Voice From The Back: Merciless global capital (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Merciless global capital

All over the world capitalists try to reduce workers’ wages as the most direct way of increasing their profits. International competition and the mobility of capital have made this “cost-cutting” more ferocious. In India last year the already low wages and poor working conditions were made worse by the government’s decision to scrap the laws which defended workers’ living standards: “NEW DELHI, Oct 21.—The government has admitted it is considering proposals for amending the country’s labour laws. An official release issued today announced that changes to the Trade Union Act, 1926, Industrial Disputes Act 1947, Payment of Wages Act, 1938 and Contract Labour (Regulation and Abolition) Act 1970, ‘are under consideration’. The statement accepted that the national information and technology taskforce had recommended extending working hours from eight to 12. It denied, however, that the proposal was being considered by the labour ministry. The report on the proposed changes in labour laws has meanwhile drawn strong reactions from the Left and trade union organisations. The move clearly indicated ‘the anti-labour policy of the government,’ said Mr Harkioshan Singh Surjeet, CPI-M general secretary. It was now obvious that the government was being dictated by big business houses,’ he declared.” The Statesmen, Calcutta, 22 October 1998.

No panic but . . .

An unprecedented meeting of world financial leaders is to be convened in Washington next month [January 1999] to implement emergency reforms of the International Monetary Fund and help head off a second bout of global economic turbulence. The move to hold a special session of the IMF’s policy-making interim Committee—the first since it was set up at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944—comes amid signs that the recent recovery in world markets is stalling, with fresh falls on world stock markets, profits warnings and job losses from multi-national companies, as well as fading hopes of restoring order to the Russian economy. The meeting will break the normal pattern of a twice-yearly IMF gathering and emphasises the concern at the fragility of the global economy in both the western countries and the developing world. Guardian, December 1998.

Death is good for business

Reaching a total of 46 billion dollars (270 billion francs), the world arms trade upped 12 percent in 1997 for the third consecutive year, according to the London Institute of International Strategic Studies. The Near and Middle East remain the topmost regional market, with the Far East as runner-up. In possession of 49 percent of these markets, the USA is the biggest supplier, followed by the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Israel. These figures could show a decline in 1998, due to the economic crisis compelling some states to revise their defence budgets. Le Monde, 24 October 1998.

Organise—please!

“On another note people were still throwing things at the cops from too far back and hitting demonstrators. People doing this have to be stopped as serious injuries happen”—from a report of a demonstration in the summer 1998 issue of an anarchist journal called Organise.

Can’t feed—won’t feed 

For several decades the world’s capacity to produce food, for instance, has far exceeded the entire human population’s need for nourishment. Yet the stockpiles of unused foodstuffs pile up unsold each year in producing nations while somewhere else in the world hundreds of millions of others are malnourished, if not actually starving to death. The paradox is explained away easily enough in market terms. Indeed, the market insists that feeding impoverished people would be harmful to them, indulging their backwardness and postponing their eventual self-sufficiency. That answer may satisfy the marketplace, but for humanity it constitutes another great, unanswered social question. Capitalism, for all its wondrous creativity and wealth, has not yet found a way to clothe the poor and feed the hungry unless they can pay for it. One World, Ready Or Not. The Manic Logic of Capitalism, by William Greider.

Nothing to Pay (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is the text of a leaflet that was produced for distribution at anti-tuition fees demonstrations recently:

• Nobody should have to pay to study.
• Nobody should have to buy books or pay rent for accommodation.
• Nobody should have to pay fares to travel.
• Nobody should have to pay for heating or food or water to drink.

The organisers of this demonstration are not asking you to support these demands. They are asking you to confine your demands to the single issue of university fees. They believe that education should be free. It should—but capitalism is not about freedom; it’s about profits and costs. Education in a capitalist system is preparation for the world of being used and exploited. The demand for free capitalist education is not going to be granted. Many people here voted Labour in the hope that it could deliver a kinder form of capitalism. It was New Labour that followed the logic of capitalism and imposed tuition fees. It is naïve in the extreme to expect free services from capitalism.

Socialism has come to be a dirty word. But it’s only once we establish a socialist society of production for use not profit that nobody will have to pay—to study, for books and housing, for travel, heating, food or water. It you are opposed to a system of society where the market plays no role and there is free access to goods and services, then don’t expect free education.

If you’re interested in FREE ACCESS FOR ALL to education, goods and services, then it’s time to go beyond the pleading of this demonstration.

To go beyond the demands for freedom under capitalism, please write for free information to The Socialist Party, FREEPOST, London SW4 7BR.

Variable standards (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may not have happened, that civilised life in this country was shaken to its roots when Peter Mandelson resigned, although to judge by some of the media comment something very like that had happened. He forgot that his government are always telling the rest of us that we can’t have what we want – and what they promised us – for a while; that we have to be patient.

This variable standard extends beyond Peter Mandelson, to the other players in this latest episode of sordid double dealing, who have the kind of embarrassing political past which now, in the days of ascendant New Labour, they must be desperate to bury.

For the Labour Party of Blair and his cronies there is a crime greater than trying to fiddle a mortgage application or borrowing a lot of money from a man whose affairs are under scrutiny. That crime is to have doubts about where their party is going and to question whether it was worth winning power from the Tories in order to run things just as if there was still a Conservative government. Of Labour MPs, loyalty is demanded above all else. Blind acceptance of the will of their leader, of the instructions of the whips and the pagers, an eagerness to feed ministers with cringingly soft questions in the House; these are what will ensure a Labour MP gets on in the world and can look forward to a ministerial job—perhaps even the kind of position that Mandelson carved out for himself, with its contact with the rich and famous, the royal and the influential. In this situation it is dangerous to have a past as a Left Winger—and if anyone has such a past they have to establish beyond all doubt that it will not be resurrected.

Past

How do the players in the Mandelson affair match up to this? First, the man himself. Mandelson was once an organiser for the Young Communist League—a trouble-maker of the left. Now he is invited to Prince Charles’s 50th birthday bash (the only member of the Cabinet to be so patronised), he escorts Princess Margaret to a swanky lunch party (perhaps needing to grit his teeth throughout the meal) and he is friends with a clutch of very, very rich people like Carla Powell and the American Linda Wachner. It can safely be assumed that whenever Mandelson is with these people he is able to resist any temptation to stir up trouble in memory of Stalinist Russia or the ghostly Communist Party.

Then there is Geoffrey Robinson, who was willing to take friendship to such a recklessly generous extent. Robinson is not just a very rich man but one who has played an important part in some of the biggest jobs in British capitalism. Like British Leyland and Jaguar cars; like the Industrial Reorganisation Corporation (a wheeze of the Wilson government which was supposed to keep British industry ever profitable, ever expanding). But in the 1970s the followers of Tony Benn, who were such thorns in the side of the embryo Labour “modernisers”, regarded Robinson as one of them and held him in high esteem. Indeed one of the most prominent of the Bennites at that time, the late Eric Heffer MP (who walked out of the Labour Annual Conference when Neil Kinnock made his famously passionate attack on Militant and what it was doing in places like Liverpool), wanted him to be head of the National Enterprise Board.

