Life and Times: The Annual Vegan Fair (2026)

The Life and Times column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Vegan Fair I went to near where I live was quite an event. People milled around outside the hall where it was being held and on either side of the entrance there were queues at the two food-to-go stalls, one of them offering Persian vegan mezze and the other vegan American-style burgers. I’d arranged to meet my friend Jane, an enthusiastic anti-vivisection campaigner, and when I arrived, she was already outside the hall handing out leaflets and asking people for petition signatures. I greatly admire her dedication and share her concern for the suffering that vast numbers of animals are subjected to in the millions of experiments on them every year – many for no faintly useful purpose. And I’m sympathetic to the vegan cause more generally and to those who put the case for it, though I also think that such things as the food people eat and the clothes they wear must in the end be a matter of personal choice.

Entrance to the hall itself was free and the place was packed. There were stalls and tables of various kinds selling a variety of different types of food as well as jewellery, clothes and ornaments. People seemed most interested in the food and I suppose I was too. What caught my eye among all else was, of all things, a stall offering a wide selection of different types of olive. I liked the look of one particular kind and the young woman at the table selling them told me they were ‘a special olive’. So I asked for some. They turned out be a special price. Too late. I should have asked about that first. But never mind.

Later on, I sat down with Jane and one of her fellow campaigners at the large dining table in the centre of the hall. We’d bought coffee and snacks and, as we ate and talked, I also began looking at the various leaflets and flyers scattered across the table. One in particular caught my eye. It was headed ‘Socialists for Animal Liberation (SAL)’. I read what it had to say and was definitely impressed. One of its paragraphs went as follows: ‘Capitalism is a highly destructive system that drives inequality, war, famine and environmental collapse in order to concentrate wealth and extreme power in the hands of the few. The need for a new economic system is clear. But if we want a future that’s sustainable and one that is not predicated on violence or exploitation, then we must reject capitalism and simultaneously reject all forms of animal exploitation’. It went on to outline aspects of the suffering inflicted on animals by factory farming, adding that ’no amount of suffering is too much for a system which cares only about maximising profit’ and concluding that ‘a post-capitalist society will inherently end the exploitation of animals’.

Later, I used the email address on it to write for further information, outlining what it seemed to me SAL had in common with the Socialist Party but also mentioning that many socialists could only see decent treatment for animals as a pipe dream under a system that set so little store by decent treatment for humans. I amplified this by saying that I thought we should therefore put our energies into campaigning for ‘system change’ (ie a new democratic, marketless, leaderless world system of production for use, without buying and selling or wages and salaries and based on free access to all goods and services) rather than focusing on issues within capitalism that we might consider ‘immediate’ and ‘priority’. I expressed the view that to do otherwise could only have the effect of postponing real system change until the first of never. I nevertheless stressed my personal sympathy with the concerns of the group and asked for more information about SAL and its activities.

I got a quick and friendly reply from their organiser, Claire, together with a copy of the SAL manifesto, which, as well as calling for involvement in ongoing issues of ‘animal rights’, stated: ‘With its emphasis on ending profit-based relationships, on social ownership and a planned economy, SAL remains convinced that it is only in the context of a socialist society that animals will achieve true liberation’. I couldn’t disagree with this or with their statement that they welcomed ‘any reduction, big or small, in the abuse that animals suffer’. Claire also invited me to the group’s next online meeting the following week, which I attended and found interesting, even if I wasn’t convinced that everyone there had a clear notion of what socialism meant. Since then, I’ve been invited to other meetings, one of which was a ‘reading group’ to discuss an article entitled ‘The Case for Socialist Veganism’ from an American journal, Monthly Review. I wasn’t able to attend but, since I’d a written a piece on that very article in a recent issue of the Socialist Standard, I drew Claire’s attention to it and she replied that she would circulate it among the group. I don’t know if she did and, if so, what they made of it, but I couldn’t help thinking that it might well be submerged in discussion of what could be done to alleviate the plight of animals here and now.

Perhaps that’s being unfair, but when, at the vegan fair that day, I drew the attention of Jane, my anti-vivisectionist friend, to the SAL leaflet, she showed little interest, focused as she was on her own immediate mission. And I couldn’t help feeling that, despite the SAL group’s stated desire for a ‘post-capitalist’ society, their overwhelming focus too would be on the various reforms they were chasing in the current system and which, even if achieved, would bring us no nearer the aim stated in their leaflet of ‘a future that works for people, planet and animals’.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: Einstein got it right (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the first issue of Monthly Review in May 1949 Einstein contributed an essay entitled Why Socialism?. He began by explaining that humans are naturally social animals but that the structure of present-day society prevents this from being properly expressed, leading to the ‘crippling of the social consciousness of individuals’, and that ‘the economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the source of the evil’.

He explained the workers’ situation under capitalism:

‘For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call “workers” all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production – although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is “free,” what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists’ requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.’

The ideological apologists of capitalism are still trying to refute this as a recent contribution to Mises Wire, entitled ‘Albert Einstein and the Folly of Marxist Sympathies’, shows. The author, Kgatlhiso Darius Leshaba, challenged Einstein’s endorsement above of Marx’s theory of worker exploitation:

‘The first problem we run into is the concept of value. It has been firmly established that economic value isn’t intrinsic, that “The measure of value is entirely subjective in nature.” Value is not transferred somehow from labor to product. In fact, the direction of the imputation of value is exactly the other way around. The economic value of labor is determined by the value of the final product it aids in producing’ (tinyurl.com/bdh7d6je).

Leshaba was quoting Carl Menger (1840-1921), the founder of the so-called Austrian School of economics, who came up with a theory aimed at refuting Marx or, in the words of the Mises Institute, ‘corrected theoretical errors of the old classical school. These errors concerned value theory, and they had sown enough confusion to make the dangerous ideology of Marxism seem more plausible than it really was’ (tinyurl.com/3r7n4wy2).

To say that economic value is ‘entirely subjective’ is to confuse use-value and exchange-value and assumes that production is carried on simply for the use of consumers. Obviously a commodity, as an item of wealth produced to be sold, has to be useful to somebody, otherwise it wouldn’t sell. The demand for it could be said to be ‘subjective’ in the sense that it depends on the buyers’ preferences but this merely explains the pattern of (paying) demand for something. It does not explain the supply.

No firm is going to produce a commodity unless it calculates that the income from selling it will at least (in practice more than) cover the prices of what it had to buy to produce it. So cost of production comes into it and that does not depend on the preferences of consumers. The claim that production costs (including wages) are subjective because their value is derived from being used to produce some consumer good whose value is said to be subjective is just assuming what has to be proved. It doesn’t explain the division of what national income statisticians call ‘added value’ into wages and profits and is not taught these days even in bourgeois economics.

Does veganism help? (2024)

From the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The term ‘greenwashing’ is often used to describe attempts, often by big companies, to convey the false impression that their goods are produced in an environmentally friendly and sustainable way – and this sometimes with a view to distracting attention from their involvement in other environmentally damaging practices. Some, in fact, see the whole of the current ‘green’ agenda as, under cover of support for the environment, actually extracting from it resources it cannot afford to lose and, no matter how good the intentions of the ‘deep’ or ‘bright’ greens, as no more than a sop to capitalism’s growth. This consists of regarding the Earth only as a target for producing goods for sale on the market and of being unable by its nature to do other than subordinate real care for flora, fauna and climate to the imperatives of growth and production for profit. In the words of one writer: ‘Our way of life doesn’t need to be saved. The planet needs to be saved from our way of life’ .

