Social Cut-backs or Social Revolution (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the past the big argument in the working class movement was
 “Social Reform or Social Revolution?” At present, as there have
 been no beneficial reforms for over twenty years and with none on 
offer, the choice is rather “Social Regression or 
Social Revolution?”

Over the years a running argument has gone on between reformists and revolutionary socialists. Between those, on the one hand, who wanted to concentrate on pursuing improvements within capitalism and, on the other hand, those like ourselves who wanted to concentrate on ending rather than reforming capitalism.

The reformists argued that reforms were worth pursuing because they bring immediate benefits to people. We didn’t deny this could happen but pointed out that reforms could never be anything more than palliatives and that they could never solve the problems they were directed at.

We added—and this was the most important factor for us—that campaigning for reforms was not a sound way to build a socialist party as it would attract the support of reform-minded people who would eventually drag the party in a reformist direction. Campaigning for reforms diverted time and energy away from campaigning for socialism, so postponing the achievement of the only framework within which the problems could be solved and so in fact prolonging the existence of those problems and the suffering they caused.

What was required was an immediate change in the basis of society from class ownership to common ownership; in other words, a social revolution.

We have to admit that, although we won the argument at an intellectual level, we didn’t win in terms of convincing even a large minority of those who wanted to further the interests of the working class or of those who considered themselves socialists. Most of these felt that, if reforms could be had, they should be pursued. To their way of thinking, socialism was a long way off, so what was wrong in trying to get improvements via reforms in the meantime? Some reformists called themselves “possiblists” to emphasise that their policy was to pursue something that was possible as something that was achievable in the immediate future, “something now".

In some ways this was an understandable (though mistaken) attitude but it had consequences. Reforms, as measures introduced by governments, have to be pursued by political means; which implies the need for a reformist political party. In Britain this was the Labour Party and, this century, hundreds of thousands of people put their time and energies into building up Labour as the political vehicle for obtaining reforms within capitalism

Reformists in power

Labour, in power, did introduce some reforms but the main purpose of any government is not to introduce reforms but to run the common affairs of the capitalist class of a country. So, in assuming government power to introduce reforms, Labour also assumed responsibility for running capitalism. As, however, capitalism by its very nature is a system based on the exploitation of wage-labour for profit and can never be made to run in the interest of the exploited majority, anybody taking on responsibility for running the political side of capitalism has to do so on capitalism’s terms.

Capitalism can only run as a profit-making system in the interest of those who live off profits and against the interest of the useful majority of wage and salary earners and their dependants. This is why all Labour governments ended up taking measures against the interests of the majority (such as restraining wages or opposing strikes) and disappointing, by cutting spending in such fields as health, housing, education and pensions, those who saw them as a vehicle for obtaining reforms.

This has always been the limitation of reformism. Capitalism can never be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority, so the most that reforms are only ever going to be able to do is to alleviate some problem a little but never solve it. Such reforms as capitalism can be pressured into granting are always granted on its terms, basically, as long as they are not too expensive and as long as there is something in them for the capitalist class or some section of it—in terms, for instance, of a better trained or less inclined to be sick workforce.

Any reformist party that becomes the government has to work to capitalism’s agenda not its own of trying to improve working class conditions. If profits and reforms conflict it is profits that must come first.

Profits before reforms

n the first half of the 1970s the background to the reform-revolution argument changed. Since the post-war boom came to a final end with the world economic crisis of 1973-4 there have been no beneficial reforms, there have been no improvements in the fields of housing, education, health, pensions and state benefits generally. Quite the opposite in fact, the reforms that existed at that time have been gradually whittled down.

No government in Britain since the mid-70s has introduced any reform. All of them have cut back on reforms. All of them have been anti-reform governments. The basic reason for this has been the increased competition on world markets that the end of the post-war boom heralded. In order to provide businesses operating from within their frontiers with the means to remain competitive all governments have had to take measures to increase profits.

Profits are the source of funds businesses draw on to invest in the more up-to- date equipment and productive methods needed to keep their productivity and costs in line with those of their competitors. Profits are also the main source of government revenue. Governments produce nothing and so have to be maintained out of the surplus value produced by workers over and above the value of the goods and services they consume.

Apart from what they borrow, governments obtain their income via taxes. Although taxes don’t all fall directly on profits as corporation tax and income tax on dividends do, all taxes fall indirectly on profits. This is because direct taxes on wages and salaries and indirect taxes on the goods and services that workers consume increase the amount of money workers must have to be in a position to maintain their working skills. They increase the cost of the workers’ consumption. To take account of this, employers have to pay higher wages and salaries, which reduces their profits. However, the benefit of these higher nominal wages doesn’t go to the worker; it goes via taxes to the government. The result would be the same if workers paid no direct or indirect taxes and received lower wages and the government taxed profits directly.

Government income and profits come out of the same pot, the surplus value produced by the workers. The more there is for one, the less there is for the other. During the post-war boom this latent conflict did not come to the surface except occasionally during balance of payments crises and the relatively mild recessions of the period. With the world market expanding, sales were relatively easy and profits were rising. Most of the time capitalist firms were able to let go without too much problem a portion of their profits to finance government spending, including on reforms, especially as the result of this reform spending—a relatively healthy, well trained and contented workforce—would benefit them in the long run in terms of a more productive and therefore more profit- producing labour force. Despite this levy they still had enough profits left to accumulate as new machinery and more up-to-date productive methods.

When the post-war boom came to an end, however, and the period of intense world market competition opened up, the situation changed. Capitalist firms needed all the profits they could to stay competitive and the cry went up “cut government spending”, “cut taxes”. Governments had no alternative but to comply. In fact the political and economic history of Britain since the mid-70s is the history of the means adopted to reduce the share of surplus value taken by governments, so as to leave more for profits.

Although this policy is particularly associated with Thatcher it actually began under the 1974-79 Callaghan Labour government, even if reluctantly. Labour had started by trying to spend its way out of the 1973-4 slump, i.e. by increasing government spending, but had been forced by economic circumstances (as relayed via the IMF) to do a U-turn and cut spending on reforms.

When the government sought to cut spending by local councils, both on wages and on the services they provided, the result was the notorious Winter of Discontent—when rubbish piled up uncollected and bodies were left unburied—which the Labour Party has only recently succeeded in living down.

Undoing reformism

Thatcher, however, showed no reluctance. In fact she made it a crusade. When she was elected leader of the Tory Party in 1975 she declared that her aim was to “destroy socialism”. By this she meant not socialism (which of course hadn’t been established to be destroyed) but the house that the post-war Labour government built, and the Tory governments of the 1950s maintained, of a capitalist economy with a large state sector and a Welfare State providing benefits as of right. Destroying “socialism” meant destroying this and, unusual as it is for a politician to honour a promise, she did.

The nationalised industries were sold off to the private sector. Local council spending was capped and services which people had come to take for granted, including help for the elderly, the sick and the handicapped, were axed or charged for. Council housing too was sold off. Market forces were introduced into the NHS and prescription and dental charges increased enormously. The conception of the Welfare State as a state that provided benefits as of right to people in return for the contributions they paid was abandoned and the old National Assistance (previously Poor Law) system where benefits were only paid after a means test to people in dire poverty was reintroduced.

Not only have there been no beneficial reforms since the mid-70s, there are not likely to be any in the foreseeable future either. Such struggles as reformists have engaged in over the past twenty years have been defensive, not struggles to achieve some new reform but struggles to prevent some previously-achieved reform from being taken away.

This, too, changed the terms of the argument between reformists and revolutionary socialists. When reforms are achieved the hope is there, even if illusory, that they may be steps forward towards a better society ; reformists are able to claim, as some used to, that a slow accumulation of reforms was the way to socialism; and ordinary workers will be inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. But in a period when reforms are being taken away this argument can’t be used. Who can claim that slowing down things getting worse is a step towards socialism or any sort of better society?

