The Banality of Everyday Life (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

"As poverty has been reduced in terms of mere material survival, it has become more profound in terms of our way of life . . ."

6.30am. Get up, get dressed, go downstairs. Put the kettle on and tune in to the relentless drone of the TV. Some reporter in battle fatigues is bringing the dead victims of corporate America to you live, right to your breakfast table. Sanitised images of a dirty war wash over you while you eat cornflakes: smiling men in uniform, tanks crossing a desert, explosions at night, thin, barefoot children petted by US marines. You're not quite sure whether this is real or a re-run of some old propaganda film; you can't quite make the connection between blasts in the sky and people dying. But you haven't time to think or feel: you wash, brush your teeth, put on your coat and are out of the door.

"The crowd commutes in a brutish weariness . . . "

Getting on the bus you ignore the woman struggling with a pushchair and the madman who tells you to fuck off. On public transport you meet your fellow workers in an atmosphere of shared tedium that stifles communication. Sitting next to a face as blank as yours, you protect your body space and avoid eye contact. Jolted around on a grimy bus, you keep your head down and blend with the herd. Welcome to the morning rush hour.

Already you're thinking of what you'll do when the daily grind is over. Outside work, you can be yourself. Outside work, time is your own. Except that it's packaged up, advertised and sold back to you as free time: time to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken, time to drink Budweiser, time to wear Adidas, time to holiday in Ibiza. A measured amount of time freed up for consumption.

"The obligation to work alienates the passion for creation . . ."

At work, time is money. You work hard, performing your tasks efficiently but with a bored detachment. Tapping at the keys of a computer, you churn out meaningless words and numbers; on the assembly line you churn out shoddy goods in the name of mass production. It never occurs to you that before it became labour, work was creative, the pleasure taken in it offsetting the hours of effort. It never occurs to you that once people had control over how and when they worked. Lacking creative work and control, you have only wages to ameliorate your labour.

But money buys illusions. You don't just buy a car, a washing machine, a pair of trainers; you buy self-expression, individuality, contentment, a way of life. Created by marketing gurus and peddled through the media, lifestyles come conveniently packaged at the local department store. Happiness is carried home in a plastic bag. You consume illusions. Retail is therapy.

"Forgetting life, one identifies with a range of images . . ."

The evening rush hour: same as the morning, but in reverse

You get home, make something to eat, put up your feet and turn on the TV. The familiar round of soaps, game shows and reality TV, schedule your week: Monday, Coronation Street; Tuesday, Who Wants to be a Millionaire; Wednesday, Big Brother.

On the small screen, celebrities enjoy romance and adventure on your behalf. You watch passively as they compensate for your inability to lead a fulfilling life. Relating more to a character in a soap than to your neighbour, you're under the illusion of sharing a real human relationship. Separated from your fellow human beings, an illusory connection is better than no connection.

Waking from a doze, you turn off the TV and crawl up to bed. Before sleep you consider tomorrow's routine: same shit, different day. You don't think that there's a better way to live. You don't think you have the power to change things. Yet the house of cards is built on your complicity. We have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom. You sleep. You don't dream.

Lynn Wright

An Open Letter to the Workers of the World (2004)

From the May 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow Workers,

The world we live in at the beginning of the 21st century is one that is fraught with contradiction. Some 800 million of our fellow humans are chronically malnourished and at least 1.2 billion will, on any one day, go without food. At the same time, the governments of the world order the destruction of vast mountains of food to keep prices high, stockpile food until it rots and pay farmers to take land out of production because the laws of supply and demand insist that overproduction is bad for the market.

Some 600 million of our fellow humans are homeless, many sleeping rough on the streets of the worlds cities, yet there is no shortage of vacant buildings countless millions of acres of empty living space in the major cities of the world and certainly no shortage of building materials or skilled builders and craftsmen presently out of work. Again, we find that the market not only dictates who does and does not eat, but who does and does not sleep comfortably.

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

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

The list is as endless as it is insane. At every turn we find evidence of how capitalism destroys us physically and mentally, retarding real human development. At every turn we come smack up against the iron law of our age cant pay, cant have. At every turn we find capitalism running wild like a rabid dog, infecting all it comes into contact with.

Credit where credit is due. Capitalism has enabled us to carry out some pretty fantastic technological and scientific feats. Advances in warfare sparked a race for rocket technology that has enabled us explore the furthest limits of the solar system. The search for oil and other resources has allowed us to plumb the deepest oceans and map out the ocean beds. We can split the atom, map the human genome, and perform the most amazing organ transplants. Nothing, it seems, is beyond us. Our productive powers are unprecedented. Our capabilities are awe-inspiring. Sadly, however, and in spite of the technology at our disposal, the never-ending battle for profits means that we have entered the 21st century dragging with us every social ill that plagued the previous century.  War, hunger, poverty, disease, and homelessness are still making the headlines, and each of these problems is, to a lesser or greater degree, rooted in the way we continue to organise ourselves for production. The terrible irony is that we are already capable of solving the major problems that face us. Indeed, we have been capable of solving them for quite some time though obviously never within the context of capitalism.

Over 20 years ago, the World Health Organisation revealed that the technology existed to feed a world population twelve times its (then) size. Five years ago the UN reported that Africa could easily feed a population six times its current size if western farming technology was introduced. Science and technology are in fact so advanced as to enable us to solve all these problems. However, the requirements of profit everywhere act as a stumbling block not only to the full use of the productive forces, but also to the full and unhindered use of science and technology in the service of humanity.

Socialists long ago realised that the problems we face are in fact social problems, not natural ones or the vengeance of gods social problems because they have their roots in the way our world is organised for production, that is production for profit, not need. If you think seriously about it, youll be hard pressed to find any aspect of our lives that is not subordinated to the requirements of profit. This is the case the world over. We are all of us at the mercy of the anarchic laws of capitalism.

What is to be done?

If this is the case, then what can we do about it? Socialists, real socialists, believe the only way forward lies in abolishing the money/wages/profit system that we know as capitalism and establishing a world socialist society or, in other words, a world of free access to the benefits of civilisation. Only then can we gain real control over our world and reassert control over our own destiny. Only then can we produce without polluting our world and only then can we enjoy a world in which there is no waste or want or war.

Since 1904, the Socialist Party has been advocating the establishment of such a world system: a global system of society based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, by and in the interests of all people.

We advocate a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders, states or governments or armies. A world devoid of money or wages, exchange, buying or selling. A world in which people give freely of their abilities and take according to their own self-defined needs from the stockpile of wealth. A global system in which each person has a free and democratic say in how their world is run.

Human nature no barrier

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

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

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

Socialists hold that because we can adapt our behaviour, the desire to cooperate should not be viewed as irrational. We hold that humans are, by nature, cooperative and that we work best when faced with the worst and that our humanity shines through when the odds are stacked against us. There are millions of cases of people donating their blood and organs to complete strangers, sacrificing their lives for others, of people giving countless hours of their free time to charitable work all of this without financial incentive. There is even the case of a man throwing himself on top of a grenade to protect children in a school yard. He died to protect children, none of which were his own, and in the instant knowledge that his action was suicidal.

