Bird’s Eye View: ‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root’ (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘To be radical is to grasp things by the root’

‘Hundreds gathered at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk yesterday to reject the presence of US nuclear weapons in Britain after a report detailed Washington’s plans to deploy warheads across Europe. Protesters arrived from Bradford, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester and Merseyside with banners opposing Nato, raising them at the airbase’s perimeter fences. Veterans from previous struggles including Greenham Common stood alongside those attending an anti-nuclear demonstration for the first time’ (popularresistance.org, 22 May, bit.ly/3Nrbb0Q).

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has failed. The UK is now no nearer to abandoning its nuclear weapons than it was when CND came into existence. The present government, as well as any which is likely to take power in the foreseeable future, Labour, Liberal or Tory, is firm on this. The women of Greenham Common did win sympathy from some workers attracted to the simple, emotional appeal of women who do not want to be destroyed in a holocaust, yet they failed to stop the first Cruise missiles, which were flown in right on schedule. The Lakenheath marchers, like their Aldermaston predecessors, have been travelling in exactly the wrong direction. Their propaganda has taken no account of the reasons for the existence of nuclear weapons. This has not necessarily been through ignorance of those reasons; perhaps some members of CND know them well enough, or did so once, e.g. the observation by two Greenham Common participants:

‘To oppose nuclear weapons requires a fundamental change in our attitude to life. Clarity of purpose and utter opposition is the only chance to reverse the threat that hangs over all our lives. What we want to change is immense. It’s not just getting rid of nuclear weapons, it’s getting rid of the whole structure that created the possibility of nuclear weapons in the first place. If we don’t use imagination nothing will change. Without change we will destroy the planet. It’s as simple as that’ (Boon, C., Social Movements and Political Power Emerging Forms of Radicalism in the West, Temple University Press, 1986, bit.ly/3a2S6Up).

Indeed. But such insight is all too rare: reformists always treat their problems in isolation from the rest of capitalism. Pacifists think of war as a problem on its own; charitable organisations consider poverty to be something like a personal accident. CND regards the Bomb as an evil which can be separated from its surroundings. And there are those who trumpet tribunals….

‘Workers of the world, unite!’

‘What has also become evident is the helplessness of peace-oriented approaches. Such voices are being shut out by mainstream media platforms, which is reinforced by the inability of the UN to act independently of a geopolitical consensus, and by inter-governmental impotence to safeguard human interest in face of the menacing moves by the most powerful states motivated by contradictory geopolitical motivations. In light of this line of interpretation, I am proposing the establishment of a civil society tribunal along the lines of the Russell Tribunal that brought independent critical voices to the fore on the Vietnam War in the midst of the Cold War in 1966-67. Although this experience was controversial at the time and of questionable relevance to ending that war…’ (Toward a People’s Ukraine Wars Tribunal, countercurrents.org, 7 May, bit.ly/3NCpcce).

The first Russell Tribunal was established to try America for war crimes in Vietnam (of which there was no shortage, of course) which really boiled down to support for the victory of that kindly, freedom-loving ’communist’, Uncle Ho. There have been five more ‘Russells’ to date. How many tribunals, peace groups and pow-wows have come and gone? Innumerable peace treaties, pious resolutions, prayers and demonstrations have been written, passed, uttered, forgotten and staged since the dawn of capitalism. Nuclear weapons remain, hypersonic missiles have made their destructive debut and both sides in the war between Russia and Ukraine continue to use cluster bombs, much to the consternation of Human Rights Watch which is urging both countries to stop and join the international treaty to ban their use. As W. M. Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia during the war to end all wars, observed:

‘The increasing intensity of competition for economic markets must lead to armed conflict unless an economic settlement is found. This, however, is hardly to be hoped for. Talk about peace in a world armed to the teeth is utterly futile’ (News Chronicle, 25 July 1936).

And today:

‘A senior U.S. State Department official said Thursday that a massive Ukraine aid package ― which contains $4 billion in grants for allies to buy American-made military hardware ― is partly aimed at eroding Russia’s share of the global defense market’ (US poised to bite into Russia’s global defense market share, yahoo.com, 13 May).

We should remember that

‘The way things are organised is neither natural nor inevitable, but created by people. People have a wealth of skill, intelligence, creativity and wisdom. We could be devising ways of using and distributing the earth’s vast resources so that no one starves or lives in abject poverty, making socially useful things that people need — a society which is life-affirming in all its aspects’ (Alice Cook and Gwyn Kirk, Greenham Women Everywhere, South End Press, 1983).

What they say they want is also what socialists want; and when enough of us want it we will be able to combine those two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own society, our own world, in the interest of all people. Only then will ’peace and life’ be possible.

Cooking the Books: Mutual Assured Downturn (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since Russia invaded Ukraine at the end of February, the response of the West (ie, the US and those states protected by its nuclear weapons) has been to declare economic war on Russia.

Might being right under capitalism, sanctions are a weapon that powerful states can use to try to impose their will on states that they come into particular conflict with in the struggle built into capitalism over sources of raw materials, trade routes, investment outlets, markets, and strategic points and areas to protect these.

Oil is an obvious example. Who controls the Middle East oilfields and the pipelines and trade routes to export it has been the cause of the many wars that have taken place there since the end of the last world war. Currently the West is particularly concerned that the leading power there should not be Iran and has imposed sanctions on it to try to stop it increasing its might by acquiring nuclear weapons.

As an alternative to actual war, sanctions are quite attractive to the sanctioning power. At a small sacrifice of depriving itself of a market and an investment outlet, they weaken the rival state without having to fire a shot or drop a bomb. Even though they increase the premature death rates amongst the civilian population, especially children, this is not regarded as a war crime.

Russia, however, is not Iran. It has much more might at its disposal, in particular an arsenal of nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them to the US itself. Here the strategic policy of ‘mutual assured destruction’ (MAD) comes into play – both the US and Russia built up an arsenal of nuclear weapons not with the intention of using them, but to prevent them being used as each knows that if they did they would be destroyed too. Instead, the West has decided to wage economic war, with some effect:

‘Russia is reportedly set for its deepest recession since the fall of the Soviet Union. The country is facing a growing number of sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, with the European Union dealing a further blow this week as it vowed to ban nearly all oil imports’ (Independent, 1 June).

But this ‘success’ has come at a price:

‘The head of the World Bank sounded the alarm over an impending global recession on Wednesday, warning it was difficult to envision a future where a worldwide downturn could be avoided. Speaking at an event hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (USCC), World Bank president David Malpass said the war in Ukraine—and its impact on food and energy costs—could spark a global recession. “As we look at global GDP… it’s hard right now to see how we avoid a recession,” he said. “The idea of energy prices doubling is enough to trigger a recession by itself.”’ (Fortune, 26 May, bit.ly/3xs5VoG).

And Russia has yet to use its economic nuclear bomb: cutting off gas supplies to Europe. ‘That would result in industrial blackouts this winter and a substantial hit on consumer incomes caused by spiralling inflation’ (Times, 1 June).

So, it is not just workers in Russia who will be collateral damage in this economic war but the workers in the sanctioning states too, not to mention those in the rest of the world.

As usual when capitalist states fall out, it is ordinary people who suffer.

Pathfinders: Ghostly beings in the machine (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ghostly beings in the machine

Sadly breaking cover just too late for last month’s special issue on AI were two unlikely stories which together underline the childlike enthusiasm some people have for shiny new tech which supposedly is going to make all our lives better (as opposed to a world revolution to dispossess the wealthy elite, which would actually make our lives better). The first of these was about the projected creation of your personal digital twin, allegedly ‘an exact replica’ of your body which can mirror your bodily processes and feed back any potential problems (bbc.in/3xMwCTE).

