Five Benefits of Not Having Money (2008)

From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist society will have no need for money. This will profoundly affect all aspects of life.

Removing money from the current economic equation would strike most people as impossible, unthinkable, absolutely imponderable. Everything we do, every transaction we make, from a simple cup of tea to sending a space probe to Mars, from birth to death and at every step in between, money has become a necessary part of getting what we require. It has become an accepted, entrenched method of acquiring anything and everything but it wasn’t always so and in a genuine socialist system money will be shown to have been an unnecessary, wasteful and divisive way of ordering world communities.

When initially presented with the notion of a world without money the first imperative is the willingness to contemplate a huge paradigm shift, to put aside all familiar long-held views and preconceived notions and to enter into an adventure of discovery that there is a place for all at the table, that it doesn’t entail regression to the Dark Ages and that the welfare and progress of people doesn’t have to come at cost to the environment.

1. Work

It is well recognised by experts in the health arena that work is one of the most stressful areas of life for reasons such as long hours, extended travelling time to and from place of employment, risk of job loss, lack of security of tenure including competition both within and without, inflexible working practices, difficulty getting release for major personal events such as bereavement, long-term illness of a spouse or partner, or even short-term care of a sick child. Loss of employment can put stress on the whole family, sinking it into debt, causing day-to-day difficulties with the budget and in many cases leading to loss of the home.

When money is not required in exchange for work and when, instead, all contribute their skills, expertise and/or manpower in return for open access to the requirements of life then we can begin to see a different motivation enter the whole concept of the “work” scenario. A moneyless world will free up millions of workers now tied to some very stressful occupations dealing only in (other people’s) money – banking, mortgage brokering, insurance; those occupied in the collection of rates, taxes and utility payments; those in security work such as guards and armoured truck staff engaged only in protecting and moving money and other “valuables” – millions of workers who, when considered logically, currently fulfil no useful function and contribute nothing to society that improves that society.

Right now, worldwide, are millions of would-be workers who are sidelined in one way or another, without employment or scratching on the edges of a black economy and in some of the more “developed” countries we find some termed “scroungers” in current-day parlance.

Within the capitalist system there has to be a pool of workers unable to find work in order to keep the bargaining power in favour of the employers who strive to keep wage levels down, whereas if there is a shortage of suitable labour the bargaining power switches to the employees who try to force wage levels up. The fact that a few “developed” countries have systems which pay a percentage of workers to remain unemployed (receive benefits) is a price the capitalists are prepared to pay to maintain the tensions in society. Encouraging the employed to think that they are the ones subsidising the benefits system maintains one fissure within the working class. Also, allowing a large number of unemployed to be without benefits would cause too many problems for the capitalists with possibilities of mass looting, rioting and damage to their property

2. Increased Leisure Time

With so many extra hands on deck working hours will be able to be considerably reduced which, with the knowledge that one’s work is not tied to the ability to feed and clothe the family, to house them and provide all the other requirements of life, is to remove the stress at a stroke.

Decreased time, but working for the common good rather than increased time working only for personal remuneration. Less working time was the oft-repeated refrain in the early days of the technology era. Workers were to benefit from machine-operated production systems, computers would be able to handle many of the mundane operations previously done manually, the working week would be much reduced, maybe even leading to job-sharing and part-time employment. In fact this state of affairs never materialised and more employees found longer working hours became part of their conditions of employment, earlier agreements having been gradually eroded to the benefit of the employers.

In socialism, with millions released from wage slavery in the then redundant financial sector free to be a part of the production, distribution and services sectors, with the black economy and “illegals” no longer threatening paid workers (pay being redundant) there will be a huge reduction in individual necessary work time. When there is no profit incentive the emphasis will be on the production of quality goods from quality materials and no one need choose an inferior item based on cost. Providers of utilities such as electricity and gas, water and communications will be able to have sufficient workers to install, service, repair and develop their installations more efficiently and effectively. If there is work that no one is prepared to undertake then an alternative will need to be found democratically.

Without the constraints that we have today the workplace will become a different place, one of cooperation not competition, where we work for the benefit of all, not for the profit of a few. The lines between work and leisure may well be much more blurred than in today’s scenario. People will have time, time to be creative, to learn different and multiple skills and to enjoy the time they spend working. Leisure activities seen as hobbies now – vehicle maintenance, gardening, DIY home improvements, baking, the making of all kinds of hand-made items, giving or receiving educational and training courses – could well form part of one’s service to the community, bringing a greater satisfaction and contributing to individual development generally, one of the aims of socialism. With more leisure time available it is also highly likely that more ‘work’ would be created in the leisure area, whether sports complexes, theatrical and music productions and educational courses in the widest sense and with unlimited opportunities for the active participation of those who choose it.

3. Housing

Adequate shelter, a “right” for all enshrined in the United Nations Charter, is still unavailable to millions (billions, probably). There is absolutely no automatic right to housing within the capitalist system. All must pay. To pay, all must work. It is no matter that you work long and hard and that your children work long and hard and don’t go to school. All that matters is that you have enough to buy or rent or build. Maybe you did have enough before the housing market bubble burst and the “worth” of your house went down while the interest rates went up. Well, tough! Look around you. See the empty houses and FOR SALE and foreclosure signs. These people must be living somewhere now. There is always housing stock available – if you can pay the going rate.

This is one very obvious benefit of not having money. The recent economic crisis has focussed many home-owners’ minds. Why should anyone be secure one month and the next find themselves in queer street? Can anybody justify one individual’s multiple home ownership while others live in slums, in cars, in cardboard boxes on the streets? Please! When the majority of us have eventually decided that this scenario is unacceptably obscene we can at last begin to move to a humanitarian way of ordering our societies. Housing for all. Decent housing for all. Materials that are free and belong to all of us. Our architects, builders, plumbers, plasterers, electricians, etc. etc. will all work for free – they also need homes to live in. New housing can be built to the best specifications using appropriate materials, incorporating adequate insulation and services with regard to environmental protection and best use of alternative energy.

Respect for people and respect for the environment. Decisions made democratically as to best use of urban space vacated by the money businesses; by communities wanting to refurbish or upgrade their older stock. The balance between urban and rural will no doubt change. In some parts of the world there will be a mass exodus back to productive farmland, reclaimed for local use and consumption rather than continuing to grow cash crops for export. Decisions will be taken based on the well-being of communities and determined by the requirements of those communities and there will be no constraints or limitations linked to profit for a third party.

4. Health care

As a result of huge stress reduction, no more worrying about salary or wages from the job, no more worrying about keeping up the payments on the house, increased leisure time – all these various factors will surely result in improved relationships all round and, quite soon, a healthier workforce.

At present there are huge variations in standards of health care around the world and also massive discrepancies in availability and monetary cost to the recipients, Universal health care simply dos not exist. Again it is tied in to the ability to pay. Let’s remove this barrier to good health and care of the sick by removing the money element and offer all services, treatments, drugs and medicines free of charge. Hospitals and clinics then will be free of top-heavy budget management and will be able to access resources, whether manpower, equipment or drugs, according to their requirements and not limited by financial constraints. Medical researchers, now mostly tied to global corporations and limited by them in the areas of their research, will be able to concentrate on eradicating disease and providing the best remedies for all comers, not just those with insurance. World diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and polio will soon be a thing of the past when money, too, is history.

Work and training in one of the many varied avenues of health care will be open to those from the pool of post-money redundant sectors. With the shift from a market economy to societies geared to fulfilling human needs there will probably be more priority given to preventive medicine and appropriate information on suitable diet and healthy living, which leads us to consider the topic of food.

5. Food

Currently the growing, processing and distribution of food is largely dominated by transnational corporations solely in the pursuit of profit. The consumer appears to have a huge choice of goods and numerous decisions to make at each aisle of the supermarket but often the choices are superficial, not actually the choices being sought. For instance, notice the difficulty of buying a processed food which doesn’t contain soya. The soya has probably been genetically modified and the labelling could be unhelpful. The choice becomes buy in ignorance or acceptance, or do without.

It’s well known that products are laced with added sugar, salt, monosodium glutamate etc. to create a certain dependency and craving for more. Last year’s problems of melamine-laced pet foods which caused animal deaths in the importing countries were followed this year by melamine-laced milk products causing infant deaths and multiple illnesses in China, spreading fear to importing countries. There can be only one reason for food to be contaminated deliberately (apart from a mass assassination attempt or the desire to spread fear among the population) and that is in the pursuit of greater profit.