Of the lesser players Stephen Byers is one of the keenest supporters of the concept of New Labour. He came into Parliament in 1992 and since then he has risen very fast. Straight after Labour’s victory in 1997 Byers was rewarded for his compliant work in opposition with the job of Schools Standards Minister. The possibilities of this seem to have been immediately apparent to him and he launched ardently into the idea of “naming and shaming” schools—in other words attacking hard working, stressed out teachers who are struggling against the odds in oversize classes in run-down schools whose catchment area includes some of the most impoverished and depressed concentrations of population. This appeal to some of the nastier and more ignorant prejudices among the voters has obviously done Byers’s career no harm; in the fall-out of Mandelson’s resignation he emerged as the new man in charge at the Department of Trade and Industry. But Byers is another one with a political past; he was once a supporter of Militant and when he was a councillor in North Tyneside he was regarded as a hard-line Bennite.

Alan Milburn is such a favourite of Tony Blair that in the reshuffle last July the Prime Minister kept a job warm for him when there was not enough room to promote him—promising that his time would come soon. He is now Chief Secretary to the Treasury ( which means that he does rather more than send out agendas and type up minutes of meetings—much of his job consists of scrutinising and cutting departmental budgets which can have its effect on things like Social Services and medical care). Milburn is another whose star is rising fast; so fast that he seems able to forget his past when he worked in a left-wing Newcastle bookshop called Days of Hope and was an activist in CND.

Campaigns

None of this need disturb us very much, unless we allow ourselves to become particularly irritated by the blatant cynicism of leaders who promote themselves as the guardians of working class interests when in fact they stand for a social system which exploits and degrades its people. We are, after all, well accustomed to the business of left-wing dynamos smartly changing into right wing monuments when there is even the slightest possibility of them achieving power.

What should concern us is the fact that when these people are on the left, when they are spouting their spurious non-arguments, they are heavily critical of the case for a revolutionary change in society, in contrast to being diverted into every blind alley of immediate issues. Left wingers tell us that in their never-ending campaigns and marches and demonstrations they doing something to change capitalism. They assert that when they campaign over jobs, wages, pensions or zebra crossings or whatever else catches their fancy as an issue which can be flogged as a vote-winner, they are actually bringing nearer the end of this social system. They are scornful of the argument that to effect a real change in society there must be a proper understanding and desire for that change instead of for keeping capitalism with one or two modifications in policies and leadership.

This government, with its gaggle of leaders who have come through all that left wing nonsense into what they will say are the realities of power—by which they mean the real, hard world of trying to run capitalism as if it is some other kind of society—exposes this powerful myth. The one big problem is that the myth is not only powerful but persistent. The likes of Mandelson, Robinson, Byers and Milburn may have changed their line and have been exposed but for every one like them there are others out there still agitating, still campaigning, still deceiving themselves. It is a massive, frustrating irony that affairs like Mandelson’s resignation, whatever else it shakes, does nothing to affect that.

Ivan

Putting on the glitz (1999)

TV Review from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

If—as many contend—the network TV channels in Britain are to be criticised for the paucity of original drama on our screens, ITV have taken a novel approach to rectify this situation. It is called Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, runs every night for two or three weeks at a time, and is a quiz show. But it majors on drama, and in a big way.

Let there be no mistake about it, this is not a normal quiz show. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? has about as much in common with The Sale of the Century as Park Lane has with the Old Kent Road. Whereas Nicholas Parsons used to dangle £1 and £5 notes in front of his lucky contestants, Chris Tarrant has £1,000,000 in an open briefcase locked in a glass cabinet, just so that all the hopefuls may drool at it. Nobody has yet won a million—in fact, nobody has yet come all that close either. But that is not the point. Substantial sums of money have been won, including in the series just finished, where two contestants walked away with £125,000 each, which—Tarrant claimed—was the highest winnings on a TV quiz show or gameshow ever, anywhere in the world.

Because of this the contestants, when chosen from a preliminary round, typically display signs of nervousness and hysteria far in excess of that usually associated with being under the glare of the lights on primetime TV. Indeed, if being in the studio encourages their nervousness, it is the juicy carrot being dangled in front of them which understandably induces the hysteria.

Contestants have to ring up the night before the programme to try and secure a place on the show. It is clear that many who do (and there are apparently hundreds of thousands of them) do so not just because it would be nice to win some money. No, most of these people are clearly desperate and many hint at debts, unemployment, hateful jobs or family misfortune (the latter of which, interestingly, could be the accurate title of another ITV quizshow). They are people on a mission and that mission is called ‘escape from the working class’. It is not Mission Impossible, though practically near enough.

Lord Smugness of Tarrant

All of this is grist to the mill at Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? This is a programme which thrives on getting its contestants to squirm, or beg even. Contestants win money by answering a series of (increasingly difficult) questions but are liable to lose most or all of it on the elucidation of the first wrong answer. It is, without doubt, a game where contestants are always best quitting while they are ahead. Even so, some contestants are so desperate they will actually guess at questions they do not know the answer to in the hope of doubling their money. Many later live to regret it.

All big money answers are met with a series of grimaces, winks and off-putting questions by the programme’s host, Chris Tarrant. Tarrant is a quiz show host never willing to simply tell a contestant they are right or wrong. He has to milk every occasion to the very utmost, so much so that many of the contestants show visible irritation with him. Put it this way—if ever the Sun drops its sponsorship of the programme, the Milk Marketing Board would be the obvious replacement.

Despite one of two flaws in the format (the half-an-hour editions are far too short given the amount of milking Tarrant engages in) this an entertaining and dramatic TV programme. It is highly watchable TV, that is if you like that sort of thing. What is sickening about it is that grown men and women should feel the need to have to prostitute themselves in such a way, winning money through their own humiliation on national television—having an over-zealous DJ teasing and taunting them as they desperately try to pay off the bills.

There are many words to describe capitalism and this is a programme which has illustrated beyond reasonable doubt that ‘the undignified society’ is one of them. With its bright spotlights, dramatic music, big money and question format it is exciting stuff at times—thrilling even. But in the dignity stakes it is one step up from eating a bucket full of pigs` bladders on The Word. And then, frankly, only just.

DAP

The World Socialist Movement (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

• claims that socialism will, and must, be a wageless, moneyless, worldwide society of common (not state) ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution.
• claims that socialism will be a sharp break with capitalism with no “transition period” or gradual implementation of socialism (although socialism will be a dynamic, changing society once it is established).
• claims that there can be no state in a socialist society.
• claims that there can be no classes in a socialist society.
• promotes only socialism, and promotes it as an immediate goal.
• claims that only the vast majority, acting consciously in its own interests, for itself, by itself, can create socialism.
• opposes any vanguardist approach, minority-led movements, and leadership, as inherently undemocratic (among other negative things).
• promotes a peaceful democratic revolution, achieved through force of numbers and understanding.
• neither promotes, nor opposes, reforms to capitalism.
• claims that there is one working class, worldwide.
• lays out the fundamentals of what socialist society must be, but does not presume to tell the future socialist society how to go about its business.
• promotes an historical materialist approach—real understanding.
• claims that religion is a social, not personal, matter and that religion is incompatible with socialist understanding.
• seeks election to facilitate the elimination of capitalism by the vast majority of socialists, not to govern capitalism.
• claims that Leninism is a distortion of Marxian analysis.
• opposes all capitalist war and claims that socialism will inherently end war, including the “war” between the classes.
• noted, in 1918, that the Bolshevik Revolution was not socialist. Had earlier, long noted that Russia was not ready for a socialist revolution.
• the first to recognize that the former USSR, China, Cuba and other so-called “socialist countries” were not socialist, but instead, state capitalist.
• claims a very accurate, consistent analysis since 1904 when the first Companion Party was founded.

