Nuclear weapons are still there (2008)

The Material World Column from the  February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who protests against nuclear weapons nowadays? People seem to have half-forgotten them.

But they are still there, patiently lying in wait. In The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2007), Jonathan Schell even speaks of a “nuclear renaissance” in the new century.

True, there are fewer nukes than there used to be. The number of active nuclear weapons has declined from a Cold War peak of some 65,000 to below 20,000. In another decade it may fall to 10,000. But this is scant consolation, for several reasons:

• Many decommissioned weapons are not destroyed, but only partially dismantled and placed in storage.
• The 10,000 remaining nukes will still suffice to wipe out the human race many times over. Even the use of 100 would cause disaster on an unprecedented scale. Atmospheric scientists at UCLA and the University of Colorado modeled the climatic effects of the use of 100 Hiroshima-type bombs – just 0.03 percent of the explosive power of the global arsenal – in a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. These countries have fought four wars and now have about 75 nukes each. Direct fatalities would be comparable with WW2, while millions of tons of soot borne aloft would devastate agriculture over vast expanses of Eurasia and North America.
• Nuclear weapons do not serve merely as status symbols or for mutual deterrence. Resort to them remains an option for the contingency of a serious setback in a conventional war, and new types of high-precision nukes, such as the so-called “bunker busters”, have been designed for that purpose. Nuclear weapons may even be used to stop a state acquiring nuclear weapons, or to suppress nuclear capacity that is in danger of falling under “terrorist” control (say, in the context of a disintegrating Pakistan).
• Finally, the number of nuclear weapons states has increased and is likely to increase further. The nuclear nonproliferation regime is gradually losing its ability to inhibit the chain reaction. The double standard on which it is based – one rule for members of the nuclear club, another for the rest – is (as Schell argues) no longer viable. If all states with the requisite economic and technological capacity are not to acquire nuclear weapons, then they must all agree to renounce them.

The numerical decline might be cause for optimism if it could be seen as progress toward nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, there are no grounds for such an interpretation. Nuclear weapon states are determined to maintain and upgrade their arsenals. Total numbers are falling as Russia and the US shed what they consider excess capacity, but they are restructuring their nuclear forces, not giving them up. Once this process is complete the decline in numbers will level off.

The Cold War is dead. Long live the Cold War!
So why have people half-forgotten the nuclear threat?

For one thing, it has been overshadowed by another threat to the human species – global warming.

Even before people became fully aware of this new peril, however, the end of the Cold War had largely dispelled the fear of nuclear war. A reformist at the time, I was closely involved in the peace and disarmament movements of the 1980s. With benefit of hindsight, I realize now that these movements did not perceive the nuclear threat in its broadest sense because they were too preoccupied by the specific context of the superpower nuclear confrontation of that period. This was especially true of European Nuclear Disarmament (END).

Western governments told us that “we” needed nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet threat. We anti-nuclear campaigners did not believe they were right, but we were naïve enough to believe that they believed what they told us. We drew the logical implication that they would become favorably disposed to nuclear disarmament if relations with the Soviet Union could only be sufficiently improved. So we hopefully looked forward to the new and deeper East-West détente heralded by Gorbachev.

Not only did the Cold War come to an end; the Soviet Union itself collapsed. No more “Soviet threat” to worry our rulers! But did they heave a sigh of relief and rush to dispose of their nuclear weapons? No, they started to come up with substitute rationales for keeping the things. Thus Blair, announcing renewal of the Trident program in 2006, explained that nuclear confrontation with another major power “remains possible in the decades ahead.” Schell sums it up nicely: “By reviving and refurbishing their arsenals, the nuclear powers signal that they expect that great-power rivalries will return” (p. 210).

The unpredictability of the future, they tell us, is itself a good reason to hold on to nuclear weapons. And the future is always unpredictable.

The world is dominated by a system based on conflict – conflict over resources of all kinds, conflict between competing property interests and the states that represent them. Once nuclear weapons were discovered and became tools in this conflict, they were bound to threaten human survival. The threat only seemed to have a necessary connection with the specific pattern of global power that happened to exist at the time. That pattern has started to change, there are new potential adversaries, but the conflict-based system remains. So does the nuclear threat.

Can nuclear disarmament be achieved under capitalism?
Schell calls for “action in concert by all the nations on Earth” (p. 217) to abolish nuclear weapons, halt global warming, and tackle other urgent global problems. His eloquence is moving, but his vision is only very briefly sketched and lacks substance. True, he has some technical and organizational proposals. Like IAEA director Mohammed ElBaradei, for instance, he would revive the Baruch Plan put forward by Truman in 1946 and place all nuclear fuel production under the control of an international agency. But he fails to consider what political, social and economic changes might be necessary to create and sustain the international trust and cooperation that he seeks.

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that nuclear disarmament were somehow to be achieved within the existing conflict-based system. Many states would still have the technological capacity to make nuclear weapons again if they so decided. This is known as the “breakout” problem. It is hard to imagine countries resisting this temptation when at war or even under conditions of acute military confrontation. As we need not just to achieve but maintain nuclear disarmament, we therefore also need to abolish war in general, together with all weapons that can be used to threaten war. A close reading of Schell suggests that he accepts this point, though he does not spell it out.

But take the argument a step further. Wars arise out of conflicts over the control of resources. Doesn’t this mean that an end has to be put to such conflicts? And how can this be done without placing resources under the control of a global community – that is, without establishing world socialism?

Socialists are not against nuclear (or general) disarmament within capitalism. We know that the world faces problems of the greatest urgency and we know that the global social revolution is not an immediate prospect. We have no wish to hold human survival hostage to the attainment of our ideals. Please go ahead and prove us wrong by abolishing nuclear weapons without abolishing capitalism. Nothing, apart from socialism itself, would make us happier. The trouble is that we simply don’t understand how it can be done. That is why we see no alternative to working for socialism.

