Voice From The Back: Pollution And Capitalism (2011)

The Voice From The Back Column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pollution And Capitalism

In their mad demand for profit the capitalist class are polluting our world more and more. “Ozone loss over the Arctic this year was so severe that for the first time it could be called an ‘ozone hole’ like the Antarctic one, scientists report.  . . . Ozone-destroying chemicals originate in substances such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that came into use late last century in appliances including refrigerators and fire extinguishers.  . . .  The ozone layer blocks ultraviolet-B rays from the Sun, which can cause skin cancer and other medical conditions.” (BBC News, 3 October) On the face of it a scientific report on the BBC may not appear to mean that much to you, until your child develops skin cancer or some other awful medical condition. It will mean a lot then.

The Sick Society

Inside capitalism everything has a price. If you can afford it you can get the best food, clothing, housing and entertainment. Conversely if you don’t have the money you have to do with the cheap, the shoddy and the second-rate. Regretfully this applies to health-care too. “Half of hospitals ‘failing to feed elderly patients properly’. Staff forgetting to give food and water, while dignified care is lacking at 40% of hospitals, Care Quality Commission says. … The figures for England, compiled from reports published over the summer, will be officially released next week by the CQC. At Sandwell general hospital inspectors found serious issues with nutrition, especially for people who needed help with eating. Staff did not check whether patients had eaten and did not keep track of their fluid intake. One nurse said: ‘Sometimes I am the only staff member to feed on the ward. How can I feed all these people? Sometimes by the time I get to the last bay, either the food is cold or it has been taken away.’” (Guardian, 8 October) They call it the National Health Service: the national ill-health service would be more accurate.

From Dream To Nightmare

As they near retirement age many workers console themselves with the notion that they will at last be free from money worries, but recent research may lead them to reconsider their dreams of rocking-chair contentment. “Research published today suggests that many people with private pensions will be as much as 30 per cent worse off compared with those with similar savings who finished work in 2008, because of a combination of tumbling stock markets and interest rates at a record low. PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountants, said those facing retirement this year would be left ‘between a rock and a hard place’, forced to consider putting off claiming a pension until market conditions improve.” (Daily Telegraph, 8 October) Even after a lifetime of work and money anxiety capitalism still holds no respite for many workers.

Empty Promises

Politicians vie with each other in claiming that they can solve capitalism’s boom and burst cycle of trade. Beyond their empty boasts there is a reality that they dare not recognise in their bombastic promises. It is that booms and bursts are the way capitalism operates and politicians are powerless to do anything about it. A recent survey by the Institute for Fiscal Studies shows what the future is likely to be. “Falling incomes will mean the biggest drop for middle-income families since the 1970s, says a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. The IFS forecasts two years ‘dominated by a large decline’ in incomes, pushing 600,000 more children into poverty. By 2013 there will be 3.1 million children in poverty in the UK, according to the IFS projections.” (BBC News, 11 October) All the politicians can do is make empty promises while we suffer empty pockets.

Skint But Not Poor

For centuries politicians, philanthropists and social observers have tried to solve the problem of the poor, but poverty has remained despite their best efforts. Now, however, a so-called think-tank has ridden to the rescue. “One of Britain’s foremost think-tanks wants to ban the phrases ‘poor people’ and ‘the poor’ to describe those in poverty, claiming they amount to discrimination akin to racism and sexism. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) says politicians and members of the public are guilty of ‘povertyism’, an unacknowledged form of prejudice which stigmatises deprived people.” (Sunday Times, 9 October) The findings of this think-tank must be a great consolation to those workers who find themselves unemployed, homeless and desperate. They may be skint but they are not poor. Thanks very much JRF!

Editorial: Beyond the Cutbacks (2011)

Editorial from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s simple really. Your wage or salary is the money necessary to reproduce your ability to work. Your pension is your wage or salary deferred until you retire. Concerns over the effect of increasing life expectancy – sometimes described as a “burden” – are only a smokescreen. We need to be clear. Lowering pension levels and raising the retirement age are cuts in real pay.

Pensions are a transfer payment from the profits of the capitalist class, which come from what workers as a whole produce. That there is at present a “problem” once more proves that the market economy is incapable of going beyond the limits of the wages system. It cannot adequately provide for the needs of the class that produces and distributes all the wealth in the first place.

Advances gained from the increased productivity of our labour – including an increased lifespan – are being clawed back by capital to its advantage, pushing the burden from the capitalists onto the workers.

The capitalist class encourages us to see their interests and problems as ours. As a result we find our lives opened up to the chaos and uncontrollable insanity of the market. The market system cannot provide any security for us in the long run, which is why we need to turn the current struggle over wages, salaries, and pensions into a politically organised movement for a society based upon the direct satisfaction of human needs.

It is encouraging to see the fight-back. The gains made by wage and salary workers on pay, pensions and other related issues have not, after all, been granted by benevolent governments or employers. They had to be fought for. If those gains are to be defended, democratic and unified action by workers is necessary. If governments and employers win on pensions and wages they will try it again with something else.

Nevertheless, important as activity of this sort is today it still does not get to the crux of the question.

The Socialist Party urges all workers to consider their position. As workers we have to strike because they are wage slaves to the capitalist class who buy our lives by the week or by the month. So, besides making the greatest possible use of trade unions, we ask for recognition that even at their best such action cannot bring permanent security or end poverty. No strike can overcome the power of the market. In the end the logic of capitalism will always win out.

While trade union activity, including strike action, is necessary as long as capitalism lasts it can’t work miracles. There can be no lasting solution to the problems the market economy creates within the market system itself. Austerity and insecurity in a world of potential plenty is always the lot of the working class. In addition to trade union action socialist political action is needed on the basis of a clear understanding and awareness of our class interests.

Unions cannot make revolutions. Only the working class themselves can do that, through clear, democratic, determined political action.

Reform is no answer.

The single, simple fact we urge working people to recognise is that capitalism generates problems it is incapable of solving. The remedy – the only remedy – is to consciously end the property system that divides and oppresses us.

Pathfinders: Bones of Contention (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bones of Contention

You’ll often find that socialists take a special interest in history and the ancient past. It’s something to do with taking the ‘long view’.  But you don’t have to be a socialist (or 6 years old) to be interested in dinosaurs, and with today’s computer generated images (CGI), it’s all a lot more fun than it ever used to be. The BBC’s new series Planet Dinosaur uses the kind of Hollywood-style special effects that made its 1999 Walking With Dinosaurs such a success. New technology and new discoveries have added hugely to the knowledge about dinosaurs in recent years, and the show’s star attraction will no doubt be the representation of feathered dinosaurs, until very recently the subject of heated controversy.

In the 1999 series too many unqualified assertions were made about dinosaur behaviour which could only have been guesses. This time the BBC has been careful to back up claims with evidence, letting the viewer follow the chain of reasoning, and making proper distinctions between fact and conjecture.

Yet still there’s a propaganda gloss on the scientific process, as if the audience somehow wouldn’t buy the real thing. The obsession with carnivorous monsters, and heavy repetition of words like ‘killer’ and ‘deadly hunter’, seem to assume the audience is on a five-second boredom timer and can only be motivated by blood and guts (ie that we are 6 years old). There is a curious moment when, in magisterial tones, we are informed that the fearsomely spiked tail of a stegosaurus is known as a ‘thagomiser’. What they don’t tell us is that this term started life as a joke by Gary Larson, in whose Far Side cartoon the caveman professor explains to the class that it is named ‘after the late Thag Simmons’. The Smithsonian Institute, having a sense of humour and no prior name of its own, promptly adopted Larson’s term, which is now semi-official. Joke names abound in science, but the BBC seems to disapprove.

