Cooking the Books: Cash Mountains (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the basis of figures released by the Office for National Statistics, the Times (9 April) reported:

  ‘Private companies, excluding financial institutions, have tucked away £173 billion since March 2016, the last full quarter before the referendum, and are sitting on £747 billion of cash, a level not seen before. At 35.3 per cent of GDP, the size of their pile of cash as a proportion of national output is at a historic high (…) In 2017, before the financial crisis, cash balances as a share of GDP were only 25 per cent. In 2000 they had been 20 per cent. They started to climb in 2012.’

This brings out how capitalist firms operate. A firm is an independent unit of capital seeking, through the actions of its top managers, to expand itself by making a profit and re-investing this in more productive capacity and production.

Cash mountains arise when the money profit acquired from selling the product is not immediately re-invested. This happens when the market for the product becomes saturated through overproduction, so that it is no longer profitable to produce them. In the particular case highlighted by the ONS figures, however, the reason seems to have been different.

Since the referendum, which went the wrong way as far as most of them are concerned, firms have been waiting to see what the post-Brexit profit-making conditions are likely to be. But the Brexit negotiations have dragged on and on. Profits are still being made from maintaining production at current levels but, in view of the uncertainty, they are not being re-invested in expanding production. Firms seem to have been marking time and as a result, have accumulated profits as cash.

The Times described this as ‘cash hoarding’ but this is not an entirely accurate description. It is not as if the cash is being stored in some safe. It is used to bring in an income as interest through buying stocks and shares and government bills and bonds, in effect by being lent.

Some critics of the present economic system describe it as a ‘debt-based economy’. This suggests that capitalism is driven by the pursuit of interest. Some have even absurdly suggested that capitalism has been kept going by loans to workers to buy things. Actually, capitalism is based on the pursuit of profits, of which interest is a sub-division. Some firms borrow money to invest in production for profit and, when they make a profit, share a part of this with the banks or other financial institutions that put up the money.

Those who talk of a ‘debt-based economy’ tend to think that banks create the money they lend by a few keyboard strokes. In fact, they can only lend what they have. The present ‘cash mountain’ is a reminder of where some of the what-banks-lend comes from – those who have lent them money either directly, or indirectly via the money market, including from firms that for one reason or another have built up cash mountains from uninvested profit.

England’s Dreaming (2019)

Book Review from the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mike Wayne: England’s Discontents: Political Cultures and National Identities. Pluto Press. 2018.

This is an attempt to make sense of political cultures and national identities with a particular focus on England in the light of both Brexit and moves towards Scottish independence. It is influenced heavily by the Italian quasi-Marxist Antonio Gramsci and his concept of hegemony. As such, much of the book is concerned with the formation of political cultures and identities – and how these inform national identity and political movements.

It is full of phrases like ‘highly multi-accentual’ and ‘counter-hegemonic organic intellectuals’ and so if you have an aversion to this sort of academic ‘discourse’ the book is not for you. Nevertheless, there are some good points within it and it is generally worth persevering. Much of it is concerned with the identification of ideologies and their key characteristics, mainly conservatism, economic liberalism, social liberalism and social democracy. Wayne explains the differences that characterise them and the relationships between them, including how they have often interlinked to form dominant ‘hegemonic blocs’ in various periods of modern British history. The most recent and notable has been the alliance between conservatism and economic liberalism, an alliance which is now facing various challenges as well as internal contradictions.

These inherent tensions between conservatism and economic liberalism are brought out well and mean that economic liberalism periodically finds common cause with social liberalism instead (as under Blair). This is because conservatism finds expression in three important strands of identity that the market economy of capitalism tends to undermine or contradict as a matter of course – ethnic/religious identity, national identity and ‘deep-history’ identifications (ie, tradition, routines and rituals, etc). As Wayne explains rather neatly:

  ‘Together these three strands attempt to create a moral framework for an economic system that does not have one, a point of national identification for a mode of production whose expansionary logic cannot be contained within the nation-state and a slowing down of historical change for a revolutionary change-obsessed mode of production’ (p.69).

These are the types of tensions he sees as having helped (among other things) fuel populism in recent years and it’s difficult to disagree. Sadly, as a counter-balance Wayne seems to be a calling for the recreation of the historic bloc that was based, in his terms, on the alliance of social liberalism and social democracy that dominated the post-war period in the UK until it started to break down in the 1970s and was rolled back in the 80s. He sees leftist Scottish nationalism as a potential vehicle for rekindling this and seriously underplays the negative role that nationalism plays in countries like Scotland where it is not as overtly right-wing and conservative as it typically is in places like England. But it is interesting too, that much polling evidence shows that the ideological make-up of the Scottish population is actually rather less different than is often supposed to that of England and Wales, especially on major left/right issues – and this goes unmentioned.

Also unmentioned is any real sense of what socialism might mean. It is a word used occasionally in historic contexts but it is never really made apparent what this is or how it might relate to (or seek to oppose) the other ideologies – or, for that matter, the tendencies some of them have helped foster that Wayne finds abhorrent in modern English political culture.

Dave Perrin

Editorial: Bad Advice From A Trade Union Leader (1944)

Editorial from the December 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Charles Dukes, C.B.E., is general secretary of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, which has about three-quarters of a million members, according to the Daily Express (January 20th, 1942) he is one of the small number of Trade Union officials in the £1,000  a year class. Starting work at eleven as an errand boy, he went through various jobs before reaching his present position as a Trade Union official. In the intervening period he has been a Member of Parliament, was for many years in the I.L.P., and is now in the Labour Party. In the last war he was an opponent of war. If experience teaches, it might be assumed that his life and political activities should have taught him much about the problems facing the working class. He claimed, many years ago, that apart from what he picked up in his brief school days up to age 11, he was self-educated. He writes articles on the problems of the day in his Union’s monthly journal that betray a painful lack of understanding, but that lack certainly cannot be ascribed to his own educational difficulties. What they do disclose is a complete failure to appreciate the nature of capitalism and the position of the working class in that system.

In an article in the May, 1944, issue of the Journal he lamented, but accepted, the fading of the dream of working-class internationalism. “It is no use pretending,” he wrote, "that there has not been a moral collapse in respect of internationalism. Whether we shall see its revival in the next decade is exceedingly problematical. . . . Our Labour Movement believed fervently that we could build the International Labour Movement across national frontiers, and ignore the ties of race and nationality. For the second time this theory has been disproved. It is not that the ideal is wrong, but rather that in its practical application it ignored the influences of race, which are deeper than association between peoples of different nationalities. The moral code is not enough. . . . The physical sanction throughout the ages has been necessary to enforce civic law, and there can be no doubt regarding its necessity in the enforcement of international law. Until this simple truth is grasped, we are merely fooling ourselves in pretending that a peaceful world can be ensured without the means to enforce the International Code.”

A little analysis shows the flaw in this argument. Mr. Dukes, in effect, despairs of working-class internationalism because ties of race and nationality prevent the workers from coming together effectively, and in his despair he turns to the idea of some international body which shall wield armed force to restrain national groups. But who shall make and control the international body? Since all the governments are capitalist governments, it is the capitalists who are to do this: but, according to Mr. Dukes' earlier remark, they too would be prevented by ties of race and nationality from getting together in an international body! We see here the sad spectacle of the workers’ chosen representative who despairs of his own class and hopefully bestows his trust on the capitalists, believing that they will do what the workers are incapable of doing. Truly reliance on a broken reed.