Stefan

Profit Laundering: what’s justice got to do with it? (2008)

From the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Tax Havens Cause Poverty" proclaims the home page of the Tax Justice Network. No, they don't. The profit system does.

The Tax Justice Network thinks that world poverty can be effectively tackled by reforming the international system of taxing profits so as to eliminate tax havens and tax dodging – "profit laundering" as they aptly call it – by capitalist corporations.

This would make no essential difference. World poverty is not caused by corporations behaving badly. Their "bad" behaviour as identified and described by the Tax Justice Network is not bad from a capitalist point of view. It is normal, and in fact it is not possible to alter it – either by legislation or by appealing to the "morality" or "ethics" of corporate leaders. It's the way the capitalist profit system works and can only work. As long as you've got capitalism, in the famous – or infamous – phrase, there is no alternative. No alternative, that is, to capitalist corporations pursuing the maximisation of profits above all else. This is not a matter of choice by corporate executives. It is not because they are personally greedy or insensitive and deliberately choose to run their corporations in this way. It's the reflection in their minds of the underlying logic of the system of which in the end they – like the rest of us in fact – are just cogs.

But what is this underlying logic? What is capitalism?

Capitalism
Basically, it's the market system. Not just markets – they existed before capitalism – but a whole economic system where every aspect of the production and distribution of wealth takes place via the market, by means of a vast network of buyers and sellers. This includes the buying and selling of labour – or, more accurately, of labour-power, of a person's ability to work. In fact, capitalism is based on the existence of a class of people whose only productive resource is our ability to work in some capacity or other (whether so-called manual or so-called intellectual) which we are obliged to sell on the labour market for a wage or salary. But sell to whom? To those who own the other resources essential to production: land and natural resources, and mines, factories, transport, communications. In other words, capitalism presupposes the division of society into two classes: those who own the means of wealth production and those who don't. This is not a 50:50 division, more like a 5:95 one. So capitalism is a class society. Like everything else under capitalism, the relationship between these two classes is a market one, one of buying and selling.

But there's more to this particular market relationship than to that between other buyers and sellers. In other cases, it is a simple exchange of something of one value for something else of an equal value. Such an exchange of equal values is also involved in the wage contract – we get as our wage or a salary more or less the value of the labour-power we are selling – but human labour-power has the unique property of being able to create new value. The difference between wages and salaries and the new value added in the course of producing some good or service is the source of profit, which it is the aim of every capitalist and every capitalist enterprise to extract and maximise.

Some of this profit is creamed off by fat cat directors and owners to support an extravagant life-style but most of it is re-invested. If a capitalist firm did not do this with a view to keeping its productive methods up to date so as to be able to produce as cheaply as possible, it would lose out in the battle of competition with its rivals and, eventually, either go bankrupt or be taken over by one of them. So, under the pressure of market competition, capitalist firms are forced to accumulate most of their profits as more capital.

This competitive struggle to make and accumulate profits as more and more capital is the essence of capitalism. It's an impersonal economic mechanism that imposes itself on all enterprises involved in producing for the market, whether they are owned by individuals, corporations, the state or even by a workers' co-operative. The logic of profit always ends by imposing itself, even on governments, and there's nothing that can be done to stop this as long as capitalism lasts.

Taxes
Despite what some ideologists of a "pure capitalism" claim, capitalism cannot exist without the existence also of a coercive state – and never has. In fact, the state helped capitalism come into being, as by establishing trading monopolies like the East India Company and as by driving peasants off the land and into factories. But the state produces nothing (unless it is itself involved in production, as it sometimes has been) and so has to be financed by a levy on those who possess wealth or who control the production of wealth, i.e. by taxes. As the 19th century economist (and MP) David Ricardo showed a long time ago, in the end the burden of taxation falls on property and property-incomes such as rent and profit (any taxes on wages are passed on to the employer). Taxes on profits of course reduce the wealth of capitalists but they generally accept the principle of paying taxes as they recognise the usefulness of the services that the state provides them, not least the armed force to back them up in conflicts with other capitalists supported by their state over markets, trade routes, sources of raw materials and investment outlets. But they are not masochists; they'll only pay the taxes they absolutely have to. And a whole business has arisen to advise them how to minimise their tax burden.
Some companies are better able to do this than others, and the Tax Justice Network have a point when they say that:

"The ability of transnational corporations to structure their affairs through paper subsidiaries in tax havens provides them with a significant tax advantage over their nationally or locally based competitors. Local businesses, no matter whether they are technically more efficient or more innovative than their transnational rivals, will be competing on an uneven field. In practice, of course, differential tax treatment favours the large business over the small one, the international business over the national one, and the long-established business over the start-up". (John Christensen and Richard Murphy, Development Journal, September 2004).

Quite true. But why should we, as wage and salary workers, worry about this? Why should we get involved in this dispute between two sections of the capitalist class as to how the tax burden should be shared between them? Why should we take the side of small business as against large business, or national business or businesses in the Third World against international business? Taxation is not our concern as wage and salary workers. Even if multinational corporations were forced to pay more taxes (which is not inconceivable), this would not benefit us, It would only benefit their smaller, national-based competitors. And it wouldn't benefit the mass of the people in the Third World either. Only the business and political elites there who would then have more money to spend on their armed forces and their privileged lifestyles. "Tax Justice" is not our concern.

