How I got to be a socialist (2009)

From the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I could hardly fail to notice that all was not well with the world of the mid-seventies”.

All of a sudden, it hits you. Overnight you go from saying “Yes, it all sounds very nice, but we’re all too greedy. What would happen if everybody wanted three televisions?” to realizing that there’s just no other way to sort out the world’s problems.

I don’t know how common it is to catch socialism from your father but that’s what happened in my case.

When younger my father had been a member of the British Communist Party. Generally, he seems to have kept his political activities low-key (the only controversy I know about is when, shortly after he had married a catholic girl from Italy, the local priest apparently created a bit of a fuss when, on a house visit, he found a CP newspaper lying around).

But he evidently became disillusioned with the CP. Certainly while I was growing up I only remember him voting Labour. Then, in the 70s, he started buying the Socialist Standard and joined the Socialist Party not long after. He got a few other people interested and soon they had formed the West Yorkshire branch. I was back home temporarily after studying and working in London and he used to keep the latest Socialist Standard in prominent view somewhere around the house. I later discovered that this had been with the express intention of getting me interested. I did read it at times but I thought it was all rubbish. What particularly annoyed me was his parting shots at the end of seemingly every news bulletin, “It wouldn’t be like that if we had socialism”.

I wasn’t remotely interested in politics. In the late sixties, as a student, I had totally failed to understand what all the unrest was about. I couldn’t see that the students had the answer to anything. During the recession of the early seventies, some of my friends talked about an impending apocalypse – things were going to get much worse – so, I thought, if we’re all going to die then fine. I’ll take some tins of food and hide somewhere.

But I could hardly fail to notice that all was not well with the world of the mid-seventies. And what with hearing my father talking to his socialist friends, and running out of answers to the things they said to me, and surreptitiously reading more and more of the Standard, suddenly socialism all started to make sense and I was hooked.

This happened the same year I started to work for a large multinational company. Before, I would have dreaded the thought of this. I had read a book by Marcuse about technology and society, which contributed to my growing dread of the modern world, but socialism provided me with the perfect context for it all, a way of seeing through the madness. I now knew what these large organizations were about and they no longer scared me.

I joined the Socialist Party and started going to branch meetings; far from being a publication of the lunatic fringe, the Socialist Standard became my monthly dose of sanity.

I stayed with the same company, in IT, for 28 years, doing a more or less 9 to 5 job, and every few years surviving the inevitable re-organisation and accompanying job cuts. By the time I finished, the structure of the IT department was back more or less to what it had been like when I started, only with about a quarter of the people. I think it would all have been too horrifying without the large pinch of salt that my membership of the socialist movement provided. I actually enjoyed the job most of the time – but it was always with the constant thinking against the grain, the knowledge that the world could be so much better, that socialism provides.

Why don’t more people become socialists?
Unfortunately, thoughts of building a world that is radically different don’t feature much on people’s agenda. Capitalism always throws other imperatives at them and there’s always another day to get through. I think I was lucky in that at the time I started to think about socialism, I was “between jobs”, single and without any particular commitments. And for all that they may bewail their lot and want to see something done about the injustices in the world, people feel uncomfortable if anything threatens to disrupt their everyday routines and thought processes. It’s easier to complain than to be constructive. It’s also quite a jolt to be told that we can scrap money, employment and governments. People think they are going to “lose all they’ve worked for”, to go back to a more primitive, barter-like existence. And unless world leaders and celebrities get behind some cause or other, it’s not regarded as important.

But once you see that socialism is the only sensible way forward, no other view of the world makes sense. For all that socialists might despair from time to time of ever getting there – just ask – what’s the alternative?

Rod Shaw

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (95)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 95th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1483 friends!

Recent blogs:

Overlords and underlings

Capitalism versus nature

Oscar Wilde and socialism

Quote for the week:

I be so tired when I spit, all my words slur together

Got so many calluses my hands are like leather

Watching MTV in your big-ass chair

Trying out slang words while you're combing your hair

"Your productivity is whack, bring that box here fo-sheezy [for sure]

Go get some coffee player, punch out before your leave"

Got your feet up on the desk nodding off to sleep

While I lift, push, pull, dig, sweat, and sweep

I could work hard all my life and in the end still suffer

Because the world is controlled by you lazy muthafuckas

The Coup, Lazy Muthafucka, Party Music, 2001.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Cooking the Books: Capitalism, but not as they know it (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Eric Hobsbawn and Amartya Sen have both written interesting stuff. Hobsbawm on the history of capitalism in Britain and Sen on how famines are not caused by a shortage of food but by the collapse of some people’s legal entitlement to it. But their comments on the current crisis are confused.