What’s even more interesting than feathered dinosaurs is the row that scientists have been having about them. Consider the archaeoraptor debacle. When this fossil turned up from China in 1999, National Geographic reported that it was the missing link between birds and dinosaurs. This elicited a furious response from the Smithsonian which, losing its sense of humour for once, accused the magazine of reaching ‘an all-time low for engaging in sensationalistic, unsubstantiated, tabloid journalism’.  Why were they so upset? First, the link between dinosaurs and birds was at that time highly speculative; second, the article had preceded the scientific paper into print, meaning that according to the rule of precedent the rightful naming of the species had been effectively filched by the magazine; third, a term like ‘proto-feather’ committed the teleological fallacy, as if genes had a sense of predestination; fourth, the fossil had been illegally exported and should not have been touched by any reputable institution anyway.

Embarrassingly, the fossil turned out to be a fake, a fact that National Geographic might have learned if it hadn’t been in such a fever to publish. The story was reported with glee by the creationist lobby, ever desperate to find leverage. Though the dinosaur-bird link has since been established, the real scandal that came to light was not only the rampant trade in illegal and stolen fossils but the large numbers of forgeries that were appearing on the international market, mainly from unregulated China. The trade in fossils continues unabated, to the continued frustration of real knowledge, as much of the traffic is destined for the private collections of the rich and is thus unavailable for study.

You don’t have to be a 6 year old to like dinosaurs, but you do have to be a socialist to understand a world where people will steal and fake old fossils for the sake of a few dollars or yuan.  ‘Archaeoraptor’, by the way, means ‘old robber’.

E=MC3?

It’s something when you go down the pub or the supermarket and everyone’s talking Einstein. But it happened recently after a world headline splash that some CERN physicists had sent some neutrinos on a faster-than-light trip through an Italian mountain. Not that anybody could make any sense of the story, not even the expert commentators. Assuming it wasn’t a mistake, either it was possible to travel faster than light, in which case the standard model of physics was in trouble, or the neutrinos were somehow skipping out the side window of another dimension and back in again, in which case the standard model of physics was still in trouble. Cosmology is in big trouble anyway, as 97 percent of the universe is officially missing (dark matter, dark energy) and large chunks supposedly keep disappearing (dark flow). And the quantum theorists are ready to string themselves up too, not having had a sniff of a decent theory in 30 years. Could life get any worse for physicists? Well, let them take a lesson from socialists. We’re optimists. We look forward to the day when everybody down the pub is talking Marx. That’s when the standard model of capitalism will be in serious trouble.

Finding fault among the fault finders

Where there’s blame there’s a claim, so now they’re prosecuting scientists for not predicting an earthquake (www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/science/04quake.html). This seems a tad unfair since nobody is suing the bankers for not predicting a global economic disaster, even though they helped cause it.

“No one expected to be told the exact time of the quake”, said one plaintiff, “We just wanted to be warned that we were sitting on a bomb.”

You would have thought that 400 tremors in the previous 6 months would be a sizeable clue, and that only a lit and sparking fuse leading directly up into the rectal cavity could give greater cause for alarm. But you’d be wrong, because the local seismic survey team reported that the risk was still low. This low risk was however translated by local officials into ‘no risk’, a prediction which turned out to be spectacularly wrong, and the writs started landing before the masonry had finished falling. The problem was that people wanted a categorical yes or no statement, and the fact that you can’t expect that kind of answer from a seismologist somehow got lost in the ensuing uproar.

People have strange ideas about science. Half the time they hate it and don’t believe a word of it, the rest of the time they seem to think it is capable of performing miracles. A bit like how people see capitalist politicians, come to think of it. It seems inconceivable that any law court would really convict the scientists, but if they do then presumably we can all start suing the Met Office every time the rain ruins our washing.

Paddy Shannon

What is Wrong With Using Parliament? (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

 The anarchist paper Black Flag recently reviewed our pamphlet on this under the title “We use it as a Dung Market”. We reply.

It seems ironic that the review should start with a romantic nod in the direction of William Morris when one of the things that Morris is well known for was his passion for “making Socialists”, something that the Socialist Party is rightly or wrongly often simplistically ridiculed for.

In essence, Morris’s socialist “propagandising” was about making sure that there was a strong body of socialists who had a good understanding of the workings of capitalism and a clear understanding of the components of a society in contrast to it. He happened to call this socialism, as we do, and it rested on the view that there needed to be a mass of opinion in favour of it as a classless, stateless, moneyless society.

If people start to believe in the possibility of a future society beyond the market and the state then it seems sensible that they should cover all bases and rob any ounce of legitimacy that the capitalist class (including leftist would-be managers with their own statist dreams) will try to bestow upon themselves. The icing on the cake is that we don’t allow them that privilege and that we should go into in parliament as rebels. Of course this implies a mass of anti-capitalist opinion outside parliament of which those elected would be the mandated delegates.

The anarcho-communist Alexander Berkman once pointed out that:

  ‘Our social institutions are founded on certain ideas and as long as these are generally believed, the institutions built on them are safe. Government remains strong because people think political authority and legal compulsion necessary. Capitalism will continue as long as such an economic system is considered adequate and just. The weakening of the ideas which support the evil and oppressive present-day conditions means the ultimate breakdown of government and capitalism.’

In other words, the big holding power that capitalism in more “developed” countries has over many is in people’s heads in that the majority believe that there is no alternative or/and that they are “free” and living in a “democratic” society. It is precisely in the countries that have a semblance of democracy that seem to be the most stable in capitalist terms, for the reasons stated by Berkman above. So if that’s the case, what’s wrong with using the platform offered by parliament to call their bluff about being democratic?

The common objection to this raised by anarchists is the “corrupting effects of politics”. If that’s a problem then anarchists wouldn’t be able to trust their own mandated recallable delegates either, since such delegates is what we propose when we seek the platform of parliament to further articulate that desire for a society free from capital and the state and ultimately capture those powers that could be used against us. And if who controls the state is not important then why are so many anarchists concerned about the BNP getting hold of it?

The Socialist Party doesn’t have a blueprint for how a future society may come about but isn’t it wise to minimise as much as possible the risk of violence that states which, if left at the disposal of those who currently control them via their own “delegates”, could more easily deploy against the development of a new society?

Any process that has as its aim the revolutionary transformation of society has to have a future vision as a realisable possibility. This has to increasingly gain ground by being articulated in workplaces, the community, shops, pubs, in the arts and culture in general. As that future society gains ground as a tangible possibility then the conversation, discussion and plans will be increasingly enthused about how best to organise and adapt in all areas to meet society’s needs.

What’s the best way to help this process? Should we go down the route of fetishising every struggle going as, according to many on the left, struggle in itself is going to magically transform the consciousness of those involved into hardened revolutionaries? But if struggle alone is supposed to incrementally revolutionise us all then what’s the reason why so many workers who’ve gone through a lot of struggle, the miners, construction workers and others, have not reached radical conclusions but sometimes very reactionary ones such as “British jobs for British workers”?

To focus on explaining the root cause of society’s problems rather than tinker around with the edges (symptoms) is one of the most important reasons for an organisation like the Socialist Party to exist. That’s why we think it important not to spend endless amounts of time campaigning as a party to try to deal with the inevitable aspects of what capitalism throws at us as workers.