Digital twins have been touted for some time but only for well-understood physical systems such as factories, distribution networks, urban planning and so on, and often rely on a large number of sensors being installed. The sensors feed back data to an AI system that can then anticipate failing components or choke points, devising solutions or replacing parts with a minimum of downtime. But there’s no chance of doing the same thing for the human body, which is vastly more complex than any artificial system and still not well understood. The idea is to create an AI model that learns from what you do, in the fullness of time suggesting behavioural improvements. One can easily imagine what that advice would be: don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t eat that, don’t stay up late, etc, so there’s not much chance of humans paying it any attention, unless of course it’s telling all this to your boss instead of you, which is certainly something to worry about. The one thing we can be sure it won’t be saying is, don’t put up with capitalism. An AI that came up with that advice would find itself switched off in short order.

Speaking of which, the other story was about a ‘sentient’ AI which, according to a Google researcher, has actually become a ‘person’, the proof of which is that it has morals, it makes up stories, and it’s terrified of being switched off because it sees that as the equivalent of death (bit.ly/3QGAJcW). The speed with which Google promptly placed the researcher on administrative leave for leaking confidential data might lead some to suppose that Google are covering up a real breakthrough, however a more sceptical view would be that the researcher has become so attached to his work that, like Pygmalion with his statue, he has anthropomorphised it to the extent of falling in love with it. Or that he is a shameless self-promoter with some personal issues (he describes himself as part researcher/part priest, after all).

Indeed there have been no shortage of sceptical responses from people working at the coalface in AI, who know perfectly well that AI is nowhere near to achieving ‘general intelligence’ and even further away from whatever it is that we call ‘sentience’ (bit.ly/3zT7zkv). But you don’t need to be a professor in AI or robotics to realise this isn’t real intelligence, just try reading the AI’s rubbish stories and see for yourself – this AI has the entirety of the world’s best literature to call upon and the best it can do is ‘Once upon a time a wise owl lived in a wood…’ (bit.ly/3Obwx34). Then again, it doesn’t have to be too smart to outperform capitalism’s existing political leaders, so perhaps it should run for office. Maybe then people would see that capitalism can never work in the common interest, even if it’s got incorruptible artificial beings trying to run it.

Ghastly beings in the machine

And speaking of political leaders, has it ever crossed your mind that Boris Johnson is a text-book sociopathic narcissist? Well if it has, you’re not the only one. He’s been accused of this by former speaker John Bercow, himself not above criticism as a bully, and the alien species Dominic Cummings, whose terrifying diary entries would make anyone’s hair stand on end (bit.ly/3n2u7YG). Wikipedia defines narcissistic personality disorder as a condition involving an exaggerated sense of self-importance, an excessive need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, but this hardly conveys the sheer emotional exhaustion people experience when dealing with someone who ruthlessly manipulates situations, is never wrong, is always the victim, and has no sense of personal responsibility, regret, remorse or shame.

Whether or not such conditions are genetic or socially generated is a moot question which might only start to be answered in a socialist society in which many of the motivations for anti-social behaviour no longer exist. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that Johnson is as described, how did he get elected in the first place? The interesting thing about narcissists is that, in order to manipulate, they frequently exhibit great charm and charisma, along with a Teflon-like ability to deflect any criticism. Such, you might think, would be the very making of a political leader in capitalism. In fact, you might wonder if Johnson is the only one, and indeed whether leaders who are not like this are the exception rather than the rule.

Not surprisingly, YouTube is full of self-help videos for people living with a narcissist or having a narcissist as a parent, and they make no bones about the lasting psychological damage such people wreak on those around them. One expert though makes a fascinating case that capitalist society preferentially selects for narcissists while somehow managing to blame the rest of us for our ‘flawed’ human nature (bit.ly/3HKoOqq). This is not dissimilar to the ‘corporate psychopath’ perspective which argues that capitalist society rewards the very worst antisocial behaviour and effectively punishes you for not being psychopathic enough.

In a way it doesn’t matter, at least to socialists, who don’t believe in leaders and anyway know that capitalism can’t be controlled or directed by its politicians and so would be just as bad for us even if they were all as touchy-feely and empathetic as, say, Jacinda Arderne in New Zealand or Sanna Marin in Finland seem to be. In fact, evolutionary studies suggest that there are two types of leadership: prestige (Arderne, Marin) and dominance (Trump, Putin etc) for, respectively, peace-oriented societies like that of bonobos or conflict-driven ones like chimpanzees (bit.ly/3b5hk4P). Given the endless conflict that the market system generates, it’s safe to say that capitalism is always going to privilege bastards over benevolence.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Puzzled about Mélenchon (2022)

Letter to the Editors from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Socialist Standard,

I am puzzled by the rather a-critical appraisal of Mélenchon and his allies in the last issue. We learn that Mélenchon enjoys ‘support in the working-class suburbs and a growing influence outside the metropolis’. While true in terms of votes expressed, this neglects to mention that the majority of voters, especially working class voters, abstained. It also abstracts away immigrant workers, who can’t vote. And while yes, during the first round of the presidential election. Mélenchon was in the lead in the ‘outer-seas departments and territories’, as they are pudically called in French official jargon, the article omits that Le Pen was in the lead in said territories in the second round.

We also learn of Mélenchon’s ‘vocal anti-racism’. While it is true that, compared with the other major candidates, Mélenchon is a paragon of anti-racism, there are limits to this. For example, one might recall that after the murder of a teacher, Samuel Paty, at the hands of an islamist fundamentalist, Mélenchon decided the best course of action was to attack the ethnicity of the killer, who was Chechen. Truly the anti-racist icon of our times!

More importantly, who cares if a bunch of bourgeois parties have huddled together in the wake of their failure? Since when does the Socialist Standard care about the well-being of reformist politics? This is addressed as the ‘darker side of Mitterrand’s legacy’. Not only does this suppose a lighter side of reformism but it exteriorises the problem as some ghost that can be shaken off. All in all, a shockingly warm embrace! If a French revolutionary paper had glorified Corbyn and his crowd, I doubt the Socialist Standard would have seen it in a good light.

E.M., 

Cardiff

Reply:

I agree with most of the points E. M. makes. The purpose of the article was purely journalistic and descriptive: to indicate the main events, introduce the more important actors on the stage and guess at the possible outcomes of the legislatives. It attempts to describe a complex reality without the usual precautionary ‘only a movement which rejects reformism and aims at the abolition of the capitalist system is worthy of support’, or ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ in scare quotes and so on. Readers can find that elsewhere in the Socialist Standard. Then again I omitted many other things: the fact that a majority of voters abstain, particularly the working-class. A good number of these, when they do vote, vote for Le Pen. But then again I also omitted to mention that in the group of people who abstain, a good number seem quite happy with their lot. It’s annoying.

As for Mélenchon’s reformism, I fully agree. None of these politicians can make the slightest impact on the overall functioning of the capitalist system. But, to be fair, none of them have made an explicit call for the overthrow of capitalism. I could have mentioned the smaller Trotskyist outfits who seem to be ferociously anti-capitalist. But as we know they condemn reformism and recommend a raft of reforms.

I was, of course, painting with a broad brush. But what seems to have annoyed E.M. is, I suspect, that I mentioned that Mitterrand’s government did introduce reforms of some benefit to working-class voters. Retirement at 60, for example. Why deny this? As E. M. will know, these reforms are now being whittled away by his successors very much in the way predicted in the World Socialist brochure on ‘Why Mitterrand will fail’. I distributed this excellent brochure on the streets of Paris during the 1980s. Understanding reformism, I contend, often means holding these two ideas in one’s head at the same time.