In an article in the New York Review of Books, reprinted in the Guardian (14 March), entitled “Capitalism Beyond the Crisis”, Sen questions “whether capitalism is a term that is of particular use today”, arguing:

“It seems to be generally assumed that relying on markets for economic transactions is a necessary condition for an economy to be identified as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive and on individual rewards based on private ownership are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist?”

Citing increased state funding over the years of the armed forces, the police, health and education as examples of non-market, non-profit economic activities, he concludes: “the idea of capitalism did in fact have an important role historically, but by now that usefulness may well be fairly exhausted”.

The market and profits certainly are central to capitalism, and state spending certainly has increased compared with some past periods, but is state spending really non-capitalist or is it not rather part of the necessary overheads of running capitalism? Capitalism and the state have always co-existed. In fact the state helped capitalism come into existence and expand and is needed to maintain it today. State spending on armed and police forces is patently aimed at serving capitalist interests at home and abroad. State spending on education and health is essentially aimed at providing employers with a fit and trained workforce and so too is pro-capitalist.

Hobsbawn also thinks we should be looking towards a society that is neither capitalist nor socialist, as in the title – “Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?” – of a recent article of his in the Guardian (10 April) brings out. But his definition of capitalism is as wrong as his definition of socialism. He contrasts “the centrally state-planned economics of the Soviet type and the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy”.

Arguments can go on about whether Russia was some form of capitalism or some new exploitative class society, but it was clearly not a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources with production directly to meet human needs and not for sale on a market, i.e. not socialism.

The case for saying that it was still a form of capitalism – best described as state capitalism – is that wealth there still took the form of “an immense accumulation of commodities” as articles for sale, produced by a class of people obliged to sell their working skills for a wage or a salary on whose unpaid labour a privileged class lived.

As an historian of capitalism Hobsbawn must know that, if defined as a “totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market” economy, “capitalism” has never existed because there never has been a time when market forces alone have exclusively determined how an economy has worked. States have always intervened to try to distort the market in favour of particular capitalist groups as well as to engage in the activities Sen mentions.

As class ownership, production for sale with a view to a profit, wage labour and surplus value still exist – as they patently do, whatever the degree of state activity – “capitalism” is the best term for describing the existing economic and social system.

History matters (2009)

Book Review from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why History Matters by John Tosh, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

At the completion of the invasion of Iraq in July 2003, British Prime Minister Tony Blair gave a speech to the US Congress in which he declared: “There has never been a time ... when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day” (Quoted by Tosh, p.5). Gordon Brown, with a Ph.D in history and current Prime Minister, supported that invasion.

Blair was probably speaking out of ignorance rather than deceit, for that was not the first time British military forces had invaded Iraq. In 1914 Britain acted alone in invading Iraq (then called Mesopotamia) to drive out the Ottoman Turks. Britain then administered Iraq as a Mandate of the League of Nations until 1934, and remained in a position of informal influence until the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown in 1958. Strategic interests were the initial motivation for the invasion, but important oil reserves were known to exist. As Marian Kent's study of this period shows, “by 1920 Mesopotamian oil ... had come to occupy a major place in British military and diplomatic concerns in the Middle East” (Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil, 1900-1920, 1976. Quoted by Tosh, p.2). History matters.

Politicians are often ill-informed, but Alan Greenspan, the long-time head of the US central bank, admitted that the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq was really aimed at protecting Middle East oil reserves. “I thought the issue of weapons of mass destruction as the excuse was utterly beside the point”, he said (See here.). How are we to explain these events? What processes are involved and what is a proper historical perspective? For John Tosh, a professional historian, “public history” matters because it can provide the basis for informed and critical understanding of the present. But there is no place for causation in this understanding of history: the invasions of Iraq in 1914 and 2003 were wars for oil, as Tosh would probably agree, but for him the causes were unique and all we can learn from history is their similarities and differences: there is no underlying structural cause. This is an unconvincing and inadequate theory of history given the regular occurrence of wars and other social problems thrown up by capitalism. History matters more than that.

