Marxism and Panda Bonds (2006)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

To mark the 112th anniversary on 26 December of the birth of Chairman Mao a new, expanded “Marxism-Leninism Academy” was opened in Beijing (Times, 3 January). According to Zhang Tongxin, of Beijing University’s Marxism Institute, “since reform, a considerable number of people have forgotten that China is a socialist country”.

By coincidence, the same day the Times reported on a number of financial reforms that came into force in the first week of January. One of them concerned the modernisation of financial markets “to steer more money to profitable projects, not white elephants, and keep the banks on their toes”. Already in 2005, the Times reminded its readers, China had seen “the launch of a highly successful commercial paper market; China’s first asset-backed and mortgage-backed securities; approval for banks to trade currency swaps and forwards; the establishment of the country’s first money broker; the first ‘panda bonds’ - denominated in yuan and sold in China by international borrowers”.

No wonder “a considerable number of people” had come to the conclusion that China is not socialist. And they are right. China is not a “socialist country” but a capitalist one. And it never was socialist. What the Chinese “Communist” Party established when they came to power in 1949 was a state-capitalist regime under their political dictatorship. The workers and peasants continued to be exploited but, from then on, by a “vanguard” which collectively exercised a monopoly, through its political control, over the state-owned means of production.

Although this state-capitalist regime was relatively successful in developing China’s heavy industry and military might, like the similar regime in Russia it proved unable to compete economically against the established capitalist powers such as the US, Europe and Japan. So, again as in Russia, a policy of “reform” was instituted involving the encouragement of private capitalist enterprise and the more rigorous subjection of state enterprises to market forces. From the point of view of the established political elite, so far this reform has been executed far more successfully than in Russia in that they are still in control of political power and on this basis can still proclaim the lie that China is a “socialist country”. Not that anybody believes them any more.

Marx wrote Capital to analyse how capitalist society worked with a view to showing how it could never be made to work in the interest of the class of wage workers on whose exploitation for surplus value it was based. He was not writing to advise political parties and governments how to run capitalism. So it is difficult to see what the Chinese government thinks it can get out of studying his writings.

Marx did write, in Volume III of Capital, about stock exchanges, financial markets and the like. Basically, he saw these as places where capitalists tried to swindle each other and small investors out of the surplus value that had already been extracted from the workers. Conceivably, Chinese government officials and the millionaires that have come into existence under the “reform” could pick up a few hints from here on how to swindle each other more efficiently.

Another question, Mr Morris (2006)

Book Review from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tony Pinkney, ed: We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885-96. Spire Books £19.95.

In the 1880s the interview was a fairly new journalist technique, and a range of publications, from Justice to the Daily News and Bookselling, wanted to have William Morris’s views on a variety of topics. Most of the thirteen interviews gathered here took place in Kelmscott House, his residence in Hammersmith. The result is an interesting view of Morris as a person (generally dressed in a blue serge suit and smoking incessantly) as well as an insight into his opinions on political and other matters.

In 1885, Morris gave his reasons for leaving the Social Democratic Federation to help form the Socialist League. The SDF had been run ‘arbitrarily’, and it was heading towards ‘political opportunism tinctured with Jingoism’. The League, in contrast, would ‘uphold the purest doctrines of scientific Socialism, and + educate and organize towards the fundamental change in society’. In an interview from 1890, Marx is given credit for starting off the Socialist movement on scientific lines, and for showing that Socialism is ‘the natural outcome of the past’. There is a pleasant image of Socialism having ‘a public library at each street corner, where everybody should read all the best books, printed in the best and most beautiful type’. An 1894 criticism of anarchism is backed up by the argument that it is important to get control of parliament rather than attempting an insurrection (a contrast with his earlier opposition to parliamentary methods).