Back to charity

How have reformists reacted to the disappearance of the only thing—the availability of reforms—that gave their mistaken position an air of plausibility? In two ways. One has been to cease to be reformists by coming to accept the present, unreformed capitalist status quo. This is the option the Labour Party has chosen. The other has been to retreat into charity and individual case work, the option taken by those who have gone into charities like Shelter, Child Poverty Action Group, Low Pay Unit, Age Concern and the like. Both options are an admission of the failure of the original reformist project of going into parliament to get legislation passed that would improve the condition of the working class.

The Labour Party is still a “reformist” party in the broad sense of the term, as a party that mistakenly believes it can make capitalism work in the interest of the majority. But in this it doesn’t differ from the Tory and Liberal parties which suffer from the same illusion. In that sense they, too, are reformist parties. But reformism was originally a current within working class opinion which sought to improve working class conditions by means of social reform legislation.

Because it now accepts that it must govern capitalism on its terms and according to its economic laws, the only reforms Labour now offers are not social reforms but constitutional reforms such as the abolition of hereditary members of the I louse of Lords or regional government for Scotland and Wales. Unlike social reforms, these don’t cost anything and so won’t be a burden on profits but, equally because they don’t cost anything, they don’t offer anything tangible to people and leave their conditions—and problems—completely unchanged.

All they amount to is rearranging the furniture, a game the Liberals and Nationalists are into too but with different proposals as to where to put the furniture. Apart from this, politics today is a choice of which gang of professional politicians is to form the government and preside over the capitalist system as it is without trying to extract social reforms from it. That is no longer on the agenda. Reformism has now become a fringe political movement, as represented by Arthur Scargill’s breakaway SLP.

The campaigning charities have come on the scene more or less avowedly as mere stretcher-bearers dealing with the worst casualties of capitalism. Their aim is not even the old reformist one of trying to improve the conditions of the whole working class by social reform legislation; it is only to try to help out the worst cases. They don’t think in terms of solving the problem they have targeted. They act on the assumption that the problem and their charity work will have to continue indefinitely, a never-ending struggle not, as with the reformist struggles of the past, to achieve and maintain social reforms but only to help out a tiny minority of those affected. They do demand legislative changes and they do ask for more money to be spent to help their clients, but the most they have ever got is the removal of some minor anomaly in the treatment of similar cases.

This is what “possibilism” has been reduced to—dealing with individual worst cases—as this is all that is possible under capitalism today in terms of social action.

The argument for reformism was weak enough anyway but, faced with this bleak social prospect, it’s got nothing going for it at all.

Adam Buick

The big picture (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I have a few friends who are politically active. One with the Green Party, another for Labour. A third is/was in the Jeremy Corbyn camp, though comes from a Trotskyist background. All three agreed the priority in the election was to get the Tories out.

I must confess to an emotional sympathy with this sentiment. The Tories seem to embody the worst political features of selfishness, virulent nationalism and an absence of empathy for the plight of others. Their appeal is to encourage such in others. However, the socialist knows no matter how accurate this view may be, the alternatives cannot offer policies of significant difference. They may well have varied and more humanely positive motives, but the practical outcomes of their governance would be so similar to a Tory administration as to be virtually indistinguishable.

This is because at root the political problem was not the Conservative Party, no matter how unpleasant it may be, but the economic system that drives all government policy, whatever party label it is enacted under, capitalism.

Billions of pounds required

It was instructive listening not to what the parties claim to be offering the electorate, but the advocates for various groups and sections of society. Child care, for instance, the expense or lack of it, inhibiting family incomes and, often, women’s career opportunities. Billions of pounds required.

Care for the elderly presents increased life expectancy as an ever burgeoning financial burden society must find billions for.

The National Health Service is unable to meet the demands made upon it. People in long term pain or dying prematurely for want of appointments, treatment and operations. Hospitals literally crumbling. Another pot of gold required.

Many incomes are below what workers and their families require simply to sustain themselves. Men and women often doing two, sometimes more, jobs and still not having enough money to afford rent, never mind buy, a home, or put adequate food on the table. Food banks and income credits/ benefits required: more billions of pounds.

The mantra of the anti-Tory parties was that all this, and more, was the result of 14 years of Conservative government. Which surely poses a question. Why would they intentionally govern to deprive the vast majority of what they need?

Perhaps it is because they are the nasty party. Yet, if this was the case they would be foolishly prioritising their visceral nastiness at the expense of their hold on government. Surely, if they could simply arrange the money transfers to meet all such urgent needs they’d garner the votes of the electorate for the foreseeable future.

The argument may well be made that the Conservative Party is in such collusion with the capitalists their priority is to protect capitalism’s profit-making at the expense of the workers, the great majority. This analysis is correct, as far as it goes.

Unfortunately, the Tory motivation, in this respect, is not unique to them, but fundamental to whichever party assumes government responsibilities. It is instructive to consider what occurred when a Tory administration acted against the interests of capital.

No one could accuse Liz Truss as being anything other than an archetypal Tory, other than she has blonde hair rather than a blue rinse. Yet her premiership was brief and quickly ended not via the ballot box, but the actions of the market. The leader of the democratically elected government was brought down because she was perceived to be a threat to the financial structure of capitalism. No secret cabal required, no illicit meeting of shadowy figures acting on behalf of capital. Merely the mechanisms of the market were enough to be self-protecting and dispense with the prime minister. What price democracy?

All this will have been, and still is, perfectly obvious to the now Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Exchequer even when they saw themselves as the government in waiting. The Labour Party campaign in this general election was founded on protestations of fiscal probity.

It’s time for a change, but without spending more. Or at least no increase in taxation. As taxation is the only source of government income, other than borrowing which is also being disavowed, the financial requirements just to sustain society, set out above, cannot be met.

Not created by governments

Unless, of course, there is the sharp upturn in the country’s economy that is being cited as a potential wellspring for meeting the increased and increasing demands. There is historical precedent. The post-Second World War boom did enable an expansion of government spending on social programmes by Labour and Conservative administrations.

But that financial boost was not created by governments. The recovery from the destruction of the war created the possibilities for capitalism to exploit and create the wealth. It was starting from the very low baseline of the economic depression preceding the war and ended rather abruptly in the 1970s.

Since when, governments have largely been managing greatly reduced financial resources. The Thatcher years saw manufacturing subordinated to finance capitalism and the supposed free market. That baton was then handed on, via John Major, to the Labour administration of Tony Blair. His government benefited from a financial uplift for a while, then in 2007-8 came the crash. By the 2010 general election the Conservative opposition was proclaiming 13 years of Labour misgovernment as being responsible for the general financial woes.

This was as an unjustified claim as is the present Labour one of 14 years of Conservative maladministration. The similarity of time periods is interesting. Governments create neither booms nor busts. Undoubtedly if they did there would only be booms.

So, voting Labour, whether of the present Starmer, or previous Corbyn, variety could not fundamentally change the economic situation. It matters little how good or bad their intentions are. The Green Party could, along with the Liberal Democrats (and even Reform), make whatever promises they wish as they won’t be in a position to realise them.

Even a proposal such as the basic income, advocated by the Greens, is really just another form of benefit that would have to be funded. Ultimately, that funding, via income tax, business tax or some sort of tax, would come from capital. However attractive that might seem initially, it is a subtraction from wealth creation that capitalism would be bound to react to. The markets would decide and an economic downturn would be of no benefit for workers.

International dimension

It always has to be kept in mind that capitalism, while it has national iterations, is an international system. A government policy, no matter how well intentioned, that was deemed adverse to capitalism would see its productive resources relocated elsewhere.

