The Money Trick (2007)

From the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was probably a rich person who devised the saying, "Money can't buy happiness". But there is more truth in the cynical retort that at least it allows you to be miserable in comfort

Money, is portable wealth, a universal medium of exchange that gives its possessor the power over most things. It is the ultimate commodity, the embodiment of capitalism. The poet Shelley put it rather well:

"Paper coin, that forgery

Of the title-deeds which we

Hold to something of the worth

Of the inheritance of earth."

Marx in an early essay on the subject said, "That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for, i.e. which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of money… If money is the bond that ties me to human life and society to me, which links me to nature and to man, is money not the bond of all bonds?" (Money, Paris Manuscripts. Original italics).

Money in various limited forms existed for hundreds of years before the advent of capitalism but because it is an indispensable element in the workings of capitalism its general usage expanded universally with the development of that system. For a start, it is the device whereby capitalism separates the worker from the fruits of his or her labour; an indispensable part of the process whereby a minority class of capitalists ration the consumption of the great majority who as workers of one sort or another produce all the real wealth of society.

Stock Exchanges

Real wealth, the essential goods and services used to sustain society, is not produced in Stock Exchanges. Stock exchanges are simply commercial casinos where capital is gambled on the products of labour. Not a single iota of the necessities of life is produced in these palaces of speculation nor in the board rooms of companies and corporations where production and distribution is planned solely on the basis of anticipated profit.

So money is at the core of human activity from the cradle to the grave. It dominates all of our lives and it is the master plan, the implacable, limiting paradigm, within which political parties administering the political and economic affairs of capitalism must work.

Within capitalism wealth is produced in the form of commodities, that is goods and services with a real or imagined use value produced for the market with a view to profit. This wealth is created, and can only be created by the application of human labour power to the resources of nature. In other words, the totality of real wealth is produced by the working class in exchange for a wage or salary that generally reflects what may from time-to-time ensure to the individual worker a sufficient ration of those necessities of life that is consistent with the prevailing rate for his or her employment. Enough to allow for existence between pay-days but insufficient to allow the worker to live without continuing to sell his or her labour power.

We are not immediately concerned here with the fraudulent process by which the wages system works to ensure that those who produce wealth at best 'get by' while the non-producing class of capitalists accumulate greater and greater wealth.

Our intent, rather, is to look at the appalling waste capitalism's money system involves in both its productive and distributive processes; to look at the vast armies of wage and salary workers who spend their lives carrying out functions made necessary only by commodity production. Thereafter we might look briefly at how socialism would operate and how society would benefit from the monumental reduction of labour time and waste that would result from the direct production of human needs solely for use as opposed to the current system of production for profit.

The waste makers

Some appreciation of the extraneous functions that capitalism's buying and selling system involves can be gained from the movement of workers in towns and cities in the morning and evening of the 'working week'. Apart from the mass of shops and stores duplicating each other's activities in a competitive melée for sales, there are usually towering office blocks where masses of clerks and sales personnel work.

Banks, financial services, insurance offices, advertising agents, solicitors, brokers, security staff, estate agents; check the functions of the masses of offices on the main arteries of any town or city and you will find the overwhelming majority of them pursue functions directly or indirectly concerned with trade or commerce or with other activities peculiar to a buying-and selling economy. Indeed in many places today the number of workers 'servicing' capital and capitalism exceeds the numbers engaged in the actual production of goods and services.

Even the poverty that capitalism creates as a result of inadequate incomes, unemployment, sickness and infirmity has to be policed and serviced by vast numbers of people checking, spying, filing, form filling and forced to make brutal and dehumanising decisions. Not only are these multifarious functions wasteful and without a useful end product for those spending their lives performing them, but they in turn have to be transported, housed and provisioned by legions of other workers.

Then there is the crime business which apart from judges, lawyers and criminals engages tens of thousands of police personnel as well as prison staff. Crime in capitalist society is a vast business and like the rest of the enterprises created by capitalism has, in turn, to be provisioned by further extensive ancillary services.

The 'defence' industry

The so-called defence industry and its mammoth support services employs most of the world's scientists. These are usually highly specialised people employed in the business of devising ever more sophisticated means of slaughtering human beings or frustrating the work of other scientists rivalling their work for other governments. Worldwide, military establishments employ millions of men and women as armed forces as well as vast numbers of civilian employees while millions more are engaged in producing armaments and other needs of the killing industry. Additionally, of course, the activities of these military establishments foster imitative resistance, or terrorist movements which governments respond to with a financial priority beyond that of the social needs of their citizens.

The legend is that this vast vortex of destructive wealth exists for the defence of the citizen but the average citizen of one country does not threaten the average citizen of another country, The 'average citizen' of most of the developed world is a member of the working class who does not possess anything that might encourage aggressive tendencies by those of similar status in another area of the world.

The truth is that armaments, armed forces, diplomacy and all the other things associated with war have nothing whatsoever to do with the working class and the problems of that class - other than the fact that it is workers who will do the fighting and the killing. Otherwise, the ordinary citizen is not consulted when alleged democratic governments decide to engage in armed conflict. Wars and the incredible destruction of human life and property are about the wealth of the capitalist class; in fact it is the predatory conflicts of the marketplace spilling over on to the battlefield.

An obscene aspect of the system of social organisation we are told represents the pinnacle of capitalist civilisation is the actual distribution of wealth globally and nationally. A United Nations report featured in the Guardian (6 December) reveals the depravity of the system by telling us that: "The first ever study of global household assets shows that half of the world's adults own just 1% of the world's wealth while the world's richest 1% own 40% of all wealth. "

This is why we have world hunger; why we have poverty and insecurity; why we have terrorism, wars, appalling social problems like alienation and crime and this is the justification for the frightening threat to the our environment. This truly bears testimony to the utter absurdity of capitalism and the mode of life it imposes on society.

Socialism

The irony of capitalism is that it is maintained and sustained on the credulity and ignorance of its victims, the working class. Not only does the working class produce capitalism's vast wealth but it is conditioned by the existing educational processes, by the media and by politicians to believe that there is no rational alternative to the system of capitalism.

This does not mean that the workers are contented and docile or that they approve of the way capitalism functions. On the contrary, dissatisfaction and alienation are rampant. Resistance to wars and cynical, reckless market globalisation has become a universal protest against aspects of world capitalism and everywhere the value systems that maintained a quiescent working class are breaking down.

In the UK, for example, crime figures soar, more than 80,000 people are in prisons in Britain and new prisons are urgently required. A large section of the population are on anti-depressants and, if the media tell it right, the use of hallucinatory drugs has reached epidemic levels. Vandalism and anti-social behaviour especially among the young evidence a marked degree of alienation and the escalation of the suicide rate, again especially among the young, demonstrates the lack of social cohesion within our rat-race society

Continually, the capitalist controlled media tells us that there is no poverty now and it is true that an explosion in productive capacity wrought by new technologies has banished much of the old hard-core destitution that was prevalent in the first decades of the last century. But poverty is a relative condition not a comparative one; it is an inevitable aspect of social inequality and has to be measured against prevailing conditions and relatively speaking poverty is still rampant even in the most highly developed nations of world capitalism.