But this same interview acknowledges ‘the wisdom of the S.D.F. in drawing up that list of palliative measures’, i.e. a policy of reformism, something which Morris himself had previously rejected. In 1885 he also talked of the need for leaders, though it is not entirely clear what they are to do other than explain Socialist ideas, so this can hardly be taken as support for a Bolshevik-style vanguard. An interview with a woman journalist reveals some views which, to put it kindly, show that Morris was a man of his time: ‘I feel very strongly that a working man’s wife is needed in her home, and it is a pity when she has to leave it to compete in the labour market.’ (Shades of News from Nowhere, where it seems to be the women who do the housekeeping.)

It helps to have some previous acquaintance with Morris’ ideas and writings, but this is a well-produced volume which shows him in an unfamiliar and revealing light.

Paul Bennett

Post-Capitalist Capitalism (2006)

Book Review from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Albert: Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Verso, £9.

Participatory economics, or parecon for short, is a vision of life after capitalism favoured by many in the anti-capitalist movement. The author of this particular vision helped to establish Z Magazine and its web site Zmag, including its subsidiary page devoted to parecon, which debates the issues raised by this book.

Parecon opposes "corporate globalisation" and argues for its replacement by "equity, solidarity, diversity and self-management." For Albert, capitalism means "private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labour." Life after capitalism is said to combine "social ownership, participatory planning allocation, council structure, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and participatory self-management with no class differentiation." The council structure involves workplaces, neighbourhoods, and "facilitation boards" which co-ordinate planning.

So-called "market socialism" is rejected because the market and class differentials would remain, as would buyers and sellers of labour power (capacity to work). In Albert's account, because class differentiation disappears in parecon, "you cannot choose to hire wage slaves nor to sell yourself as a wage slave." Parecon permits workers to assess their own pay and conditions in their decision-making by inputting their preferences via councils. It apportions income in accord with effort and "does not force or even permit people to try to maximise profits, surplus, or even revenues."

Notice however that Albert is specifically talking about prohibiting profit maximisation, not profits as such. Profits are acceptable; "excessive" profits are not. In the procedure envisaged, individuals and councils submit proposals for their own activities, receive new information including new indicative prices, and submit revised proposals until they reach a point of agreement. This process is open-ended and in Albert's book a hypothetical example is discussed which reaches a seventh planning cycle, or as Albert calls it "planning iteration." In reviews of this book much has been made of the potential for bureaucracy in this procedure, but a more telling criticism would be its unquestioning acceptance of the profit system. Wages cannot rise to the point which prevent profits being made; and a fall in profits will put a downward pressure on wages. This is called the class struggle.

"Parecon is basically an anarchistic economic vision", admits Albert, and it shows. Like many on the left, the difference between capitalism and post-capitalism presented here is essentially political, not economic. As indicated by the title, the crucial factor is participatory planning. The capitalist economy would remain substantially the same in parecon: the accumulation of capital out of profits produced by the unpaid labour of the working class.

Lew Higgins

The Nationalist Madness (2006)

From the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again recent events in Morocco have brought to the fore the madness in the nationalist issue. Hundreds of West Africans who tried to enter Spain through Morocco were brutally maltreated by the Moroccan security services apparently at the instigation of the Spanish authorities. They were beaten, put in prison and many were driven to the heart of the desert and left there to die.

In the wake of the brutal attacks on these West Africans, many human rights groups in Morocco came out in their numbers to protest against the inhuman act. Unfortunately most of these activists attributed the action of the Moroccan authorities to racism. This however is a gross misrepresentation of the issue.

This misguided hatred of fellow human beings who happen not to have been born (or who have not been officially recognised as 'citizens') in certain parts of this world is not just found in Africa but everywhere in the world. This inhuman phenomenon makes nonsense of the oneness of the human race as preached by the UN, Christianity, Islam, etc. But this state of affairs could not have been otherwise in a world that is controlled by vampires whose only concern is profits and who place money on a higher pedestal than human beings.

