England as Marx's Model (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

"In this work", wrote Marx in the 1867 Preface to the first German edition of Capital, "I have to examine the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. This is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas".

In fact, the last part of Volume I of Capital, on "so-called primitive accumulation", is virtually a short history of the economic and social development of England from the middle of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century, Marx explains again:

"The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process . . .In England alone, which we take as our example, has it the classic form" (last paragraph of Chapter XXVI on "The Secret of Primitive Accumulation").

Only in England had society come to be divided into three distinct classes, each with its own particular relationship to the means of wealth production:

— the landlord class which monopolised the land and other natural resources;

— the capitalist class which owned the man-made buildings, instruments and machines with which production was carried out; and

— the working class which owned nothing but its ability to work, which it sold for wages and who carried out the actual work of producing wealth.

Marx inherited this three-class analysis of society from the classical political economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, but gave it a working-class interpretation by showing that the source of both the profits of the capitalists and the rents of the landlords was the unpaid labour of the workers. In actual fact, even with Ricardo, who wrote his On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation as late as 1817, farming is taken as the typical "industry", the capitalist being a tenant farmer renting the land from a landlord and employing agricultural wage labourers. With Marx, however, the emphasis shifts to manufacturing industry, in particular the spinning of raw cotton into yarn.

Marx took the cotton spinning industry as his model because it was the industry in which the "factory system" had first been introduced and where it was still most widespread at the time he was writing (first half of the 1860s). At that time machines were still made by artisan methods, not by other machines, nor by factory production. Afterwards of course the factory system spread to other industries, including the making of machines and soon after Marx's death in 1883 the Cotton Age was to give way to the Age of Steel, to metal-working replacing cotton-spinning as the key capitalist industry.

So Marx was studying factory production, rather than cotton-spinning as such. With the cotton industry he was studying the future of other industries, just as in studying England he was also considering the future of other countries. Marx was very careful to define precisely what he meant by a factory: a workplace where production was carried out by power-operated machines and where the workforce was reduced to the status of machine-minders (and of machine maintainers and repairers). Thus, when he chose a typical example of a factory, it was one in which cotton was spun into yarn by self-acting mules powered by a coal-fired steam engine. Others, especially at the beginning, were powered by water wheels.

Factory production spread rapidly in the cotton industry in the period 1815 to 1840. The uncontrolled and ruthless exploitation of the workers during this period — this was the time of the prolongation of the working day and of children down the ones, denounced with such vehemence by Marx in Capital — provoked a reaction, both from the working class and from a section of the landlord class. It also led to the curbing, through the Factory Acts, of the freedom of action of the "cotton lords" and "millocracy", as the new factory-owning capitalist class were known in working class circles.

The repeal of the Corn Laws from 1848 opened up a new period of capitalist expansion. Writing of the period 1846-66, Marx remarked:

"No period of modern society is so favourable for the study of capitalist accumulation as the period of the last 20 years. It is as if this period had found Fortunatus' purse. But of all countries England again furnishes the classical example, because it holds the foremost place in the world-market, because capitalist production is here alone completely developed, and lastly, because the introduction of the Free-trade millennium since 1846 has cut off the last retreat of vulgar economy." (Chapter XXV "The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation", Section 5(a))

Marx went on to show, as he had already done in the Inaugural Address he had written for the IWMA in 1864, that the majority of the working class had not benefited from the enormous growth of wealth during this period. The agricultural workers (1) certainly had not, nor had those employed in the "sweated trades" whose plight Marx described in detail on the basis of official documents.

The census of 1851 revealed that for the first time the town population in Britain exceeded that of the country. Agriculture, in other words, had become a minority interest. In any event, most of those working in agriculture were wage workers so that even before this time the bulk of the active population were propertyless wage earners. With the progress of industry and the factory system, the proportion of wage workers in the population grew ever larger. Britain in Marx's time was already a capitalist country with a working class, majority, as Marx himself was well aware. England, he wrote in a letter in 1870:

"is the only country where there are no longer any peasants, and where land ownership is concentrated in very few hands. It is the only country where almost all production has been taken over by the capitalist form, in other words with work combined on a vast scale under capitalist bosses. It is the only country where the large majority of the population consists of wage-labourers. It is the only country where the class struggle and the organisation of the working class into trade unions have actually reached a considerable degree of maturity and universality. Because of its domination of the world market, it is the only country where any revolution in the economic system will have immediate repercussions on the rest of the world. Though landlordism and capitalism are most traditionally established in this country, on the other hand the material conditions for getting rid of them are also most ripe here."

Marx attached great importance to the fact that the working class made up the vast majority of the population in Britain. For it meant that the extension of the right to vote there would put political power potentially in their hands.

As early as February 1848 Marx had realised that universal suffrage in Britain (with its working class majority) would have a quite different social significance than on the Continent (where it was one of the slogans of those who merely wanted to see established a bourgeois democratic Republic). As he wrote in a German-language paper published in Brussels where he was then living:

"We believe . . . that the English Charter, if it were to be put forward not by individual enthusiasts for universal suffrage but by a great national party, presupposed a long and arduous unification of the English workers into a class, and that this Charter is being striven for with quite another purpose and must bring about quite different social consequences than the Constitution of America or of Switzerland ever strove for or brought about" (Deutsche-Brüsseler Zeitung, 13 February 1848).

At this time, as the article he published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung at the beginning of 1849 illustrates, Marx did not believe that the Chartists would be able to win universal suffrage without an armed insurrection, a view shared by a minority of the Chartist leaders themselves (Julian Harney, Ernest Jones and others) with whom Marx and Engels were in contact.

After coming to England Marx did not change his mind about the social significance of the Chartist demand for universal suffrage in a country where the working class were the majority of the population, even if he had now come to believe that this could now be achieved by peaceful mass agitation. In an article he wrote on the Chartists in August 1852, he wrote:

". . . Universal Suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England, where the proletariat forms the large majority of the population, where, in a long, though underground civil war, it has gained a clear consciousness of its position as a class, and where even the rural districts know no longer any peasants, but only landlords, industrial capitalists (farmers) and hired labourers. The carrying of Universal Suffrage in England would, therefore, be a far more socialist measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent. Its inevitable result, here, is the political supremacy of the working class."

Marx returned to this question of the different significance of universal suffrage in Britain as compared with on the Continent in an article published in the Neue Oder-Zeitung on 5 June 1855:

"After the experiments which destroyed faith in the universal suffrage of 1848 in France, the continentals are prone to underrate the importance and meaning of the English Charter. They overlook the fact that two-thirds of French society are peasants and over one-third townspeople, while in England more than two-thirds live in the towns and less than one-third in the countryside. In England the results of universal suffrage must thus be in the same inverse proportion to its results in France as town and country are in two empires."

Since 1842, when "a last but futile attempt to formulate universal suffrage as a common demand of the so-called Radicals and the masses of the people" was made, Marx went on

"there has no longer been any doubt as to the meaning of universal suffrage. Nor as to its name. It is the Charter of the classes of the people and implies the assumption of political power as a means of meeting their social requirements. That is why universal suffrage, a watchword of universal fraternisation in the France of 1848, is taken as a war slogan in England. There the immediate content of the revolution was universal suffrage; here, the immediate content of universal suffrage is the revolution."

Universal suffrage, in other words, would place political power in the hands of the working class who Marx expected (somewhat over-optimistically, as it turned out) would soon use it to carry out the communist revolution, dispossessing the capitalist and landlord classes and instituting a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production. Marx not only supported, through Ernest Jones and thePeople's Paper, the campaign of the Chartist rump in the 1850s for universal suffrage, but also, through the IWMA, the similar campaign of the Reform league in the 1860s.

The Second Reform Act of 1867 by no means provided for universal suffrage, but it did create a situation where the majority of voters in the towns were members of the working class. The experience of the 1868 election — which returned a Liberal government and in which no working class candidate, even those standing for the Liberal Party, was elected — no doubt tempered Marx's earlier optimism about the "immediate" content of universal suffrage being "the revolution". But if it was no longer the immediate content, it was nevertheless still a longer term one. Now that the working class was a majority of the electorate it could, if it chose, use the vote to gain control of political power peacefully, by sending to Parliament socialist MPs mandated to institute the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In a speech in the Hague after the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association in September 1872 Marx declared, according to a report in the French paper La Liberté:

"The workers will have to seize political power one day in order to construct the new organisation of labour . . .We do not claim, however, that the road leading to this goal is the same everywhere. We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goals by peaceful means. That being the case, we must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labour."