Anyone would think from reading the review that all our members do is campaign to persuade people to resort to the ballot box .The conception that the review has of the Socialist Party supposedly thinking that strikes are a “diversion” is a complete red herring. What fairy tale was that whisked up from? Strikes are an inevitable part of the class war that workers can sometimes utilise to defend or improve their working conditions or rates of pay. Our members are involved in these as workers. What’s wrong thinking that all these things don’t necessarily lead to revolution? Surely if they did then, with all the struggles on the economic front that the working class is forced to engage in every day since it came into existence, we should already be there in the review’s (for want of a better term) “councillist utopia”?

This rosy view of the working class doesn’t accord with reality. Most workplaces in the developed world are not one big “comradely experience” although most people are pretty decent despite the competitive environments they find themselves in. In the UK for example it’s the “Service Sector” that accounts for 73 per cent of GDP. I have worked in it and wonder why the reviewer has not been able to see what I see. Low pay, poorly unionised, competitive and non-stop, target-driven bullshit for many. Hierarchies built-in all over the place, where managers believe they’ve got a better deal than other workers who they generally view as their subordinates, and where often in return the other workers have respect or/and fear of the “higher ups”. In many cases the view is that the way to improve one’s position is done not as a class but as a rat in the rat race up the ladder. The effect is that the higher up the worker goes, the more they are forced to compromise and conform and get those beneath them to do the same.

Try openly putting across revolutionary or even militant ideas in workplaces like this (and many typically are) and you will be seen as “different” by your fellow workers who generally have very reactionary ideas in their heads. There’s also the problem of all the informal hierarchies that are there as well as the real ones. Ever seen The Office? It’s a brilliant example of this kind of behaviour. Once the bosses get an idea that there may be a “real revolutionary” in their midst, one that can’t easily be compromised that is, then they’ll soon “come up” with a “plausible” reason to get rid of them.

In addition, the figures for part-time work, temporary contracts and self-employment pose severe problems with the various “down tools” scenarios. And what about the unemployed, those on benefits, the retired or those dependent on partners or parents who may well go along with the way things are?

Those pushing papers around in the world of academia or those working out how to push some product onto the “consumer”? What clout do they or will they have if just tied down to a concept of revolution as a purely economic struggle?

What was probably most offensive about the review is the final paragraph where the reviewer sites the Socialist Party “slap bang in the middle of the Marxist vanguard groups whose characteristics it shares – authoritarian structure, party chauvinism and so on”. One of the reasons I joined the Socialist Party was because I didn’t like the de facto personality-dominated politics that often crept into groups that deemed themselves to be “anarchist”, with little or no structure to get the “personalities” to come down from their privileged positions. In this respect at least, I felt that the Socialist Party was actually more “anarchist” than the anarchists! An important part of my “anarchism” meant allowing for the widest conception of democracy possible to suit the needs of society.

The Socialist Party is merely a tool to be used by those who want socialism and who think that organising democratically is more important than seeing yourself as bigger than the society that you want to inhabit and think it important to have a voice for the possibility of a future that is so often buried.

Ultimately, what socialist conscious workers decide to do will be for them to decide. If they decide that parliament is an irrelevance then they will ignore it. On the other hand, if they see that to ignore it could be dangerous and also that it has potential, then they will make use of that potential.

Stair

Rowan Williams v New (and old) Atheism (2011)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

You almost have to feel sorry for the Archbishop of Cant. It seems that the Church of England is on its knees. With declining attendance, internal disagreement about God’s wishes regarding women and gays becoming bishops, and clergy defecting to the Catholics he has the job of holding the whole circus together and trying to present it as a credible organisation with something useful to say.

Back in February, in response to a report highlighting the problems the Church faces in trying to convince us to take it seriously, he put much of the blame on what he calls ‘new atheism’. How this differs from old atheism he didn’t say but presumably he was referring to the numerous books published recently attacking the antiquated beliefs that he and his cronies expect us to accept. What was needed, he said, was for the clergy to be more vocal in countering the arguments put by such writers as Dawkins and Hitchens.

Unfortunately he didn’t give any suggestions as to the kind of counter-arguments he expects them to use against the flood of rationalism and science that they face so it’s difficult to imagine exactly what he has in mind. He certainly didn’t volunteer to step in himself and debate against Dawkins on the question of ‘Evolution or Creationism?’ That would be worth hearing.

Maybe he’s busy behind the scenes praying for some undeniable evidence that the story of Adam and Eve and the talking serpent IS true, that the earth really IS only a few thousand years old, and that Noah DID collect together two elephants, two aardvarks, two duck-billed platypus, two orangutans, two hippopotami, etc, etc, etc, and take them all for a ride in his ark.

To be fair to the Archbishop and his mates though, it’s unlikely that many of them believe this tosh any more than we do. And it must be difficult to keep a straight face when they have to mention it. But that’s the problem they are saddled with. Rowan Williams can hardly turn round now and say, “Sorry folks, it’s just a load of old cobblers we’ve been using to remind you of your place in a class divided society”.  Well, he could; but he’s not going to. He may like to be seen as an affable old leftie but he’s certainly no socialist.

As for ‘new’ atheist Richard Dawkins, well, as a scientist and academic he is of course concerned that such unscientific nonsense as ‘intelligent design’ is being taught in schools. And while we agree with him, from a socialist point of view the problem is much deeper.

It’s all very well to point out the lack of logic in religious beliefs, but religion is not simply a jumble of confused ideas. It is a powerful weapon in the hands of the capitalist class. It divides us and blinds us to the class action that is required to overcome the menace of capitalism.

Religion is the ideological expression of a long-gone world and its ancient social conditions, a world of superstition, slavery and little education. Far from providing an answer to today’s problems, it tells us to put our faith in the supernatural hopes of a past age. Instead of uniting us as a class we are to become meek and mild, and to submit to the whims of an ancient god that was dreamt up in the bronze age.

Nick White

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jenny Nicholson is tired of hearing how the poor are poor because they make poor choices. Let’s see what kind of choices you make when it’s your turn to be flattened by the economy. That’s the idea behind Spent, an online game Nicholson created to challenge popular misconceptions about poverty. Play it at www.playspent.org.

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Some children in the North [of China] live ferally: they are known as kotjebi, or “fluttering swallows”, and roam in packs. When they cannot steal in the markets, they eat dead dogs and rotten food (reportedly chewing toothpaste in the belief that it prevents food poisoning).

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A typical prize for a children’s contest might be a backpack, a lunchbox or maybe some toys. But not in Somalia. Over the weekend, a Somali radio station run by the Shabab, the most powerful Islamist  militant group in the war-ravaged country, held an awards ceremony to honor children who were experts at Shabab trivia and at reciting the Koran . The prizes? Fully automatic assault rifles and live hand grenades.

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What makes individual stockbrokers blow billions in financial markets with criminal trading schemes? According to a new study conducted at a Swiss university, it may be because share traders behave  more recklessly and are more manipulative than psychopaths:

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A Saudi Arabian ministry statement carried by the state news agency, SPA, stated that Abdul Hamid al-Fakki “practiced witchcraft and sorcery,” which are illegal under Saudi Arabia’s Islamic sharia law. Al-Fakki was beheaded in the western city of Medina on Monday, the interior ministry announced:

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Mr. Daisey’s trip to Shenzhen, China, where he posed as a wealthy businessman to infiltrate factories where Apple products and other electronics are made. He says he witnessed inhumane conditions and interviewed workers outside of factories who said they were as young as 12.