The unfortunate aspect of this hatred towards the 'foreigner' or 'alien' is that the champions of nationalism use the working class of their countries against the working class of other countries. The truth however, is that the loyalty felt by many members of the working class to their country is a misplaced loyalty. Their so-called leaders actually hold them in the same measure of contempt as the 'foreign' members of the working class. In real terms there is no difference whatsoever between these 'citizens' who gleefully inflict the pain and the 'foreigner' on whom the pain is inflicted. The two groups are both exploited by the ruling class. In fact these African youth who were trying to enter Spain en route to inner Europe were actually forced to abandon their birthplaces by the actions of the ruling class of this world. No one in this world is unaware of the poverty and misery that is the lot of the African. And the capitalists cause this.

The only real division that exists between human beings is their access to the resources and wealth of the world. In this money-dominated world, the minority ruling class (the capitalists) own and control these resources and wealth - the land, factories, the transport and communication network, etc. The working class has no access to these and has to sell their mental and physical labour power to the former in return for peanuts.

Nationalism is therefore an illusion that has no basis in reality. The working class in Morocco has more in common to the working class in sub-Saharan Africa (and indeed the working class of the whole world) than it has with its masters in Morocco and else where. The point, in a gist, is that nationalism is nothing short of an ideology that seeks to enhance the profit-making interests of the capitalist class.

However, the problem of nationalism cannot be wished away. To do away with it will mean to eliminate the present the system that fosters it. This system ensures that a minority owns and controls the means with which wealth is produced and distributed whilst the vast majority who actually does the production owns nothing. The resources and wealth of the world must be owned and controlled by all humanity. Under such an arrangement, no one will care who goes where or who belongs where. Then nationalism and its present brutalities would have been buried.

But this type of system - call it socialism - can only be possible when people make efforts to understand the workings of not just that system but also this capitalist system.

This article originally appeared as the editorial in the African journal, 'Socialist Banner'

Pathfinders (2006)

From the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

YOOF CULTURE

Free radicals in mitochondrial DNA, the energy producing parts of cells, may be the cause of ageing (New Scientist, Jan 14, 2006). There is an understandably irresistible imperative to drive back the death horizon, but wouldn't it be better to create a life worth living before trying to extend it any further? For many people, death is the only possible way to beat the system. Eternal life in capitalism does not sound like fun, and we'd have to develop some pretty effective birth control systems too. But just how long would one want to live anyway? Would 300 lifespans create a race of super-educated highly motivated polymaths, or a rag-bag of apathetic and listless slugs too indolent even to wash?

FARTING FLOWERS

It has been discovered that plants emit large amounts of methane (New Scientist, Jan 14, 2006). Now let's wait for the discovery that politicians also emit methane, and embark on a mass cull for the good of our health. Seriously though, this is potentially disastrous, and in one stroke renders all available climate models useless. If the carbon sinks we were relying on are themselves contributing to global warming, the threshold to a runaway feedback effect may be now impossible to prevent. If the capitalist class succeed in destroying the ecology of this planet, the window of opportunity for the human species will close, and socialism or indeed any kind of advanced culture will become impossible. The urgency of revolution is not decreasing with time, but increasing.

FAKING IT

The recent furore in South Korea over the 'faked' results of the stem-cell research team headed by Woo Suk Hwang (New Scientist, Dec 24, 2005), has spiralled down into mutual recrimination amid more intensive probing into the past cloning work of the world famous team. This raises the question: would scientists or their researchers ever be disposed to fake results in socialism? Without the financial and status rewards that are capitalism's strong incentives, it's hard to see how. Who could own science in socialism, and therefore who could buy, sell, steal, corrupt, or profit personally from it? And therefore, what motive would any scientist have to lie? Socialism does not make people 'honest'. It just gives them no particular reason to be 'dishonest'.

THE ROOT OF ALL REASON

Is science the natural enemy of religion, or can they coexist? Religious scientists (they do exist) will obviously answer the latter, but many scientists, reared on evidence-based thinking, could no more tolerate the free-for-all that is 'faith' than they could walk on water. Few scientists however bother to get up and attack superstition in so many words, it being considered beneath them.