Corporations
The profit logic imposes itself irrespective of the type of enterprise. In Adam Smith's day – the middle of the 18th century – most enterprises were run by individual capitalists who risked all their money; there was no distinction between their personal wealth and that of their business. So, if their business failed they were ruined. As capitalism developed more and more capital was needed to start and sustain a business. This problem was partly overcome by partnerships, but this was complicated legally and partners were also still personally liable for the debts of the business; so, if it went under they went under too.

The solution, found and implemented from the middle of the 19th century, was the limited liability company. This was a legal business entity in which people could invest money to be used as capital but only be liable in the event of bankruptcy for the amount of their shareholding. Hence the name in Britain of limited liability company. In France it was called a "nameless [i.e. impersonal] society" and in America a "corporation". Whatever they were called, all had a separate legal personality, allowing them to sign contracts, pay taxes, sue and be sued as if they were real people. Even if, as the recent film The Corporation has underlined, they were real people they would be locked up as dangerous psychopaths. No real person is so cold and calculating and so obsessive about pursuing a single aim.
As might have been expected, many of the early company promoters and directors were rogues who swindled and robbed those who put up the money for their companies, i.e. the shareholders. Legislation was therefore introduced to protect shareholders. Company directors were required to act in such a way as to exclusively further the financial interests of the shareholders, i.e. to make as much profit for them as they could. All their acts as directors had to be justified by this end: they had to try to maximise profits and were not allowed to siphon off money for themselves nor, it could be added, to spend it on "ethical" objectives which they might personally favour.

As Christensen and Murphy noted in their article:

" … tax minimization through elaborate and frequently aggressive tax avoidance is regarded as one of the prime duties that directors are required to perform on behalf of their shareholders."
"Compelled by the profit logic, and by a legal principle that asserts that tax payers may organize their affairs in such a way as to pay the least tax possible under the law, the majority of large businesses have been structured so as to enable tax avoidance in every jurisdiction in which they operate."

The Tax Justice Network thinks that this can be changed, both by changing company law and by appealing to corporate executives to behave"ethically", but they are wrong. Company law – and the legal obligation on corporations to be "a pure money-making machine" – is a reflection of the underlying economic reality of capitalism which, as we saw, is the impersonal economic mechanism of the making and accumulation of profits as more and more capital. No law will ever be passed that goes against this impersonal logic of profit – and, even if it were, it wouldn't work. Any government which tried it would cripple industry within its borders by rendering it less competitive internationally, so provoking an economic crisis and mass unemployment – and the coming into office of a government that would repeal the legislation in question. Within capitalism there is, quite literally, no alternative to corporations being pure money-making machines.

So, if there's no way out under capitalism what are we in the Socialist Party proposing? Basically, to end capitalism, not trying to patch it up or trying to make it work in some other way through tax reforms. Capitalism. So, we're talking about a world-wide change, a global change in both senses of the term. Both world-wide and thorough-going.

To end the operation of the impersonal economic mechanism of the pursuit and accumulation of profits as capital, the first thing that must happen is that the natural and industrial resources of the planet must stop being the property of rich individuals, corporations or States and become instead the common heritage of all humanity. On this basis, the productive resources of the world can be freed from the tyranny of profit-driven market forces and become available to be used, under democratic control, to simply turn out the things that the world's population needs to live and to enjoy life, in accordance with the principle "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs".

In the current atmosphere of cynicism, apathy and alienation, to talk in terms of a world-wide democratic revolution to replace world capitalism with world socialism must seem incredibly utopian. Be that as it may, it is the only way out and until people organise to abolish the capitalist profit system the problems we have been discussing will continue. The real utopians are not us, but those like the Tax Justice Network who still think that you can doing something constructive within the capitalist framework of class ownership and production for profit. You can't.

Adam Buick

Voice From The Back: Ten Wasted Years (2008)

Voice From The Back column from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

TEN WASTED YEARS
Socialists have always stressed that supporting schemes of reforms will not fundamentally change the nature of capitalism and here comes an official capitalist institution whose findings back up that view. "There are 1.4 million children living below the poverty line in Britain, even though at least one of their parents has a job. Despite the changes to taxes and benefits, and the introduction of the national minimum wage, the number of poor children in working households is no lower than in 1997, a report by the Institute for Public Policy Research says." (London Times, 3 January)

NO IMMIGRATION PROBLEM
Politicians ever ready to seek the votes of little-Englanders often speak about the problem of immigrants from abroad coming to this country and causing problems such as housing, medical care and education. We imagine these politicians will completely ignore this type of immigration though. "Lev Leviev, who until a week ago was classified as the richest man in Israel, has joined the growing list of Israeli billionaires who have made their homes in London, where wealthy foreigners are not asked to pay tax on income earned overseas. This month, Mr Leviev officially moved into a bullet-proof house in Hampstead, which he bought for £35m. His near neighbours include several other mega-rich Israeli tycoons who prefer UK tax rates. In Israel, they are liable for tax on all their income, no matter where it is from. ...News of his departure has shocked the Israeli business community and created a political headache for its government, because of the drain of wealth from Tel Aviv to London. Among those who have made their homes in London are Zvi Meitar, the founder of one of Israel's biggest law firms; Benny Steinmitz, a diamond dealer and property tycoon; Yigal Zilka, head of Queenco Leisure International; and the real estate developer, Sammy Shimon." (Independent, 8 January)

THIS IS COMMUNISM?
Socialists have always maintained that countries like Russia and China that have claimed to be establishing socialism were in fact building up state capitalism, and now a pillar of US capitalism agrees with us that China has nothing to do with socialism. "The spending choices for China's rich are multiplying as quickly as the world's fastest-growing major economy can mint new tycoons.In the latest sign of China's rising upper crust and its growing appeal to international marketers, Robb Report, a self-declared catalogue of the best of the best for the richest of the rich, is making its pitch here with a Chinese-language edition. The 200-plus-page Chinese monthly, published under the name Robb Report Lifestyle, is packed with news, product placements and advertising that promotes elite brands such as Volkswagen AG's Bugatti sports cars and Lürssen yachts." (Wall Street Journal, 9 January)