And why, we may ask, did the efforts at working-class internationalism fail? Basically they failed because the workers have not yet grasped the truth that all over the world they have a common interest in destroying capitalism by their own class unity and efforts; but this hits Mr. Dukes too. Internationalism, like charity, is something that should begin at home, it ill becomes the supporter of a capitalist government in one country to lament the lack of international class sentiment among the workers in other countries.

In a later article (July, 1944) Mr. Dukes starts off by urging trade unionists not to concentrate too much on social reforms; ”there is always the danger of becoming obsessed with these palliative measures,” he writes. This is a hopeful beginning, but what follows is the amazing statement that the real basic issue deserving attention is ”work and wages,” which “must, for all time, remain the primary consideration.”

Later on, to show that he means just what he says, he adds that “not even a Social Revolution will solve the vexed problem of WORK AND WAGES” (his capitals!).

Mr. Dukes—who at least at one time will have claimed to be a Socialist—goes on to make his reader’s flesh creep at the post-war problem of capitalist governments having to budget “to meet the colossal indebtedness of war-time circumstances,” which includes, of course, paying millions of pounds of interest to investors in government loans. Because of this he warns us that “those who expect big margins out of which to finance great schemes of social development will encounter almost insuperable obstacles.” Then follows a piece of further advice to his own hard-working and low-paid members. “Unless production can be stepped up far in excess of our pre-war production, no juggling with national finance will bring into being any great improvement in the lives of the people of this country. Let us, therefore, understand that the chief responsibility of the post-war government is to ensure full production and full employment. . . .”

This is history repeating itself, for after the last war most of the trade union officials were lending themselves to government propaganda to increase production, and one of the outstanding figures was Mr. J. R. Clynes, an official of this same union, who likewise still writes for the journal. The S.P.G.B. told Mr. Clynes then that the result of the increased-production campaign would be the more rapid rise of unemployment, and events justified our warning to the hilt. Capitalism needs unemployment just as it needs the poverty of the working class. It will abolish neither.

We tell Mr. Dukes’ members that, instead of following his despairing policy of making the best of capitalism (or, rather, of making even less than the best of capitalism), they should turn the other way. Start by appreciating that capitalism necessarily means the exploitation of the working class, and recognise the common interest of the workers everywhere of resisting that exploitation as far as they are able, but, above all, of ending capitalism by international Socialist action. Ponder the wise advice given by Karl Marx instead of chasing Mr. Dukes' will o’ the wisp of “full work at full wages.” Marx said over half a century ago to trade unionists:—

  Instead of the Conservative motto, “A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work !” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, “Abolition of the wages System!”

Don’t heed Mr. Dukes’ ignorant assertion that the social revolution will still leave us facing problems of work and wages. They are part of the capitalist wages system, and will go when it goes.

Letter: The Cause of Crime (1944)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

The letter below from Mr. Whitehead continues the correspondence published in our May issue.

Newcastle.

Sir,

Without challenging one of the many examples I gave showing that capitalism and poverty could not be the most serious causes of crime, the Socialist Standard instead is much more concerned with what is my view of the cause of crime.

Actually there is no cause of crime or of any other sociological phenomena, but many causes. And in showing as I did that neither capitalism nor poverty is the cause of crime, I am no more called upon to give the true causes than is a critic logically bound to supply the real explanation when he says spirits are not responsible for the flying tambourines at a seance.

By showing that India, a poor country, has the lowest crime rate, and the United States, the richest country with the highest standard of living among the workers of any nation on earth, has also the highest rate of crime, I demonstrated that poverty could not be the cause of crime. The low violent-crime rate among Jews in any environment and the high rate for violent crime of Italians in Italy or in any other environment shows again that capitalism per se cannot be the cause of crime. The far greater crime rate of Catholics compared with Jews, Protestants, or any other class in Britain, America, France and Germany is not due to their greater poverty and insecurity, as is proved not only by India, where crime is less frequent, but by the fact that Southern Europe and the Latins in general have a greater ratio of crimes of violence (often connected with sex) than the peoples of Northern Europe, but the latter in turn have a greater ratio of crimes against property. These Latin characteristics go with their owners to America, North and South, and even to Australia, where Italians are famous for their ready use of the knife—so much so, that I have a peacetime report of Australian workers striking rather than work in company with Italian colleagues. Germans, by the way, are law abiding in almost any community. And almost everywhere agricultural communities, usually more poverty stricken and insecure than industrial, have a far lower crime rate in the same countries, and as a class all over the world tend to have a lower rate than the industrial populations.

Crime is far more complex than Socialists assume, and crimes of violence are far less associated with economic causes than are crimes against property. Sex, jealousy, revenge, passion, drink, uncontrolled temper and other temperamental idiosyncracies have more to do with crimes of violence than has capitalism or poverty.

The causes of serious crime must be sought not only in the sphere of economics, but in morals, biology, psychology, religion and race; and not only in environment but far more in heredity and parental and other training of the young. Even temperature cannot be excluded, crime and insanity being more rife in summer than in winter, in spite of there being more unemployment and poverty in winter.

The psychological and inherited factors all have causes and are obviously associated with material conditions without, however, being, as the Marxians assume, the direct or indirect reflexes, being more often themselves causes of economic reflexions. This, I hasten to add, is not the prelude to a long controversy on the Materialistic Conception of History. My present intention is merely to expose the absurdity of the claim that capitalism is the cause of crime, criminals being rife scores of thousands of years before capitalism became the King Charles' head of Socialists. Finally, if capitalism is responsible for economic insecurity, which causes crime, why do 95 per cent. of the workers suffering from insecurity never commit serious crime, and why are Jews, who in many countries are penalised and relatively insecure, far less prone to crime and drunkenness than Catholics in the same countries?

Yours, etc..

G. Whitehead.

Reply.

Mr. Whitehead introduces too much detail for us to cover all his statements in the space at our disposal. We will therefore consider the broad aspects of the question, and refer the reader back to the previous reply to him, which he has not met.

First of all, we note that Mr. Whitehead has no remedy for crime. He argues that there is not one but many causes of crime. He has entirely missed the point of our previous reply, which stated that crime "is to lie explained by the capitalist environment in which we live."

Crime did not flourish in early communistic communities because there was no private property and sex relations were free. It grew with the development of private property.

Crime consists of infringement against the social rules of the time. These rules in turn depend upon, or rise out of, the nature of the human communities. In the early communities these social rules were based upon communism and were formulated freely by the community as a whole. With the growth of private property the owners of private property became the rulers and law makers. Infringement of their laws became “crimes.” For example, to-day sex is a private property institution and sex relations outside of wedlock are regarded as crimes, except in circumstances where it suits the rulers—when the birthrate of prospective workers and fighters is going down, rich appetites have to be met, or the needs of soldiers attended to for the sake of morale.