Africa, a net exporter of food until the post-colonial days of the 1960s, became a victim again, indebted to the World Bank and IMF. Recipient of highly subsidised dumping of food from rich countries (US and Europe) the result has been that the countries there have to grow cash crops for export in order to pay off some of the growing debt creating food shortages for the domestic population, many of whom had been forced off ancestral lands (for the growing of cash crops) and who were then without the means of subsistence. There have been a number of studies which reveal there is no problem feeding a world population considerably larger than today’s. There is an enormous wastage of food in the rich world. The major problem for the hungry in the poorest countries is lack of cash.

Food, if regarded simply as fuel for the body, should be clean – free from contaminants, chemicals and the like; fresh – the more local the better; and nutritious. Free food for all would come with the bonus of knowing there would no longer be any incentive to adulterate ingredients. The question of “FAIR TRADE” wouldn’t arise as all along the line farmers, producers, pickers, packers and distributors would have the same motivation to provide good clean food knowing they have the same access as the consumers. This has to be a win-win situation. Another winner in this scenario would be the environment.

Janet Surman

Next month, five more benefits from not having to have money.

A critique of political ecology (1987)

From the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last January's German elections Die Grünen — the Greens — increased their representation in the Bundestag from the 27 seats they had won in 1983 to 42. This makes them the envy of "ecology" parties in the rest of Europe. Compare their success with, for instance, the performance of the Green Party in Britain in recent by-elections: 264 votes in Greenwich and 403 in Truro.

Even though ecology is a politically-neutral scientific discipline its particular field of study — the relationships of living organisms to each other and to their non-living environment — makes it one that has an important relevance for human social activity. This is because humans too are natural organisms, in fact the only ones, due to their particular biological make-up, capable of regulating and changing their relations with the rest of nature.

Ecological research has shown the present relationship of human society to the rest of nature to be damaging — both to the rest of nature and so in the end to humans themselves as part of nature. It seems reasonable that an ecologically-inspired movement should have arisen calling for social and political action to change this relationship. The German Greens present the argument for this in their Federal Programme in the following way:

A prerequisite of an ecologically oriented political view is the recognition of the interdependence between the balance of nature and life cycles, and an awareness of the consequences of human interference in nature. Our highest aim is therefore the enlightenment of the population concerning these relationships. The urgently needed communal approach to an ecologically oriented form of politics is still obstructed by powerful economic interests. An economically informed political policy which looks towards the future must replace our present profit-oriented mode of thinking. We must put a stop to the violation of nature in order to guarantee her survival and ours.

In the future economic goals should only be realised within a framework of ecological necessities. Our greatest imperative must be the least possible alteration of natural processes.

We can fully endorse both the ecologically-based criticism of present-day human society — capitalism, in its private form in the West and its state form in the East — and its conclusion that humans must take action to change it. Where we differ from the various Green and "ecology" parties and groups is over what action should be taken.

Briefly, we hold that what is required is a fundamental social revolution, to be carried out by democratic political action, to make the natural and industrial resources of the world the common property of all humanity. Only on this basis — the abolition of all property rights over nature and what is produced from it — can production be re-oriented from its present aim of profit-making and unlimited capital accumulation towards the satisfaction of human needs in an ecologically acceptable way.

Very few political ecologists see the establishment of a property-less society as the only way in which humans can consciously regulate their relations with the rest of nature so as to respect ecological imperatives. The vast majority of them see what the German Greens call “an ecologically informed political policy" as involving little more than trying to limit the damage the present economic and social system causes to nature. When they enter into the details of the "ecologically oriented" economic system they would like to see eventually replace the present one, it turns out to be a system which retains property, money, markets, banks, taxes and so on. In other words, they imagine that they can re-orient the wages-prices-profits system that is capitalism along ecological lines. But this is an illusion: capitalism can no more be reformed to respect ecological imperatives than it can be reformed to serve the interests of the wage and salary working class.

Green parties may be very good at criticising present-day society from an ecological point of view and in identifying what productive practices would have to be adopted to respect the balance of nature (such as maximum use of renewable resources, recycling of materials, interchangeable spare parts and energy conservation) but they go completely off the rails when they imagine that ecologically-acceptable productive methods could be imposed on the present economic system by public pressure, government intervention, laws and tax reforms. In other words, they are wrong when they claim that the present capitalist economy could be gradually transformed into an ecologically-oriented one.

Most Greens would probably object to being told that they stand for reforming capitalism in a Green direction. Petra Kelly, one of the more prominent of the Greens in Germany, has even claimed that almost all German Greens hold, with regard to the East-West conflict, that "there is a form of capitalism on both sides, state capitalism on the one side and private capitalism on the other" (Green Politics by Charlene Spretnak and Fritjof Capra. Paladin, p.62). And the German Greens' Federal Programme identifies clearly enough the link between capitalism and ecological damage:

People in the Federal Republic of Germany are also affected by the ecological and economic crisis threatening industrial societies. This crisis is characterised by the increasing destruction of the biological basis of life for human beings and the exploitation of one human by another. The ruthless plundering of nature causes long-term damage which is in part irreparable. This damage is seen merely as an unfortunate side effect in the search for short-term profits. The biological basis of life is endangered by nuclear power plants, by air. water and ground pollution. by the storage of hazardous wastes, and by the spendthrift waste of natural resources. The ruthless plundering of human resources is even worse. The physical and psychological burdens experienced at work mount up as industry develops and utilises technology without regard for human beings. Production is not oriented towards the needs of people, but towards the interests of investors. The ecological balance of nature is sacrificed on the altars of economic growth and profit-winning competition.

"Economic growth" (capital accumulation) and "profit-winning competition", however, are not seen as inevitable consequences of the system of buying and selling, wages and profits but as a result of this system being dominated by big private and state enterprises whose size orients them to pursue these particular goals.

This mistaken economic analysis leads the Greens in a quite different direction from socialists. While we advocate an end to the wages-prices-profits system through the establishment of a world of common ownership and democratic control, they advocate that "large corporations should be split up into manageable units and administered democratically by the people who actually work there" and that these "smaller, more medium-size", self-managed units should practise ecological, as well as financial, accounting. In other words, they advocate that the wages-prices-profits system should be run by smaller, worker-controlled and ecologically-oriented businesses. This, however. is no solution to current ecological problems because it is completely unrealistic.

It is not decentralisation, smaller productive units and democratic control of work in themselves that are unrealistic (as defenders of the economic status quo would claim) , but their achievement within the framework of the wages-prices-profits system. In other words, they could be achieved but not within this system. As Karl Marx was the first to show clearly, in a situation where everything is produced with a view to being sold, where everything including human mental and physical energies is subject to buying and selling, economic forces come into operation which impose profit-seeking and capital accumulation on economic decision-makers whether these be individual property-owners, private corporations, state industries or workers’ cooperatives. It is not the internal structure of an enterprise that is important in this respect but the fact that it is an institution producing goods for sale on a market. These same economic forces also lead to the concentration and centralisation of the control of industry and to the short-term economic goals that result in monetary profits taking priority over longer-term ecological considerations.

We are aware that most Greens are suspicious of Marxian economics due to its association with the self-styled socialist regimes in the East which represent all that they reject in economics (productivism, gigantism, pursuit of unlimited economic growth) but these regimes are in no way socialist; rather they are examples of what Marx would have called state capitalism.

If the Greens can overcome this prejudice they would find that Marx’s analysis of the wages-prices-profits system of capitalism explains both why the ecological laws that ought to govern the relationship between human society and the rest of nature are not respected at the moment and how there is no way of this happening as long as this economic system, whose very essence is the externally-imposed pursuit of profits and unlimited capital accumulation, is allowed to continue.

Reinforced with such a knowledge of the economic laws of capitalism, the Greens’ understanding of the ecological laws of nature would lead them to realise that the political action demanded by the findings of ecological research is one aimed at replacing private and state property by common ownership and democratic control — replacing production for sale and profit by production solely for use. Socialism alone provides for the decentralised, non-hierarchical and non-exploitative society in harmony with nature that the Greens are searching for.