Today, world capitalism threatens the human race with extinction. The reason this obnoxious system survives is because we have been conditioned to accept it, not born to perpetuate it. Rest assured, no gene inclines us to defend the profit system.

Not been tried

Many we come into contact with tell us that socialism has already been tried and has failed. They then point to the former Soviet Union, to China, Cuba and a dozen other states that claimed to have established socialism. What they fail to grasp is that socialism has existed nowhere, and that what existed being passed off as socialism was in fact state capitalism, not socialism or communism (which mean the same thing). A cursory glance at the affairs of these countries reveals they never abolished the wages system. The rulers exploited their workers and outlawed dissent. They produced when only viable to do so, maintained commodity production, traded according to the dictates of international capital and, like every other capitalist state, were prepared to go to war to defend their economic interests. Moreover, in all of these countries, it was believed that socialism could be established by force, that socialism could exist in one country. The Leninists who carried out the Bolshevik Revolution maintained that the revolution could only be carried out by a minority vanguard party, that the masses were too ignorant to understand the case for change.

Since 1904, our movement has maintained that socialism, like capitalism, can only exist on a global scale, and that it will only come about when a majority of the worlds people want it and are prepared to organise for it peacefully and democratically, in their own interests and without leaders. No vanguard can establish socialism the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.

We can do it

But who are the working class? Agreeing with Marx, we believe that there are two classes in society the working class and the capitalist class, each one determined by its relationship to the means of living. The capitalist class own and control the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth, living as parasites off profits, rent and interest. The working class, other than possessions we have purchased with our own sweat, own little more than our ability to sell our physical and mental abilities to the highest bidder. There is  no middle class as the working class includes land workers, doctors, lawyers and teachers anyone, indeed, who must sell their mental and physical energies to survive.

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

The ruling class, of capitalists and their executive, the governments of the world, have no monopoly on our skills and abilities. These belong to us. Moreover, it is we who are responsible for the inventions that have benefited humanity and the improvements in productive techniques. Most inventions and improvements are the result of those who do the actual work thinking up easier and faster ways of completing a task, the result of ideas being passed down from generation to generation, each one improving  the techniques of the previous. If those who work have given the world so much, in the past say 2000 years, then how much more are we capable of providing in a world devoid of the artificial constraints of profit?

Capitalism must go

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

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

Do we really need leaders deciding our lives for us? Do we really need governments administering our lives when what is really needed is the administration of the things we need to live in peace and security? Must every decision made by our elites be first of all weighed on the scales of profit, tilted always in their favour? A growing number think not and have mobilised to confront what they perceive to be the major problems of contemporary capitalism.

In recent years there has been a world-wide backlash against neoliberal globalisation, corporate power and the iniquities of modern-day capitalism. Everywhere where the worlds ruling elite have assembled to decide their next step they have been met with protests and demonstrations that have attracted hundreds of thousands. Demonstrations at Seattle, Gothenburg, Prague and Genoa, for instance, have fuelled the ongoing debate on the nature of modern day capitalism. Thousands of articles have been written on the subject and hundreds of books have been published that explore the alternatives offered by the anti-globalisation movement.

What is now clear is that the anti-globalisation movement, however well-meaning, does not seek to replace capitalism with any real alternative social system. At best it attracts a myriad of groups, all pursuing their own agenda. Some call for greater corporate responsibility. Some demand the reform of international institutions. Others call for the expansion of democracy and fairer trading conditions. All, however, fail to address the root cause of the problems of capitalism.

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

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

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

John Bissett

The Call of the Patriot. (1914)

From the November 1914 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fellow Workers — During the last three months there has been staring at you from every hoarding, from trams, 'buses, and stations, from vans, warehouse walls, and notice boards on churches, from the pages of the newspapers and every other available space, the statement that: "YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU."

This statement, showing, if you will but think, how important and vitally necessary you are to the ruling class, has been re-iterated again and again, with innumerable variations, from countless pulpits and platforms up and down the country. Urgent appeals by the hundred thousand have been made to all " fit" men to enlist; every device and every weapon that the "liberty-loving" masters could invent, from the call of a sham patriotism to the wholesale backing of employers; from lying to bribery; from silent coercion to the insults of the white feather brigade, and from this to the deliberate suppression of hostile opinion, have been used either to entice or drive you into the ranks. For you, fellow workers, are today, as you always are, indispensable to the bosses, both for the production of profits in the "piping times of peace" (!) and for cannon fodder and the slaughter of the "enemy" in times of war.

Without you the masters are helpless; without you the State collapses and the rulers of the one country cannot hope to win in their struggle against the rulers of another country; and knowing this, and recognising YOUR supreme importance, the bosses have been moving heaven and earth, spending money like water, lying like Christians, combining cajolery with economic pressure, and ringing the changes on every form of cant, from "stirring" appeals to your manhood to virulent denunciation of your indifference or backwardness, in order to make YOU go and fight battles from which you will receive the usual rewards of empty honour, broken health, wounded bodies, or the eternal silence of the grave.

The reasons advanced why you and the working men of Europe should fight each other have been many, and we could fill a column with the contradictions of the politicians, the black coats, and the "intellectuals" on this matter. Any excuse has been good enough as long as it has had the effect of making you and the German working men defend your respective masters. From the violation of treaties by Germany to deliberate provocation on the part of England; from Russian court intrigue to the capture of international trade; from the rottenness of secret diplomacy to the enthronement of Atheism; from the policy of "blood and iron" to the jealousy and hatred of the Allies: each and every excuse in its turn, according to whether the apologist was pro-British or pro-German, has been offered as justification for the infamy now going on, and as a reason why you should take part in it.

In England it is declared to be a war for "liberty, righteousness, democracy," and other bunkumalthough the bosses occasionally give the game away by stating, as the "Sunday Chronicle" of August 30th, that "the men in the trenches are fighting on behalf of the manufacturer, the millowner, and the shopkeeper." In Germany it is declared to be a conflict in which the ruling class of England, Russia, and Japan have combined to reduce her to the level of a fifth-rate power, and to render her politically, militarily, and above all economically, impotent for ever. And each aide, using every possible device, has dragged you and your fellow-workers abroad into the arena.

You had neither lot, voice, nor counsel in the events leading to the conflict; YOUR place while it lasts is that of automata, conscious only to obey blindly and, if need be, to suffer; and your lot after it is over will be the usual lot of your class, the lot of the poor, the down-trodden and the oppressed everywhere.