CHINESE BOOMING DEATH RATE
"Accidents in China's notoriously dangerous coal mines killed nearly 3,800 people last year, state media reported Saturday – a toll that is a marked improvement from previous years, but still leaves China's mines the world's deadliest. A total of 3,786 were killed in mining accidents in 2007 – 20 percent lower than the 2006 toll, indicating the effectiveness of a safety campaign to shut small, illegal mining operations and reduce gas explosions, the Xinhua News Agency quoted the head of China's government safety watchdog as saying. Coal is the lifeblood of China's booming, energy-hungry economy. The mining industry's safety, which has never been good, has often suffered as mine owners push to dig up more coal to take advantage of higher prices." (Yahoo News, 12 January) The development of capitalism in China has led to more deaths amongst the working class. Surprise, surprise?

PROPHETS AND PROFITS
The future of global warming is a complex subject, but many experts believe the growth of carbon emissions could lead to disaster. One of the supporters of that notion is the World Bank with its various schemes to halt or lessen these emmissions, but their difficulty is that they also support the profit system so they are left in a contradictory position. "The World Bank has emerged as one of the key backers behind an explosion of cattle ranching in the Amazon, which new research has identified as the greatest threat to the survival of the rainforest. Ranching has grown by half in the last three years, driven by new industrial slaughterhouses which are being constructed in the Amazon basin with the help of the World Bank. The revelation flies in the face of claims from the bank that it is funding efforts to halt deforestation and reduce the massive greenhouse gas emissions it causes. Roberto Smeraldi, head of Friends of the Earth Brazil and lead author of the new report, obtained exclusively by The Independent on Sunday, said the bank's contradictory policy on forests was now clear: "On the one hand you try and save the forest, on the other you give incentives for its conversion." (Independent on Sunday, 13 January)

PROGRESSING BACKWARDS
In a sane society technological advances would be looked upon as a step forward for humanity, but we don't live in a sane society. We live in capitalism. Simon Caulkin the Management Editor of the Observer reveals some alarming outcomes of such technical progress. "More than half of all UK employees – 52 per cent – are now subject to computer surveillance at work, according to research from the Economic and Social Research Council's "Future of Work" programme. That's a remarkable figure, and it has lead to a sharp increase in strain among those being monitored – particularly white-collar administrative staff. ... Substantial pay rises for most managers contrast with static or even declining wages for low-end computer-monitored workers, who are working harder, and longer hours, into the bargain." (Observer, 13 January)

POOR AND DESPERATE
Men and women because of poverty are forced to work for wages. Inside Europe and North America they have to do as they are told by their masters, to turn up on time to be respectful and if asked to do so cringe, but it is even worse for our African comrades."Last year roughly 31,000 Africans tried to reach the Canary Islands, a prime transit point to Europe, in more than 900 boats. About 6,000 died or disappeared, according to one estimate cited by the United Nations." (New York Times, 14 January) Men and women of the working class are dying to be exploited. Let us get rid of this mad society. 6.000 died last year, how many this year?

Buying People (2008)

Book Review from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Selling Olga: Stories of Human Trafficking and Resistance' by Louisa Waugh

The Olga of the title is a Moldovan woman who was earning 35p a day working in an outdoor market. In desperation she and a friend replied to a newspaper ad promising well-paid jobs abroad, and were told they would be caring for elderly people in Italy. They ended up being sold to a bar-owner in Kosovo, where they were forced to work as prostitutes. After two years Olga managed to escape and returned to her home town, where she was housed and supported by the International Organisation for Migration. During her time in Kosovo she was beaten so badly that she lost almost 70 per cent of her sight.

Louisa Waugh's book is full of appalling stories such as this, of women trafficked into the sex industry and forced to 'repay' those who arranged their journey and employment. Not all trafficking involves sex slaves, however, and many of those smuggled to other countries work in construction and agriculture, among other industries. The International Labour Office estimates that two and a half million people are caught up in trafficking, though others give far higher figures. In Moldova it has become one of the largest national industries, while Albania is another big source of trafficked women.

And what are the causes of this shocking 'industry'? One is the fact that many men are willing to pay for sex, so pimps can make a profit from it. But on the supply side the answer is one simple word: poverty. Waugh quotes the director of an organisation called the Useful Women of Albania: "Women are trafficked from Albania because they are desperate to leave in the first place . . .if women are living here in poverty and they have nothing, then they will sell the only thing they can make money from: their own bodies." The line between those who are trafficked and those who migrate 'freely' is a thin one. A report for Save the Children referred to "a steady rise in emigration for voluntary prostitution abroad in order to escape poverty and bleak futures in Albania." But prostitution can rarely be voluntary in any real sense, and few of the women who migrate in order to earn money from selling sex are prepared for precisely what awaits them.

Many governments in Western Europe, including the UK, have addressed the problem of trafficking by cracking down on illegal immigration. But this has only led to the creation of an underclass of undocumented migrants, a group which includes those who died in Morecambe Bay in 2004. Forced labour — not confined to sex work — is an important part of the British economy, for capitalism wants cheap and pliant labour power. The extremes to which it will sometimes go to obtain it, graphically depicted in Waugh's pages, show why it's necessary to get rid of this diabolical system.

Paul Bennett

Further Reading:

Use My Name "Two women, Olga in Moldova and Bright from Nigeria, talk to Louisa Waugh about their experiences." (From the September 2007 issue of the New Internationalist.)