Adam Buick

Ecologia e Socialismo (2023)

Via the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Three. articles from the Socialist Standard have been translated into Italian :

https://www.antropocene.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=427:stiamo-andando-incontro-a-una-fame-di-massa&catid=12

https://www.antropocene.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=422:perche-la-biodiversita-e-importante&catid=12

https://www.antropocene.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=425:half-earth-socialim-troy-vettese-e-drew-pendergrass-2022&catid=13

New Socialist Party pamphlets (1990)

Party News from the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

How We Live and How We Might Live

On the occasion of the cententary of the publication of the utopian romance News from Nowhere by the revolutionary socialist William Morris, the Socialist Party is shortly to republish Morris's pamphlet How We Live and How We Might Live together with a full-length introduction assessing his contribution to the socialist movement.

To order a copy in advance send cheque or postal order for £1 to: Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Ecology and Socialism

This new 32-page pamphlet giving the socialist view on environmental issues has just been published. To obtain a copy (post paid) send cheque or postal order for 75p to: Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Socialism and nature (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a criticism from a Marxist viewpoint of the so-called “Deep Greens” or “Deep Ecologists” who see nature as a force to which humans must submit.

Our ecological crisis, say the “deep” Greens, stems from a fundamentally unhealthy relationship between society and nature. In this relationship, inherited from attitudes and philosophies developed during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, we regard ourselves as separate from and superior to nature. We think we can constantly change, develop and destroy it for material benefit. Such alienation and exploitation result, Deep Greens say, from human arrogance and greed, which are displayed equally in capitalism and socialism.

They argue that a healthy, holistic, organic relationship with nature would, by contrast, regard humans as part of it, not separate from it—subject, like any other species, to the same ecological laws. We therefore must observe the natural limits on human activity imposed by finite resources. We should respect, celebrate and revere nature in its own right (the “bioethic”)—regardless of its use value to us. This means abandoning materialism and “living lightly on the earth”, while conserving virtually all species from highest to lowest.

Socialists, too, condemn Western attitudes to nature. However we relate them not to human “sin” but to the specific workings of capitalist economics (state or private). We reject the Deep Ecology approach in favour of a dialectical Marxist one.

Dialectical approach

A dialectical view of the society-nature relationship says, first, that there is no separation between them. They are part of a unity. There is not a self-contained “humanity” counterposed to a self-contained “non-human” world. The two are so un-self-contained that you cannot define one without the other (try it!). They are really aspects of one another: what humans do is natural, while nature is socially produced.

Second, as they develop they constantly interact to change each other, in a circular, mutually affecting way. “Non-human” nature, and human perceptions of it, affect and change human society. The latter then changes nature, which, changed, affects society to further change it, and so on.

Underlying human interactions with nature is the process of production, which is a defining characteristic of being human. In production we change nature with forethought, into forms more useful to us than in their “natural” state. Labour incorporates our essential human forces into nature, which therefore gains social quality in the form of use values. Under capitalism, of course, the value of nature is not judged simply by its use, material or aesthetic. It is expressed as exchange value: the value which its products realise when bought and sold in a market place.

Over time, our work on a nature which existed before humans were present—a “first nature”—has produced the material creations of society together with its institutions, ideas and values—a “second nature”. Here, we should recognise something which most Deep Ecologists do not (or if they do, they do not welcome it—see Bill McKibben’s Death of Nature). This is that wherever there are humans it is no longer meaningful to distinguish between first or second nature: everything is the latter. Marx certainly recognised this:

Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of nature, are, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour, but the results of a gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence and by means of his labour. (Capital Vol. I).

The nature that preceded human history . . . today no longer exists anywhere . . .

(German Ideology).

In these days of concern about ubiquitous global atmospheric modification the truth of these observations becomes clear upon a moment’s reflection. Even “wilderness” areas and wildlife preserves are not “natural”. They have been artificially segregated from normal development processes by human decisions.

Because socialists accept all this with equanimity, Deep Ecologists often accuse them of sharing with capitalism an arrogance towards the rest of nature. And, indeed, Marxism was, like liberalism, born of the Enlightenment view that saw nature as something to be understood in order to use its laws, principles and resources for the material benefit of humans.

But the society-nature dialectic does also acknowledge human dependence on non-human nature as well as vice versa. This is fundamental in the recognition of nature as one of the forces of production: a recognition which should beget, in socialists, sensitivity to the objective existence of ecological laws. It should also beget kindness and humane (i.e. like humanity) treatment of animals. For, if in changing nature we change ourselves, then acts of cruelty to animals create cruel humans.

This all means that as the productive forces of technology develop, what it is to be human and to be “natural” both change. In production

Man sets in motion arms and legs, head and hands—the natural forces of his body—in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. (Marx. Capital).

So through learning how to farm nature’s products we changed ourselves from nomadic hunter/gatherers to sedentary humans. Through learning how to manufacture things we changed ourselves to an industrial society. As our ability to use resources has grown we have developed new needs: housing, energy, telecommunication. As we have changed our power to do things (e.g. via transport and computers) we have changed the things we want and need to do (e.g. travel).

This interaction is not just material. Through changing nature and making things, we have changed ourselves into creatures who appreciate the beauty of what we create: buildings, machines, art, landscapes. Included in all this are our intellectual senses. As we transform nature, we get to know nature’s laws in order to do it more effectively and usefully. As this happens we develop our own intelligence.

Lewis Mumford described aspects of this dialectic, in Technics and Civilisation. He argued that creating machines produced new moral values in Western societies. These elevated practicality, thus favouring a meritocracy which swept aside a feudal caste system. And new cultural values were created. Nature was transformed into a human work of art: its beauty and wonder being augmented by the quantitative and analytic appreciation which a machine culture induces. The human imagination has also been enlarged by scientific, technological fantasising, and by a new machine aesthetic: a second nature of cranes, skyscrapers and microscopes. Cubism was the first style to reflect the beauty of the machine. Photography enhanced our appreciation of pure form in nature, while films brought distant environments near, recreating symbolically a world beyond our immediate reach.

This unfolding society-nature dialectic is an evolutionary process. In it, industrial, technological society is not some unnatural aberration, but a natural stage in social development and a social stage in the development of nature. It follows that changing our nature changes our needs. If most needs are thus socially produced, so too are the resources to fill them. Coal, oil, quartz, then, are not fundamental, basic resources: they did not become resources until we developed the technologies to use them. So we should be less concerned about whether they are going to run out. Rather, we should ask whether we wish to fulfil needs for energy, transport and telecommunication through these particular resources or others. Alternatively, we may wish to change our view of what we need; consequently our view of what constitutes “resources”. The point is that the choice is ours: we are not the helpless playthings of natural or economic forces that Greens sometimes would have us believe.

We should appreciate that this dialectical perspective is profoundly holistic. It contains no dualism of society and nature, but a monism in which both are defined by each other and are constantly co-cvolving:

Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. “Man lives on nature” means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature . . . (Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

As Fritjof Capra, the Deep Ecology physicist who is not a friend of Marxism, has conceded, this is a deeply ecological view of the society-nature relationship.

Alienation from nature

The socialist conception of nature, then, is not as a mere stock of economic goods (capitalism), nor as a source of intrinsic worth or good (deep ecology), nor as an endangered ecosystem (tragedy of the commons survivalism). It conceives of nature as a social category: though there was an “objective” nature it has been reshaped and reinterpreted by one aspect of itself, human society.

Since alienation means separation from aspects of the self, then alienation from nature means a failure to realise that it is an aspect of the self, i.e. a social creation. This implies that the environmental crisis results from failing to see nature as our own creation and to understand that we can exercise conscious social control over this creation in order to make it a more desirable environment. Instead, we tend to view change towards unpleasant environments as substantially inevitable—a result of economic and technological forces (like the market and mechanisation) that are (we imagine) largely beyond our control. Reformist environmentalists and politicians try to wrestle with such forces, introducing taxes and legislation to soften their environmental impact. But they consider that a truly socialist society—an egalitarian, productive community of society and nature in which both are mutually benign—is quite beyond their reach.

For Deep Greens, “alienation” from nature means something quite different. It means asserting the naturalness of humans by “living in harmony with nature”, i.e. effectively conceding that natural laws (c.g. carrying capacity) have immediate determining power over us. Nature is seen as the source of worth (it “knows best”) and we endanger it unless we follow its rules. This view, says Steven Vogel, by seeing human activity as encroachment on or violation of nature

seems to be curiously guilty of just the sort of dualism it ascribes to the project of dominating nature. Somehow the activity of humans in transforming their environmcnt, alone of all other species, is ‘‘unnatural". ("Marx and Alienation from Nature", Social Theory and Practice, Vol 14, No3).