Of the forces now engaged not more than five per cent come from the ranks of the well-to do; YOU furnish the remaining ninety-five per cent. YOU have to bear the infinitely greater proportion of the deaths, the disease, the permanent injury and the awful strain, while those who goad you on with sweet words or threats, rest securely and comfortably in their easy chairs in club or office, killing the enemy every day with their mouths, but taking particular care, in the vast majority of instances, never to risk their precious carcases within a hundred miles of the actual conflict.

We Socialists would therefore ask you to put on your considering caps and think for yourselves, instead of allowing the capitalist Press, Tory, Liberal, and sham Labour, to think for you.

When the war is over, and you are tramping the country, as you will be in many cases; when you and those near and dear to you hunger and thirst; when you feel the whip of semi-starvation and the gaunt spectre of want is your daily companion, will your "King and Country" need you then? Does not your daily experience teach you that you have no country, that you are landless and propertyless? Does it not show you that here, as in Germany, the land and its fatness belong to the masters, your portion being a mean tenement in a mean street, with the bare means of existence, and then only if you are lucky enough to get work?

When the bosses ask you to fightto offer your lives for "democracy and liberty against militarism"; when they pose as the defenders of oppressed people, and express themselves deeply concerned to uphold justice, humanity, and right, ask them why it is that they have so long practised in Englandpractise to this day the tyranny and oppression they now denounce abroad.

The present British Government, the "champions of liberty," through their then Home Secretary, Churchill, prepared, previous to the railway workers going on strike, and turned out at the request of the railway magnates, no less than 58,000 troops, crushing by militarism the attempt of those workers to slightly improve their admittedly rotten conditions of existence.

This Government, "the apostle of humanity," during the last London Dock strikewhen the men merely asked that agreements previously entered into by the Government itself should be honouredplaced at the disposal of the capitalist Devonport and the gang around him, an unlimited supply of police and military, and deliberately starved the women and children, in some cases to death, in order to break the resistance of the men.

This Government, the "defender of freedom, the upholder of justice, and right," endorsed martial law, the denial of all liberty and the firing on defenceless crowds in S. Africa; it batoned 700 men in Dublin, turned out the military against YOU at Belfast, Llanelly, Leith, the Rhondda valley and elsewhere; it has callously refused to give underfed children sufficient food; it mocks with pretty words, but cynical, brutal inaction, the condition of the ever-growing army of unemployed; it has sanctioned wholesale imprisonment, exile and butchery, in India, Persia, Egypt, and the New Hebrides, and allied itself with the infamies perpetrated in Russia and Japan: in a word, it reeks with lying pretence and self-satisfied Pharisaism, for in very truth, it is the ever-willing tool of autocracy. Capitalism, and class rule and the deadly enemy of the working class everywhere.

Ask this or any capitalistic Government for their credentials, examine their records, and you will learn that, beyond all dispute, whether it be England or Russia, France or Belgium, Germany or Japan, there is, so far as YOU are concerned, no difference between them whatever. They are all made in the same mould, filled with the same lust the lust of exploiting YOU. When it suits them they flatter you; but when you ask them for a little of the justice they now prate about, then they insult, imprison and often murder you. To-day they want you badly, for they are at war with each other and want YOU to do THEIR dirty work; but remember that whoever wins or loses, your lot will be the same; the politician will still soft-soap you ; the industrial machine will still grind you, and poverty and all that it means will still enchain you.

If, therefore, you are wise, if you are men, if you are really anxious for freedom from slavery, then look around you here, and you will soon learn the truth, that it is your class which is denied this freedom, and denied it by the very class who now call upon you to act. One law for the rich and one for the poor. Adulation, servility and the world's wealth for the rich; grinding toil, insecurity and eternal hardship for the poorthese are the commonplace of every day life. Is it not so?

Your duty, then, is to fight against this, and the only way you can fight successfully is by understanding your position in society, realising that wars and hate, malice and theft, oppression and greed, class rule and the travail of the workers the world over, are to-day born of capitalism. This it the root evil; it is this you have to war against if you would be free, for all else is futile; and when you do this, BUT NOT BEFORE, then liberty will be with you as your possession; there will be no oppressed peoples, for the might of the working class, organised consciously for the overthrow of the modern octopus, will have conquered, and the international commonwealth will be here.

Frank Vickers

The same the whole world over (1987)

Book Review from the April 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management by Adam Buick and John Crump (Macmillan, 1986, 157pp.)

Alfred P. Sloane, who once ran General Motors, is reported to have said: It is the business of the automobile industry to make money not cars and what he was saying applies generally to production in the modern world. It takes place first and foremost with a view to making monetary profit and only incidentally with a view to producing goods or services. Theres no difficulty in seeing this in whats called the private sector. Its clear that an employer will only carry on a business as long as it is making a profit or theres a prospect of profit. If profit stops being made, the business will either try to cut costs (usually by reducing its workforce) or, if this is impossible, will close down.

We can see this process together with its human toll in insecurity and unemployment going on all the time. And we can see it not just in the private sector but in state-owned industry too, as in the closure in recent years of so many British coal mines. Yet its still widely thought that in state owned industry profit is not paramount and that in countries such as Russia, where virtually the whole of the production process is state controlled, planning and not the profit motive prevails. In the West, because many of the state-owned industries have been concerned with providing essential goods and services (such as energy and transport) its been widely believed that they somehow belong to us all, that their purpose is to serve the community and they do not have to run at a profit.

This belief was particularly widespread in Britain in the years immediately following the second world war when the Labour government introduced large-scale nationalisation measures. The old lady who went down to the pithead with her coal bucket to collect some of what she thought was her coal had just this kind of optimism. She had been told that now the mines were nationalised they belonged to the people. In fact she was greeted with delirious laughter and told to go and buy her coal from the coal merchant as before. Many other people have been similarly disillusioned when confronted with the failure of nationalisation to bring about the shared prosperity of a new social order. And so unpopular has it now become that the present-day Conservative Party is able to gain electoral advantage by bringing in sweeping privatisation measures.

Its often said that this failure of state-run industry to give people a better life shows that socialism has been tried and failed. This is true only if you regard socialism as synonymous with state ownership (and by extension capitalism with private ownership). But another way of looking at it is that state ownership is simply an alternative to private ownership of capital and of running a capitalist economy. No matter who handles capital the state or private investors the majority of people, all those who have to work for a living, continue to have only the limited access to the wealth of society which their wage or salary gives them.

State industries

This is an approach adopted in a new book by Adam Buick and John Crump called State Capitalism: the Wages System Under New Management (Macmillan, 1986, 157pp.) Buick and Crump argue that state-run production is just as much concerned with profit as private enterprise and present convincing evidence that, when it comes to making profit, nationalised industries in Britain and other Western countries have on the whole been extraordinarily successful. They do not deny that state-run industries such as coal and transport necessary for the overall profitability of production have sometimes been run at a loss with the aid of government subsidies. But this has been the exception rather than the rule and in general nationalised industries, which have a statutory legal obligation to try to run at a profit, have not been allowed to continue to run at a loss. The cut- backs in the coal and iron and steel industries over the last 20 years by both Labour and Tory governments are evidence of this and on the whole anyway, despite popular myth, subsidies have not been needed for nationalised industries. They have generally produced not only enough profit to accumulate new capital but also enough to provide a property income for the private individuals who originally owned the nationalised industries. For the old private owners nationalisation meant a change in the form of ownership from private shares to interest-bearing government bonds, while some chose to receive payment in cash from the state to the full value of what was being purchased from them.