50 Years Ago: Busman’s Half-Holiday (1999)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

London Busmen’s Half-Day Strike—By a Busman

With tales of workers walking home from work in the pouring rain and children disappointed at being unable to visit the pantomime, the press and radio stimulates animosity between workers in different industries. Remember Mr. Attlee during the 1948 Dock Strike? “You strike against your mates, strike against the housewives,” a “strike against the ordinary common people.” (News Chronicle, 29/6/48.) Now it is the busmen against the dockers and others. “Public opinion” it is called. It is really a lack of understanding that all workers have a common interest as workers, not as busmen, bakers, dockers, dentists, hauliers or housewives.

There is one type of strike that the busmen have not tried yet. One that would not alienate “public opinion.” One that would not interfere with the normal running of the services. One that would show who had the welfare and interests of the “public” at hearts. One that would make the newspapers turn about face. The Busmen have not yet tried to gain their demands by running the buses, giving a good service, but not collecting the fares. That would solve most of their strike problems—and other people’s too. It would show who really had the sympathy for the poor tired worker trudging home in the wind and the rain.

(From an article by W. Waters, Socialist Standard, February 1949)

Careers (1999)

A Short Story from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 1940s schools had the equivalent of what I suppose today would be called “careers” officers. Three people (it was usually three) would visit a school and pupils of fourteen and fifteen would be called in, one-by-one, for an interview about their job prospects. The interview took place with a head teacher present and was, at least in my own experience, a scanty and one-sided affair. It should be borne in mind that this was 1949 just four years after the end of the second world war and there was a serious shortage of labour. The resultant devastation wreaked by the Blitz called for massive re-building, but the thousands slaughtered both at home and abroad meant that jobs were plentiful but at very low wages in most cases.

In those days (and I suspect the situation is still prevalent today despite mass unemployment) poor families viewed their offspring’s school-leaving as a time when perhaps a little more money would be brought into the house to help alleviate hardship. The word “career” did not come into the thinking of people who spent a major part of their existence wondering where the next meal was coming from. And as far as I know not one child went from my school to either Grammar school or to a university. As for me, I was aware that, like my brothers before me, I would one day quit school and be expected to do something to contribute to household funds, but what that “something” was going to be was a thought I had never entertained. I think I fondly imagined that once freed from dreary old school I would spend joyous hours reading and writing or tearing round streets on the clapped-out old bike a neighbour had passed on to me. And I was encouraged in this self-deception simply because no-one at home had thought to discuss with me how I was going to earn a living, though once my father had remarked that he would not want to see me end up at Tate & Lyle’s, the sugar factory on the other side of the Thames.

I remember my career interview with as much clarity as though it was yesterday. Hauled in from the playground where I had been taking part in a game of net-ball, sweaty and dishevelled, I entered a room where four people, one woman, two men and the headmaster, sat round a table and eyed me suspiciously. But without looking at me the woman asked “What are you going to do when you leave school?” Without a moment’s hesitation I told her “I am going to write, Miss”. There was a stunned silence. I knew by the smiles of disbelief on the faces of those present that I had voiced a preposterous idea. The headmaster cleared his throat. “Heather writes very competent essays and poetry and edits the school magazine, but her other subjects are weak, particularly her maths. She could never earn her living as a writer.” I keenly felt the injustice of this statement. I had never said that I wished to earn my living as a writer. I had been asked what I was going to do when I left school and had answered in all honesty that I was going to write.

The woman said, still avoiding looking at me directly (I noticed that nobody looked at me or even addressed their remarks to me; they spoke only to each other) “What about an office job?” The headmaster stroked his chin. “Yes,” he said, “we had given that some consideration.” I wondered who had given that “some consideration” because it certainly wasn’t me. Then one of the men consulted his notes. “You could get a job in a shop,” he told me. Well, he didn’t actually tell me, he told the others. The second man ventured another splendid proposal. “What about a factory?” I was beginning to feel that eventually someone would come up with the bright idea of suggesting sending me up chimneys like poor Tom in The Water Babies.

I was gazing out of the window as they talked among themselves. I heard murmurs of “Pleasing appearance” and “Nicely spoken”. How could they tell? I had spoken only six words since I had entered the room.

The rest of that interview has always remained rather hazy for me. When I left that room depression descended heavily upon me. I saw, in my mind’s eye, years and years of office, shop and factory work stretching out before me. The attitude of those people, helpful though they may have thought they were being, had instilled in me the notion that I really wasn’t up to much, that I was in some way deficient. Now I know what is meant by a self-fulfilling prophecy. If children are told they cannot do this or that, then the chances are that they never will. To me education means always starting with the premise that kids are unique and social little beings, that they can do anything. But if they are treated as I was, only as fodder for a capitalist system, then in all probability they will become unhappy adults doing work that in their hearts they despise. That is what happened to me.

Heather Ball

Middle East: Thirsting for conflict (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ismail Seageldin, vice-president of the World Bank, made a disturbing prediction in 1995: “Many of the wars this century were about oil, but the wars of the next century will be about water.” It was a comment that was to find many echoes at a meeting of UN hydrologists and meteorologists, convened by UNESCO in London back in November.

According to scientists, 7 percent of the world’s people do not have enough water to survive. With the world’s population set to rise by an India every ten years, by the year 2050, with a global population in excess of 10 billion, 70 percent will have an insufficient supply of water.

With similar facts in front of them, the London meeting agreed to a decade-long campaign to highlight the case for urgent action. UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) has already started the ball rolling and committed itself to making water disputes a priority, currently mediating in disputes in the Zambezi river basin and in the stand-off between Peru and Bolivia over access to Lake Titicaca.

From Africa, which has 19 of the 25 countries with the greatest number of people lacking access to clean water, to Central Asia, where 5 countries contest the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, conflict could indeed break out at any moment, and ironically over the world’s most abundant resource.

There is so much water that, shared out, each person could have 100 billion litres. Of course, 97 percent of this is sea water, and of the remainder only 0.8 percent is accessible. Still, taking into account that a person’s annual requirement is one million litres, there is still enough. The point is that it is not evenly distributed throughout the world and some countries control much greater resources than others. If we add to this the fact that three-quarters goes on growing food, and that a lot is lost through drainage, poorly constructed channels and evaporation, then we really understand UNEP spokesman Klaus Topfer when he declares that the “potential for water disputes is great and the issue needs urgent political action” (Guardian, 2 November 1998).