And whereas in the past the dispossessed could see hope in the massed political formations of Labour and Social Democratic parties and many were imbued with the belief that the Bolsheviks were building a future of hope, today those illusions have been banished by time and the realities of the system. The dream of applying rational solutions to the anarchy of capitalism and its wages and money system has been shattered.

Whether these illusions were part of a necessary process of social education is open to doubt but at least now we know from our experience that neither political parties nor armed insurrectionists can create a truly social democratic society while leaving the structures of capitalism like its money trick and its wages servitude intact. Today we have to face the fact that we live with capitalism and its appalling problems or move forward to its logical alternative: Socialism.

Socialism will be a system of social organisation that, by its nature, can only be brought about by overwhelming democratic consensus. It will involve the political disestablishment of the concept of ownership in society's means of life - the land and the instruments for producing and distributing all the things human beings need as the material basis of a full and happy life.

Essentially, socialism will be a voluntary association of free people cooperating in  creating at regional and global levels the goods and services they need and availing of those goods and services as required.

Even such a brief statement clarifies the fact that all the wasteful functions we have referred to and which are essential within a market economy will disappear, freeing hundreds of millions of human beings from the demeaning servitude of functions associated only with the machinery used by our masters for our exploitation.

Richard Montague

Mixed Media: 'The Marriage of Figaro' & 'Paul Klee' (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Marriage of Figaro

Mozart's Le Nozze di Figaro with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte was performed last year at the Royal Opera House, Drury Lane, London in Italian with English subtitles. The opera is based on the banned play Le Mariage de Figaro by Beaumarchais, and was originally staged just before the French Revolution. Later Napoleon called it 'the Revolution already put into Action.' The major themes of the opera are sex and class conflict.

Christopher Maltman as Count Almaviva is predatory, displays contemptuous hauteur, and wants to revive the 'droit du seigneur', a nobleman's prerogative feudal right allowing him to have sexual relations with a subordinate woman which was also known as 'jus primae noctis' ('first night'). Luca Pisaroni as Figaro, the barber turned valet and major-domo to the Count denounces this 'offending right' when he discovers the Count intends to sleep with his fiancée Susanna. He sings 'Se vuol ballare' ('If you would dance'): 'Signor Contino, Il Chitarrino, Le Susnero' ('Count, if you come to my dancing school, you'll jump to my tune') and vows 'tutte le macchine rovescierò' ('all of your schemes I'll turn inside out').

Marriage for 'love' was a product of the rise of the bourgeoisie, freeing itself from the feudal norm of arranged marriage, and the notion of 'individual sex-love' was a source of inspiration for Mozart. Da Ponte removed political references such as replacing Figaro's speech in Beaumarchais against inherited privilege: 'Here a Master, there a Servant, according to the whim of fortune, being an aristocrat, having money, a position in society, holding public office. What have you ever done for all this wealth?'

Mozart was a Freemason, then a radical bourgeois reform movement extolling rationalist Enlightenment philosophy mixed with mystic humanism, promoting republicanism and brotherly love, and questioning the accepted idea that nobility makes someone worthy of respect. Mozart was a friend of Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Illuminati which espoused the humanist views of Rousseau and Diderot, and opposed the superstition and prejudice of the Roman Catholic Church. The Illuminati contended that social rank was not coincident with nobility of the spirit, but that people of lower class could be noble in spirit.

Mozart 'knew' his place in the feudal hierarchy as a servant to the Archbishop of Salzburg. Mozart described a typical dinner time: 'Our party consists of the two valets, the two cooks, and my insignificant self. Note that the two valets sit at the top of the table but at least I have the honour of being placed above the cooks.'

Mozart was the first composer to take the step into capitalism becoming a freelance composer in Vienna, selling his music on the market through subscription concerts and commissions. Mozart had moved into the world of petty commodity production.

************************************************************

Paul Klee

Tate Modern in London recently held an exhibition of works by the early twentieth century modernist painter Paul Klee.

Klee contributed to the art and literature magazine Der Weg in Munich which in January 1919 proclaimed 'It is time for the revolution to create a revolution, under the stormy pressure of necessity one will not escape socialism.' With the establishment in Munich of the Bavarian Council Republic (Bayerische Räterepublik) on 6 April 1919 Klee wrote 'the Aktionsausschuss Revolutionäre Künstler (Action Committee of Revolutionary Artists) may dispose completely of my artistic capabilities.' Ernst Toller, Expressionist playwright briefly president described the Bavarian Council Republic as the 'Bavarian Revolution of Love.' This revolution was crushed by the Freikorps ('White Guards of Capitalism') on 3 May 1919 with 1,000 workers killed in street fighting, and 700 workers summarily executed in the following 'White Terror.'

Klee fled to Switzerland where he wrote to Alfred Kubin on 12 May 1919: 'this communist republic did give us the opportunity of checking our subjective in such a community. It was not without a positive result. Of course, exaggerated, individualistic art is not suitable for the general public, it is a capitalist luxury. That part of us which somehow aims for eternal values would be better able to receive support in a Communist Community.'

Klee's paintings of 1920 such as Aerial Combat, Memorial to the Kaiser and Christian Sectarian reflect the revolutionary times in Munich but most memorable is his Angelus Novus, the angel of history, part bird, part man, part angel. Walter Benjamin wrote of the painting in his 1940 Theses on the Philosophy of History: 'His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.'

The Nazis described Klee as a 'cultural Bolshevist' and in 1937 included his paintings in the 'Degenerate Art' exhibition.

Steve Clayton

Greasy Pole: Tony Benn – Getting it Wrong (2014)

The Greasy Pole Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the matter of political funerals and their selectively phoney eulogies, Tony Benn had to be outdistanced by Margaret Thatcher, which should not obscure a few significant similarities between them because after all they were both in that same business of politics. In their time as back benchers they each cosseted an intention to rule as much of the world as possible starting with a considered process of undermining their party leaders by an implicit claim to represent a simpler, clearer, more effective style of managing this chaotic social system. They were bolstered by a conviction that they would leave a non-fading mark on history which in itself, as an implacable reality reduces them, will provide material enough to keep a tribe of biographers at work. There were of course some divergences between them; for one thing Thatcher chose to pass into the ermine comforts of that same House of Lords that Benn had devoted so much energy to escape from. And he remained active to the end, passing on his delusions to others rather than endure their exposure. He died as President of the Stop the War Coalition, with an established reputation as '...one of the few politicians to have become more left wing after holding ministerial office'.