Presently some FTSE 100 companies are deserting the City to relocate in other stock exchanges. Their motivation is simply expectation of greater financial returns. The Henley Private Mitigation Report indicates that 2024 will see a net loss of approximately 9,500 of what the report terms high-net-worth individuals, compared with 4,200 the previous year. The Henley is a consultancy that monitors migration trends. It reported that between 1950 and the early 2000s Britain saw a continuous influx of millionaires. That trend has now been seriously reversed. This has been exacerbated more recently following Brexit with 16,500 leaving between 2017 and 2023.

Such is surely a demonstration of how government policy, even if implementing the decision of the ballot box, can adversely affect capital decision making. No matter how determined a particular government might be to access the wealth of non-doms, for instance, those funds all too easily migrate.

This is how capitalism works, no matter how reformers wish it were otherwise. Consider what happened to British manufacturing in the Thatcher years. For example, it is still possible to buy the quintessential British motorcycle the Royal Enfield, but made in India.

Any short-term gain made by a basic income will be undone in the medium to long term. Just as has, and is, happening to the welfare state and National Health Service.

What’s the alternative?

Supporters of the ‘let’s get the Tories out’ parties asked what other alternative there was. Truth can be difficult, especially when it is inconvenient or not immediately helpful. The only truthful response is, look at the big picture.

There is indeed a better way. That is a worldwide commonwealth based on meeting people’s self-defined needs through production based on those same people contributing whatever they can. Then there will be no need for billions or even trillions of pounds or dollars or whatever as there’ll be no money.

Capitalism transcended by socialism is the only solution. Otherwise, the electorate are merely voting to maintain what presently is with all its ills unaddressed and beyond solution while things stay as they are. Every vote, for whichever party, is a vote for capitalism.

Voters can decide they will pursue real change, but they must act consciously together to achieve it. No party, including The Socialist Party, can deliver it for them. It is undoubtedly a tremendous task and responsibility. Although it does not address immediate concerns which are so very difficult for many, it is the only real alternative.

Capitalism has developed the technology and the means for the socialist change, but its own fundamental motivation of capital accumulation through profit-making will always prevent it from being generally beneficial.

So democracy will either continue to be the means of choosing governance on behalf of capitalism, or become part of the change to socialism. That is the big picture.

Dave Alton

Globalisation: the left on the coat-tails of liberalism (2003)

Book Review from the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two recent books, Globalization: Neoliberal Challenge, Radical Responses by Robert Went and The Twilight of Globalization: Property, State and Capitalism by Boris Kagarlitsky highlight the long-standing history of globalisation of trade, changing imperial relations and the failure of the modern left to come to any effective strategy to combat its renewed assertive neo-liberal ideology. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century the left was able to delineate a clear position between its own anti-imperialist stance and the pro-imperialist and apologist liberal positions. By the second half of the twentieth-century, however, after the experience of running capitalism (with its consequent disillusioning impact on principles) and the disorientating policies of supporting “progressive” struggles over “reactionary” ones, the left is in a muddle. For example, a significant section of the British left backed the NATO bombing of Serbia and the support of the Labour Party for the hegemonic ambitions of the US shows how much politics has seemingly changed in the course of a century.

Or does it? The tradition of leftism in Britain, rather than being an alternative to capitalism has, when negotiating for political power been liberal rather than anything approaching socialist. The 1945 “settlement” was not based on the ideas of the Labour movement but on a programme of social-security and nationalisation that had long been part of the liberal agenda, being synthesised in the 1942 Beveridge Report (which was also incidentally supported by the Communist Party). During the twenty years following the second world war the “social-compromise” of the welfare-state and Keynesianism become the accepted centre ground of British politics.

However, following the long-term decline in economic growth liberal opinion swung away from the Keynesian orthodoxy to a new one based in classical economic theory. The left, increasingly isolated from mainstream economics, first led a failed counter-attack in the early 1980s and then slowly surrendered on all fronts under Neil Kinnock and finally the right-wing bully Tony Blair. There is and always has been, it is true, a radical left aiming at arriving at state-capitalism through the Labour Party but the “socialising” impact of the post-war nationalisations was virtually non-existent. Such measures were not accepted by the political centre as necessary on the grounds of radical social and economic ambition but because it could be defended – to an extent – in terms of the overall efficiency of capitalism.

Privatisations, pursued ideologically against perceived excess government economic activity, have generally failed and sometimes cost business more than the old nationalised equivalents. The state remains, despite globalisation, a strong social, economic and political force, which is no doubt why transnational corporations spend billions of pounds globally in influencing their decisions. This despite the continuing ideological attack on the state even to the point of damaging the stability of the capitalist state itself. Privatisation has seen the domination of ideology over pragmatism for capitalist government. A European Commission report of 1992 (quoted by Kagarlitsky) failed to find any advantage and in fact an additional cost to be borne for capitalism. The reason given, to reduce the economic role of the state and thus to reduce state expenditure has singularly failed to occur; in Russia, for example, it was said that a reduction in the state economic sector of one-tenth required an increase of the state apparatus by one-third. States are not reducing in size or reducing their role but are merely changing with an increase of unaccountable quangos and so on. Similarly the increasing role of international organisations have not been met by a reduction in the role of national governments. The situation may be summed up with the phrase “freer markets and more rules”. Thus the use of the state is open to a different approach and is open to the left, which is currently unwilling to use it.

Further, the social inequalities engendered by neo-liberal capitalism can threaten to undermine the basis of capitalist government itself. A strong state involvement in the economy has historically been a boon for, rather than the bain of, capitalism. It is essential for the creation of a social consensus for capitalist relations:

“Because the capitalist market cannot get by without non-market institutions, the state as a non-commercial entity plays a key role, not only financing public bodies but also overseeing the interaction between the development of the economy and that of the various structures of the social sphere… Without a certain consent by the governed, the state could hardly perform its class function. But this means that the state system, as an instrument of the ruling class, cannot fail to take account of the interests of other social layers as well. When the institutions of power prove incapable of this, the state system enters into crisis” (Kagarlitsky, The Twilight, p.8).

Increasing inequalities are likely to lead, if not to outright conflict, then to tensions and an increasing political demand and therefore political will, where representative democracies exist, to a likely challenge to the unapologetic inegalitarian capitalism of recent decades. Robert Went reveals that the ratio of income between the top 20 per cent and the bottom 20 per cent of the world population was 60:1 in the early 1990s and predicted to decline to 50:1 by 2010 if all went well with the world economy; given the crises of the 1990s the ratio is far likely to increase rather than decrease. Went argues that the prospects for workers globally of the continuation of current trends is bleak indeed:

“there will be a greater and more dominant dictatorship of the markets, particularly over countries that wish to attract capital; greater social inequality as a result of a dual process of polarisation, within countries and on a world scale, among countries; progressive levelling down of wages, working conditions and social security; ecological destruction and deterioration; a greater role for unaccountable international institutions and blocs; and a further undermining of democracy” (Went, p.108).

The state has also tended to be a great source of innovation in the field of technology, which is not, as widely reported, the cause of globalisation but merely facilitates it. Not least of these developments was the internet, which originated in the 1960s in the US Defence Department but also includes space technology, infrastructure and education.

The confidence of global finance capital was somewhat shaken by the capital-flow and currency crises in Mexico in 1994 and Asia in 1997, which produced several calls for international regulation of global capital flows. Further crises are likely to induce regulation if severe enough. Current actions to solve financial crises are tied to austerity packages, which avoid the global impact of such incidences but create problems of development for those countries which are subject to them. While the share of world trade of developing countries has increased from 20 per cent to 30 per cent in the post-war period, economic growth has in the main been restricted to the EU, US and Japan. The imposition of export-led growth on the resource rich developing countries means that to develop a break with neo-liberalism is needed. A degree of protectionism is needed for national capitalist economies to prioritise industrial development. Such a growth, of course, could well be a stimulus for the global economy were it not geared to the interests of finance capital in the developed world.