Socialists have a materialist conception of history in which we view the past in the context of the development of the forces of production (productive technology) and relations of production (economic classes), and analyse social development to better understand the present and possible futures. The state and its machinery of government have historically favoured the interests of the economically dominant class - presently the capitalist class. It is in their interests that wars have been prosecuted in Iraq for oil, or for their strategic interests as in Afghanistan. This follows a regular pattern in capitalism, and using a materialist historical perspective we can see the capitalist process at work and predict that as long as we have capitalism we will have wars. We cannot predict where and when, but they will happen: the forces and classes driving history will always make them likely, and since the end of the Second World War there has always been a war being fought somewhere in the world. An understanding of the materialist conception of history would provide a rational motivation for revolutionary political action by us, the subordinate class in society, to end capitalism as the cause of war in the modern world. History matters because your life may depend on it.

Lew Higgins

Greasy Pole: Bloggers at loggerheads (2009)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Advice for anyone who assess themselves as alluringly qualified to rescue the world from a deadly combination of economic disintegration and ecological catastrophe: pay heed to the example of Gordon Brown. Divesting himself of his rumoured persona of brooding neurosis occasionally relieved in volcanic tirades, the Prime Minister genially hosted the recent London G20 conference, promoted as a mechanism to flush out and eliminate every threat to the world’s harmony and health. As the assembled world leaders, deaf to the clamouring protesters outside – and to the thwack of police batons on their bodies – steamrollered on, smilingly massaging each others’ shoulders and self-esteem, Brown blossomed like an unusually poisonous nightshade. Around the world which the conference was supposed to have as its concern, banks and industries were choking almost to death and millions of workers were being ejected into poverty deep enough to be immediately life-threatening; meanwhile Brown went about the business of bolstering his appeal to remain as the occupant of Number Ten, strutting his fantastic stuff as the new Saviour of the World. Whether this act was effective to the extent of being sufficiently deceptive to the British electorate will be clear come the next election.

But meanwhile…
We were told that G20 would be a seminal gathering, in the sense that its terms of reference were to design a cleaner, safer world in control of its economy and its environment. As a side line its timing was clearly fortunate for Gordon Brown but his luck is not in for, whatever euphoria G20 may have encouraged among Labour supporters, it would have been immediately damaged by the emergence of real politics as represented by the murky strategies of governmental “advisers” Damian McBride and Derek Draper. These two set out to damage the Tory leadership through publicising some salacious allegations about them and their families. This is known as “briefing” against – another example of New Labour’s distortion of the lexicon, which defines briefing as a process of summarising a clutch of complex facts into an easily assimilated and presentable form. Far from embarrassing the Tories this provoked a mass panic among the Labour benches, as one minister after another rushed to assure us that they had also been victims of such smears which, as every right-thinking person knows, should have no place in politics: “vile, horrible and despicable” raged Ed Balls – who once worked closely with McBride when they were at the Treasury with Brown as Chancellor – “we all need to work to raise standards and to stamp this out”. This may have been unwelcome to McBride, who has been paid a lot of money over almost ten years to do just this kind of “work”.

Draper
A similar confusion may be affecting Draper, who was abandoned to his fate by the very people in the Labour Party who until recently might have been seen as his stalwart friends. A “special adviser” to Peter Mandelson in the early days of the Blair government, Draper’s naiveté and self-regard were to cost him dear when, in 2001, he boasted to an undercover reporter that, as an intimate of the “17 people who mattered” in the government he could be trusted to arrange rewarding meetings with them. This episode revealed him to be vulnerable as well as unusually conceited; a nervous breakdown preceded him fleeing to America to train as a psychotherapist. He came back here in 2004 to set up in what is described as a “successful” psychotherapy practice (it is to be hoped that that is the opinion of his patients and not just another example of his tendency for over-positive self-assessment). Impressed, and perhaps not a little envious, of the progress up the greasy pole of some of the people – like David Miliband and Liam Byrne – he had once been on a level with, he scraped his way back into Labour politics. An invitation to lunch at Chequers last November must have convinced him that he was on his way back and earlier this year he set up the web site LabourList, with plans to open another, to be called Red Rag, to compete with the scandal aimed at Labour leaders by the Tory blog ConservativeHome. This progress – if that is what it was – came to an abrupt halt with the exposure of the e-mails between Draper and McBride.

Anger
The distasteful episode has raised a lot of anger among grass roots Labour supporters, some of whom responded to Draper’s apology on LabourList: “What you have done is outrageous and disgusting, and no apology is enough” and another “You complete half-wits. Yet another weekend spent with one’s head in one’s hands every time the news comes on”. But such people are of too humble a standing to be treated with anything other than contempt by the likes of Draper and McBride, who were more readily impressed when they were disowned by the party leaders insisting that LabourList had nothing to do with the party and that Draper was used as only a part-time volunteer – and then by Gordon Brown raging that “When I saw this first I was horrified. I was shocked and I was very angry indeed. The person who was responsible went immediately”.
Such emergencies need to be understood. Those who have been immunised by experience against the conceits and fantasies of political leaders recognise that the rulers of class society can have no effect on the system which, they deceive themselves, is open to their manipulation. That is the only useful assessment of their behaviour and of their relationship with us.