Egypt anticipates that its population will double to 110 million within 35 years. Even now it is faced with a water shortage and has for some time imported “virtual water”—grain and other foodstuffs which removes the necessity to use water for home-grown food. Egypt finds itself in the unique position of being totally dependent on the Nile, a river whose flow and tributaries are controlled by 8 other countries.

Already, Egypt has rattled its sabre at Ethiopia, which controls 80 percent of the supply and which has embarked upon a series of dams and irrigation schemes along the Blue Nile and, which if extended, would also interfere with Sudan’s supply.

With Egypt looking to irrigate reclaimed desert along its northern coast and needing to increase its share of Nile water by 15 billion cubic metres per year, and with a further 8 countries seeking to increase their share, it takes no great leap in the imagination to see how water is increasingly dominating Egypt’s foreign policy and why Egypt sees the taking of more water by its neighbours as an act of war.

At the other end of the scale, Turkey possesses an abundance of water and has primary control over the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates—rivers that both Syria and Iraq are heavily dependent on.

In 1984, Turkey began the South Eastern Antollia Project at a cost of £20 billion—a mammoth effort to construct 22 dams, 19 hydro-electric plants and thousands of miles of irrigation channels.

As Turkey directs more and more water for its own use, Syria and Iraq feel that should they upset their northern neighbour, water could be used as a weapon, and thus are anxious not to upset the controller of their water supply. Turkey has already used its control of Syria’s water to great effect, forcing Syria to withdraw its support for the Turkish Guerrilla movement, the PKK. And it’s a fair bet that Turkey’s political might will be felt further in the region when the 1984-begun project nears its completion in 2005.

Forty percent of Israel’s water depends on territory occupied in 1967 and still not handed back. Studies of hydrologists’ maps further reveal a pattern of settlement construction in the “occupied territories” along the ridges of aquifers suggesting a wider Israeli game plan to control an increasing share of the region’s water.

Interestingly, at a time when Israel is losing interest in Gaza, it can be found that Gaza’s groundwater is sinking by 8 inches per year. Just as it’s a fact that Israel controls 80 percent of the Palestinian water supply, so too do we find 26 percent of Palestinians with no access to clean water while the average Israeli consumes three-and-a-half times as much water as those Palestinians fortunate to have access.

Meanwhile, Israel’s continuing control of the Golan Heights and south eastern Lebanon enables it to guard a series of pumps and pipelines which moves the Jordan’s water throughout Israel and as far north as the Negev desert.

Israel’s case is echoed the world over. In the former Soviet Union, while the Aral sea continues to shrink because of HEP plants and irrigation, five countries are becoming increasingly dependent on its diminishing waters.

Sensing trouble ahead, the UN adopted a convention on international waters in 1997—basically a framework for sharing rivers and lakes. Before it can become operational it requires 35 signatories. So far only 11 have signed—such is the reluctance of governments to sign such a valuable resource away.

In an age when we have the scientific and technological know how to enable us to solve almost all our problems, it is indeed an indictment on capitalism that so many humans, living on a planet, seven eighths of which is covered in water, have so little access to it. With the ever-present drive to cut costs and make profits, it is little wonder that better irrigation and improved channels are as rare as desalination plants and reservoirs? What wars our master will plunge us into in the coming millennium is anyone’s guess, but among them don’t be alarmed if the cause of many is water and its control by a profit-crazed élite.

John Bissett

Banana war? (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The European Commission said yesterday that annual trade worth nearly £1 billion with the United States could be put at risk after Washington issued a list of European products which could face 100 percent duties next year if it does not get a change in the EU’s banana import regime . . . The US does not grow bananas except in Hawaii, and does not export those it has to the EU. But the Clinton administration lodged a complaint with the WTO (World Trade Organisation) last year within 24 hours of a decision by Chiquita’s previously staunchly Republican chairman Carl H. Lindner Jnr to donate $500,000 to Democratic party funds. Guardian, 12 November 1998.

Chiquita, the US banana-exporting multi-national, controls more than 70 percent of the EU market already but wants to prevent European importation of Caribbean bananas. Chiquita sold the Caribbean plantations five years ago to concentrate on its Latin American plantations.

The cracks start to show (1999)

Editorial from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eighteen months on and the Blair project is looking increasingly hollow. Government resignations, charges of “cronyism” and sleaze plus the apparent feuding between Blair and Brown. It seems like a far cry from the happy days of May 1997.

This is not all. There is the NHS crisis (nothing new about this of course), a looming recession and government plans to join the Euro which could prove tricky.

For our part, we did argue at the General Election that the New Labour project would be a damp squib. Unlike the leftists, we did not feel that the working class should have to experience yet another Labour government to realise that it would be anti-working class. We were arguing that reformist politics is anti-working class before the Labour Party was even properly formed! We feel the current government has not disappointed us—it has demonstrated yet again that capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the working class.

The vacuous nature of the Blair project is encapsulated by the much used phrase “the third way” which is associated with Professor Anthony Giddens—the Director of the London School of Economics and one of Blair’s intellectual gurus. The basic idea is that Britain should position itself somewhere between American neo-liberalism and European social democracy.

Quite frankly, if this is the best pro-capitalist intellectuals can come up with then there really is a crisis in capitalist intellectual thought and an obvious need to search for an alternative to capitalism itself.

However, “the third way” does broadly serve the interests of the capitalist class and the implicit message is quite clear: there is no other capitalist option than “Thatcherism with a human face”. As we have argued before in this journal, ideas do not come from nowhere—they have a material basis. The social and political crisis of the 70s never really ended which is why the current government is carrying on with ostensibly the same Thatcherite programme as those preceding it. The post-war period of reformism is dead and there is no going back.

From this point of view it is easier to understand why Blair is forever fiddling with constitutional reform, getting into bed with the Liberals etc. without such things the government would not have a programme. Not only this, Blair is clearly intending to stay in power for at least three terms and he has calculated (rightly or wrongly) that proportional representation and possible coalition government with the Lib-Dems is only probably the only way to achieve it. The Tories may be kept out of power for a generation but the Blair project will inevitably come to a sticky end sooner or later. And who will mourn? Not the working class which elected it in 1997 with such a landslide—that’s for sure.

USA: The fallacy of the free market (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The illusion that is peddled by sharp-suited government spokesmen on television about the benefits of the free market system is just that—an illusion. Every government in the world is in favour of free trade when their owning class is in a favourable position to compete and in favour of protectionism when some competitor from another country has the drop on them.

The British toadies of capitalism are bad enough but, in the USA the hypocritical posturing of the worshippers of the market system is truly nauseating. As the foremost industrial and commercial power in the world, the USA is loud in its praise of free trade as the cure-all for social problems. In practice, though, it often favours the strictest protectionism and some recent examples from the Press starkly prove this.