   ‘What was shocking to me was the level of dehumanization built into the systems that have been put into place by American corporations in collusion with suppliers…… There’s a hunger in very controlling companies like Apple to create planned obsolescences sooner rather than later, so it will become more and more difficult to stay functional’:

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Eight in 10 British workers are overweight or living with long-term illnesses that limit their productivity, according to early findings of a 25-year study of people’s wellbeing:

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Tobacco companies knew that cigarettes contained a radioactive substance called polonium-210, but hid that knowledge from the public for over four decades, a new study of historical documents revealed:

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Is 20 Years of the Big Issue Something To Shout About? (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

  This September saw The Big Issue magazine ‘celebrate’ 20 years of trying to tackle homeless issues.

The Big Issue was started back in 1991 by Gordon Roddick (husband of Body Shop owner Anita) and John Bird (not the John Bird of TV comedy Bremner, Bird and Fortune) who was himself a victim of homelessness when young. Its initial aims were to help the homeless by allowing them to help themselves. The basic concept of the magazine is simple: a homeless person is given 5 copies to start for free. They sell these for £2 each and can then buy further copies from the magazine for £1 each, re-selling for £2 and keeping the difference. In time the vendor can eventually build up for themselves a small client base and earn reasonable enough money to eventually get themselves set up in a home of their own, thus ‘solving’ the homeless crisis one person at a time. For some this method indeed works and there have been many successful vendors over time. However as a wider solution to the housing and homeless crisis, this kind of work-for-your-supper thinking is really a very poor quality sticking plaster over a wide, gaping wound and is fundamentally flawed.

Homelessness is a complex issue. For every homeless person there is a raft of interrelated reasons why they may be in that situation. Some are simple: loss of housing through relationship breakdowns, inability to pay for housing, drink, drugs, mental health issues, abuse and domestic violence. For some, all they really need is a house or flat. For others, more complex social help is required from specialists perhaps in drink and drug rehabilitation, or social workers to support individuals through crises. In fairness to the Big Issue, they never set out to deal with these problems, although the later founded Big Issue Foundation has tried to expand its approach.

Many of the issues homeless people face are centred around their ability to pay for their accommodation and to maintain those payments. Whether buying or renting, housing takes a disproportionate amount of income and in recent years has sailed close to the maximum 30% as recommended by most financial experts as a percentage of income. These costs coupled with spiralling food and fuel expenditure, mean the ability to maintain housing is getting increasingly harder for many families. Loss of a job, reduction in working hours or wages can have a devastating impact and can often result in homelessness. Exact figures for homelessness are difficult to obtain due to the transient nature of the people involved, the various bodies doing research and the changing way the government classifies homelessness. However, as a rule of thumb, in times of economic downturn the number of homeless persons increases exponentially. No amount of charity, magazine sales or campaigning will alter the root cause of the problem and the profit driven nature of housing.

So in 20 years how has the Big Issue helped with solving the problems of homelessness? According to their own website:

 The Big Issue is a business solution to a social problem, demonstrating that an organisation can succeed whilst being simultaneously driven by commercial aims and social objectives. It has helped thousands of individuals to regain control of their lives and has simultaneously altered public perceptions of homeless people (http://www.bigissue.com/History_34.php)

No doubt on an individual basis the Big Issue has helped some of the thousands it has had contact with to be able to better their own situations, but in the bigger picture it, like so many other homeless charities, is unable to achieve anything of real and lasting value. There was a huge homeless problem 20 years ago in the UK and there is still one now. Unless capitalism is swept away, there will still be one in 20 years time.

Under capitalism, housing, like everything else, is a commodity to be bought and sold on the market. For those unable to afford it, homelessness is the only option unless bailed out by limited council and state help or charitable donations. These are not solving the problem, merely at best reducing some of its ill effects. Business has no interest in solving social problems, contrary to the statement by the Big Issue. Its goal, always, is profit. If housing was fairly distributed according to need rather than via a market, then the problem of homelessness would disappear and there would be no need for such ‘social entrepreneurship’ as lauded by the Big Issue and similar organisations.

A telling quote comes from John Bird himself:

  I am a self appointed grandee of the poor. I am one of them who got out and got into a position to help, so I will mollycoddle Lord Mandleson, Cameron, Blair, and Brown, anyone if it helps. I don’t want to read The Big Issue and read how miserable it is living under capitalism. I want to know what you’re going to do about it, how you’re going to dismantle it (Independent, 5 September).

In socialism, a society based on people’s needs not profit, housing like everything else would be free and open to all. The masses of empty homes would not stay empty because people couldn’t afford to live in them anymore. Homelessness will be a thing of the past and consigned to history, and with it will be the well-intentioned but ultimately self-perpetuating charities. Hopefully in another 20 years there will be no need for a ‘celebration’ of the continuing need for charity.

David Humphries

Where Will It End? (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Occupy movement is a sign of spreading unrest.

Just last month ago we asked in our editorial whether we were beginning to see the “red shoots” of recovery in the class struggle. At the time, the annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) had just called for joint industrial action, street protests and a campaign of civil disobedience, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had warned that America and Europe were facing the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and an ‘explosion of social unrest’. We said then that there was no way of predicting with any confidence whether this expected ‘explosion’ would go off, or turn out to be a damp squib, depending, as it did and does, on what millions of people think and decide to do.

Since we wrote those words, you’d have to be a dour cynic indeed not to be heartened and encouraged by world events. Truly has it been said that there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen. It’s hard to believe that in just one year we have seen a series of democratic uprisings across the Middle East and north Africa threaten or topple dictatorships; strikes and increasingly militant protests against austerity in Greece and across Europe; strikes, demonstrations and riots across Britain; and mass protests and occupations against anti-union legislation in Wisconsin, USA, to name just the most obvious and inspiring examples.

And then, in September of this year, the anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters and the activist group Anonymous announced an occupation of Wall Street. The bourgeoisie – along with the older, more senile, battle-weary ranks of class warriors and socialists – barely had time for the sneers to settle on their faces before the ‘anarchism as usual’ action had morphed into what some commentators are already calling the most significant populist movement of the left since the 1930s. On Wall Street, a decade happened in just a few weeks, and a small activist action exploded into an ever-growing movement that the mainstream media and ruling-class establishment eventually and reluctantly decided it could no longer ignore.

Ignoring it didn’t work, and neither did a rapid police attempt to suppress it with violence. Every attempt to silence and repress the Occupy Wall Street movement – including mass arrests and rioting cops pepper-spraying young girls – merely led to new waves of support. More and more workers from all kinds of backgrounds – nurses, sacked cleaners, doctors, serving and former soldiers, unemployed graduates, poor youth from the city’s most impoverished districts, even sympathetic Wall Street traders – have poured into New York’s financial district to see what’s happening, listen to talks, take part in democratically organised general assemblies to plan actions and decide upon demands (if any), and generally build solidarity, communication, and mutual aid. (For informative news reports, see the Democracy Now channel at www.democracynow.org.) The example in Wall Street soon spread throughout the country, and there are now copycat occupations in Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Wisconsin, and many others, and attempts to repeat the success are spreading around the world, soon to arrive in London and the rest of Britain.     

With what result? Well, of course, no one but fake Cassandras and Nostradamuses know. It may be that the whole thing will have fizzled out before this journal hits your doorstep. Or perhaps the movement will turn lamely reformist and be bought off. Perhaps, like the civil rights movement, it will prove not at all lame, even if reformist, and win some essential gains for our class. Or perhaps even, if some of the more radical demands and ideas put up on the Occupy movement’s websites become reality, we will see a genuine anti-capitalist movement develop worldwide. These are exciting times.