What constitutes “crime" has varied as communities have developed. Among the Spartans in early Greek times thieving was a virtue because the Spartan ruling class was a small body among a host of subservient, and their wits had to be developed to the highest pitch for the purpose of repression. In Elizabethan times piracy by English sailors was a virtue because it brought maritime wealth to the English ruling class. In the later centuries private property owners stole millions of acres of common land from the people, but this was not regarded as crime because the new laws based upon private property excluded from their influence the land that had no individual owner but was free for the use of all. In our own day millions of men are trained to strangle, drown, blow to pieces, shoot and maim their fellow-men, but this large scale slaughter and destruction is not regarded as criminal because the rulers of a capitalist society justify it on suitable abstract principles. If a poor man kills another man no abstract principles will save him from the hangman. If a rich man kills another man he has many avenues to escape from the hangman.

Prostitution, over-drinking, over and under eating, the blind pursuit of wealth and the enslaving of native people, war, and the strain of modern life are all consequences of capitalism, and have a demoralising influence on people. All these things contribute to a weakening of the social instincts. They were present in previous forms of society, but have reached their highest expression and their greatest power for evil in the capitalist system.

Poverty and laborious lives induce a low intellectual condition and a brutalised outlook on life. These together with prostitution and unhealthy sex unions produce degeneracy and insanity.

Crime ratios are misleading. Numbers of people commit what Mr. Whitehead would call crimes but never appear in criminal courts because they are rich or crafty. The poor prostitute figures in records, the rich rarely. While proof is difficult, it can hardly be doubted that much evasion of tax and similar regulations is carried on by monied men who are in a position to “know the ropes," or who can afford expert legal advice on ways of finding loopholes.

From the foregoing it will be seen that Mr. Whitehead's references to the ratio of crime in different countries and among different people is no answer to the question. “What is the cause of crime?" nor is it a refutation of our claim that crime can only be explained by social conditions. The rate of crime depends upon the influence of the social factors mentioned above in the countries and among the people in question. This is too wide a subject to be dealt with here. Surely his reference to law-abiding Germans is strange in the light of the rise of the Nazi party and the Gestapo, whose performances rival any criminal propensities of the Italians anywhere. What greater volume of crimes have Catholics committed than those committed by Protestants upon native peoples and upon men. women and children in the mines and factory hells of this country during the last century? The opera “Madame Butterfly" is based upon the attitude of Western man towards his Eastern sister, and many of those who go to see it and enjoy the luxury of shedding tears over the tragedy of Madame Butterfly are blind to their own share in similar tragedies.

We would remind Mr. Whitehead that an understanding of the cause of crime requires also an understanding of what crime is.

When wealth becomes commonly owned and each can obtain what he needs, there will be no crimes against property, the intellectual condition of people will rise, and the heritage of degeneracy and insanity will disappear; when woman has no economic need to sell her body, prostitution will disappear; when the relations between the sexes are free and partnerships can be made and unmade according to the emotional requirements of each, sex crimes will disappear. Then at last we shall really live, healthy, happy and crimeless—morals, biology, psychology, religion, race, heredity, and every other ology notwithstanding!

Editorial Committee

By The Way: Give the Dogs a Thousand Lashes, Damme ! (1944)

The By The Way column from the December 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Give the Dogs a Thousand Lashes, Damme !

The mentality of some Tory M.P.s is weird and wonderful.

Thus we have Mr. D. Robertson (Conservative, Streatham) dilating on the idleness of the men employed on bomb damage repairs.

  He mentioned a case of men who were brought to Streatham in luxury coaches from a hostel at 8 o'clock and went off to breakfast at 10 o'clock.
  They should have had their breakfast before they left the hostel, but did not because they had lain too long in their beds. (Evening Standard, October 27th, 1944.)

Just fancy! Luxury coaches—the louts! Of course, M.P.s don't ride to the House in luxury coaches, not them— usually plain private (“unluxury”) cars, or just common old taxis.

  "If this idleness continues,” declared Mr. Robertson, "I say put the young men into the infantry and let the older men have a spell of unemployment.”

There for you! The young men can smash more houses up in the Army and the older ones do nothing! How Mr. Robertson can imagine this is going to put anyone's roof back, we can't think!

One or two members of the Socialist Party working on war damage repairs in South London have a suggestion; they propose that Mr. Robertson have a week off from the House of Commons and take a turn on the roofs down in Streatham. He won't do much work, of course, but it would give him a marvellous appetite for those wonderful dinners they serve in the Commons restaurant. Perhaps he might feel like lying in his bed Sunday morning as a result; he wouldn’t have to be at the House, anyway, for they don't sit Saturdays or Sundays.

Our comrades say they are quite willing to do a week in the House of Commons for every day Mr. Robertson gets his hands dirty down at Streatham.


Trouble Down on the Farm

As if in answer to Mr. Robertson, the Norfolk War Agricultural Committee has informed the London Star (November 4th) that the Italian prisoners are rather difficult.

  When they are slack, lazy or disobedient we can report them to their camp, but what happens? They may get a spell of detention, but while they are away doing their punishment the farms are deprived of their services, indifferent though they may be.
  We have also found that punishment does not seem to improve them. As a fact, a spell of detention does not have any salutary effect on them, neither does it seem to have any terrors for them.
  And when they return to the farm they are worse than ever. The result is that the farmers will not report them for minor breaches of discipline.

And these are the boys we went to Italy to “liberate”!

This War

More Trouble. Now Thorburn Wiant, Associated Press correspondent back in London after two years in China, wrote : —

   There is probably no more efficient dictatorship than General Chiang Kai-shek’s party.
   There are secret police, concentration camps and firing squads for those who dare to speak, write or act out of turn. (Daily Mirror, November 1st, l944.)

Come, come, Thorburn! Chiang may be more efficient than Hitler—but not more than .Marshal Stalin!.

He also says the Chinese are not fighting the Japs at all—but one another.

We give it up!

A General Tells About the Cause of War

Lieutenant-General Sir G. Le Q. Martel, K.C.B., is writing on Conscription after the War.

  There is a universal hope that after the war the great nations will get together and solve the international problems of trade and currency, and thus eliminate unemployment and poverty. This would remove the main causes of world wars and the need for large fighting forces. (Evening Standard, September 27th, 1944.) 

Unemployment and poverty are not solved by trade or currency reorganisation, but the worthy General is certainly getting rather warm on the causes of modern war.

Perhaps, as he has retired, now he can write this sort of thing. We can’t imagine General Montgomery telling his troops that the war is caused by unemployment and poverty, though.

Virtue is its Own Reward

The Press is already speculating on how much Parliament is going to give the heads of the fighting services when the war is won. After the last war a sum of £585,000 was voted by Parliament to be distributed to Admirals, Generals and Air Marshals.

Admiral Jellico got £50,000, as did French and Lord Allenby. Sir Hugh Trenchard got £10,000 (Air Force), Sir David Beatty £10,000, and Sir Douglas Haig £100,000 and a statue in Whitehall.

  “It seems clear that any sum voted by Parliament must considerably exceed the £585,000 of the last war,” says one London evening paper (Star, September 7th).

Oh! quite clear! And most essential to cut down on expenditure for the rank and file to do so. Those who lose limbs will lie supplied with mass-produced standardised “Woolworth” arms and legs—free of all charge. Better artificial legs—for the benefit of the workers.

Dreaming of Thee !