Plant-based

As part of ‘greenwashing’ in production and consumption via various ‘green’ solutions (eg, solar panels, wind turbines, green energy storage, recycling, LED lights, electric cars, hydropower, biomass, geothermal energy, etc.), some now add a particular lifestyle often presented as a way to reduce climate change and human impact on the environment: plant-based eating or veganism. In a recent article in Monthly Review entitled ‘The Case for Socialist Veganism’ , Benjamin Selwyn and Charis Davies point to the fact that many of the companies and corporations that have embraced the plant-based market use this as ‘cover’ for the damaging environmental impact they cause with their other production (‘meat, dairy and other environmental ruinous activities’). This, they say, represents ‘attempts at corporate brand greenwashing’ and is aimed at continued expansion of their sales and markets. It includes fast-food chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King, whose products are still overwhelmingly meat-based but who have developed plant-based product lines in an attempt to cash in on growing concerns for the environment or animal welfare. A chart the authors have put together demonstrates that plant-based brands not readily associated with big corporations often turn out to be owned by large non-vegan parent companies (e.g. Vivera by JBS, the world’s largest meat company; the Vegetarian Butcher by Unilever; Alpro by Danone, one of the biggest dairy companies in the world). And all these companies continue to have a massively damaging environmental impact in such areas as support for deforestation, mass-scale meat and dairy production, high levels of plastic pollution and damage to natural water sources. So JBS, while promoting Vivera under the flag of promoting ‘the wellbeing of the planet’, slaughters 8.7 million birds, 92,600 hogs and 42,700 head of cattle every day of the year, thus making an appreciable contribution to climate breakdown via deforestation, greenhouse gases from cattle and cultivation of massive quantities of feed crops. Unilever, for its part, was, in 2022, named as one of ‘the top ten global polluters’, and Danone too is a leading plastic polluter and, despite its stated aim to encourage ‘healthy eating trends’, is largely focused on cow’s milk production, which produces three times more greenhouse gas emissions than plant-based milk and, like for like, uses ten times more land.

The charge here is that, however much veganism may have the potential to reduce human impact on the environment, the relative monopoly held by the big food producers makes that impossible. Focused as they are on animal-based production, any positive effect of vegan production is likely to be small and may in fact be negated completely if it simply increases the profits and investment power of the big producers and so aids their continuing focus on producing meat and milk as cheaply as possible, and so paradoxically increasing animal suffering and exploitation.

An ethical marriage?

So what to do? The solution which the authors of this article propose is to move the food system towards what they call ‘socialist veganism’, also described as ‘an ethical marriage between veganism and socialism’. This, they tell us, would involve the hundreds of billions of dollars currently spent on so called ‘green transitioning’ being directed towards what they call ‘an ecosocially transformative political-economic agenda’. This, they maintain, will help to ‘shift the balance of class power away from capital to labor’ and can be achieved, as they see it, via movements ‘from below’, largely, that is, through collective action by unionised workers to ‘alter the balance of class power between capital and labor in favor of the latter’.

The kind of development they see as necessary is an extension of ‘welfare provision’, through which ‘services are provided across an expanding array of social life as part of the transformation and increasing equalization of society’, and what they call a ‘decommodification of food’. This would mean, they say, that ‘food production itself could be increasingly brought under democratic control by workers, their communities, and consumers’. And this would be part of a ‘broader process of managed degrowth’ and ‘a socialist green transition’, which would include, in the words they quote of John Bellamy Foster, ‘growth in such areas as regenerative agriculture, food production, decent housing, clean energy, accessible health care, universal education, community welfare, public transportation, digital connectivity, and other areas related to green production and social needs’.

They also have other indisputably admirable ambitions, such as various alternatives to chemical-intensive farming assisted in part by use of computerisation and robotisation, hydroponics with plants growing without soil in vertical farms, and precision fermentation producing a whole range of tasty foods that mimic meat and milk products but do not come from animals. Precision fermentation could, we are told, ‘produce the same amount of protein as soy production does in the United States on 1,700 times less land’, which in turn ‘could, through reducing cropland, enable large-scale rewilding (to expand the world’s carbon sinks and restore the diversity of plant and animal species), through restoration of grasslands, wetlands, forests, and savannas’. Part of this transformation would, as the authors see it, allow ‘animals to be raised in more compassionate and ecologically sound ways’, and ‘with reductions in the role of meat in the overall Western diet’. So, the authors, while having a soft spot for veganism, do not necessarily advocate its universal adoption. They say, rather, that ‘vegan food production can, through decommodification and democratization of social life, contribute to providing good quality and affordable food for the many, mitigating climate breakdown, and contributing to mending the metabolic rift’.

Powers of government

Overall, an extremely positive and optimistic case is made by these authors for what they term ‘socialist managed degrowth’, even if, with its only ‘partial’ veganism, it is not what many socialist vegans, especially if coming from an ethical standpoint and favouring universal veganism, would want to hear. But it’s also a proposition that needs to be looked at through the lens of the operating procedures of the society we live in and of what it will take to move to the different operating procedures of a socialist society. Two beliefs seem to underlie the picture painted by the authors. The first one is that the shift to a different kind of society can take place bit by bit via a series of struggles by workers who gradually impose on governments their demands for greater fairness and more equality. The second belief is that governments have the power to bend and flex at will the capitalist system they administer and regardless of the profit imperative that underlies it. For all the good intentions of the authors, these beliefs are untenable, since the role of governments is to be the executive committee of the small class of people who own the productive forces, against whom they cannot act in any substantive way. It’s true that governments sometimes can and do intervene in the running of the system in the wider interests of its survival, such as in the case of America’s ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s (referred to in some detail here by these writers) and in the recent Covid crisis. But they do that to keep the system working not to make it fairer or more equal, even if sometimes reforms they bring in may turn out to give some relief to those suffering most from its effects. But they simply cannot regulate to their heart’s content the system of production for profit and buying and selling.

Tweaks or consciousness?

So what needs to happen to establish the kind of society that no doubt the authors of this article would ultimately want to see – a leaderless, stateless, marketless society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole environment of which we are a part, including its geology and its flora and fauna? What needs to happen is not just some tweaks to the way we live and work today brought about by pressure on governments (which would usually be reversible anyway) but the growth of a democratic movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people which will win control of political power, probably via the ballot box, and then collectively organise that new society. This can only happen of course once the necessary spread of consciousness has been achieved and plans to democratically organise that society are in place. It will then be up to that conscious majority to make all sorts of choices about how they live, including whether humans should continue using animals for food and other purposes and, if so, how and to what extent.

Howard Moss

Socialist Scholars Conference (1989)

From issue 6 of the World Socialist Review

Held at the City University of New York at the beginning of April (which this writer attended), it was impressive enough in terms of the range of subjects it covered, the number of persons attending it and the breadth of representation of the sponsors and participants. The closest thing to it I can think of (and which I have never been to) is an annual event in France sponsored by the Trotskyist Lutte Ouvridro (Workers’Struggle), in which everyone who’s anyone on the left shows up.

It was, on the face of it, a welcome opportunity to discuss ideas and events in a relatively open atmosphere, though in practice, it frequently turned into a war of fixed positions between competing points of view. It also represented an occasion for networking (establishing contacts with other organizations) and generally a pretty good place to find source materials.

Organized by the CUNY Democratic Socialists’ Club and centered nominally on the theme, “Two Centuries of Revolution: 1789-1989," the Conference was used regularly and methodically by the DSs to get in some Marx-bashing; I couldn't be sure how well attended those workshops were, since they were all the same dreary variations on the topic, "Isn’t Marxism dead yet?" which did not help them to seem any more interesting.