Richard Dawkins has never been one to keep his views to himself, and the militant monarch of evolutionary biology has just recently been waging war on 'the religious virus' on UK TV (The Root of all Evil? Jan 9 & 16, Channel 4). This somewhat overambitious project to lay waste the world's religions in two hours flat ended up being frankly underwhelming. Truth is, our Richard suffers the same problem as a lot of socialists he's so rational he doesn't really comprehend the nature of what he's dealing with, and this is a serious disadvantage when the argument goes nose to nose. The religious types, having had a logic-ectomy, are impervious to all the gigantic contradictions in their own world-view, and thus perform well, talk impressively, and look confident. Richard, on the other hand, clearly didn't go into these interviews properly prepared. Too long among real thinking humans who play by the rules of debate, he looked as shocked, baffled and bemused as somebody being addressed by a talking baboon in a dress. The effect, sadly, was that the zealots constantly seemed to get the better of him. It should not have been difficult for a scientist to make a fundamentalist bigot look the fool that he is (even accusing the scientist of arrogance, which was a nice touch), but one had the feeling that Dawkins actually was being a tad arrogant in his approach, imagining that reason and the scientific method were all the weapons he would need. Socialists, who have a lot more experience of this sort of debate, could have told him it wasn't going to be that easy. These people just don't roll over and die when calmly presented with the facts. The only thing to do is go for the jugular, make them squirm, make them angry, and then enjoy the fun. Instead, it was Dawkins who was too angry, and Dawkins who wasn't thinking straight. And in indulging his exquisite loathing of the religious 'meme' he made an even bigger mistake, from a socialist point of view, in imagining that 'for good people to do evil things, it takes religion'. It doesn't, it takes capitalist class society. The Nazis didn't kill for religious reasons, and contrary to what Dawkins supposes, suicide bombing was not invented by religious extremists but by Leninists (the Tamil Tigers). In fact, new research that Dawkins ought to have known about shows that for someone to become a suicide bomber takes no extreme belief-system at all (New Scientist, July 23, 2005).

But why attack religion on TV, and why now? Dawkins does not really explain, but the answer lies in a secondary school in Dover, Pennsylvania, where a celebrated federal court case has made headlines around America for weeks. Dawkins, with many other biologists, was incensed that the school board of governors ruled that Intelligent Design should be taught in science lessons alongside evolution, as if it had equal scientific validity. In America, ID cannot be taught in 'religious lessons' separately because such lessons are outlawed by the First Amendment, which separates Church from State. Thus, religion is smuggled in by other means. However, the parents weren't having it, and sued the school, and in the end the parents won and the governors had to resign, their defence team having made themselves look ridiculous in court, equating ID with astrology. So why wasn't Dawkins himself called as a witness for the prosecution, one wonders? He would have jumped at it. The surprising answer is that the parents didn't want him, for the even more surprising reason that, defenders of evolution though they were, they were Christians themselves. Even among religious people there is clearly only so much unreason they can take.

So should scientists really worry about a new-age fundamentalism wiping out all progress and knowledge, burning the libraries of Alexandria and plunging the world into the long night of ignorance, fear and superstition? Well, they can worry, but there's really no need to be paranoid. Religion has had to do all the hard work of accommodating more and more scientific progress, which is why mature religions tend to become ever vaguer and more metaphorical, and there's no prospect, save nuclear Armageddon, of the world's knowledge being lost again. Progress is progress, and it will stand. Dawkins can vent his spleen, and he is right to do so, but fear of a new order of god-driven moral extremism is probably taking things a little too far. And blaming the ills of the world on sad delusionals merely deflects attention away from the real problem the divisive effect of class and its social relations.