The Price of Bread (2008)

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

The price of bread went up by 10 percent last year and is likely to go up again this year. Wheat is a commodity, something produced primarily for sale not use; in fact it is a world commodity traded on world markets and so subject to international speculators betting on its future price going up or down. Its price is fixed by trading in Chicago where speculators as well as genuine buyers and sellers meet electronically. The Times (18 December) reported that "the Chicago wheat price has risen from about $5 a bushel in the fourth quarter of last year to reach $10.09 yesterday".

As wheat is the main ingredient of bread what happens in Chicago in the end affects the price of bread too. That the price of such an everyday item depends on world developments is a striking illustration of the world-wide nature of production today and one of the reasons why socialists say that the basis for a world socialist society already exists today.
The price of wheat is fixed in Chicago because the US is the biggest exporter of wheat, from its highly productive prairie farms. According to estimates by the International Grains Council, in 2007 of the 56 million tonnes produced in the US, 32 million were exported. The other major exporters were Canada (15 million), Russia (12 million), EU (10 million) and Argentina (10 million). (See the following link). Normally Australia would be the second biggest exporter but a prolonged drought there reduced its 2007 output.

The IGC forecasts that world wheat consumption in 2007/8 will be 611 million tonnes whereas production in 2007 will only have been 603 million. So countries have been digging into their reserves and will be looking to replenish them. Hence the current rise in the world price of wheat. There is even talk of this being the biggest wheat shortage in history.

As the price of wheat rises so it becomes profitable to plant more land with it, either by switching from something else or by bringing previously unused land back into cultivation. This latter is what has happened in Europe. Meeting in Brussels on 26 September EU agriculture ministers agreed to fix a zero "set-aside" rate for the autumn 2007 and spring 2008 sowings. The press release went on: "The change comes in response to the increasingly tight situation on the cereals market. It should increase next year's cereals harvest by at least 10 million tonnes".

Set-aside is the scheme under which EU farmers are paid not to grow food. In the past they were encouraged just to let the land lie fallow but, more recently with the rise of an environmentalist conscience, the scheme has been justified in terms of creating nature reserves and restoring "natural" wildernesses. That the whole scheme is in effect being suspended and previously set-aside land brought back into cultivation, in response to rising world wheat prices, exposes the real reason for set-aside: maintaining crop prices by reducing supply – while the world poor starve.

Which confirms what socialists have long said, that the world could produce more food if the aim of production was the satisfaction of human needs. People are starving simply because they lack the means to pay, not because the food cannot be produced – as this new output demonstrates, there is plenty of scope for increasing supply.

Activity in Captivity

February 2008 Socialist Standard

Editorial

Democracy matters

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Emission control we have a problem

Cooking the Books 1 Ever heard of tryvertising?

Cooking the Books 2 The price of bread

Material World Nuclear weapons are still here.

Greasy Pole The mass debaters

50 Years Ago Old familiar faces

Main Articles

Work as it is (and could be) Work is a "four-letter word" today under capitalism, but our view of it might change in a society where it is solely a means of improving the quality of our lives.

Profit laundering what has justice got to do with it?? "Tax Havens Cause Poverty" proclaims the home page of the Tax Justice Network. No, they don't. The profit system does.

Social responsibility and corporations Can corporations be trusted, or even expected, to have any social responsibility?

Thicker than water/Obituary of a capitalist The Stagecoach story: a lesson in the random nature of business success.

Capitalism Chinese-style Chinese capitalism is becoming less and less different from the kind found in the West.

The last time the police went on strike What we said in 1919 about the police unrest and strikes of that time. Ironically today's demonstrations are organised by the Police Federation, the company union set up in 1919 to stop a real union being organised.

Ire of the Irate Itinerant Cartoon Strip

Letters, Reviews & Meetings

Letter To The Editor: Social Improvement?

Book Reviews: 'Multi-nationals on trial' by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer; 'Selling Olga' by Louisa Waugh; 'Economics transformed' by Robert Albritton;'Bronterre O'Brien and the Chartist Uprisings of 1839' by David Black

Socialist Party Meetings: West London & Manchester:

Voice From The Back

Ten Wasted Years; No Immigration Problem; This Is Communism?; Chinese Booming Death Rate; Prophets And Profits; Progressing Backwards; Poor And Desperate

Emission Control? We have a problem (2008)

The Pathfinders column of the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have for years railed at capitalist market production for being on a relentless collision course with the environment, and have been more than once guilty of tired clichés like 'profits of doom' and 'merchants of menace'. Nobody expected, twenty or so years ago, that the fat cats in their plexiglass palaces would lift their noses from their account books long enough to notice that, outside the window, the last tree was dying in a desert. Now, mysteriously, we see 150 of the world's largest corporations, including Nestle, Coca Cola, General Electric and Shell, enthusiastically demanding carbon emission cuts of up to 50 percent by 2050 (New Scientist, Dec 8, 07). And in the wake of the recent Bali accord, we have most of the world's countries behind a global effort to cap carbon emissions and prevent disastrous global warming. What is behind this sudden laudable concern for the environment, and how are they going to achieve their aims? Simple, the only way capitalism can think of doing anything. By making loads of money out of it.

Now the way you make money out of anything in capitalism is to deprive everyone of it, and then charge them for access to it. Thus, at Kyoto, was born the idea of depriving everyone equally of the right to emit greenhouse gases, and then charging a flat rate for access to metered pollution rights. It would work, so long as all countries signed up to it. This last proviso is of course what has taken so long to resolve, which is why Kyoto never really worked and Bali, which was strong on emotion but weak on hard targets, still might not.