Two panels which I did attend—one called “Is Capitalism Entering a New Stage?” sponsored by Monthly Review, featuring Paul Sweezy, Samir Amin and Beatrix Campbell, and the other on “Black Workers and Class Consciousness"—were at least on more provocative subjects. (Sweezy believes the answer to the question is "no”: capitalism is locked on a course of continued stagnation.) The panel on class consciousness among black workers brought forth the usual round of analyses and ended by leaving the impression that black workers are neither more nor less class conscious than any other sectors of the working class in the United States—though racism and systematic underemployment can generate extra obstacles to socialist understanding for blacks.

Had we (the Boston group) made inquiries early enough, we could at least have had adequate time to decide whether or not we wanted to pay for and man a literature booth at the Conference. We should definitely set up a booth there next year; it would give some very good exposure to socialist ideas. If we can demonstrate expertise in some field, it is even possible we could sponsor a panel or workshop of our own at future conferences, assuming there is a show of interest in it from comrades.

Ron Elbert

Revolution and intellectuals (1971)

From issue number 1 (1971) of The Western Socialist

Some few weeks ago this writer received a visit from a graduate university student — a personable but somewhat over-verbalized young man who is working toward his doctorate degree. Following self-introductions and the customary exchange of social amenities, our student lost no time in displaying what he obviously considered a firm theoretical grasp of Marxism and glibly spoke of such organizations as the Communist Party, the Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Labor Party, the Young Socialist Alliance, the Socialist Workers Party, the Progressive Labor Party, the American Youth for Democracy, the Labor Youth League, the Socialist Club, etc. It would seem that the existence of the World Socialist Party had come to his attention for the first time but several weeks prior to his visit via a handed-down, well-thumbed copy of The Western Socialist.

Intellectuals: Vanguards of Revolution?

Warming up to his subject between sips of sherry, he articulately and emphatically expressed the opinion — or more accurately speaking, the conviction that a gifted portion of the intellectuals of any given age, and not the workers or the majority of the people, are the prime movers — the engine, so to speak — of social revolutions. The latter, according to this budding intellectual with a verbal itch he could not seem to satisfactorily scratch, “will need to be led into the promised land by an intellectual vanguard for reason of their apathy and immature mentality.”

The counter arguments presented by this writer, arguments which are undoubtedly familiar to consistent readers of this journal, were augmented with the views of an intellectual — one who has been given, rightly or wrongly, the distinction of being, or having been, the only Marxist teacher in a large American university, the late Paul A. Baran, professor of economics at Stanford University — dealing with revolution and Intellectuals. These views of Baran are found in a pamphlet reprinted from Monthly Review entitled "Reflections on the Cuban Revolution.”

Baran writes that the strong stress placed by students upon the active role of intellectuals relating to revolutions has

"deep theoretical roots, and relates to two propositions which are central to both political theory and a general interpretation of the historical process. One is an Implied rejection of the principal tenet of historical materialism according to which it Is social classes that are the prime agents on the historical scene, with both the composition of these classes and their broad political and ideological outlook determined chiefly by their position in the economic structure. The other, closely connected with the first, is the assertion that the intellectuals constitute a separate social stratum, an ‘elite' above classes which plays an independent and indeed a decisive role In history . . ."

As for the first proposition above — the implication that it is not social classes that are the prime agents on the historical scene — serious students of Marx know, along with Baran, this to be false. For they have learned that history has developed through a series of social revolutions and that this development is brought about by means of class struggle.

Social Revolutions & Class Struggle

Put in over-simplified form, it is found that as the forces of production developed and new relations of production came into being which corresponded to the development of the forces of production, classes came into being. It is known, for example, that there were no classes in primitive society. But with the development of new forces of production (which resulted in, among other things, man being able to produce more than his own needs) and new relations of production, primitive society was broken up and replaced by class society — Slavery (e.g., in Rome) — consisting of slaves, slaveowners and other social classes such as the military, the religious, and the free — but impoverished — proletariat. In time Slavery deteriorated, fell apart or was overthrown by outside Invaders and replaced by Feudal society ruled principally by a landed aristocracy and the church and in which the producing, exploited, class took the form of serfs, bound to the land rather than to individual owners. Subsequently, Capitalism replaced Feudalism. [1]

Now with capitalism there arise new conflicts and class antagonisms. The accumulators of the means of production, the capitalists, through sheer ownership (stocks, bonds, etc.) forcibly deprive — by virtue of their control of the state — the sole producers of social wealth, the workers, of what they have created. Society is spilt between a minute minority of owners and a vast majority of non-owners, bringing with it class conflict and antagonism. Idealistic humanitarians to the contrary, class conflict can only be resolved by the complete abolition of classes.

Serious students of Marxism know that the dynamic of historical change is the conflict between the forces of production and the relations of production, with “the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history" (Letter from Marx and Engels to August Bebel, etc. Emphasis added.) With maligned Marx, such students hold that 

"the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore cooperate with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois" — or, it could be added, freed by a gifted segment or vanguard of society's intellectuals. (Ibid)

As stated above, society in our times is divided into two classes: capitalists and workers, rulers and ruled, exploiters and exploited. One class challenges the other. But unlike the slaveowners and feudal lords of the past, the capitalist class has no rival exploiting class challenging its rule. For it is the workers, the bottom rung of the ladder as it were, a non-exploiting class, who challenge the reign of the capitalists. And the successful consummation of the workers’ challenge, carried out consciously and politically, will spell the end of class society and of the exploitation of man by man. This consummation will once and for all spell finish to the last antagonistic form of the social process of production and consequently end “the prehistory of man" and usher in “truly human history.”

Are intellectuals a separate class?

As for Baran’s second proposition — the implication that the intellectuals constitute a separate class (though Baran calls it “a separate social stratum" — apparently taking his cue from Lenin, who in turn took it from Kautsky’s theory that the intellectuals were not a class but a privileged social stratum) — serious students of Marxism know this also to be false. For they know that those who specialize in intellectual functions no more constitute a class than do those individuals who perform various administrative and executive functions. In brief, intellectuals do not constitute a class with separate class interests (though they may have group interests in common), but function, consciously or not. as an integral portion of one or other of the classes which constitute society — function in the interests of the rulers or the ruled.

Baran continues:

"There are many reasons for this hypo-statization of the intellectuals. Leaving aside the obvious, but therefore by no means irrelevant one, that the glorification of the intellectuals is most flattering to the intellectuals themselves, four considerations must be primarily borne in mind:

"In the first place, the assignment of a crucially important role to the intellectuals is a sociological derivative of an idealistic philosophic position. If intellectuals are the salt of the earth, responsible for the nature and direction of social development, then clearly it is ideas that run history. There is the further implication that these ideas are not mere reflections of processes in the material world (tensions between forces and relations of production, struggles among social classes, and so forth) but rather unfold in an emanate from the pensive heads of the ’freely floating intellectual elite' (Mannheim)."

(It might be noted in passing that Karl Mannheim, referred to above, was a German sociologist with a decided proclivity to place intellectuals in a niche quite above the common herd. Needless to say he was popular with intellectuals throughout the world).