That a peaceful capture of political power was a possibility under certain circumstances remained Marx's view for the rest of his life (2). It was not Marx's view, however, that the conversion of the means of production into the common property of the whole of society would necessarily be carried out without any violence whatsoever, even in Britain. Although he believed that the extension of the franchise had given the working class the possibility of winning political power legally and peacefully, he still expected that they were likely to meet resistance as soon as they began to use this political power against the capitalist and landlord class. In Capital Marx had carefully recorded how the capitalist class had resisted the implementation of the Ten Hours Act passed by Parliament in 1847. and he had observed how the slave-owners of the Southern States of America had preferred armed resistance to the possibility of Congress voting a Bill to emancipate their slaves. Marx expected a similar "slaveholders revolt" once the working class began to use the political power they had captured peacefully to legally dispossess the capitalists and landlords. In other words, it was Marx's view that, in the end. the working class would have to use the full power of the state machine, including actual physical force, against a recalcitrant capitalist minority, in order to establish socialism. This employment of force would, of course, be quite legal, as it would be employed by a state which had come to be controlled, after democratic elections, by a socialist working class majority. It would be the recalcitrant capitalist minority that would be acting illegally in resisting the democratically-expressed will of the majority for a classless society to be established.

1. Marx welcomed the formation of a trade union by agricultural workers in Scotland in 1865 as "a historical event" (Capital, Chapter X "The Working Day", Section 3, footnote). He saw it as a sign that even this downtrodden section of the working class was preparing to fight back.

2. In 1880, less than ten years after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune by the French Third Republic, we even find him talking of converting universal suffrage in France "from the instrument of fraud it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation" (Preamble to the Programme of the "Federation of the Party of Socialist Workers in France").

Adam Buick

A Future With No Future (1975)

Book Review from the February 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Iron Heel by Jack London. Journeyman Press; paperback 75p., hardback £2.50.

This is the first of a series of reissues of working-class and radical "classics". The Iron Heel was last published in Britain in 1947 and — apart from more sumptuous American editions — is generally available only in second-hand copies from the old Mills & Boon shilling edition of all Jack London's works. A new French edition (Le Talon de Fer) appeared in 1972.

Jack London wrote over fifty books in a short life. The majority were written in haste; they include childish trash, four or five first-rate novels, and a number of outstanding short stories. In most of his writing the chief idea in one form or another comes from a crude version of Darwinism. It is either the survival of the fittest under savage conditions, or the depiction of a physical and intellectual superman who overshadows his fellows.

The Iron Heel was written in 1906 and published in 1907. It was received with misgivings by London's fellow-members of the American Socialist Party. In the International Socialist Review John Spargo called it "an unfortunate book" whose tendency was

to weaken the political Socialist movement by discrediting the ballot and to encourage the chimerical and reactionary notion of physical force, so alluring to a certain type of mind  . . . 

It describes a "revolution", i.e. a large-scale working-class revolt led by "socialists", breaking out in the United States and being crushed by the totalitarian methods. Following that, society is ruled by a class of tyrants called the Oligarchs, while the socialists carry on an underground struggle in which Fighting Groups of terrorists play a heroic part. The dominant figure is Ernest Everhard, the revolutionary leader, and the book is written by his wife after this presumed death. Everhard is presented as a paragon of physical strength, learning, foresight and bravery. He was, London's daughter wrote, "the revolutionist Jack would have liked to be if he had not, unfortunately, also desired to be several other kinds of men" (Jack London and his Times by Joan London, 1939).

The place of The Iron Heel in the literature of the working-class movement is due mainly to the early chapters in which the need to overthrow capitalism is vigorously stated and exemplified, with Everhard expounding Marx's theory of value. But in all the ensuing action, what should be understood is that London was consciously rejecting ideas of Socialism when he wrote it. Much of it was intended to express his disillusionment with political activity and his disbelief that the masses were capable of helping themselves.

The book's immediate impulse came from the Russian upheaval of 1905; the guerrilla groups were "modelled somewhat after the Fighting Organization of the Russian Revolution". However, London was alsu strongly influenced by W. J. Ghent's Our Benevolent Feudalism, published in 1902. Ghent predicted the growth of monopolies into a single monolith: "A gigantic merger of all interests, governed by a council of ten, may supplant the individual dukedoms and baronies in the different industries." This appealed to London's imagination and his conviction that the revolution could only be a contest between the fittest and strongest.

Other fragments of ideas are incorporated in The Iron Heel. The earliest economic thought which London met was that of "General" Coxey, whose "army" of tramps features in London's novel of his own hobo experiences, The Road. Coxey's "good roads" theory was a primitive Keynesism: setting the tramps and the other unemployed to build better roads, financed by openly inflationary budgets, would solve the economic problems of America. For comparison, Keynes in his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money wrote:

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again  . . . there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.

This is the economics of the Oligarchy's pyramid age of "magnificent roads" and "wonder cities" in The Iron Heel. Jack London may have tasted Marx, but the doctrine he swallowed was Coxey's. Thus, his hero's indictment of the capitalists is not that their system is incapable of working for the majority, but that they have failed to make it work:

You have made a shambles of civilization. Yo have been blind and greedy . . . You have failed in your management of society, and your management is to be taken away from you.

One other curiosity is that the chapter "The Bishop's Vision" was plagiarized word for word from an article by Frank Harris in a British publication. Many people, including Trotsky, A. M. Lewis, Anatole France and Orwell, have seen The Iron Heel as prophetic, but it is not. The best thing is not to take the contradictory borrowed ideas at all seriously, and read it as a strongly-written fantasy in the manner of H. G. Wells (whom London admired) with a political setting.

The present edition is well produced (though the cover design strives overmuch for an up-to-date message), and many people will be glad of the chance to get a new copy at a reasonable price.

Robert Barltrop

Benny (1945)

From the February 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago my closest friends were killed in an air raid. They were a small working-class family—father, mother and two young children. Benny and I knew each other very well. He was not a Socialist but nevertheless always professed working-class sympathies. His life was comparable to millions—poverty while in work and long periods of unemployment. An emigrant from Poland, he began work in this country at the age of thirteen. From that time onwards until his violent and tragic end all he experienced was that well-known Churchillian curse, "Blood, sweat, toil and tears."

Benny was a machinist is an East End factory. Year in, year out, he had struggled to provide is family with the best that his meagre wages could buy. A small rented suburban house and a secondary education for the children. But Benny's most remarkable characteristic was his contentment. Try as I might, I could never stir in him any real revolutionary class-conscious feeling. He escaped from reality within the narrow confines of his family, and therein created a world of fantastic make-believe and pseudo-happiness. A pitiful happiness, for the family's poverty and degradation were only too obvious.

Unfortunately. there are many others like Benny—workers who are prepared to allow the present system of society to continue. To these people we put forward the only solution that we claim can end all this needless suffering and misery.

If capitalism continues, poverty, unemployment, insecurity and war will always be with us. Poverty for the masses, riches for the few. Wages for the workers barely sufficient to keep them alive; profits for the capitalists sufficient to keep them in indolent luxury. And unemployment. Has Beveridge shown us the way out? Why, of course not. Given conditions of production and distribution for sale and profit-making, when commodities find no market factories close down and widespread unemployment occurs. Great Britain since 1920 has had an unemployed army ranging from one to three millions, and the U.S.A.—that country of "high" wages and refrigerators—had figures reaching heights of 11 million. Poverty together with unemployment and perpetual economic insecurity are in themselves sufficient condemnation of capitalism. Besides all this, however, the various national sections of the world capitalist class periodically fall out with each other. No longer can their disagreements over private property issues be settled around conference tables; wars are declared and millions are massacred and maimed.

For all this there is but one answer—Socialism. To the millions of "Bennys" who have so far paid little heed to our message we say awaken from your political slumbers. We endeavour to tear down the film which hangs heavy over your eyes. As yet you have always succumbed to the subtle propaganda of your masters but this state of affairs is drawing to a close. The post-war period looms threateningly. Your destiny and the destiny of future generations lies within your hands. Leaders can do nothing for you. All political parties in this country, apart from the S.P.G.B., stand for the reform and consequent retention of capitalism. We, alone, advocate the total overthrown and abolition of capitalism, and the establishment of Socialism.

I write this article heavy with regret for the loss of a dear friend, but confident and hopeful for the future—for the future holds great promise for mankind. Socialism and happiness are within our grasp: only understanding and the necessary political action are needed to make it a reality.

Samuel Leight

Mental power (2000)

Book Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Knowledge Capitalism By A. Burton-Jones. Oxford University Press. 1999.