Vogel might well be thinking of Greenpeace's 1990 recruiting leaflet, which accuses “man” of multiplying “his numbers to plague proportions . . . and now stands like a brutish infant, gloating over this metcroric rise to ascendency".

Deep Ecologists would have us revere nature, preserving it to acknowledge our “one-ness” with it. But, as Murray Bookchin suggests, such worship mystifies nature, actually placing humanity far apart from it. It is a "Supernature with its shamans, priests, priestesses and fanciful deities". Reverent mystification really separates us from nature: we the “impotent and terrified mortal before a jealous and angry god", Gaia as an inhuman force we cannot change but to which we must adjust for our survival.

So Deep Ecology’s view of alienation from nature really rests on a dualistic conception of the human-nature relationship: a conception it is supposed to reject. The socialist dialectic, however, is not dualistic, and therefore, as Vogel says, “the question is not whether what we do ‘accords with nature’, it is whether we like what we have wrought”. And, as Reiner Grundmann says, in communism (socialism) humans will “dominate” nature but only in the sense of being in total control of their relationship with it. This in fact is the precondition for avoiding ecological crises.

David Pepper

Carrying Capacity Carry-ons (2021)

From the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

When members of the World Socialist Movement explain that we aspire to a society of abundance where there is plenty for all, it is not a recommendation for some sort of orgy of consumerism, but simply referring to the fact that it is technically possible to produce more than enough to satisfy everyone’s material needs and that meeting everybody’s needs will indeed likely involve an increase in what people consume. This will certainly be the case for the billions of people who endure horrendous hunger, disease, and squalor. So, yes, socialism will involve raising the personal and individual consumption for much of the world’s population.

Surprisingly, some of our most vociferous critics are not conservatives but liberal progressives who decry such a goal as ecologically unfriendly and unachievable. More often than not, they will cite statistics of our planet’s carrying capacity and tell us we would require two or three Earths to provide for humanity’s needs.

Carrying capacity is a well-known and widely accepted concept. It basically says that sustainability requires balance and goes something like this: Humans need certain resources to survive, food, water and shelter. A sustainable habitat is one in which supply of and demand for these resources are balanced.

Some environmentalists today assert that current consumption limits have already breached or are about to breach the carrying capacity of our planet. This view assumes carrying capacity to be static. Seldom do they question why many carrying capacity calculations often differ. It is because determining a sustainable carrying capacity involves many variables which depend upon various criteria. Estimates vary widely depending on availability of resources and differing lifestyles of people in different parts of the world consuming different amounts of those resources.

The carrying capacity concept is fraught with problems from an ecological point of view. Carrying capacity is an idealised concept not to be taken literally. When applied to ecosystems, and even more, to human society, it falls apart. The fundamental flaw is failure to consider the role of social structure and relationships.

The talk of carrying capacity isn’t particularly helpful and supports the status quo. We are accustomed to the claim of too many people with images of the teeming slums of mega-cities, the bloated bellies of starving babies in the crammed refugee camps, as evidence that the planet cannot support our numbers. To bring the argument closer to home, we hear scare stories that Europe or the United States needs to shut its borders to (non-white) immigration, for having finally got our own birth-rate down to manageable levels, the last thing we now need to do is to open our doors to an invasion of poor (non-whites), who will use up our scarce social services and crowd us out of our neighbourhoods – the racist ‘white replacement’ theory.

The very concept of carrying capacity is a fabrication designed for social control. The possibility of marginalised populations being subject to eugenics and sterilisation to ‘curb’ their procreation isn’t too far-fetched. It is irrational that the culpability for poverty and hunger is attributed to them having big families and not to today’s wealth and resource inequality.

Too many sincere eco-activists buy into the idea that overpopulation is a problem leading to the destruction of the environment. The enemy is people. The poor are being blamed for being poor. The WSM response is that it is capital accumulation which is responsible for most resource use and subsequent waste. It demands increasing levels of consumption and strives toward unending growth and expanding markets. We should ask why advertisers need to spend billions of dollars on marketing if people seek never-satisfied levels of consumption. Under capitalism, there is a very large industry devoted to creating these wants. Capitalism requires consumption, whether it improves our lives or not, and drives us to consume up to, and past, our ability to pay for that consumption. In a system of capitalist competition, there is a built-in tendency to stimulate demand to a maximum extent. Corporations need to persuade customers to buy their products or they go out of business. De-growth as a few radical green proponents propose would destroy the capitalist economy.

‘Would the grow-or-die economy called capitalism really cease to plunder the planet even if the world’s population were reduced to a tenth of its present numbers? Would lumber companies, mining concerns, oil cartels, and agribusiness render redwood and Douglas fir forests safer for grizzly bears if — given capitalism’s need to accumulate and produce for their own sake — California’s population were reduced to one million people? The answer to these questions is a categorical no…’ argued Murray Bookchin, who introduced the school of thought called social ecology.

The ideal use of technology is to find ways to make fewer resources stretch far further. Renewable energy is clearly capable of providing large quantities of power for large numbers of people without emitting so much carbon. Adaptive agricultural methods are similarly capable of meeting the dietary needs of many more people than at present. Technology can cope with the growing demands placed on carrying capacity or planetary boundaries, by which we are not referring to greenwashing capitalist techno-fixes such as carbon capture and storage.

Technological innovation under capitalism is overwhelmingly introduced with the fundamental goal of enhancing profits and capital accumulation. So it is not suprising that some technological innovations under capitalism come at the cost of the environment. Capitalism lacks any intrinsic mechanism for regulating negative social and ecological side effects, which are deemed ‘externalities.’ The most that can be achieved, and then only under the pressure of social movements, is limited regulation.

Socialists are seeking to create a ‘steady-state economy’ which corresponds to what Marx called ‘simple reproduction’ – a situation where human needs are in balance with the resources needed to satisfy them. Such a society would already have decided, according to its own criteria and through its own decision-making processes, on the most appropriate way to allocate resources to meet the needs of its members. This having been done, it would only need to go on repeating this continuously from production period to production period. Production would not be ever-increasing but would be stabilised at the level required to satisfy needs. All that would be produced would be products for consumption and the products needed to replace and repair the raw materials and instruments of production used up in producing these consumer goods.

The existence of the carrying capacity concept is to maintain the ruling class’s current stranglehold over the lives of the poor – and to extend this stranglehold into the most intimate aspects of their lives such as decisions over family size and childbearing. Figures for carrying capacity are tied to current technology and practices. Any talk of carrying capacity should start by saying ‘If we never, ever do a single thing different than we do today…’

The future of society, and of the environment, relies on whether the global working class can wrest control of society from the parasitic few and commence production for need and use instead of for profit and capital accumulation.

When those in the environmentalist movement offer their ideal future it usually tends towards a pastoral idyll. Marxists have always advocated the greening of the cities ever since the Communist Manifesto declared for the ‘gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.’

ALJO

Letters: Eco-Socialism (1987)

Letters to the Editors from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eco-Socialism

Dear Letters Editors,

Congratulations on your August issue "One Green World”, which addressed some of the multifarious issues of the environment.

I have been a fairly regular reader of the Socialist Standard in the past and have been consistently disappointed at your failure to look at "green" issues. All too often I have come to the view, after reading your journal, that the SPGB languishes in the past, placing an overriding faith in the ideas and doctrines of Marxism and attempting to apply them unquestioningly to the modern world. That is not to say that Marx's fundamental theories do not hold good — indeed they do — but it is necessary, in my view, to appreciate how capitalism has surpassed Marx's expectation of how ingeniously it would strive to keep itself going.

For example. Marx could not have forseen the invention and proliferation of the atomic bomb, the ultimate symbol of capitalism's self-destructive tenacity, nor could he have envisaged the sheer scale of waste and ruthless exploitation of the world's finite resources which we are now witnessing.

I believe that the future — if there is to be one — must be a "green" one. It is my hope that it will be a socialist "green” future if we are to avoid a return to a form of feudal societal structure.