The Materialist Conception of History

Returning to the kernel under discussion, historical materialism teaches that social ideas arise out of the conditions of the material life of society. Marx has afforded us the most lucid, compact formulation of the main elements of the concept of historical materialism in his Preface to a Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy. But for the purpose at hand, the following brief definition of the foundation of the Marxian scientific system as given by Louis B. Boudin in his book The Theoretical System of Karl Marx, will better serve. Boudin writes (p. 23):

"The Materialist conception of history maintains that the evolution of human society as a whole, and that of all human institutions, is not, as the idealists insisted, the result of the changes in men's ideas relative to the society they were living in and its institutions, which changes are brought about by the inherent law of development of ideas; but that, quite to the contrary, the development of society, including men's ideas of human society and institutions, are the result of the development of the material conditions under which men live; that these conditions are the only ones which have an independent existence and development; that the changes of the material conditions cause the institutions of human society to be changed to suit them; and that the ideas on all subjects relating to man in society, including those of right and wrong between man and man and even between man and his God, are changed by man in accordance with and because of, those changed material conditions of his existence."

As outlined by Boudin, the antithesis of historical materialism is philosophic idealism. The latter holds "that the ultimate causes of all historical changes are to be looked for in the changing ideas of human beings (Engels)." Idealists believe that there is little that cannot be changed or altered by the determined will of individuals. Idealists, no matter their label or differences, all have this in common: they appeal explicitly to moral standards which they consider common to all mankind. Marxists are not in sympathy with them. For it is their conviction that individuals actuated by this or that ideal cannot alter laws governing human history. Marxists denounce the existing system by appealing not to ideas but to history. The existing system has nothing to do with unjustness or human folly, but is the inevitable outcome of a certain stage in human history. This stage will pass. But knowing the laws governing human history and applying this knowledge will hasten the passing and lessen the friction and painfulness of the social transition.

Now it invariably happens that when socialists express the principle that social ideas arise out of the conditions of the material life of society — that is to say, the forces of production and the relations of production; the methods, in short, by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves — non-socialists are all too prone to interpret this to be a denial of the significance and the social role of ideas. Any such interpretation is unwarranted. For by all means socialists are acutely aware and, given the opportunity, make quite clear that ideas arising from the conditions of material life of society play a most active role in material development once they come into being. The argument of the socialist primarily concerns not the significance of ideas, but rather their origin.

Intellectual leaders

Without direct comment. Baran's second, third and fourth considerations follow:

"The leadership of nearly all major social movements in history (with the exception of the most primitive peasant rebellions) has consisted of or included intellectuals by upbringing or individuals turned intellectuals in the course of their political careers. What is then simpler than to conclude that since there were always intellectuals prominently associated with revolutionary movements, the intellectuals were their cause and their engine?"

"The growing awareness among intellectuals of the irrationality, inhumanity, and degeneration of capitalism has been accompanied in many Western countries by an increasing disillusionment with the labor movement and a sharpened disappointment with its lack of political dynamism and its widespread capitulation before the capitalist order. Under such circumstances the faith in the awakening of the intellectuals remains the only bright spot on the horizon for those who seek a way out of the impasses of the status quo . . ."

". . . Treating the intellectuals as the yeast of history, counting upon them to move things off dead center serves many intellectuals as a convenient rationalization for staying in the academic or literary ivory towers, from refraining from participating actively in such political and social struggles as are actually fought in their societies."

Baran, having pointed out above the factors which, in his view, help explain why aspiring intellectuals and “intellectuals assign to intellectuals such a vastly inflated role in the historical process," and warning that the "Influence of the intellectuals on the speed, direction and outcome of social movements is not to be denied," sees the problem to be this:

"Under what historical circumstances do intellectuals become drawn in such movements. under what conditions are they capable of affecting the course of events in a particular way. and what forces determine the specific part which they play?"

Aside from a few profound-sounding discourses scattered here and there by intellectuals, the problem posed by Baran in the main goes unanswered. And with the exception of a brief sentence in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels offer no theory as to why intellectuals join the socialist movement. But Marx and Engels have indicated that revolutionary intellectuals are often authoritatively motivated. Such intellectuals would be chiefs, not indians. These self-chosen ones would supplant the present ruling class, but in a more benevolent manner. They believe that the conception of a socialist society is beyond the comprehension of workingmen, and that only they can bring social consciousness to the workers. In reality they have brought not social consciousness to the workers but have brought to the fore instead their own elite authoritarianism.

No, socialism will not be brought about by an intellectual elite and a proclamation of a dictatorship in the name of the workers. Genuine socialism will only be brought about by the working class, consciously and politically organized.

One has only to look about the world today to note that the old vitality of the capitalist order is in sharp decline, is losing favor in wide sections of the people. Intellectuals are definitely not our saviors, but revolutionary intellectuals, with revolutionary thought and propaganda and free of elitism, could class-rightly be our helpmates — could aid in laying to rest nowadays cancerous Capitalism. Intellectuals can be in the forefront with the working class, or perforce follow with their impotent grieving about their impotence upon the latter's heels into World Socialism.

Whether or not the arguments put forth by this writer had any appreciable effect on the mode of thought of his student caller is anyone's guess. The latter left, saying he would call again soon. But this has not come to pass as of this writing.

REN

Endnote:

[1] There were, of course, vast areas of the globe, notably northern Europe and Asia, in which Chattel Slavery was exceptional. The social system may be called Warrior Chiefdoms, with ruling and subject classes and with many vestiges of primitive communal institutions. The system is also called Early Feudalism.

Chattel Slave society was confined to the area around the Mediterranean: Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome. Chattel Slavery dominated the known world and was eventually overthrown by the Barbarians of the North, the early feudalism. The feudal society of the post Roman era evolved from the existing early feudal social relations but was greatly affected by the impact of chattel slave society.

A ‘Free’ Press (2005)

From the February 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

  A free press is a de-facto sign of a liberal democratic capitalist state, and an independent media can often make things uncomfortable for those in charge. So why does the criticism persist that the free press is not really free, and that these champions of public opinion in fact collude in perpetuating not truth but capitalist mythology? 

  “The Primary Freedom of the Press lies in not being a Trade”

(Karl Marx, Rheinische Zeitung, May 1842.) 

   “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” (Anon)

For the last twenty years there has been increasing public awareness that journalistic integrity and the capitalist press are uneasy bedfellows. Various writers, particularly in America, have highlighted the incompatibility between a supposedly ‘free press’ and the production of a newspaper as a commodity for profit. Those who have criticised the press have every right to be scornful. But this is no breakthrough in investigative journalism; capitalism has always corrupted the press and led to it functioning as a mouthpiece for the ruling class, a point explosively demonstrated by Upton Sinclair in 1919 when he first published The Brass Check (republished by University of Illinois Press in 2002). In a timeless and scathing attack on the capitalist press Sinclair asserted “that American journalism is a class institution serving the rich and spurning the poor”, likening the journalist to a prostitute, enslaved in the business ideology of the owning class and functioning to work hand in glove with political leaders and big business to deceive public opinion.

Brass Check was written in the ‘Progressive Era’ at the beginning of the 20th century, a period that saw large swathes of US industry come under the sway of immensely powerful inter-linking monopolistic corporations controlled by a highly concentrated elite of powerful owners. The monopolistic ownership of the newspaper industry that spawned a new journalistic style that trivialised and sensationalised news, abandoning journalistic integrity and independence, caused particular outrage and was branded ‘yellow journalism’. But the essence of this condemnation was more seditious than a simple dispute over the presentation of newsprint. Critics argued that the newspaper monopoly strangled public awareness, censored all anti-business opinion and now served solely to express the owner’s class interests that operated, in Sinclair’s words, for the “hoodwinking of the public and the plunder of labour”. The press, it was argued, must be cleansed of corrupting class bias and function as a neutral conduit for the communication of meaningful information enabling the public to exercise informed democratic preferences.