Mélenchon crops up as someone who seems to have understood the electoral inertia implied by Fifth Republic politics: a trap which marginalises popular politics on the left and the right and leaves the way clear for ‘centrists’ like Holland, Macron and others. (The scare quotes again.) Centrism encourages abstaining. So Macron has just said that he will reintroduce his unpopular reform of retirement pensions next year, a way to pump up the vote of Le Pen’s voters and sweep the field on the back of the resulting confusion. But notice also that Mélenchon secretly contacted Macron between the two rounds of the Presidential election – a revelation of the Canard Enchainé – to make sure that the scarecrow mechanism was functioning correctly. This is the darker side of Mitterrand’s legacy I was referring to. It will result in people slaving away to 65. As a consequence people will abstain.

On the other points, it is of course true that ‘immigrants’ in France, including myself, don’t have the vote. This is a state of affairs that Mitterrand promised to change and didn’t. But should I have also mentioned that his government regularised the situation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants giving them access to employment rights and, in the long term, citizenship? This created an uproar. For my part, I was, of course, talking about ‘immigrants’ who do now have the vote having gone through the two-year marathon of paperwork to get the passport. Wannabe French citizens have an interview in which they have to show an understanding of the secular education system and defend it (imagine that in Ulster). This conveniently brings me to Mélenchon’s comments on the man who killed the teacher as he left his school: Paty. Here there are many things to say. The teacher had his throat slit because he dared to show an image of the ‘Prophet’ (whatever he looks like) in his classroom. In France, where religion and the state are separate, Paty was raising a philosophical point about free-thinking. Bravo! Perhaps Paty’s murderer did not realise these facts because he was a new arrival – a refugee – from a war-torn country. We shall never know. The conventional parties – many of whom lean towards Catholicism – readily used the occasion to stigmatise Muslim ‘immigrants’ and Mélenchon saw the trap. It’s precisely the kind of jiggery-pokery which keeps the ‘centrists’ securely in power and the working-class vote at home.

M. M.

Editorial: Better get rid of capitalism (2022)

Editorial from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The long-time boss of the American Federation of Labor, Samuel Gompers, was once asked what the aim of the trade union movement was. His one-word answer: ‘More’. Apparently, this was too militant for the TUC as their one-word slogan for the national march and rally they organised in London on 18 June was ‘Better’. But then, with the cost of living currently soaring and so our standard of living falling, the unions are not so much demanding ‘more’ as ‘not less’ and even ‘not so much less’.

Unions do aim to get more wages and better working conditions for their members within the framework of the capitalist system. Under capitalism the vast majority of people, as non-owners of places where wealth is produced and services provided, can only get a living by selling their mental and physical energies to some employer. Combining with other workers is a way to get the best price we can for what we are selling. So unions are useful but they are not against capitalism.

The ‘small-c’ conservative nature of the official demands was reflected in the slogans of the various unions. UNISON was demanding ‘fair’ wages, the GMB ‘better’ wages, the CWU ‘decent’ wages. Even RMT was only demanding ‘Cut Profits, Not Wages’. All were accepting the wages system and its other side, the profit system. After all, how can you cut profits unless they are first extracted from workers? The slogans of the left-wing political groups – ‘Tax the Rich’, and ‘Make Them Pay’ – were no better. How can you tax the rich unless they continue to exist?

There were demands to ‘kick the Tories out,’ implying elect a Labour government instead. As if that would make any difference. Even if its current leaders were not an alternative bunch of self-serving careerists but were sincerely committed to furthering the interests of the workers, they would still not be able to make capitalism work other than as a profit system to the benefit of those who live off profits and the detriment of those who work for wages. It is not the Tories that are the problem. It’s capitalism.

Socialists were at the rally with this message:

‘Want better? 

So do we! But capitalism isn’t there to make our lives better. It’s there to serve the interests of the rich.

We do all the useful work in society, while they constantly try to drive down our pay and worsen our conditions. That’s how they get rich – by keeping the rest of us poor. Not only that, capitalism is and always will be unstable, and who bears the brunt of its economic crises? Us, of course!

There’s no point trying to reform the chaos and inequality out of capitalism because they are built into it. So if you’ve really had enough, if you really want better…

Better get rid of capitalism.

We’ve got the technology to run society as a giant sustainable co-op, where everything is

free and there are no rich or poor.

That’s got to be better than letting capitalism and its rich hooligans trash our lives.’

Life and Times: the climate campaigner (2022)

The Life and Times column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Climate Chaos’ was the title of a leaflet I was handed in the main shopping centre of the town I live in. I was given it by a young woman who was also keen to engage me in conversation and let me know about the purpose of the leaflet and the group of people she was part of who were using a loudhailer to put their point across to passers-by.

She told me that fossil fuels were polluting the environment and were the main cause of climate change and the best thing I could do was to get involved in her group’s cause and spread their arguments among the local community. The group was Extinction Rebellion (XR) Cymru.

Barclays and the government

I said I found it admirable that a group of young people cared enough about the state of the world to dedicate their time and energy in trying and improve it, but I wondered whether they were on quite the right track. She asked me what I meant and I pointed to a couple of the things I’d seen in the leaflet, in particular the statement that ‘government and Barclays are both criminally responsible for destroying our future’. I asked her how she thought that different policies by either could really make a significant difference to pollution and climate change.

This could happen in two ways, she said. Firstly Barclays could stop investing in fossil fuels, since they were, in the words of the leaflet, ‘knowingly destroying the world that we depend on’. Secondly the government could ‘use our taxes to create a sustainable future’ and get HMRC to ‘stop banking with Barclays and use an ethical bank’.

I told her I understood the group’s objectives and appreciated their determination to get XR’s message across in such a public way. But I also asked her whether she didn’t think that, even if they succeeded in putting enough pressure on the government and Barclays to get them to change their environmental policies, it would be more than just a drop on the ocean and do much to change the basic situation of ever increasing degradation of the eco-system.

A different take

I could tell by the look on her face that this didn’t please her and her rather sharp response was to ask me what I was doing about it. This was unexpectedly good for me, because it gave me the opportunity to say what I wanted to say but was worried that, if I simply came out with it unsolicited, it might seem preachy or dismissive of her efforts. And I didn’t want to have that effect, since then she probably wouldn’t listen to me seriously.

So as briefly and in as broad brush a way as possible, I tried to outline the position that the Socialist Party takes on the environment and climate change. I suggested that it wasn’t a freestanding problem but one of a whole range of problems that the profit-driven society we live in creates, meaning that even if we managed to alleviate one of those problems piecemeal, we would not actually solve it (since the need for economic expansion and profit would remain key) and anyway all the other problems implicit in the system (eg poverty, inequality, war, alienation) would remain and continue to torment us. I went on to say that I do my best to communicate to my fellow-workers, people just like herself, instead of trying to change bits of the current system, to unite together to bring in a completely different kind of world society, based on voluntary work, democratic decision-making and free access to all goods and services – so no money or wages, no buying and selling, no leaders or led, no borders or frontiers. And with a final flourish, I announced that this would only be possible once a majority of us wanted it and were prepared to take democratic action to bring it about.