This is another in the growing pile of books on how capitalism is changing, how it is bringing opportunities for the few and problems for the many who allegedly can do little or nothing about it. The author's fundamental proposition is that, among the various factors causing change in the economy, none is more important than the changing role of knowledge.

Burton-Jones gives us first what we are supposed to accept as the good news: "inflation is down, productivity is up, the US locomotive is powering away, the former communist bloc is rapidly embracing western-style capitalism". But he goes on to admit that "everywhere there is a sense of unease . . . the malaise is spreading throughout society". Large, labour-intensive manufacturing firms, which are able to relocate their production, are rapidly establishing themselves in the Third World where labour is cheap and government regulations few. Small firms are in trouble.

The consequences for workers are dire. Whole industries have declined, skilled jobs have been lost, and the new jobs created are often part-time, temporary, unskilled and poorly paid. Unemployment is high and insecurity widespread. The ever-present question is "who will be next?"

The labour power that workers have sold and employers have bought has always contained a proportion of "knowledge", relatively low with manual work and relatively high with non-manual and professional work. The balance is clearly shifting from industrial/manual employment to service/non-manual employment.

Burton-Jones suggests that firms are becoming knowledge integrators and individual workers knowledge suppliers. He writes of "flexihire", the new casual labour. He believes we are in a transitional stage "on the road from jobs owned by organizations to careers owned by individuals". It is a distinction without a difference. What kind of career can you "own" if you can't find a buyer for your knowledge?

The author, of course, has the knowledge. He drives us in his paper taxi around the terrain of capitalism but never ventures outside it, never even recognises that there is anywhere else to go. The changes he describes are "outside the control of all of us". We have "no option but to accept and work with, rather than against, forces outside [our] control".

On the last page he tells us we are all on a knowledge escalator. Some manage to climb the steps faster than others. "The main requirement is for everyone to be on board the escalator!" To such an injunction socialists can only reply "Include us out!" We have the knowledge to build a society that surpasses capitalism.

Stan Parker

How the Rich Become Richer (2015)

From the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

On most accounts Bill Gates is the richest person in the world but, according to Bloomberg Markets, it is a rather less well-known individual who saw the biggest increase in his wealth in 2014. This was Jack Ma, founder and Chief Executive Officer of Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce business. His fortune is just short of $26bn, up over $22bn in a year. You might wonder how anyone could earn that much in just twelve months through their own labour, but of course Ma did not make this money through his own abilities; he cannot even write computer programs.

In September, Alibaba Group Holding sold shares to outsiders for the first time in its initial public offering (IPO) on the New York Stock Exchange, raising a record $25bn. Ma owns a good chunk of the shares, and it was this that led to his fabulous increase in wealth, making him the richest person in China. The company is attractive to other members of the mega-rich super-elite too, and Alisher Usmanov, the richest man in Russia, has a substantial stake in it. Usmanov (who also owns a large part of Arsenal Football Club) is pretty secretive about his financial affairs and does not disclose how many shares he owns, but he has apparently sold his stake in Facebook in order to invest in technology companies, especially in India and China.

Now, Alibaba Group Holding is not quite the same as Alibaba in China. Ma and another executive, Simon Xie, own most of the Chinese assets, and Alibaba Group Holding is a Cayman Islands shell which has contractual rights to the profits of the Chinese company. It is what is called a variable interest entity structure (VIE), a way to get around restrictions in China on foreign investment in certain industries (dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/i-p-o-revives-debate-over-a-chinese-structure/). There are arguments as to whether such arrangements are strictly legal under Chinese law, and anyone buying at the IPO is taking a fair amount of risk. Yahoo, which owns around a fifth of Alibaba's shares, complained previously that the VIE was a way of moving assets to put them under Ma's control.

So what does Alibaba actually do? It is a striking example of the extent of globalisation, since its customers are not just in China, and in a sense it combines the functions of eBay, Amazon and PayPal, as it incorporates a number of businesses that do slightly different things. Tmail.com is a platform for businesses to sell to the public, while Alibaba.com is for business-to-business sales (described on its website as ‘the leading platform for global wholesale trade’). There are financial subsidiaries that deal with lending and other financial services, and a telecom company too. The company has also bought a sizeable chunk of other firms, including the Chinese equivalents of Twitter and YouTube, and the Guangzhou Evergrande Football Club.

It has even managed to market its own version of Black Friday, known as Singles Day, on 11 November. On this day in 2014 it sold well over $9bn worth of discounted goods to online shoppers in China and abroad (an increase of over a half compared to 2013). It has copyrighted the term ‘Double 11’, though many think this is unlikely to become a major shopping day in Europe as it coincides with Armistice Day. But who can really be sure that commercial considerations will not outweigh commemoration of the war dead?  

Alibaba has around 26,000 employees at its ‘campus’ in Hangzhou. But in addition China has a number of ‘Taobao Villages’ (Taobao.com being the customer-to-customer part of Alibaba). People in these have set up online shops to buy and sell almost anything via Taobao. This is related to the fact that, outside the big cities, most people in China live a very long way from a major retail centre and so are less able to shop in person. Many such online shops now have a split between owners and employees too, so are not purely for sales between individuals.

In a recent letter to his workers, Ma wrote of ‘unparalleled ruthlessness and pressure ahead’ (Beijing Review  9 October). No doubt the ruthlessness will be his and the pressure will be on those who labour to produce his profits. 

Paul Bennett

Uniformity & Convenience (1972)

Book Review from the August 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Technological Eating, by Magnus Pyke (John Murray £2.50)

Ever since capitalism became, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the dominant world economic system it has fashioned the world in its own image. Local traditions and culture have, in the main, been unable to withstand the onslaught of the money/commodity system. Backed by technological. economic and military superiority the developed nations of Europe and North America have imposed their values and traditions upon 'primitive' communities. Mass production methods needing standardisation and uniformity of product and production method have led to a depressing uniformity of world working class lifestyles. Scientific technology has de-tribalised society. Coca-Cola culture has triumphed.

In this short, very readable, book Professor Pyke argues that the areas in which technological developments have had the greatest impact on our everyday lives have been those relating to food—what we eat and how and when we eat it. This aspect of social experience and behaviour has been and will continue to be influenced by evolutions in food technology. "Food plays a central part in social life and the rapid progress of food technology in exercising a more profound influence on the social scene than has so far been recognised". The book develops this theme showing how in a modern industrial society different parts of the world grow more and more alike.

Having destroyed the tribal communist societies of West Africa in the search for raw materials, in this case palm oil which through the process of hydrogenation could be used for making margarine, capitalism replaced it with the plantation system introducing money values and drawing the local inhabitants into the world economy. Financial empires were built up out of what had formerly been jungle. Refrigeration techniques enabled the United Fruit Company to exploit tropical plants such as the banana on a massive scale "not primarily for the benefit of the citizens of the area but for entirely separate social groups, United States businessmen".

In the metropolitan countries the same technology, put to the same purpose, brought about the retail revolution which converted the shopkeeper craftsman into a wage worker in a supermarket. This new method of shopping is more impersonal, less of an occasion for social contact and discussion—more like a factory in fact. The author looks forward to the possible eventual superseding of the supermarket by the "Cash and Carry" depot possibly delivering food for the winter to the family deep freezer. The less well off members of society presumably having to rely on the few remaining small "corner shops".

New products appear on supermarket shelves at the rate of one a week. The successful ones being those which most satisfactorily fulfill an already existing need. Thus breakfast cereals such as cornflakes, developed by Seventh Day Adventists as a "morally neutral" food, transformed breakfast from being a major meal of the day into one which each member of a family can partake individually in their own time.

The whole range of "convenience foods" which can be prepared quickly and with a minimum of fuss, frees a large section of the population (mainly women) to do other things. In the money dominated society of buying and selling this tends to be going out to work to get the money to buy the refrigerators or deep freezers in which to store the frozen convenience foods. This tendency is likely to grow. The changing needs of capital will make mincemeat of old, trusted and respected institutions such as the family.

In perhaps the most provocative chapter in the book—entitled "The Disappearance of Mealtimes"—the author argues that the shared family meal is under great pressure. Already large numbers of children eat the main meal of the day in school dining rooms as their parents eat theirs in office or factory canteens. As parents are forced by social and economic pressures to go out to work, and as food technology increasingly makes it possible for children to eat without having to go home then the fabric of social relationships is bound to change.

In a society such as our own in which primary importance is attached to economic cost and money value, there is likely to be a further advance in food technology bringing with it further influences on social organisation.

