Voice From The Back: Owners And Non-Owners (2013)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Owners And Non-Owners

The development of the oil industry in the Middle East has led to immense wealth for the ruling class there. ‘In just seven decades as a nation, Saudi Arabia has grown from an impoverished backwater of desert nomads to an economic powerhouse with an oil industry that brought in $300bn last year. Forbes magazine estimates King Abdullah’s personal fortune at $18bn, making him the world’s third-richest royal, behind the rulers of Thailand and Brunei’ (Guardian, 1 January). The report goes on to record that the Saudi government discloses little official data about its poorest citizens. But press reports and private estimates suggest that between 2 million and 4 million of the country’s native Saudis live on less than about $530 a month – about $17 a day – considered the poverty line in Saudi Arabia. So we have up to a quarter of the population living in poverty and hunger while the owning clique luxuriates in obscene wealth. This is capitalism in action.

Recession? Who’s Recessing?

We are at present living through an economic recession and we are told by the mass media that we all must share the hardships of these straitened times, but it seems that some are faring better than the rest of us. ‘The richest people on the planet got richer in 2012, adding $241 billion to their collective net worth, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a daily ranking of the world’s 100 wealthiest individuals… Amancio Ortega, the Spaniard who founded retailer Inditex SA, was the year’s biggest gainer. The 76-year-old tycoon’s fortune increased $22.2 billion to $57.5 billion, according to the index, as shares of Inditex, operator of the Zara clothing chain, rose 66.7 per cent’ (Chicago Tribune, 2 January).

Desperation In Spain

In recent years Spain has been struggling with a dramatic economic crisis, leading to an unemployment rate of 25 per cent and massive evictions. ‘Spain’s housing market collapsed in 2008 after a housing bubble, hurting the economy and causing a homelessness epidemic. As a result, more than 50,000 delinquent Spanish homeowners were evicted in the first half of 2012 alone, and 1 million homes lie empty in Spain, according to Reuters‘ (Huffington Post, 3 January). These evictions have led to locksmiths in Pamplona refusing to carry out evictions. This move they think could essentially stop evictions in Pamplona because even if the police kick a family out of their home, the evicted can still get back in if no one has changed the locks. But it’s unlikely to work.

The Dignity Of Labour

Desperate for work, many Mexicans come to the USA and Canada and work on the farms there. Concerned about migrants settling permanently, the Canadian government has very strict rules to deal with this. Only married men are eligible for the Canadian program, preferably those with young children, and their families must remain in Mexico. Another incentive to return home: a cut of the migrants’ wages is placed in a Canadian pension fund, receivable only if they return to Mexico. ‘Once in Canada, the workers live like monks, sleeping in trailers or barracks, under contractual agreements that forbid them from drinking alcohol and having female visitors, or even socializing with other Mexican workers from different farms. Most of their time in Canada is limited to sleeping, eating and working long days that can stretch to 15 hours, without overtime pay’ (Washington Post, 5 January).

Happy Families?

Aspiring politicians like to be seen as supporting families, but the reality is far different. ‘Soaring energy bills are forcing one in four mothers to turn off their heating in the depths of winter in order to afford food for their children. Fuel poverty is resulting in thousands of families resorting to wearing extra clothes and using blankets in their homes. More than half of families turn off the heating in their houses when the children are out, while 45 per cent of adults keep warm using blankets or duvets during the day, according to a survey. ….. A shocking 23 per cent of families are already having to choose between buying food or using heating, according to a survey by the Energy Bill Revolution campaign’ (Daily Mail, 6 January). Warm shows of affection by politicians won’t heat up your kid’s bedroom.

Chinese Capitalism

It is always touching to see a father being generous to his daughter, but this takes a bit of beating. ‘Bringing new meaning to the phrase ‘happy couple,’ Chinese businessman Wu Duanbiao gave his daughter and her husband a dowry worth nearly $150 million in celebration of their wedding on Sunday, according to the South China Morning Post‘ (Shine from Yahoo!, 2 January). This generosity is all the more remarkable as China pretends to be a communist country.

The Falklands Again (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

They are back in the news following the recent disclosure, in documents released at the end of December under the thirty year rule, that Thatcher was taken by surprise, but this changes nothing and vindicates nobody. Opponents of Britain are encouraged by Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s renewed call on 3 January for the Falklands to become part of Argentina.

The Falklands (in Spanish, Islas Malvinas) are a group of small islands in the South Atlantic off the coast of Argentina. The present population can be traced back to European settlement in the nineteenth century, primarily the British approval in 1840 to form a colony there. Britain aside, many other countries have claimed them over time, but Argentina has the longest standing claim to these islands as their own territory.

In 1982, the Socialist Standard at the time described the country ‘in the grip of a severe recession. At the end of March a trade union demonstration against the effects of unemployment and rising prices brought some of the worst civil disorder … But the move against the Falklands brought a miraculous change; patriotic frenzy swamped the reality of the workers’ parlous condition’ (Doing the Bulldog Thing, May 1982). This was a description of Argentina, but one that in many respects might have equally applied to Britain at the time.

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, then, just short of a thousand workers dead, over two thousand wounded and two months later the islands were retaken by British forces. A few days later the Argentine junta collapsed. American support was absent, the President, Ronald Reagan, had been advised the military junta led by the dictator General Galtieri was a bulwark against ‘communism’. We asked of Britain, ‘If the government was so disgusted by the Argentine junta’s record of repressively anti-working class dictatorship, why was it a major arms supplier to the Junta up until the invasion of the Falklands?’ (The War in the South Atlantic, July 1982.)  The famous left-winger Michael Foot, then Leader of the Labour Party, made a powerful speech in favour of the taskforce sent to retake the islands.

If you want to see how sincerely Britain or any ruling class protects the wishes of the islanders, look at what Britain did to the similarly populated Chagos islanders in Diego Garcia some years earlier.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

DJW

Pathfinders: Caring and Sharing (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

You have a pie, and you have to share part of it with someone else. The question is, how much should you offer? Logically, not much, and logically, the recipient should be happy to accept any amount, no matter how small, since it’s better than nothing. But here’s the rub. If that someone thinks you’re being stingy they might refuse your offer, in which case neither of you gets anything.

In the human version of this ‘ultimatum game’, where the pie is replaced with money, the players tend  to make roughly equal or ‘fair’ offers, showing that human concepts of fairness can override the logic of economics. Exactly why this happens is uncertain. It may be that the donor is motivated by some internalised moral framework, or it may be that the donor feels nothing of the sort but is simply responding to the fear that the recipient is fundamentally irrational and will ruin everything by throwing their proverbial toys out of the pram in response to a perceived injustice.