It is all very well to sit in an ivory tower of pure, untainted Marxist socialism, pronouncing an "I told you so" view of modern society and waiting for a "mass understanding" which will bring about true socialism. I too believe that genuine socialism can only come about through the collective will, but in the meantime there is a world out there and if we don't act to protect it through means pragmatic as well as pure, then we may well lose it. Yes, capitalism with its absurd self-contradictions is a dying order — the very real danger is that it now has the power to take us all with it (and thus all hope of genuine socialism).

Having made these points, I wish to come back to your August issue: 1 was dismayed to see that in all your considerations of green issues you didn't mention SERA — the Socialist Environment and Resources Association. SERA is a growing body (currently over 1.000 members) of "green" socialists actively campaigning for a green and socialist future.

May I, through your letters page, urge you to return to the theme in future issues and look at the work of SERA? Perhaps the SPGB might consider trying to organise a public debate with SERA? Further, if I may be so bold — members of the SPGB might consider also becoming members of SERA — membership of the one organisation is not. in my view, incompatible with membership of the other.

Yours sincerely.

Steve Dent

Reply

We welcome the invitation to debate with SERA. However we cannot agree that membership of The Socialist Party is compatible with SERA. Although we recognise the urgency of the ecological problems facing the world, reformist activity perpetuates capitalism and so postpones their solution.

Editors.

Theory, theory and even more theory

Dear Editors.

I have only been reading the Socialist Standard for a short while but to me it seems that the principal fault in your presentation is that you are too academic.

You theorise so much that you ignore what happens in society in practice. If a certain society is not theoretically correct in terms of your rigid Marxist analysis then you dismiss it totally. You are completely hostile to anyone that does not completely support your case.

In terms of strict socialist analysis, based upon Marxist principles, perhaps Russia is not socialist. But the vast majority of people are not concerned with such theoretical analysis that the SPGB keeps coming up with. They are concerned with practical matters such as jobs and homes. The fact of the matter is that in practice Russia does provide jobs and homes for its people. In theoretical terms the SPGB may deny that this could take place but in the real world the SPGB's theory has little relevance. While the SPGB remains trapped within the language of theory and abstract analysis then it will remain an irrelevance to ordinary people.

Paul Jenkins 

Swansea

Reply

The aim of the Socialist Standard is to put across socialist ideas. We try to do this by publishing articles which offer a socialist interpretation of current affairs and political ideas and by including articles written in a variety of styles and taking different approaches in the hope that they will appeal to as many readers as possible. However the common element in all the articles we print is the case that capitalism cannot meet the needs of the working class and that socialist revolution is necessary if that objective is to be met.

Although we agree that in putting across our ideas we should not ignore reality, it is true that how people see reality may very well be affected by the ideas that they hold — the two are not totally independent of each other. Indeed one of the most important functions of the Socialist Standard is to challenge the conventional view that capitalism, despite its problems, is the best of all possible worlds by highlighting the extent to which the political rhetoric of capitalism does not conform to people's everyday experiences.

That kind of thinking also informs our approach to countries like Russia. In this case the rhetoric used is that of "socialism" and because our sole objective is the establishment of a socialist world we are bound to be interested in any country that claims to have already established socialism. But an examination of the social and economical system in Russia demonstrates that, once again, the reality does not live up to the rhetoric. What The Socialist Party understands by socialism is a system based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, a society where everyone has access to the things they need, a society where there is no buying and selling, no wage slavery, no production for profit and a society where everyone can participate in the making of decisions affecting their lives. That kind of society is not to be found in Russia. It may be that workers have jobs and houses in Russia but this does not affect the things they do not have — free access to all the things they need, freedom from the tyranny of wage slavery and state coercion.

The Socialist Party is concerned with practical issues like people's standard of living — housing, health care and so on — and it is because we are so concerned that we ask questions about why it is that millions of workers throughout the world are deprived of such basic necessities. The only answer that makes sense is that it is because of the way society is ordered. And the only permanent solution that makes any sense is to abolish the present social system and instead establish a socialist society.

There are three stages in the development of political ideas. Firstly, an analysis of what's wrong with society as it is and most people from their own experience of life in capitalism could come up with a list of persistent problems that they would like to see solved. Secondly, if we are serious about trying to find permanent solutions to those problems then we need to try to explain why such problems arise. Theory may very well be useful here, enabling people to put their own personal experiences into a broader context. Having come up with an explanation that fits what we know about the world we can then think about ways to solve the problems identified in the most effective way. At this stage we need not only political theory but just as importantly, political action and organisation.

The Socialist Standard provides a forum for a discussion of ideas about life in capitalist society and why it is the way it is and of socialist ideas. These issues are not abstractions but are of vital relevance to all workers. But The Socialist Party is not just concerned with ideas. Why not visit your local branch of The Socialist Party and find out about socialist action in your area?

Editors.

Saving graces (2020)

Book Review from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Science and Passion of Communism. Selected Writings of Amadeo Bordiga. Edited by Pietro Basso. Brill. 540 pages,

Amadeo Bordiga (1889-1970), the first leader of the Italian Communist Party who later became a prominent figure in the Left Communist opposition to Stalin, was a super-Leninist. Not only did he hold that under capitalism the working class was incapable of understanding socialism but that (for this reason) the working class should not be consulted by the vanguard party as to what to do; this party should seize power as a minority in an armed uprising and then rule on behalf of the workers. So why should he be of any interest to socialists?

After the Second World War Bordiga resumed activity (during the fascist period he had remained in Italy), which for him was mainly a question of developing a correct understanding of Marx. This led to his two saving graces – his analysis of the USSR as capitalist and his view that communist society had to be a society from which production for the market, working for wages, and using money (even as an accounting unit) had disappeared.

According to him, Russia had never ceased to have a capitalist economy. In this he followed up Lenin’s view of the ‘New Economic Policy’ that the Bolsheviks were forced to adopt in 1921 and which Lenin described as the development of capitalism under the auspices of the ‘proletarian state’ (i.e, a state controlled by a vanguard party claiming to have socialism as its aim). For Bordiga, at some point during the 1920s the ‘proletarian state’ ceased to exist but capitalism continued. He preferred to call Russia simply capitalist rather than state capitalist, on the grounds that production was in the hands of enterprises as separate accounting and capital accumulating units producing for the market. Even though he exaggerated the degree of autonomy of state enterprises, he was to be proved right to the extent that, with the collapse of Bolshevik rule in the 1990s, many of the oligarchs who emerged as open capitalists did come from the ranks of those who had managed state enterprises.

To illustrate Bordiga’s view of communism (which we call socialism) the editor has chosen an article written in 1958 entitled ‘The Revolutionary Programme of Communist Society Eliminates All Forms of Ownership of Land, the Instruments of Production and the Products of Labour’. In it Bordiga starts from a criticism Engels made of the agrarian programme adopted by the French Workers Party in 1894 which came out in favour of peasants owning the land they worked even those employing workers. Engels saw this as ‘opportunism’ in the sense of adopting a policy to attract votes that contradicted the socialist aim of common ownership by society of land. This aim, says Bordiga, rules out both peasant cooperatives and either municipal or state ownership of land.

He doesn’t object so much to the word ‘nationalisation’ (also used by Marx) as this implies that the land belongs to the people rather than to a political institution. He ends up rejecting the word ‘property’ – even as ‘common property’ – altogether as it still implies ownership by a restricted group, even if this group is the whole human population alive at a particular time. In communism the existing population would not have exclusive rights over the land to do with it as they pleased, as this would be to exclude future generations. What they will have is the use of the land which they will have to care for and hand down to future generations in the same or better state that they found it. Bordiga quotes Marx:

  ‘Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias’ (Capital, Volume 3, chapter 46).

The words in Latin are from Roman law (which Marx started to study in university) meaning literally ‘good heads of family’. Today, we would use a more familiar form of words such as ‘good stewards’.

This introduces what would now be called an ecological dimension to socialist society as envisaged by Marx. Bordiga, writing in the 1950s as a Marxist, took up this point and developed it in other writings, long before ecological movements got off the ground.

Bordiga goes on to apply this not just to natural resources but also to the instruments of labour made by humans and to the products of their work (hence the article’s title). None of these will be ‘owned’ but will simply be there to be used by good stewards. The concept of ‘property’ and ‘ownership’ is replaced by that of ‘stewardship’ though the word Bordiga uses is ‘usufruct’ (use without ownership).