The notion that it is the soundest economic wisdom to “buy in the cheapest market” may be all very well for American academic economists to expound in the ivory towers of university and business schools, but in the USA when they find that their home produced commodities are being undercut in price the capitalists appeal to their government to protect US products from “unfair” competition. They call any competition at which they are losing “dumping”:

“Anti-dumping duties are a frequent recourse of the US government when faced with a trade problem. As the US trade deficit has mounted, pressure for duties has mounted, pressure for duties has increased rapidly and 36 petitions for anti-dumping have been received by the government so far in 1998, compared with 16 for the whole of last year. Most concerned imports of steel products . . . Ominously, William Daly, the US Commerce Secretary, has invited US manufacturers to make his anti-dumping staff ‘the busiest people in town’ . . . .” (Independent on Sunday, 22 November.)

The US exporters of Chiquita bananas, produced in Central America, used their political muscle to combat the European Union’s favourable trade terms for Caribbean bananas, and got the US government to slap 100 percent duties on such products as sheep’s cheese from the EU to the US. The American Financial Group, who own Chiquita, have recently given $1 million to Democratic and Republican politicians to fight the Caribbean preference which the they claim has lost Chiquita $1,000 million in earnings since the EC ruling of 1983 in favour of Caribbean bananas.

Behind the threats and counter-threats of a trade war the US and the EU are playing for higher stakes than are represented by bananas and sheep’s cheese:

“Andrew Hughes Hallett, professor of economics at Strathclyde University, believes we need to peel back the skin on this row to understand it. ‘I suspect it isn’t about bananas at all and it isn’t about protecting poor farmers either in St. Lucia or Honduras. It’s about political pressure in Washington and Brussels . . . In the EU this dispute is tied up with the power of the agricultural lobby. It’s like a bargaining chip. France is prepared to support Britain which is keen to get a favourable deal for its former colonies, so Britain will be more supportive of France on other issues affecting French farmers’.” (The Herald, 24 December.)

All over the world the US government pursues a policy of free trade or protectionism, whichever is most beneficial to US economic interests, but it is from New Zealand that we learn of the naked power of the US being used to force its products down the throats of unsuspecting consumers.

As the world’s biggest producer of genetically modified food, the US does everything in its power to protect the global ambitions of the agri-chemical firm Monsanto. It is increasingly concerned about European reluctance to accept genetically modified foodstuffs without proper labelling and testing.

In reply to criticisms of the British government that it was being pressured to accept US-produced genetically modified foodstuff, Tony Blair hid behind the cloak of secrecy when he replied:

“By convention it is not the practice of governments to make information on such meetings, or their contents, publicly available.”

In New Zealand no such convention applies and it was revealed in cabinet minutes that economic pressure was being applied to the New Zealand government to accept genetically modified food:

“The Cabinet Minutes, dated 19 February 1998, state: ‘The United States, and Canada to a lesser extent, are concerned in principle about the kind of approach advocated by Anzfa [part of the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Council], and the demonstration effect this may have on others, including the European Union. The United States have told us that such an approach could impact negatively on the bilateral trade relationship and potentially end any chance of a New Zealand-United States Free Trade Agreement.'” (Independent on Sunday, 22 November.)

So there you have it. Blatant economic threats, undisguised self-interest, and no recourse to such fine rhetoric, so beloved by US politicians, as the “free world”, or hypocritical cant about “democracy and the freedom of choice”.

Capitalism is a horrible society—let’s get rid of it.

Richard Donnelly

Chattel and wage slavery (1999)

Frederick Douglass

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1855, Frederick Douglass, a former slave, born on a Maryland plantation in 1817, had his book, My Bondage and My Freedom published.

We reproduce three passages from his book because we think it draws parallels between chattel slavery in the USA over a hundred years ago and the position of a modern wage slave:

“When Col. Lloyd’s slaves met those of Jacob Jepson, they seldom parted without a quarrel about their masters, Col. Lloyd’s slaves contending that he was the richest, and Mr Jepson’s slaves that he was the smartest, man of the two. Col. Lloyd’s slaves would boast his ability to buy and sell Jacob Jepson, Mr Jepson’s slaves would boast his ability to whip Col. Lloyd. These quarrels would always end in a fight between the parties, those that beat were supposed to have gained the point at issue. They seemed to think that the greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves. To be a SLAVE , was thought to be bad enough; but to be a poor man’s slave, was deemed a disgrace, indeed” (p.118).

“Were I again to be reduced to the condition of a slave, next to that calamity, I should regard the fact of being the slave of a religious slave-holder, the greatest that could befall me. For of all slave-holders with whom I have ever met, religious slave-holders are the worst. I have found them, almost invariably, the vilest, the meanest and the basest of their class. Exceptions there may be, but this is true of religious slave-holders as a class”

When Douglas goes to work as a caulker in a shipyard in Baltimore, and works besides white wage workers, he writes about the resentment of white workers towards the black slaves:

“In the country, this conflict is not so apparent; but, in cities, such as Baltimore, Richmond, New Orleans, Mobile etc; it is seen pretty clearly. The slave-holder with a craftiness peculiar to themselves, by encouraging the enmity of the poor, labouring white men against the blacks, succeeds in making the said white men almost as much a slave as the black slave himself. The difference between the white slave, and the black slave, is this: the latter belongs to ONE slave-holder, and the former belongs to ALL the slave-holders, collectively. The white slave has taken from his, by indirection, what the black slave had taken from him, directly, and without ceremony. Both are plundered, and by the same plunderers” (p.309).

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti (1999)

Theatre Review from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr Puntila and His Man Matti by Bertolt Brecht. The Right Size Company, Albery Theatre, London.

Here is a play to delight socialists. The story of a capitalist and his chauffeur, which becomes the subject of an uninhibited Marxist analysis. An evening of exuberant theatricality: an occasion when in the words of one critic, “Karl Marx meets the Marx Brothers”.

The story is simply told. Puntila, a widower and capitalist landlord, seems schizoid. When sober he is ruthless, unfriendly and exploitative. When drunk he becomes driven by lust and “sentimental overflowings of fraternity”. (At one stage he proposes to four women who are advised by Matti to form a union of fiancées, the better to protect themselves when Puntila becomes sober.) We follow several weeks in Puntila’s life as he moves between bouts of drunkenness and sobriety, trying to recruit labour and to marry his daughter to a wealthy diplomat.

“What kind of man am I?” wails Puntila in the middle of one drinking spree. “No one cares, Mr Puntila,” replies Matti, thus confirming that relations between capitalists and workers are determined not by the personalities of those involved but by their economic and social relations. And if members of the audience are unaware of the implications of the dialogue the actors occasionally drop out of character and form themselves into a group of singers in order to offer a Marxist analysis of the plot. Here is another example of the “double process” which I referred to when discussing a recent production of Mother Courage (November 1998). Brecht wants us both to lose ourselves in events, but at the same time to remain distant from them the better to understand the plight of the people in a more objective, scientific manner.

The acting is dazzling. Puntila and Matti remain on stage for most of the evening whilst the rest of the group of ten actors appear as a myriad of different characters. And the staging is full of wit and invention, and culminates in a real coup de theatre when the main structure collapses as a metaphor for the collapse of capitalism. An evening to treasure. Do look out for the Right Size Company and Mr Puntila and His Man Matti which is set for a national tour.