Whether this is a good thing or not is a moot point, but what is clear is that, as in the past, if it proves to be profitable we will have it whether we like it or not.

Technology in general and food technology in particular are inextricably intermingled with the philosophy of money value, which permeates western society. While the quality of life may be improved by the ample provision of sophisticated, prepacked foods and the avoidance of drudgery . . . there is also a social price to be paid. The emotional impact of a row of vending machines from which the diverse articles can only be obtained by the introduction of the appropriate coin must be different from that received in the course of a family meal . . . Within an industrial society such as our own, the powerful and persuasive influence of economics—the subject in which human desires are provided with a single index number, their price—is particularly apparent when we come to consider manufactured foods.

Baked beans anyone?

Gwynn Thomas

Politics for a change — here comes the Socialist Party (2015)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

It has been decided that the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog will give more prominence to the participation of the Socialist Party (GB) in the upcoming general election in May so in the run-up to it, we will be reducing the number of blog posts upon other topics. 

Around the world, people are clamouring to be heard. They want a voice. People are searching for a way to transform an economic system that benefits the few over the many. They are searching for fairness, opportunity, justice and real change. We must re-envision and renew the workers’ movement. Our world changes - we too must change. But episodes of activism and moments of struggle are not the same as movements. Our challenge is to build anew the socialist movement by constructing a new aim for collective action, the creation of a purpose and object. People seek a movement that promises progress. They want change. We see every day working people coming together and speaking out and pushing forward with determination and dedication for a better future. Millions of people have begun to draw political conclusions about the nature of the capitalist system and the need for an alternative. The alternative is socialism. Anger and disgust is not enough. If opposition to the pro-capitalist parties is to be built, then the working class must build it.

Elections are one of the best ways for socialists to get a public hearing and it raises the morale to discover that there are like-minded workers out there and fellow socialists. If we socialists don’t speak up for socialism in the electoral arena, who will? By fielding socialist candidates in elections, the Socialist Party educates the public about socialism and socialist solutions. We ask for workers’ votes for a new social system, not just a few reforms or a petty changes to the status quo.

Nevertheless, the Socialist Party is well aware that capitalist elections are rigged against us and we struggle to gain a hearing through the media. There is no contradiction between understanding the limits of a bourgeois democracy and at the same time fighting for access to it. The fact is that in every arena of the class struggle under capitalism workers fight an uphill battle. Corporate power is not called "the ruling class" for nothing. Even in the best of circumstances, when unionised workers simply seek a contract, they operate in a playing field where employers have the power to lock them out, hire scabs and threaten to shut the plant - a threat that they sometimes carry out.

 Some on the Left continue, with a variety of pretexts, to denigrate and disparage the electoral battle and to discourage active participation in it. They advance the strange argument that elections, involving public meetings and door-to-door canvassing and distribution of leaflets are not mass movements. To move the ball towards the goal you must be on the field. Everyone can take part and a myriad of skills are needed. At each stage your impact will depend on how hard and how well you play. But one thing is certain - you will have no influence if you sit out the game on the side-lines, preferring the bench of indifference. Certainly, the electoral system is not the only game in town for the working class. But it is where much of the attention of workers will be drawn this year. Those who do not directly participate are obliged to listen to the debates because it fills the airwaves and newspaper columns.

Some on the Left tell us, “You will not get elected,” and cynically accuse us of conspiring to take away votes from reformist candidates such as the Green Party. Make no mistake about it, we want to take away their votes. A socialist is not a supporter of any capitalist party whatever. The Green Party may desire a kinder, gentler capitalism but why would socialists feed the Green Party’s false hopes that capitalism can be fixed? We aim to persuade working people to struggle for socialism. We reach out to workers with a message of hope and with a mission of real struggle.

Different groups of capitalists have different priorities and political inclinations, and back parties that reflect this. One of the key functions of the state under capitalism is to mediate conflicts between different members and sectors of the ruling class. When times are good and profits are high, this is a relatively easy task because there is no need to take drastic steps in one direction or another. But this is a period of economic and political crisis. The ruling class is scattered, competing for influence over their widely divergent views about how to stabilise the system. This contest is played on the electoral field. The growing divides between different sectors of the ruling class opens up greater space for a socialist party to expose the countless weakness of the system.

The Socialist Party does not believe that the solution to the problems facing the working class will come from any reforms passed by parliament. We want a revolution; and, we work hard to make it happen. Our party knows that revolution is necessary. But the election will sorely disappoint anyone longing for real change. Those who want a better life, a better world or an end to war, will not get any of those things from the pro-capitalist reformist parties on parade. In the UK, two capitalist parties dominate political life inside the system. Candidates from the Tory and Labour parties bask in the glow of the media cameras. The contest, however, is really one between two parties of war and exploitation, two parties of extreme wealth. Other smaller parties such as UKIP  demagogically pay lip-service to “the interests of the ordinary people,” but they do not mean a word of it. All of the pro-capitalist parties, time and time again, pledged themselves to manage the affairs of the ruling class. Their campaign platforms may articulate the outlook of different wings of the ruling class, but at the end of the day they all have the same goal. All capitalist candidates share a single slogan — “profits not people”—that is, if they wanted to tell the naked truth. They aim to get elected not to serve “the people” as they claim, but to serve the miniscule capitalist class. Many of their candidates will be actual capitalists themselves.

The Socialist Party is not a party of professional politicians. Our candidates are different because they do not serve the interests of business and capital. Quite the contrary, they have spent their lives fighting against it. The Socialist Party provides a choice for voters. We wish to be a catalyst to raise working-class consciousness. We want to spread the idea of social revolution, of true change. We know that change is possible.

We, in the Socialist Party, take the ideas of socialism - the way forward for humanity- to the electorate. Socialists, to quote the Communist Manifesto, “disdain to conceal their aims.” The Socialist Party’s election campaign is to open a much-needed avenue for workers to wage political combat against the capitalist class and their corrupt accomplices.

Our prospective candidates for ten constituencies are as follows:

Bill Martin - Islington North; Danny Lambert - Vauxhall (London); Brian Johnson - Swansea West (Wales); Steve Colborn - Easington (North East England); Kevin Parkin - Oxford East; Mike Foster - Oxford West and Abingdon; Robert Cox – Canterbury; Andy Thomas - Folkestone and Hythe (Kent); Howard Pilott - Brighton Pavilion; Jacqueline Shodeke - Brighton Kemptown.

Green Party embraces the market (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the Green Party finally gave into media pressure and decided to have leaders one of the two they appointed was Dr Richard Lawson. He stood as their candidate in the general election in Weston-Super-Mare where he got 1262 votes.

Last year he wrote an article in the magazine Greening the Planet entitled "Notes towards a Green Theory of Money" in which he tried to argue that "given the right political guidance, money, although a tyrannical master can be a useful servant in the cause of greening the planet". This is to ignore the role that money plays within the capitalist economic system where everything is valued in money terms and where the aim of producing things is to make more money.

Capitalism is based on the ownership of productive resources by a tiny minority of the population. Under it goods and services are produced, not directly to meet human needs but for sale on a market with a view to profit. This unleashes economic forces—"market forces", "the power of money", as they have been called—which come to confront those who take economic decisions as if they were coercive laws, forcing them to to give priority to profit-making both over satisfying needs and over achieving a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature, as well as to accumulate most of these profits as more and more capital. The capital accumulation is of course the "blind economic growth" that Greens see as overloading nature's ability to adjust to human productive activity.

Socialists draw the conclusion that if the environment is to be safeguarded then capitalism must go, to be replaced by a system where productive resources are owned in common under the democratic control of all the people. This must mean the complete disappearance of the market and money. Production for sale and profit gives way to production for use and need. Buying and selling are replaced by giving and taking; people give to society directly in the form of work and take from society directly in the form of useful goods and services to satisfy their needs.

This is not how Dr Lawson see things. In his article the joint leader of the Green Party outlined what he called "a green philosophy of the market" which teaches that the market and money can be controlled by the government and made to function in accordance with economic principles:

We seek not a free market, nor a social market (whatever that may be), and certainly not a command economy but a guided market, the guidance coming from rational consideration of the interaction of economics and ecology, and realised through creative taxation and regulation. Creative taxation weighs heavily on elements that are econegative and gives tax breaks to elements that are ecopositive.

Given the amply recorded failure of all other attempts to use taxes to change the way the market system works—notably the Labour Party's long since abandoned attempt to redistribute income and wealth in favour of the workers—this illustrates an incredible poverty of thought. But it does confirm what we have always said about the Green Party: its policy is the reformist, and ultimately futile, one of trying to work within the present system to "green the planet". It won't work and it can't work.