In studies with chimpanzees involving food, the same does not apply. The recipient is happy to get whatever they can, and the donor shows no tendency towards generosity. However a new study with chimpanzees, using tokens instead of food, has found the same tendency towards ‘fairness’ that is found in human adults and young children (‘Sharing: Chimp study reveals origins of human fair play’, BBC Online, 15 January).

One of the awkward questions in evolutionary theory is the rationale for altruism, which on the face of it contradicts the principle of selfish interest, at least outside close kinship groups. But since we know it does exist in humans there is considerable interest in establishing whether something akin to it is present in our nearest relatives, in other words whether it  is ancient and innate behaviour or modern and socially acquired.

Unfortunately the chimp test is not entirely conclusive. It only used a small number of chimps, and critics argue that with limited abstract capability the animals may not have understood the test all that well, or just had less interest in tokens than in food, hence skewing the result. One would be tempted to dismiss the study altogether were it not for the fact that other studies have suggested suites of behaviour that might be summed up as ‘ethical’ in wolves and coyotes (‘The Ethical Dog’, Scientific American, 19 March 2010). Vampire bats are known for reciprocal meal-sharing, and a type of awareness which among humans would be called empathy has been observed in many other mammals, from elephants to rats and mice.

In game theory, the tendency to cooperate or defect (cheat) depends on how many times the game is played. In one single iteration or turn the logical strategy is to defect, because there is no opportunity for the other player to ‘retaliate’ tit for tat. The same is true if there are a finite number of iterations, because the end point logically dictates a defection,  which strategy then cascades in reverse all the way back to the beginning. But where the number of iterations is infinite, that is when there is no fixed end-point, the most stable strategy is tit for tat cooperation, where defection is punished and cooperation rewarded.

Professor Martin Nowak of Harvard describes how this direct reciprocity can evolve in a number of ways, most interestingly towards indirect reciprocity, where the individual ‘pays it forward’ without immediate expectation of return (Scientific American, January 2013). This behaviour is most developed in humans, possibly because of language and the evolution of gossip and the consequent emergence of ‘reputation’. However, defection still exists. In Garrett Hardin’s classic 1968 study ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, a group of livestock owners who share common land each allow their animals to overgraze, ultimately leading to disaster for all. This ‘Tragedy’ has been offered up as a reason why socialism, based on sharing, won’t work, and real world examples of the Tragedy of the Commons abound, in particular with regard to natural resources and climate change, where humans share the world but are separately and collectively ruining it.

Nowak goes on to discuss game studies where players had to donate a portion of their money into a pool which was used to ‘save the world’. They didn’t always succeed, but cooperation was more likely to occur where the players felt properly informed, and where their acts of reciprocity were public, rather than private (the reputation factor again).

What these studies overlook is the question of private property, and how this motivates behaviour. The players failed to ‘save the world’ because their common interest in doing so was at odds with their personal interest in preserving their ‘private property’.  Here there was a clear temptation to cheat, hoping that other people would make up for the shortfall. Nowak does not describe any version of the game in which the players have no private money but only a common pool, yet it seems likely that behaviour would be quite different where no interests were in conflict.

Similarly, Hardin’s scenario is not a demonstration of why socialism won’t work because it involves livestock owners, whose interests are separate and conflicting, so even though the land is shared the animals are not, and this private ownership leads to conflicting interests resulting in the destruction of the Commons. Were they socialist farmers who shared ownership of the animals as well as the land, their interests would not be in conflict and therefore overgrazing would be a nonsensical strategy that would help none of them.

On a not unrelated note, and demonstrating that charities do fulfil a useful purpose in promoting awareness even if they don’t ultimately solve problems, Oxfam recently produced a report which pointed out in no uncertain terms what the consequences of private ownership are – massive and destructive inequality (The Cost Of Inequality: How Wealth And Income Extremes Hurt Us All, Oxfam, 2013). As they point out, the 100 richest people could abolish poverty for the world’s poorest four times over, and that during this global recession there has been ‘an explosion in extreme wealth’ (BBC Online, 19 January). As their Chief Executive states, ‘We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many – too often the reverse is true’. Quite so, and whether the human response to this is intellectual or animal, scientific or ethical, it would do well to look past Oxfam’s feeble and pious demands for tax reforms towards the one thing that really would be a game-changer – socialist revolution and the abolition of private property.

PJS

Film Review: Les Misérables (2013)

Film Review from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables is the cinematic version of the Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boubel stage musical based on the 1862 Victor Hugo novel.  Hooper’s film comes in at 158 minutes and is a ‘sung-through’ musical comprising about fifty songs, the most popular being, I Dreamed a Dream sung by Fantine, a ‘grisette’ turned prostitute played by Anne Hathaway. Hooper had all his actors sing live on set, there is no ‘count-in’ or predetermined tempo and the piano is following the pacing of the actor which is a first for a filmed musical. Orchestral music was added post-production. The outstanding voice is Eddie Redmayne’s tenor as revolutionary student Marius, especially in the song, A Heart Full of Love.

‘Les misérables’ are the working class, ‘the wretched poor’ of nineteenth-century French capitalism in Paris, but the film glosses over the poverty, disease, crime, prostitution, exploitation of the working class, and the inequalities of wealth in capitalism. Hugo was concerned with the ‘degradation of man by poverty and the ruin of woman by starvation’.  The ‘saintly’ Valjean, played by Hugh Jackman, has served 19 years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread. The film is Valjean’s search for redemption, and there is a Christian theme in songs, I Have Saved your Soul for God and Why did I allow this man to touch my Soul and teach me Love?  Hugo saw his novel as ‘a progress from nothingness to God.’ Valjean’s conversion supports Marx’s statement: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’

The characters of Monsieur and Madame Thenardier, played by Sacha Baron Cohen and Helena Bonham Carter, are the ‘comic relief,’ and their ‘rascally’ antics in Master of the House and Beggars at the Feast push the film into the Dickensian whimsy of Lionel Bart’s Oliver.  If the Thenardier couple are Fagin then the street urchin, Gavroche, with ‘cockney’ accent is the Artful Dodger.

The use of computer-generated imagery recreates the Parisian working-class districts of faubourgs and ‘cour des miracles,’ comprising dense streets and medieval alleyways, later destroyed by the ‘renovations’ under Haussmann which would better able the bourgeoisie to control the Parisian working class. A replica of ‘the Elephant of the Bastille’ was built in Greenwich which adds authentic historical context to the film.

The climax of the film is a futile, student-led Republican uprising, which actually took place in June 1832 against the ‘haute bourgeoisie’ monarchy of Louis Philippe and is portrayed in the songs At the Barricades and Do you hear the People Sing? Sixty million people worldwide have seen the stage musical, Les Misérables, but if going to see it could change the world then it would have been made illegal.