Michael Gill

Early critics of capitalism (1999)

Book Review from the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775-1850 by Noel Thompson, Pluto Press, 1998.

Between 1775 and 1850 Britain was transformed from a country of largely rural communities into a nation built on industrial capitalism. In 1791 Tom Paine's Rights of Man argued for universal political rights. But as early as 1793 Thomas Spence's The Real Rights of Man countered with the claim that political rights were grounded in economic power. For Spence, the question was no longer about "what form of government is most favourable to liberty" but:

"which system of society is most favourable to existence and capable of delivering us from the deadly mischief of great accumulation of wealth which enables a few unfeeling monsters to starve whole nations."

This is a history of the struggle for an anti-capitalist, but not necessarily pro-socialist, political economy. Anti-capitalist writers such as Spence, William Ogilvie, William Cobbett and Thomas Hodgskin were reactionaries who wanted to retreat from urban squalor to the rural idyll. They were not opposed in principle to class society but to the way "unequal exchange" drove the newly created working class into poverty. Their political economy (not pseudo-scientific "economics") explained working class poverty as the result of a failure of workers to get the full value of what they produced. The "unequal exchange" meant employers paid wages less than the value of the product and so were cheating workers.

Robert Owen attempted to rectify "unequal exchange" by establishing a number of producer and consumer co-operatives around the country, linked by labour exchanges. The guiding principle of these labour exchanges was that goods were exchanged according to their value as measured by labour time, with non-circulating labour notes used to facilitate the exchange of goods. In this way, it was believed, there would be equal exchange and no exploitation. However, these co-operatives were short-lived and had difficulty in providing even basic provisions for exchange against labour notes.

According to Noel Thompson:

"the problems of valuing goods in terms of labour time meant that errors were made and, inevitably, there were goods undervalued in relation to their market equivalents that were quickly purchased, while there were others that were overvalued and just as rapidly accumulated in the exchanges. Only where the labour exchanges replicated the market valuation were there no such problems. In effect, therefore, market price rapidly exerted its hegemony over labour values."

A distinctively socialist political economy did not emerge until the Chartist movement. Ernest Jones, for example, dismissed the demand for "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work", which was to ask for:

"a golden slavery instead of an iron one. But that golden chain would soon be turned to iron again, for if you still allow the system of wages slavery to exist, labour must be still subject to capital, and if so, capital being its master, will possess the power and never lack the will to reduce the slave from his fat diet down to fast-day fare!"

Even though Jones was a friend of Marx and Engels, he and other Chartist leaders still saw exploitation originating in the sphere of exchange, as "unequal exchange." It was not until after the period under review that Marx provided a proper explanation of exploitation: exploitation takes place in the sphere of production. Workers generally get the full value of what they have to sell, their "labour power" or capacity to work sold as a commodity, which the employers buy and put to work. But the employers can extract labour greater than the equivalent of that wage or salary. This is the source of profit that is realised when the commodities are sold. A wage or salary is the market-determined price of the commodity labour power. Generally no cheating is involved: exploitation is the normal function of the capitalist economy.

Lew Higgins

In these we trust? (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is it a coincidence that so many of capitalism's Great Men - its leaders and captains of industry - are so utterly unworthy as human beings?

By all accounts, including his own, Bill Clinton is a mendacious, sleazy rogue, whom you would trust to look after your shares but not your younger sister. Clinton's own analysis of his condition, after taking priestly counsel, is that he's a sinner. His process of repentance has involved dropping bombs on Iraq, for which he has been praised as a defender of global peace, and parading around America exhibiting his ubiquitous smirk. It is the insolent smirk reminiscent of a southern Baptist choirboy caught nicking the church collection whose only resource of defence, after months of righteously denying the charge, is to bite his lip and utter hoarsely "I was looking after it for Gaad".

Christopher Hitchens, who has watched the US President perform his political vaudeville routine for years, wonders aloud whether the White House is occupied by a psychopath; apparently, a group of leading US psychiatrists met to consider the President's condition and a majority arrived at this diagnosis. (London Evening Standard, 6 January). He is certainly a persistent liar whose personal affairs smack less of the liberated Sixties than of the latter days of the Roman Empire. And yet he is the twice-elected leader of the most powerful nation-state within global capitalism. It is perhaps fitting that a sterile, degenerate, obsolete social system, incapable of providing material comfort or security for the majority of the population, is presided over by a character who would not be appointed by anyone responsible to run a youth club or a school for girls.

Crowd of scoundrels

Is it a coincidence that so many of capitalism's Great Men—its leaders and captains of industry—are so utterly unworthy as human beings? In Britain we have witnessed the fall of Cabinet Ministers who, until their moments of disgrace, were depicted as the embodiments of political virtue. Mandelson, who was Batman to Blair's Robin, was caught borrowing money to fund his domestic mansion from a tax-evading millionaire whose business dealings Mandelson's own government department were supposed to be investigating. Robin Cook's ex-wife has described the Foreign Secretary as an adulterous drunk. Meanwhile, the European Parliament (in a bid to remind us of its existence in time for the June elections) has been feeling the collar of numerous cheats, frauds and criminals within the European Commission. The Commission's defenders have responded with the defence that, as a percentage of the EU budget, there is no more corruption there than in the governments of the fifteen member states. Oh, that's alright then.

It is surely unsurprising that capitalism's leaders should be such a disreputable crowd of scoundrels. After all, they are elected to run a system which thrives by robbing workers of the fruits of their labour and pursues competition by ruthless dishonesty, culminating in wars in which men, women and children are indiscriminately slaughtered upon the altar of profit. The system requires a certain brand of callousness at its nerve centre. To be elected, leaders need to tell complete lies with a straight face. Either that, or they must be dopes (Reagan) or masters of self-deception (Clinton). Running capitalism is not a career for an undamaged human being.

But let's not deceive ourselves. Even if capitalism was run by saints—and, according to New Labour, they don't come much more angelic than St Tony—it would not take long for the system to wipe away their virtuous intentions. The simple reason for this is that politicians do not manage capitalism but it manages them. Although they pose as leaders (and may sometimes imagine that they are actually in charge) their job is to justify before the public the results of the economic anarchy over which they have very little control. So, Blair might be committed morally to helping the poor and being kind to little children, but when the Treasury officials call for a callous attack on the benefits of single mothers and the disabled he does so with large doses of pious excuses; when the Pentagon ordered him to send British troops as bag-carriers in the Iraqi bombing Mr Nice suddenly became a cheerleader for a gang of contemptible thugs.

Capitalist politics, having run out of reform policies to waste its time upon, has now become largely a contest for popularity between various moral postures. In the USA the only mitigating factor on Clinton's side is the repulsive Christian dogmatism of his Republican prosecutors, whose complacent individualism and ethical authoritarianism has turned parts of their country into a cultural Bedlam inhabited by a hard minority of True Believers, others without any hope at all and a significant minority who will believe anything. And in Britain the best strategy for Blair in the midst of government disarray is to let Michael Howard appear on the TV saying how disgusted the Tories are by government corruption. The battle for power under capitalism is largely a matter of electing (to use Bob Hope's phrase about the 1988 presidential contest) the evil of two lessers.