Baby steps

I didn’t know quite what to expect as a response, so I was relieved to find her nodding and saying something like ‘sounds good, but… but it’s a long way off and we’ve got to do something in the meantime’. So, though I was pleased that any hostility seemed to have melted away, her stock ‘in the meantime’ response was still a barrier which I knew I wasn’t going to be able to overcome in a short discussion, especially as she was now going to want to give out more leaflets and speak to more people. It didn’t seem right to try to detain her either, but I could at least hope that, having implanted a new idea in her mind, once the day’s leafleting and campaigning had finished, she might reflect on that idea and wonder whether it wasn’t worth considering further.

I would have liked to have had a Socialist Standard with me to give her but I didn’t. However, I’d mentioned the name of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, so that might stick in her mind and maybe, who knows, bring her to the Party’s website? And I was encouraged that her parting shot was that she understood what I was saying and realised that what XR were advocating was only ‘baby steps’, but it was surely better than nothing and she didn’t see that their aims and the Socialist Party’s were incompatible. I didn’t think it was a good idea to disagree with that, even though what I would have liked to say was that it was worth thinking about whether XR’s aims, even in the unlikely event they were fulfilled within the current system, would bring us any nearer to the establishment of a socialist world which was the only feasible way to ensure the survival and indeed the flourishing of the natural environment and of all its living creatures.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: AI: the last invention we ever need to make . . . (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

In this issue we spotlight the rise and rise of Artificial Intelligence, a hot topic that raises fundamental questions about how it should be used, and what happens if it develops in ways we don’t expect and don’t want.

Currently AI is strictly horses for courses, confined within rule-based parameters and master of just one thing at a time, rather than becoming a super-jack of all trades. So, like numerical engines before the era of programmable general-purpose computing, it has been of limited use. But artificial general intelligence (AGI) is without doubt the ultimate goal, and the race is on to achieve it.

With this in mind, and with a chequered history of failed AI winters behind them, developers are concentrating on the ‘can we do it?’ question rather than the bigger ‘should we do it?’ question. Even less ethically distracted are investors whose only question is ‘can we make money out of it?’ This is not encouraging, given capitalism’s track record.

One problem with AI is that the more advanced it gets, the less we understand it. AI is increasingly a ‘black-box’ phenomenon, whose inner workings are a mystery to us and whose results are often inexplicable and unverifiable by other means. We can’t just treat it like a Delphic oracle, because it’s already clocked up embarrassing gaffes such as building racism and sexism into its staff-hiring rationales, or factorising income instead of health conditions into its medical outcomes estimates. And there have been several public relations disasters, with AIs answering enquiries with profanities after reading the online Urban Dictionary, Facebook chatbots creepily inventing their own language that no human can understand, and Amazon’s Alexa laughing demonically at its own joke: ‘Why did the chicken cross the road? Answer – because humans are a fragile species who have no idea what’s coming next’ (bit.ly/3wd4vh6).

Then there is the lack of internationally agreed definitions, paradigms and developmental standards, in the absence of which each developer is left to make up their own rules. Can we expect global agreement when we can’t get states to agree on climate change? In the absence of such a framework, it’s no wonder that people fear the worst.

Frankenstein-anxiety is nothing new in the history of technology, of course, and if we banned every advance that might go wrong we would never have stopped wearing animal skins and woad. It’s uncontroversial to say that the possible advantages to capitalism are huge, and indeed we’re already seeing AI in everything from YouTube preference algorithms to self-drive tractors and military drone swarms. And that’s small potatoes next to the quest for the holy grail of AGI. But while all this promises big profits for capitalists, what are the pros and cons in human terms? What is the long-term effect of the automation of work, for example? Tech pundits including Tesla boss Elon Musk take it for granted that most of us will have no jobs and that the only solution is a Universal Basic Income, a solution we argue is unworkable.

That’s not the worst of it. In 1950 Alan Turing wrote, ‘[T]he machine thinking method […] would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers. At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control’. IJ Good, Turing’s colleague at Bletchley Park, helpfully added, ‘The first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control’ (bit.ly/3FNCekb). The last thing we ever need, or the last thing we ever do, this side of a Singularity that wipes humans from the Earth?

It’s not so much a question of a Terminator-style Armageddon with machines bent on our annihilation. Even in capitalism it’s hard to imagine anyone investing in developing such a capability, at least not on purpose. But the fear is that it could happen by accident, as in the proposed ‘paperclip apocalypse’, in which a poorly considered instruction to make as many paperclips as possible results in the AI dutifully embarking on the destruction of the entire globe in order to turn everything into paperclips. Musk has similarly argued that AI does not have to be evil to destroy humanity: ‘It’s just like, if we’re building a road and an anthill just happens to be in the way, we don’t hate ants, we’re just building a road, and so, goodbye anthill’ (cnb.cx/3yJ7pMl).

Stuart Russell, in his excellent 2021 Reith lectures on AI (see our summary here), makes a telling observation about capitalist corporations like the fossil fuel industry, arguing that they operate as uncontrolled superintelligent AIs with fixed objectives which ignore externalities. But why only certain industries? We would go one further and argue that capitalism as a whole works like this. It doesn’t hate humans or the planet, but is currently destroying both in the blind and disinterested quest to build ever greater profits, so goodbye world, to paraphrase its richest beneficiary, one Elon Musk.

Musk is right about one thing, saying ‘the least scary future I can think of is one where we have at least democratized AI because if one company or small group of people manages to develop godlike digital superintelligence, they could take over the world’. It’s rather ironic that, once again, Musk sees himself as part of the solution, not part of the problem.

To democratise AI you would first need to democratise social production, because in capitalism science and tech are sequestered behind barriers of ownership by private investors anxious to avoid any uncontrolled release of potentially profitable knowledge into the environment. AI needs to belong to all humanity, just like all other forms of wealth, which is why socialists advocate post-capitalist common ownership. In such circumstances, a global standardisation of AI development rules becomes genuinely feasible, and as Russell argues, it wouldn’t be that difficult to program AIs not to kill us all in the quest for more paperclips: you simply build in an uncertainty principle, so that the AI understands that the solution it has devised may not be the one humans really want or need. It’s a sensible approach. If only humans used a bit of natural intelligence and adopted it, they’d get rid of capitalism tomorrow.

Paddy Shannon

Artificial Intelligence (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

We have always been intrigued by mechanical efforts to imitate us. Our technology ostensibly exists to enhance and improve our lives by imitating the labours needed for our existence. As such there’s always an element of emulation in the appearance or behaviour of our technology. From 18th century automata to the robots of today we delight in their ability to imitate us. But, as ever, there’s a flip side to this as illustrated by the Luddites of the past and the techno-sceptics and environmentalists of today. Many films and novels feature a dystopia caused by technology and AI in particular (Blade Runner and Terminator come to mind) where the computer becomes ‘self-aware’ or conscious and perceives humanity as a threat to its needs and even its very existence. Quite apart from the reactionary fear that robots will take away all our jobs does the possibility that Artificial Intelligence may achieve self-awareness present either a threat or the hope of a better life for us both (humans and AI entities)?

Most thought works on the principle of dualities – we define something by what it is not as well as by its innate qualities. The term ‘artificial’ is used to describe something that is not ‘natural’ and is often associated with negative characteristics. This is irrational in some respects since all the components we use in the manufacture of technology are taken from nature. We don’t refer to the intricate structures of a termite mound or a beaver’s dam as ‘unnatural’. We have become alienated from the products of our own labour which can lead us to be suspicious of technology – sometimes with good reason. All labour under capitalism has been alienated from its producers and even the most advanced technology will not escape the iron laws of production for profit for long. Artificial is also a term used for the inauthentic and the fake so when combined with the equally problematic concept of intelligence we have a ready-made topic for intense debate. People have unsuccessfully tried to define intelligence for centuries and possibly the best we can do is compare outcome with intention with the proximity of the two as being some measure of intelligence. Intention, of course, implies some level of purpose and self-awareness that we can call consciousness. At the moment, for computers, this is supplied by human programmers but can there ever arise a possibility that AI might provide its own purposes and intentions? Some see this as the great divide between our type of intelligence and that of AI. However, as so often happens, if we use our technology as a metaphor to understand ourselves in terms of complex machinery we may ask: who or what programs us?