The key, of course, will be whether the protest movement can involve the rest of the working class and organise to take democratic control of the whole of social life, including winning control of  the powers of government. With the potential for the Occupy movement spreading to this country and a nationwide day of action, including strikes, on 30 November, organised by the TUC, these are days of precious opportunity for the working class in Britain. It’s time, as the poet Shelley once put it, to rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number. We have a life to win.

Stuart Watkins

All Keynesians now? (2011)

Book Review from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Political Economy of Development. Edited by Bayliss, Fine and Van Waeyenberge (Pluto Press) 2011

The subject of this book is the World Bank. Along with the International Monetary Fund, it was created by a UN conference at Bretton Woods USA in 1944. The original purpose of the Bank was to encourage post-war investment for reconstruction and development by making loans to governments. The Bank, based in Washington, went on to develop financial aid packages for the less developed countries around the world. Critics complained that this aid was conditional on accepting the ‘Washington Consensus’ on the need for implementing neo-liberal ideology – deregulation of markets, privatisation and a reduced role for the state. Since 1998 this has been replaced by the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’ in which the Bank promotes the market through state intervention. As the authors explain, ‘neo-liberalism has never been short of state intervention’. What is new, they argue, is the state-sponsored expansion of private financial institutions and services over the last three decades.

This book challenges the neo-liberal assumptions which still guide the Bank, and they provide detailed evidence of its failures. But what is the alternative? The authors pose the rhetorical question ‘Are we all Keynesians once more?’ with the clear implication that it is the only alternative. However, this conclusion lacks historical perspective. Keynesian economics (after the economist JM Keynes) is basically the belief that governments should intervene in the economy to spend their way out of trouble, and its failure to solve the problems of capitalism led to its replacement by faith in the market in the 1980s. (In practice, governments – even those who have formally repudiated Keynesianism – have intervened to prop-up their markets when necessary; especially in the current recession.) Neo-liberal faith in the market was bound to end in disillusion, but that does not vindicate an equally misplaced faith in Keynesian economics. Keynesianism and neo-liberalism are merely two policies for running capitalism.

Lew Higgins

Greasy Pole: Djanogly – One Of The Family (2011)

The Greasy Pole Column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around that legendary city of Nottingham there is a name which is very difficult to avoid and even more difficult to forget. Djanogly. There is, for example, the Djanogly City Academy, previously the Technology College. Then there are the University Djanogly Gallery and Lecture Theatre and a Djanogly playground. Even more splendidly we might come across the Sir Harry and Lady Djanogly Learning Resource Centre – a daringly circular building on an island platform. All this reminds us that the said Sir Harry, apart from owning the largest collection of Lowry paintings in the world, has also been an habitual sponsor of technology and learning and if we ask how he can afford this we need to know only that he has interests in, apart from anything else, the massively famous textile company Coats Viyella (now Coats plc), which he is said to have founded. Another family investment has been their son Jonathan who, after an unexciting academic experience, qualified as a solicitor and is now a partner in the corporate department of a city law firm as well as the Conservative MP for Huntingdon – one of the safest seats in the country previously represented by Prime Minister John Major, who is a close personal friend of Sir Harry.

Millionaire

The Djanogly family fortune is put at £300 million; Jonathan is himself a millionaire, recording shareholdings in companies including Imperial Tobacco and BP. However it has not all been unyielding happiness for among the rural bliss of Huntingdon there has been mutinous gossip on the theme that Sir Harry’s close bonds with John Major may have allowed some subtle arm-twisting to ensure that his son was selected to stand for the Tories after Major gave up. Any such resentment could not have been soothed by the new MP’s subsequent rapid rise up the Greasy Pole, in opposition and government, until Cameron’s victory in 2010 saw him blossom into Under-Secretary of State at the Justice Department, dealing with matters including legal aid, family justice and the law courts.

But at some stage – there were quite a few incidents to explain it – the dizzying rise and rise of Djanogly stalled. Perhaps it was when, as one source of information has it, he caused local opinion to sour to the extent of describing him as “lazy, with no political convictions or beliefs”. Or when one leading party member, possibly nostalgic for the battles between John Major and his Eurosceptic bastards, thought that he “works very hard not to give an opinion… nobody knows where he stands on anything. He is a wet fish…” and again he was damned for winning the candidature because “…party members voted for him as a favour to John Major. He has been a disaster and we need to deselect him”. With which the local “Ditch Djanogly” Facebook campaign, whose membership included the “estranged” son of a Tory big-wig, will heartily agree. In his own defence Djanogly can give examples of his performing with very adequate energy and commitment, except that this was not always on matters and in a style likely to justify the approval of the Huntingdon Tories.

Expenses

There was, as a start, the scandal of his expense claims in which, along the green benches, he was not alone. Djanogly had claimed something over £77,000 on his “second home” in Cambridgeshire while giving his main home as in London. This claim entailed a certain adjustment of the facts, because that £3.7 million Maida Vale home is owned, or rather held in trust, by his parents who allowed him to live there rent free. Then there was the sum of £4,936 to install a set of automatic gates at his home in Alconbury, which he said were needed to keep him safe from animal rights campaigners protesting at his links with the notoriously animal-testing Huntingdon Life Sciences. Gardening costs accounted for £400 a month, two digital TV boxes £846…

And then there was the item which attracted the most intensive media scrutiny – his claim for over £13,000 for students described as cleaners for his constituency home, although it emerged that one of them was an au pair who advertised herself as such and spent most of her time in their London home or on holiday with them, looking after their children and waiting on visitors at constituency events. Under pressure from the exposure of his breaches of the rules on expenses, Djanogly had to repay £25,000 while local party members were angry that he – a Minister of Justice – had lied to them.

Their Honourable Member’s response to this was to employ, at a cost of £5,000, private detectives who worked their well-honed deceptive skills to trick Djanogly’s most serious critics (who included his constituency agent) to reveal their identity. And any energy he had to spare from this subterfuge he devoted to pushing through the Commons a Bill which, by slashing legal aid entitlement and changing the procedures in cases of claims for damages after accidents and the like, promises effectively to benefit the insurance industry by as much as hundreds of millions of pounds. Djanogly did not seem to be embarrassed by being likely to profit from this as a partner in his family’s underwriting firm – although, seven days after the matter was publicised in the Guardian, he moved his shares in the Djanogly Family LLP to a “blind trust”. Just another incident in the political career of Jonathan Djanogly, with its ripples of confusion, doubt and outrage among even his closest supporters, to put his parliamentary future in serious doubt. By even the accustomed standards, it has been a sad and sterile affair, nurturing the myths of capitalist politics – that privilege and charity are proper and adequate adjustments to enduring poverty, that society’s rulers wheedle into power over us on the pledge that the outcome will be to our benefit when it will remorselessly aggravate the damage and repression we already know so well.

Ivan

Reformism Failed (2011)

Book Review from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labour Party. By Martin Pugh (Vintage) £9.99.

It’s not often that an entry in a book’s index gives rise to a chuckle, but that’s the case here. Under ‘Thatcher, Margaret’, the index lists a few page references and then states, ‘see also Blair, Tony’.

In fact Pugh clearly has it in for Blair, regarding him as an essentially Conservative figure. ‘When he announced his intention of becoming an MP friends laughed and asked: “Really, which party?”’. He was easily impressed by strong personalities, not just Thatcher but also George W Bush and Rupert Murdoch. Blair was also keen to ingratiate himself with others, and in 1982 he wrote to the then Labour leader, Michael Foot, saying, ‘I came to Socialism through Marxism’ (not that he has a clue about either).