Liberals

It was not always like this. Benn came from a family well established in politics with both his grandfathers elected as Liberal MPs as was his father, before 1929 when he crossed to the Labour benches under Ramsay MacDonald. This did not, apparently, quell his political appetite because in 1941 he reluctantly agreed to augment the Labour Party in the House of Lords by accepting a peerage, making him Viscount Stansgate and a member of the Attlee government. So in 1950 when Stafford Cripps MP – who had his own reputation for being disruptive of party discipline – had to retire through ill health there was a vacancy in Bristol South-East and, with the help of his friend Anthony Crosland, Tony Benn was selected as the Labour candidate. To begin with Benn was an unremarkable back bencher, taking a place in the political centre with a leaning towards the right wing and critical of the restless Bevanites. He was a follower of the party leader Hugh Gaitskell, a leader who after an aberrant phase of opposing the Suez invasion was nervous of further damaging the party's electoral chances, and pursued a noisy campaign to revise the worrisome Clause Four of the party constitution with its policy of widespread nationalisation and warned that he would '...fight, fight and fight again' to overturn a conference decision to ban nuclear weapons.

Wilson

The image of a party persistently at war within itself was not voter-attractive and among the candidates offering a more peaceable and seductive style was Harold Wilson with his strategy of soothing the edges of inconvenient policies rather than abandoning them. Benn transferred his allegiance to Wilson and Gaitskell retaliated by no longer actively supporting him as a Labour MP. The matter was temporarily resolved in 1960 with the death of Benn's father which transformed him into the new Viscount Stansgate, thereby disqualifying him from the Commons. Nevertheless he grimly contested the resultant by-election in Bristol – which made the case for changes in the honours system, but inevitably he was again disqualified. He then resorted to a long, determined campaign to change the law which eventually, in August 1963, resulted in the Peerage Bill and after yet another by-election he won his way back into the Commons. (There were other results of that Bill, for example it allowed the excessively wealthy, heavily aristocratic, massively land-owning Lord Home to change into Alec Douglas-Home and to succeed that other Old Etonian Harold Macmillan as a Conservative Prime Minister).

Technology

Gaitskell died suddenly in January 1963 and the following year Wilson led the Labour Party to victory, on some vague assumptions about a Britain fed, cared for and stimulated by something he had called the Technological Revolution. By this time Benn was occupying a niche as an untiring advocate of a rabble of superficially attractive policies. In his first ministry as Postmaster General he covered the opening of the Post Office Tower and then, more memorably, he had to compromise on his proposal to remove the Queen's head from all postage stamps, instead using a miniaturised version of it. As Minister of Technology he recommended to patriotic British workers the supersonic Concorde airliner, which was promoted as a knock-out blow to the American company Boeing. As part of the process of getting the Concorde into service it was decided to run trials of the effect of its supersonic booms on the general population. It did not take long for this to be assessed as too much by way of pollution and misery inflicted on the people below and Concorde had to be confined to going supersonic over oceans or deserts or the like.

Leadership

In 1974 when Labour came back to power Benn reacted with the assumption that the establishment of socialism was surely a technological process. As Secretary for Industry he operated a policy of industrial rationalisation leading to the merging of large companies with all that entailed by way of a better organised and applied exploitation of the labour force. In the miners' 1984/5 strike there was some residual resentment that the miners' cause was actually damaged by the effect of such policies. But Benn's typically obscure justification was that 'We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values'. In the background to this there was the recurrent struggle for leadership of this disgraced and floundering Party. In the 1981 contest for Deputy Leader Benn lost by 0.5 per cent to Denis Healey and in 1988, against Kinnock for the Leadership, he was defeated by a large majority. He eventually gave up, with his well-publicised declaration that he was 'leaving parliament in order to spend more time on politics'. If nothing else, this gave him more time to amass his archives – his diaries, newspaper cuttings, and minutia of correspondence. Like all Labour politicians, his career can be summarised as an unremitting distortion of the meaning of the word socialism and all that implies, wilfully confusing socialism with state capitalism. In spite of all his obsessive energy, sadly he died leaving capitalism as brutal and wasteful a system of human affairs as it ever was.

Ivan.

Why I Joined the S.P.G.B. (1938)

From the September 1938 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like most of you, I was always interested in politics to a certain extent. My first object of affection was the Labour Party, and whilst I never joined, I always gave them my vote and between elections occasionally went to meetings and applauded Labour speakers. That was before 1929—when the Labour Party took office for the second time. I had not thought deeply about the issues involved, it was just a matter of instinct and sentiment with me—just as it is with millions of working-men and women.

After a year of Labour Government my enthusiasm for the Labour Party had vanished. but, unlike others, I never got it back again. Instead I began to look for something different, something more "extreme." I found it in the speeches of Harry Pollitt. Perhaps you, too, remember some of them, when, in 1930 and 1931, Mr. Pollitt contested Whitechapel and St. George's as Communist candidate for Parliament? By his fiery outbursts against the Labour Party and wholesome condemnation of working-class poverty I was won over. But, had I been asked whether I wanted Communism, or whether I understood it, I could not have given a satisfactory answer. No doubt I could have read the works of Marx and Engels had I wanted to, but the issues around which the Communist Party was arousing attention, and the general impression given by their propaganda, did not stimulate an interest in works on Socialism.

Yesterday's Problems—and To-day's

Then I came across an S.P.G.B. meeting. I immediately noticed the fundamental difference in approach used by the speaker. Everything he dealt with—political parties, topical events—looked so much different in the light of his reasoning. Of course the issues were not of "the day-to-day struggle," or so it seemed. For I have discovered this fact: capitalism can find something new every day, some problem which can occupy your time until another comes along to take its place in your mind. That is the trap which capitalism sets and into which reformist parties are continually falling. They said then, just as they are saying to-day: "This problem can't wait until we have Socialism, so we must deal with it first." And capitalism continues to produce problems of apparent immediate urgency; so that somehow they never get to Socialism—and, in the MEANTIME, CAPITALISM REMAINS.

Socialism Demands Knowledge

When I first listened to those S.P.G.B. meetings I did not understood this much. I've learnt it since, and it's about time some of you who are always asking us to do this, that, and the other, found it also.

Perhaps the most important fact that speaker brought home to me right at the beginning was the impossibility of Socialism without a majority of Socialists. Socialism, he pointed out, meant such a revolutionary social change, that to achieve it was out of the question unless most of the people understood what it was all about and wanted it. That's heart-breaking for those who are looking for a short cut. But has anyone found that short cut so many were talking about ten, twenty and thirty years ago? I didn't argue with that speaker about the impossibility of the workers ever learning what Socialism really meant. I set to work learning it! Perhaps some of our hecklers will take a tip from that and, instead of continually interrupting our speakers with that bogey question, keep quiet and give themselves a chance to learn!