What this shows is that nationalisation does not dispossess private capitalists but simply changes their property titles. And what Buick and Crump go on to illustrate with many practical examples is that historically state intervention in industry (or state purchase as it used to be called) has taken place not for ideological reasons but to protect the interests of the private-owning class as a whole so that individual or groups of capitalists could not, by their monopoly of an essential good or service, hold the rest of the capitalist class to ransom.

The depth and sophistication of the authors analysis makes their conclusions irresistible nationalisation is essentially a buying and selling transaction involving haggling over a purchase price and represents no more than an institutional arrangement, a change of formal ownership which leaves intact the basic social relation of wage labour to capital. It is of no concern therefore to the majority of us in society, who receive in return for selling our energies to a state or private employer a wage or salary of smaller value than what we have produced. And like private capitalists or the managers of a private enterprise, the professional managers appointed by the state to run the nationalised industries are, as the authors put it. the mere agents of market forces, interpreting, more or less successfully, the dictates of the market and exploiting, more or less successfully, the labour power purchased.

But what about countries like Russia and China where there is blanket state ownership and no distinct privately-owning capitalist class? Here Buick and Crump show that the party bosses and bureaucrats who govern Russia also effectively own the wealth of that country, by virtue of their control over production and the productive machinery. The privileges they draw from ownership are expressed in the massively higher living standards they enjoy compared with the majority of Russians. Like the private capitalists in the West they derive their wealth from the surplus value produced by the wage and salary earners. But instead of, as in the West, receiving this wealth directly in the form of profit due to them legally as a return on investment, they receive it in the form of enormously bloated salaries, bonuses and payments in kind of various types holiday villas, travel abroad, access to special shops and so on.

Socialist analysis

Not that Buick and Crump claim to have discovered anything new in this. In the detailed and wide-ranging account they give of the idea and history of state capitalism, they point out that since the 1920s the Socialist Standard has argued that Russia has a capitalist class and that the system there is not socialism or communism but a form of capitalism -state capitalism. They point out too that in recent years other observers and political currents have been driven to a similar view, usually without even knowing about the pioneering work of the Socialist Party. Unlike the Socialist Party, however, most of them have argued that if Russia is now a class society in which the party leaders and bureaucrats have become a new ruling class on the basis of the wages system, it was not always so. The Russian revolution of 1917, the arguments run, was a socialist revolution which overthrew capitalism for a while until it was restored at a later date by Stalin, Kruschev or whoever. But, as Buick and Crump remark, wherever the date of capitalisms restoration in Russia is fixed, all the elements which are cited as evidence of capitalisms existence subsequent to that date were also in existence previously.

The point here is that the difference between capitalism and socialism is seen as a difference between the politics of those controlling the state and not as a different form of social organisation. And what the authors show, in their chapter entitled The Revolutionary Road to State Capitalism, is that a different form of social organisation on a socialist basis of production for use, voluntary cooperation and the abolition of the wages system never existed at any time in Russia. The Russian revolution from the very beginning was aimed not at abolishing capitalism and making the means of living into the common property of the whole community but at a takeover of the state by a minority group whose purpose was to centralise capital in the state with a view to speeding up industrial development and all this behind a smokescreen of socialist declarations.

How has this centralisation of capital in the hands of the state worked out in practice? The answer to this question is the area in which Buick and Crump are at their most original. What they do is to analyse in detail the mechanics of production in Russia and other such countries (but in particular Russia) to show precisely how and why production, even under almost total state control, takes place and indeed must take place with a view to making profit and not to satisfying peoples needs. Not to concentrate on profit, they point out, would be to ignore the pressure arising from the international rivalry of competing capitals, the pressure to compete both militarily and commercially, and therefore to accumulate capital. And the penalty for such ignorance would be economic and political collapse. So Russian planning is not aimed at satisfying the needs of consumers but at extracting surplus value from Russian workers as effectively as possible making them produce greater value by their labour than they receive in wages or salaries, just like workers in the West. Not that, under the profit imperative, planning and its production targets are a particularly precise, reliable or long-term instrument for economic organisation. They must of necessity be short-term, piecemeal and subject to constant revision as indeed they have always been in Russia as the nature and amount of the goods that can be sold on the market at a profit constantly changes.

Russian capitalism

Shades here of Western market forces. And indeed perhaps the most penetrating insight of this book is that an effective market and the forces of competition that go with it do exist in Russia. The plan does not abolish exchange relationships between enterprises but merely attempts to quantify the exchanges in advance.

In other words the state has to devise mechanisms of a market kind and the pressures which act on the state and its economic planners in the state capitalist countries are identical to the pressures which act on their private capitalist counterparts via the market. And these pressures, the need to make financial calculations in order to realise profit and accumulate capital indicate, over and above any differences of detail, the essential similarity of the economic systems of East and West. Nor does planning remove the element of competition from Russian production. Competition remains an essential and ever-present feature. There is competition between enterprises producing different goods where financially accountable enterprise managers are anxious to achieve their targets ahead of other enterprises. There is competition between enterprises which produce the same goods, with planning specifications, which are necessarily vague and approximate to allow individual managers latitude to adapt to rises and falls in spare capacity and consumer demand, have brought about a situation where a number of different enterprises may be producing, say, refrigerators at the same time in competition with one another. There is, above all, because of the pressure on managers to reach production targets, competition among enterprises for the skilled labour power available.

Such is the intensity of competition for scarce grades of labour power that even the Russian authorities admit that almost one-third of labour recruitment by-passes official channels, while many Western scholars believe that, with certain exceptions, the immense majority of workers and employees is recruited at the factory or office gates.

All this knocks sideways the arguments of those who say that what exists in Russia is not state capitalism but some form of socialism, or at least a fundamentally different economic system than in the West. The view of Trotsky, Trotskyist theoreticians like Ernest Mandel and Trotsky's followers in many of todays left-wing organisations, that Russia does not operate on capitalist principles but is a deformed or degenerate workers state where production takes place at least partly for the benefit of workers is shown to be based on excessive attention to legal forms and official ideological pronouncements rather than on how the economy functions in practice. Likewise, those who, identifying socialism with fullscale nationalisation, refuse to see Russia as capitalist because it has no privately-owning class are shown wrong through overestimating the importance and effectiveness of planning and seriously underestimating the role of prices, profit and money. Often of course such Western observers have an ideological point to prove but in this they are no different from the official ideologists of the Russian state who must also insist on qualitative differences of organisation and lifestyle between socialist Russia and the capitalist West.