The 1831 working-class uprising of silk workers in Lyons who sang, ‘When our rule arrives, when your rule shall end, then we shall weave the shroud of the old world. Listen! Revolt is rumbling,” is a better subject for a ‘revolutionary’ film musical.

Steve Clayton

Material World: Roadkill (2013)

The Material World column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

A massacre of 28 children and teachers at a school in Connecticut on December 15 has received weeks of intensive media coverage. And yet very little attention is paid to the roughly 100 people killed in the U.S. every day by motor vehicles. The carnage at the scene of a serious road accident is just as horrific as a battlefield, but only those directly involved – the victims and the workers whose job is to clean up the mess – are fully aware of it as an everyday reality.

Millions of animals – deer, badgers, frogs, birds, etc. – also die on the roads. They are called ‘roadkill’. That seems an apt term for the human casualties too. Worldwide human roadkill is estimated at 1.3 million a year. The injured number in the tens of millions.

Average annual human roadkill in the U.S. in recent years has been about 40,000. (Another couple of million are hurt; 250,000 of them have sufficiently bad injuries and sufficiently good health insurance to be hospitalised.) There has been a modest decline since the 1970s, when the yearly average was about 50,000.

Various reasons have been suggested for the decline, including a crackdown on drunk driving and the adoption of certain safety features, especially seat belts and eventually (in the 1990s) air bags. We owe these improvements to persistent efforts by campaigners for safer car design, Ralph Nader being the best known.

Feeling safe

This example demonstrates that campaigns for reform can sometimes achieve worthwhile results. Worthwhile, but limited and temporary. Because there has been no decisive reorientation of car design toward safety as opposed to style, power and comfort.

Thus, as Catherine Lutz and Anne Lutz Fernandez point out, car manufacturers prefer to make the driver feel safe rather than help him drive safely. By swaddling driver and passengers in a warm, quiet and smoothly moving cocoon, insulated from the noise and bumps of the road, they ‘prevent drivers from sensing how fast they are going or how dangerous the road conditions are’ (Carjacked: The Culture of the Automobile and its Effect on our Lives, Palgrave Macmillan 2010, p. 179).

However, the biggest setback to the cause of safe design has been the rise of the monsters known as Sport Utility Vehicles. SUVs are much more prone to roll over than ordinary cars and much more lethal when they collide with other road users (Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV, PublicAffairs 2002).

The decline in human roadkill is partly the result of people minimising their exposure to traffic as pedestrians, though at a high cost in the form of isolation and loss of community. In the old days, when motor vehicles were few and far between, children were free to roam around on their own and play with friends in the streets. Now they are cooped up at home. There they can prepare for their future role as drivers by playing video games like Carmageddon, where the goal is to smash up as many other cars and run down as many pedestrians as possible.

Pollutants

Beside direct roadkill, cars harm and kill people through the pollutants that they emit into the air we breathe. Here too campaigns for reform have had some successes. In particular, exhaust filters are now in wider use and petrol no longer contains lead additives.

Here too, however, the few successes are overshadowed by a daunting list of failures. And here too SUVs are the worst culprits. Motor vehicles still emit enormous quantities of tiny particles and poisonous compounds, including nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds that react in sunlight to form ozone. Most of these gases and particles do most harm to the respiratory system, causing such diseases as asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and lung cancer. Another pollutant, benzene, damages the bone marrow and immune system and causes leukemia and other blood cancers.

A car emits poisons into the air both inside and outside, making it hard to tell whether it is less unhealthy to ride with the windows closed or open.

Burdens on society

These are not the only burdens that the car imposes on society. It devours enormous material and labour resources and generates a vast stream of material waste, much of it hazardous and/or non-recyclable. The car and the hydrocarbon fuels that power it make a big contribution to the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases and thereby to climate change.

Cars have a huge impact on land use. Land is used to manufacture cars, sell cars (showrooms), service and repair cars (garages, filling stations), wash cars, drive cars (roads, driveways) and – no small item! – park cars (roadsides, car parks, home garages). An expanding area of arable land is being used to cultivate biofuels for cars.

These burdens grow heavier as the numbers of cars (and especially SUVs) increase. The total number of motor vehicles in the world passed the one-billion mark in 2010. It can be expected to continue rising rapidly as cheaper models open up new consumer markets in countries such as India and China.

A central issue in clarifying the general shape of a socialist society is what place cars would occupy in it. Will it be possible to provide everyone with access to car transport in some form, provided that a switch is made to electric cars? Or would it be necessary to restrict car use to a bare minimum?

Stefan

Values (2013)

Book Review from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Where Do My Values Come From? – And How To Attain Social Sustainability. By Thomas M.V. Hallatt & Dale M.R. Hallatt. Kindle eBook.

Instead of chasing the chimerical ‘values’ that may lurk inside the heads of private individuals, the focus of this book is human behaviour as it is shaped by and shapes the cultural referents that make up a ‘value system’. The authors undertake their investigation using an interdisciplinary approach with case studies to illustrate their argument. The focus is on four fields from the human sciences: genetics, neuroscience, physiology and environmental psychology.

Beginning with an examination of the genetic basis of behaviour, the authors correctly state that there is no evidence that genes can bypass environmental influences and directly cause a particular behaviour. However, as they point out, that is not to claim that we are born as ‘blank states’, as we are born with certain genetic predispositions, but it is the environment that determines how and in what way these will play out.

It is our genetic inheritance that gives us the neuronal equipment that enables us to experience empathy, because of the survival value of becoming a social species. It is also due to our evolved history that we have brains that are highly malleable: changes in the environment determine which propensities are strengthened and which are weakened. With this is mind it makes no sense to speak of a fixed human nature which is outside or above environmental influence. Any long-term observed patterns of human behaviour must also be squared against the fact that the problem of scarcity in the environment has never been resolved and that any changes in the environment in the future will affect behaviour. ‘We make the environment, the environment makes us’.

The concept of ‘operant conditioning’ is central to this book, the basic idea being that behaviours that are ‘reinforced’ are more likely to be repeated. Positive reinforcement takes place when a behaviour is reinforced because of a reward of some kind; negative reinforcement takes place when a behaviour is reinforced by the removal of an adverse stimulus in the environment. The strengthening of neural pathways in the brain is the reinforcing mechanism.

The penultimate chapter is largely taken up with proposals for a reform of education methods inspired by the observations of the preceding chapters. All of these could be incorporated into present system; after all science and technological innovation do require a stream of new critical thinkers. Though, under capitalism the purpose of education is not to raise healthy, free-thinking individuals but only to provide sellers of labour-power capable of operating the technological means of production. The authors do raise this point in a brief passage, but its full implications are not fully developed.