The Importance of Numbers

Another matter. It simply did not occur to me to ask how many members the S.P.G.B. had got. That was the problem to tackle when I was inside the organisation. It has certainly nothing to do with the merits of the S.P.G.B.'s policy, except as a measure of its popularity with the working class (and, remember, the Labour Party's popularity was at its height at the very time when that Party became an instrument of attack on working-class wages and conditions!). So when you hear or read about the smallness of the S.P.G.B., try to be logical. If our policy is right, and you are convinced of that, then it's your job to help us put it across; and if you don't agree with us, then remember our size does not alter the merits of our policy in any way whatever. I would assert, moreover, that there is not another organisation which is as active as the S.P.G.B., considering that all the work of speaking, writing, literature-selling, and the hundred-and-one other jobs, are all done voluntarily in members' spare time without payment. How would some parties look if they had to carry on under similar circumstances?

Are We Sectarian?

Another factor that added to my resolve to join up was the way in which all kinds of objections to Socialism were dealt with by the S.P.G.B. (It is amazing how many so-called "advanced" people oppose Socialism!)

Those who argue that all we need do to-day is get rid of the National Government and replace it by a Labour-Liberal Coalition (euphemistically called a "Popular Front") in order to "keep open the door to Socialism," are begging the question. That "door" (Democracy) has been open for a long time. Why hasn't it been used? Why isn't it used to-day? There is only one answer: the workers don't want to use it to establish Socialism, because they're not Socialists. If you don't believe me, come to some of our meetings and hear their protests when Socialism is explained. That is why I endorse the S.P.G.B.'s attitude when they insist that, when joining the Party, applicants should know what Socialism stands for. Otherwise they would be a hinderance to the work of making Socialists. And that, after all, is the only justification for the existence of a Socialist Party.

Of course, this means that our membership is limited—to Socialists only. Our opponents say this question makes us a sect. It depends on the way the question is looked at. For instance, the New Leader has been featuring some letters from people who recently joined the I.L.P. In several cases the writers as good as stated they were not quite satisfied with the I.L.P., but joined because they could find nothing better. One writer went further. He actually disagreed completely with the I.L.P. on a fundamental question.

Well, that's perhaps one way of showing that the I.L.P. does not intend to be a sect. But then, a Socialist Party cannot be built up that way. Labourites, Pacifists, Trotskyists, Anarchists, and others banded together in an organisation might give themselves a Socialist label, but they cannot work for Socialism. That much is evident when you know what the I.L.P. is and has been. Such a situation could not arise in the S.P.G.B. We are a small organisation because membership is recruited on the basis of a clear understanding of Socialism and how to obtain it. Those who accuse us of being a "sect" produce no evidence except that we are small.

Many people who appreciate the quality of S.P.G.B. propaganda say: "You should be in the movement" . . . "get inside the Labour Party and put your Socialism across in there."

It is difficult to believe that anyone really thinks that that is possible. Would we be allowed to join as an organisation? And, having joined, what could we do there? Get busy telling the members that the Labour policy is completely wrong, anti-Socialist, and that their leaders are simply politicians depending upon mass political ignorance? That would be the truth, but we would certainly not be allowed to say it.

The I.L.P. was never Socialist. They left the Labour Party when they found it too awkward to defend what the Labour Government had done during their two years of office in 1929 to 1931. To-day, when the memory of that fiasco has dimmed, the I.L.P. is trying to crawl back again into the Labour fold. So little do they differ from the Labour Party that a welcome should be certain!

Fellow-workers, the Socialist Party has to stand on its own feet, even if it means that, for the time being, we can't make a big noise. Big demonstrations are excellent things, we would like to indulge in them, but we want demonstrations of working-class understanding, not political dupes whose flags are beginning to look very much like the Union Jack!

Pity—or Power?
And the pity of it all is that the workers really feel that they are doing something useful when they march in demonstrations and attend huge meetings. They really believe they are contributing towards the alleviation of the terrible distress that exists the world over. Many come to our meetings and ask: "What is the S.P.G.B. doing about China, Spain, Abyssinia, Germany, Austria?"—and we could add many other countries to that list ourselves: Palestine, Jamaica, Trinidad, India—why, the whole world is a crying indictment against the system and the class responsible for it. Do we not feel the horror of it all, too?

The brutal truth us that these demonstrating masses can do nothing to end the real trouble. They are frequently merely the playthings of politicians. Posing as the Messiahs of the world, so-called leaders cannot even find a solution for the problems on their own doorstep.

So that is another lesson the S.P.G.B. has taught me. In the words of Marx: "In every country the workers must settle matters with their own ruling-class first."

Our job here is to win power for Socialism; then, and not before, will we be able to help others.

Now I put the question to you: Are my reasons for joining the S.P.G.B. sound? Do they tell the truth? Without exaggeration, I honestly assert that, on the answer the working-class gives, the fate of the world depends.

Sid Rubin

The First of May (1955)

From the May 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Then turn, and be not alarm’d O Libertad

– turn your undying face,

To where the future, greater than all the past,

Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.”

WALT WHITMAN

It is sixty-five years since half a million people poured through London, “an interminable array with multitudinous banners,” on the first International May Day. No celebration, no insubstantial pageant this: column upon threadbare column they came, signifying and expressing labour's strength and labour's aspirations, with an eight-hour day as their rallying call. For sixty-five years it has continued, but the columns are smaller now. And the eight-hour day? They have it and, so generous is life to the working class, work overtime.

May Day is workers' day, the day of our class. However hollow the cries and futile the demonstrations, it remains the anniversary of protest, a continual reminder of exploitation and, subjection. “Class” is the reason and the theme of May Day – class in its fullest, truest sense. The working class is not the labourers or the artisans or the machine-minders: it is all people to whom wages are life. The working class is international: so is its cause. Among the cries and chants and slogans of May Day, only one has meaning: “Workers of all countries unite!”

Class consciousness was never more needed than now. Sixty-five years have seen war, dereliction, fear and disaster; today mankind is under a shadow without precedent. The working people of the world have it in their hands to end poverty, fear, hatred and war. Nationalism is not their interest but their rulers'; submission is taught, not conceived. That is where the tragedy of the May Day processions lies. The hundreds of thousands who paraded their rights in 1890 lined the streets again seven years later, still threadbare, still of one mind – to cheer and wave streamers for their Queen.

To the Socialist, class-consciousness is the breaking-down of all barriers to understanding. Without it, militancy means nothing. The conflict between the classes is more than a struggle for each to gain from the other: it is the division which reaches across all others. The class-conscious working man knows where he stands in society. His interests are opposed at every point to those of the capitalist class; his cause can only be the cause of revolution for the abolishing of classes. Without that understanding, militancy can mean little. It is not mere preamble that the Socialist Party's principles open by stating the class division in capitalism: it is the all important basis from which the rest must follow.