The following is from the Daily Mirror (October 25th, 1944):—

   Have Your Holidays by Hypnotism, says Doctor.
   Tired and jaded war workers can have all the invigorating benefits of a seaside holiday without ever going near a beach. It can all he done at home—by hypnotism.
  So, at least, says Dr. Alexander Cannon, of the Isle of Man, former psychiatrist to the L.C.C. mental hospital service.
  Dr. Cannon suggests the hypnotism may be based on a wavelength in some way common to the length of the so-called short wave.”
  “The tired and worn-out worker in this dreamland of hypnosis,” he says, “can be made to walk along the seashore on a warm, sunny day, with a cool, refreshing breeze, and to feel the magnetic power being drawn in through the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet as he leisurely walks until he feels wonderful.”
  “Having allowed this dream picture to be implanted in his mind for a period of from twenty to forty minutes,” the doctor adds, “the worker can then be awakened with no recollection of his dreamland tour but with a feeling of energy, power and revitalisation which may last anything from one to four weeks or longer.”

So this is where “psychology” has got us to. Starting out with telling us that the cause of the trouble is our repressions, going on, like Max Eastman, to inform us that the reason Karl Marx expounded scientific Socialism is because be wanted Hegel for his father, finishing up with fortune telling and psycho-analysis.

We are quite amenable to the idea of having this dream implanted on us if Dr. Cannon will undertake to implant one on our guv'nor on the same terms—viz., are will go away to the seaside for twenty minutes in our dreams, if he (the guv'nor) will agree to dream that we’ve done a week’s work and pay us for it (in real money --not dreams).

Great “Legal” Victory of the Working Class

We gather from the Socialist Appeal (September) that the quashing of the sentences of imprisonment passed on the members of the Revolutionary Communist Party is “one of the most important legal victories in the struggle against anti-labour legislation” which the working class has gained.

We must confess to some mild surprise. For ourselves, we have always held that the only real “legal victory” was when the working class captured the machinery of government (including the armed forces) by voting themselves IN and the boss OUT, which would enable them to enact and enforce laws.

Are we to understand that “revolutionary” Trotskyists have now forsaken armed insurrection and direct action for pleading at the bar of (capitalist) justice?

The New Statesmen !

Every week the New Statesman awards five shillings for the most idiotic statement published in the Press sent in by its readers.

We submit the following :— 

  Somebody should now get up, as they did in 1940-41, and point out that Southern England is part of the same battlefront as Normandy, and that the toughest part of the war is still to come. If the German threat to send rocket shells does mature, something of the sort will have to be done. I believe the response would be much as it was in 1940—production would increase and so would popular resolution. We should in our hearts all rejoice that in this war we are not “sending our sons” only, but sharing in some small way in their risks. (New Statesman, July 1st, 1944.)

Please send our five shillings award to Socialist Standard, Rugby Chambers.

New Insecticide

Reference has already been made in these colmuns to the new insecticide, D.D.T.

It is stated that this new compound has already stopped an incipient typhus epidemic in Naples, and been used with deadly effect on bugs, fleas, cockroaches, beetles, moths, lice and mosquitoes. 

It is a great preventative of malaria and dysentery. British troops now have a standard issue of D.D.T. impregnated shirts which effectively protect the wearer against lice for two months even after regular washing. (Times, August 2nd.)

It will be available to civilians after the war. So. perhaps, ends the career of some of the greatest pests of poverty-stricken workers—their poverty, however, will remain.

D.D.T. was discovered by an obscure German student chemist employed by the Basle firm of J. R. Geigy in 1874.

It lay dormant until 1942. when the British branch of the Geigy Company brought it to the notice of the British Government. What became of the inventor is not known.

Explosions for all

  “The reason given on Thursday for the dismissal recently of 1,000 war workers, 900 of them women, from a factory in the West Riding of Yorkshire was that the country is so overstocked with shells that to get rid of them, firing day and night, would take two years. “Two hundred workers are reported to have been dismissed by another Yorkshire firm, but all the 1,200 are said to have been absorbed by engineering concerns in Bradford and Leeds or given jobs as conductresses on buses in these two cities. About fifty have been permitted to return to their peace-time jobs in the textile trade.”—(Manchester Guardian, November 11th, 1944.)

Free Health (? !) Service for Workers

  “Frank statements about the methods of some medical men are made to-day by Dr. Andrew Kefalas, of Sheffield. After pointing out that one reason why many people go to the chemist instead of the doctor is that they cannot afford to pay both, he says this in the British Medical Journal:
  There is a more ugly side to this scandal and that is that so many of us neither prescribe nor dispense at all. We simply dope out stock mixtures. 

Cutting the Cards.

  For myself, I would, in case of illness, as soon lay out at half-dozen patent preparations, select one of them by cutting a pack of cards, and take my chance on the one which turned up, as swallow some of the  'mist this' and ‘mist that' which are foisted upon the people who chance the doctor instead of the chemist.” (Evening Standard, September 12th, 1944.)

“ Good God! said God. I've got MY Work Cut Out.”

  “Britain as a nation is not ready to have victory granted to her,” says Rev. A. M. Hay. of St Paul's, Braintree, Essex, “and that is why the weather—God's weather— has been almost persistently against us since D-Day.”
  Writing in the church magazine, he says: “If there is any doubt that we are not ready for victory, let us ask ourselves how are the majority of people in onr land preparing to celebrate? With revelling rather than with humble thanksgiving.”
Mr. Hay told the Daily Mirror last night: “It was God's good weather at Dunkirk and in the Battle of Britain that saved us.
  “I believe strongly that God uses the weather as an instrument in his moral government,” Mr. Hay added.

(Daily Mirror, November 9th, 1944.)

Horatio

Massacre in Norway (2011)

From the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 22 July, the government offices in Oslo, Norway, were blown up, killing eight people. Shortly afterwards the bomber travelled to a Norwegian Labour Party summer camp mainly attended by children and began shooting them. He killed 68.

To begin with, the news media reported this accurately as a terrorist attack, speculating predictably but wrongly that the attacker was muslim. When it emerged that the attacker was not in fact muslim but a self-declared christian, with political views similar to that held by many mainstream news commentators and politicians, and with links to right-wing political parties throughout Europe, suddenly it was decided that Anders Behring Breivik was not a terrorist after all, merely a deranged madman, acting alone.

Then began the usual debate about how to define terrorism, which is held, as Chomsky has pointed out, to be a “vexing and complex problem” – at least, it’s deemed vexing and complex by those whose job it is to provide apologetic cover for the forms of terrorism that are acceptable to the ruling class.

There is just as much confusion about multiculturalism, or what the Norway terrorist called in his political manifesto “Marxist multiculturalism”. The fact is that human societies, and especially modern ones, are almost always multicultural. As Gary Younge pointed out in the Guardian (14 March): “Cultures are dynamic, and emerge organically from communities. None exist in isolation or remain static. So the presence of a range of cultures in Britain or anywhere else is not novel, but the norm.” There’s nothing wrong with that. A diversity of languages, festivals, music and food is something to be welcomed and enjoyed.

