democratic can alter this because that’s not where the problem lies. It’s that capitalism is a system geared to making profits and accumulating capital irrespective of people’s decisions and needs.

This is not happening just in Britain. In some other countries it’s even more blatant. In Iceland a law was passed during the financial bubble guaranteeing the savings of depositors, whether from Iceland or abroad, in Icelandic banks in the case of a bank failing. No one expected that banks would fail but they did. The Icelandic government didn’t have the money to hand to honour this promise so the British and Dutch governments stepped in and sent the bill to Iceland. The government there told these creditors that it would find the money by drastically worsening the life of the people in Iceland. And did so. The people of Iceland have voted twice in referendums to reject the terms of the deals. To no effect. In the end the Icelandic government will have to pay up and cannot reverse its austerity programme.

It’s the same in Ireland where the government had given a guarantee to underwrite bank losses. Fintan O’Toole made a valid point in the Irish Times (3 May) when he criticised the twisted logic used to justify making things worse for people there:

  “The basic proposition is that ‘the Irish’ borrowed loads of money and ‘the Irish’ must pay it back. Each and every citizen of a particular nationality is responsible for the misdeeds of others who hold the same nationality. National identity trumps everything else. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t borrow the money or that you had no way of knowing what decisions private banks were making. You’re Irish, the banks are Irish, so you’re all guilty. (…) so the nurse in Ennis and the factory worker in Portlaoise have to pay it back.”

The Irish government will have to honour its guarantee, and nurses and factory workers and others will have to suffer. The Irish voted to kick out the previous government but that hasn’t made any difference. The new government will have to continue doing the same, as will the new government in Portugal and as the old government in Greece has been doing. It’s what managing capitalism – whichever party or coalition of parties is in office – involves at the moment, what the Archbishop (who seems to be rather perspicacious) described in his article in the New Statesman (9 June) as “managerial politics, attempting with shrinking success to negotiate life in the shadow of big finance”. He described this as “not an attractive rallying point”, but that’s all that’s on offer and can be on offer.

In other places it’s yet worse still. The government of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean decided recently to float its currency against the dollar as “essential to cut the country’s ballooning budget deficit and stabilise the economy” (Times, 6 May). As a result “almost overnight, the price of staples such as rice and bread soared by 30 per cent”. Hence the news item’s headline: “Violence in the holiday island intensifies as food prices soar.” The opposition party there is trying to use the unrest to get back into office but even if they succeed they would still have to attempt to negotiate life in the shadow of capitalism. This is all governments everywhere can do.

People don’t take this lying down and, rightly, try to resist their lives being made worse. But if government action cannot overcome the iron laws of capitalism, neither can strikes, street demonstrations or riots. The most these can do is slow down the worsening a little but not reverse it. The cruel fact is that within the context of capitalism, as Mrs Thatcher said to the archbishop, there is no alternative. That’s the case for socialism.

Adam Buick

Rowan Williams v New (and old) Atheism (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

You almost have to feel sorry for the Archbishop of Cant. It seems that the Church of England is on its knees. With declining attendance, internal disagreement about God’s wishes regarding women and gays becoming bishops, and clergy defecting to the Catholics he has the job of holding the whole circus together and trying to present it as a credible organisation with something useful to say.

Back in February, in response to a report highlighting the problems the Church faces in trying to convince us to take it seriously, he put much of the blame on what he calls ‘new atheism’. How this differs from old atheism he didn’t say but presumably he was referring to the numerous books published recently attacking the antiquated beliefs that he and his cronies expect us to accept. What was needed, he said, was for the clergy to be more vocal in countering the arguments put by such writers as Dawkins and Hitchens.

Unfortunately he didn’t give any suggestions as to the kind of counter-arguments he expects them to use against the flood of rationalism and science that they face so it’s difficult to imagine exactly what he has in mind. He certainly didn’t volunteer to step in himself and debate against Dawkins on the question of ‘Evolution or Creationism?’ That would be worth hearing.