Capitalist business

In Britain, a similar concentration of ownership had already dramatically altered the newspaper industry that stifled and later decimated the popular press. During the first half of the 19th century Britain had enjoyed a thriving and vigorous popular press that criticised appalling working conditions and was spurred on by the ‘betrayal’ of the 1832 Reform Act and anger at the 1834 Poor Law. The radical press produced numerous papers that “promoted greater collective confidence by repeatedly emphasising the potential power of working people to effect social change through the force of ‘combination’ and organised action” (James Curren and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain, p.24). The radical press was a major source of antagonism to government and the propertied class but neither libel actions nor stamp tax on newsprint were effective in subjugating it. Nevertheless, by 1865 the radical press was in decline, broken not by laws but by a combination of rising costs and market forces.

By the second half of the 19th century the rising cost of printing technology to support national newspaper circulation required major investment. Newspaper set-up costs in Britain rose from £1,000 to over £50,000 between 1840 and 1870 while in America these capital costs rose by 600 percent between 1855 and 1875, a huge investment that excluded all but the extremely wealthy. In addition to rising costs, the growing importance of advertising in Britain greatly disadvantaged the alternative press because successful advertising meant appealing to people who had money. The readers of the radical press were mainly working people on low incomes and advertisers discriminated against these newspapers because “their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much money thrown away” (quotation from 1856, in James Curren and Jean Seaton, p.43). Advertising revenue acted as a subsidy enabling newspapers to be sold at a price below the cost of production and, once exposed to the realism of commercial capitalism, competitors without advertising revenue were forced from the market or sufficiently weakened to be taken over by larger companies. Newspaper production had become a capitalist business.

Sinclair too identified advertising as a main corrupting agent enabling wealthy advertisers to drive-out the US radical press and exert pressure on editors to mould content and editorial comment. “Everywhere in the world of journalism, high and low, you see this power of the advertiser,” Sinclair declared at a time when advertising, accounting for two-thirds of US newspaper income, greatly enhanced the concentration of ownership. Little has changed in an industry that allows little opportunity for new entrants to enter the market. Today, twenty-four inter-linking US corporations control over half of newspapers and most magazines, broadcasting, books and movies, while Britain is reputed to have the most highly concentrated newspaper ownership in the world, being dominated by five immense corporate groups.

Newspapers must appeal to wealthy corporations as a platform for advertising and to a readership with sufficient purchasing power to satisfy the advertisers’ selling aspirations. Making a newspaper attractive to advertisers is achieved by altering content to suit the values and prejudices of those who pay advertising revenues, as was pointed out in 1910 by US Professor Edward Ross: “When the news-columns and editorial page are a mere incident in the profitable sale of mercantile publicity, in it is strictly ‘businesslike’ to let the big advertisers censor both”(cited by Robert McChesney and Ben Scott, Monthly Review) A newspaper boasting a large circulation but lacking content that appeals to advertisers will rarely survive, a fact that provides an explanation for the disappearance of ‘labour news’ and the widespread growth of lucrative ‘business news’ aimed at a minority audience. The demise of the Daily Herald and Sunday Citizen in the 1960s also illustrate the point. In its final year the Daily Herald enjoyed 8 percent of daily circulation but attracted only 3 percent of the net advertising revenue while the Sunday Citizen received barely one-tenth of net advertising income of the Sunday Times. Both newspapers were considered hostile to business and therefore denied advertising patronage, while in the US the corrupting influences that Sinclair so scathingly criticised have free rein, frequently suppressing news carrying anti-business content by threatening to cancel corporate advertising accounts.

Self-censorship

But besides advertising other, less obvious, factors have also worked to make newspapers a willing mouthpiece for corporations and for government. Newspapers demand a constant flow of low-cost material from reliable sources that avoids expensive research. With budgets squeezed, newspapers must focus where ‘meaningful’ news is most likely to occur. Government, corporations, trade groups and business lobbies with press and PR offices feed the press with stories that are presumed accurate, with mutual benefit derived by delivering cost reductions to the newspaper while tending to mute criticism by limiting the access of alternative views. Similarly, purchasing news from enormously powerful agencies like Associated Press or Reuters has cut costly international newsgathering. Of course, not all news can be printed, but when reputedly less than 2 percent of the world’s news gathered by these agencies is actually passed on to the news media, it raises serious questions about the criteria used to filter news deemed fit for our consumption. News that seriously threatens the status quo is given scant exposure or will simply be omitted – as if it never existed. Clearly, not all capitalism’s misdemeanours can be simply ignored because the consequences cannot always be hidden. The press must be seen as criticising the behaviour of a company or government, for no other reason than to maintain credibility, though such incidents are generally quickly forgotten as the press moves on to the next story.

But although censorship by omission certainly occurs it would be wrong to assume that journalism, in Britain at least, is consciously censored or that a conspiracy amongst journalists exists to hide facts from public scrutiny. Instead self-censorship linked to the personal economic necessity to conform to institutional and company requirements make journalists, in Sinclair’s words, drift “inevitably towards the point of view held by their masters”. This is precisely what George Orwell meant when he wrote in his unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, that “unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without any need for an official ban” (Times Literary Supplement, September 1972.)

In capitalist society the production of a successful newspaper means journalistic integrity and editorial objectiveness are subordinate to the institutional requirement of production for profit. There can be no other way, for as Professor Edward Ross pointed out in Sinclair’s era:

  “To urge the editor, under the thumb of the advertiser or of the owner, to be more independent, is to invite him to remove himself from his profession. As to the capitalist owner, to exhort him to run his newspaper in the interests of truth and progress is about as reasonable as to exhort the mill-owner to work his property for the public good instead of for his private benefit.” (Edward Alsworth Ross, ‘The Suppression of Important News’, Atlantic Magazine, March 1910, quoted in Monthly Review May 2002).

More recent testimony to this enduring law of capitalist newspaper production was expressed by Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror, when he stated, “I only judge a story on what sells and what doesn’t” (Guardian, 30 November 1996).

Unreformable

Today, newspapers perform in much the same way as they did in Sinclair’s time, precisely because they operate in the same economic conditions. They lock-in our views to prevailing ideology by playing on prejudices and aspirations, incessantly communicating messages that instil working people with beliefs needed to integrate them into a life of wage slavery, with advertising assisting to create a ‘virtual’ world conducive to buying. “Journalism,” Sinclair wrote, “is one of the devices whereby industrial autocracy keeps its control over political democracy; it is the day to day, between elections propaganda, whereby the minds of the people are kept in a state of acquiescence, so that when the crisis of an election comes, they can go to the polls and caste their ballots for either one of the two parties of the exploiters”.

Sinclair’s book is a penetrating analysis of the early US capitalist press. But it is also the work of an author who, despite his stinging criticisms of the capitalist newspaper industry, believed that the press could in someway reform itself to stand outside class struggle and be recreated as a neutral independent force within capitalist society. Sinclair held the views that capitalism and genuine democracy could co-exist and journalism could be freed from the economic laws of capitalism to give expression to popular demand and abstract ideas of ‘social justice’ and ‘fairness’ that were divorced from the actual material conditions. But the reality is that as long as newspaper production is a profit-driven business it can never be free from the corrosive economic influence of capitalism. We need not lament this fact – for the press can perform in no any other way in capitalist society. But nor should we waste our energies on bankrupt delusions of press (or any other) reform, as Sinclair did, that at best can offer only temporary respite. Instead, we should organise to replace a society that corrupts and debases everything it touches and build socialism where a free and equal people will enjoy a free and informative press.