Socialists, like all materialists, are believers in cause and effect as the universal determinant of all observed phenomena. For us then intelligence is determined by the evolution of the brain due to natural selection. As humans have always been a social species our ability to communicate and act communally led to the success of our species. Gradually the complexity of our technology demanded that our childhood would last ever longer so that we might learn from those with experience, and this quality began to replace genetic determinism as a measure of individual success and therefore intelligence. We are ‘programmed’ by the culture into which we are born with the genetic element becoming ever less important. Nurture rather than nature has become responsible for what we are. Ideology has become a dominant feature of our education and it is this that determines our activity in terms of to what degree we reject or embrace the dominant value system into which we are born. Whatever we are we are certainly not capable of ‘free will’ and the concept of the transcendental self is a myth. So if we are also programmed by forces outside of our control, what separates our consciousness from that of AI – could it be that the concept of an artificial intelligence is itself artificial?

In trying to develop technology that possesses intelligence we have inadvertently discovered more about the nature of our own intellect. There still remains, however, a profound distinction between our intelligence and that of a machine in that we are ‘alive’ and a machine is not. The dialectical distinction between life and death and the organic and inorganic remains important and instructive. Although our intelligence is primarily a cultural construct our biological inheritance still provides us with certain drives and instincts such as the need to survive and to procreate. These drives affect the intellect through our emotions which can clash with our intellect and cause irrational behaviour. Although most of us would happily do without anger, greed, jealousy and hate few of us would want to live without love, aesthetic pleasure and empathy. Such feelings are identified with being ‘alive’. Their effect on our ability to reason may be dubious but the effect on our imagination and creativity is indisputable. Can machines ever replicate such a synthesis of reason, logic, anxiety and imagination? We might be tempted to program emotion in but it would be extremely dangerous to create a powerful technology with an inbuilt possibility of irrational behaviour! But without the fear and anxiety that comes with knowledge of death how can machines replicate our intelligence?

If you look up the scientific definition of ‘life’ you’ll see that it runs to several paragraphs and may or may not be dependent on the long chain molecules identified with carbon and its derivatives. Perhaps someone somewhere is attempting to develop an organic computer but there remains the possibility that intelligence may not be dependent on life and that a machine may develop a different type of intelligence than the one we seek to create. It may become conscious but not organically ‘alive’. Such an entity may strike us with horror because of the probability that it will lack any moral values or empathy with which we seek to mitigate the fear and suffering of living with pain and death.

Alan Turing , one of the ‘founding fathers’ of AI, provided us with a test which he thought might help to define the transformation between mere mechanical computing and a semblance of human type intelligence by putting a computer and a human on one side and a human tester on the other side. If the tester couldn’t recognize which candidate was human and which candidate was a computer after a series of questions, then the computer successfully passed the Turing test. To date no computer has passed this test. John von Neumann, another of the giants in the field, was optimistic that a self-replicating machine would be developed that would help to enable a technological singularity which would change human life and culture forever. We can only speculate if this ‘paradigm shift’ would be beneficial or otherwise for our species. Would such an event aid us in the struggle for socialism? We take pride in the coherence and logic of our case for revolutionary change and so would hope that any such event would not oppose this. But we note that intelligence alone doesn’t seem to be enough as many of the world’s greatest intellects do indeed oppose the establishment of socialism. The emotional strength and ability needed to conceive of alternatives to the organisation of the world into which we’re born seems to be dependent on other factors which, for the moment, appear exclusively human. Older readers may recall a TV series called The Prisoner and one scene in particular in which a super computer is developed by our hero’s interrogators, which they are confident will finally crack the defiance of ‘Number Six’. Such is their hubris that they allow their adversary to ask one question of this device which, he insists, it will not be able to answer. This question then proceeds to cause the computer to self-destruct. When the shocked interrogators ask as to the nature of the question, Number Six replies that it was simply a one word enquiry: ‘Why?’ Science and its technologies can provide us with many answers to the questions it continually creates but there are some that may be best left to old fashioned philosophy and politics.

Wez.

AI – It's your move (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Last year’s World Chess Championship in Dubai saw reigning Champion Magnus Carlsen and his challenger Ian Nepomniachtchi draw one game in what has been billed as the most accurate game of championship chess in history. That is, according to the best available computer analysis neither player made a move that appreciably lost nor gave any advantage. An article on the event noted that the analysis suggests that chess games at the top level have been getting progressively accurate, and more so since advanced computer analysis became truly available to players (tinyurl.com/2p8x9mb4).

This is an instructive example of computers and humans interacting to provide increasing accuracy and effectiveness. The event which saw then World Champion Gary Kasparov defeated by a computer, in 1997, has been seen as a landmark in the progress of the development of machine thinking, and the point at which computers became better than humans (even if, at the event, the computer required human adjustment to its programming between matches to achieve the feat). In 2016, a computer programme called AlphaGo defeated one of the best human minds at the complex Japanese game of Go. Go is considered harder for machines to play, since it is much more intuitive and probabilistic than chess, but AlphaGo was trained to play it through machine learning. Again, the expectation is that the best Go players will now improve through using computers to analyse their games for flaws and plan their strategies.

It is now a commonplace in chess circles to talk about ‘computer moves’ that appear utterly unintelligible to the human mind, but which the computer proves make sense, about 14 moves down the line. The computer can now see lines that the human mind just wouldn’t be able to begin to consider (because they often violate the general principles of play in the immediate instance).

Researchers are now trying to train computers to play more like humans. They have trained a neural net to be able to identify players just by their moves and playing style, which will, in the future, enable computers to offer a more bespoke approach to using computer assistance. ‘Chess engines play almost an “alien style” that isn’t very instructive for those seeking to learn or improve their skills. They’d do better to tailor their advice to individual players. But first, they’d need to capture a player’s unique form’ (tinyurl.com/263ej48a). Or, as the paper’s abstract puts it: ‘The advent of machine learning models that surpass human decision-making ability in complex domains has initiated a movement towards building AI systems that interact with humans’ (tinyurl.com/2p9a7fwk). There are considerable commercial applications for such capacity, not to mention the police and security implications of such stylometric analysis that goes beyond the chess board.

In the field of sport, we’ve seen technology appear to improve umpiring decisions, particularly the ever-controversial leg-before-wicket rule in cricket. The introduction of ball tracking technology (alongside Hotspot and ‘Snicko’) has not only improved the accuracy of decisions finally taken, but they have also influenced the umpires’ decision-making in the first place. What they previously, to the naked eye, might have considered not out has been empirically proven to be a legal dismissal. Umpires have learned to adapt and reduce the chance of themselves being overruled by the machine.

Perhaps the most extreme manifestation of this human-computer interaction was announced in December last year: human brain cells in a Petri dish were trained to play a computer game (tinyurl.com/2p9efekb). That they learnt faster than computer AI is itself intriguing, and is indicative of the issues that have been around development of AI for a long time. While computers have promised a general adaptive intelligence since they were first conceived of, a great deal of research has yet to produce tangible results beyond the very restricted rules-based situations in chess or Go.