Bordiga’s brand of Left Communism gave rise to various groups in the 1970s which inherited his (and Marx’s) view of communism as a worldwide society from which classes, private property, the coercive state, markets, money, wages and profits had disappeared. So he deserves some credit for keeping alive, as we have done, the original idea of socialism/communism.

Priced at over £50 this book is mainly for university libraries not the general public. Bordiga’s article is available, though in a different translation, in the Libcom online library.

Adam Buick

Where the Greens go wrong (1990)

From the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not a day goes by without the problems of the environment being featured in the press and on radio and television. Particularly since the industrial revolution, there have been developed vastly increased powers of production which have spread across the planet and which are being operated in a very destructive way. So the question is: how do we establish a society in which all people are able to cooperate to provide a decent life for each other which at the same time will be a society which is in balance with nature?

The Socialist Party holds that only socialism can set up the relationships of co-operation, the freedom and the rational control over our affairs which can get us out of the mess we’re in. For all their good intentions, and for all their apparent radicalism, the policies of the Green Party are impractical because they stand no chance of establishing the kind of world they want to see.

The destructive nature of modern production has developed as part of capitalism. Because we live in a competitive, profit-motivated system enterprises come under an irresistible pressure to use the cheapest and most labour efficient methods. There is no choice about this. Companies simply have to go for low cost options and cannot afford to worry about the ecological consequences of this. To choose high cost options would be to commit economic suicide.

Under capitalism the production and distribution of goods takes place – and can only take place – according to the economic laws which govern the profitable circulation of capital. These laws are of an absolutely compelling nature. You can break the criminal law and sometimes get away with it, but you cannot break the laws which regulate the profit system without suffering financial loss or going bankrupt. What this means is that production methods cannot be chosen on their merits, as being environmentally friendly.

Constraints of Market System

The Central Electricity Generating Board is a state capitalist enterprise which every year throws up 4.2 million tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. It’s not the only villain. West Germany has been putting up 3.5 million tons every year and the countries of the EEC have been putting up over 20 million tons.

In 1984, the British government came under pressure to reduce its emissions by 30 per cent. It refused because the cost would have been £1,000m. At the time British capitalism was struggling to get out of a deep depression in which there were nearly 4 million unemployed and in these circumstances the British government was not in a position to add £1 billion to its energy costs. You only get out of a depression by becoming more competitive, by improving the prospect of profit and by improving investment confidence. You can only achieve these things by lowering not increasing your overall production costs. This is a fundamental and compelling fact of market life.

Everybody must be aware of the tragic absurdity of the situation. We’ve got the urgent need to eliminate these harmful acid emissions and not just by 30 per cent. We’ve got the techniques for doing it, and there are millions of unemployed, so there’s a vast availability of labour for the work. Yet we are unable to bring these things together. We are held back by the economic constraints of the market system. We cannot do it because the profits of a privileged class minority who own and control the means of life come before the needs of the community. There are no sane grounds on which this can be justified.

The only way to get out of the mess is to establish socialism which will be based on common ownership, production solely for need and democratic control. With common ownership all means of production and distribution and all resources will be held in common by the whole community.

You can’t have the oil resources of the North Sea or anywhere else owned by oil companies or governments, you can’t have the land owned by agribusiness and exploited by them for profit, you can’t have the means of life, mining, industry, manufacture and transport owned by capital, and at the same time expect to run a decent society based on cooperation and social responsibility. It is just not possible. If you want a world of co-operation and responsibility then all these means of life must be brought under the democratic control of the whole community on the basis of common ownership.

On this basis, instead of the wages system through which workers are exploited, there will be a community of free producers who will cooperate to produce goods and provide services solely and directly for needs. The community will have access to the pool of goods created free from the barriers of the market, without exchange of any kind and therefore without the use of money which is only necessary for making profit.

It is only by this means that we can sweep aside the economic straitjacket which constrains all social action under capitalism. To come back to the problem of eliminating acid emissions from power stations, the cost of £1 billion would not be a factor. That money barrier would disappear and through co-operation we would use the techniques which are available, apply our energies and get on with the job.

In socialism we would not be bound to use the most labour efficient methods of production. We would be free to select our methods in accordance with a wide range of socially desirable criteria, in particular the vital need to protect the environment. It wouldn’t matter if ecologically benign methods of producing energy required more allocations of labour than destructive methods as we wouldn’t be producing commodities which have to compete in price for sales in the market. We’d be free of all that.

The Green Party has talked about a “steady-state” society and this is something we should aim at. What it means is that we should construct permanent, durable means of production which you don’t constantly innovate. We would use these to produce durable equipment and machinery and durable consumer goods designed to last for a long time, designed for minimum maintenance and made from materials which if necessary can be re-cycled. In this way we would get a minimum loss of materials; once they’ve been extracted and processed they can be used over and over again. It also means that once you’ve achieved satisfactory levels of consumer goods, you don’t insist on producing more and more. Total social production could even be reduced. You achieve this “steady state” and you don’t go on expanding production. This would be the opposite of cheap, shoddy, “throw-away” goods and built-in obsolescence, which results in a massive loss and destruction of resources.

This is something that socialism could do. The problem for the Green Party is that they want this, but they also want to retain the market system in which goods are distributed through sales at a profit and people’s access to goods depends upon their incomes. The market, however, can only function with a constant pressure to renew its capacity for sales; and if it fails to do this production breaks down, people are out of employment and suffer a reduced income. It is a fundamental flaw and an insoluble contradiction in the Green Party argument that they want to retain the market system, which can only be sustained by continuous sales and continuous incomes, and at the same time they want a conservation society with reduced productive activity. These aims are totally incompatible with each other.

Old Failed Policies

The Green Party sees itself as a new force in politics but its basic approach to problems is years out of date. Like the Labour Party, it imagines it can do all sorts of things through the tax system. It says, for example, that it wants a tax system which will substantially redistribute wealth. The Labour Party tried that years ago and it failed, and the Green Party will fail for the same reasons.

Like the old Labour Party they imagine that by having the right kind of government in charge of capitalism they will be able to administer it in the interests of the whole community. The reason the Labour Party failed should be obvious. In its everyday operation capitalism staggers along according to its economic laws which cannot be controlled or rationally directed, on the basis of an economic antagonism between classes with capital trying to maximise its profits at the expense of wages and salaries and workers struggling to maximise wages at the expense of profits. It staggers along on the basis of competition and economic rivalries between enterprises and between capitalist nations.

Yet the Green Party thinks it can form a government which somehow, as if by magic, can ignore this reality and act on the basis of a common community interest through cooperation and socially responsible policies. This cannot be done. The tragedy is that we’ve got a lot of sincere and enthusiastic people in the Greens being sidetracked by these out-dated illusions which have dissipated so much energy and wasted so much time in the past.

The Green Party manifesto contains an elaborate battery of new taxes through which they hope to restructure society. Again, the old Labour Party manifestos contained similar proposals with the same intentions. The Labour Party abandoned them because they failed, but the Green Party has resurrected the corpses of these dead policies.

There’s a community ground rent, a resource or conservation tax, pollution charges, increased consumption taxes, higher taxes on large firms, a new company turnover tax, and new trade taxes which would operate through import and export tariffs.

We can project a scenario for what would happen under a Green government. Imagine that it has passed a law standardising the production of all bottles and glass containers so they can be returned to food and drink producers to be used again. It’s a sensible idea – socialism would do it – but this is a Green government under capitalism and it has put firms in the glass industry out of business and made a lot of workers unemployed. As a result of its trade tax on imports other government have retaliated and placed an embargo on the imports of British goods. This has put more firms out of business and more workers out of jobs. As a result of higher company taxes on large firms there has been a sharp drop in business confidence with a corresponding reduction in investment. Again, this has made more workers unemployed. With less trade and less taxable income, there has been a sharp fall in funds flowing into the Green Exchequer. It has had to abandon its guaranteed income scheme and is facing widespread strikes in the public sector with vital services breaking down.

These depressed conditions have led to an alarming run on the pound, with the Green Chancellor frantically buying in sterling to keep up its value. Having dissipated government funds on this and other measures the Green government has been forced to abandon its plans to invest L1 billion to reduce acid emissions from power stations.