Pugh has a point when he says that it is not really so odd for Labour to have been led by a Conservative, for ex-Tories had previously played a prominent role in the Party (such as Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps). Tories and Labour agreed originally on issues such as protectionism, empire and alcohol, where Liberals took a different view. An internal Labour report of 1955 accepted ‘the absence of clearly defined differences between the parties’.

Unfortunately, Pugh gives too much emphasis to questions of leadership, claiming that the Labour Party has tended to choose the wrong leaders and then retain them for far too long. He uses the word ‘socialism’ a lot but never defines it, though he is no doubt correct in saying that Clause IV of the Labour constitution, with its commitment to nationalisation, was of largely symbolic value. Even Harold Wilson opposed its removal when Hugh Gaitskell tried to do away with it in 1959, though of course Blair achieved this in 1995.

Overall, Pugh gives a good factual picture of the Labour Party’s history, including its backing for wars and the British Empire, and its preparedness to undermine strikes. It  is odd, however, that he says virtually nothing about the actual formation of the Labour Party out of the Labour Representation Committee in 1906.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: Stripped Blair (2011)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the dark corridors beneath the Chilcot theatre, Gordon Brown has finally caught up with Tony Blair. He raises his gun and Blair tries to talk his way out of a tight situation one last time: “I think you’ll make a great Prime Minister. You’ll love it. The girls. The parties. Power’s a great aphrodisiac.” Brown doesn’t listen and, trembling, he pulls the trigger.

And so marks the end of Blair’s escape from those who turned on him, as imagined in The Comic Strip Presents: The Hunt For Tony Blair. This enjoyable one-off reunited the team who have been making short comedy films since Channel Four’s launch in 1982. Previously, their output has included both the miners’ strike and Ken Livingstone’s takeover of the Greater London Council filmed in the style of Hollywood blockbusters. The Hunt For Tony Blair developed this approach by presenting Blair’s downfall as a 1950s film noir.

On the run for murder, he finds himself abandoned by his previous allies, including a sinister, camp Peter Mandelson who changes sides to help Blair’s pursuer, Inspector Hutton. He’s even rejected by George W. Bush, here depicted (probably for the first time) as a mafia godfather out to “fuck Iraq”. But the most memorable performance is from Jennifer Saunders, playing Margaret Thatcher as a faded movie star. Lying on a chaise longue, she reminisces over old footage of the Falklands War before seducing Blair in her four-poster bed.

Keeping the satire this loose allows the Comic Strip team to get away with scenes like Blair pushing Robin Cook from a mountain during “a friendly walk in the Highlands”. But elsewhere, the film skirts closer to reality, especially in Stephen Mangan’s spot-on portrayal of Tony Blair as someone too self-satisfied to accept his guilt as a murderer.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: Labour Conference (2011)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

What was the theme of this year’s Labour Party Conference?

Revolution? Radicalism? Reform, even?

Well, no—respectability.

Many responsible newspapers have been worried for a long time at Labour’s inability to dent the Tories’ confidence. None of them want to see the British capitalist class having to rely upon only one party to form their governments for them.

So they were full of concern that Labour should have a dignified conference. They all hoped for the sort of inoffensive, meaningless resolutions which would make the Labour Party appear as a party which any man of good will could vote for.

This is what is needed to make Mr. Gaitskell anything like a reasonable bet for Prime Minister.

The platform at Brighton played exactly as the press had advised and, except for one or two resolutions, the conference as a whole also fell into line.

This is the logical end to the Labour Party road of power conscious, capitalist reform policies. It is the end which Socialists foretold over fifty years ago, when the Labour Party were busily dubbing us Impossibilists.

Perhaps some of the Labour pioneers never thought it would come to this.

Blackpool, 1961, has done its share to show how wrong they were.

(from ‘The News in Review’, Socialist Standard, November 1961)

Action Replay: Flat Out (2011)

The Action Replay column from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Back in July we commented on the build-up to next year’s London Olympics, in particular the new giant shopping mall that lies between Stratford station and the Olympic Park.

But that’s not the only way in which capitalist companies hope to make a profit from the Games. For instance, spectators will only be allowed to take in with them drinks in small containers, as a way of encouraging them to buy refreshments inside the venues – at inflated prices, no doubt.

Property developers, too, have seen a chance to make a killing in what has always been one of the poorest areas of London. New blocks of flats are being built in anticipation of an ‘Olympic legacy’ that will attract young professionals who can afford prices such as £350,000 for a two-bedroom flat. Not many of those who live in the area at the moment will be buying at prices like these, even as their local shops and houses are demolished or converted.

While the Games are on there will be an enormous demand for accommodation, especially in the surrounding area. So, many homeowners are planning to move out for a month or so and rent their homes to others for the duration at several thousand pounds a week. And “an increasing number of landlords are asking for clauses to be written into their rental contracts allowing them to kick out their tenants for a convenient ‘holiday let’ during the Games” (Guardian 8 October). Who said the housing industry existed to meet human need?

Paul Bennett

Casino Capitalism: Inefficient and Irrational (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Even supporters of capitalism can see this – at least some of the time.

One of the trends of political reporting in recent years has been to announce the odds being given by bookies of a particular outcome of an election.  On the face of it, this makes a lot of sense.  Punters will use the information they have to hand to gauge the mood of the electorate and risk their money.  The fact that many of them do so separately should draw out the “wisdom of the crowd” and provide the best analysis short of the actual vote itself.  Of course, this face value isn’t the whole story:  candidates may try boosting themselves by encouraging supporters to bet on them; large-scale betting syndicates may skew the odds through their betting patterns; punters may follow the crowd and bet on the short odds, hoping for a win; some people may just place a flutter without caring if they win or lose. Which is why we don’t decide elections based on the bookies odds alone, and wait till the actual vote.

Some people, though, think that that is a good way to organise producing and distributing what we need.  There was an idea, with considerable traction in academic and official circles, called the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, which held, as a recent UN report puts it, ‘that all publicly available information is immediately reflected in prices. In its strong form, the EMH contends that even private information – available only to individual market participants – is reflected in the price through the effects of the transactions of the persons in possession of the information.’ (Link.). In short, it holds that market prices (particularly stock market prices) are always right, and we shouldn’t try and second guess the market.  Almost no-one, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, seriously puts this case forward any more – although a few bitter-enders maintain it was the state failing to leave it to markets that caused the crisis; and doubtless a new version will appear if the economy returns to steady growth.

The UN report, Price formation in financialized commodity markets: the role of information, delivers an academic coup de grace to that idea.  It analyses recent trends in food markets, with a view to explaining their apparent volatility.  It finds ‘market participants also make trading decisions based on factors that are totally unrelated to the respective commodity, such as portfolio considerations, or they may be following a trend.’  It explains this by identifying a difference between commodity markets (trying to profitably get goods to where they are needed) and financial investment (which is about maintaining a portfolio of investments and following a pattern of earnings, irrespective of the goods/outcomes involved).  When this latter predominates, then, they note, rational use of information goes out of the window:

‘In an environment of herd behaviour there are limits to arbitrage. Acting against the majority, even if justified by fundamentals, may result in large losses, often of borrowed money. It may therefore be rational for market participants to ignore their own information and follow the trend. This is what many financial players do by default, basing their trading decisions purely on the behaviour of price series (algorithmic trading), which can lead to a commodity price bubble.’  