Pathetic followers

One of the saddest things about leaders is not how they behave but how their followers are forced to behave. The political follower is a miserable, pathetic specimen. These are people—usually with no material stake in their leader's success—who will go the ends of the earth to defend the Great One's reputation. In America one has witnessed Democrat-supporting feminists who have had to appear on TV defending Clinton's sleazy relations with his young intern and arguing that women like Paula Jones, an employee who was sexually molested by the President, are unreliable witnesses. Just like the deluded leftists of the 1930s who were forced by their own blind loyalty to justify every brutal crime of "Comrade Stalin", so one has New Labour supporters today who will nod approvingly at Blair's new-Tory policies when they would have been marching in the streets had the Tories introduced them. (Would the National Union of Students have adopted such a belly-up approach to tuition fees if the Education Secretary had not been David Blunkett?) Capitalism's leaders disgrace themselves—and, as that's what they're paid to do, why should we throw our hands up in horror? But the way they diminish and degrade their supporters is truly loathsome.

So, Clinton falls on his knees before the American people and, smirk intact, asks Gaad and the gullible to forgive him. The gullible have shown themselves to be a majority in the (non-) opinion polls and Gaad has not responded—unless Hurricane Mitch can be regarded as a provisional comment from the all-loving deity.

There will come a day—unless our leaders blow us up before it comes—when people will look at film footage of Clinton and laugh at the comedy of our times. They will wonder how so many people were taken in by such a terribly bad act. They will wait for the hollow statements, the rehearsed gestures and the sterile clichés to be trotted out and they will mimic them in the way that a certain generation learned to copy catchphrases from Monty Python sketches. They will have no leaders and will look upon their ancestors who followed as poor, deluded creatures who were insufficiently educated to tell these con-men where to get off. How soon that day comes depends quite simply on how soon we develop sufficient consciousness and organisation to tell the leaders to get lost (as they invariably do anyway) and to replace the Rule of Leaders with a Society of Equals.

Steve Coleman

Utopian socialism (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Utopian socialism, properly so-called, is the name given to socialist aspiration in the era prior to the development of industrial capitalism. It refers to the yearning for an egalitarian society, but without the scientific analysis of social evolution that modern scientific socialism provides.

Before the coming of industrial capitalism, the yearning for an egalitarian society could only be a yearning, without any concrete analysis of social reality. Utopian socialism does not refer, therefore, to the vision of a William Morris, who was a scientific socialist, but to largely pre-capitalist visions of a socialist future. Under this heading come the mediaeval communists together with the Anabaptist and other religiously-motivated sects.

The decaying feudal society that produced the Hutterites and other pre-capitalist utopian socialists could only produce a vision, expressed usually in religious terms. An innumerable range of "heretical" Christian sects come under this heading, most of them expressing the yearning of peasants and the urban poor for "something better" than the world they suffered in. This is the principal reason for the Catholic Church's absolutely savage persecution of such "heresy". The Church represented the feudal ruling class, whose aim had to be to keep the serfs exploitable and in their place. Anabaptism and other communistic self-regulating communities were seen as a threat to that rule; as indeed many were, by emancipating their adherents from the ideological control of the Catholic clergy and hence of the feudal system.

The response of the pre-capitalist communists was to separate themselves from the dominant society. This was the only thing, apart from initiate or participate in widespread peasant revolt (which many did), they could do to realise their socialistic dream in an age in which the social and economic conditions were by no means ripe for converting the dominant society itself into a socialist one. The only answer was to separate oneself and set up alternative communities, in the manner of what we know as the cult, or the religious sect. Some of these sects were more or less democratic, others were authoritarian, but all challenged the existing order. (And in feudal, as in capitalist society, remember, even pacifist separation constitutes defiance.)

In continental Europe, the last great communist movement that accompanied the end of feudalism, that of militant Anabaptism, was bloodily crushed at Münster in Germany in the 16th century. Anabaptism, however, continued to play a part in the English bourgeois revolution of the 1640s, where political groupings such as the Diggers and Ranters aimed at building a communist society, expressing this aspiration in the only way they could as people of their time: in the language of the Bible and Protestant Christianity. In both central Europe and in England, the failure of these early utopian socialists to realise their hopes for an egalitarian society led inevitably to the pacifist reclusiveness and social separation which marks their descendants today: the Amish, Old Order Mennonites, Hutterites and other Anabaptist groups in America; and the pacifist, democratic English sect of the Quakers. These groups all represent utopian socialism "forced into retirement" by the social reality of feudal and early capitalist Europe.

Latter-day utopians

The descendants of pre-capitalist utopian socialism have been joined in our time, and throughout the three centuries which separate us from the militant Anabaptists, by new sects advocating intentionally communistic "alternative societies" consisting of people understandably disillusioned by the dominant society of our time—capitalism—and seeking alternative lifestyles to that of the modern wage-slave. These communities range from the genuinely democratic on the one hand, to the authoritarian and cultish on the other. Most, but not all, express their aspirations, like the pre-capitalist communist movements they emulate, in religious terms, Christian or otherwise. They are to be distinguished from scientific socialists not only in their policy of social separation (marked by greater or lesser degrees of reclusiveness), but by the fact that they emphasise the common ownership and consumption of goods, as in Anabaptist and early Christian injunctions. For scientific socialists communism (socialism) entails the common ownership of the means of production.

Scientific socialism comprehends the socialist task to be the transformation of society, now that the economic means for the establishment of a socialist society have been realised. For the past 100 years or so the means for the establishment of socialism as a society have existed. This was not the case prior to the industrial revolution, when socialism could only be utopian, as to its realisation at the time was socially and economically impossible. Likewise, the analysis of capitalist society and of the social development leading up to it provided by Marx in his book Capital could not have been made prior to the industrial revolution.

Today, utopian communities in separation from the dominant (capitalist) society which reigns in all countries court at best a deceptive bliss and, at worst, disaster. The pre-capitalist, utopian communism they espouse in all genuineness necessarily fights a losing battle everywhere against the destructive effects of world capitalism. A polluted river will carry its poison through all valleys; the hydrogen bomb respects no person's health. In a sense the true heirs of the militant Anabaptist and other pre-capitalist communists are not those who still seek to separate themselves from capitalist society but those who realise that a democratic society-wide revolution can at last achieve a society the original utopian socialists could only dream of.

Anthony Walker

Why reform a rotten system? (1999)

From the February 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many think that reform is positive, but why should Socialists divert their energies to repair and patch up a system they want to end altogether?

"Campaigning for reforms is a distracting and diversionary waste of time," I declaimed, to the massed ranks of blank uncomprehending Socialist Worker Students at one of their campus meetings, "that mostly will attract people interested in reforms, and not Socialists!". I had as usual, to fill up the abject spaces in time due to the lack of debate, spoken too much—or so I presumed by the scowling cat's-arse face of the most grungy (and therefore dedicated and friendless) Trotskyist in the room. "Bollocks," he eventually said. I had gone too far, I had attacked the sacred cow, I was a heretic.