The only way to green the planet is to first make it the common heritage of all of us. Then we will be freed from the tyranny of market forces and money and in a position to consciously regulate our relationship with the rest of nature in an ecologically acceptable way.

Adam Buick

Marxist Iconoclast (1994)

Book Review from the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Survival of the Weakest by Ken R. Smith, The John Ball Press (ISBN 871240 06 9 PP336). £14.95

"Love, Science and Social Change" says the legend under the title. If these are the three points on Smith's triangle then it encompasses a wide area of knowledge. The book is a virtual political and social encyclopaedia of the twentieth century but, if is proves a point, the author is willing to sweep back to the pre-history of capitalism - especially to demonstrate his favourite theme, that Marx was in error in arguing that capitalism was an essential precondition of Socialism.

Smith lets friend and foe speak for themselves and adds his own bit. A names index of some nine double column pages leave out few of the great, and lesser, thinkers of today and yesterday. Thatcher is given a small voice but the academics who lent intellectual muscle to her assault on capitalism's mean handouts are well represented. Their ideas are expanded upon and repudiated, sometimes by events, sometimes by their own later wisdom.

Equally examined and explained is the fallacious reasoning of those Liberal, Maynard Keynes and Lord Beveridge, who formulated what was to become the basic political and economic agenda of the Left, Right and Centre in Britain and - especially in the case of Keynes - throughout the entire world of capitalism in the post-war years. Smith introduces their critics, their champions and then, with an iconoclastic sweep of history, consigns the Left's dream of a compassionate capitalism to the graveyard of failed hopes.

Unlike those pundits who, with the demise of state capitalism in eastern Europe, underwent an illusion of disillusionment, the author, with a pedigree originating in his earlier work, Free is Cheaper, clearly shows the irreconcilable conflict between Marxism and Leninism. Marx's vision of a socialist, or communist (for Marx used the terms interchangeably), world was essentially democratically centred, Lenin's elitism was quintessentially authoritarian and the consequence of this, welded to the economic reality of Russia in 1917, was to give the world a grotesque and brutal form of state capitalism masquerading as Socialism.

Smith is a socialist who, despite his peripheral disagreement with Marx, consistently emphasises that while the wages system and its concomitant, commodity production, continue to exist so will all the inherent problems of capitalism. One of those problems, currently and correctly, preoccupying most people is the continuing destruction of non-renewable resources and the general threat to the ecosphere. The contradiction of trying ti reverse this process within the context of a world economy based on the need for relentless growth is well documented.

Survival of the Weakest is a book you will be loath to lend. We see it as a well-thumbed, annotated, perhaps, dog-eared reference volume much prized by students and by those who want to know more about the world they live in.

Richard Montague

Democracy and the Class Struggle (1926)

From the July 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since the Bolshevik's coup of 1917, the idea has been widely fostered by their would-be imitators that "democracy" is nothing but a bourgeois snare and a delusion. In the mouths of these so-called Communists, however, the term has meant nothing more than the sham article offered to the workers by the political parties which trade upon delusions.

Conservative, Liberal and "Labour" politicians have all paid lip-service to the popular will and have just as readily ignored it and resorted to the use of force whenever it has suited their purpose. The war of 1914-18 was a glaring example of the contempt which these leaders of the people entertain for their followers.

The Communists, however, while indulging in fiery denunciation of "sober," "respectable," "eminently practical," "legal," "Parliamentary," opportunism, have not offered, as an alternative, anything more satisfying than a crazy and erratic opportunism which exaggerates the importance of industrial action, and regards a street-fight as a revolution. They invite the workers to jump out of the frying-pan into the fire.

The Socialist Party insists upon the necessity for the education and organisation of the workers on the basis of the class struggle and this involves a constant loyalty to democratic methods. This necessity follows logically from its object, i.e., "Socialism."

The workers can only acquire possession in common of the means of life by conscious collective action, and they can only exercise control thereof when they are prepared to assert themselves as a class.

The Socialist Party, therefore, opposes, not only the orthodox capitalist parties (Liberal and Tory) but the so-called Right and Left Wings of the alleged "Labour" movement.

The "Right Wing" professes to be able to use the political machinery in the interests of the workers without first having laid the foundations of political triumph in a clear understanding of its objects and conditions.

Instead of imparting to the workers a sound knowledge of their position in capitalist society, it simply accepts the illusions already prevalent and plays up to them for the purpose of catching votes.

Thus the workers imagine themselves to be free citizens, payers of rates and taxes with an interest in the day-to-day administration of capitalist society; and the Labour politicians thereupon adopt programmes of reforms based upon the alleged necessity of "economy" or "wise expenditure." Their policy presupposes the continued existence of capitalism, and they can, therefore, be nothing more than the tools of capitalist interests, no matter what their motives or intentions may be.

The Left Wing trades upon the repeated disappointment of the workers with their official political leaders. Every act of treachery, every blunder into the enemy's hands is hailed by the Left as a reason for a change of leadership; yet, in practice, the leaders of the Left never fail to follow in the footsteps of those whom they displace. The industrial leader seizes the first opportunity to set his foot upon the loftier ladder of political ambition; the Left is thus continually melting into the Right.

This is inevitable, for the simple reason that the policy of "industrial action," as such, is as barren of benefit to the workers as that of parliamentary reform. The existing Trade Unions are quite incapable of effectively meeting the continual encroachments of modern capitalism upon the workers' standard of life. Nothing less than a complete change of outlook and re-organisation of the working class can convert a chaotic retreat into an orderly advance.

This, however, implies Socialist education; and the leaders of the Left are as loath as those of the Right to undertake this slow and arduous task. It is easier to make showy promises, to tickle the ears of the workers with flattery, and to occupy their attention with personalities rather than with principles.

The Socialist, however, knows and proclaims that conditions and not leaders give rise to movements. So long as the workers see no further than the effects of capitalism and aspire no higher than to battle with those effects, just so long will they trust in leaders to guide them. The underlying causes of poverty, however, become more obvious as time goes on. Increasing numbers of workers are beginning to realise that the ownership of the means of life is the central factor in their common problems, and the leaders of to-day have a less easy task than their predecessors had to arrest the onward march of working-class knowledge. That is the principal reason for the palpable divisions among those leaders, and the constant danger of internal break-up which is characteristic of the "Labour Movement."

The industrial and political organisation of the workers does not arise from an idea fallen from the clouds. The Trades Unions originated in the first early struggles of the factory-hands to prevent themselves being reduced to a level from which they could never hope to rise. They were the instinctive defence against capitalist aggression; but these working-class pioneers were early forced to see that they were obliged to take into account a greater power than the individual capitalist. At every turn they were met by the actions of the Government, the agent of the master-class as a whole. For years they were engaged in a bitter struggle to secure their unions from legal extinction. Hence they saw the necessity for political power, and supported the Chartist Movement, which aimed at the obliteration of class-distinctions in the political field.

The original connection between democracy and the class struggle is thus plain. Just as bureaucracy in all its forms exists only to preserve capitalist interests, so democracy is the logical political expression of working-class interests.

This is in no way altered by the fact that the franchise was conceded by the master-class to serve their own ends. The concession merely indicates that at the present stage of industrial development power lies, in the last resort, at the disposal of the workers. So long as the workers lack the necessary organisation, the masters will utilise their support; but from the workers' point of view, the franchise has only one meaning. It is the instrument of emancipation. As such, the most enlightened of the Chartists regarded it, and the Socialist merely preserves the lessons of experience, keeping in line with the historical development of the working-class.

The pioneers, who penned the "Communist Manifesto," took the same view. "The bourgeoisie itself . . . furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie" (page 14). "All the previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the majority" (page 15). 

"The first step in the revolution by the working-class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy." "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the working-class organised as the ruling class" (page 21).

Similarly, Marx, in "Value, Price and Profit," refers to the fact that "This very necessity for general political action affords proof that in its merely economic action capital is the stronger side" (page 50), while Engels again, in "Socialism; Utopian and Scientific," advances the proposition that "The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this transforms the socialised means of production into public property." To thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and, thus, the very nature of this act, to impart to the now oppressed proletarian class a full knowledge of the conditions and of the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish, this is the task of the theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism" (pages 86-87).

To this task we of the Socialist Party have set our hands. Others may attempt to lead the half-awakening mass back into the camp of the enemy, or to lure them, unprepared, to the shambles. The Socialist Party avoids both the Scylla of the vote-catching reformer on the one hand, and the Charybdis of the minority movement fanatic on the other hand.