So here is the fly in the soup, the whole book is based on an analysis of culture but from the standpoint of the individual, the role of structural factors in limiting and steering behaviour is neglected: ‘society is like one big experiment, whereby the dependent variable is the behaviour emitted by a person and the independent variable is the environment that is manipulated and changed in various ways to bring out the behaviours in people’. But the fact that the control of the productive factors that shape the economic and socio-political environment is outside the reach of the majority and that the owning minority are compelled to comply to the blind logic of capital accumulation is somewhat missing from the analysis. The interdisciplinary approach that is adopted fails, as it fails to include the study of the laws of historical and economic change.

This book can be thought of as an updated version of B.F. Skinner’s Freedom and Dignity, incorporating the latest developments in the sciences. If Marx can be said to be history’s number one victim of glib criticism and misrepresentation, then perhaps Skinner is a close contender for the number two spot. Both Marx and Skinner developed coherently materialist theories of change, Marx in the area of social change with what has become known as historical materialism, and Skinner in the field of individual behavioural change with what he called behaviorology or radical behaviourism. These two concepts could be seen as complementing each other to make a coherent whole, with Marx providing analysis at the macro level and Skinner at the micro; though Skinner himself never advanced such a view (more often than not he got Marx wrong) and this claim is sure to bring resistance from Marxists. However, with that thought in mind I shall recall the words of Engels writing in the Anti-Dühring: ‘Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends’; there is no reason to exclude the laws of behaviour from our enquiry.

Darren Poynton

Mixed Media: ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma’ (2013)

The Mixed Media column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Doctor’s Dilemma by Bernard Shaw at the National Theatre

Bernard Shaw’s 1906 ‘serious comedy,’ The Doctor’s Dilemma, was recently produced at the National Theatre starring Aiden Gillett as Sir Colenso Ridgeon and Tom Burke as Louis Dubedat.

Shaw based Ridgeon on Sir Almroth Wright, a celebrated and fashionable bacteriologist, who when asked by Shaw what he would do if there were too many applying for a certain treatment, replied, ‘we should have to consider which life was worth saving’. This would become the central plot of the play where Shaw indicts privatised medicine because of its lack of impartiality, its pecuniary interest, rationing, moralising, unaccountability, ineffective treatments, negligence, and sees private doctors as competitive tradesmen in ‘a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering’. The Doctor’s Dilemma is an argument for the creation of a public health care system such as the NHS in 1948 (which Shaw himself welcomed as an example of ‘gradualist Fabian socialism’).

Lenin felt that Shaw was ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’, and Alick West saw Shaw as a ‘second Proudhon’. In 1882 under the influence of Henry George and reading Marx’s Capital, Shaw wrote: ‘the importance of the economic basis dawned on me’, and was on the point of joining the Marxist SDF but instead opted for the Fabian Society. Shaw disagreed with Marxian concepts such as the labour theory of value and the class struggle and wanted ‘to place socialism on a respectable bourgeois footing’.

Shaw’s 1912 The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism was republished in 1937 and Hardy in the Socialist Standard wrote that Shaw’s views were ‘essentially utopian – that there will be money incomes under socialism, and that the capitalist foundation can be made to support a socialist system of society’. The welfare state and the NHS established from the 1942 Beveridge Report and the 1944 White Paper are Fabian ‘socialist’ constructs within capitalism. Marxists see the welfare state and NHS essentially as the ‘redistribution of poverty among the workers’ from those without to those with dependants, maintaining a sufficiently healthy and efficient working population, keeping unemployed workers from becoming unemployable, and insuring the capitalist class against working-class discontent. For the capitalist class the welfare state and the NHS meant increased profits and were seen as ‘a necessary expense of production’.

As we said in the Socialist Standard June 1944, ‘only under socialism can doctors truly serve their fellow workers, and a real health service for all be established’.

Steve Clayton

Deadly prayers, twisted knickers and motorcycles (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Saudi Labor minister faces “Deadly Prayers” from angry clerics’ ran the headline on the Al Arabiya News website (26 December 2012). When you read an opening paragraph like that you just know, don’t you, that the more you read, the more bizarre it’s going to get?

‘A group of religious figures in Saudi Arabia have threatened to strike the labor minister who seeks to create jobs for women with “deadly prayers” ’, ran the story. ‘They threatened to pray that he gets cancer like his predecessor Ghazi al-Gosaibi, who died of the disease in 2010’. And to prove that he meant business, one of them assured reporters: ‘I supplicated against a senior official at the ministry and he received the (cancer) disease and he died’.

They don’t mess about with their prayers in Saudi Arabia, do they? And while, as threats from Islamic extremists go, having the ‘deadly prayers’ of a group of deranged clerics unleashed at you probably isn’t on the same level as a fatwa, it probably is extremely noisy and inconvenient, and God knows what the neighbours must think.

To a non-believer the most disturbing thing about being threatened with ‘deadly prayers’ by 200 odd clerics (well, very odd clerics in this case) must be that they assume that everyone else is as ignorant and gullible as they are. But what was it that got them so wound up?

The cause of the problem was the obviously unsuitable nature of the work that was being proposed for women to do. It was a ‘Westernisation plan,’ the Minister, Adel Fakeih, was told. ‘Your ministry has thrown our daughters in places that don’t suit their values’.

The unsuitable work for women that the Minister was proposing, believe it or not, and that the clerics were getting their religious knickers in a twist about, was the plan to allow women to work in lingerie shops instead of men.

Meanwhile in the Indonesian province of Aceh where strict sharia law is observed the Mayor, Suaidi Yahya, says he intends to save women’s ‘morals and behaviours’ and has ordered them not to straddle motorbikes behind male drivers.

Under new regulations women motorcycle passengers are only allowed to ride side-saddle because straddling the bike seat violates Islamic values. ‘When you see a woman straddle, she looks like a man’ he said. ‘But if she sits side-saddle, she looks like a woman’. And he added, helpfully, that women sitting side-saddle only rarely fell off.

But ‘how to ride a motorbike is not regulated in Sharia’ protested one local. ‘There is no mention of it in the Koran’. And it does seem that the new regulation has not been fully thought through. What if the woman is driving the motorcycle? Should her crash helmet be worn over or under the burka? What position should she adopt when riding a push bike? What about two women on a tandem? Which side should she face when riding side-saddle?

Well the answer to the last one is obvious. – Whichever side faces Mecca. Although care will be needed to face the proper direction when turning corners.