But if Russias state propaganda calls the society there socialist, what it claims to be moving towards as the ultimate realisation is communism . And what it is widely thought to mean by this is a classless, stateless society based on the principle from each according to ability, to each according to need. But in their final chapter, The Alternative to Capitalism, Buick and Crump examine closely the wording of official Russian pronouncements on future society and find that what is actually being advocated is not a classless society of free access at all but a society of free distribution, one in which a minority will still rule and a majority will still work for the rulers receiving in return for their work payment in kind of the things the rulers consider they need. Such a society would still be a form of wages system and in any case not a society based on the self-determined satisfaction of needs.

Alternative society

The alternative the authors offer to replace all the different forms of wages system examined in the book is just that society of free access which Russian state ideology denies. It is a society without money and wages and without buying and selling. It cannot, they insist, be brought in gradually by some kind of transition process but only as a rupture, a clean break with the present system if for no other reason than the total difference in the form that wealth takes in the two societies. In the one (socialism or production for use) it appears in its natural form for the purpose of satisfying human needs; in the other (capitalism or production for profit) it appears in the form of exchange value for the purpose of being sold on the market at a profit. And the two are mutually exclusive. In socialism, as the writers put it:

"Goods would simply become useful things produced for human beings to take and use . . . people would obtain the food, clothes and other articles they needed for their personal consumption by going into a distribution centre and taking what they needed without having to hand over either money or consumption vouchers."

And they go on to suggest how it could be organised in practical terms. Such arrangements are possible today, they conclude, because our resources, technology, skills and knowledge are sufficient to allow us to produce a massive abundance of all the goods and services we need in order to live comfortably on a worldwide scale. But if this is to be achieved then we must organise ourselves democratically on the basis of voluntary cooperative work instead of forced wage labour and through production for use instead of profit and all this in a society without states and frontiers, without rulers and ruled, without leaders and led.

Some might find these recommendations require too great a leap of the imagination, but they should not be deterred from reading this excellent book. It is a landmark in the study of modern society to which no short account can do justice and it is thoroughly readable. It will find its way on to the bookshelf of socialists but it will also be read by, and change the thinking of, many non-socialists. 

Howard Moss

Post-Capitalist Capitalism (2006)

Book Review from the February 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Albert: Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Verso, £9.

Participatory economics, or parecon for short, is a vision of life after capitalism favoured by many in the anti-capitalist movement. The author of this particular vision helped to establish Z Magazine and its web site Zmag, including its subsidiary page devoted to parecon, which debates the issues raised by this book.

Parecon opposes "corporate globalisation" and argues for its replacement by "equity, solidarity, diversity and self-management." For Albert, capitalism means "private ownership of the means of production, market allocation, and corporate divisions of labour." Life after capitalism is said to combine "social ownership, participatory planning allocation, council structure, balanced job complexes, remuneration for effort and sacrifice, and participatory self-management with no class differentiation." The council structure involves workplaces, neighbourhoods, and "facilitation boards" which co-ordinate planning.

So-called "market socialism" is rejected because the market and class differentials would remain, as would buyers and sellers of labour power (capacity to work). In Albert's account, because class differentiation disappears in parecon, "you cannot choose to hire wage slaves nor to sell yourself as a wage slave." Parecon permits workers to assess their own pay and conditions in their decision-making by inputting their preferences via councils. It apportions income in accord with effort and "does not force or even permit people to try to maximise profits, surplus, or even revenues."

Notice however that Albert is specifically talking about prohibiting profit maximisation, not profits as such. Profits are acceptable; "excessive" profits are not. In the procedure envisaged, individuals and councils submit proposals for their own activities, receive new information including new indicative prices, and submit revised proposals until they reach a point of agreement. This process is open-ended and in Albert's book a hypothetical example is discussed which reaches a seventh planning cycle, or as Albert calls it "planning iteration." In reviews of this book much has been made of the potential for bureaucracy in this procedure, but a more telling criticism would be its unquestioning acceptance of the profit system. Wages cannot rise to the point which prevent profits being made; and a fall in profits will put a downward pressure on wages. This is called the class struggle.

"Parecon is basically an anarchistic economic vision", admits Albert, and it shows. Like many on the left, the difference between capitalism and post-capitalism presented here is essentially political, not economic. As indicated by the title, the crucial factor is participatory planning. The capitalist economy would remain substantially the same in parecon: the accumulation of capital out of profits produced by the unpaid labour of the working class.

Lew Higgins

Class War No More? (1997)

From the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The magazine Class War has decided to cease publication after 15 years

One of the more delicious frissons I derived from the recent death of Princess Diana was the wicked thought of what Class War magazine would have made out of it. They would have had a field day with the idiotic business, and shocked a great number of the grieving public with an extra-special dose of their puerile sick-bag humour.

But the demise of this less-than-august periodical means we will now have to make up our own sick Diana jokes, and we are the poorer for it. Of all the groups on the ‘Left’, Class War was the most consistently outrageous and self-parodying. Any revolutionary after our own heart could find much to like about Class War, even if some of their statements could bleach the roots of your hair. Tearaways, hooligans perhaps, juvenile and even infantile at times, the Class War Federation had an energy and a freshness about it which you don’t often see in print, a willingness to say the unsayable, to alienate just about everyone, to flout almost every principle of taste and good manners in their unrelenting efforts to shock people into political awareness.

But now they’ve hauled down their pirates’ flag. Class War is Dead, they proclaim. Long Live The Class War! They have decided to pack it in after 15 years, and do something else. And they are asking revolutionaries everywhere to discuss with them what that something else ought to be. In an Open Letter to the Revolutionary Movement contained in their final issue, Class War, in a fit of honesty certainly alien to the Left, offer to exchange dirty washing with all-comers in an attempt to find the way forward. There follows a sad tale of internal division and internecine squabbling which will sound familiar to many groups. The gradual conversion of the Federation from free individuals to stagnating monolith is an object lesson in how not to run an organisation, as is their frank admission of the ‘macho’ female-excluding nature of their political ethos. That they are sincere cannot be doubted. Nor are they one whit diminished by these admissions, but in fact appear more dignified upon their retirement than ever during their career.

Class War, it has to be said, succeeded brilliantly in appealing to a small section of the radical ‘market’ – those who wanted action, but not the stale formulaic sloganeering of the Left. They had an effect and an influence out of all proportion to their size, making headlines and TV appearances again and again. But for every one person (young white male, as they admitted) who was attracted, fifty were put off. Mainly it was the violence. Pin-up pictures of dead coppers might make good satire, but confirmed most people’s worst prejudices about the real nature of anarchists and of revolution. And it narrowed the already small band of their potential sympathisers to the point where Class War became more thuggery than thinking. And when the thinking stopped, the Federation fell apart.