For nearly fifty-one years the Socialist Party has addressed its case to the working class on May Day, demanding not support but understanding. In those years, it has seen movements rise and fall, heard slogans die away, known panaceas acclaimed and discarded. In 1904, the great working-class party was the I.L.P.; now, the giant is a pantaloon. The Labour Party was not yet formed; now, it is torn by its members' disillusionment. Incredibly, they tell the Socialist he is impractical: impractical, when through their denial of what the Socialist knows they have fallen, and with them the hopes of millions!

The Socialist Party’s proposition is the only practical one. Class-conscious people need no leaders. The single, simple fact which all working people have to learn is that capitalism causes capitalism's problems, so that the remedy – the onlyremedy – is to abolish capitalism. In that knowledge they must take hold of the powers of government – for one purpose only: that the rule of class by class shall end. Socialism is not a benevolently-administered capitalism: it is a different social system.

Can the working class do that? He who doubts needs only look round him. The wonders and the splendours of modern civilization all are made by the working class. The knowledge, the skill, the perception are theirs – often, indeed, unwanted by the capitalist to whom trash is the soul of profit. Often, too, wanted for destruction: see the boy taught mathematics who has fine judgment, that he may drop bombs.

Reform is no answer, even though at times – rare times – it benefits working people. The reformer (he may not know it) has not even set out to change the world; he has agreed that capitalism shall continue, and is merely trying to alleviate its worst effects. Has poverty – extreme, dire poverty – been abolished by the reformers? Ask the old; ask the public assistance cases or the slum dwellers or the sick. Has life been made more satisfying by the Welfare State? Ask the thousands snatching at Billy Graham's promise of peace, joy and contentment.

From the beginning, the Socialist Party has been intractable in its opposition to reformists. Working class action, in fact, must be revolutionary. That is the real message of May Day, for people all over the world. The workers of Britain have common cause with the workers of every other country. They are members of an international class, faced with the same problems, holding the same interests once they are conscious of them. There is only one way of realizing those interests: the immense productive powers of the world must become the common property of every man, woman and child.

“Common ownership” is part of the definition of Socialism, but it is not an end in itself; rather is it a beginning, a condition. Private ownership by the capitalist class of the means of life is the condition of all that is deplored today – the wars, the poverty and the rest; that is why, without abolishing that ownership, there can be no solution to those problems. And in the same way, the common ownership of the means of life is the condition of another sort of world. The system so based would be incapable of causing wars, incapable of producing want.

The need for Socialism grows more urgent each day. It awaits the conscious will of the workers of the world, and nothing more; when they desire it, it can be. In the clamour of rivalry between factions and nations, the voice of the Socialist is a small one, but it must be heard. Exploitation and conflict must be ended; the catastrophe of worker killing worker must be prevented. Fifty-one years ago a small group of working people made plans for a new era in human history – today, more than ever before, it is vital necessity.

May Day has come again. Let it be an occasion of fresh resolve. There are many who are with us but not of us. The struggle for Socialism is a long and arduous one, needing the help of every class-conscious man and woman. On this day, then, we urge the need to work for Socialism within the Socialist Party. To spread Socialist understanding is the great task of our time: every fresh adherent to the Socialist Party Principles is another step towards the emancipation of mankind.

Robert Barltrop

Cooking the Books: Capitalism and Inequality (2014)

The Cooking the Books Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Observer (13 April) carried an interview by Andrew Hussey with Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose views on capitalism are, apparently, the talk of the town amongst economists. He is the author of a book Capital in the Twenty-First Century which is said to show that growing inequality is a built-in feature of capitalism.

In the interview Piketty says that, going through the data from the 19th century for Britain and other countries, ‘I saw a pattern beginning to emerge, which is that capital, and the money it produces, accumulates faster than growth in capital societies.’ What he is saying he has discovered is a tendency for a larger and larger proportion of new output to be accumulated as new capital. As a result, over time, the income from capital (property incomes such as profit and interest) grows faster than other incomes (mainly wages and salaries). The rich get richer. He claims, ‘I have proved that under the present circumstances capitalism simply cannot work.’

The key phrase here is not the claim that capitalism cannot work (it clearly can, even if this involves the rich getting richer) but the ‘under the present circumstances’ which suggests that under other circumstances capitalism could work. That this is his view can be seen by his proposal in the interview for ‘a progressive tax, a global tax, based on the taxation of private property.’

However unlikely it might be that any government would adopt what he calls in French a ‘révolution fiscale’ and impose high taxes on property and property incomes – Will Hutton in a comment in the same paper on the interview writes of ‘a top income tax rate of 80%, effective inheritance tax, proper property taxes and, because the issue is global, a global wealth tax’ – the implication must be that Piketty thinks that, if ever this was done, it would stop the rich getting richer.

It is not clear from the interview how Piketty defines capitalism. He seems to mean what the French call capitalisme sauvage, or unregulated, wildcat capitalism. If so, then his claim to have shown that ‘capitalism simply cannot work’ is reduced to the lesser claim that unregulated capitalism cannot work. This is a powerful refutation of the free marketers but is still suggesting that capitalism can be reformed ‘to work’.

The similarity between Piketty’s view and that of Marx on how capitalism works to make the rich richer is obvious but there is a difference. Piketty is more concerned with the distribution of the income from capital while Marx was concerned with the accumulation of capital itself irrespective of who owns it (whether individuals, corporations or the state) or who benefits personally from it.

Piketty claims in the interview that the data his research uncovered ‘contradicted nearly all of the theories [of inequality] including in Marx and Ricardo.’ He doesn’t say in the interview what he thinks Marx’s theory was, but elsewhere he has made it clear that he is criticising the theory of the long-run tendency for the rate of profit to fall (a position held, in different forms, by both Marx and Ricardo). He doesn’t think that there is any such tendency.

And of course, unlike Piketty, Marx never advocated trying to stop or reverse capital accumulation and/or the rich getting richer through legislation or government action. The distribution of property income amongst the rich can be changed, but that would make no difference to those whose income is derived from working. The way out is to get rid of capitalism.

Editorial: People not Profits (2014)

Editorial from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Things are not produced today to meet people's needs. They are produced to make a profit. And that's the cause of the problems we face.

Under the profit system profits always come first. Before providing basic services like health care and transport, before improving conditions at work, and before protecting the environment.

It’s profits first, people second.

Under the profit system production is in the hands of profit-seeking business enterprises—whether state or privately owned—all competing to maximise the rate of return on the money invested in them. Decisions as to what to produce and how much, and how and where to produce it, are not made in response to people's needs but in response to market forces.

The health and welfare of the workforce and the effects on the environment take second place. This is why at work we suffer speed-up, pain, stress, boredom, overwork and accidents. This is why we have to work long hours, shiftwork and nightwork.

This is why the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe are all polluted. This is why the Earth's non-renewable mineral and energy resources are plundered. This is why natural balances are upset and the environment destroyed.

The profit system can't help doing this. It's the only way it can work. Which is why it must go.

What's the alternative?

One thing is certain. The Tories, LibDems and Labour—and now UKIP—have nothing to offer. They all support the profit system and are only squabbling over which of them should have a go at running it.