In other words, the Green government is facing mounting hostility from the trade unions, employers, the City and the international business community. It is in desperate straits struggling with a worsening financial crisis. They’ve had to set aside all their plans for dealing with the problems of the environment. Their poll ratings have hit zero, and they’ve fallen out amongst themselves arguing about what went wrong.

In the light of the economic realities of capitalism and the experience of previous reformist governments, which is the more likely scenario? The one being projected in the Green Party’s sublimely optimistic literature or the one just outlined?

Urgent Need for Socialism

The obvious, and only practical, way forward is to get rid of the whole insane capitalist structure. This is the serious work begun by the socialist movement which has to be supported. One of the problems is that throughout this century we’ve had a lot of people who don’t like the system and who want a better world, but they were diverted by the superficially attractive but fatal illusion that capitalism can be made to serve our needs through the right kind of reformist government.

In the meantime the problems have stayed and some have got worse. The Green Party is the first to stress that we don’t have a lot of time, and it is certain that we cannot delay the solution without suffering the consequences. There can be no justification, on any grounds whatsoever, for wanting to retain an exploitative system which robs workers of the products of their labour, which puts privileged class interests and profit before the needs of the community, which robs the soil of its fertility, plunders nature of its resources and destroys the natural systems on which all our lives depend.

The only alternative is socialism. We must concentrate all our efforts on the work of building up a majority of socialists. It might seem a big job because our numbers are small, but we wouldn’t need many more for us to become a strong voice in the community and every new socialist makes the work easier.

Pieter Lawrence

Society, Ideas & Nature (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although most people these days would admit to being concerned about the state of the planet we live on it is remarkable how little the destructive tendencies of the profit system are blamed for causing environmental damage. Yet it should be impossible for us to ignore the fact that our relationship to our environment, and the effect we have on it, is governed entirely by the kind of society we live in.

In contrast to idealist theories of history, historical materialism holds that the development of ideas is mainly explicable in terms of the prevailing “mode of production”. This should not be seen as “economic determinism”; it does not mean ideas simply spring from economic conditions like mushrooms from a compost heap. Indeed, at any point in time one will probably find an array of ideas on any subject. What causes some of these to take root and spread while others are passed over or allowed to wither on the vine? According to historical materialism, a key factor, but by no means the only factor, in this social selection of ideas is the economic one. Thus, the precise origins of an idea is less important than its utility for society and its mode of production in particular.

But what is a “mode of production”? This has two aspects—the “forces of production”, and the “relations of production” as constituted by the form of ownership of the means of living. With the emergence of private property and the state several thousand years ago these relations became differentiated into antagonistic class relationships. As ownership of the means of living became concentrated in the hands of a small minority, this minority began to live off the labour of others, using the state as its means of coercion. The particular form this economic exploitation took allows us to distinguish one mode of production from another. Thus, in the relatively short history of private property society we can identify a succession of such modes: chattel slavery', feudalism and capitalism.

According to Marx, the relations of production tend to reflect the level of technological progress. However, as the productive forces develop within a particular mode of production they eventually come into conflict with, are “fettered” by, its relations of production. This conflict expresses itself as an intensification of class struggle between the exploiting class which has a vested interest in maintaining these relations and a new class whose interests lie with the further development of the productive forces (and hence the revolutionary' overthrow of those relations which block that development). The resolution of that conflict occurs when the latter class finally succeeds in capturing the state and using it to usher in the new mode of production.

Every established order tends to project an image of itself as being tunelessly grounded in nature, thereby implying change is “unnatural”. As a social order is defined by its class structure, this projection is bound up with the need for a ruling class to perpetuate the existing relations of production through which it dominates society. Such dominance is hegemonic: it is based on the acquiescence of the exploited majority rather than just crude force. Although the “objective” interests of most people should lead them to change society, they tend to accept the ruling class idea that society cannot, and should not, change. As Marx points out “the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force” (German Ideology).

Yet despite the enormous power a ruling class wields through its control over the means of disseminating ideas, change is inescapable. In this respect, the development of the productive forces exerts a subversive influence, breaking the mould of long-established ideas. Indeed, insofar as technology mediates our relationship with nature, technological change can alter our perception of “nature” and hence society.

Ideas on nature under feudalism

We can see this in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The dominant metaphor of nature up until the early modem era was an organismic one. Nature was viewed as a living organism. Its manifold parts, including humankind, were held to be fundamentally interdependent and constituting an integrated whole. Such a concept fitted in with tire close organic ties most people had with the land and with the nature of the society in which they lived. Nature was seen in essentially teleological terms; everything was designed for a purpose which supposedly emanated from God. That purpose was to benefit humankind. This anthropocentric view of nature was nevertheless couched in religious terms whereby nature was seen as a “book” through which God’s plan was revealed.

“Physico-theology”, or the religious study of nature, was the means by which one could discover what God had in store for humankind. Since God was seen as a benevolent creator the world he created was essentially good, so to act in a way that conflicted with his design was wrong. Thus the notion that the universe was designed as a Great Chain of Being in which everything was interconnected was not simply an attempt to understand how it functioned; it was a moral statement which had implications not only for the behaviour of human beings towards each other but also for their treatment of nature.

On the other hand, the Christian belief contained in the Book of Genesis that God made man “in his own image” and enjoined him to “subdue the earth” has been interpreted as sanctioning a domineering attitude to nature. A leading exponent of this view is Lynn White who argued in a famous essay that a traditional Christian arrogance towards nature and the driving out of pagan animistic religions is what led to our present ecological crisis. According to him, “since the roots of our trouble are largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious” (The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis).

But this “idealist” interpretation of history does not stand up to scrutiny. There is considerable evidence of environmental destruction on a large scale in the Ancient World pre-dating Christianity which can in fact be linked to the emergence of class-based forms of social organisation.

A more telling argument against White’s thesis is that it does not explain why some aspects in the Christian worldview emphasising harmony with nature became less influential in the early modern era while the theme of dominating nature came to be increasingly asserted. The latter was in fact connected with a marked increase in productive activities such as mining, deforestation and draining marshes which in turn were related to the growth of a capitalist market and scientific progress. The “tension between technological development in the world of action and the controlling organic images in the world of the mind had become too great. The old structures were incompatible with the new activities” (Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, p.2).

Rise of capitalism
The rise of capitalism undermined the old static order of feudalism in which everyone “knew their place” by bringing about increased mobility. Land enclosures and agricultural improvements resulted in the removal of labourers from the land and their transformation into an urban proletariat, no longer in intimate contact with nature’s rhythms. Furthermore, the commodification of labour power went hand-in-hand with commodification of nature itself. As Marx put it, “the mode of perceiving nature under the rule of private property is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation of, nature”.

This change in perception was reinforced by scientific developments. The Copernican revolution in astronomy which shattered the Medieval view that the earth was the centre of the universe, the growing awareness of hitherto unknown biological organisms (many of which did not appear to serve any useful purpose for humankind) in the wake of the Voyages of Discovery and the invention of the microscope, and the dawning realisation that fossils were the remains of now-extinct species, all served to undermine the old anthropocentric view of a world designed by God for the good of humankind. Such developments did not occur in a vacuum but in response to the specific needs of an emerging capitalist economy.

However, organicism was to re-surface in the shape of the Romantic Movement of the 19th century—a philosophical and aesthetic reaction to the depredations of industrial capitalism which sought solace in spiritual communion with nature. This idealisation of nature was dealt a blow by the Darwinian Revolution which represented nature as an arena of struggle in which only the fittest survived—in some respects a mirror image of the competitive ethos of Victorian capitalism—but out of Darwinism was to emerge the science of ecology.

The development of science under capitalism proved to be a double-edged sword. In a remarkable passage Engels noted that for all our claims to have “conquered nature”, it lends to take its revenge on us, thus reminding us that “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people” but “belong to nature, and exist in its midst”:

  “After the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more placed in a position where we can get to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences of our most ordinary productive activities. But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but know themselves to be one with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and anti-natural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body" (Dialectics of Nature).

Today, we can once again find evidence of organicism in the modem environmental movement. While this has been viewed as a positive development it does have its negative side: it can lend itself to authoritarian, even fascistic, forms of social organisation. It can also lead to a misplaced and irrational opposition to science for allegedly displacing a sentimental attachment to nature by an objective analysis of it; and its tendency to deify nature, to blame humankind-in-the-abstract for our ecological crisis, rather than the society we live in, can only cripple our ability to tackle that crisis.