But the other kind of multiculturalism – that which advocates liberal, state-led policies for encouraging and supporting cultural differences at the expense of working class unity – has nothing to do with Marxism. It is something to be opposed as much as the alternative policy pursued by some states of inculcating a single “national identity”. Workers should be encouraged to think of themselves as members of a worldwide class with a common interest, not as members of different “nations” or different “ethnic” or “cultural” groups with their own different, competing interests.

We have never had a problem doing that. That’s because we understand that working class people of all cultures need to come together as equals to fight for issues that unite them as a class. And that’s the only way we’ll ever achieve a society where we can work together for things that unite us all as human beings, regardless of skin colour, religious beliefs, cultural or national origin, or individual difference.

Early Communist (2011)

Book Review from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gerrard Winstanley: A Common Treasury. Presented by Tony Benn. Verso, 2011. £8.99

Verso have republished this selection of writings by Winstanley chosen by Andrew Hopton. It first appeared in 1989. The publishers have given it a new title, a new Foreword (20 pages) and an introduction by Tony Benn (3 pages). Winstanley, an early advocate of making the Earth a common treasury for all, is always worth reading. The selection here includes only his writings from 1648-9 and so does not include his main work The Law of Freedom.

Adam Buick

Film Review: Super 8 (2011)

Film Review from the September 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Super 8 (director: J. J. Abrams)

This is a commercial not an art film and any ideological content is entirely subservient to box-office earnings. Its appeal is primarily to young teens and their forty-something daddies. It mates an undemanding kids-versus-aliens storyline to a meticulously detailed 1970s social-realist setting. It is widely said to be the most Spielbergian film never made by Spielberg (who is, however, credited as producer). As such, the cinema-goer gets full value for money: gooey emotion, scares, laughs, big bangs, weird happenings, puppy love and heroic geeks. Essentially this is director, JJ Abrams’s tribute to the master, extensively referencing Spielberg’s life and movies including ‘ET: The Extra-Terrestrial’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.

There are two interesting aspects to the film. Firstly, the portrayal of the military (the word is evil). The head honcho oversees the torture of the shipwrecked alien into insanity, runs an assassination programme against witnesses including a busload of young teens, and holds an injured high school teacher in grossly unhygienic conditions before murdering him by lethal injection. No comment has been made about the credibility of this portrayal. In the light of the well publicised atrocities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, it is unlikely there will be none forthcoming. Most would not acknowledge that “they have the right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing” and that we can’t stop them from doing anything.

The second is the nature of the alien. Although it does some scary things, when revealed in full it is not a scary thing – much resembling the comic horror of ‘Cloverfield’, which JJ Abrams produced. In essence, this is a human in alien clothes, perhaps even more human than the humans. Unlike the saintly ET, this alien, tortured and incarcerated, reacts like a human being with anger. It is, however, unlike the demonic aliens from ‘Alien’. Like any human, it can be appealed to on grounds of its own self-interest. The boy hero wisely does not apply logic or an appeal to the alien’s better nature.

Of course ‘Super 8’ is stupid and unrealistic in many respects. But sci-fi’s purpose is to provide an eye-catching scenario within which an entertaining drama can be played out and ideas put forward and issues raised. ‘Super 8’ does this. This is not a ‘socialist film’ but like JJ Abrams’s other creation, the much vaunted ‘Lost’, there is food for thought here.

Kaz.

Proper Gander: From WAGs to Riches (2011)

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

Watching a BBC3 documentary and expecting it to give you a deep insight into capitalist society is like going into a sweet shop hoping to get a three-course meal. In both cases, you end up with something sugary and gaudy instead of nourishing. Cherry’s Cash Dilemmas was therefore like a bag of liquorice allsorts. It was the latest show from Cherry Healey, the unthinking-person’s investigative journalist. She spent a day each with five women who have different kinds of relationship with money. WAG wannabe Esma believes that “it’s the man’s job to bring in the money and the woman’s job to look nice”, and by ‘nice’ she means being bronzed and vajazzled. Amanda made her fortune inventing and selling potties but was too busy making money from other people’s children to be around her own kids. ‘Freegan’ Katharine avoids spending money by raiding bin bags, looking for food needlessly thrown away by cafés and takeaways. Claire struggles to feed her family of nine on wages of £150 a week. And Birgit went from the Hollywood high life to a council flat in London, and feels that ‘karma’ has caught up with her.

Presumably it was assumed that the viewers would have the attention span of an amnesiac goldfish, as the programme only spent ten minutes with each interviewee. But behind the hyperactive editing and Cherry’s wide-eyed zeal were some interesting observations about how people feel about money. In particular, the show revealed a correlation between how much someone fetishises money and how self-absorbed and irritating they are. Katharine, Claire and Birgit have learnt, unfortunately the hard way, that money is less important than fulfilling, warm relationships. And they have become kinder and more thoughtful as a result. But Esma and Amanda, who have allowed their alienation to take them over, just come across as tanned robots with bling. Whether or not money can buy you happiness, the love of money only seems to buy you shallowness.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: Little Budget (2011)

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

Many big-time financial editors applauded Mr. Selwyn Lloyd’s second attempt at producing a Budget for 1961/2. Here, they said, was the strong medicine which was needed to sort out our troubles once and for all.

This was the sort of comment which greeted Mr. Butler’s autumn Budget in 1957, when Bank Rate last went up to seven per cent. It is what is always being said about the so-called remedies for the economic and financial crises of capitalism.

The trouble this time, said Fleet Street, is that we are all living too well. Agricultural workers, who are getting by on an average wage of £10 11s. a week and local government employees who are somehow making do on an average of £10 16s a week, must have been very surprised to hear that nowadays their life is one long spree of opulence.

Whatever measures successive Chancellors may impose, the economy keeps on staggering from boom to recession, from expansion to retrenchment. One budget (often at election time) knocks a couple of pennies off beer, a couple of shillings off income tax. Another puts them back on, or onto something else.

The workers end up where they started, with a personal budget which is very finely balanced, often on a tight-rope supplied by the hire purchase companies. Yet they keep their faith with capitalism — if they blame anything, it is the planners, or their plans. But capitalism — unplannable, chaotic, unbudgetable — is always doing its best to teach them better.

(from News in Review, Socialist Standard, September 1961)

Rear View: Principled hostility (2019)

The Rear View Column from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Principled hostility

Socialists are opposed to capitalism and its parties, Left, Right or in between. From our Declaration of Principles: ‘That as all political parties are but the expression of class interests, and as the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party.’ We have as a Party, since our inception in 1904, been maligned, misunderstood, occasionally praised but more often than not just ignored. The conservative news site www.bizpakreview.com recently drew attention to our Twitter feed in an article titled ‘Stephen King and writer of HBO series get ‘Chernobyl’d’ by Dan Bongino when they make the show about Trump’ (31 May). Such attention is very rare, however. Ironically, it is often those praising ‘socialism’ who do just as much damage as its opponents: Andre Vltchek, author of ‘Europe in irreversible decay, UE [sic] elections are proof of it!’ (informationclearinghouse.info, 1 June) is just one example.