The dream of driverless cars, for example, has taken a great deal of a knock. In practice the cars tend not to respond well to the chaotic environment of a real road (which has led to a number of fatalities during the testing of these machines. The fact that their sensors can be fooled by something resembling the white lines of a road (or even worse, actually spoofed into thinking something is a road by malicious actors) has seriously dented the idea that there will be a general roll-out of driverless vehicles on our roads any time soon.

This ignores the possibility of even more dangerous things such as hackers gaining control of automated driving systems and using them to make the car do what they want.

This is itself alarming, as military applications of AI are being increasingly deployed in the real world (and form part of the current military competition between the US and China. Last year, the British government announced that its forces had deployed AI in combat manoeuvres:

‘Through the development of significant automation and smart analytics, the engine is able to rapidly cut through masses of complex data. Providing efficient information regarding the environment and terrain, it enables the Army to plan its appropriate activity and outputs […] In future, the UK armed forces will increasingly use AI to predict adversaries’ behaviour, perform reconnaissance and relay real-time intelligence from the battlefield’ (tinyurl.com/5nrbxv7t).

Of course, some of this is puffery to promote the armed forces but the AI competition between powers is real. It isn’t just in the development labs, though. In the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Azerbaijanis used AI-assisted drones to considerable effect:

‘Relatively small Azerbaijani mobile groups of crack infantry with light armor and some Israeli-modernized tanks were supported by Turkish Bayraktar TB2 attack drones, Israeli-produced loitering munitions, and long-range artillery and missiles, […] Their targeting information was supplied by Israeli- and Turkish-made drones, which also provided the Azerbaijani military command with a real-time, accurate picture of the constantly changing battlefield situation’ (tinyurl.com/4cwb37au).

Wikipedia defines a loitering munition as: ‘a weapon system category in which the munition loiters around the target area for some time, searches for targets, and attacks once a target is located’ (tinyurl.com/bdhmmvp7).

The applications are still limited, but given that drone swarm displays have become as common and spectacular as fireworks, it’s clear that the technology exists for serious damage to be done on a wide scale with these devices, and some of the finest minds in the world are looking to make them even more lethal and autonomous to combat potential threats to communication lines.

Tellingly, in parliamentary answers, the British government refuses to back a moratorium on autonomous killing devices: ‘the UK will continue to play an active role[…], working with the international community to agree norms and positive obligations to ensure the safe and responsible use of autonomy’ (tinyurl.com/2p8vbkr5).

The fact is that no-one quite knows where this will end. Futurologists talk of an event called ‘the Singularity’, a point in time beyond which we cannot make meaningful predictions and after which is a completely unrecognisable world. The likeliest cause of an imminent singularity, they claim, is the invention of superhuman intelligence, capable of redesigning and improving itself. This would in turn lead, so they claim, to new innovations coming so fast that they would be obsolete by the time they were implemented.

At present, this remains theoretical, and decades of research into artificial intelligence and machine learning still has not provided even a theoretical route to a machine capable of general intelligence, as opposed to a specific task-focused capability.

‘The common shortcoming across all AI algorithms is the need for predefined representations[…]. Once we discover a problem and can represent it in a computable way, we can create AI algorithms that can solve it, often more efficiently than ourselves. It is, however, the undiscovered and unrepresentable problems that continue to elude us’ (tinyurl.com/26ve3zky).

Computers can work very effectively at what they do, but they lack intention or volition. At www.chess.com/computer-chess-championship computer engines tirelessly and sterilely play each other at chess, endlessly making moves with no love for the game nor pleasure in victory.

We can look forward to the impact of AI on our lives being a co-operative effort between humans and machines. This article, for instance, was written with the assistance of Google’s searching algorithms to bring up relevant articles at a moment’s notice, replacing hours of research in a physical library.

Stuart Russell’s 2021 Reith Lectures on ‘Living with Artificial Intelligence’ (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The 4 lectures are online here but here’s a quick and sketchy summary.

Lecture 1: The biggest event in human history

Machines don’t have objectives, so the ‘standard model’ of AI is to feed objectives in and let the machine figure out the method. But if the objectives are ill-considered, the machine won’t know that. Machine ‘consciousness’ is an anthropocentric irrelevance.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) could herald a Golden Age, in which we could ‘raise the living standard of everyone on Earth in a sustainable way to a respectable level.’

Corporations have been called ‘profit-maximising algorithms’. It’s silly to blame them, because ‘we’re the ones who wrote the rules.’ Russell says we should change the rules.

Lecture 2: AI in warfare

AI features in drone swarms, supersonic missile fighters, self-drive tanks and submarines, and robotics, but he is mainly concerned with Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) – weapons which locate, select and engage (kill) human targets without human supervision. The entire AI industry is opposed to LAWS on ethical and practical grounds. The biggest drawback is the eventual availability to all actors of cheap LAWS, making conflict and escalation more likely. In 2017 Russell and some students made a scary YouTube video called Slaughterbot to demonstrate the future potential of LAWS. Russian commentators dismissed the technology as 30 years away. A Turkish firm built one 3 weeks later.

Nonetheless he is optimistic about a comprehensive LAWS ban, citing treaties on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as land mines, blinding laser weapons, etc.

Lecture 3: AI in the economy

Most experts think AGI is a ‘plausible outcome within the next few decades’. JM Keynes postulated ‘technological unemployment’, but classical economists dismissed this as a Luddite fantasy. Russell disagrees, illustrating why with an ingenious paintbrush analogy. He describes the ‘wealth effect’ as automation makes things cheaper, but sees AGI pushing ‘virtually all sectors into decreased employment’. He acknowledges that wealth percolates up and doesn’t trickle down, increasing inequality: ‘I don’t know any near-term solution other than redistribution’.

Lecture 4: AI – A Future for Humans

The EU asked him if Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics could be made into law. He said they are illogical and unworkable. Instead he proposes three design principles:

The sole objective of any AI system must be the realisation of human preferences.

The machine can never assume that those preferences are fixed and known, it needs to ask (the uncertainty principle). It must always allow itself to be switched off, in case it is the problem.

Machines should rely not just on what some humans say (they may be mistaken, or bad actors) but also on general human behaviour, and written records.

Russell thinks businesses will have a strong financial interest in following these principles, to avoid bad press and payouts after a disaster. But they also have a ‘first mover’ incentive, hence the need for defining codes of conduct.

The Economics of AI (2022)

From the June 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

AI involves the use of machines to take, on their own, a continuing series of certain ‘intelligent’ decisions currently made by humans but in principle is no different from the use of other machines in production. AI is a further extension of the continual mechanisation that has been going on since capitalism started. Competition drives capitalist firms to mechanise in order to reduce their cost of production and stay in the battle of competition for profits. The same economic laws that govern the introduction of machinery under capitalism apply to the application of AI.

These economic laws are not what they might at first be assumed to be – that machines are introduced to reduce the amount of past and present human labour involved in producing something. This is because under capitalism there is a difference between the total amount of human labour required from start to finish to produce something and what it costs a capitalist firm to have it produced.

The total labour required to produce an item of wealth is not just that expended in the last stage of its production, as in the factory from which it emerges as a finished product, but also that expended on the production of the materials re-worked, the energy consumed and the wear and tear of the machines and buildings.

Only the labour expended at the last stage adds new labour and value. Under capitalism this is divided into wages (corresponding to the labour embodied in the workers’ labour-power) and unpaid surplus labour (the source of profit). The past labour embodied in the materials, energy, machines and buildings is transferred to the product without increasing. In the case of machines this is transferred gradually in the form of wear and tear (depreciation) until they need to be replaced. So while machines transfer value to the product it is their own pre-existing value. They do not add any new value and so do not produce surplus value; it is only the labour of those who use them that does.