Two not three

One gets no satisfaction from saying this, but Class War got it wrong from the start. They wanted a democratic moneyless society, without leaders or classes, and without State control. Furthermore they detested the elitist and authoritarian demagogues of the Left every bit as much as we do. But they made, in my view, one crucial error in their class analysis. Instead of a two-class society – owners and workers, they had three. The middle-class to them was the ’controller’ section of society (around 20%) which actively collaborated with the top 5% , and also acted as a buffer zone between the owners and the smelly ’working class’ (the bottom 75%). This view therefore involved a class struggle not against a tiny minority, but against a very large minority which, though some might be expected to embrace revolution, had its role as collaborator and class traitor already marked out for it.

“We were inspired by the principles of anarchism to raise the flag of direct class conflict because we know that it’s the only way our class can win its freedom. To do this we have to push the middle class out of the way”.

Hence the perceived necessity, indeed inevitability, of violence. Hence the dropping of paving stones off motorway bridges onto ‘posh cars’ . Hence the whole tone and thrust of the magazine. Revolution to Class War was essentially a bloody affair, with at least one quarter of the population condemned to the wrong side of a civil war:

“We are in favour of mass working class violence, out in the open.”

And this snobbish dismissal of the ‘middle-class’ in turn condemned Class War, for in purposefully insulting the educated, the Guardian readers, the trendy-lefties, the road-protesters, the vegetarians and the tree-climbers, they managed to alienate the ‘joiners’ and the ‘do-ers’. Despite a circulation of up to 15,000, they could never persuade any of their ‘real working class’ readers to get involved. But they were not interested in getting involved, and they bought Class War because it amused them, like Viz or Private Eye, or because it flirted with some secret desire to destroy and vandalise—few if any took it seriously. And revolutionaries need to be taken seriously if revolution is ever going to be possible.

Most jokes have a butt, a target to hit in order to get the laugh. It might be women, or men, or the Irish, or blacks, or politicians, but the victim must be there for the joke to work. Interestingly, most left-wing politics also has to have a butt, a human target, a victim, without which the argument doesn’t work. Class War relied very heavily on having a palpable ‘enemy’, against whom one could vent one’s spleen and exact one’s revenge. But the trouble with this is, whom do you blame for the way a social system works? Our leaders? Or ourselves for following them? The rich? Or the poor for accepting their poverty? History doesn’t hold individuals responsible. Capitalism is the real enemy, not its come-and-go managers, nor its police, nor its teachers. If scapegoats there must be, we are all deserving. The creation of the human ‘enemy’ in revolutionary politics is the point of departure from the Socialist Party’s case for change, and the foundation and wellspring of all appeals to violence. In short, any solution which necessitates violence against individuals is probably wrong, not because of some pacifist moral imperative, but because it doesn’t get rid of the problem.

Violent nonsense

In order for Class War’s politics to maintain its appeal, the enemy had to be found, not in the abstract workings of a social system, but in the concrete everyday realities. The owning class was too remote to be tangible, and certainly too remote to be vulnerable. So Class War dragooned the ‘middle-class’ into the role:

“Those who really run society never put a foot outside their heavily protected worlds. For most of us, our immediate enemy is the middle class: management, social workers, magistrates, teachers and all the other functionaries of capital.”

Making a putative middle-class into an enemy is as divisive as anything dreamed up by the owning class, and has more to do with testosterone than tactics. Violence is the steamy sex of left-wing politics, including Class War’s. It is adventure, illicit excitement, danger, risk, Marx meets Millwall F.C, hooligans on a mission. It is attractive, but only to some, in the same way as cave diving or bungee jumping. To most people, I suspect, Class War was one of three things: an affront to common decency, or an MI5 plot, or a gang of kids having a lark. In no case was it a thing to get involved with.

What many groups can’t stand about the Socialist Party is that we do not advocate violence and therefore cannot offer a practical programme of activity based on it. We are just not exciting enough for them, and thus we are labelled as sterile or ‘theoretical’ (this being a term of abuse, naturally). But we are not Quakers, and do not rule out the need for violence under all circumstances. We simply argue that it is quite possible, and highly desirable, for a large majority to establish socialism without bloodshed. The more violence is involved, the more likely the revolution is to fail outright, or be blown sideways into a new minority dictatorship.

The Socialist Party has consistently struggled to be heard for almost a century, and continues to struggle. Our venerable age however is no cause to be smug, and we hope that we also can learn something from Class War’s commendable openness. We also have not always got it right. We also have had divisions. And we also have known stagnation. Partly it is the political climate. Partly our own shortcomings. Class War tried a tack – that of attack – which didn’t work. We could have told them it wouldn’t. But we are not sitting pretty either, and are not pointing any fingers. So long as there are revolutionaries out there with the energy to act and the will to think, we want to talk to them.

[How to further the revolutionary process? We wish we knew. But we will be watching with interest as ex-Class War members grapple with this new, and for us, very old problem. Maybe they can make a few suggestions.]*

Paddy Shannon

Blogger's Note:

* The final paragraph in brackets was not in the printed Socialist Standard but is on the SPGB website, so I'm not sure if the latter was the first draft of the article.

Cuba: No Workers Paradise (2003)

From the October 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

The scene is typical: the dog-end of a trade union branch meeting; members are tired after discussing complex pay and discipline issues; tired from listening to the hyper-activists glorying in the sound of their own voices; desperate to escape. Item 9 on the agenda of the hour-long meeting is expenses for a delegate to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign meeting. Exhausted hands fly up to approve the monies, without debate, voting as much for escape as for sanction.

Cuba has become a cause celebre amongst those who identify themselves as 'Old Labour'. Tommy Sheridan of the Scottish Socialist Party has dreams of an independent Scotland emulating Cuba; Arthur Scargill's Socialist Labour Party adores Cuba and makes trade with it a centre-piece of their foreign policy; Guardianistas write endless letters in support of the country; no union conference is complete without a resolution or six in support of Cuba. (See Cuba Solidarity Campaign.)

This is as true for America as for the UK. Michael Albert of Z-Magazine had to give a rearguard defence of his criticisms of Cuba's decision to murder a number of hijackers (his critics themselves being activists and opponents of state-murder in the US); anarchist superstar Noam Chomsky warmly supports Cuba's defiance of the US, staying stoically silent on Cuba's internal regime, save that it is a matter for Cubans themselves.

In European literature, Utopia was always supposed to be an imaginary far-flung Island in uncharted seas like the Caribbean; now, it seems, it is a very real island in perfectly well-charted waters for a good majority of the left — even if those are waters that have been well sailed by the USSR and its sundry fellow travellers. This misty eyed respect for Cuba would not be so worrying were it confined to the dying ranks of Tankie Stalinists; however, its tendrils reach well beyond them. Like Chomsky, many take an anti-American reflex and root for the underdog versus the hyperpower: excusing the repressive parts of Castro's regime as mistakes, or excesses of siege warfare.