Successful development has generally taken place in countries or regions where the interventionist state is the norm and not under conditions of anything approaching free-trade. Selective intervention in the world economy has been the basis of most industrial growth, from the British cotton-trade to South Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s who, without government protection of the domestic market tied to export performances of amongst others the clothing industry, would still be exporting rice as its export mainstay. Protectionism then most probably must play a prominent part in any meaningful economic growth in the non-western world – the west of course being still well acquainted with it, despite its rhetoric.

In the light of the utter failure of the Kyoto agreement to result in meaningful regulation it is also clear that for any serious recognition of environmental sustainability there must be a proliferation of regulation and state-led implementation of clean-technologies and the innovation of new ones. If humans are to survive on the earth then this must be done. If ecological disaster is not to be averted by socialism then capitalism must clearly adopt such an approach.

What then is to be done? Went is clear that capitalist relations are flawed:

“It is not possible within the existing economic logic, in which profit maximization comes first, to solve the most important problems that humanity faces. Under capitalism, the individual interests of speculators, employers or investors determine what they do. The partial rationality of their actions clashes with the general social interest of present and future generations.

In fact, capitalism is becoming more and more irrational. The discrepancy between what is economically and socially possible and what is actually happening has never been greater than it is today” (Robert Went, Globalization, p.121).

Kagarlitsky is also clear that the old state driven approaches to the problems of capitalism are also little hope for the future:

“The old Big Brother is dead, meet the New Big Brother. Now Big Brother is global or multinational, but even more faceless and even less accountable than before. It is no surprise that after experiencing what globalization has in store, so many people world-wide are becoming nostalgic for the old Big Brother” (Boris Kagarlitsky, The Twilight, p.2).

It seems strange then that despite the attention that both Went and Kagarlitsky pay to the need for an adequate response to capitalism and its current ideology that both see the answer in progressive reforms, or what Kagarlitsky calls “revolutionary reforms”. Following the massive defeat of leftism across the world, it is clear that socialist revolution can well do without the pursuit of reforms. Such an attitude also ignores the extent to which any challenge to neo-liberalism will most likely be led by an ideological shift back to liberal social-pragmatism – in other words, a shift motivated not in the interests of labour but of capital.

Colin Skelly

Contradictions of capitalism (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Defenders of the capitalist class, noticeably those from the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute, have recently been rather vocal in claiming that commodity production—buying and selling and the market—represent the climax of human economic development and in asserting the uselessness of anyone seeking to establish an alternative social system.

This confident bravado coincides with the collapse of state capitalist dictatorships in central Europe. Confusing nationalisation and state planning with socialism, these ideologists present capitalism, particularly the private form they favour, as a “rational” system effortlessly drifting towards some kind of free market Utopia in which every facet of the social world will be reduced to a commodity relationship. Some even suggest that governments and their economic advisers possess the necessary management skills to avert economic problems, while politicians, journalists and academics tell us in unison to be satisfied with our lot and to realise we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

This form of blinkered conservatism miserably fails to understand the workings of capitalism and the array of contradictions to be found within commodity production and distribution.

Economic crises

Despite the political rhetoric, for the governments and the economists who frame their policy documents there remains the uncomfortable fact that the economic and social problems which are features of capitalism cannot simply be wished away. Take for example economic crises and trade depressions which express all the contradictions of commodity production and highlight the anarchy of a system whose sole aim is to produce commodities for a profit.

It was Marx who discovered that crises spring from the very character of capitalism itself. Capitalism produces commodities which have to be exchanged to realise the profit embodied in them and the medium of exchange is money. Yet in this transaction there is an implicit contradiction which Marx expressed in the following way:

No one can sell unless some one else purchases. But no one is forthwith bound to purchase because he has just sold.(Capital. Vol I. chapter 3. section 2a).

Any break in this commodity chain of buying and selling will result in a crisis in which:

The spinner cannot pay because the weaver cannot pay: both of them do not pay the machine manufacturer who does not pay the iron, timber and coal merchant. All these again cannot meet their obligations as they have not realised the value of their commodities . . . and a general crisis thus arises. (Theories of Surplus Value, vol.III pt 2 pp 284-285).

Marx's theoretical explanation of the irrationality and unpredictability of capitalism, and of its crises, small and large, national or global, has been verified empirically, not only during his life-time but afterwards too. We only have to think back to the crisis and resultant trade depression at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s to see the vindication of Marx over the dreary academic economists and their theories of capitalism as a smooth-running rational system.

Profit before Need

There is currently a slump in the housebuilding industry. Before the crisis there was a feverish boom, with developers building as fast as they could acquire land. Workers within the building industry or related to it were able to gain higher wages, estate agents were snapped up by large corporations with many trading seven days a week, while the Sunday Supplements predicted the boom would last forever.

Then the break in the chain occurred between those buying houses and those selling them. Suddenly developers found they had unsold houses on their hands with interest repayments still outstanding to the banks. Some went bankrupt bringing unemployment and disruption to the lives of their employees. Contractors and building workers found work evaporating, while materials began to stockpile and large distribution companies began to lay off workers. The government and their economic advisers were neither able to predict the depression in house-building nor do anything about it once it had occurred.

This is a classic example of the way under capitalism a contradiction develops between production for profit and social need. Because of the inability to sell houses and realise a profit, house-building is stopped or cut-back while the needs of people for housing are passed over and remain unfulfilled.

This contradiction under capitalism between production for profit and social need takes place in other spheres of commodity production too. Peter Buchanan's 'Open Space' (BBC2 29 May) recently exposed the lie of the consumer fantasy world of the advertisers—the stick which beats the bucket of swill—by showing us homeless men in Cambridge being driven off a skip full of out-of-date supermarket food. There is also capitalism's complete indifference to the needs of 1.8 billion children under the age of 16 in the world to-day. According to a recent report, 61,000 children under the age of 5 die every day in the extreme poverty-stricken areas of the world as a result of preventable diarrhoeal diseases most of which are caused by poor water (Guardian, 25 March). In a rational society producing directly for social need this problem could easily be dealt with through the use of existing technology and of the skills of people working in the field of sanitation engineering. But we don't exist in a rational society: capitalism is perverse and indifferent to anything but the making of profit.

Despite the well-meaning but totally misplaced and ineffective effort of people in charities, the problem of starvation exists side by side with food mountains and deliberate underproduction. Farmers are paid subsidies not to produce and agricultural land is taken out of production to ensure profits are maintained. It would only be someone with a profitable interest in capitalism or someone who had been bought by the capitalist class to produce ruling-class ideas who could ever depict capitalism as "rational" or as a society representing the best of all possible worlds.

To rectify the problems, both social and economic, which affect workers today throughout the world, capitalism has to be abolished and replaced by socialism. To create this new social system of common ownership and democratic control over the means to life in which these problems can be solved and the needs of society met, requires conscious political action by a working class majority. No one else can do it for us. Until we take the necessary steps to capture political power then economic depressions, unemployment poverty and unfulfilled needs will continue: to borrow a phrase from one of Mrs Thatcher s speech writers, "There is no alternative".

Richard Lloyd

Editorial: No joke? (1983)

Editorial from the August 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

From her apparently invulnerable Fortress Westminster, Margaret Thatcher does not need to pay heed to most of the criticisms levelled at her, least of all to the jibe that she is incapable of consciously making a joke. This is not to say that she never says anything amusing; reporters with especially acute hearing often record some comment which, although innocent of any such intention, has the kind of sexual or lavatorial interpretation which can provoke a few guffaws.

A humourless, out of touch Thatcher fits in neatly with her opponents’ view of her as a fanatic who will heartlessly destroy entire industries, towns and families to suit her political dogma. The prime minister herself does not go out of her way to discourage this notion; the medicine she is administering, she says, may be harsh and unpalatable but it is the only known cure and when we have taken it we shall be much healthier and more prosperous. There is, in the famous phrase, no alternative, no cause for doubt — and no reason to make jokes either.