We seek to instil into the minds of the members of our class the facts that they are slaves needing emancipation, and that they may achieve it when they will by using the powers lying to their hands. Thus, for us, democracy is not something which resides all ready in a bourgeois Parliament. On  the contrary, it can spring into life only with the conscious self-assertion of the working-class majority having for its object the emancipation of all mankind through the abolition of the private ownership of the means of life.

Eric Boden

Capitalism and underdevelopment: where Leninists go wrong (1986)

From the Summer 1986 issue of the World Socialist

The whole Leninist theory of imperialism turns on two or three major concepts: the twin notions of super-profits and super-exploitation, monopoly (denned in a strictly legal sense) and investment strategy. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin pretended to have discovered an ultimate and final stage of capitalism, and this discovery has been widely attributed to his astute grasp of the materialist conception of history. Reading his pamphlet between the lines, however, we discover the existence of at least five acutely unMarxist tendencies:

First, Lenin ignores the definition of monopoly favored by Marx as a monopoly established socially by the capitalist class over the means of production, proceeding instead to adopt a conventional (bourgeois) definition of it as the centralization of control of industries resulting in "restraint of trade".

Second, Lenin identifies capitalism as a system of production with its regime of 19th-century Liberalism, thus persuading himself that the latter's all too apparent demise meant the onset of the socialist revolution.

Third, Lenin describes the frenzy of imperialist acquisitions by the European powers in the last quarter of the 19th century as being the result of monopoly defined in the above manner, in so far as the super-profits made by the monopolies forced capital to be exported abroad to the system's undeveloped periphery, foisting super-exploitation on the local working class and a pattern of "dependent" economic development on the local capitalist class.

Fourth, investment strategy moves quickly to the fore as the dominant focus of Lenin's analysis. His theory of imperialism orients itself around decisions as to how to invest capital rather than around the conflict between capitalists and workers.

Fifth, Lenin's theory is preoccupied with questions of international commodity exchange and very little with capitalist production as such.

Later Leninists have built on these erroneous views of their master to argue that the fundamental cause of underdevelopment is the unfavorable relations of exchange that have evolved between capitalists on the "periphery" and those in the "metropolis", rather than the rigid social structures inherited from colonial times or from home-grown traditions.

ROADS TO CAPITALISM

Teresa Meade in an article in Latin American Perspectives (Summer 1978) on "The transition to capitalism in Brazil: Notes on a third road" argues that "normal" capitalist development in Brazil (and hence, by implication, everywhere that comparable conditions existed) was impossible, owing to the region's integration into the emerging capitalist world economy.

The "third road" referred to in the title of her article is distinguished from the classical or "first" road (according to which small independent producers challenged the dominance of an assumed "pre-capitalist mode of production") and a Prussian or "second" road (where the Junker landlords retained control of the agricultural system even as they benefited from its overall industrialization).

Here Leninist theory has typically inverted the relationship between agricultural backwardness and capitalist development. But it does call attention to the fact that capitalism is a single system of production which develops differently under different conditions. Many a critic of Marxism has concluded with premature glee that the very diversity of capitalist development disproves Marx's analysis of it. What Meade curiously - or not so curiously - neglects to do, however, is to broaden her criterion to include all forms of capital accumulation regardless of ideology. For she has managed to leave out Soviet (or Chinese) state capitalism as an intervening "third road" before she got to the case of Brazilian capitalism.

In the same issue of Latin American Perspectives Peter Singlemann argues that:

during the initial phases of the industrial revolution in the advanced capitalist nations, colonies and dependent nations contributed to the formation of relative surpluses in the industries of the metropolis . . . The amount of relative surplus can be increased by decreasing the amount of socially necessary labor which, in turn, entails a devaluation of the means of subsistence.

This "devaluation", it turns out, is really the campaign to cheapen labor-power, the model case for this being the Anti-Corn Law struggle in mid-19th-century Britain carried out by the industrialists, who subsequently kept the price of grain down by importing American wheat "which paid no rent".

This idea of rent holding up the value of labor-power is in fact interpreted in a very rigid manner: in his The Law of Value and Historical Materialism Samir Amin advances the thesis that there exists a "world-scale hierarchy in the price of labor-power" (radiating outward from the developed centers), in which the price of labor-power and the productivity of labor are disconnected from each other, owing to the distortions created by an export-oriented production strategy. This strategy in turn marks the subordination of local capital to that of the center, perpetuating "super-profits" in the center and "super-exploitation" of labor-power on the periphery. The point, according to Amin, is that the reduction of ground rent to insignificance has failed to take place to a large extent throughout the third world and therefore has blocked the further investment of capital in productive activity, with a consequent brake on industrialization.

LENINIST INVESTMENT ADVICE

Since third-world countries have generally had or continue to have an agonizingly protracted experience of pre-industrial capitalism, Leninist theory has seen in agricultural backwardness an effect rather than a cause of "low and slow" industrialization. However, whether or not we are talking about "classical" economic development, the original source of the "industrialization fund" of an economy based on commodity exchange is an agriculture which has been monopolized (in the Marxian sense) by agrarian capitalists or capitalist farmers. This process of social monopolization of the means of production carries with it the mass expulsion of the rural population - regardless of the exact course the process may follow - leaving behind only those whom wages can pay or those who can pay them. On the classical model, this leads to a direct polarization of capitalist-worker relations in the countryside and to a lowering of the value of labor-power as in Britain with the abolition of the Corn Laws in the 1840s.

Leninist theorists argue that this process (the "formation of relative surpluses") is blocked for third-world capitalists because of their investment strategy of channeling their capital investments into exports of locally produced goods and then compounding the contradiction by locking themselves into import substitution (instead of, as formerly, into conspicuous consumption).

Import substitution - the decision to manufacture domestically what before had been imported (a major trend after the second world war) — is arguably self-defeating as a way to capitalist development. But the propriety of advising the capitalist class on how to "correct" the situation (even if this means replacing wholesale one gang of accumulators with another) is highly dubious at best. It is not necessary, as Leninists claim, for the working class to achieve its emancipation from capital, in the underdeveloped countries or anywhere else, by proceeding to place commodity production on a competitive footing through the foundation of so-called "proletarian republics" (state-capitalist regimes) as a supposed means of allowing productive capital to build up its base of profits by turning its investments to light industry. State capitalism is not a necessary step in third-world countries towards socialism but just another road to capitalism.

Ron Elbert (USA.)

New Economics: old errors (1986)

From the Winter 1986-7 issue of the World Socialist

Alvin Toffler, in his latest book about the nature of the global crisis, opens up with a compelling metaphor:

What is happening is not like a hurricane that sweeps across the landscape, leaving the earth itself unchanged. It is more like the beginnings of an earthquake. For the subterranean structure on which all our economics are based is now, itself, shifting, cracking. In our efforts to prevent a major collapse, we are dealing with surface phenomena rather than focussing on the deep-structure where the really big changes are occurring (Previews and Premises, Pan Books, 1984, p.9).

While, as Victor Anderson points out, the "New Economics" represents a "field of debate rather than a settled doctrine" (New Ground, No.6), one can detect within it a unifying theme: the desire to break out of the suffocating grip of market forces, to situate real needs and values at the centre of social affairs. For this reason it has been dubbed the economics of "anti-economics".

For socialists, this undoubtedly holds promise. Indeed, at the extreme cutting edge of this movement one may obliquely glimpse a vision of the socialist alternative, an alternative so long obscured by the prolific undergrowth of reformist politics. If today the tension between life as we know it and life as we could make it, has never been so palpable, than the significance of the New Economics is precisely that it often unwittingly mirrors much of this tension. Its aspirations, its assumptions, are channeled to no small extent along grooves gouged out by the material forces that have now made socialism, a non-market society based on voluntary work and the free availability of goods, a real possibility.

HUMAN VALUES VERSUS MONEY VALUES

One aspect of this revolt against the blinkered tyranny of abstract economic laws is the belief that "non-economic values" should be allowed to play a greater role in the capitalist economy. As Harford Thomas has put it, there is an "urgent need for new economic indicators which will show a cost benefit balance of loss and gain not only in money terms but also in terms of human needs and human values" (Guardian, 8 May 1985).