This is a siege that has been going on for a very long time. Castro's guerrillas emerged from the hills in 1959 to drive away the US-backed kleptocrat dictator Batista. What began as a simple nationalist movement was quickly driven into the "Communist" camp by the hostility of the American government. The new regime weathered numerous attempts to displace it, including Kennedy's Bay of Pigs invasion, and miscellaneous attempts by the CIA to assassinate Castro. Simultaneously, the former guerrillas declared for "Communism", and abandoned dreams of national autarky by becoming a sugar plantation for the USSR rather than the US. (See Socialist Standard, April 1984).

The US has never been able to forgive the expropriation of its millionaires by Castro's party, and has maintained its siege ever since. For its part, the Castro regime has proven remarkably resilient (to the point at which American planners are now taking the 'biological resolution', i.e. Castro's death from old age, as the most likely way for them to advance their cause). In that time, the regime has maintained a tight control over the economy. At times, this has meant a heavy bureaucratic hand, requiring strings of permits to produce, distribute and export or import goods.

None of this has abolished the commodity nature of production, nor the wages system. A fact starkly illustrated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the loss of Cuba's export markets as well as the convenient supply of oil for industrial purposes. The economy underwent serious recession, from which it has yet to fully recover. Since then, the government has been trying to re-orientate the economy towards tourism to bring in essential foreign currency. This has led to a situation in which goods are produced solely to be consumed by tourists in their enclaves which are denied the Cuban workers.

The continued existence of the wages system has meant the need for measures to impose labour discipline. The Cuban state only recognises one trade union federation, Central de Trabajadores Cubanos (CTC). This consists of unions entirely dominated by the ruling Communist Party, wherein officers are vetted (not just by their present affiliations, but on a documentary of their entire lives going back to their school records) before they are allowed to take up posts. Whilst independent trade unions are not entirely illegal, their existence is subject to repressive controls and harassment, beginning with the Associations Act (Leyes de Asociaciones) and escalating to the generally repressive political order laws. (Source: ICFTU).

As Amnesty International notes, in the past few years, the numbers of long term political dissidents imprisoned has fallen; but this is counter-posed by an increase in short-run harassment techniques, like arrest without trial, breaking up of meetings, threats of eviction, etc. According to the ICFTU (an organisation which the British TUC is affiliated to) in the early months of this year over 78 union activists had been targeted by the Cuban state. One, for example, was arrested for attempting to resist a state organised eviction of a family.

Although Cuba nominally has 100 percent post-16 suffrage, this is restricted to candidates approved by the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution. Likewise, a plethora of laws make free criticism and electoral organisation impossible: Article 144(17) of the criminal code prohibits disrespect to authority; Articles 200-201 preventing the spread and cause of panic and disorder have been used to imprison people publicly voicing criticisms; Article 103 prohibits 'enemy propaganda' which is interpreted as anyone inciting criticism of the Cuban system and its international allies; Article 203 criminalises disrespect to the flag and symbols of the regime; Article 115 prevents the dissemination of 'false news against international peace'; and the piece de résistance is articles 72-74 which forbid anything 'dangerous', which can be anything the police and courts decide are so (Amnesty International).

This battery of laws amounts to an arsenal fit to stop any independent thought and organisation, and amounts to a capacity to arrest anyone the state doesn't like, any time they want. In a situation in which workers cannot hope to organise politically, it makes free association in trade unions impossible. All of this needs to be borne in mind when stories are repeated by supporters of Cuba (such as the Cuba Solidarity Campaign) about how workers have democracy and freedom to organise in Cuba; or of how workplace committees and trade unions decide industrial matters. Indeed, as the ICFTU points out, the requirements of the Labour Code demand that collective agreements be decided by both workers' meetings, and the employers, with the Communist Party being heavily involved on both sides of these negotiations. There is no legally-sanctioned right to strike.

Thus, although there are formal and nominal freedoms, much like in the USSR, in practice they are undermined by highly centralised capacity to crush dissent. In the absence of political and trade union freedoms, then, the working conditions of Cuban workers are hard. Their living standards drastically cut by the recent recessions, even if they "agreed" to this in mass meetings to save their jobs. International companies that invest in Cuba are compelled to hire their workers via agencies. These agencies pocket 95 percent of the dollar value of the wages. State officials maintain that this is to maintain Cuban equality, and not to direct the dollars into state hands. This despite the obvious stratification of Cuban society that has emerged.

The romantic supporters of Cuba put their concerns for "national rights" before class solidarity, in supporting the Cuban regime. They excuse its actions as a necessary defence against US aggression, and will it to survive against the greater power, even at the expense of its workers' lives and liberties. And they can point to its impressive record on health care, education and education (much better than in much of the rest of Latin America: including a healthy 76 year life expectancy).

Cuba does indeed show what could be possible, even with meagre resources to meet the needs of human beings, and how artificial the deprivation across much of the rest of the world is. But the difference in treatment stems largely from an autarkic nation's need to maintain a functioning workforce versus the surplus population of the mono-export countries of much of the rest of South America.

Socialists do not consider that the best way to assist the workers of Cuba is to support the régime that dragoons them in siege warfare with the US, but that the spread of the world socialist revolution is the only way to rescue them from the unpalatable set of choices facing them. To do that, we need to free socialism from the taint of the undemocratic methods applied in Cuba and stand clearly for the political freedoms of association and speech for the working class the world over, so as better to spread the ideas and consciousness required for the building of a truly stateless classless world co-operative commonwealth.

Pik Smeet

Open Letter To Michael Moore (2003)

From the January 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Mike,

I owe you, man. I've been watching your work for years now, from the first series of TV Nation onwards. I've enjoyed your rigour, integrity and sense of rye humour. I've been to see Bowling for Columbine – twice! By my calculations that means I've personally given you 48p. I got my hands, however, on a free "damaged" copy of Stupid White Men through a friend of mine. My calculations on that are that I've probably just cost you £1.50. So I owe you £1.02. Well, first off, let me tell you about the Socialist Standard. OK, that's free on the web, but if you bought the magazine, it'd have cost you a quid. So that's square. That leaves a wee bit left over, though. So I reckon I'll give you my twopenneth.

No one can doubt your heart is in the right place, nor your commitment. Your palpable anger at the destruction of communities by big business; at the bullying of the poor and defenceless by the rich and powerful; at the hypocrisy of our rulers; shows clearly in all your work. Yet, the answers that you present, your suggested course of action, I feel, just aren't enough. It's entirely laudable to say "Just get involved" – after all, if people don't get involved at all, then nothing will ever change. You've shown in yourself how simply turning up and noisily making demands can make the rich and powerful bend and twist to do the popular thing.