If we are going to improve things we are going to have to act for ourselves, without professional politicians or leaders of any kind. We are going to have to organise ourselves democratically to bring about a society geared to serving human needs not profits.

Production to satisfy people's needs. That's the alternative. But this is only going to be possible if we control production and the only basis on which this can be done is common ownership and democratic control. In a word, socialism.

We are talking about a world community without frontiers. Only on this basis can world poverty, hunger and the destruction of the environment be ended.

The socialist alternative to the profit system is:

Common ownership: no individuals or groups of individuals have property rights over the natural and industrial resources needed for production.
Democratic control: everybody has an equal say in the way things are run including work, not just the limited political democracy we have today.
Production for use: goods and services produced directly to meet people's needs, not for sale on a market or for profit.
Free access: all of us have access to what we require to satisfy our needs, not rationed as today by the size of our wage packet or State handout.

Cooking the Books: Capitalism will not collapse (2014)

The Cooking the Books column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘NOT EVEN CLIMATE CHANGE WILL KILL OFF CAPITALISM. AS LONG AS THE CONDITIONS FOR INVESTMENT AND PROFIT REMAIN, THE SYSTEM WILL ADAPT. WHICH IS WHY WE NEED A REVOLUTION.’ 

This is not a headline from the Socialist Standard but the introduction to an article in the Guardian (6 March) by Razmig Keucheyan which does indeed put forward an argument similar to ours about not expecting capitalism to collapse of its own accord, in this case from an ecological rather than an economic crisis.

Keucheyan wrote of ‘ a worryingly widespread belief in left-wing circles that capitalism will not survive the environmental crisis’ and went on:

‘ The system, so the story goes, has reached its absolute limits: without natural resources – oil among them – it can't function, and these resources are fast depleting; the growing number of ecological disasters will increase the cost of maintaining infrastructures to unsustainable levels; and the impact of a changing climate on food prices will induce riots that will make societies ungovernable. The beauty of catastrophism, today as in the past, is that if the system is to crumble under the weight of its own contradictions, the weakness of the left ceases to be a problem. The end of capitalism takes the form of suicide rather than murder. So the absence of a murderer – that is, an organised revolutionary movement – doesn't really matter any more.’

We can add that, supposing the environmental catastrophists were right and capitalism did collapse from an ecological crisis, the outcome would not be socialism. In the absence of a strong socialist movement the outcome would be a social regression to the sort of dystopia portrayed in disaster films. So, there would still be a need to build up a movement consciously aiming to replace capitalism with socialism. In fact it would be more urgent than it already is.

Keucheyan counters ecological catastrophism by arguing that capitalism can adapt to the environmental crisis to the extent that this opens up profit-making opportunities, giving as examples ‘militarisation’ (investment in producing arms to defend or acquire diminishing resources) and ‘financialisation’ (in particular insurance against catastrophes). Others, which he didn’t mention, would be investment in technologies to reduce CO₂ emissions or in developing alternative energy sources to burning fossil fuels.

This is not to say that capitalism is capable of solving the environmental crisis, but merely that it will be able to adapt to it and make profits from attempts to mitigate it. Saying this can be interpreted as saying that capitalism is not as bad as the ‘catastrophists’ claim. To a certain extent this is true. Capitalist governments have intervened since its inception to prevent the unbridled pursuit of private profit from harming the general capitalist interest. A large section of Marx’s Capital is devoted to describing the struggle for Factory Acts which the government eventually adopted to prevent employers driving workers into the ground and so threatening future generations of wealth- and profit-producing workers.

A modern example would be the Clean Air Act of 1956 which ended London’s notorious smogs. So capitalism is capable of adapting to environmental problems, even if it waits till the last moment (when overall profitability is threatened) and risks doing too little too late. Not that this makes capitalism any more acceptable.

In any event, capitalism will not collapse of its own accord. It will have to be done to death by conscious, majority political action.

Has Bevan Sold the Pass? (1957)

From the November 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

A lot of people who have for years worshipped Aneurin Bevan have now turned against their hero because of his support for the H-Bomb at the Labour Party Conference. Bevan says that he is as strongly against the bomb as ever he was and that his speech and vote at Brighton (decided on "after a lot of agonising thinking"), were only designed to find "the most effective way of getting the damned thing destroyed": but this a bit too subtle for those who have passionately believed that Bevan was hundred per cent against the bomb and now find that he isn't.

But actually the disgruntled Bevanites have little ground for complaint for, as it happens, Bevan has changed his politics hardly at all. If any deception has been carried out it is their own self-deception; an obstinate refusal to take note of that Bevan has for years been saying and doing.

If a few of them are genuine pacifists who resolutely refuse to support armaments or war, they are fully entitled to be opposed to Bevan who supported World War II and the Korean War, and conscription and re-armament, but they cannot pretend that Bevan has deceived them about his record of war-supporting.

With others the revulsion of feeling may appear to be more soundly based, but again it will not stand examination. They take the view (like Bevan) that armaments are necessary and that war is sometimes unavoidable and must be supported no matter what the cost in death and destruction. They reject the Socialist view that war arises from capitalism and can only be got rid of by establishing Socialism. They can stomach it all, the millions of dead and maimed, the trench warfare, machine guns and artillery, the bombing raids, the napalm and even the A-Bomb—but the H-Bomb. No! The H-Bomb, they say is horrible, unthinkable, and on account of it they will destroy their beloved reader, Bevan. But they have no serious ground for indignation with Bevan on this count, for he long ago made it clear that in his view he and others supported the second World War and the Labour Government of 1945-51 have no moral or logical case against the H-Bomb.

Writing in the News Chronicle (9/3/1955) he said :-

"Those of us who concurred in the making of the atom bomb and tolerated the saturation bombing of the last war have no moral or logical case against the hydrogen bomb. All three are methods and weapons of imprecision, that is, it is known they will destroy the civilian population and all the civil installations of the enemy."

He went on to admit that the addition of the H-Bomb to the weapons of war would only be "carrying the logic of our past behaviour to its furthermost extremities" but put his own view that on practical grounds every effort should be made to get international agreement against the bomb. It is hard to see how those of his followers who swallowed all the other horrors of war making can justifiably wax indignant now because of a minute shift in Bevan's policy. Yet an irate reader of Tribune can write that Bevan's action has left "a gaping hole" in all the principles of the Socialist rank and file: "The tender, compassionate heart of our Socialism has been torn out and replaced with a dessicated calculating machine." (Tribune, 11/10/57).

Socialists, of course, never had any confidence in Bevan, or believed for one moment that he adhered to or ever had any understanding of Socialist principles; and, nobody with Socialist principles would have supported him or the Labour Government or the wars of capitalism that that government had a hand in.