So how do businesses make money out of a carbon tax? By developing 'green' technologies that produce less pollution, allowing countries to save money on buying or sell on their spare credits to the belching giants like China and the USA. Hence all the new debate in the UK about nuclear power. Hence also the probable Second Coming to Europe of GM technology, previously scorned but now about to return with a vengeance. Agriculture is the largest contributor to global warming, not through carbon directly but through nitrogen in fertiliser, which, apart from the considerable problems of nitrate pollution, algal blooms and dead zones in coastal waters, has the unhappy effect of oxidising into nitrous oxide, which is a greenhouse gas 300 times more potent than carbon (New Scientist, Jan 5). Genetically modified crops which don't need so much fertiliser, or which can take up more nitrogen and waste less of it, are seen as one way to reduce this huge impact.

And genetic modification of crops won't stop at a few strains of cereal. Rice feeds half the world, and in a more drought-prone world, rice cultivation will be seriously at risk, so drought-resistant strains will have to be developed. And as with salt-resistance, another important factor in coastal areas more prone to flooding, what happens when modifications migrate, as they are known to do, to wild and weedy cousins? Crops could in the future be strangled by superweeds that can withstand flood, drought or weedkillers to threaten the world's food supplies.

But one of the biggest money-making production bonanzas is biofuels. Transport is responsible for roughly one quarter of all global human emissions, but the oil is running out and the much-vaunted hydrogen option requires unfeasibly massive infrastructure changes for storage and filling-station delivery. Besides, biofuels are close to carbon-neutral, absorbing as much in growing as they emit in burning. Better still, with some strains such as switchgrass offering up to 540 percent more energy than is required to grow them, leading to a carbon-saving of 94 percent compared to petrol, the smart money is in inedible crop-growing (BBC Online, Jan 8). Already large swathes of North America are switching to corn-based biofuel production, both to earn carbon credits and as a future hedge against Arab and Chinese-controlled petroleum, while Latin American countries, in particular Brazil, are gearing up to sugarcane-based ethanol harvesting.

So lucrative is this potential market that, not to be outdone, developing countries like Indonesian Sumatra are hurriedly destroying what's left of their last vestiges of rainforest in order to cash in on palm oil production for diesel fuel. And who could blame them when, prior to Bali, there was no agreement under Kyoto to recompense 'green' countries for preserving such unprofitable natural forest. As much of Sumatra's richest forest is bulldozed, the peat that it has lived in for thousands of years is ripped up, and this releases more carbon than will ever be saved by the palm oil grown on it (New Scientist, Dec 1, 07). The Bali accord hurriedly attempted to address deforestation for the first time, but much of the damage has already been done and it remains to be seen whether forest-rich countries stand to gain more by sitting on their green growth or churning it up for the bio-barrels.

Nor are these the only problems. Subsistence farmers pushed off land to make way for biofuel production, and given no help or financial aid by regional governments, have no choice but to invade natural forest and clear it by slash and burn in order to live. And food supplies are threatened on a larger scale too, as biofuels, though efficient in some ways, are the most land-hungry method of producing energy, many times more than fossil, wind, nuclear, hydro or solar. There is only so much arable land, and the population is rising. What happens to human food supplies as the world's engines groan ever more hungrily to be fed? According to recent research, the total availability of suitable undeveloped land for biofuels is between 250 and 300 million hectares, but even using the most efficient crops it will take 290 million hectares to produce 10 percent of the world's projected energy requirement in 2030. But by then, the world will also need 200 million of these same hectares to feed the extra 2 to 3 billion people who will then be alive (New Scientist, Dec 15, 07). And this is to say nothing of all the extra nitrous oxide being emitted by fertilised biocrops, if suitable GM alternatives are not developed or are not accepted for use. On top of all that, there is the problem of water supply. Switching 50 percent of transport and electricity requirement to biofuels by 2050 will require up to 12,000 cubic kilometres of extra water per year, close to the total annual flow down the world's rivers (New Scientist, Dec 15, 07). All this and in a drier world too where water wars are already widely predicted.

The truth is, nobody really knows if the pros of biofuel production really outweigh the cons. Like all capitalist economics, it is largely guesswork. All capitalism really knows for sure is that, in the words of the aforementioned large corporations, "the shift to a low-carbon economy will create significant business opportunities", or in plainer language, there's gold in them thar green hills. Besides, the subtleties of comparative studies may be lost on governments keen to assuage a growing public demand that they 'do something' about the environment. Australia, already suffering the longest drought in its recorded history, has recently turfed out its long established climate-sceptic government in favour of one which, within weeks, signed up to Kyoto. As Bob Dylan would say, "it don't take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows".

Paddy Shannon

Ever heard of tryvertising? (2008)

From the 'Cooking the Books' column in the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Your Money's No Good Here" read the headline of an article by David McNeill in the Irish Times "Innovation" supplement (10 December). "Tokyo has a shop with no price tags, no cash registers or no paying customers – what's it all about?" No, they haven't introduced socialism in Japan. So what is it all about?

One of the more abstruse objections to socialism is that it would have no means of knowing what new products to make available and so people would have a narrower choice than under capitalism. The critics concede that, with free access to what they needed, people might well take from the common stores and distribution centres only what they needed till their next visit -- just as today, when some things are free, they end up taking only as much water or free travel or free phone calls as they need. But, the objection goes, how would you find out what new products to make available?

Socialists have replied that this would not be a problem in that the same sort of techniques for finding out what new products people might like that are used under capitalism could, with suitable modification, be used in socialism. Of course it could not be called "market research" since there'd be no markets, so it would have to be called something like "new wants research". But the techniques would be the same even though the aim would be to find out what new products people would take under conditions of free access instead of what they might be prepared to pay for.