Tweeting for socialism or the status quo

@OfficialSPGB takes @dbongino to task for tweeting ‘Why do Hollywood elitists continue to publicly humiliate themselves on Twitter? Chernobyl was a failure of socialism (where the govt controls the means of production), the exact opposite of the Trump deregulation and tax cut agenda.’ We replied ‘You persist in trying to keep the lie going that socialism is “where the govt controls the means of production”. The truth (not that you’re interested in that, obviously) is that socialism is where THE PEOPLE own and control the means of production. The USSR had state capitalism.’ Tom Tillison, author of the BPR piece in question, is incredulous. Yes, the Bolshevik coup d’etat of November 1917 hastened the development of capitalism there, not socialism. Lenin admitted such, and we made our position clear as early as August 1918 in ‘The Revolution in Russia – Where It Fails.’ Reading the BPR article could leave one with the impression that the ‘West’ has no record of nuclear accidents! There are currently 454 operable civil nuclear reactors around the world, with a further 54 under construction. Given worldwide capitalism’s concern for profits over people, further ‘accidents’ are inevitable.

Workers have no country

Vltchek, who recently toured seven EU countries, described as ‘decaying. . . even collapsing,‘ and met some of the people there, adds: ‘What I did not witness, was hope, or enthusiasm. There was no optimism. No healthy and productive exchange of ideas, or profound debate; something I am so used to in China, Russia or Venezuela, just confusion, apathy and decay everywhere. And hate for those countries that are better, more human, more advanced, and full of socialist enthusiasm.’ At one point even North Korea gets a favourable mention: ‘ On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris.’ And his remedy: ‘ Let us [put] the people of Russia first … China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!’

Unite for socialism

Lenin wrote tellingly of Russia in 1918: ‘reality says that state capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about state capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’ (The Chief Tasks of Our Time). In his Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927), Mao admitted that the coming revolution would not be socialist: ‘To overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the revolution’. Iran is a theocratic dictatorship – Hell on Earth for scientific materialists! – and North Korea a family-run cult cum kleptocracy. ‘Maduro recognizes Venezuela is still a capitalist-based economy . . .’ (Popular Resistance newsletter, 27 May, 2018). Capitalist hallmarks, such as class society, commodity production, profit motive, exploitation of wage labour, markets, etc., are found worldwide. If you are of the Left, Right or in between and do not believe the capitalist stooge Vltchek, any of his anti-working class heroes, or us consider Thatcher: ‘there is only one economic system in the world, and that is capitalism. The difference lies in whether the capital is in the hands of the state or whether the greater part of it is in the hands of people outside of state control’ (House of Commons speech, 24 November, 1976).

Pathfinders: The Parthian Torpedo (2019)

The Pathfinders column from the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘I’ve never seen a politician that didn’t look better looking back,’ as Lee Marvin might have sung, and thus with the benefit of distance posterity may come to view former PM Theresa May more kindly than people do at present, especially if she is replaced by the unspeakable Boorish Johnson. May spent her last days in office frantically legacy-building, living up to her old Cabinet nickname of ‘the submarine’ by launching a few ticking torpedoes before retiring to dry dock in the back benches. One of these was a £27 billion cash boost for the education budget, which her successor will have to pay or else look bad by wriggling out of (Sunday Telegraph, 16 June).

But £27 billion is nothing compared with her Parthian shot par excellence, which will stuff not only her immediate successor, but several successors after that, as well as every political leader in virtually every country in the world for the next 30 years.

In short, she decided to adopt the desperately-ambitious recommendations of the UK Climate Change Committee and formally commit the UK to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Pause a moment to consider with amused schadenfreude the behind-the-scenes panic and pandemonium this announcement must have caused. The mandarins of the British state have no idea how to enforce this commitment, but they do know there is no chance whatever of doing so without resorting to extreme and probably unpopular measures. Somehow, for a start, they have to get the rich employers on side and persuade them to bear the extra costs of reducing industrial and commercial emissions to net zero, while still managing to remain competitive with players on the international market who are facing no such costs. Then there is the problem of upgrading the aged and inefficient housing stock with insulation and heat exchangers when neither state nor most private householders can afford it, while also telling the population to turn down their thermostats and wear extra jumpers in winter. The new runway at Heathrow will surely have to be cancelled, and people persuaded against foreign holidays in favour of camping or caravanning at home. Then there’s your filthy fossil car, your fat-making sugar and meat diet, your cheap fashionista clothes shipped over in containers from fire traps in Bangladesh – you name it, you’ll probably be told to stop doing it.

Good, you might be thinking. We can’t beat climate change without making a few personal sacrifices. But here’s the thing – who’s going to make the Duke of Westminster turn his damn thermostat down? Who’s going to legislate the rich into painful personal sacrifices equivalent to those being forced on workers? Who’s going to take their private golf courses off them, or cancel their champagne and truffle banquets or stop their Lear jet flights to exclusive private resorts? Nobody, that’s who, because governments don’t get to tell the rich what to do. If anything it’s the other way round. The rich are all for reducing emissions, as long as they’re somebody else’s emissions. Knowing this, just how cooperative are workers likely to be?

And personal privations aside, what is the likelihood of all the competing ruling elites of the world forming a grand environmental alliance and sharing the eye-watering costs of a shift to net-zero, without sooner or later one or more of them succumbing to the lure of the fast buck and reneging on the deal? Capitalism is about making money and the rich are more devoted to that objective than they ever are to cooperating with each other, even for the sake of the common good.

The brilliance of Theresa’s coup is that, unlike David Cameron, she gets to look heroic as she dumps this monumental task on the table and then runs off through a cornfield. Whoever succeeds her, even the Bullingdon Bozo, will probably not want to go down in history as the one who ‘did a Trump’ and backed out of the most ambitious climate commitment made anywhere to date. More likely now is that the other world leaders will be eyeing each other nervously, wondering who is going to be next to try to carve their name into the history books. Now the precedent has been set. Call it the Thunberg factor, but populations will be in riotous mood should politicians not be seen to answer the net-zero call, even if those same populations are not necessarily clear about the personal implications.

The only realistic way out for May’s successors, and for capitalism, is to sign up to the draconian commitment in principle and ignore it in practice. But will they keep getting away with that? People already don’t believe anything politicians say. A recent survey suggests that only 6 percent of the population believe that politicians understand their concerns (Guardian, 16 June). Back in 2010 a similar poll found that only 7 percent rated politicians’ honesty as high and 58 percent rated it low or very low, while a more recent survey in 2016 suggested that 25 percent of the population thought robots would make better politicians than humans. Socialists have a better idea. Abolish politicians along with the rich and manage the world democratically. Then you’d see an effective climate policy.

Change My View

Somebody who should lift your spirits a little is Kal Turnbull, the young man from the Scottish Highlands who at the age of 17 set out to combat all the ranting hate and abuse of polarised social media with one simple and ingenious idea. Aware of his own parochial background and limited knowledge, he set up a Reddit channel called Change My View, where users post genuinely-held ideas or beliefs on any subject and then invite other people to come forward with rational arguments for changing this view. What’s needed, he thinks, is to ‘reframe our relationship to being wrong. It’s not necessarily a negative thing. It doesn’t have to be a humiliating thing. It’s a chance to lose some ignorance, and perhaps gain some insight’.

Don’t you just love this guy? If only the rest of us workers had this kind of unprepossessing honesty and intellectual integrity, we’d sort out the world’s toxic obsession with capitalism in short order. Of course it’s slightly disappointing to learn that he’s now trying to monetise the whole idea, but hey ho, that’s capitalism for you.