That is, it becomes harmful to act on good information against the flow of the market.  A “weight of money” effect can come into play.  If, for example, an investor commits a large sum of money relative to the market, and then faces liquidity constraints. This may push market prices in the wrong direction. In particular, since many investors rely on computer programs to organise their trades, there is a risk of re-enforcing herd behaviour due to the fact that the software is following the same set of algorithms and programmed responses: like an evolutionary ecology lacking diversity, it may work well for a while, but a small change in the environment could see everyone killed off.  

A recent report by the UK Government Office for Science, entitled "The Future of Computer Trading in Financial Markets” identifies:

‘three main mechanisms that may lead to instability when financial markets involve significant proportions of CBT [Computer Based Trading]: nonlinear sensitivities to change (where small changes can have very big effects), incomplete information (where some agents in the market have more, or more accurate, knowledge than others), and internal “endogenous” risks based on feedback loops within the system.’ (Link.)  

They also, though, find that computer-based trading is more efficient than human trading.  That may be, as another study has shown, that human traders do not behave in a rational manner at all.  According to Der Spiegel a study at the University of St. Gallen has found traders behave in a reckless manner:  

‘the bankers weren’t aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, “it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents.(…) And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents.’ (Link.)

Rather than behaving like parts of a rational algorithm, they behave like primates in a status competition. In either case, whether it is computer or primate driven, the financial markets, according to the UN report, have expanded massively into the food production process.  Its authors speculate that this may be attributable to the 2000 financial crisis (the collapse of the dot.com bubble after the Asian Tigers wobble) as investors sought to find a new safer profitable place to put their money.  In other words, the real world need of human beings to eat became subsumed to a (virtual) game of profit making ever more divorced from reality.

The important thing about all these reports is the emphasis they put on the flow of information in the production process.  As the UN report notes:

‘There is ample information on physical commodity markets, but it is not easy to obtain in a systematic way. A number of sources provide the same information, but in different formats. It therefore takes time and expertise to find out which are the most useful, relevant and reliable sources of information required for a specific commodity. Even from a single source the multiplicity of information products can make it rather cumbersome to access the targeted information. The various sources of information include official sources, such as international organizations and study groups, organizations specializing in specific commodities or groups of commodities, and governments of countries which are key players in the commodity markets, such as Australia and the United States, as well as private sources. In many cases, even from official sources, the information is not publicly available and can be accessed only against payment.’

This, in part, illustrates what a simple idea socialism is: that that information about production and stocks will be opened up and consciously shared.  It doesn’t require complex mathematics, or the invention of the new way of doing things, but a framework allowing the opening up and provision of information currently hidden behind and distorted by the operations of the financial market and indeed of the whole market system.  The brains of mathematicians currently behind the computer trading programs could be put to use finding creative and useful ways of enabling the free information to find its way to the hands of those who need to organise producing and distributing what we need.  Socialism will not be the result of advances in computing, but it could certainly benefit.  Even aggressive bankers will see that they would benefit: after all, many of their jobs are now being mechanised away.  We can see to it that getting food for everyone isn’t a gamble. It’s what might be called the Efficient Non-Market Hypothesis.

Pik Smeet

Obituary: Margaret Hopwood (2011)

Obituary from the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Margaret Hopwood (1924–2011)

Manchester Branch are saddened to report the death in Bolton of Margaret Hopwood, the widow of Alf Atkinson, late General Secretary of the Socialist Party.

Margaret joined Manchester Branch in 1945, were she met Alf, having been introduced to socialism by her father Ernie Hopwood, a Socialist Standard subscriber and sympathizer. She remained active in the branch until it folded in 1957 and was involved in the re-forming of branch in 1968, a very active period in Manchester. She was responsible for organizing the 1969 and 1970 Manchester Summer schools, both tremendous successes.

In 1975 she and Alf moved to East Grinstead, a career move for Margaret who became headmistress of a school teaching English as a second language to immigrant children. This gave her an opportunity to work at Head Office, and she was Overseas Contact Secretary and a member of the Library Committee for many years. She was also a founder member of Croydon branch in 1981. Generous and hospitable, she and Alf accommodated Bolton and Lancaster delegates at Conference and Autumn Delegate Meeting for years – more than eight members at once sometimes.

Despite her commitment to socialism, Margaret could be critical at times of the Party and its members. Often, her opening remark was “and what have you done for socialism today, comrade?” She was by far the best Socialist Standard seller I have ever seen; no street corner was safe. On retirement, she and Alf moved to Shrewsbury, attending meetings in Birmingham until Alf’s death in 1998, when she transferred to Manchester Branch again.

Margaret was clever, funny and a true socialist.  She will be missed by her many friends and comrades. Our sympathy goes out to her children, Owen and Adele, both members of the Party, and to her grandchildren.

Joan Morris

Cooking the Books: Ground Rents and Coronets (2011)

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

The slump has led to a revival of long-forgotten nostrums. Last year the Times (10 June) carried an article advocating a single tax on land as a way out of the crisis. This proposal normally associated with Henry George (1839-1897), but Philippe Legrain chose to associate it with Winston Churchill. Hence the subtitle of his article: “Adopting Churchill’s plan would benefit wealth creators at the expense of the idle rich”.

It is true that a hundred years ago, when the Liberal government of the day was in a power struggle with the House of Lords over the budget, Churchill who was then a Liberal did support a tax on land as a way of getting at the landed aristocracy.

Some harsh things were said in the course of this struggle with the likes of the Duke of Westminster and Churchill’s cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, being denounced as “land monopolists” and the “idle rich”. As indeed they were. Those who own a piece of the Earth’s surface are able to extract an income from the rest of society as ground-rent without having to lift a finger; the higher the demand for their land, the higher their income. In capitalist society this has to come out of the surplus value created in capitalist agriculture and industry. Naturally it was resented by the capitalist class who at least have to arrange for their capital to be invested before they can obtain their property income.

Henry George’s idea was to tax away the whole of the ground-rent of landowners and use it to relieve the capitalist class of the need to pay any taxes. Churchill, Lloyd George and the others didn’t want to go that far, but they still wanted to tax the mere ownership of land. Legrain repeats their argument:

‘The country's biggest private landowner, the Duke of Buccleuch, owns 277,000 acres, not because of his talent or industry, but because his ancestors seized vast swaths of Scotland. These "land monopolists" — as Churchill dubbed them — get richer not through their own efforts, but that of others. The Duke of Westminster owns 300 acres of what was once fields and is now London's priciest real estate — Mayfair and Belgravia. And because so many people have established thriving businesses in the capital, that inheritance is now worth billions of pounds. Surely it would be better to tax that windfall gain, rather than the employees and entrepreneurs who generate it?’

The landed aristocracy lost the political battle and in 1911 the House of Lords had its wings clipped. But they kept their property. According to Legrain, in Britain today ‘0.3 percent of population owns 69 per cent of the land.’ The latest Sunday Times Rich List puts the Duke of Westminster as the 4th richest person in Britain with a pile worth £7,000 million. The Duke of Buccleuch is equal 381st with “only” £180 million, but that’s because land in the wilds of Scotland is less in demand than land in central London. Other bluebloods monopolising land in central London are Earl Cadogan (21st with £2,850 million), the Howard de Walden family (33rd with £1,820 million) and Viscount Portman (53rd with £1,200 million).