Now when our planet is threatened as never before, the need to change society has never been so great. Only by altering our relationship with one another can w'e hope to transform our relationship with nature of which we are an inextricable part.

Robin Cox

The LTV: A Bad Criticism of Marx’s Labour Theory of Value (2020)

From the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

In an article on 12 January for the website Dissident Voice entitled ‘Marx’s Labor Theory of Value: Bad Science and Bad for Ecological Socialism’, David Pena launches a stinging attack on the Marxian theory of value and outlines an alternative theory which he evidently considers more appropriate to an age of heightened environmental concern.

Pena is not exactly breaking new ground, though. The intellectual origins of some of his ideas can be traced back to writers such as Sergei Podolinsky, in the 1880s, a pioneer in the field of ‘energetics’, who tried to reconcile Marx’s labour theory of value with the laws of thermodynamics.

Classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo maintained that a commodity’s value depended on how much labour went into making it. This argument was taken up and refined by Marx. It is important to understand that Marx’s theory does not equate ‘value’ with the actual amount of labour it took to produce a good – ‘concrete labour’. If that were case there would never be any incentive to introduce labour-displacing technology since this would mean less value being produced. Rather the metric of value is ‘abstract labour’ – the socially necessary labour time it takes to produce a good, from start to finish, under average industry-wide conditions.

‘Socially necessary labour time’ is not something you can measure with a stop watch – like concrete labour. Moreover, it can only express itself through market exchange. As Marx explained: ‘Social labour-time exists in these commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course of their exchange. Universal social labour is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an emerging result’.(A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Lawrence & Wishart, Ch. 1, p. 45). Meaning the value of a product can change even after it has been produced as a result of ongoing technological and other changes.

Pena’s criticism

Pena begins by identifying what he believes is a basic flaw in Marx’s theory:

  ‘“Abstract human labor,” according to Marx, is the “value forming substance” that is “materialized” in commodities. … But how can an immaterial element (an abstraction) become materialized and take up residence in a physical commodity (like the word becoming flesh)? What a confusion of categories!’

This is making rather heavy weather over what is, after all, just a metaphor. That Marx saw value as something immaterial is quite true (even if he used a ‘material’ metaphor like ‘substance’). As he put it ‘the value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition’ (Capital Vol 1, Ch.1). Value here is a construct in the same way as the statement, ‘the national average for children per family unit is 1.8’, is a construct. As far as we know there is no actual ‘material’ family unit consisting of 1.8 children.

For Pena, however, this smacks of a contradiction. How can something as immaterial and abstract as value become ‘congealed’ in (and thus, according to him, be transformed into) a material substance? Labour is a process not a substance. Consequently:

  ‘Despite all the talk about Marx’s materialism, his theory is obviously based on an immaterialist metaphysics, which holds that all commodities share a common non-material property that gives them exchange value. Marx is not a materialist after all, at least not when it comes to exchange value’

For Marx’s theory to be ‘scientific’, claims Pena, it needs to identify ‘an empirically detectable and measurable property that gives value to commodities, and a theory that is consistent with fundamental propositions of other relevant sciences, such as physics and chemistry’. But since abstract labour is not something physical and therefore not empirically detectable and measurable, it follows that Marx’s theory cannot be materialist or scientific.

Oddly enough, until recently there was no empirical evidence for the existence of black holes in outer space. Were the astrophysicists inferring the existence of such phenomena being ‘unscientific’ in doing so? The value of scientific theory lives in its predictive power and this is the basis on which Marx’s theory must be judged.

Naïve empiricism

It is precisely the kind of naïve empiricism Pena espouses which focusses only on the outer appearance of phenomena that Marx criticised in his analysis of capital. Capital is not a thing but a social relationship. As he explained in Wage Labour and Capital (1847):

  ‘A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.’

Pena is committing the same error as those who conflate these things. This can be extended to include also natural resources as in Schumacher’s comment that ‘Natural capital is the world’s stock of natural resources’ (Small is Beautiful, 1973). Inadvertently or otherwise this ‘has the effect of ‘naturalising’ capitalism, rendering its categories timeless and ahistorical.

Pena describes ‘value’ in much the same vein:

  ‘value in its original and grounding manifestation, the dual form of matter and energy, pre-exists human and all other life forms. The worker is an arranger and discoverer of values, but not a creator. Nature is the source of all values, not only use values, as Marx erroneously believed.’

So instead of commodities having in common the fact that they are products of human labour, their commensurability hinges on the fact that they all require energy to produce. As Pena puts it: ‘Rationally expended energy is the “common element” of all commodities. The amount of expenditure represented by the finished commodity is its objective exchange value.’

Pena thus wants to make ‘energy’ the fundamental metric of exchange value because it is physical and can be empirically measured (unlike the ‘metaphysical’ concept of abstract labour). However, exchange value presupposes and springs from commodity production and cannot really be understood outside of this context – which, unfortunately, is precisely what Pena wants to do.

We see this in his claim that value, ‘pre-exists human and all other life forms’ and has its source in nature. The perfect riposte to this is the rather colourful observation made by the nineteenth-century Ricardian economist John Ramsay McCulloch, as follows:

  ‘When a fish is caught, or a tree is felled, do the nereids or wood-nymphs make their appearance, and stipulate that the labour of nature in its production should be paid for before it is carried off and made use of? When the miner has dug his way down to the ore, does Plutus hinder its appropriation? Nature is not, as so many would have us to suppose, frugal and grudging. Her rude products, and her various capacities and powers, are all freely offered to man. She neither demands nor receives a return for her favours. Her services are of inestimable utility; but being granted freely and unconditionally, they are wholly destitute of value, and are consequently without the power of communicating that quality to any thing.’ (The Principles of Political Economy, 1864)

Nature, along with human labour, is of course the source of all use values but, as McCulloch points out, makes no contribution whatsoever to the production of exchange values. The latter is a product of human society and even then, only a very particular and recent form of human society called capitalism in which alone the law of value applies.

It makes intuitive sense that abstract labour should be the basis of value under capitalism since this system sprang from alienation of the great majority from the means of producing wealth. The economic compulsion this imposes on them to sell their working abilities – or ‘labour power’ – to the capitalists in return for a wage with which they can buy their own means of subsistence is precisely what makes for the generalisation of commodity production and, hence, for the ‘value’ to come into play.

The worker under capitalism does not approach the capitalist offering a particular bundle of energy (measured in joules) in exchange for a wage. Rather, they offer a particular skill which the capitalist specifically requires. The application of their labour power in the process of labouring is what creates a greater value than the value of the wages they receives and is the source of that capitalist’s great wealth.

True, labour in any society (including societies without commodities or markets) involves the expenditure of energy but so too does leisure, love-making and tending to one’s allotment. But none of these latter activities necessarily entail commodity exchange and the production of exchange values.

Value a social relationship

Pena does not see this because he does not grasp that value is essentially a social relationship based on economic exchange. His physical reductionist approach to the whole subject also informs his absurd claim that Marx’s labour theory is ‘bad for ecological socialism’. Since the theory posits only labour as the source of value it overlooks and devalues, he supposes, the contribution of Mother Nature to our material wellbeing.

But this is to totally miss the point. Marx’s labour theory of value is an explanation of the modus operandi of a system socialists want to get rid of, not perpetuate. We want to bring about a society in which the exchange values no longer exist and use values are the sole consideration. It is the very existence of economic exchange that gets in the way of our fully appreciating, and acting upon, the latter and is incompatible with ‘ecological socialism’.

Ironically, Pena himself calls for the retention of exchange value and even argues ‘If we cannot understand and measure value… we cannot have socialism’. But you cannot divorce ‘exchange value’ from the system of generalised commodity production called capitalism. And you cannot divorce capitalism from the relentless accumulation of capital it entails.

When Marx and Engels talked in the Communist Manifesto of the need to ‘increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible’ all they meant by this was that these needed to be developed to the point where human needs could be adequately met as a precondition of socialism itself. This was emphatically not a recipe for infinite growth, as Pena seems to think, or some Promethean desire for ‘production for its own sake’.

Unfortunately, by arguing for the retention of a system of economic exchange (and exchange values couched in units of energy), Pena himself is unwittingly helping to promote the very thing that increasingly imperils our global ecosystem about which he is (quite rightly) concerned.

Robin Cox