There have been other prime ministers, in similar circumstances, cast in the same humourless mould. History records no risible comments by Clement Attlee, whose stock in trade was a dry, waspish dismissal of opponents and who was as unbending as Thatcher in the conviction that the assaults his government were making on workers’ living standards were the only possible way of running the country.

And of course Attlee was right. His government came into power just as the second world war was coming to its dreadful close amid the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Capitalism worldwide was extensively damaged, in many areas devastated. In the wreckage the pre-war competitive menace of Germany and Japan had, for a while, been laid low and there was now a new rival for British capitalism in its former ally Russia. American capitalism dominated the western world both economically and militarily. If British industry was to arrest the decline it had suffered since the turn of the century (an enduring, if fantastic, ambition for a long succession of British politicians) there had to be a massive effort of industry and sacrifice from the working class. Who better to organise this, and to discipline it. than a Labour government with its close ties with the trade unions and its established reputation as the most deceptive leader in the endless pilgrimage to the Promised Land? The promises came in a flood from Labour ministers. One more effort, the workers were told — a few more years of austerity and restraint — and all would be well. No wonder Attlee cracked no jokes for it was not a laughing matter.

The significance of the fact that, some thirty years on, Thatcher faces a similar situation seems to have escaped the working class, who obediently voted her back into power. Just like the post-war Labour government, her ministers tell us that we are in a massively threatening crisis. If we behave irresponsibly, by demanding pay rises above what the government say we should have, or by failing to work hard enough, or by reacting against the deeper poverty we face through being unemployed, then there will follow a collapse of civilised society. But if we do as the government advise — if we are exceedingly generous towards the exploiting capitalist class — then everything will eventually come right. There should be no surprise that Thatcher does not easily make jokes, because this too is no laughing matter.

It is time for the workers also to take this seriously. Ever since they won the right to vote, they have consistently given power to the class which exists in privilege by virtue of its exploitation of the working class. The most frightful obscenities have been committed to preserve this privilege — the horrors of two world wars, the persistent death toll of tens of millions every year in famine, the unrelenting grind of poverty and repression which workers everywhere endure in order to survive. Yet whenever those workers have the chance to act to end this — as they had in Britain in June — they clearly opt for it to carry on.

They come to this self-damaging decision through the process of a debate which never approaches any fundamental analysis of modern society and of the causes of its ailments. Instead, workers argue over the supposed merits of the programmes offered by the Labour, Conservative and Alliance parties although such differences as there are in these programmes are superficial and unimportant. Whichever the workers choose makes no difference to society worth taking into account. Because they all agree that capitalism shall continue — and because the working class agree on this as well — the society of class privilege, war, exploitation, famine and disease remains. The choice between Labour, Tory and Alliance is an unreal one; the debate over their programmes is a phoney.

There is in fact an alternative. People who, every day of their lives, do the vital and complex work involved in running modern society are capable of better than this. The bankruptcy of capitalism and the impotence of its apologists significantly to improve it are all too apparent. In their everyday lives workers could not function if they did not act on an assessment and acceptance of available evidence and their experience. It should be a simple matter for them to apply this same reasoning to the wider field of society at large and its organisation.

That must lead them in only one direction — to a decision that, as capitalism is characteristically unable to do other than degrade, repress and murder its people, it must be abolished through a world wide democratic revolution which will replace it with a fundamentally different social order. Socialism will be based on the communal ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. It will be a society without classes, without privilege, without social conflict. Its wealth will not be bought and sold but will be available for free access, with every human being standing equally in their right to take as much as they need. It w'ill be a democratic society, without leaders who take on themselves the decision making at whatever the cost to the majority.

It needs only a conscious political act by the world working class for socialism to become a reality. This is what socialists work for and our object — the capture of political power by the working class to establish a socialist society — must be taken seriously by anyone who is interested in the welfare of the human race.

Capitalism’s crisis of legitimacy (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Capitalism’s current crisis is not just economic and financial.

The recent worldwide recession has led not only to an economic crisis, but also a crisis of political legitimacy for the global system of capitalism. In Britain the ruling elite and in particular the coalition government are attempting to side-step this fact by claiming that “we’re all in it together.” Of course in some ways we are, the impending state spending cuts and inevitable redundancies and reduction in public services to vulnerable people being imposed by these hard-boiled public schoolboys will obviously affect those of us in the working class far more than the small minority of capitalists. The narrative from central government is that swingeing cuts in borrowing and public spending need to be enacted, in order to restore profitability to UK Capitalism plc.

And so in this allegedly different political landscape, we hear new terminology and concepts such as ‘The Big Society’, ‘The New Localism’, an increased role for ‘Civil Society’, ‘Ethical Consumerism’ and of capitalism’s concern for the ‘The Environment’.

Are these recent, reformist style trends evidence of the state’s attempt to mask the realities of a class-divided society? Over the next few years, what other coping strategies will the capitalist class use to try to find some stability for their system? How can individuals and the working class as a whole respond to this in a way which will best reflect our interests? What sort of future do we want to see?

Possibly the most profound trend that is now emerging and rapidly advancing is not necessarily the recent decline in profitability of the wages system of production, but a decline rather in the confidence of the ruling class to convince us of the validity of their system. It seems the legitimisation crisis transcends the sphere of domestic capitalist politics and extends to the spheres of religion, nationhood and the state, liberal democracy and the most basic tenets of human liberty.

Thatcher’s mantras

When Thatcher was Prime Minister in the 1980s she endlessly repeated the slogan “There is no alternative” (shortened as TINA). In economics, politics and political economy, it came to mean that there was no alternative to the status quo of their economic system and economic liberalism. It is still the main slogan of economic liberalism, arguing that free markets, free trade, and capitalist globalisation are the only way in which modern societies can go, as any deviation from their doctrine is certain to lead to disaster. Thatcher’s affinity for the phrase led to the author Claire Berlinski choosing it as the title for her biography of the former Prime Minister.

In the early nineties, Francis Fukuyama wrote a book named The End of History and the Last Man, which in a similar strain argued that liberal democracy had triumphed over so-called communism, actually authoritarian state capitalism, and the historical struggle between competing political systems within capitalism was over, though apparently there could still be future events. This trend dovetailed into a political fashion for “Rugged Individualism”. Indeed, Thatcher in her third term of office regularly claimed “There is no such thing as society.”

Change of rhetoric

Today, far from Thatcher’s ‘There is No Alternative’ rhetoric, we now get an apologetic, “We’re All in this Together” from our so-called leaders.

We now have an offer from the state for us to be part of the “Big Society”. At first sight this apparently bold initiative at rolling back the state may seem appealing. But strip it to its core and one suspects other motives.

In a speech in Liverpool on 19 July to re-launch what critics say is a vague idea, the still newish Con-Dem Coalition Prime Minister David Cameron insisted that what he terms “the Big Society” is at the heart of his policy agenda:

  “We need to create communities with oomph! Neighbourhoods who are in charge of their own destiny, who feel if they club together and get involved they can shape the world around them.”

And with one eye on the detailed government spending cuts that were to be announced in October, Cameron insisted his attempt to revive community action was driven by “great passion” rather than the need to save money:

  “It is not a cover for anything. This would be a great agenda whether we were having to cut public spending or whether we were increasing public spending.

“This is not about trying to save money, it is about trying to have a bigger, better society.”

I wonder how many people really believe him.

And while all that and far more is going on, we as apparently individual, and certainly individuated, citizens are micro-managed keenly by armies of state officials in terms of our health, personal habits, children and domestic waste disposal. We are implored to consume ethically and to be mindful of our Environmental Impact and Carbon Footprints.

It seems capitalism in the coming decade is likely to be a miserabilist, reactionary affair in which personal responsibility and self-reliance is propounded as the dominant ethos within society. Is this the future we want?

This scenario could be so very different. How can we reach for the sort of world many people long to see, a world in which poverty, hunger, war and ruination of the quality of life for the majority of people can be abolished? That means going beyond capitalism to a society in which things like money, nation states, official government and production for profit are abolished.