Paddy Shannon

Make them (and us) Redundant (2019)

From the July 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Redundancy for All

If you cast your mind back, at Christmas the Queen sat in her golden chair, in a gold encrusted room, in front of her golden piano, and had the gall to suggest that the 100th anniversary of an air force which has bombed countless civilians, as well as fellow workers in uniform (they were mostly compelled to wear) was something worth celebrating. This was while prattling on about ‘faith and charity’, yet how many of us were left wondering just how many lives had been lost due to her governments’ vicious welfare cuts and austerity measures?

And speaking of faith and charity, every time the multi-millionaire ‘Saint Bono of Ireland’ snaps his fingers another child dies of hunger or starvation in Africa. This is while the church he follows drowns itself in riches – and the Pope sits on his throne in his palatial residence in the Vatican city state, with his golden sceptres and crowns piously praying for the poor, while desperately trying to deal with the fall out of, oh so many, paedophile priests, and the Vatican Bank rakes in the pennies, pounds, euros, pesos, plus any number of other currencies dumped on collection plates globally by the deluded poor, in the vain hope of ‘the meek’ inheriting anything, let alone the world! While at the same time they are told to: work all day, live on hay, and you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.

That’s not to say that any of the other countless organised religions and churches of the world fare any better in the truth, justice, humility or humanity stakes.

We apologise for discomforting the discombobulated – but this is no time for mealy mouthed platitudes – not while the poor, dispossessed, and downtrodden are demonised by the maniacal, mass media machine as workshy layabouts and scroungers, and hurried off this mortal coil, by either enduring a shortened lifetime of poverty and illness, wondering where the money for next week’s rent, or tomorrow’s dinner is coming from. Or by being subjected to being bombed in the name of democracy by the world’s regional superpowers or their despotic allies, in search of oil, new raw materials and markets or the simple lust for ever greater power, and or, territory.

We were also informed recently, by the UN, that we have 12 years to stop escalating global warming or face ever-increasing, ever-hastening, environmental degradation. There is much debate as to exactly how bad this catastrophe is or will get, but not much is likely to change given climate change deniers, capitalism’s past record on effectively solving the problem, national state rivalries and competition, and the recent climate change conference in Poland being sponsored by coal boards and its halls and rooms, being filled by coal, of all things (COP24 – the 24th such conference!). It seems the best we can expect is continued rising sea levels, more stormy weather, more forest fires, more droughts, and more desertification, which will seem certain to disrupt the lives of millions.

At first sight, to the casual observer, it may seem that these things are unconnected and unfixable, but do not fall into easy despair, and throw up your hands in apparent helplessness, at all this needless death, and wanton destruction.

The simple fact of the matter is, there is one reason, and cause behind all of it, and it can be fixed – but only with your conscious understanding – and participatory help.

We are taught from birth that ‘our country’ and its people are superior to all other nations and their inhabitants, and that if only we all stopped being negative and hyper-critical, and worked together for ‘the common good’ then ‘our country’ can become great again and a new fairer dawn will be just around the corner. Funny how it never materialises, and we’re still left in the dark and fed a constant diet of ideological bullshit!

That simple reason and cause is our masters’ rapacious greed and lust for power, i.e. capitalism. Whether that be the naked private capitalism of the UK, USA, and Western nations, or the cloaked and hidden state capitalism of China, Cuba, Venezuela, the former Soviet Union etc (those countries which demonstrably falsely call and called themselves communist/socialist).

Capitalism today is the global politico-economic system. Nothing is produced under capitalism unless it realises a profit. The bottom line is all. The capitalist mode of production breaks all human relationships, alienates us from ourselves, the environment we are embedded within, and require for our survival – capitalism has only one requirement – all other considerations are moot. It seeks only to create more capital, whatever the cost, to reproduce itself without limit, or end, no matter the real social costs to humanity, or the planet.

The simple solution to this problem is a truly democratic society – a society of production for human (environmental and planetary) need not profit and greed, a leaderless, classless, stateless, society of equals, consciously working together in harmony as one people, Homo sapiens sapiens (forgetting the lies of ‘race’ and religious strife and division etc we were indoctrinated with at school, and are exposed to daily by the mass media machine). A participatory democracy of economic and political equals where no-one holds power over any other, by force, or by economic compulsion.

We don’t demand ‘jobs for all’ or a minimum, or even maximum wage – the continuation of a gilded sparkly wage-slavery, with incremental steps towards a brighter future that will never arrive. We have no such paucity of vision or ambition.

Instead, we demand the end of wage slavery and redundancy for all!

Make the bread-heads and greed-heads, the ‘1 percenters’ who own and unjustifiably control, the vast majority of the world’s wealth, and resources, for their personal gratification, a phenomenon from the past too (the true vampiric scroungers who live by exploiting the planet and its people).

Do not support capitalist parties, with their false rhetoric, false promises, and demonstrably false agendas for ‘a brighter better tomorrow’ and help make them redundant.

Support no capitalist institution or ideology. Instead support yourself and your right to do useful pleasing work, of real social, and personal value.

Help us make the need for a socialist party redundant and fight for a real future for ourselves. For the environment we are embedded within. For a revolutionary system change, with no false promises, or hidden agendas.

IMM

Voice From the Back: Orwell and Human Nature (2011)

The Voice From the Back column from the October 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Orwell and Human Nature 

When we say that socialism is a society where everybody will work to the best of their ability and take according to their needs – a society without ownership, wages or prices – we are taken to task for our naivety. What about human nature we are asked? We have always explained our position with illustrations from history, but it is unlikely that we could improve on this argument advanced by the writer George Orwell nearly 70 years ago. “The proper answer, it seems to me, is that this argument belongs to the Stone Age. It presupposes that material goods will always be desperately scarce . . . but there is no reason for thinking that the greed for mere wealth is a permanent human characteristic. We are selfish in economic matters because we all live in terror of poverty but when a commodity is not scarce, no one tries to grab more than his fair share of it. No one tries to make a corner in air, for instance. The millionaire as well as the beggar is content with just so much air as he can breathe.” (Tribune, 21 July 1944.)  Inside a socialist society where we can produce an abundance of food clothing and shelter the notion of human nature will indeed seem like something out of the Stone Age.  

Dr. Doom and Dr. Marx

You don’t often hear of university professors praising Marx or a business journal reporting it, but we must give credit where credit is due. “Economist Nouriel “Dr. Doom” Roubini, the New York University professor who four years ago accurately predicted the global financial crisis, said one of economist, Karl Marx’s critiques of capitalism is playing itself out in the current global financial crisis. …”Karl Marx had it right,” Roubini said in an interview with wsj.com. “At some point capitalism can self-destroy itself. That’s because you can not keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. We thought that markets work. They are not working.” (International Business Times, 13 August.) Being a university economic professor he couldn’t get it all correct of course. Marx never claimed that capitalism would “self-destroy itself”. That destruction can only come about by the action of the working class.