Market research has traditionally involved questionnaires and many people have earned some extra money by stopping people in the street or phoning them to ask what they think of some product. The clue to what's it all about is in the name of the Tokyo free shop: Sample Lab. It's a shop where firms provide samples of their products for people to take and try without having to pay for them. According to David McNeill, this is known as "tryvertising".

It's not really like things would normally be in socialism, even though there are no price tags and no cash registers. Those who use the free sample shop have to pay a modest registration and annual membership fee and are expected to answer questions about the products they take away and try, and they can only take five products at a time. The advantage for the capitalist firms who supply the free samples is that they get some feedback on what people think of their new product and how well they are likely to sell if marketed, a feedback that is said to be more accurate than from questioning people in the streets or by phone.

But this technique, at present prostituted in the service of profit, could easily be adopted in socialism. There could still be sample shops where a representative cross-section of people could come and take new products to try in return for answering questions about what they thought of them. It might even still be called "tryvertising".

Capitalism Chinese-Style (2008)

From the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 17th Congress of the Chinese 'Communist' Party was held back in October. It was five years since the previous one, so this is clearly not a decision-making body that determines how the party — and therefore the country — should be run. Rather it's a rubber-stamp gathering that endorses what the CCP's power-holders have already decided. The Central Committee is 'elected', but even that meets less than once a year, and it is the political bureau and its standing committee (nine men in dark suits) who really run things.

The CCP has changed over the years. It now has over 70 million members, and another 20 million applicants for membership. The growth of private capitalism in China has led many of the wealthiest people in the country to join the party. In the Hongdou textile group, which has assets of over a billion yuan (around £60 million), all the high-level managers are party members. Another capitalist, Liang Wengen, who has a fortune of three billion yuan (£190 million), was a delegate to the congress. If private entrepreneurs can join the party, he said, it "helps to enhance the brand recognition of our company." Western companies may promote their brands by sponsoring football teams, while in China they do so by joining the 'Communist' Party!

A new party constitution was adopted at the congress. This talks about building 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', which includes a supposed socialist market economy, i.e. "optimizing resource allocation while giving play to market forces". As the balance shifts towards private rather than state capitalism and state-owned enterprises are increasingly listed on the stock market, all pretence at any connection to Marxism has long since been dropped.

Instead, the rich are getting much much richer. According to some reports there are over a hundred billionaires in China, while the average income is less than $1000 a year. No wonder many Chinese workers, especially in the south, are prey to the 'snakeheads' who promise good jobs and decent wages in return for a huge fee for smuggling people out of China and across to Europe. The jobs and pay are never quite what is promised, of course, but the prospect is better for many than the grinding poverty of life in China. Within China there are 120 million migrant workers who have moved to the cities to find work and yet fail to escape poverty and exploitation.

In December, the China Labour Bulletin published a report on the workers' movement in China 2005-6 (see the following link). It begins as follows:

"After working repeated overtime shifts for an entire month, Hu Xinyu, a 25-year-old employee at the Huawei factory in Shenzhen, collapsed and died from multiple organ failure on May 28, 2006. Two days later, Gan Hongying, a 35-year-old woman employed in a clothing factory in the Haizhu district of Guangzhou, died after working a total of 54 hours and 25 minutes (22 hours overtime) in the previous four days. A few weeks later, a senior union official publicly admitted that China's official trade union was virtually powerless to prevent forced overtime in factories across the country."

So workers endure forced overtime in dangerous conditions while the bosses count their ill-gotten gains and flaunt their membership of the 'Communist' Party. It's still capitalism, and becoming less and less different in any way from the kind found in the West.

Paul Bennett

Social responsibility and Corporations (2008)

From the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can corporations be trusted, or even expected, to have any social responsibility?

Millions, billions even, are spent by corporations in PR attempts to green up their images. Not spent to improve conditions for their workers, not spent to find alternative, better methods of production less harmful to the environment, not spent to seriously reduce consumption of the world's shrinking non-renewable resources, not spent to significantly reduce pollution of the planet's earth, air and water; simply spent to present an illusion of green, caring, altruistic, socially responsible business. One may even be lulled into believing that profit is the least of their worries.

Yeah, but – that far too frequent punctuation in what was meant to be a meaningful conversation – there are laws and regulations that outlaw trade in illegal timber and diamonds and there are agreements like Kyoto to reduce pollution and big name companies are now taking responsibility for the level of pay and conditions of their workers in the sweatshops in Indonesia and Bangladesh etc.

Right, of course. There are laws and agreements and treaties but for every one there are loopholes. Agreements are signed and then reneged on regularly. The buck gets passed from pillar to post with elites denying knowledge until forced by public pressure to 'take steps' to repair damage done to their image. Business just doesn't work with the best interest of the majority in mind. We have to look at the raison d'être of the business world which is not to make or supply goods specifically at the behest of the citizenry, not to provide the services demanded by them. Business makes the goods and provides the services and manufactures the need. It is simply and straightforwardly to make a profit. One very simple example is the call-centre. Who do you know who would choose to sit waiting on the end of a phone with mind-numbing music and recorded apologies just to get the answer to a simple question and you know you're waiting while the company is either making money by selling you something or saving money by not employing enough bodies to answer the phones. Where's the responsibility to the consumer there?

Yeah, but we need these products and services anyway, don't we?