NW

Proper Gander: Courting Mormons (2013)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mormonism will be under the theatrical spotlight with the London debut of musical The Book of Mormon later this month. This provocative production has been written by the creators of South Park, which featured an episode lampooning the faith’s flimsy origins. In the 1820s, humble farmer Joseph Smith was supposedly directed by an angel to some magic golden plates inscribed with sacred texts, which no-one else ever saw. His translations of these apparently-real inscriptions formed the basis of Mormonism, a spin-off from Christianity with a morbid emphasis on judgement after you kick the bucket. The South Park episode made the point that nice, friendly people can have some pretty wacky beliefs. This was also borne out by BBC3 documentary Young, Mormon and Single.

The programme focused on the annual week-long Duck Beach gathering in North Carolina, U S of A. This is where hundreds of single Mormons meet up looking for love and marriage; a Mormon meat market, even. Getting hitched is central to Mormon beliefs, with marriage being what you aspire for. And there’s something else missing in an unmarried Mormon’s life as well as a ring on their finger. This is a ticket to the VIP area of their ‘Celestial Kingdom’ afterlife, only open to married (and deceased) Mormons. Aiming for this adds to the pressure to find Mr / Miss Right already felt by these no-sex-before-marriage hormone-bombs. So, when courting Mormons split up, their emotional fallout includes dealing with guilt that they’re not following their faith properly. It’s a shame that all the emotions that come with finding a partner are complicated and constrained by the far-fetched beliefs Mormons have. On top of these expectations, Mormons have to manage without alcohol and drugs as social lubricants at the Duck Beach gathering. But they prove that you can have a good night playing party games and dancing about without booze. And at least this means they can play beach volleyball the following morning, rather than waking up with a pounding head after downing seventeen Jack Daniel’s.

Mike Foster

Obituary: Roland Lambert (2013)

Obituary from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

West London branch are saddened to have to announce the death in November of Roland Lambert, who was the Party’s Head Office Organiser until a couple of years ago, at the relatively early age of 62. Roland first joined the Socialist Party in 1968 at the age of 18, having previously been in the YCL. He was born, bred and lived and worked all his life in the Chiswick area of West London, working for the parks department of Hounslow Council. He was an active member of the branch, participating in all its activities and attending the regular fortnightly meetings. As Head Office Organiser he came into contact with members and others throughout the country who will remember him for his helpful and unassuming manner. Our condolences go to his partner and family.

Action Replay: Reds in the Red (2013)

The Action Replay column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Salford is the largest city in England without a professional football club. You might think that the proximity to Manchester more than made up for this, but it also has something Manchester lacks, a professional rugby league team, currently known as Salford City Reds (it used to have two, but Swinton Lions are at present playing at Leigh’s ground because of their own financial problems).

Last year Reds left their stadium at the Willows to move to a new ground, the Salford City Stadium at Barton, a brownfield site near the River Irwell. The stadium was built as a joint venture between Salford Council and Peel Holdings, the largest property investment company in the UK (they also own the Manchester Ship Canal and Liverpool Airport). The stadium, currently shared with rugby union club, Sale Sharks, actually belongs to Peel, and optimistic comparisons were made between the Reds’ move to Barton and Manchester City’s move to their new Eastlands stadium and the investment that attracted.

But all did not go well. Blame has been attached to the general economic recession, to overinvestment in new players, and to failure to attract large enough crowds; whatever the reason, Salford got into financial difficulties and had their bank account frozen, though the chairman insisted it was just ‘a short-term cash flow problem’. In December Salford Council rejected a £1.5m rescue plan.

At the time of writing, the club owe money to ex-players and to Revenue & Customs. A hearing to wind them up was due to be held in early January but was adjourned until 4 February, just after the new league season starts. A millionaire racehorse owner has now emerged as a potential buyer.

So it looks like another example of an enterprise aiming too high, failing to achieve its targets and so possibly going out of business. A familiar story in sport and other areas of the economy.

Paul Bennett

Mixed Media: The Strange Agency (2013)

The Mixed Media column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Strange Agency (Live in Tottenham)

The Strange Agency, an Anarcho-Socialist ‘prog rock’ quartet from West Wales was the highlight at the ‘Paranoid Olympics’, a Mad Pride fund-raiser for the Campaign Against Welfare Benefit Cuts in Tottenham recently.

The Strange Agency (possibly named in homage to the 1960s Marvel Comics superhero, Dr Strange) are Craig High, vocals, Dave Bates on guitar, Issy Bates on bass guitar, and Steve Johnstone on drums. Their début LP, Strange One, was reviewed by Classic Rock Magazine in September 2012, which declared that: ‘Had this unruly bunch of West Wales long hairs been signed to Stiff Records in 1976, you can’t help but think chart success would surely have been theirs’. Dave was previously a long-term member of former Hawkwind front man Nik Turner’s band, and Craig also worked with Turner on a dub/psych version of the 1973 Hawkwind single Urban Guerrilla, which was about the anarchist Angry Brigade.

The Strange Agency played a set of nine songs in Tottenham which displayed Craig High’s political lyricism from helping out your neighbour in Digging Holes – also notable for the John Cipollina guitar style of Dave Bates – to Stanley, a tribute song to the film director Kubrick, famous for the anti-nuclear bomb film Dr Strangelove, and the psychedelic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Twisted Instinct is a powerful tour de force, referencing LSD discoverer, Albert Hoffman, and musically it was Blue Cheer’s cover of Summertime Blues or James Williamson’s guitar on Iggy and the Stooges album Raw Power. The lyric ‘Do they know what we are after? signals a call to overthrow the system. Digital Inferno is an attack on capitalist war, The Storm identifies the bankruptcy of bourgeois capitalism and Judeo-Christian civilisation, Corporate Buildings highlights the oppression of financial capitalism, A Global Warning shows that capitalism is the enemy of nature and the urgent need for a green socialism. Whirlpool attacks political apathy and urges people to ‘mobilise your picket lines’ and ‘mass action is a must’.

Craig High’s vocals are articulate and literate Punk, and his trilling ‘r’s’ are reminiscent of John Lydon while Dave Bates’ guitar has its origins in Hendrix. With Craig also on clarinet or blues harp, the Strange Agency effect is a 1960s and 70s psychedelic and progressive melodic rock sound. Think of a heavier Tom Verlaine and Television circa 1977.

Steve Clayton

Cooking the Books: Why the Arms Trade (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, is the LibDem MP for Twickenham. At a meeting in his constituency on 29 November he was handed a petition signed by 9,000 demanding an end to arms sales to oppressive regimes. Among other things, the petitioners criticised the government for helping organise the two-yearly arms fair at the Excel Centre in London. According to the local paper:

‘Business Secretary Dr Cable defended his position and said the aerospace sector was helping to refuel the economy and countries should be allowed to protect themselves. Dr Cable said: “I am not a pacifist. I do accept that governments and countries have a right to defend themselves and that is done either through manufacturing or [importing] the weapons to do so”’ (Richmond & Twickenham Times, 7 December).