A Billion Dollar Deal

The conflict in Libya has proved to be very profitable for the British oil firm Vitol which has supplied fuel and associated products to the rebels and traded oil on their behalf. The deal is estimated to be worth about $1 billion. “The deal with Vitol was said to have been masterminded by Alan Duncan, the former oil trader turned junior minister, who has close business links to the oil firm and was previously a director of one of its subsidiaries. Mr Duncan’s private office received funding from the head of Vitol before the general election. Ian Taylor, the company’s chief executive and a friend of Mr Duncan, has given more than £200,000 to the Conservatives. Vitol is thought to be the only oil firm to have traded with the rebels during the Libyan conflict. Oil industry sources said that other firms including BP, Shell and Glencore had not been approached over the deal. One well-placed source said this was “very surprising” because other companies would have been keen to be involved.” (Daily Telegraph, 1 September) The other firms are unhappy with the deal and questions are likely to be raised in parliament. Enquiries are likely to be about how political donors were given the business, but no one will query the accepted fact that war and military conflict is an excellent business opportunity.

Government Paymasters

Legislation by the government to allow house building on previously designated green areas has aroused opposition, but the background to the proposals is likely to cause even more resentment. “Dozens of property firms have given a total of £3.3 million to the party over the past three years, including large gifts from companies seeking to develop rural land. Developers are also paying thousands of pounds for access to senior Tories through the Conservative Property Forum, a club of elite donors which sets up breakfast meetings to discuss planning and property issues. The disclosures are likely to provoke a new “cash-for-access” row and will give rise to fears that planning policies could have been influenced by powerful figures from the property industry.” (Daily Telegraph, 10 September) The newspaper’s fears about “powerful figures” influencing the government seem somewhat naive. The whole purpose of legislation inside capitalism is to accommodate the wishes of the owning class.

Pathfinders: Meat without the bleat (2011)

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

Meat without the bleat

Panda pie anyone? How about cheetah chow mein or koala curry? The much-anticipated arrival of in-vitro synthetic meat is almost upon us, with the first artificial pork sausage now an estimated six months away (New Scientist, 3 September). Since the animals normally used for meat are those that were historically easiest to domesticate regardless of whether they were the best tasting, this could be an opportunity to get really adventurous. And, come to think of it, why stop at living animals? With the genomes of many extinct animals now in the bag or in the pipeline it should in theory be possible to serve up dodo and dinosaur too. And for the slightly perverse gourmand what about Neanderthal? We could even find out whether it’s true what they say about ‘long pig’. And all of it pain, guilt and mostly fat and resource-free, according to the hype in which it will surely be packaged. Though no lower in energy consumption than poultry or pork production, in-vitro promises to produce about a tenth of the greenhouse gases associated with beef farming and use around five percent of the water and one percent of the land. Vegetarians should be ecstatic, and meat eaters can stop worrying about ethics. Farmyard animals should be dancing in the barns for joy as the Third Meat Revolution emancipates the worldwide Doner-tariat and slaughterhouses become overgrown with weeds. Fish can swim round the mill pond rejoicing at their imminent return from the brink of extinction.

For socialists with a serious concern for world food supplies this ought to be unequivocally welcome news. Socialism, as a society of universal free access, presupposes material abundance, or at least sufficiency, and food is at the top of the critical list. Though the world could currently support around 10 billion using third world farming methods, the diet would be unenviably drab, and probably less healthy than at any time since the first development of farming. To provide the world’s population with the kind of meat diet and general variety the West is accustomed to would take between three and five planets. With this technology however, one of socialism’s most pressing problems looks well on the way to being solved.

Hard not to get excited about, surely? Well, we don’t want to piss on anyone’s mammothburger and chips, but let’s just take a moment here. Some scientists anticipate public resistance, citing a ‘yuk factor’ response as consumers react against this ‘unnatural’ technology. A thoroughly unscientific straw poll around our office’s meat-eaters revealed that, assuming general equivalence in price, two would indeed take this view, since meat ‘ought to come from real animals’, two wouldn’t care, given what goes in today’s meat products anyway, and one would be enthusiastic for ethical reasons. This suggests that though the ‘yuk factor’ is likely to be a real phenomenon, it is not universal. It may only be a temporary reaction too, since ‘artificial’ foods like quorn have grown in popularity over time. Comparisons with Europe-wide rejection of ‘unnatural’ GM foods are rather off-beam. People don’t just object to GM because it’s ‘unnatural’, whatever that means, but also because it is largely untested and untrusted technology in the hands of untrustworthy corporations, and in the case of the notorious ‘terminator gene’, blatantly used for the purpose of ruthless profit in defiance of any conceivable human interest.

One can hope that capitalism will use in-vitro technology in the best possible way to produce the best possible products, but one should add a piquant splash of cynicism to that dish. What is just as likely to emerge is something stringy, greasy and anaemic for the labouring classes while the price of ‘real’ meat rockets along with its upper class mystique. Capitalism will certainly try to wring the best possible profit from the technology, but it may be left to socialism to find the best possible use for it.


Citizens band

Socialists with their own PCs might like to consider donating some free machine time to important scientific research projects, many of which now use distributed networks of home PCs for the huge data-crunching they need.  The SETI@home project is probably the most iconic of these, the quest to find extraterrestrial intelligence that has such a remote chance of success that wags have observed they’d do better to mount a search for terrestrial intelligence instead. Now, and with more hope of useful result, the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) is requesting home help to process the data coming from radio observatories, including the soon to be built Square Kilometre Array, itself a distributed multiple-dish telescope the effective size of a continent (‘Skynet seeks to crowdsource the stars’, BBC Online, 13 September). This is exactly how we’ll do so much science in socialism too, because quite apart from the efficiency of distributed parallel data processing, distributed human participation is the whole point, the whole socialist raison d’etre. And how amazing to be directly involved in new discoveries! But did they really have to call it Skynet? Wasn’t that the name of the rogue system that took over the world and killed everyone in the film Terminator? Oooer….


Capitalism gets smart?

The University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts and Social Science recently announced a study which used millions of press articles to predict unrest in North Africa retrospectively, and which could, say the report authors, be used to predict future conflicts (‘Supercomputer predicts revolution’, BBC Online, 9 September). While the likelihood of future conflicts in capitalism is a total no-brainer, the ability to predict just when and where would clearly be of no small advantage to the world’s ruling classes. A not dissimilar claim is being made for a system which links global unrest to climatic conditions, with the observation that conflict rose in tropical countries during hot and dry El Nino periods and fell during cool and wet La Ninas, even independently of local conditions such as droughts and famines (New Scientist, 27 August). Meanwhile IBM has built a ‘cognitive’ microchip with transistor ‘synapses’ connecting wire ‘dendrites’ in imitation of a neuron cell in the brain. By connecting such chips together IBM expects to construct a supercomputer with some 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses (the human brain has 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses), and all in about the space of a shoebox – or a brain (New Scientist, 27 August). No doubt this paragon will also be pressed into service to fathom the complexities of capitalism and predict future wars, conflicts, slumps and civil unrest. The boundless faith some scientists have in their own gadgets is truly wondrous to behold, as is this farcical idea that they can use them to expose the hidden wires of the capitalist system. We suggest that they would probably get as good a level of predictive accuracy, and significantly better analysis, if they just shelled out £1.50 for a copy of the Socialist Standard every month.

Paddy Shannon