But then Socialists do not believe in leadership, the danger and uselessness of which are well shown by the Bevanite movement. If the Bevanites had been Socialists they would have had their own clean clear conviction that Socialists do not take on the administration of capitalism, and they would, therefore, never have supported the Labour Government. They would have known that the government that runs capitalism has all to do all the obnoxious things that capitalism requires of them, including the waging of war. They would have seen the absurdity of putting a Labour Government in charge of British capitalism and of its war-machine with a mandate to keep it going and of then demanding of them that they behave as Socialists.

But the Bevanites were not and are not Socialists, they were everything and nothing, a motley collection of individuals united only by the leader's spell-bending oratory:-

"The Communist, the pacifist, the believer in the innate virtue of the Soviet State, the hater of American 'capitalism,' the general do-gooder," all see something of themselves reflected in the glowing rhetoric of Mr. Bevan." - (Manchester Guardian, 17/3/55.)    

Well, they have got what they asked for; they laboured to feed his vanity and build his reputation, and now he doesn't much mind what they do. Will it cure them? That remains to be seen, but there is no evidence yet that they have learned the uselessness of  leadership for the establishment of Socialism.

It might help them on their way to getting a better understanding if they noted that Bevan, whom they think has played them false, had his own ideas on leadership. The leader of the Labour Party ought to be, he said, not someone from "the top drawer of society" (meaning, presumably, Attlee and Gaitskell), but should be drawn "from those who had spent their lives in the Labour and Trade Union movement, and who not only understood Socialism with their heads, but knew it with their hearts." (Manchester Guardian, 18/6/51). And it all ends with the heart of Bevan and the head of Gaitskell and Attlee, uniting as one on the Labour Party's H-bomb policy. So little difference does the kind of leader make, and so necessary is it that the workers should learn to think for themselves and not leave their thinking to leaders. 

Edgar Hardcastle

Embarrassing Marx (2005)

Book Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Anglo-Russian Relations and Other Writings.  By D. B. Riazanov. Francis Boutle Publishers, 2003, £10.

Marx’s views on the Russia of his day have, to be frank, always been a bit of an embarrassment. Not that they cannot be explained, and even to a certain extent understood, in their historical context, but it is still rather hard to take from the pen of Marx arguments about Russian Tsarism wanting, like Genghis Khan, to conquer the world and that it had been plotting to do so for centuries or talk of a threat to Europe of “Mongol rule” and “Eastern barbarism”, let alone constant calls for war against Russia. This was unacceptable even in Marx’s day, and we have said so on many occasions.

The historical context was that, for most of the 19th century, capitalist economic and particularly political forms were not all that securely established in continental Europe where the army of Tsarist Russia was a constant threat to them. This led Marx and other revolutionary democrats to regard Russia as the main enemy, to be contained and countered. In the 1850s when Marx was earning a precarious living as a journalist, some of the articles for the New York Tribune putting an anti-Russia position came to the attention of David Urquhart, a former Tory MP and Russophobe. Urquhart encouraged Marx to write more in the same vein published them in his papers which in 1857 he republished as a pamphlet entitled Revelations of the Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century, republished in 1899 as The Secretary  Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century. In these Marx tried to show how British foreign policy under the Whigs had always been pro-Russia. He also ventured some ideas on the origin of Tsarism and on Russian history.

In a special supplement to Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the German Social Democratic Party, in 1909, the Russian Social-Democrat David Riazanov analysed in detail Marx’s theories of Russian history and of British foreign policy towards Russia and, respectfully, argued that they were largely mistaken. This lengthy article makes up three-quarters of this 200-page book (the rest being two other pre-WWI articles by Riazanov, on Marx and Engels on the Polish Question - they wanted an independent Poland so there would be a buffer between Russia and Europe - and on the Balkans). It is well worth reading as an application of the materialist conception of history to Anglo-Russian relations from the 16th century onwards.

Riazanov in fact applies this better than Marx did in this instance, bringing out the importance of changing trade conditions which Marx had neglected in favour of purely political considerations. Riazanov’s article reflected a growing understanding amongst second-generation Marxists that the situation regarding Russia had changed since Marx’s day in that Tsarist Russia was no longer capable of being “the gendarme of Europe” but was now itself threatened by overthrow by internal forces; and that therefore it was no longer the main enemy. Even so, those members of the German Social Democratic Party who backed their government in WWI still quoted Marx’s anti-Russia stand as a justification for their position.

At the time Riazanov wrote this work he was not a member of  Lenin’s Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democrats but he did join the Bolshevik Party in July 1917. He became the leading Marx-scholar of his day, setting up the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in 1921 to track down and publish the collective works of Marx and Engels. He was dismissed from this by Stalin in 1931 and sent into internal exile. During the purges he was arrested and shot in 1938. 

Adam Buick

Halo Halo!: All Things Bright and Beautiful? (2014)

The Halo Halo! Column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The rich man in his castle the poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly and ordered their estate’.

Remember having to sing that during school assemblies? It was before schools discreetly dropped the verse because, to those of us whose estate was more likely to have been a council one than an ancestral mansion with a few hundred acres of land, it pointed out where God’s political sympathies lie just a bit too bluntly.

Ah, the good old days. The Church of England wasn’t known as ‘The Tory Party at Prayer’ for nothing and they could be honest about their views on the place of the working class. 

But things change. These days, just as in any other business, the old firm of Church of England Ltd has stiff competition, and to retain its share of the market has had to update and improve its public image. And the competition to recruit gullible believers has never been fiercer. While the C of E now attract smaller and smaller congregations, and thus smaller collection plates, the ‘happy-clappy’ born-again, and the born-yesterday brands are recruiting hard and forging ahead. And they frequently need plastic buckets for their collections.

So once the rumours that poverty and food banks do actually exist in working class Britain finally penetrated Lambeth Palace, and it dawned on them that unlike other banks, these don’t pay out millions in bonuses to their bosses every year, the bishops have swooped into action. Prodded on perhaps by stories in the press such as ‘Woman in coma told to find work by DWP’ (Independent, 28 February) and ‘Vulnerable man starved to death after cut to benefits’ (Guardian, 1 March) they have come flying to the rescue of the poor like a heavenly host of dog-collared Batman and Robins.

They’re quite cross too, and have told David Cameron that ‘We must, as a society, face up to the fact that over half of people using food banks have been put in that situation by cutbacks to and failures in the benefits system’. And to show they mean business they’ve launched an ‘End Hunger Fast’ campaign. This involves asking volunteers to join them for a ‘National Day of Fasting’ on 4 April and, as an added attraction, includes a couple of vicars announcing that they would only be taking fruit juice and water for 40 days. That will certainly give Cameron and Co something to think about.

Is the Halo Halo column being a bit churlish here perhaps, do you think? This attack by the government on the poorest in society is one of the most vicious for some time and, as the bishops point out, the fact that in the world’s seventh richest country thousands are forced to rely on food banks, 5,500 have been admitted to hospital with malnutrition since last Easter, and numerous single mothers are skipping meals to enable them to feed their children is nothing short of scandalous.