Actually, given capitalism (which both he and the petitioners accept), this is not an unreasonable answer. The world is divided politically into armed states whose governments preside over the operation of capitalism in the territory where their writ runs. These states are all jockeying for position over access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and investment outlets. It’s a struggle in which ‘might is right’.

In order to maintain their position, states need to arm themselves with the most destructive weapons they can afford, not necessarily to use but to show how much ‘might’ they have when it comes to negotiations over these economic matters. They need weapons for this just as much to ‘protect themselves’ in the event of invasion. In fact, actual war is only as a last resort, when a state considers that its ‘vital economic interests’ are under serious threat.

So, there is an economic demand for weapons, and where there is a paying demand a profit-seeking supply will arise to meet it. Britain has an arms-producing capacity – miscalled the ‘defence industry’ which can meet this demand. The capitalist firms concerned are not going to miss this opportunity to make profits, and the government is not going to discourage them. Quite the reverse. The Prime Minister himself has not hesitated to personally become a ‘merchant of death’:

‘The Prime Minister said Britain should support all sectors of the economy where it had a comparative advantage, including defence. He came under fire last week for pushing for contracts for Typhoon jets in UAE, Saudi Arabia and Oman. He previously led trade missions to Africa, Indonesia, China, India, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and Malaysia’ (Times, 13 November).

Opponents of the arms trade argue that it promotes war. But they have got it the wrong way round. It is economic competition in which ‘might is right’ that promotes the arms trade. As long as capitalism lasts with this built-in competitive struggle between states over economic matters there will be a demand for arms and so an arms trade. No state which has, as Cameron put it, a ‘comparative advantage’ in arms production is going to renounce this profit-making advantage on ‘ethical’ grounds. This means that, given capitalism, the opponents, despite their sincerity and however justified their objection to arms and arms trading which socialists share, will unfortunately be tilting at windmills. The only way to stop it is to join us in campaigning to end capitalism.

Religious Observations (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TÜBİTAK) has put a stop to the publication and sale of all books in its archives that support the theory of evolution, daily Radikal has reported. Titles by Richard Dawkins, Alan Moorehead, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Levontin and James Watson are all included in the list of books that will no longer be available to Turkish readers: (Link)

Every year an unknown number of children – most of them disabled in some way – are murdered in northern Ghana because of the belief that they are in some way possessed by evil spirits set on bringing ill fortune to those around them. The practice is the consequence of ancient traditions and customs and is shaped by poverty and ignorance in remote and often marginalised communities. But it is still infanticide and no less horrifying than the killing of children anywhere. For years NGOs and the Ghanaian authorities have tried advocacy and education in an attempt to eradicate the practice but with only marginal success. Well into the 21st century, Ghana’s so called spirit children are still being killed because they carry the blame for the misfortunes of everyday life: (Link)

Millions of children in Indonesian elementary schools may no longer have separate science classes starting in June, the beginning of their next school year, if the government approves a curriculum overhaul that would merge science and social studies with other classes so more time can be devoted to religious education…. Officials who back the changes say that more religious instruction is needed because a lack of moral development has led to an increase in violence and vandalism among youths, and that could fuel social unrest and corruption in the future: (Link)

A popular Indian spiritual guru sparked a backlash Tuesday after saying a 23-year-old student could have averted a murderous gang-rape by begging for mercy from her attackers. Self-styled godman Asharam, known to his followers as ‘Bapu’ or father, told his devotees: ‘This tragedy would not have happened if she had chanted God’s name and fallen at the feet of the attackers. The error was not committed by just one side,’ he said: (Dead Link)

Being spiritual may give life deeper meaning but it can also mess up your mind, research suggests. A study found that people professing to be spiritual, but not conventionally religious, were more likely to suffer from a host of mental challenges. Their demons included abnormal eating conditions, drug abuse, anxiety disorder, phobias and neurosis. They were also more likely than others to be taking medication for mental health problems: (Dead Link)

What is Capitalism? (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the dawn of humanity people lived in small communal groups and shared the produce of the day’s gathering and hunting amongst themselves to ensure their collective survival. With the advent of agriculture, many thousands of years later, came private property. With private property came social classes and the state. Property, in the form of land and cattle to begin with, has to be defended from those who do not own it. The state develops as institutions are created to help preserve private property.

Early agricultural society eventually develops into feudalism. At the top of the feudal system is an all-powerful monarch; below him, barons and knights; and below them, peasants and serfs. The monarch grants the barons land in return for support in times of war. At the bottom of the pyramid are the peasants and serfs who work the land. Serfs are tied to the land and have to give a certain amount of work a year to support the barons.

Eventually, as the result of a process that begins in the seventeenth century, increasing numbers of peasants are driven from the land and become wage-labourers. The era of Capital is born.

Capitalism is a system of society in which the purpose of economic activity is to both reproduce and enlarge capital.

What is capital?

‘Capital’ is wealth, but a very specific type of wealth, which merely through ownership allows one to create more wealth. In capitalism wealth takes the form of commodities.  A commodity is any useful product of human labour that is produced to be exchanged. Money acts as the universal equivalent of all commodities.

Since all goods have been turned into commodities, and access to non-commodified materials is restricted, those without the means of producing anything to exchange must sell the only thing they have: their capacity to work and bring themselves back to work the next day –their labour-power.

As an economic system, capitalism involves just two classes. On one hand, the capitalists, those who use their monopoly on the productive wealth (factories, raw materials etc.) to create more wealth, and on the other, non-owners of capital, the workers.

In feudal society, as the peasants have their own means of production, surplus must be extracted via ‘extra-economic’ methods through the real or ultimate threat of force. In capitalism surplus wealth is extracted through economic means; it is because of the market-dependency of the wage-labourer that labour-power is sold and the owner of capital profits from it.

Production in a capitalist society is not production for use but production for exchange with a view to a profit. The producer does not produce to directly satisfy a need but produces in order to exchange one commodity for another. In order to produce, the capitalist must purchase means of production (factories, land, equipment etc.) and labour-power. Once the production cycle is complete the capitalist hopes to recoup these costs plus an extra amount on top (the profits).

To survive in the competitive marketplace each enterprise attempts to increase the amount of profit coming to it; the capitalists must strive to increase the productivity of labour-power. But paradoxically this increased productivity has the effect of lowering the value of commodities since less labour-time is required per unit to produce them.

If an enterprise adopts a new production technique that allows it to produce commodities at a rate below the socially necessary average labour time it will have a competitive advantage: it can sell the commodity cheaper than its competitors and yet still make a profit or sell at the same price as its competitors and make ‘super profits’.