Maybe we do need some of them but many products are produced for a created market; stuff to sell to those who have enough money to be in any particular market place. Obsolescence is built in – to cars, washing machines and other electrical gear; fans' football strip needs replacing/updating once or twice a year; fashion is a must in everything, spurred on by advertising and the media, itself a smaller and smaller group of expanding mega-businesses concentrating profit and control into fewer and fewer hands; clothes, furniture, house decoration, garden decoration, accessories of all kinds, creating an unending lust for more, more, more. The other side of this is that millions of people don't have access to most of this stuff because they don't have the resources or the access to earn the resources with which to pay for them. Even sufficient food, clean drinking water and adequate shelter is beyond the reach of many. This surely demonstrates that the over-riding motivation is profit, not responsibility. There is a green-washing, white-washing, brain-washing going on constantly by corporations and their PR departments trying to keep up with or preferably to stay one step ahead of the watchdogs and activists ready to reveal their next miscalculated step.

Yeah, but the activists and watchdogs do get some changes made . . .

Yes, they do. However, what gains are made are more than made up for by losses in other areas. Ask the activists. Ask them and ask yourself why there are more activists working in more areas than there ever were before. Slavery was abolished generations ago but it hasn't stopped slavery and trafficking. Forcing one clothing company to stop employing children or to pay a minimum wage or to allow their workers some time off the premises or even to accept that these are areas of their responsibility, not just of their sub-contractors' doesn't address the fundamental issue of general social responsibility. 'Social responsibility' and 'environmental responsibility' have become convenient screens to hide behind, theatrical masks behind which amoral, unethical pirates can continue their quest for a larger share of the world's pie untouched by the cognisance of starving millions who can't get close enough to even smell the pie. The fact is, whatever sop a corporation may deign to give, whatever concessions any number of corporations may yield, globally there are more people without work, without prospect of work, who are homeless, who are destitute – and closer to home there are more who work longer hours for less pay, who have reduced pension rights and less bargaining power.

Yeah, but back to public pressure . . .

Public pressure is important but to know, to be aware of what form that pressure should take is more important. Public awareness must come first for any kind of pressure to be effective. First we have to recognise that the corporations are just following their designated route in pursuing maximum profits so it's pointless complaining about them doing their utmost to fulfil their mission. If we focus on this only as a single issue then we are allowing ourselves to be sidetracked. If we truly wish to give people and the environment a fair deal we have to see this issue as one part of a much bigger whole. In this particular issue the only way to positively affect the whole production line from raw material to consumer is to remove the profit involved. By removing money from any transaction along the chain the gains will be for the environment and people's welfare. Similarly with regard to other issues (water – health / big dams / privatisation; wars – weapons and proliferation / numberless casualties; oil the far too frequent punctuation in what was meant to be a meaningful conversation conflict / environmental problems / imbalance in use of resources; farming – cash crop problems / big pharma – seed rights ownership / landless peasants; trafficking – drugs / sex / workers / babies; and on and on---) awareness of the negative effects of the money/profit system reveal that, as it's the capitalist system itself that requires this profit motive at its base to function, it goes without saying, it's the capitalist system as a whole which has to be replaced. And imagine how much more quickly that change could be brought about with the combined effort and energy of all those dedicated people around the world seeking justice and fairness for all through their single issue campaigns; how much stronger and more powerful the whole when all the separate parts work together for the ultimate single issue, socialism.

Janet Surman

Democracy Matters (2008)

Editorial from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recent months have seen power contested across the world. Brutal suppression of fledgling democratic demands in Burma were followed by blatant abuse of elections in Kenya.
At the same time the various factions of Russian capitalism have been brazenly playing out in public their private chess game: to control the state for their own economic ends.

Meanwhile in Pakistan, hope for "democracy" apparently dies with the assassination of an unelected political leader at the head of a feudal political dynasty. And while all this happens, in parts of the USA, voters get an early chance to pick the leader of the "free world". A choice, that is, between the $100 million presidential candidate and the $90 million candidate (with every likelihood of two dynasties being in power in USA for some 25 consecutive years).

Closer to home, in a "mature" democracy such as the UK's, all the major parties have been pimping up their policies for drooling millionaires to purchase by means of ever-more creative accountancy over donations.

In contrast to this shabby and sleazy reality of democracy in this society, workers are continually spun the convenient tale that democracy and capitalism are intertwined. It is a reassuring thought for some: that the obscene inequalities of the capitalist economic system are justified by the political freedoms the market supposedly enables.

But it's a myth, of course. Around the world the profit system can be found bedding down very nicely with all sorts of political systems. From fascistic religious dictatorships to liberal democracies, from national liberation movements to supra-economic geo-political blocs, they all end up having to accommodate themselves to capital and its unquenchable thirst for profit.

World socialists applaud those workers around the world who fight at massive risk to themselves for basic civil liberties and trade union rights, for the freedom to hold meetings and participate in free elections.

The fight for a measure of democracy world-wide is an essential part of the struggle for world socialism. After all, if workers are not able to fight for something as basic as the vote, they are unlikely to be able to work for the transformation of society from one based on production for profit to one based on production for human need.

The World Socialist Movement does not intend playing into the hands of the global ruling class and their political mouthpieces, whether dictatorial or democratic. We don't intend making it easy for them to treat world socialism as an "undemocratic" threat.

But neither are we under any illusion about the nature of democracy inside capitalism. We confront the myth that capitalism and democracy are interdependent. We oppose the practices of so many so-called revolutionary organisations down the years who expect to bring democracy to the masses while unwilling to practise it internally.

We challenge the notion that revolution cannot at the same time be democratic and planned, cannot be participative and structured.

Where it is available to workers we take the viewpoint that capitalist democracy can and should be used. But not in order to chase the ever diminishing returns of reforming capitalism. Instead we see democracy as a (indeed arguably the only) critically-importantinstrument available to class-conscious workers for making a genuine and democratic revolution.

And in the process of making a revolution the really interesting work can start of course: that of reinventing a democracy fit for society on a human scale. A democracy that is free from the patronage, the power games and the profit motive that currently, from Moscow to Rangoon, Nairobi to Washington, abuses it.