China : the Mines That Kill (2006)

From the February 2006 Socialist Standard

As shown by the tragedy in West Virginia at the start of this year, mining is hard, unpleasant and dangerous work. Coal is the main substance mined, so naturally that is where most of the fatalities occur. The annals of the coal industry are indeed full of appalling disasters: over four hundred miners killed at a pit in Senghenydd in Wales in 1913, for instance, and over three hundred at the Monongah mine, also in West Virginia, in 1907. Even a list of disasters, however, says nothing about the many more whose lives have been crippled and shortened by diseases resulting from working in a mine. As the industry in Britain has been progressively closed down, mining and its dangers have been shifted to other countries, especially China. The disasters have been exported there as well:

'China produces 35 per cent of the world's coal but accounts for 80 per cent of fatalities globally. The death rate is 30 times that of South Africa and 100 times higher than in the United States. Mining coal in China is probably the most dangerous job in the world.' (http://www.chinalaborwatch.org/en/web/article.php?article_id=50250)

Over six thousand Chinese coalminers were killed at work in 2004 (the equivalent of one Senghenydd-like death toll every three weeks or so). In August last year, for instance, the Daxing mine in Guangdong province was flooded and 123 miners killed (Beijing Review, 25 August). The previous month, another mine in the same area had been flooded, killing sixteen miners; after this, the local government ordered all mines to close for a safety inspection, but this did not happen. The Daxing mine, which was privatised in 1999, was producing well above its intended capacity. The millionaire owner of the mine had paid out massive bribes to local officials: the mine received a safety certificate in June, which it clearly should not have done. Many of the mine managers have gone on the run, and the local mayor has been suspended from his office. Corruption and the ignoring of safety regulations are the immediate reasons behind the tragedy.

The list goes on and on: 171 killed in an explosion in Heilongjiang province in November, this time at a state-owned colliery; 214 at the Sunjiawan mine in Liaoning province last February; 166 killed in an explosion at Chenjiashan mine in Shaanxi province in November 2004. In March last year eighteen miners died following a gas explosion in the Xinfu mine, also in Heilongjiang: the owner was deputy director of the local safety bureau. Xinfu should have been closed on account of its fairly scanty coal reserves, but it had been registered as having nearly three times the actual figure.

It is not just the disasters themselves that are so appalling. After the Chenjiashan explosions, widows of the dead miners were harassed by police and others, and contact between them and anyone outside the local area was made as difficult as possible. They were paid less in compensation than in other cases. Nobody has been charged in connection with the deaths.

Safety regulations in Chinese mines are (pardon the unfortunate play on words) a dead letter. The rules and regulations may exist, but mine owners, whether the state or private capitalists, have little incentive to enforce them. Bribery and corruption are rife, with many local officials in the pay of the owners and so encouraged to turn a blind eye to violations and to ignore safety inspections. The regulations are more for show than for the safety of the workers. As with capitalism anywhere, output and profit take first place, with consideration for the producers a long way behind. At Chenjiashan, the mine manager is said to have told the safety chief, "The management wants coal, not miners."

Nor can everything be seen as a consequence of the recent partial privatisation of the Chinese mining industry. Some disasters have occurred in mines that are still state-owned, while the biggest death toll in a Chinese mine was at Laobaidong in Shanxi province back in 1960, when no fewer than 684 died.

Despite the increase in the use of oil, coal remains the primary source of energy in China. The country burns a quarter of the world's coal, with coal making up two-thirds of China's energy consumption and being used mostly for power generation. Yet much of the equipment is outdated and many of the smaller mines in particular are very inefficient. With the demand for energy ever-increasing, there is bound to be pressure to produce more and more, with the inevitable short cuts and downgrading of safety issues. As always, it is the miners and their families who suffer while the owners, whether private capitalists or those who control the government, are those who benefit.

A Socialist society would presumably do its utmost to replace human miners with robots or to find other sources of energy besides coal. Capitalism, in China as elsewhere, is a violent and murderous system that should be replaced as soon as possible.

Paul Bennett