To compete and remain profitable, the competitors have to adopt this new technique also. The socially necessary average labour time is now reduced across the board; instead of being a means of gaining a competitive edge, the new technique is now a necessity for remaining in business.

It is this never-ending need to improve production techniques that creates the dynamic of capitalism. To simply stand still capitalists must re-invest the majority of their surplus value. Without keeping pace of developments in machinery and technological advances the capitalist would go out of business and cease to be a capitalist.

In this sense then, capitalism is not a system for the enrichment of individuals but a system for the never ending accumulation of capital for its own sake.

At odds with itself

In primitive societies where production is not yet market dependent crises take the form of disease, pestilence, famine and natural disasters. In capitalist societies crises tend not to be caused by nature. For the most part we can store enough surplus to protect us from the ravages of the elements. Capitalist crises occur when the market mechanisms that regulate the distribution of labour break down. This is not because of some external influence that disrupts an otherwise balanced system but because of the internal contradictions of capital which periodically present and resolve themselves through crisis.

Capitalists throw their money into circulation in order to have it returned plus a profit. When there are no profitable avenues of investment to be found the production cycle freezes up, commodities pile up in warehouses, debts cannot be repaid and economic activity comes to grinding halt.

Crises can only be overcome by the devaluing of capital. This is done by selling off commodities cheaply, laying off workers, shutting down factories and dropping property prices. Though some capitalists will not survive the purge some will and those that do will be able to buy the assets of their former competitors at knock down prices, thus fuelling the next round of accumulation.

The capitalist system is the most productive mode of production in the history of humankind. In the space of a few centuries the world has been transformed beyond all recognition. Average life expectancies have more than doubled. Technological developments occur at a rate that would have been previously unimaginable. More food, clothing and shelter can be produced using less labour than ever before. It would seem that the material problems of survival have finally been solved.

Yet capitalism is a system at odds with itself. The need for constant accumulation is the driving force of society, determining where and in what way human energies will be used. Instead of being a system through which humankind controls the fulfilment of its own development, humanity is controlled by a system which it has itself created. It is the conflict between the need to accumulate capital and the need to fulfil human want that is at the heart of all social problems today.

Capitalism creates vast wealth but it also creates vast poverty and inequality. If you image the world were shrunk to a global village of 100 people with all ratios remaining the same, 20 people would own 75 per cent of the wealth, 21 would live on $1.25 a day or less, 18 would live without clean water and 14 would go hungry or malnourished.

Society has passed through many stages and it would seem unlikely that this current one is the final. A further period of social change is possible, where humanity as a whole takes control of the productive powers and where human need becomes the guiding force for a new age of technological and scientific progress.

DJP

50 Years Ago: Sir William (2013)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nobody who has troubled to keep an eye on the trade union movement will have fainted with surprise at the news that the New Year Honours List brought a knighthood to William Carron.

Carron, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (motto, carved impressively on the presidential chair, “Be United And Industrious “), is the latest in a lengthening line of trade union knights, preceded by such as Tom O’Brien of NATKE and Tom Williamson (now a life peer) of NUGMW.

One thing these men have in common. They are all what is known as “moderate” trade union leaders. And “moderate” is another of the euphemisms beloved of the Capitalist press.

It means a trade union leader who can be relied upon to angrily denounce unofficial strikes. It means the sort of leader who suffers the wage restrictions of a Labour government and who cooperates in drives for greater efficiency and productivity. A man who thinks that it is a good idea for the unions to be represented on the National Economic Development Council and other such bodies, which are designed to promote co-operation between the workers and the employers. It means a man who does his best to ignore the fact that there is a class struggle in Capitalist society. .

But this is not what trade unions are there for. The unions should concern themselves with protecting and advancing the interests of their members. They should be struggling for higher pay, shorter hours, better working conditions, and so on. But where do honours come into all this?

Honours are reserved for the people who have served Capitalism in some way or other; they are the establishment’s mark of appreciation.

It is a bitter commentary on the standing of the trade unions today, and on the standard of consciousness of their members, that the men at the top are so often coming to wear a coronet or some other bauble to show that Capitalism has looked upon them and found them good.

(From ‘News in Review’, Socialist Standard, February 1963)

Obituary: Stan Royal (2013)

Obituary from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our oldest and longest-standing member, Stan Royal, died in November a few weeks short of his 98th birthday. He was born in Fulham in 1914 and joined the Socialist Party in 1942. During the war, as a carpenter by trade, he was directed to work on bomb damage. Afterwards he and a brother set up their own business. Later he worked as a surveyor pricing jobs for Ealing and then for Wandsworth council. He was an active member of West London branch until he retired to live near Arundel in Sussex but still kept in touch.

Curate’s egg (2013)

Book Review from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Guide to Marx’s Capital, Volumes I-III. By Kenneth Smith. Anthem Press, 2012.

Readers of Volume I of Karl Marx’s Capital may have found the early theoretical chapters difficult. In a letter to Kugelmann (30 November 1867) Marx advises him that the following chapters were the most immediately readable: ‘Working Day’ (Vol. I, Part III), ‘Co-operation’ and ‘The Division of Labour and Machinery’ (Part IV) and ‘Primitive Accumulation’ (Part VI). In a letter to Wollmann (19 March 1877) Marx explained why he did not follow his own advice and start the book with the descriptive historical material: ‘In the scientific exposition the arrangement is prescribed for the author, although some other arrangement might often be more convenient and more appropriate for the reader’.

Building on Marx’s advice to Kugelmann, Kenneth Smith’s guide presents the three volumes of Capital in a different order of reading to that in which they were published, as a more user-friendly way of reading Marx’s work. However, in the course of his exposition Smith argues that for most of the twentieth century the full development of capitalism has been undermined by the existence of a non-capitalist ‘third world’ which has caused capitalism to take on the form of a highly developed mercantile system. Mercantilism, as Smith points out, is basically ‘buying cheap in order to sell dear’, rather than the accumulation of capital in industrial enterprises. But while some sellers can profit in this way, the seller’s gain is exactly offset by the buyer’s loss. The total amount of value in existence remains unchanged. If all sell dear then they cannot buy cheap and all lose as buyers exactly what they gain as sellers. Exchange, in Smith’s interpretation, is a zero-sum game. There has undoubtedly been a growth of speculative finance, but without the surplus value provided by the accumulation of capital there would have been no growth of ‘mercantile-capital’.