“Capitalism is only unbeatable as long as everybody thinks it is. As soon as everybody thinks it is finished, then it will be finished. We therefore need to keep in touch with what other people are really thinking. And we need to explain, tirelessly, where the only viable future for the Human race lies – in that post-capitalist society of common ownership of the world. It is impossible to be neutral in this struggle.” (Ron Cook, Yes, Utopia!)

Andy P Davies

The cuts – let’s make capitalism redundant (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

We have been forewarned. It is going to get worse; worse than it was – and for most it was never good; worse than it is now.

A deep unease haunts the land; a sense of foreboding as politicians, the media and the man next door talk of The Cuts and the impending cuts. Something is drastically wrong. Tens of thousands of people who thought they had secure employment have been made redundant and more going every day. The houses that people have on hire-purchase from building societies are in many cases worth less than what is owed on them. The state ‘benefits’ that guaranteed a mean living are being eroded, and the authoritative voices solemnly proclaim that it is going to get progressively worse.

Predictions

Some two decades ago the gurus of capitalism, its politicians, and its experts, were telling us that capitalism reigned supreme. Dr Francis Fukuyama, for example, who backed Obama for the US Presidency and earlier advised the Bush administration, put it thus:

  “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy and the final form of human government.”

Victims of their own propaganda, people like Fukuyama saw the ending of state capitalism in the totalitarian Russian empire as clearing the way for the untrammelled hegemony of American style neo-liberalism. The benign attempts of the European Left to economically sanitise capitalism by political regulation had failed; the flawed conception of the state as the national capitalist, as in so-called communist countries, was in disarray. The savants of capitalist wisdom could confidently predict that history had played its final hand and that the future was a vibrant, prosperous capitalism where ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ would be words of the past and we’d all live happily ever after.

Now that future has come crashing down, as it does periodically and inevitably since the inception of capitalism. If there is a quality unique to the present crisis it must be the clarity in which it exposes the system itself as being fatally defective and incapable of furthering human development. There can be no doubt about the awful realities of the crisis. They are grim and terrible and they are now the stuff of politics across the board. There is absolutely no escape within the economic imperatives of capitalism from the problems that the current crisis will impose on the working class into the future. Nor is there any audible voice from within the main political parties suggesting even consideration of an alternative way of organising the vital affairs of society. On the contrary, the largely illusionary differences between Left and Right is simply now about the degree of pain that should be inflicted over time on the working class. The Tories and the power-lusting leadership of the Lib-Dems would concentrate the pain into a short period while the Labour Party would impose the pain over a longer period of time

The “nation’s” debt. 

So political debate is now about the amount of time the alleged recovery should take, otherwise there is unanimity about the inevitability of the need for ‘cuts’. The suggestion is that ‘we’ as a ‘nation’ are living on borrowed money. That every fourth pound that the ’nation’ now spends has to be borrowed from international investment agencies which will become exponentially richer on the proceeds of ‘our’ accelerating poverty. That the ‘nation’s’ debt has got out of hand and we will all have to restrict our spending for the foreseeable future.

There can be no argument about it. Given the way our political and economic system works ‘the nation’ – whether the UK, Ireland, Germany, the US, et al – is in grave financial difficulty. The various ‘nations’ are the component parts of an intricate world economic system and those living within each of the component parts are going to be adversely affected one way or the other.

For members of the working class that means that generally they will be expected to do without more than they were doing without previously; a more restricted standard of living, a financially crippled health service and the ending of access to third level education. The lot of members of the capitalist class is less predictable; for some the crisis will provide opportunities to acquire bargain assets from the economic casualities of their less-fortunate class brethren; for others it might impact on the rate of their wealth accumulation; and there will be those who will be joining the working class and become impoverished celebrities.

Whereas, in the past, politics was about politicians and their parties telling us how they were going to improve our living standards, today politics is about the pace and duration of the cuts that are going to bite into our lives in the future: the political Right, abetted by the craven Centre, thinks the pain of economic retrenchment should be fully applied now; the Left argues that less pain over an extended period is preferable. But the ubiquitous watchword is that it is going to be painful!

Endorsing capitalism 

There can be no doubting that the immediate future is perilous for the working class and requires a serious approach. Getting the placards out, shouting slogans and having a futile punch-up with cops divides us and gives succour to our enemies – especially so when the slogans offer no real alternatives to the system that gave rise to our problem in the first place.

We have to recognise that it is the working class that politically endorses capitalism in elections and it is only the working class that can abolish that system in conditions that will allow for the establishment of socialism. That statement requires recognition of the limitations of bourgeois democracy but such limitations do not alter the fact that without the conscious democratic consent of the working class real social democracy is out of the question.

The cuts are not the result of any change in our potential to produce wealth and there is plainly urgent human need for vibrant wealth production. That such wealth production in any form of society is the result of human mental and physical labour power being applied to nature-given resources is clearly obvious and both these factors remain as they were before the advent of the present crisis. Unfortunately capitalism adds another predominating factor into the simple wealth-producing equation: capital investment on the promise of profit. Today capitalism controls our means of life by its ownership of those means and only allows production of our human needs in conditions likely to produce profit for the owning class. Socialism will make our means of life the common property of society as a whole thus abolishing ownership and that factor in the present wealth-producing equation that puts greed before need. Political reformers on the Left might protest that immediate organising for Socialism does nothing to alleviate the current problems of capitalism but if they accept that these problems are an effect of capitalism they must surely accept that the logical way to remove an effect is to remove its cause.

Richard Montague

Global reformists (2001)

Book Review from the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism’. Edited by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, (Vintage 2001)

This is a collection of essays by various “lefty” and centrist writers on aspects of global capitalism. The essays are sandwiched between an opening dialogue between the editors and a concluding chapter curiously titled “Fighting Back” (against whom or what?—certainly not global capitalism).

Manuel Castells outlines three sources of unsustainability for what he calls info-capitalism. One of these is “the social, cultural and political rejection by large numbers of people around the world of an Automaton whose logic either ignores or devalues their humanity”. Unfortunately he follows this by suggestions for taming the Automaton (global capitalism), not for getting rid of it.

Vandana Shiva is scathing about global capitalism and its effects on poor people and the environment: “Instead of getting rid of pollution, systems are being evolved which allow the rich to sell their pollution to the poor . . . The proposal to give market values to all resources as a solution of the ecological crisis is like offering the disease as the cure”—good diagnosis, pity about the lack of treatment.

Arlie Russell Hochschild describes how a Philippines mother-of-five migrates to the US to work as a nanny to the young son of a wealthy Beverly Hills family. The family pay the nanny the going rate, and the nanny pays her domestic worker the going Philippines rate. The nanny would have preferred staying home to look after her own children. The Beverly Hills family are satisfied with the deal. So Hochschild asks: are that family getting emotional surplus value?

In the face of this and much other evidence that global capitalism is destroying or severely damaging human relationships and values, you would expect the editors to condemn the system and urge its replacement. Not a bit of it. Hutton does not go beyond recognising the driving force behind global capitalism: “Its overriding objective is to serve the interests of property owners and shareholders, and it has a firm belief . . . that all obstacles to its capacity to do that-regulation, controls, trade unions, taxation, public ownership, etc—are unjustified and should be removed.”

Giddens, seeking to magnify the minuscule differences between himself and Hutton, claims that “Capitalism, at least for the moment, has hardly any critics.” Not true. Capitalism has plenty of critics, but none of them (except socialists, of course) carries their criticisms to the point of advocating the removal of the system whose deficiencies they eloquently describe. Instead they accept the myth that There is No Alternative.

The editors say in their concluding chapter “the task, surely, in the absence of alternatives, is to keep the current system going and improve it.” It doesn’t seem to occur to Hutton and Giddens that this “task” is effectively to condemn us to endure some form of capitalism for ever. Echoing Fukuyama, we really have, according to this scenario, reached the end of history.