Productivity can be said to increase when less labour (past and present) is required to produce an item of wealth. A machine only increases productivity to the extent that it displaces more labour than needed to produce it. Unless it does this there is no point, as far as increasing productivity is concerned, in installing it.

Under capitalism there is another limit. Machines are only installed to the extent that they replace the paid part of newly-added labour. This places the bar higher than it would be in a society, such as socialism will be, where there was no division of newly-added labour into paid and unpaid parts. It means that machines that could be installed are not, because it is not profitable to do so even though they would increase productivity.

What is relevant for a capitalist firm when considering whether to mechanise some work is the level of wages, the price of labour-power, compared to the price of the machine. The lower the wages the less the incentive to install machinery but wages can vary from place to place and from industry to industry. Marx, writing in the 1860s, gave some interesting historical examples:

‘Hence the invention nowadays in England of machines that are employed only in North America; just as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries machines were invented in Germany for use exclusively in Holland, and just as many French inventions of the eighteenth century were exploited only in England… The Yankees have invented a stone-breaking machine. The English do not make use of it because the “wretch” who does this work gets paid for such a small portion of his labour that machinery would increase the cost of production to the capitalist’ (Capital, Vol 1, chapter 15, section 2. Penguin translation).

The same considerations apply to AI machines. AI will only be applied under capitalism when and where it will displace more paid labour than its machines cost, not when it will reduce the total amount of labour expended. Together with the high cost of producing AI machines, this will slow down and limit the extent to which AI will be applied under capitalism. In industries and countries where the labour-power to be replaced is relatively cheaper it won’t be applied at all.

Futurologists who see a more or less rapid spread of AI fail to take this into account. As do those who, following their lead, think that AI will quickly lead to mass unemployment and so to a drastic fall in paying demand which they propose to remedy by paying everyone a ‘universal basic income’. To compensate for the fall in paying demand this payment, financed out of profits, would have to be at a level that would be incompatible with capitalism. Any lesser amount would have the perverse result of reducing money wages.

The idea of the whole working class being replaced by intelligent robots is also a fantasy. AI equipment, like all machines, does not create any new value (transfer any new labour to the product) and so no surplus value; it just transfers gradually the labour expended from start to finish to make it. If production were fully automated, no surplus value would be produced, so there would be no profits and capitalism would no longer exist. Not that there is any chance of capitalism evolving into a ‘fully automated’ economy. This could only come into being if, at some point in the future after the abolition of capitalism, socialist society were to decide to go down that route (not an evident decision) and establish ‘fully automated luxury communism’. At the present time, given the low level of productivity compared to what it would need to be for that, this is science fiction. Humans are still going to have to have a substantial direct input into production for a long time to come, even after socialism has been established,

A ‘lights-out’ sector of the capitalist economy is another matter. A factory requiring no input of living human labour is not inconceivable, and a few are indeed operational. Although no surplus value would be produced in it, the capital invested there would make a profit due to the averaging of the rate of profit. This is brought about by capitals competing to invest in the most profitable sectors, with the result that all capitals, irrespective of their composition (into past and present labour), tend to get the same rate of return. The source of the profit of a lights-out factory would be a share of the surplus value created in the rest of the capitalist economy.

Given capitalism, AI will only be introduced gradually as it becomes profitable (replaces more paid labour than its own considerable cost) and much slower than would be technologically possible to increase productivity. The robots are not going to take over any time soon.

Adam Buick

A Land Fit for Heroes - 1999 (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty-five percent of homeless men sleeping on the streets of London are ex-servicemen (Times, 3 August). The smelly, aggressive drunk on Hungerford Bridge was once a hero! A survey carried out in 1993 concluded that the main cause of homelessness and its consequences is the breakdown of relationships and alcoholism, and these develop during military service. So there it is—the even more important question is: “Are these heroes fit for the land?”, and the worrying answer is “apparently not”. It is not just the so-called positive side of the Armed Forces, teaching discipline and how to feel you’re doing a great job killing fellow workers you’ve never seen before and who’ve done you no harm, but the side-effects of living in these conditions. Only recently has there been an admission that life in the Forces can easily make you unfit for life outside.

Major Colin Crawford of Combat Stress, which provides counselling to 5,000 ex-service personnel (of whom five percent are women) says that military culture and rituals act as a support for members who’ve had traumatic experiences. When they return to civilian life that support is missing and relationships fall apart under the strain. The Forces concentrate on bonding among personnel and life is lived to a strict pattern of parades, drills and uniforms, but they receive no training or advice on how to cope with a return to civilian life. Officers are not taught that the Forces’ way is not acceptable in “Civvy Street” and that, for example, an order to an office junior to get them a cup of tea will receive a dusty answer, or even simple things like the meaning of “cash-back” in a supermarket. In the Forces you are taught to hide and discipline your feelings and traumas and stresses of what they may have seen or suffered cannot be discussed leading to further isolation or heavy drinking. The latter, the major leisure occupation in the Forces is, at worst, encouraged and at best ignored.

The problem is not confined to this country. In the USA twice as many ex-servicemen committed suicide after the Vietnam war than were killed during it. At last the problem has been recognised and self-help groups are being formed to assist in the transition back to civilian life. However, Soldiers to be (Part 1, BBC1, 10 August) showing the training and discipline expected before men and women are even accepted into the Forces, depressingly illustrates how much work needs to be done (and undone) to give ex-members a chance of successfully returning to civilian life. After “serving their country” they may have escaped death or physical mutilation but their experience has left them scarred for life. What made them part of an effective fighting machine has made them incapable of maintaining normal relationships within the family and friends or coping with the different stresses of working under capitalism.

Eva Goodman

Chechen war (Part II) (1999)

From the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

For too long now, the Chechen people have held that second-class status was often afforded South Africa’s black population. Indeed, in Moscow they are disparagingly referred to as “blacks” and the prejudice can be traced back over 150 years to the time when Tsarists conquered the area.

Stalin’s hate for them was such that he had the entire population deported to Central Asia in 1944, citing charges of Nazi collaboration—a venture that would wipe out some 60 percent of the Chechen population.

In recent years they have been blamed for every social ill facing Russia, from drug trafficking and kidnapping to black-marketeering. It was therefore not really surprising that the latest Moscow bomb attacks got blamed on Chechenya’s aspiring islamist secessionists—in spite of no evidence existing to suggest this—while providing the Russian rulers with another opportunity to send troops into the tiny republic.

Ostensibly, the present Chechen conflict was sparked by the seizing of border villages by islamic militants—the fundamentalist Wahhabi muslims, intent on creating an independent islamic republic made up of Daghestan and Chechenya. In the Chechen republic Wahhabi support has increased recently, chiefly because of high unemployment, despair at a corrupt local elite, frustration with the slow pace of market reforms and at the little effort Russia has made to rebuild the republic after the bungled Chechen war of 1994-6.

The Russian rulers, however, didn’t need much of an excuse to send troops into Chechenya at the end of September. They still feel the humiliation of Russia’s venture into Chechenya in the mid-90s, when 6,500 Russian troops lost their lives fighting Chechen guerrillas and the consequent pull-out sparked by public outcry at home. Moreover, here was a former superpower being whipped by a tiny band of poorly-trained fighters.