Steve Trott

Marx in modern times (1979)

Book Review from the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labor and Monopoly Capital, by Harry Braverman. Monthly Review Press, 1974. (£3.25)

Labor and Monopoly Capital is a most remarkable book, providing the answer to the criticisms, alleged refutations and revisions of Marxism.

Carrying on from Marx’s own description of the transformation of the labour process by manufacture in Volume I of Capital (manufacture begins when the tool is driven by a machine) Braverman gives the first detailed historical study of the continuation of the process in its hot bed, the United States of America.

Our author, by the way, is in the best tradition of the worker-writer. Unlike Professors of Sociology, who do nothing but lecture students and conduct “surveys” (ask people their opinions of themselves) Harry Braverman is a skilled coppersmith who spent seven years or so working as a craftsman in the shipyards. While this does not necessarily make him right, it does make him interesting! He knows what he writes about, from books and from life.

He explains that the way to increase relative surplus value is to break down the labour process into the tiniest possible detail, transferring from the productive worker the last vestige of any kind of decision about size, shape, weight, material to the “office”. The worker can now be watched and timed, every moment being closely studied and recorded. This is the famous Taylor system of scientific management. Braverman recounts from Taylor’s own book The Principles of Scientific Management how he raised the handling of pig iron at the Bethlehem Steel Company from 12½ to 47 tons per man per day, with a 60 per cent increase in wages. They studied the men intently before selecting the first victim, “a little Dutchman”. The following dialogue ensued: 

“You see that pile of pig iron?”
“Yes”
“Well, if you are a high priced man you will load that pig iron on that car for $1.85 [the standard rate was $1.15]. “You will do exactly as this man tells you. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk—you walk; when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. And you do it straight through the day. But no back-talk — understand!”

As Braverman explains, this is the origin of the system of time and motion study now universal in capitalist production. True, now electronic timers, stroboscopic cameras, microphones, television cameras have been added, but the principle is the same (shades of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times).

Increasing Misery

Consequently Braverman is able to show pretty convincingly that Marx’s view regarding the increasing misery, dubbed the “weak point” of his system by so many latter-day critics, is not wrong, but absolutely right in America in 1979. The classic example is the Model T Ford car. With the invention of the now universal conveyor chain assembly line system, Ford was producing by 1925 as many cars in a day as he had in a year.

  But the new technology proved increasingly unpopular. The men walked out in droves; they could pick and choose. So great was labour’s distaste for the new system, that when the company wanted 100 men, it had to hire 963.

The Legend of Henry Ford, page 149.

However, once the conveyor belt system had spread to other plants the workers could not pick and choose: they were shackled to the assembly line.

Perhaps the author’s greatest achievement, in addition to showing the degradation of the craftsman to an automaton, is his shattering debunking of that sacred cow of American sociology, the “white collar worker”. How many gallons of ink, scores of surveys, dozens of graphs, have analysed the status of the so-called Management Sector?

From official sources, Braverman shows how the “white collar” worker in America today is actually paid below the wage rates of “blue collar” workers. The explanation given is that those very same methods of scientific management (Taylorism) have now invaded the office. The process of dividing all mental effort from the craftsman’s work has attacked the managers and their staffs.

  If one ascribes to the millions of present day clerical workers-the “middle class” of a long vanished clerical stratum of early capitalism, the result can only be a drastic misconception of modern society. Yet this is exactly the practice of academic sociology and popular journalism.
  [In the office] the productive processes of society disappear in a stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow line like that of a cannery, the meat packing line or the car assembly conveyor, by workers organised in much the same way.
  Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory . . . since every motion involves consumption of physical energy, why should not analysis result in the discovery of a mass of useful effort in clerical work, just as it does in the factory.
(Lee Galloway, Office Work, its Principles and Practice)

Braverman quotes from the Guide to Office Clerical Time Standards of the Systems and Procedures Association of America such gems as

           

          Chair Activity                   Minutes

Get up from chair                 .033
Sit down in chair                 .033
Turn in chair                         .009
Move in chair to adjoin desk .080

Similar times are given for cut with scissors, rubber stamping, collating, gather, lay aside, handle, punch, staple, and so on.

New Division of Labour

With the invention of the Hollerith punched card system a means of reading and interpreting simple data without direct human participation was available. Information is now stored by electric impulses, with the result that the magnetic disc-pack can store 29 million characters. These can be transferred to or from a computer at the rate of 186,000 characters a second. The computer introduces a new division of labour, the largest single new occupation being that of key punch operator.

  Mrs. Duncan described all key punch girls as nervous wrecks. Mrs. Calvin reported the same kind of tension. “If you tap one of them on the shoulder when she is working, she’ll fly through the ceiling. Although the girls do not quit, they stay home frequently and keep supplies of tranquillisers and aspirins at their desk”; they felt they were doing a factory job, “frozen” to their desk like an assembly line.

(Automation in the Office, Hoos)

The vice president of an insurance company, pointing to a room tilled with key punch operators, remarked “All they need is a chain”. Said one operator: “This job is no different from a factory job, except that I don’t gel paid as much”.

Typists' Pool Eliminated

With the use of the modern word processor the typists pool is eliminated. The other functions of the secretary are taken over by an “administrative support centre”, which handles filing, phone answering and postings. Thus Lewis Corey could write “a typical large office is now nothing but a white collar factory.”

  The problem of the so-called employees, or white collar workers, which so bothered early generations of Marxists, and which was hailed by the anti-Marxists as proof of the falsity of the ‘proletarianisation’ theses, has thus been unambiguously clarified by the polarisation of office employment, and the growth at one pole of an immense mass of wage workers. The apparent trend to a large non-proletarian ‘middle class’ has resolved itself into the creation of a large proletariat in a new form.

This is a book in which the problems of the so-called middle class, ‘‘increased misery", polarisation, automation, are dealt with on strictly Marxian lines . It has the further merit of being written in clear, limpid style of easy flowing English.

Horatio

Human development (2011)

Michael A. Lebowitz

Book Review from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Path to Human Development: capitalism or socialism? By Michael Lebowitz, from the Socialist Interventions Pamphlet Series. Monthly Review Press., April 2009 Free download

This pamphlet, written to support educational and political discussions in trade unions, communal councils and political formations, particularly in Venezuela, was prepared for collective rather than individual readers with the specific purpose of ‘encouraging collective struggle against capitalism and for socialism’.

Lebowitz lays down some of the basics of the whats and whys of human development. The obvious prerequisites to any human development are the satisfaction of basic needs and the recognition that each individual’s self-development should be self-defined.

He compares the ‘vicious circle of capitalism’ with the ‘virtuous circle of socialism.’ Capitalism – people separated from the means of production with needs to be fulfilled having to sell their labour power in competition with others, thereby entering into capitalist production which gives them the need to consume but limited means to do so, locking them into a never-ending vicious circle. A vicious circle that is expanding all the while because capitalism requires growth and must generate new needs for consumption.

Socialism – in which producers enter into an association to produce for the needs of society and in so doing expand their capacities as rich human beings. So here we have producers who recognise the value of unity, cooperation and interdependence increasing the circle voluntarily, driven by the logic of human development with no limits – ‘except the full development of all human potential’.