The major force for change in this direction has been the growth in ecological awareness. Conventional accounting measures economic performance in terms of Gross National Product (GNP) according to which losses inflicted upon nature may actually count as additions to economic prosperity. The New Economics argues that as long as governments are guided by GNP in their efforts to promote economic prosperity, they will remain blind to the environmental consequences of economic growth - until, that is, those consequences reach the point where they rebound against them, forcing them to re-assess the parameters of their economic thinking. Once again, Harford Thomas:

Money economics is treated as sacrosanct but the rate of return on money is no measure of the worthiness of human endeavour. It is inappropriate as an indicator of personal or social wellbeing. We need a new financial ethos.
We need a new economic language to match new concepts. This would distinguish between "sustained recovery" and "sustainable development". New accounting systems would distinguish between self-defeating and sustainable growth (Guardian, 5 June 1985).

What this proposal amounts to is a translation of ecological factors into monetary values. In theory, this would mean that if a particular amenity such as a river were priced, the destruction of that amenity would entail a cost that would have to be borne by the offending firm to hopefully deter it from polluting. The cost of disposing of its pollutants in an ecologically acceptable manner would thus be "internalised". Perhaps as a consequence, the local fishing industry downstream might live to see another day and in so doing, continue to provide employment for the local population. In this event, the "sustainable development" of the area would have been secured. But in order for this to happen, goes the argument, it is essential that the relevant authority - central or local government - takes the necessary steps to ensure that firms conduct their business with due regard for the environment Left to their own devices, market forces are quite "unfit for (this) purpose" (Harford Thomas). In any case, some elements of the environment - like the oceans or the atmosphere - do not lend themselves to private ownership by individuals or firms. Thus a political authority of some sort is regarded as a vital key to policing the environment.

BUT CAPITALISM CANT BE HUMANISED

The trouble with this scenario, and even more so, that proposed by the advocates of "zero growth", is that it assumes that governments operate in a social vacuum, that they are in a position to consciously direct economic growth in line with some preconceived objective. In fact, economic growth is subject to those very economic laws, the consequences of which the Green movement attacks, that arise out of the nature of the present social system, that transcend firms, governments and even international bodies. Capitalism is a system that is inherently dynamic and geared to "growth". It is a system based upon the relentless accumulation of capital out of the surplus value produced by workers. Because it is an intrinsically competitive system, each enterprise must strive to maximise this surplus value in order to extract from it as much capital for the purpose of investment so that the enterprise can remain competitive - the only alternative is economic bankruptcy. The tendency of a competitive economy is to force upon its competing units the overriding need to pursue short-term gain. It is hardly surprising, then, that the total effect of their actions should amount to a general disregard for the long-term costs such actions entail.

Of course, economic growth does not proceed in a straight line; it is periodically interrupted by recessions. But this is not something for which governments can be held responsible any more than they can take the credit for the economic upswing that follows on the heels of every recession. Rather, it arises out of the anarchic nature of capitalist competition itself, resulting in an uneven growth between different industries leading to cutbacks which spiral uncontrollably into a general recession.

Governments do not control the capitalist economy - the opposite is the case - and those who want the government to direct the economy along ecologically sustainable lines overlook that firms, including government -owned firms (which are among the most conspicuous polluters of the environment), invest their capital only if they see the prospect of profit in doing this. Ironically, in an economic recession when that prospect diminishes, the pressure on firms to "externalise" their costs actually increases. It is no coincidence that at such a time, "acceptable" levels of pollution are less rigorously adhered to or are deliberately downgraded by government decree. Under these circumstances to expect governments to compel firms to internalise their costs is to ignore the essential nature of government as an institution which seeks to promote the interests of the capitalist class within its territorial bounds, upon which it depends for its revenue.

Despite Murray Bookchin's claim that "carried to its logical conclusion . . . the struggle for a more balanced environment is the struggle against commodity production" (Post Scarcity Anarchism p. 16). it is clear that the Green movement with talk of a "new financial ethos" and the like is still trapped within a money-bound mode of thinking. Spurning the sacrosanctity of "money economics" it nevertheless pays it due homage. Yet it cannot hope to make much headway while it fails to extend its ecological awareness of the environment into a more fundamental analysis of the economics of capitalism.

TOWARDS A SOCIETY OF MASS UNEMPLOYMENT?

If the New Economics sees the "environmental backlash" to be an external constraint upon capitalism, supposedly forcing it to redefine its priorities, then the primary internal constraint is seen as the impact of new technology on the level of employment, forcing a separation of work and income.

The basic premiss of this argument, as presented by Andre Gorz. is the view that the new technology is of a qualitatively different order to that of previous technologies:

New technologies are being developed which are both cheaper and more effective than the old ones, allowing for growing quantities of goods and services to be produced with shrinking quantities not only of labour but also of capital. Whereas in the past, additional investment made for a growing number of jobs, at present it abolishes more jobs than it generates (Guardian, I August 1985).

Moreover, argues Gorz, it is no longer possible to count on the service sector to compensate for the elimination of jobs in manufacturing industry. Here too, jobs are under threat as automation bites deeper holding out the prospect of a tapering off of service sector employment. As a net result, a "society of mass unemployment is coming into being before our eyes".

How in the face of this chronic mass unemployment on an ever-increasing scale can workers expect to support themselves beyond the diminishing opportunities afforded by waged employment? For Gorz. the answer is to sever the link between income and employment by providing everyone with a "social income" as of right - an idea that can be traced back to the "underconsumptionist" theories of Jacques Duboin before the war and others before him (see Socialist Standard, February 1980).

To some extent, a "social income" of a sort already exists in that many workers receive an income out of state funds in the form of welfare benefits, to supplement, or to substitute for the total lack of. an income from employment. This is not merely a politically expedient development carried through by the state, mindful of the social consequences of absolute destitution on a large scale and aware of the advantage of holding large sections of the working class within a relationship of dependance upon the crumbs it doles out. There is also an important element of economic expediency in this in that it makes for a working class sufficiently fit and able to run modern industry with the degree of efficiency it requires.

On the other hand, there arc also counteracting tendencies that inexorably work to restrict the size of the crumbs doled out. Above all there is the fact that such benefits, paid for out of taxation, represent a burden upon the national capitalist class, whose competitive standing in the world economy would be adversely affected were that burden to become too great. This is why at a time of economic recession welfare benefits tend to be squeezed.

For this reason one would think that the notion of a "social income" has at best a limited applicability. Yet Gorz insists that it is bound to become a much more significant aspect of capitalism - indeed, a precondition for its continued survival - with the consequence that the law of value regulating the distribution of income will bear little, if any, relation to the way capitalism will operate in the future. Since the rapidly shrinking amount of wages as a result of growing unemployment will lead to a severe contraction of the market, capitalism will be increasingly forced to provide workers with a social income to buoy up its markets. In a sense, says Gorz, capitalism will thereby negate itself:

We are going towards a society where commodities will buy people instead of people buying commodities. It's what I call "dead-living" capitalism - capitalism which is a living corpse. Capitalism which is already dead but keeps up the appearance of the wage relationship and commodity production (International, January-April 1984).

But is Gorz right in claiming that a "society of mass unemployment is coming into being before our eyes" as a result of new technology? Similar claims have been made in the past about other technologies. Generally speaking, such claims have proved unfounded, based as they were upon a grossly exaggerated view of the increase in productivity that could be achieved by the introduction of such technologies. In focussing attention upon the particular area of employment immediately affected, they failed to notice, or greatly underestimated, the repercussions this had for the wider picture of employment as a whole. In this respect, the claims made about new technology are no exception.

An an antidote to Gorz's conjectures, one can cite the conclusions reached in a major study recently published by Wassily Leontief and other researchers of the Institute of Economic Analysis of New York University. This study, called The Impacts of Automation on Employment 1963-2000, which relies on an input-output analysis of different sectors of the United States Economy, argues that new technology, far from precipitating  a fall in aggregate employment, is likely to result in a substantial increase:

Far from it being likely that machines will displace workers, it is more likely that there will not be enough workers to operate all the machines we will want Equally, the changing structure of the labour force will not be dominated by a decline in production workers who will probably increase their share of jobs. But there will be a dramatic fall in office workers and a rise in the number of professionals (Guardian, 7 February 1985).

How is it possible to have such vastly different predictions about the future? The answer is that both scenarios - those who foresee the "collapse of work" and those who imagine there will be abundance of jobs - take as their starting point what they believe is an existing trend and, differing markedly over their interpretation of this trend, are able to reach very different conclusions about what the future might hold.

But there is an inherent weakness in the procedure of extrapolating from an existing trend. It assumes the linear progression of that trend indefinitely into the future. As earlier pointed out, economic growth does not behave in this fashion. Unemployment, as a feature of capitalism, waxes and wanes in response to the capitalist business cycle of boom and slump. In every slump there have been prophets to predict that mass unemployment was here to stay. In every upturn that followed those prophecies were proved false as industrial growth eventually led to more workers being employed.