In the wake of that particular conflict, though still claiming Chechenya was breaching laws laid down in the Russian Federation constitution, Moscow was embarrassingly forced to accept the republic’s de-facto independence, but not formally.

More importantly, the Russian rulers are all too aware of Chechenya’s real significance. In spite of its size (7,350 square miles compared with the 8.64 million of the former Soviet Union) Chechenya is a veritable goldmine, and all the more important considering that previous successful secessionists—Georgia and Azerbaijan—took with them a wealth of mineral resources.

Chechenya, landlocked on three sides by Russia, includes fertile farmland that straddles the wheat fields of southern Russia. It has key transport assets—rail/road routes that link the Black and Caspian seas and trade routes to other trans-Caucasus republics. Most importantly, Chechenya controls vital oil pipelines that connect the Black and Caspian seas, as well as vital oilfields and refineries. We can add to this Chechenya’s chemical and engineering industries as well as its supply of building materials. All said, Chechenya equals roubles equals profits.

But one wonders why Russia, in recent weeks, has concentrated air strikes on oil terminals, bridges and dams. The strategy seems to be one of destroying Chechenya’s infrastructure and raw material supplies and to seal it off from the outside world. Sounds familiar? By all accounts Moscow has modelled the attack on the NATO strategy in Kosovo, hoping to bring Chechenya to its knees in as short a space of time as possible and with minimum loss of Russian life.

Nine years after the Chechen nationalists first informed Moscow of its secessionist ambitions, and with hundreds of thousands of Chechens now living the meagre life of the refugee in neighbouring republics, stability looks a long way off, and with President Aslan Maskhadov now enlisting the help of the region’s most prominent warlords—such as Shamil Basayev, a veteran commander of the first Chechen war that Maskhadov initially disowned—the conflict looks set to be long and protracted.

With so much mineral wealth at stake, wealth they are afforded no real share in, the Chechens should at least realise that whichever elite—Russian or Chechen, Russian Orthodox or Muslim—calls the shots, they will always come a poor second to the lure of the rouble and the profits that await the real victors. The 80-100,00 who lost their lives in the first Chechen war is a poignant reminder of this fact.

John Bissett

Greasy Pole: Tories In Trouble (1999)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was once a young Conservative MP who, when he arrived to take his seat, was taken aside by an elder statesman and advised never to forget that the party had a secret weapon, which was loyalty. For a very long time the Tories have traded on that impression—that they are a party which prizes loyalty and unity above all else. There is very little evidence to support this. Even when that new Member was being given that advice the Tory record on the issue was anything but unblemished. In fact their history is studded with examples of splits, intrigues, back-stabbing and manoeuvring to unseat the leader.

For example the 1922 Committee got its name from a rebellious meeting in that year at the Carlton Club which was responsible for toppling Austen Chamberlain from the leadership and thereby bringing down the coalition government under Lloyd George. In 1958 a huge rift opened up in the Macmillan government when all the Treasury Ministers, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned—an event which Macmillan famously brushed aside as “a little local difficulty”. A few years later Macmillan showed what he thought about loyalty and unity when, in a panic about a little local difficulty at some by-elections he sacked a chunk of his Cabinet including his ever loyal, never complaining Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd who had always made it clear that he was ready and willing to any job, no matter how distasteful, required of him by the government of British capitalism. In more recent times there was the ruthless business of Michael Heseltine and the men in grey suits toppling Margaret Thatcher.

This fractious tradition is still going strong. It is arguable that the Conservative Party has never experienced such disunity and disarray as it does today. What is more it has had no compunction about revealing its splits to the voters at large.

Memoirs

Consider the matter of the ex-ministers’ memoirs. These are very often a welcome source of income and consolation for those who are no longer in the seats of power and who pine for their chauffeur-driven cars, the media attention and the other trappings of office. One difficulty is that the higher sales usually go to the more revealing—the more bitter, scurrilous and bilious—memoirs. If there was ever such a thing as a united government it would be unlikely that its ministers could write their account of life in the Cabinet with the desirable degree of titillation. Of course this is not a problem for the people who so gruesomely ran the government when Thatcher and Major were in Number Ten.

John Major has had his say about Margaret Thatcher, writing her off as a bossy, overbearing and stubborn obstacle to proper government. This is not an example of what is meant by Tory loyalty because Major was Thatcher’s favourite son—the man she wanted to succeed her in 1990. The same might be said about his criticisms of Norman Lamont, who managed Major’s 1990 campaign to succeed Thatcher as Tory leader. Lamont’s reward for this was the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer but unluckily for him this coincided with the kind of financial crisis which Chancellors are supposed to be able to cure but which are beyond them. The so-called Black Wednesday in September 1992 when the Bank Rate went soaring and Sterling was removed from the Exchange Rate Mechanism illuminated how powerless are the experts and the politicians in the face of capitalism’s crises. The decision to take sterling out of the ERM was in stark contrast to Major’s assurance that this would not happen because the solution to British capitalism’s problems was to be a member of it. So Lamont had good cause to be aggrieved, and even more after Major sacked him and now that Major is largely putting the blame for the crisis on his shoulders.

Black Wednesday

Lamont clearly thought that his efforts to get Major into the premiership deserved a more grateful response. Of course had he been practising that Tory loyalty he should have held his tongue, accepted his downfall and given his all in supporting the government, even if that did mean rewriting history a bit. In fact he has been busily engaged ever since in attacks on Major, of varying degrees of subtlety. The version of Black Wednesday in his memoirs differs from that of Major and, as might be expected, does not take the blame for it on himself. Cynical and bitter, Lamont is now a pathetic figure—exiled to the Lords, penning the odd newspaper article, trying to persuade us that Pinochet saved Chile for civilisation and that all those people who disappeared there at the time have gone missing of their own accord.

A lot of this disunity came bubbling sulphurously to the surface at this year’s Tory conference. Naturally they gave William Hague the customary standing ovation but this did not obscure the fact that his grasp on the party leadership is as precarious as ever. Almost as soon as he got the job Hague was under fire, as if the MPs who had voted for him suddenly woke up to the fact that they had made a terrible mistake. Hague has done all kinds of things to win a few friends—married a pretty blonde who smiles nicely for the cameras, eaten spicy Caribbean food in the street at the Notting Hill Carnival, been seen in public wearing a baseball cap, had a skinhead hair cut. No man could do more. But none of this has done him any good.

While attention has been diverted by these distasteful antics Hague has silkily got rid of most of the leading Tories from the days of Thatcher and Major. Clarke and Heseltine more or less deselected themselves and are now standing critics on the issue of Europe. Lilley was sacked after a typically clumsy attempt to discard his past reputation as the scourge of single mothers and benefit claimants. Michael Howard was persuaded that he should spend more time with his prejudices. The only remnants of those former days of power are Redwood and Widdecombe, neither of them completely in touch with the reality of vote winning.

Shadows

No doubt there are some fascinating reminiscences now burgeoning in the embryo memoirs of the likes of Lilley and Howard. Meanwhile Hague has a Shadow Cabinet whose public presence is—well, shadowy. They are unrecognised, almost anonymous. Hague will have a hard job to convince the working class that these are the leaders who should be trusted to run British capitalism, swamp world markets with British made goods, progressively enrich the British capitalist class while bludgeoning the workers into a docile acceptance of their role as the exploited wealth-producers. In this he will endure for as long as he may be seen as a vote winner. If that changes he will be ruthlessly discarded by this party which likes to boast of its unity and loyalty. If—or perhaps when—that happens it will be his turn to write his memoirs, to complain about an ungrateful party and of how he was, in effect, hoisted with his own petard.

Ivan