The pamphlet is an attempt to raise socialist consciousness and, in Lebowitz’s own words, “It is important that we live the revolutionary process as a great organism and not as a vanguard atop a complacent mass”. Our hope is that workers around the world, and not just in Venezuela, take this advice seriously. If they did, a useful next step might be to remove populist reformists such as Chavez from office, and replace him with recallable delegates from their own ranks.

Janet Surman

A Correction

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In our review of Michael Lebowitz’s book, The Path to Human Development: capitalism or socialism?, in last month’s Socialist Standard, we attributed to him the passage “it is important that we live the revolutionary process as a great organism and not as a vanguard atop a complacent mass”. In drawing our attention to the fact that he did not write this, Michael Lebowitz said that “the phrase itself doesn’t embarrass me as I reject the vanguard party (but not leadership as such) as it is understood”. He added: “Incidentally, let me recommend to you and your comrades my new book, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (Monthly Review, 2010), which explores much more deeply the themes posed in The Path. As for the vanguard question, I’m taking that up right now in the book I’m working on (The Conductor and the Conducted), which explores what I call ‘vanguard relations of production.’”

In fact the passage was a quote from a review of his book by Ivan Drury in the Canadian Trotskyist paper Socialist Voice. We apologise to him and are pleased to make this correction.

Privilege in China (1978)

From the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "These privileges involved, for example, the use of a service automobile, more spacious and comfortable housing. and even, above a certain level, a villa and access to special shops (for clothes and certain consumer durables such as refrigerators, radios, TV sets, cameras, tape recorders, etc.). At the level of the central leadership. these privileges could extend to possession of several villas, free use of an airplane for personal trips, and so on.” 

French Maoist Charles Bettelheim on the privileges of the Chinese bureaucracy, in Monthly Review, July-August 1978, p. 109.

Need to end capitalism (2012)

Book Review from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

What every environmentalist needs to know about capitalism. By Fred Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster. Monthly Review Press. 2011.

Overall the book contains a very good analysis of the causes of the world’s environmental problems which it is claimed are largely attributable to the global economic system of capitalism. Bearing in mind the book is aimed at environmental activists and those concerned with the problems associated with global warming, climate change and the general degradation of the state of the planet, the authors are spot on with this early statement: ‘It’s essential to break with a system based on a single motive – the perpetual accumulation of capital and hence economic growth without end.’  

The chapters unfold neatly revealing the depths of inequality between rich and poor, individually and collectively, including the relative size of their ecological footprints. A clear case is presented as to the illogicality of an expectation that capitalism can be organised a different way to be made ‘green.’  The growth imperative of capitalism is explained and linked to its antagonism to the health of our environment in that what’s good for economic growth is bad for the environment and vice versa. The wide spread of capitalism’s ever expanding reach and resultant damage is comprehensively covered, including the imperialism of land grab, resource wars, water as an urgent resource problem, the exploitation of aquifers adding to annual sea level rise, damage as a result of careless but deliberate exploitation and externalities in their many guises. How appropriately the authors suggest amending the well known phrase, ‘the tragedy of the commons’ to ‘the tragedy of the private exploitation of the commons.’

When it comes to how we should deal with the causes and what is promoted to achieve the break with the system based on the perpetual accumulation of capital and economic growth without end, however, things take a turn for the worse. The final chapter is a disappointing list of rules, regulations, what could, should and must be done to put people and the environment before profit.  It’s disappointing because these demands are all reformist based. Having read this far it must now be plain for readers to see that without first dismantling the very economic system that the authors have so successfully discredited right up to the final chapter there is no way that anything will change for the better, neither for people nor for the environment. Capitalism has been reformed many times and in many different ways and still it continues to progressively worsen the environment. If socialism is to be achieved it has to mean much more than transitional reforms to a democratically planned economy.

Janet Surman

Einstein and Socialism (2005)

From the April 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year sees a double anniversary for Albert Einstein: fifty years this month since his death, and one hundred since the publication of his first seminal papers on quantum theory and relativity. No doubt there will be fulsome, and well-deserved, tributes to one of the great names of twentieth-century science. But it is likely that there will be little if any reference to Einstein’s political views, especially his opposition to capitalism, including his acceptance of the labour theory of value.

In 1949, Einstein published an article ‘Why Socialism?’ in the first issue of the American left-wing journal Monthly Review. It is available on the web at various places. e.g. here.  In it he argued that class society is an instance of ‘the predatory phase’ of human development (in Thorstein Veblen’s phrase). Yet humans depend on society to provide food, clothing, a home and so on. We have a fixed and unalterable biological constitution, but during our lives we acquire a ‘cultural constitution’ which is subject to change. Anthropological research shows that people’s social behaviour differs greatly, so our biological make-up does not determine the way we live.

But small groups of humans cannot be self-sufficient: ‘mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.’ This dependence on society, however, is seen as a threat to our existence rather than as a positive asset. This is largely due to ‘the economic anarchy of capitalist society’. All those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production, Einstein calls workers. Workers’ wages are determined not by the value of what they produce but by their minimum needs. As private capital becomes more and more concentrated, it achieves a power that even democratic politics cannot check.

Under capitalism, he continues, production is for profit, not use. Unemployment exists almost always, and workers are in fear of losing their jobs. Unlimited competition results in an enormous waste of labour. The worst evil of capitalism, he says, is the ‘crippling of individuals’, as education inculcates competitive notions.

Having given a pretty decent sketch of how capitalism works and of what’s wrong with it, Einstein goes on to advocate a planned economy which guarantees a livelihood to everyone and adjusts production to the needs of the community. But a planned economy, he recognises, is not socialism, as it may involve ‘the complete enslavement of the individual’ (so perhaps he had Russian-style state capitalism in mind?). And after a few misguided remarks about so-called problems of socialism (how to limit the power of the bureaucracy? etc), Einstein closes his contribution. It’s a shame that he is so inconclusive, but his article is still well worth reading, even if you can’t get through it at the speed of light.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Don’t ask Jevons (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last November’s Monthly Review carried an article by John Bellamy Foster, Robert Clark and Richard York on “Capitalism and the Curse of Energy Efficiency. The Return of the Jevons Paradox” They recounted how in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1863 the leading capitalist (and arms manufacturer) Sir William Armstrong raised the question “as to whether Britain's world supremacy in industrial production could be threatened in the long run by the exhaustion of readily available coal reserves”. The authors went on:

“In response, William Stanley Jevons, who would become one of the founders of neoclassical economics, wrote, in only three months, a book entitled The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines (1865). Jevons argued that British industrial growth relied on cheap coal, and that the increasing cost of coal, as deeper seams were mined, would lead to the loss of ‘commercial and manufacturing supremacy,’ possibly ‘within a lifetime,’ and a check to economies growth, generating a ‘stationary condition’ of industry ‘within a century‘. Neither technology nor substitution of other energy sources for coal, he argued, could alter this.”

Jevons (1835-1882) is known to students of Marxian economics but only as bit of a joke for his view that economic crises were caused by sunspots but also for his theory that prices were determined by their marginal utility to consumers.

H. M. Hyndman called his 1884 lecture defending the labour theory of value “The Final Futility of Final Utility”. In it he also took a sideswipe at Jevons’s theory of crises saying that “Jevons’ Commercial Crises and Sun Spots may be left to gather dust on its neglected shelf, until some writer, with nothing better to do, thinks it worth while to publish a monograph on ‘the Strange Hallucinations of Professors of Political Economy’.”

Jevons was of course just as wrong about coal becoming exhausted as he was about crises being caused by sunspots. Coal in Britain is not exhausted even today, only not mined as much as it once was, due to the relative cheapness of oil and gas as alternative sources of energy.