I must have been speaking Dutch that night, for it was plain that no-one in the room was understanding the least word I said. I was incomprehensible. "But, but," said the deputy dedicated Trotskyist, "we need reforms, we need to fight for higher wages, against factory closures, we need to keep the Tories out"—all said with the same matter of factness and certitude as statements like "gravity is" or "the Earth is flat". I was fascinated to note not one mention of things like nationalisation, union recognition laws, nor capital regulation tariffs, clearly such little matters do not occupy the activists' time (although they each form a part of the SWP's amazing "Action Plan" against the economic crisis). I then, however, went on to point out, presumably in Ancient Hebrew, that higher wages were not what I understood by the word reforms, whilst the latter list were nothing else. The looks of incomprehension (and contempt) grew. I sat down, and made my peace, and suffered the interminable summing up by their speaker.

Such is the triumph of the spirit of reformism that it presents itself to its adherents as if a natural law, an obviousness, a natural thing that must be done. There could be no questioning of the principle of fighting for reforms, no exploration as to their efficacy or need. Politicians' logic prevails:

1. Capitalism is terrible.

2. We must do something.

3. Reforms are something.

4. Therefore we must enact reforms.

Reforms are beyond question, apparently.

It is a tribute to the ideology of the possible that Labour penny-snatchers can pass themselves off as radical allies of the poor, when in fact they are their willing and servile oppressors, gradgrinding through their careers. It is a tribute to "reform" that it has come to take on a wholly positive meaning, as if any reform of a system is inherently good. Such are the fruits of one hundred years' deleterious perseverance.

The average Labourite can of course claim that they are just working to improve the lives of working folk. They do not question the property and market systems, they accept them as a natural fact, and thus work within them. Our fine feathered Trotskyists, however, have no such excuse. They claim to be fighting for Socialism, for an end to property and the madness of the market, so how can they justify fighting for reforms predicated upon just such a pernicious system?

When I asked, I was met with two responses. The first was half-way reasonable—the working class must fight to defend itself under capitalism, and to improve its lot and avoid poverty. Fair enough, and of course it must; that's the whole point of the class war, but that is hardly a revolutionary platform; because the working class is engaged in such a struggle every day, every pay cheque is an act of class war. Further, any defence of the working class or gains for the working class must be won by ourselves, for ourselves, because we cannot expect the capitalist state to administer affairs for our benefit. Changing laws does not help the working class, because they are only a change on paper. Only a real social change can aid the working class. Everything else is just window dressing.

Reform-minded

But, "Aha!" they cried, "there is another, more important reason for fighting for reforms, we must help workers gain the confidence to effect a revolution". I stroked the feeble wisps of hair on my chin that some wags have named a beard, and thought this through, as they filled in the details:

1. The working class has a reformist consciousness.

2. It is the duty of the Revolutionary Party to be where the masses are.

3. Therefore, to be with the mass of the working class, we must advocate reforms.

Further:

1. The working class is only reformist minded.

2. Winning reformist battles will give the working class confidence.

3. So that, therefore, they will go on to have a socialist revolution.

I swear, this is the argument that they have put to me. What none of them has ever relayed to me, was exactly how the jump from reform-mindedness to socialist consciousness would come about. There are three basic models for how this may come about:

1. The working class will learn from its struggles, and will eventually come to realise that assuming power is the only way to meet its ends.

2. That the working class will realise, through the failure of reforms to meet its needs, the futility of reformism and capitalism, and will overthrow it.

3. That the working class will come to trust the Party that leads them to victory, and come a social crisis they will follow it to revolution.

The first relies upon a notion of the inherently revolutionary nature of the working class (a popular Leninism), and that through the class struggle this inherently revolutionary character will show itself. After the best part of a century it hasn't, so I think it safe to say it doesn't exist.

The second reason is flawed because it shows no reason why, due to the failure of reform, the workers should turn to socialism. Why, since it was people calling themselves socialists who advocated that reform, don't they turn against it, or even to fascism? However, given that that is precisely what Lenin advocates in Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder we can assume that the loyal Leninists of the SWP leadership have this idea thoroughly in mind.

Just as likely is that they will have number three in mind as well. Since they want to be leading the revolution, they will have to find a way for themselves to become leaders. "The revolution is made by the minority" (Trotsky said so, so it must be true) and the way for the minority to become a good little bunch of leaders is to show that they are the successful ones.

Under the model of revolution presented by the Trotskyists this can be the only way I can see the working class could come to socialist consciousness. This, then, explains their dubious point about needing to "be" where the mass of the working class is. Being a poor ignorant fool, I always wondered about quite why a revolutionary party should change its mind to be with the masses, rather than trying to get folk to change their minds and be with it. They do not want folk to change their minds, merely to become followers. Their efforts are not geared towards changing minds, or raising revolutionary class consciousness. The problem is that the central committee doesn't tell the sloggers on the ground this, because, just perhaps, our enthusiastic cat-arse faced friend might just object to being manipulated, just maybe.

Capitalist ideology

Fighting for reforms is to fail in the duty of socialists to demystify and dispel capitalist ideology. This is important to note: capitalism is in the end an ideology; everything it does, all of its workings, all of it is a human product, constructed in the minds of humans, and obeyed because it presents itself as the natural law, as the real world, and the realm of the possible. Money itself is the example par excellence of ideology at work; it is a sign, an idea, used to cover up the contradictions in property society. Money presents itself as the natural and only way of dealing with property relations, and as a socially neutral object, and not as a way of controlling poverty and inequality in favour of a small minority, which it really is.

To fail to reveal the ideology, to de-mystify and explain it, means to remain within it. To work with workers under the influence of the ideology of capitalism, to attempt to use the ideology to lead them, in the end means that you will find yourself replicating the ideology, obeying its demands, and replicating the social structures of dominance and obedience that it helps build. As such this amounts to a heinous flaw in Leninist politics. However, the Leninists claim, the workers are not capable of seeing through ideology; only they are, the minority, and so they must work this way. This is why, in the end, they are doomed to recreate capitalism.

For so-called socialists to fight for reforms then is to fail as socialists, to become enmeshed within the working of capitalism. Can the SWP's action plan work? Wouldn't raising the taxes necessary to nationalise all failing industries at a time of reduced profits just exacerbate the crisis? Or is that what they want? Whatever way, fighting for reforms effectively becomes a way of retaining leaders and leadership, of running away from the more difficult and radical task of changing minds.

A Trotskyist friend of mine showed me a petition of people who had voted Labour, but who now were sick of them, and of how these people were coming to the SWP. Had any of these people changed their mind? Were any of them now more revolutionary? Or had the SWP just filled in a space left by the Labour Party, and effectively changed nothing. Politicians' logic—the urge to "do something"—must be resisted. Doing something is no good, we need to do the right thing. We need to campaign for socialism.

Pik Smeet