Stan Parker

The Virus: Our Perspective – Covid and Class (2020)

From the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you were to compile a list of essential workers that your community has been reliant on during the Coronavirus crisis, you’d very likely not include billionaires, CEOs, businessmen, bankers, economists or the royals or that class of people who live off rent, interest and profit. Your list would include workers we encounter every day and whose occupations we had hitherto taken for granted. Your list would undoubtedly include medical workers, shop staff, ‘bin men’, delivery drivers, those working in power plants or working in front-line maintenance of the technology society needs etc. In short, you’d cite members of the class that sells its physical and mental abilities for a wage or salary in order to live – the working class. In her recent address to the nation about the coronavirus crisis, the queen began her brief message with a recognition of the importance of such workers to a society in crisis and, unwittingly, revealing the utter uselessness of her own institution to society.

We keep the world going

This class, the working class, runs the world and it is important to grasp this fact. It is we, members of this majority class, who build the cities and railway networks, the bridges and roads, the docks and airports. It is we who staff the hospitals and schools, who empty the bins and go down the sewers. It is we who fish the oceans and tend the forests, work the farm and till the land and plantations. It is we, the working class, who produce everything society needs from a pin to an oil-rig, who provide all of its services. If we can do all of this off our own bats, then assuredly, we can continue to do so without a profit-greedy minority watching over us and, more, in our own interests.

To be sure, the ruling class of capitalists and their executive, the governments of the world, have no monopoly on our skills and abilities. These belong to us. Moreover, it is we who are responsible for the inventions that have benefited humanity and the improvements in productive techniques. Most inventions and improvements are the result of those who do the actual work, thinking up easier and faster ways of completing a task, the result of ideas being passed down from generation to generation, each one improving the techniques of the previous. If those who work have given the world so much, in the past say 2,000 years, then how much more are we capable of providing in a world devoid of the artificial constraints of profit? Needless to say, any vaccine for the coronavirus will be the result of the hard work of salary-earning scientists, not some fat-arsed apologist for the profit system.

It is easy to cite the advantages of capitalism over previous economic systems. Many people believe that capitalism, though not perfect, is the only system possible. One thing is certain, though – if we follow the capitalist trajectory, we’re in for some pretty troublesome times. Capitalism has undoubtedly raised the productive potential of humanity and it is now quite possible to provide a comfortable standard of living for every human on the planet. But, to reiterate, capitalism now stands as a barrier to the full and improved use of the world’s productive and distributive forces. In a world of potential abundance, the unceasing quest for profit imposes on our global society widespread artificial scarcity. Hundreds of millions of humans are consigned to a life of abject poverty, whilst the majority live lives filled with uncertainty.

Our ability to imagine has brought us so very far, from the days when our ancestors chipped away at flint to produce the first tools, to the sending of scientific probes to the surface of Mars, the setting up of the worldwide web, and the mapping of the human genome. Is it really such a huge leap of the imagination to now envisage a social system that can take over from the present capitalist order of things? Is it just too daring to imagine humans consigning poverty, disease, hunger and war to some pre-historic age?

Do we really need leaders deciding our lives for us, when collectively we are far more capable of deciding what is best? Do we really need governments administering our lives when what is really needed is the administration of the things we need to live in peace and security? Must every decision made by our elites be first of all weighed on the scales of profit, tilted always in their favour?

Can’t be reformed to work for us

One thing is certain: capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of the world’s suffering billions, because reform does not address the basic contradiction between profit and need. The world’s leaders cannot be depended upon because they can only ever act as the executive of corporate capitalism. The expansion of democracy, while welcome, serves little function if all candidates at election time can only offer variations on the same basic set of policies that keep capitalism in the ascendancy.

Capitalism must be abolished if we as a species are to thrive, if the planet is to survive. No amount of reform, however great, will work. Change must be global and irreversible. It must involve all of us. We need to erase borders and frontiers; to abolish states and governments and false concepts of nationalism. We need to abolish our money systems, and with it buying, selling and exchange. And in place of this we need to establish a different global social system – a society in which there is common ownership and true democratic control of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources. A society where the everyday things we need to live in comfort are produced and distributed freely and for no other reason than that they are needed – socialism.

It is now no utopian fantasy to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. That much is assured. We certainly have the science, the technology and the know-how. All that is missing is the will – the global desire for change that can make that next great historical advance possible; a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny; a belief that it is possible to free production from the artificial constraints of profit and to fashion a world in our own interests. And how soon this happens depends upon us all – each and every one of us.

Of course, many, even our detractors, will agree that such a socialist world would be a beautiful place to live in, but that ‘human nature’ will always be a barrier to its establishment, because humans are ‘by nature’ greedy, selfish and aggressive. It quickly becomes apparent that what they are describing is not human nature as such, but various traits of human behaviour exhibited under particular circumstances. Socialists maintain that human behaviour is shaped by the kind of system people are brought up to live in – that it is not our consciousness that determines our social existence but our social existence which determines our consciousness. Nobody is born a racist or a patriot, a bigot or with a belief in gods. Nobody is born a murderer, a robber or a rapist, and our alleged greed for money is no more a function of the natural human thought process than were slavery or witch burning.

In general, the ideas the common people hold have been acquired second-hand, passed down from the ruling class above us. This is because the class which owns and controls the productive process also controls the intellectual life process in general. Any anti-social behaviour is likewise influenced by our social circumstances at any given time, i.e., when we are poor, depressed, afraid, lonely, angry and frustrated.

In most cases, those who produce the world’s wealth (some 95 percent of the world’s population) have had that second-rate education that makes free thought difficult – an upbringing that conditions us to accept without question the ideas of our betters and superiors. Indeed, the education system is geared to perpetuate the rule of an elite, insofar as it never encourages children to question and take issue with the status quo. Children may well recite that 8 times 8 equals 64, but how many will ask about the cause of wars or query the destruction of food?

Socialists hold that because we can adapt our behaviour, the desire to cooperate should not be viewed as irrational. We hold that humans are, ‘by nature’, cooperative and that we work best when faced with the worst and that our humanity shines through when the odds are stacked against us. There are millions of cases of people donating their blood and organs to complete strangers, sacrificing their lives for others, of people giving countless hours of their free time to charitable work – all of this without financial incentive.

When the call went out for volunteers to help the NHS during the current crisis, over 700,000 offered their services. Elsewhere, in Britain and around the world, countless millions have stepped forward to help the most vulnerable in society and in every way imaginable and with social media flooded with countless acts of selflessness and solidarity and, often, carried out by those with the least to give.

Today, world capitalism threatens the human race with extinction, if not through existential threats to the planet through nuclear war and climate change, then through the threat of pandemics which lays bare the utter incompetence of the profit system when faced with crisis. The reason this obnoxious system survives is because we have been conditioned to accept it, but we are not born to perpetuate it. Rest assured, no gene inclines us to defend the profit system.

Normality is not normal

It is perhaps ‘natural’ for people to want to return to something resembling a pre-Covid-19 world, to get ‘back to normal’, for family and friends to meet up and continue as before, to love and to care and to share, which is the essence of human nature. But let’s remember what this normality really means for many of us. It is a world where every aspect of life is subordinated to the worst excesses of the drive to make profit on the part of a minority owning and controlling class.

Normality is a world where almost 800 million are chronically malnourished and where 25,000 children die each day from hunger or related illness. At the same time, the governments of the world order the destruction of vast mountains of food to keep prices high, stockpile food until it rots and pay farmers to take land out of production because the laws of supply and demand insist that overproduction is bad for the market.