The problem is, however, that unless the people "getting involved" have some clear idea about where they are going, and what they want, they'll just end up pestering our masters for different crumbs from the table for ever: as those devious buggers spin and turn in the wind, giving just enough to stay in power. When the workers of St. Louis took control of the city in 1871, for instance, they had free reign to do as they pleased, to work for their own betterment. They came to power though, without any ideas, with no plan for running their own lives, and so slowly melted away again, to return to ordinary drudgery on the railroads.

Of course, America is the country that brought us philosophical pragmatism. This tells in your approach, taking whatever chances are available. In Stupid White Men you tell of how you tried to persuade the Green faction of the Capitalist Party's presidential candidate, Ralph Nader, to bargain from his position of holding the swing vote. "We hold all the power" you told them. What, though, did that power amount to? It amounted to being in a position to wring a few concessions from candidates from other sections of the Capitalist Party, dragging them "'to the left".

This maximum power for your candidate was only scheduled to last "for the next week or so", before handing absolute power over to someone who would "keep no promises". After all, once leaders are firmly ensconced in power, what need have they for king makers, whether other candidates or mere voters? The whole point of being a leader is to exercise power as you see fit. Bargaining with leaders is like letting a prisoner out for a stroll, and expecting them to come back.

You yourself admit there is not much difference in voting between different wings of the Capitalist Party. As you point out, Ronald "Evil Empire" Regan imposed stricter controls on car manufacturers on miles per gallon usage of petrol than "Slick Willy" Clinton. You could go further, and show how Eisenhower stuck by the welfare state as much as Johnson, who in turn was just as Hawkish as Cheney. In fact, you could show that, despite their protestations that the opposing faction are the paragon of all evil, that both sides are always prepared to steal each others' policies. Your list of how the Democratic faction of the Capitalist Party's voting records accord with the Republican faction's shows as much.

The reason for this is not hard to find – they're not really in charge at all. Any policy they may impose will have to accord with the ongoing operation of capitalism, and the rules of that system, or they won't work at all. After all, Reagan controlled miles per gallon because the world was still dealing with the effects of the 1972 oil shock and recession. Clinton was dealing with a time when oil was flowing free and constraints on use would have been constraints on profit rather than a support. So, Nader's maximum moment of power amounted to being able to ask for a few concessions from someone whose maximum moment of power would be asking for a few concessions from the people who really own the world.

No wonder politicians prefer to ape the noises of these parasites. They might as well make the right sounds so that they can kid themselves that they really are part of the gang in charge, and that the policies they are implementing really are their own. Who wants to sound like they are championing the cause of ineffectual groups?

Any leader is going to find themself in this position. Imagine (just for a second) that Nader did win the presidency (no, seriously), committed as he was to the continued existence of capitalism with a green face. He would have to make policies that conformed with one logical premise – the law of no profit, no production. All his policies would have to allow the owners of America to make at least the average rate of profit from their investments, or else they would launch a capital strike, declining to invest in industries or even withdrawing altogether. That is, no matter what he is like as a man, no matter how honest his followers, or their determination, he would have to adapt his policies to running capitalism the only way it can be run, in the interests of them as own it.

Even were (for some odd reason) someone to come to power in the US and nationalise everything that moved, just as in the state-capitalist states in the old Soviet bloc (and we all know how well that worked), they would still be subject to this self same law. Whilst they might not face the same irritating bunch of rich people, they would still need to operate the circulation of goods produced by waged-labour at a profit as a first condition of their policies.

This law afflicts even our rulers. As Lord Byron said, "there can be no freedom, even for the masters, among slaves". Even though you state that "there is no recession, my friends. No downturn," but that it is a deliberate machiavellian ploy by our masters to prevent us asking for a share of their wealth, the fact is that they are compelled into cutting back by the logic of their system.

If they did not disinvest, cut back, rationalise and downsize, any competitor who did so would get the better of them, and thus drive them out of the market. They may still be rolling in money themselves, but they cannot use it to create any more jobs. If they allowed their profits to fall behind relative to the size of their capital advanced, they would risk losing the lot (poor diddums). They just aren't going to allow that to happen.

The fact is that the crime of capitalism is not that some have money and refuse to give it to others - and the money is, as you rightly point out, there. No, the crime is that the rules of the system mean that all that money must uselessly slush around – protecting the stakes advanced by the capitalists – rather than going into doing the useful things that communities like Flint Michigan require. This inevitable waste stems from the law of no profit no production, and the whole system of producing commodities for exchange on the market (like SUV's) to be bought, rather than produced directly to fulfil a need.

So, bang goes your whole strategy. Badgering the rich and powerful like a toddler pulling at their parent's trousers – mummy, mummy, we want some welfare! Despite your call to get involved, to go out and get for ourselves, the result is that it involves going like naughty children up to some corporate master, and hassling them (preferably with an embarrassing film crew present to broadcast their perfidy and meanness to the world – no wonder Neil (brother of George) Bush was so relieved to run into you without your camera. It must be irritating for them to subjected to even that level of public scrutiny and expectation.

Your whole attempt to portray welfare as in the interests of our masters reveals the truth behind the welfare state that has gone before (Chapter Four "Kill Whitey"). They precisely instituted the welfare state on the expectation that it would increase their profits and help their system run smoother. Administering a share of the wealth to the workers, rather than allowing the market to do it, lest freak market conditions result in sections of the working class getting more than our masters' need for profits could allow. Now it has become less profitable to run (as well as too rigid), they have tried (quite successfully) to cut it back. So, we can see that any gains our masters may grant (because they are either in, or at least not against, their interest) can be revoked and re-instated as they see fit. Things may well get better again for places like Flint, only to be blighted again the next time the law of no profit no production demands it.

So, what's with badgering you, then? Why my twopenneth? Am I just getting on at someone powerful to try and get them to help promote my cause? Well, no. I was short of material for this month's magazine and you presented an opportunity of providing me with a focus for a simple message. If, as you most certainly do, you care about the widespread poverty and misery produced by US capitalism, then you need to go down to first principles.

Reject leaders. You don't need to be a cheer leader for Nader, it doesn't matter what he's like as a human. Both the capitalist system and the whole relationship of leader to led means that one is going to betray the other pretty quickly after assuming power (usually followers betraying leaders by actually expecting them to be able to fulfil their promises). We have enough strength in our own communities without having to bow and scrape to our masters.

Go beyond capitalism. Recognise that it is the whole system of producing things for a chaotic market that produces inequality and poverty, and think about how we could go about making the change to a situation in which we use all that idle talent, ability and imagination that you reveal and revel in your documentaries, to produce things directly for people's needs.

If we reach out across the workers of the world, who share more in common with you than any American capitalist, then we can create a co-operative commonwealth spanning the globe, which will put an end to all the wars, violence and strife caused by the competition between capitalist rivals, and which spill over into our communities and our schools. That commonwealth though, always starts with individuals, individuals like you, and anyone else who might read this open letter.

That's my twopenneth, I consider the debt settled.

For World Socialism,

Pik Smeet.