Maybe he’s busy behind the scenes praying for some undeniable evidence that the story of Adam and Eve and the talking serpent IS true, that the earth really IS only a few thousand years old, and that Noah DID collect together two elephants, two aardvarks, two duck-billed platypus, two orangutans, two hippopotami, etc, etc, etc, and take them all for a ride in his ark.

To be fair to the Archbishop and his mates though, it’s unlikely that many of them believe this tosh any more than we do. And it must be difficult to keep a straight face when they have to mention it. But that’s the problem they are saddled with. Rowan Williams can hardly turn round now and say, “Sorry folks, it’s just a load of old cobblers we’ve been using to remind you of your place in a class divided society”.  Well, he could; but he’s not going to. He may like to be seen as an affable old leftie but he’s certainly no socialist.

As for ‘new’ atheist Richard Dawkins, well, as a scientist and academic he is of course concerned that such unscientific nonsense as ‘intelligent design’ is being taught in schools. And while we agree with him, from a socialist point of view the problem is much deeper.

It’s all very well to point out the lack of logic in religious beliefs, but religion is not simply a jumble of confused ideas. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of the capitalist class. It divides us and blinds us to the class action that is required to overcome the menace of capitalism.

Religion is the ideological expression of a long-gone world and its ancient social conditions, a world of superstition, slavery and little education. Far from providing an answer to today’s problems, it tells us to put our faith in the supernatural hopes of a past age. Instead of uniting us as a class we are to become meek and mild, and to submit to the whims of an ancient god that was dreamt up in the bronze age.

Nick White

Cooking the Books: God and the Market (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commenting on the current world financial crisis former 1968 student leader and now a Green MEP, Daniel Cohn Bendit, said that “the belief that the market is god is over” (Guardian, 17 September). Someone who should know more about God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, hopes this is so as he thinks that the Market has become a rival to his god.

In an article in the Spectator (26 September) Dr Rowan Williams in effect accused “market fundamentalists” of breaking the First Commandment – “Thou shalt have no other gods before me”. He even called in Marx to back up this charge of idol worship:

“Marx long ago observed the way in which unbridled capitalism became a kind of mythology, ascribing reality, power and agency to things that had no life in themselves; he was right about that, if about little else. And ascribing independent reality to what you have in fact made yourself is a perfect definition of what the Jewish and Christian Scriptures call idolatry.”

Dr Williams is said to be a learned man and he is right: Marx did see capital as the product of human labour which had come to dominate those who produced it (except that he saw this as applying to capitalism in general not just to “unbridled capitalism”).

This was in fact his whole “critique of political economy” (the subtitle of Capital), that the economic laws of capitalism were not the natural laws that Adam Smith, David Ricardo, the Rev Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill and the others thought but forces that came into operation only because society was organised in a particular way. Market forces were the result of human activity which had escaped from human control and which had come to dominate them as if they were a natural force.

Dr Williams may also be aware that here Marx was applying to economics the theory that Ludwig Feuerbach had applied to religion in his 1841 The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach argued that, far from God making man in his own image, it was the other way round. Humans made God in their image and attributed to him the powers which they collectively possessed, and then bowed down and worshipped this figment of their imagination. If humans were to realise this and take their own destiny in hand there would be no need for God or religion. So, according to Feuerbach, the Archbishop’s god was also an idol.

The Archbishop was getting a dig at Marx in when he said he said he was right about this “if about little else”. But Marx once made a harsh comment about the Church of England, writing in the Preface to the first edition of Capital, that it would “more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income”.

It is interesting to speculate what the one article it would keep might be. At one time it would have been obvious – Article 38 that “the riches and goods of Christians are not common, as touching the right, title, and possession of the same, as certain Anabaptists do falsely boast . . .” If he keeps on reading Marx maybe the Archbishop might be prepared to abandon this one too.