The Queen, who besides being the figurehead of the British capitalist state is a landed aristocrat in her own right, is equal 257th with £300 million. Other titled landowners with more than her are the Duke of Devonshire, the Duke of Sutherland and the Duke of Northumberland.

Their wealth is obscene and not justifiable even by capitalist standards. But Legrain is mistaken. Taxing away their rents would not benefit the real “wealth creators”, i.e. the wage and salary working class, but only the capitalist class by reducing the tax it has to pay.

Riot! (2011)

From the November 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

We take another look at the August riots.

Moral outrage ran riot across the pages of the tabloid press for six days in August this year while looting, arson and battles with the police spilled across the streets of London and other English cities. Angry condemnation of the rioters and promises of legal revenge emerged from the mouths of Westminster politicians, while the nightly television newscasts drip-fed the nation with a steady message of shocked disapproval.

‘These are sickening scenes. This is criminality pure and simple, and it has to be confronted and defeated’ said an apparently affronted David Cameron (PM and former member of the Bullingdon Club).

In the first days and nights of rioting, David Lammy, Labour MP for Tottenham, put the establishment case. The riots were: ‘an attack on Tottenham, on people, ordinary people, shopkeepers, women, children , who are now standing on the street homeless as a consequence’. It was a politician’s oily speech, carefully tailored to achieve maximum media effect, but it expressed a view which many of Lammy’s constituents might well have shared: the main damage inflicted by the rioters was on their own communities. The looting and arson attacks had been indiscriminate, directed at small local shops as well as banks, larger businesses and chain stores; people’s homes had been destroyed and members of the community were left traumatised and angry. Eventually, the rioting would also lead to the deaths of five innocent people. What Lammy’s comment also implied, though, was that the rioters were somehow not ‘ordinary people.’ By marginalising them in this way he was showing a desire to sidestep any need to understand what was happening.   

Revolution?

Unreported by the corporate media, another very different political commentary was also taking place. Its tone was not condemnatory but enthusiastic: ‘We are in a revolutionary moment’, proclaimed one blogger, ‘Prepare yourself…’ Several of the more excitable anarchist and leftist groups were in animated discussion about whether the long awaited ‘revolutionary moment’ had arrived; or, if it hadn’t, whether the rioting was, at least, an important step towards it; or, if it wasn’t, whether this was, anyhow, how revolution might begin?  Of the more ponderous political groups out on capitalism’s left-wing, the Trotskyist ‘Socialist’ Party of England and Wales (SPEW) preferred to censor the disorderly way young workers on the streets were expressing their frustration at the system. In its view, this was clearly incorrect. (The rioters, evidently, had not asked SPEW to stage manage the week’s events.)

Capitalism and the limits of tolerance

So, what did actually happen during those six August days and nights? Was it simply a sudden and inexplicable upsurge in criminality and ‘disgusting behaviour’ by urban youth? Or was it an inarticulate cry of the working-class stumbling blindly towards a revolutionary overthrow of the established order? Perhaps, of course, it was neither of these things.  Perhaps it was something else entirely.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that the rioting, wherever it occurred, had several obvious and consistent features: it took place almost exclusively in the poorer districts of cities; it had no obvious racial basis; the participants were young, sometimes very young; and where their voices were recorded in the dozens of published web videos, they delivered the same angry and unambiguous message: “it’s payback time.”

Payback

But payback for what? The answer which the rioters gave most frequently themselves was payback for years of indignity suffered at the hands of the police. And it was apparent that at the Pembury Estate in Hackney and at various other locations, many of those out on the streets were spoiling for a fight. ‘Kill the police’, they shouted. One man summed up the general mood this way: ‘[The police] are not all bad but most of them are; no-one around here has got any liking for the police’.   I’ve been wanting to do this to the Fedz for years, said another. Although the killing of Mark Duggan by police officers on 4 August and the insulting treatment meted out to his family was a powerful trigger for the riots, it was the longer-standing resentment felt towards the police in London and elsewhere that lit the powder keg.

For unemployed teenagers and young people in urban areas, regular harassment by police and the use of stop-and-search tactics has long been the source of that resentment. For black communities who feel themselves singled out for this kind of treatment, it is a double insult. But, black or white, the rioters universally expressed the view that the police “took the piss” on the streets.

There was, though, another aspect to ‘payback.’ It was about claiming what many felt society had denied them: the right to be treated equally and the right to a decent standard of living. They were not shy about it: it was about ‘the money’. Stafford Scott, in a Guardian comment piece made this connection: “looting comes from the belief that if you cannot get equality and cannot expect justice, then you better make sure that you get paid.” Though he was speaking of attitudes within the black community, his remarks chimed very closely with what all the rioters were saying.  For some, the collective nature of ‘riot’ was enough to legitimise the looting of shops and businesses. It was a moment of ‘freedom’ one teenager claimed.  And though not all spoke openly in these terms, the attitude is nevertheless implicit in the widespread notion of payback.  

Class war

So, were the rioters simply criminals, as Cameron, and others claimed? Certainly they were criminals. The law defines all attacks upon capitalism’s system of property relationships as criminal, whoever carries them out.  But the question that Cameron, as a defender of capitalist property could not raise, however, let alone answer, was what kind of challenge the rioters were making.

The significance of the August riots becomes clear only when they are set against the background of the conflicts of interest that are built into the social relationships of capitalism. Those conflicts are never far from the surface and are liable to break out at any time, visibly and destructively. That’s especially the case when the capitalist system, which is always unstable and unpredictable, puts large groups of people or even whole classes under pressure. And the rioters who came from Hackney, Tottenham and Peckham, and from dozens of other socially deprived urban areas around the country were certainly feeling the pressure. Many of these areas have for a long time been dependent on services funded by government and, as a result, are now being disproportionately hit by cuts in public spending. As the UK Coalition government continues its policy of making the working-class pay for the chaos and shrinkage in the economy, many families on low incomes now face not just the prospect of increasing unemployment but benefit cuts, higher prices, and the withdrawal of public services. All this is happening - and seen to be happening – in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, and conspicuous consumption by the rich continues unabated.  It is hardly to be wondered at, under these circumstances, that frustration is going to spill over into action on the streets.

The rioting was not an example of class conflict. There was no direct confrontation between workers and their employers, for example.  The indiscriminate acts of violence, and arson seen on the streets last August were purely destructive.  The looting was for individual gratification or to meet individual need.   And there was certainly no sign that any of this would lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist order.  But as damaging to their own working-class communities as the riots showed themselves to be, they were a response to the specific class conditions that the rioters fond themselves facing under capitalism.  The targets they chose to loot were the everyday embodiments of capitalist property relations, high-street shops and businesses that hand over their consumer goods only to those with the money to pay for them. Also targeted were the defenders of those property relations, the police. Looting in these circumstances is a way of breaking through the barriers that capitalism imposes. It’s a way of challenging capitalism’s institutionalised entitlement system (money) and asserting your own sense of entitlement to a share of what society has produced.  To that extent, rioting is a political statement.

What is striking, though, is how little sense of identification the rioters had with their own communities or with other members of their own class.  From a socialist perspective, they betrayed no real understanding of why they lacked jobs and had little prospect of getting them – or why they needed jobs at all.  They showed no understanding of why they led impoverished, disempowered lives in a world full of rich folk, expenses-grabbing politicians, greedy bankers and glitzy consumer goods. They were seeking payback and a means, individually, to survive.  They were not fomenting revolution.  But at the same time, they understood enough to know that their interests were not being served by the world in which they lived, and felt strongly that they were entitled to something more.

HUD.