Normality is a world where some 150 million of our fellow humans are homeless, many sleeping rough on the streets of the world’s cities, with 1.6 billion lacking adequate housing, yet there is no shortage of vacant buildings – countless millions of acres of empty living space in the major cities of the world – and certainly no shortage of building materials or skilled builders and craftsmen presently out of work. Again, we find that the market not only dictates who does and does not eat, but who does and does not sleep comfortably.

Normality is a planet on which over one billion of our fellow humans have no access to clean water and 2.6 billion lack adequate sanitation, and the growing scarcity of fresh water is calculated to spark many wars across the globe in the coming decades. Meanwhile, the technology exists to desalinate millions of gallons each day and to set up treatment plants capable of cleaning the dirtiest water. However, there is not much profit in selling something which covers five-sixths of the planet, so the investment never comes.

While millions of children die each year of curable diseases and while we still await breakthroughs in medical science that can cure the presently incurable, we find there are literally thousands of scientists around the world employed in weapons programmes – paid by their respective governments to devise new methods of murder, including germ warfare, the deaths from which could dwarf those of the current pandemic.

The list is as endless as it is insane. At every turn we find evidence of how capitalism destroys us physically and mentally, retarding real human development. At every turn we come smack up against the iron law of our age – ‘can’t pay, can’t have’. At every turn we find capitalism running wild like a rabid dog, infecting all it comes into contact with, a pandemic that is rarely recognised for what it is.

If we return to ‘normality’, let’s hope it is with an increased awareness of our own worth, capabilities and potential, a recognition that it’s the workers who run the world, no matter how seemingly menial the job, and how interdependent we are on each other. Whilst our leaders, in the face of crisis, resemble more each day the character in Edvard Munch’s The Scream, let us not lose sight of the fact it was the workers who kept society going and rid the world of Covid-19.

John Bissett

Imagine . . . (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing in human history is inevitable. We are not living and organising society according to any pre-ordained schemes. We are masters of our own history, not slaves of it. We can do what we choose. But you know that these are not the sort of ideas that we are encouraged to develop. On the contrary, we are encouraged to think of ourselves as slaves to the present order of things. This process of learning to believe that history has come to a halt, and that “you cannot change the way things are”, is often described as learning to “be realistic".

Where this point becomes particularly noticeable is in discussion about war. The society we live in produces war. There is a split between the minority who own and control the means of life and the majority of us who produce the wealth. A split, that is. between those who produce but do not possess and those who possess but do not produce. The economic rivalries among the wealth owners over market territories, areas rich in mineral resources and strategic locations on the trade atlas are often fought off the conference tables on the battlefields. Society based on competition and property is a war-producing society. This is the current state of affairs. We are born into a social setting where there are armies and bombs and Stock Exchanges and governments. But just because such things cluttered the world into which we were born is no reason for us to consent to them, nor believe that they are part of some “reality" which, although we can imagine it not existing, can never actually change.

Although another world war is not inevitable, if the present state of society is allowed to continue then it is a distinct possibility. The profit system is an unstable and volatile method of organising society, and armed to the back teeth as many states are, the recipe is being mixed for a nuclear exchange. Falling into the trap of regarding the way things are as largely unalterable, many commentators fortify the fallacy by using the language of inevitability.

Wintex-Cimex 83 is not a package ski tour, nor is it one of those instant relief nasal decongestants. W-C was the codename of a “paper” nuclear war game organised last month by NATO. This operation saw ministers from all over Europe frenetically telephoning each other and sending telex messages in rehearsal for a full-scale nuclear war. The fact that grown men and women are able to calmly and efficiently go through a paper rehearsal of what “on the night” would amount to a massive social carnage represents a hideous contradiction between our ability to plan and act co-operatively and what these abilities are actually being used for today.

The British Medical Association recently issued a report on the predicted state of Britain after a nuclear attack. The report paints a grim picture. Decaying corpses will litter the streets and millions of initial survivors — burnt, irradiated and starving — will die slowly and in agony. Doctors will not be able to help them and there will be no equipment or drugs to ease their deaths.

  Food stockpiles within 10-20 kilometres of an explosion could be exposed to fallout. Farm animals are sensitive to radiation. But insects and vermin are much more resistant: flies, cockroaches and rats could proliferate, spreading disease . . . survivors would face epidemics of typhoid, cholera, typhus, malaria ... a full-scale attack would result in about 38.600,000 deaths and 4,300,000 casualties. . . (The Report of the BMA Hoard of Science and Education Inquiry into the effects of Nuclear War.)

The doctors who composed this report after two years' research drew no political conclusions. But if we are capable of examining the dangers in this way then we are also capable of dismantling not only the weapons which menace us. but the social system which gives rise to them.

Apart from the socialist point of view, the responses to this issue are varied but all have the common thread of accepting the structure of society which produces the need for wars which produces the need for weapons. Peter Blaker is the Tory minister for the Armed Services. His recent response to the subversive noises about a peaceful world was to take a jab at "woolly minds in woolly hats”. If minds that desire a peaceful society and do not regard the production of bombs as a wise route to it are "woolly", one wonders what exactly predominates between the ears of Blacker? A solid lump of granite perhaps?

Another conservative with ideas to contribute to the debate about how to secure peace is Lord Hill-Norton. Admiral-of-the-Fleet Lord Hill-Norton last month proposed a plan to raise a 750,000 Dads' Army carrying their own weapons and defending the shores of England. “Defence”, remarked the Admiral, "begins at home”, which is of course something we will remember if it ever comes to the day when we have to whitewash our windows and hide under the table.

The reason organised peace movements this century, and before, have failed is that they have all consented to the power structure which creates war. War is neither democratically begun, nor democratically prosecuted. It is therefore facile to contend for wars to be fought on the terms of, say, the CND “no to cruise missiles”, or “no to trident”. These pleas, no matter from how many mouths they come, are lame. Apart from this, many of the phenomena which frighten people into CND to try and stop happening actually exist now: starvation of millions of people, lack of sanitation and hygenic water for thousands, riots, totalitarian regimes and military conflict all over the world.

As the Tory Party becomes increasingly associated with war-mongering policies and militarism there is a danger that the ideas of the Labour Party will be regarded as better and more beneficial to us. In fact the party under which the atom bomb was developed in Britain, and which recruited workers to fight for the bosses in two world wars, has not got any answers to the problem. The interests of workers and capitalists are diametrically opposed. The idea of nationalism has been supported by the ruling class because it deludes the workers into believing that within one territory. under one flag, they have a united interest with the bosses. Nationalism is divisive among workers and is used to help work up antagonism between workers from different places for them to fight the cause of their masters. Yet the Labour Party has always engaged in the promotion of nationalism. One recent example appears in the latest draft of their election campaign document, which will soon appear as part of their manifesto.

  Labour is determined that our country shall play a full part in the struggle for peace . . . Labour will pursue and win international support for policies designed to stimulate trade, investment and growth and we shall work inside the appropriate institutions to end the financial chaos which now threatens the stability of so many countries.

It is not "our” country; it is theirs — the capitalists’. In Britain the top 2 per cent own 64 per cent of the land (Inland Revenue Statistics 1980) and the top 13 per cent own 91.3 per cent of all housing. Workers of the world have no country, we only have a class. We are not interested in “stimulating trade" or “investment". We do not wish to streamline the efficiency of our own exploitation. We want a new social system. We do not want to sort out the "financial chaos” of capitalism, and try to make the system run well. This system can, by definition, never work well for us. It is working well for the bosses which keeps this system going.

We want a system based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing wealth. From each according to ability, to each according to need. Imagine it. All developments have at one time been merely ideas or dreams scoffed at by those who did not think historically. “The sun travels around the earth . . . the earth is flat . . . man will never fly . . . man will never split the atom . . . stand on the moon . . ." History is ripe for socialism and there are clear reasons for its urgent establishment.

The voice apologising for capitalism and defending "reality" grows quieter and less confident as we give up adjusting to fit painfully in with reality and start adjusting reality to suit our self-determined needs.

Gary Jay