Smith also repeats a few myths, such as the claim that capitalism for Marx was characterised by increasing ‘immiseration’ of the working class. Despite the usual use of quotation marks, Marx never used that term. Central to the notion of ‘immiseration’ is increasing poverty of the working class, but this is based on a misunderstanding of Marx’s discussion of paupers in mid-nineteenth century Britain. The increasing pauperism Marx mentions in Chapter 25 of Volume I refers to the then ‘lowest sediment’ of society (the unemployed, the ragged, the sick, the old, the widows and orphans), not the entire working class. This issue is important because many commentators cite this misunderstanding as proof that Marx was completely wrong. For instance, the influential economist Paul Samuelson has asserted that since ‘the immiseration of the working class’ (using quotation marks as though he is quoting Marx) ‘simply never took place’ Capital can be disregarded (‘Marxian Economics as Economics’, American Economic Review, Vol. 57, 1967). Capital still demands attention, but Smith’s guide cannot be recommended.

Lew Higgins

Zeitgeist and ‘Marxism’ (2013)

From the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Zeitgeist Movement, founded in America in 2008 by Peter Joseph and Jacque Fresco, stands for a worldwide ‘resource-based economy, which in many respects resembles what we called ‘socialism’ (and, if pressed, ‘communism’): the Earth’s resources would become the common heritage of all humanity and be used in a rational way to provide what people need and to which they would have free access without money; and calculations concerning production would be done solely in units of resources and not duplicated by monetary calculation, as today.

The Movement’s opponents have also noticed a similarity and have denounced Zeitgeist for propagating ‘Marxist Communism’, still a powerful swear-word in the US. ZM’s response, in a new guide to their orientation just published on the internet, is to insist that they are not Marxists (see thezeitgeistmovement.com/orientation). This is true. They aren’t. While they are scientific materialists and do see humans as adapting their social arrangements in the light of changing economic and technological conditions, they do not see the agency for these adaptations as some class pursuing its material class interest.

Referencing the Communist Manifesto of 1848, they acknowledge that the goal it advocates is a ‘stateless and classless society’. (Curiously, they omit ‘moneyless’ even though the Manifesto speaks specifically of ‘the communist abolition of buying and selling’.) But they go on:

‘On the surface, reformations proposed in TZM’s promoted solutions might appear to mirror attributes of ‘Marxism’ if one was to completely ignore the underlying reasoning. The idea of a society ‘without classes’, ‘without universal property’, and the complete redefinition of what comprises the ‘State’ might, on the surface, show confluence by the mere gestures themselves …. However, the actual Train of Thought to support these seemingly similar conclusions is quite different. TZM’s advocated benchmark for decision making is not a Moral Philosophy, which, when examined at its root, is essentially what Marxist philosophy was a manifestation of.’

Continuing the same theme, they say ‘the Marxist notion of a “classless society” was to overcome the capitalist originating “inhumanity” imposed on the working class or “proletariat”.’

They then expound their own approach:

‘TZM’s advocated train of thought, on the other hand, sources advantages in human studies. It finds, for example, that social stratification, which is inherent to the capitalist/market model, to actually be a form of indirect violence against the vast majority as a result of the evolutionary psychology we humans naturally possess. It generates an unnecessary form of human suffering on many levels which is destabilizing and, by implication, technically unsustainable.’ (Their emphasis)

So, unless all they are concerned about is that capitalism is ‘technically unsustainable’, they too want to overcome the ‘indirect violence’ and unnecessary suffering that its ‘social stratification’ imposes on the ‘vast majority’. So let’s not argue about who is more scientific than thou.

Is ‘Marxism’ really a ‘moral philosophy’? What, in fact, is ‘Marxism’? Is it the views of Marx the individual or the system of thought that Engels called ‘Scientific Socialism’? It is true that in his earliest writings, just after becoming a socialist at the end of 1843, Marx’s approach was philosophical rather than scientific. He denounced ‘political economy’ and ‘private property’ for resulting in the treatment of the ‘proletariat’ in a way that was contrary to the ‘species-nature’ of humans. This could indeed be interpreted as basing the case for socialism on a ‘moral philosophy’ –a view of how humans should be treated but weren’t.

However, while Marx never abandoned his indignation at what the working class had to suffer under capitalism, he soon ceased to base the case for socialism on a philosophical theory of human nature. Already in the Communist Manifesto he was criticising other German Socialists for not seeing socialism as the movement and outcome of the struggle of ‘one class with another’ but as representing ‘not the interest of the proletariat, but the interest of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.’

As Engels was later to put it, in Socialism Scientific and Socialism, based on something he had written in 1875:

‘Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms, existing in the society of to-day, between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production.’

Socialism was a class issue, not a mere moral issue; it was when this was recognised that socialism ceased to be ‘utopian’ and became ‘scientific’.

Engels’s pamphlet was in effect the founding document (much more than the Communist Manifesto) of what has come to be called ‘Marxism’ – though not by Marx himself. Marx was right about this, as the term suggests that socialist theory was the product of ideas thought up by one man, whereas, in fact, being a reflection of an on-going struggle built-in to capitalist society, it would have developed even if Marx and Engels had never been born and stands independently of whatever they may or may not have said or done. But inadequate as the term is, we are lumbered with it.

So, when, in their criticism of what we will have to call ‘Marxism’, ZM go on to say the following, they are in fact expressing a view shared by Scientific Socialism:

‘TZM is not interested in the poetic, subjective & arbitrary notions of “a fair society”, “guaranteed freedom”, “world peace”, or “making a better world” simply because it sounds “right”, “humane” or “good”.’

They go on:

‘Rather, TZM is interested in Scientific Application, as applied to societal sustainability, both physical and cultural. …. The Method of Science is not restricted in its application to the “physical world” and hence the social system, infrastructure, educational relevance and even understanding human behavior itself, all exist within the confines of scientific causality. In turn, there is a natural feedback system built into physical reality which will express itself very clearly in the context of what ‘works’ and what doesn’t over time, guiding our conscious adaptation.’

Apart from the language, Marx had said something similar in 1859 in his well-known outline of the materialist conception of history in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in particular:

‘Humanity always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve: indeed, on closer examination, it will always be found that the task itself only arises when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.’

In other words, as long as a social and economic system is ‘working’ there will be no pressure to change it. Marx identified the pressure for change as arising when a contradiction developed between a newly emerging way of organising the production of the wealth of society and a social and political superstructure reflecting an earlier technico-economic basis; the agent for change was a class that organised and benefitted from the new method and which would engage in a struggle with the old ruling class for control of political power. Technico-economic changes made a change of society necessary but the agent of change would be a specific class rather than the members of society in general that Zeitgeist seem to be suggesting

The same applies to the change from capitalism to socialism where, according to Marx, the agent of change will be the majority class of wage and salary workers and their dependents struggling against the entrenched minority capitalist class for control over the means of wealth production.

Insofar as ZM reject the class struggle they can be acquitted of the charge of ‘Marxism’. However, as they stand for the Earth’s resources becoming the common heritage of all, they must be found guilty of standing for ‘Communism.’

Adam Buick