The problem is that religious do-gooder events are no answer to the problem. Thousands are already fasting full time – because they don’t have any choice. Instead of stunts where vicars pretend to go hungry, or Tory MPs pretend to live (for a couple of days) on fifty quid a week to show that it can be done, the only solution is conscious class action against the system which causes the problem.

The bishops may be outraged by unemployment and poverty, and rant on about loan sharks, but what the hell do they expect? That’s capitalism for you. And the Church of England itself holds investments of about £5.2 billion in capitalist ventures – which included, as came to light last July, a hefty sum invested in Wonga, the payday loan outfit. Political virgins they may be, but how do they think the profits on their investments are generated?

Patronising the poor with charity stunts is insulting and useless. Instead of skipping your corn flakes for Jesus, we urge all members of the working class get involved in the class struggle to end this degrading and unnecessary nightmare.

Pathfinders: Mission Statement (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Interest was pricked recently in socialist circles by a Guardian environmental blog report of a NASA-funded study suggesting that a ‘perfect storm’ of five economic and environmental factors, namely population, climate, water, agriculture, and energy,  were leading to the imminent collapse of industrial civilisation (‘Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'?’, Guardian Online, 14 March). According to the Guardian’s Earth Insight blog, the study is funded by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and is the product of a cross-disciplinary team of natural and social scientists based at the University of Maryland (UMD). Their argument is that there is a 5000 year history of civilisation collapses and that they all have two crucial and related factors in common, the ‘stretching of resources due to the strain on the ecological carrying capacity’ (also key in Jared Diamond’s 2005 study Collapse) and, somewhat more controversially to anyone but socialists, the ‘economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or ‘commoners’)[poor]’.

Reading eerily like a Socialist Standard editorial, the study states that ‘... accumulated surplus is not evenly distributed throughout society, but rather has been controlled by an elite. The mass of the population, while producing the wealth, is only allocated a small portion of it by elites, usually at or just above subsistence levels.’ Technology won’t help, the study says, because net consumption will simply rise to match net increased output. Neither will appeals to those elites themselves be any use, because their monopoly on wealth and resources means that they are protected from the ‘detrimental effects of the environmental collapse until much later than the Commoners’ with the result that they blindly continue their policy of ‘business as usual’. This I’m-alright-Jack mentality, argues the study, is why ‘historical collapses were allowed to occur by elites who appear to be oblivious to the catastrophic trajectory.’ But even where elites bother to address these problems at all, they tend to oppose any conclusion requiring fundamental structural change in society and instead ‘point to the long sustainable trajectory 'so far' in support of doing nothing.’

It’s worth distinguishing between collapse as envisaged here and two other kinds of collapse as described by ecologists and left-wingers. Ecological collapse, where the world simply dies, is an extreme and largely nonsensical idea. It’s also unlikely that humans could damage the world so badly that it became uninhabitable to humans. The collapse of capitalism through its own internal contradictions,  a kind of Get-out-of-capitalism-free card devoutly wished for by some on the left, is equally unlikely and anyway undesirable (see Cooking the Books, page 18). This study describes scenarios which are more plausible because they are consistent with evidence from historical events. In its view, it is not so much nature which fails but workers, through catastrophic immiseration: ‘the Elites eventually consume too much, resulting in a famine among Commoners that eventually causes the collapse of society. It is important to note that this [possible scenario] is due to an inequality-induced famine that causes a loss of workers, rather than a collapse of Nature.’

The two key solutions in the study, as quoted in the blog article, are as follows: ‘Collapse can be avoided and population can reach equilibrium if the per capita rate of depletion of nature is reduced to a sustainable level, and if resources are distributed in a reasonably equitable fashion.’ Since the study has already identified the fact that all the wealth and power are in the hands of elites who don’t listen to reason, the likelihood of achieving either of these aims through political reform of capitalism stands at zero. That being the case, the logical conclusion to draw is that the global elites must be forcibly dispossessed and overthrown along with the capitalist system which placed them in power.

Is budget-strapped NASA really promoting global socialist revolution? It hardly seems likely. It’s not so far been possible to obtain a copy of the study, and investigation of the sources behind the story has proved frustrating. A search of NASA’s website reveals no trace of any such study. Ditto the Goddard Space Centre. Apart from a brief synopsis of a seminar given by the named lead researcher last October, there is also no report offered by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), based at UMD and supposedly where the study originates. The researcher is a bona fide graduate student whose PhD studies may well be funded in some part by Goddard, and his cross-disciplinary colleagues are mostly respectable Maryland professors of public policy, hydrology, geography, meteorology and a weird hybrid, ‘econophysics’. However the study is set to be published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Ecological Economics, which has had a rocky history and some credibility issues, as has the field of ecological economics in general. According to its current Wikipedia entry the journal has lost focus on its core field and now ‘seems to accept anything to do with the environment and economics from any field’.

Hard to fathom too is the role of the Guardian journalist behind this scoop, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, whose by-line bills him as executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (IPRD). Apart from a member page entry on the Stanford University MAHB website (Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere) which describes IPRD as a London-based ‘voluntary global collective of specialist scholars, scientists, and analysts, working in different fields of the social and physical sciences’, this Institute appears to exist in name only, with a web address that doesn’t work. Dr Ahmed is also the author of a 2011 book, The Crisis of Civilization, whose main thrust seems if not identical to that of the UMD study then along very similar lines (see review of this in Socialist Standard, February 2011). He advocates certain key resources like energy and water being placed in a ‘global Commons’ which is immune from monopolisation by any elite. This is encouraging, but then why not all resources? He argues for ‘more equal access’ but then why not just ‘equal access’? Disappointingly the agent of much of this redistribution is, he proposes, banks, an idea which shows that even would-be revolutionary thinkers just can’t let go of capitalist institutions no matter how hard they try. It turns out that Dr Ahmed also has a day job as chief research officer for the London-based PR company Unitas, which lists among its services ‘media positioning’ and ‘pre-empting negative media coverage’. This prompts a number of wild speculations. One is that the research team have adopted the increasingly common but dubious practice among scientists of engaging a PR firm to ‘spin’ their study in the popular press prior to academic publication, either for simple promotional purposes or to offset anticipated hostile reactions. Another is that the Maryland team and the Institute are in cahoots, or even one and the same, while preferring to appear as objectively independent for purposes of academic credibility. As we go to press enquiries to Dr Ahmed and to the lead researcher of the Maryland team have not met with any response.

It would be good to know for sure whether NASA is genuinely behind this, even indirectly. It certainly ought to be. NASA gives itself a bold strapline: Earth. Your Future. Our Mission. So in among its studies of hurricanes, sinkholes, salt and the anatomy of a raindrop it really ought to find space for any serious study that suggests Earth has no future unless the mission parameters change drastically.

Paddy Shannon