A DUAL ECONOMY: MARKET AND NON-MARKET

For the New Economics, the administration of a "social income" poses a particular problem. It could massively reinforce the power of the state, a prospect which it does not welcome. The way round this difficulty, suggests Gorz, is to create opportunities for the "autonomous production of use-values", that is, people using their free time to produce goods and services for their own consumption (what Toffler calls the "prosumer economy") rather than for sale on a market. What is interesting about this proposal is the way Gorz relates it to the socialist objective:

Today there is another technological revolution going on which can be compared in its significance to the industrial revolution and which holds out the possibility of the dream of the first socialists - the abolition of wage labour. In the Grundrisse, Marx opposed disposable time to labour time. And certain key parts of his work say that the measure of wealth is disposable free time. "Really rich" is a nation where you work six hours and not twelve hours... When people work two days a week, the essence of their life is no longer labour, it's no longer the wage relation, it's what they do with their free time (International, January-April 1984).

According to Gorz, the realisation of socialism is only possible through the spaces opened up within capitalism for the utilisation of free time for the purpose of autonomous production; the development of technology under capitalism has effectively short-circuited the possibility of socialism being achieved in the way classical Marxism envisaged. The division of labour, having evolved into a highly integrated system of mass production, does not lend itself to a "socialist rationality" with its emphasis on the "free development of each individual as goal and precondition of the free development of all" (Marx):

Technology is not neutral, it was developed precisely in order to destroy workers' power in the factory. You can win a certain amount of control overworking conditions, over the technical process of production on the shop floor. You cannot, as Marx thought in his early period, say that the working class will feel at one with a comprehensive social process of production. You have to compare the working class as it is now with an army. It is structured by capitalist management, like an army. It is subdivided by smaller units led by what Marx called the "officers and petty officers of production". Of course an army can take power. But as long as the technology of production remains the same, the division of labour remains the same, the subdivisions will remain the same and those who will take power will be the officers. It will not be the soldiers (International, January-April 1984). 

What is at issue, then, is a form of alienation inherent not only in capitalist relations of production, but in the socialisation of the process of production itself; in the workings of a complex machine-like society. The effects of this alienation can be attenuated, but never entirely eliminated. (Farewell to the Working Class, Pluto Press, 1982, p.9)

So for Gorz, there will always remain a residual area of what he calls "heteronomous activity" - that is, activity over which individuals have relatively little control, activity that is determined by the technical requirements of the production system. In other words, the opposite of autonomous or self-determined activity. For example, no individual or group of individuals can manufacture a complete washing machine. As Gorz points out, "because there are so many inter-dependant processes you need a country of five million people to make one washing machine". In that each of these processes is tightly honed into, and governed by the specifications laid down by, numerous other processes, there is very little room within which individuals can freely develop, can creatively identify with the product of their collective efforts.

It is worth relating this point to the recurring theme in Alvin Toffler's work that, as a result of the revolutionary impact of new technology, society's dependance on socialised mass production techniques is now diminishing. According to Toffler, the trend towards a de-massified economy signals the end of a centuries old process of "market building". This marketisation of the economy went hand in hand with the socialisation of production itself based upon an ever more complex division of labour. The more elaborate this division of labour, the greater the split between producers and consumers, between production and consumption. This led as a direct result to the market playing an increasingly important role of mediating between the needs of producers and consumers (including, of course, the consumers of producer goods such as machinery). Now that the divorce between producers and consumers is narrowing - as shown by the growth of the "prosumer" economy - so the role of the market itself is corresponding contracting.

Gorz himself appears to endorse this view of the market as inextricably bound up with the development of socialised production. But whereas for Toffler the necessity for the market lies in the fact that it provides an indispensable mechanism to facilitate the flow of information linking producers and consumers (a quite mistaken view, as it happens, since it is entirely feasible to convey such information purely in terms of physical quantities by means of a self-regulating system of stock control), for Gorz market relations will remain an inevitable feature of a socialised system of production by virtue of the alienating experience of work within such a system which necessitates the retention of labour power in its coercive, commodity form. Like Toffler, he sees the decline of market relationships in relative terms as being connected with the growth in autonomous production:

The liberation of individuals and society, together with the regression of wage labour and commodity-based relationships, requires the domination of autonomous over heteronomous activity (Farewell to the Working Class p. 10).

Thus, instead of what the Communist Manifesto described as a "radical rupture with traditional property relationships", Gorz envisages the emergence of a socialist society in terms of a process of change analogous to the way capitalistic relationships developed within, and ultimately gained ascendancy over, feudalism. As he puts it:

The outlines of a society based on the free use of time are only beginning to appear in the interstices of, and in opposition to, the present social order (p.3).

However, this analogy only holds good up to a point Whereas capitalism supplanted feudal society, Gorz does not foresee the growth of self-determined, autonomous production leading to the elimination of externally-imposed, heteronomous activity. On the contrary, he asserts that that very growth will depend crucially on the goods and services provided by the latter. For example, advanced technology like computers which could be used for autonomous purposes depends crucially on research and development which can only be effectively carried out on a socialised basis. Generally speaking, local communities or groups lack the means to undertake such work, but the large-scale production of such technologies at low cost puts them within a price range that the latter can afford.

Thus, what Gorz is arguing for is what he calls a "Dual Society" with the emphasis on enlarging the sphere of autonomous production by making the sphere of non-autonomous, wage-based production as productive as possible through widespread automation, with workers moving continuously to and fro between these two spheres. He relates this scenario to Marx's reference in Capital Vol III to the "realm of freedom" and the "realm of necessity". The latter cannot be merged with the former and the former can "blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis" having "the shortening of the working day as its basic prerequisite" - a prerequisite which Gorz would contend has now been met with the aid of new technology.

SOCIALISM AND WORK

Let us now examine Gorz's claim that the nature of "socialised" or mass production techniques makes for the retention of wage labour (however marginalised it may become as a result of the growth in autonomous production) because of the "alien" technical requirements imposed upon the workforce. Put simply what this suggests is that, in any sort of society that makes use of such techniques, there would be certain types of work that would still have to be done but which could not be made intrinsically enjoyable or satisfying, regardless of the extent to which such a society sought to attenuate "the effects of this alienation", and that therefore people would have to be offered monetary incentives - a wage - to undertake them.

Quite apart from the absurdity of imagining that money could be an incentive - could have any sense even - in a society where goods and services would be freely available, there are several reasons for supposing that such work would not present the insurmountable difficulty it would appear to in a society based upon the purely voluntary efforts of its members.

Firstly, there is the fact that having established socialism people would not wish to jeopardise what they had consciously achieved. In so far as such work was seen to be a vitally necessary contribution to the material security of a socialist society it would be carried out. Gorz's claim that "socialist morality - with its injunction that each individual be completely committed to his or her work and equate it with personal fulfilment - is oppressive and totalitarian at root" and that it is "a morality of accumulation which mirrors the morality of the bourgeoise in the heroic age of capitalism" (Farewell to the Working Class p. 10) completely misses the point To describe as totalitarian what (for want of a better term) is a self-imposed sense of duty, a desire to cooperate out of a sense of enlightened self-interest to carry out the more routine humdrum tasks of a socialist society, is to strain the use of language beyond all reasonable bounds. Oppression presupposes the division of society into oppressors and oppressed. In a socialist society where all have free and equal access to the wealth produced by that society there can be no leverage that one could apply in order to oppress others.

Secondly, it is quite mistaken to argue that the only source of satisfaction in work derives from the intrinsic nature of the work itself. Another source of satisfaction is the social esteem that attaches to such work. In a socialist society, where the products of work are made freely available to all, status based upon the conspicuous consumption of wealth would be rendered meaningless: the only possible basis of social esteem would therefore be one's contribution to society. This being the case, it would seem likely that the less intrinsically satisfying a particular task is held to be, the greater would tend to be the social esteem that attaches to such a task.

Finally, one has to question whether the externally-imposed nature of some aspects of work today would in any meaningful sense persist in a society based upon voluntary effort. It is true, of course, that having volunteered to work for a certain length of time in some process such as the mass production of washing machines (to use Gorz's example) one would have to submit up to a point to the technical requirements this involves. But the point is that one would have consciously chosen to do this. In this sense one's activity is of an autonomous or self-determined nature however little one is able to individually influence or alter the technical process of production itself.

Robin Cox (Britain)