The “Jevons Paradox” that Foster and the others were interested in says that economies in the use of some material aimed at reducing its consumption will in fact, by making it cheaper to use, actually increase this. This is why they called energy efficiency a “curse” today. Economies in the use of oil and coal under capitalism, they said, will lead to more not less being consumed, and so not reduce the threat of global overwarming.

This is a problem only because under capitalism the competitive struggle for profits to accumulate as more capital that is built-in to it forces enterprises to use the cheapest methods and materials so as to keep the price of their products as low or lower than those of their rivals. It’s called “being competitive” or “maintaining competitiveness”.

In a socialist society energy efficiency would not have this perverse effect. It really would cut the consumption of coal and oil (and, similarly, for other non-renewable resources) as neither the imperative to accumulate capital, nor profit-seeking nor economic competition would operate.

Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein

"This essay was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949)."

Is it advisable for one who is not an expert on economic and social issues to express views on the subject of socialism? I believe for a number of reasons that it is.

Let us first consider the question from the point of view of scientific knowledge. It might appear that there are no essential methodological differences between astronomy and economics: scientists in both fields attempt to discover laws of general acceptability for a circumscribed group of phenomena in order to make the interconnection of these phenomena as clearly understandable as possible. But in reality such methodological differences do exist. The discovery of general laws in the field of economics is made difficult by the circumstance that observed economic phenomena are often affected by many factors which are very hard to evaluate separately. In addition, the experience which has accumulated since the beginning of the so-called civilized period of human history has - as is well known - been largely influenced and limited by causes which are by no means exclusively economic in nature. For example, most of the major states of history owed their existence to conquest. The conquering peoples established themselves, legally and economically, as the privileged class of the conquered country. They seized for themselves a monopoly of the land ownership and appointed a priesthood from among their own ranks. The priests, in control of education, made the class division of society into a permanent institution and created a system of values by which the people were thenceforth, to a large extent unconsciously, guided in their social behavior.

But historic tradition is, so to speak, of yesterday; nowhere have we really overcome what Thorstein Veblen called "the predatory phase" of human development. The observable economic facts belong to that phase and even such laws as we can derive from them are not applicable to other phases. Since the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development, economic science in its present state can throw little light on the socialist society of the future.

Second, socialism is directed towards a social-ethical end. Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and - if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous - are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

For these reasons, we should be on our guard not to overestimate science and scientific methods when it is a question of human problems; and we should not assume that experts are the only ones who have a right to express themselves on questions affecting the organization of society.

Innumerable voices have been asserting for some time now that human society is passing through a crisis, that its stability has been gravely shattered. It is characteristic of such a situation that individuals feel indifferent or even hostile toward the group, small or large, to which they belong. In order to illustrate my meaning, let me record here a personal experience. I recently discussed with an intelligent and well-disposed man the threat of another war, which in my opinion would seriously endanger the existence of mankind, and I remarked that only a supra-national organization would offer protection from that danger. Thereupon my visitor, very calmly and coolly, said to me: "Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?"

I am sure that as little as a century ago no one would have so lightly made a statement of this kind. It is the statement of a man who has striven in vain to attain an equilibrium within himself and has more or less lost hope of succeeding. It is the expression of a painful solitude and isolation from which so many people are suffering in these days. What is the cause? Is there a way out?

It is easy to raise such questions, but difficult to answer them with any degree of assurance. I must try, however, as best I can, although I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life. Only the existence of these varied, frequently conflicting, strivings accounts for the special character of a man, and their specific combination determines the extent to which an individual can achieve an inner equilibrium and can contribute to the well-being of society. It is quite possible that the relative strength of these two drives is, in the main, fixed by inheritance. But the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment in which a man happens to find himself during his development, by the structure of the society in which he grows up, by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior. The abstract concept "society" means to the individual human being the sum total of his direct and indirect relations to his contemporaries and to all the people of earlier generations. The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society - in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence - that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is "society" which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word "society."

It is evident, therefore, that the dependence of the individual upon society is a fact of nature which cannot be abolished - just as in the case of ants and bees. However, while the whole life process of ants and bees is fixed down to the smallest detail by rigid, hereditary instincts, the social pattern and interrelationships of human beings are very variable and susceptible to change. Memory, the capacity to make new combinations, the gift of oral communication have made possible developments among human being which are not dictated by biological necessities. Such developments manifest themselves in traditions, institutions, and organizations; in literature; in scientific and engineering accomplishments; in works of art. This explains how it happens that, in a certain sense, man can influence his life through his own conduct, and that in this process conscious thinking and wanting can play a part.

Man acquires at birth, through heredity, a biological constitution which we must consider fixed and unalterable, including the natural urges which are characteristic of the human species. In addition, during his lifetime, he acquires a cultural constitution which he adopts from society through communication and through many other types of influences. It is this cultural constitution which, with the passage of time, is subject to change and which determines to a very large extent the relationship between the individual and society. Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organization which predominate in society. It is on this that those who are striving to improve the lot of man may ground their hopes: human beings are not condemned, because of their biological constitution, to annihilate each other or to be at the mercy of a cruel, self-inflicted fate.

If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change. Furthermore, technological and demographic developments of the last few centuries have created conditions which are here to stay. In relatively densely settled populations with the goods which are indispensable to their continued existence, an extreme division of labor and a highly-centralized productive apparatus are absolutely necessary. The time - which, looking back, seems so idyllic - is gone forever when individuals or relatively small groups could be completely self-sufficient. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.

I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor - not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules. In this respect, it is important to realize that the means of production - that is to say, the entire productive capacity that is needed for producing consumer goods as well as additional capital goods - may legally be, and for the most part are, the private property of individuals.

For the sake of simplicity, in the discussion that follows I shall call "workers" all those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production - although this does not quite correspond to the customary use of the term. The owner of the means of production is in a position to purchase the labor power of the worker. By using the means of production, the worker produces new goods which become the property of the capitalist. The essential point about this process is the relation between what the worker produces and what he is paid, both measured in terms of real value. Insofar as the labor contract is "free," what the worker receives is determined not by the real value of the goods he produces, but by his minimum needs and by the capitalists' requirements for labor power in relation to the number of workers competing for jobs. It is important to understand that even in theory the payment of the worker is not determined by the value of his product.

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands, partly because of competition among the capitalists, and partly because technological development and the increasing division of labor encourage the formation of larger units of production at the expense of smaller ones. The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

The situation prevailing in an economy based on the private ownership of capital is thus characterized by two main principles: first, means of production (capital) are privately owned and the owners dispose of them as they see fit; second, the labor contract is free. Of course, there is no such thing as a pure capitalist society in this sense. In particular, it should be noted that the workers, through long and bitter political struggles, have succeeded in securing a somewhat improved form of the "free labor contract" for certain categories of workers. But taken as a whole, the present day economy does not differ much from "pure" capitalism.

Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an "army of unemployed" almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is the consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before.

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to remember that a planned economy is not yet socialism. A planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual. The achievement of socialism requires the solution of some extremely difficult socio-political problems: how is it possible, in view of the far-reaching centralization of political and economic power, to prevent bureaucracy from becoming all-powerful and overweening? How can the rights of the individual be protected and therewith a democratic counterweight to the power of bureaucracy be assured?

Clarity about the aims and problems of socialism is of greatest significance in our age of transition. Since, under present circumstances, free and unhindered discussion of these problems has come under a powerful taboo, I consider the foundation of this magazine to be an important public service.

Albert Einstein