Ivan

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (94)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 94th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1487 friends!

Recent blogs:

Food: commodity or need?

The Grimethorpe Miners

Do We Need Money?

Quote for the week:

"In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others." William Morris, Useful Work vs Useless Toil, 1884.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Editorial: Toxic products (2009)

Editorial from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Negotiations are heating up between our rulers. With an economy cooling and a planet warming, there would appear much to talk about. In the short-term there is an economic system needing urgent shoring up: the confidence of workers in the system is disappearing as quickly as the confidence of bankers, employers and shareholders that they can turn a profit.

But in the longer-term it would appear that global warming is likely to present an even greater challenge to individual states to start serious discussions with each other. Every inch of the planet's surface has been mapped and claimed by one bunch of gangsters or another. The atmosphere and the air we breathe however is uncontrollable and has therefore historically been the global sewer into which capitalist economies have spewed their so-called "externalities" (those things not traditionally accounted for by the market). The CO2 disappears into thin air: out-of-sight and conveniently off the balance sheet.

Capitalism appears to be having serious difficulty in identifying and quantifying its own (so-called "toxic") internal liabilities and risks. What hope can we have that this system will ever really be able to deal properly with the overlooked externalities – including a genuinely "toxic" by-product of economic activity, in the form of CO2 emissions.

From Beijing to Bonn, and Moscow to Mumbai, the battle lines are already being drawn up as negotiations tighten over the sort of global regulatory regimes required to address both the credit crunch and the CO2 crunch.

Despite their apparent collective willingness (in the form of countless speeches and statements) to address both the weakening economy and rising CO2 emissions, it is clear that there are other forces at work, acting to slow and stall this process. Every state has a "special interest" in protecting or advancing the interests of the various sectors of its own capitalist class. That, after all, is pretty much the job of the state.

Members and sympathisers of the World Socialist Movement can be found in many countries around the world. Where we can, we organise politically to put the case for socialism in front of the workers of the world. The arguments put by a world socialist from the US or the UK is the same as that put by a world socialist from India or Ghana. We have no regional interests, and only one "special interest" - “the emancipation of the global working-class”.

Our case is consistent not just for the last 100 years, but also across continents, cultures and languages. From farmers in India to IT workers in China, from the unemployed of Europe to the overworked of the US, the experience of workers across the globe can differ greatly. But in some crucial respects the same story is repeated, with differing degrees only of exploitation, alienation, poverty, insecurity and stress. Investigate our case. Test it against your own experience. If it chimes with how you're thinking, then join us and hasten the day when humanity finally grows up and takes responsibility for its planet.

Capitalism in Crisis: A May Day School for Socialism

The Socialist Party is holding a dayschool on the current crisis this Saturday 2 May at its offices at 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 (nearest tube: Clapham North).

Programme with approximate timings:-

10.30 Welcome visitors

11.00 First session with Brian Gardner - Capitalism and Economics
- Chair Richard Field
11.45 Discussion
12.45 Lunch

14.00 Second Session with Gwynn Thomas -- Capitalism, Resources & the Environment
- Chair Fraser Anderson
14.45 Discussion

15.45 Tea Break
16.15 Third Session with Simon Wigley - Capitalism and Society
- Chair Tristan Miller
17.00 Discussion

18.00 Close

ALL WELCOME.

ADMISSION FREE

"This worlds ok - you're the problem."

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (93)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 93rd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1484 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalism's reserve army of labour

The health of wage slaves

Guess whoís not getting that rose garden?

Quote for the week:

"This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser." Marx, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 4 (1867)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers
Socialist Party of Great Britain

Socialism: an open source society (2009)

From the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A socialist describes his personal experience of open source software - and its socialist implications.

A little over a year ago I started to use something in my daily life “that'll never work” because “it's human nature, mate”; “No such thing as something for nothing, a free lunch”; “People don't work for pleasure, you know, they only work because they have to or to make money”. Yet here I am, totally chuffed with this thing that is so opposed to much of the preconceived notion of “Human Nature” and the ways of this wicked world that it can't possibly exist let alone bring some pretty unbridled pleasure to this 65 year-old anorak.

Any idea what I'm talking about?

Here're some more clues. Thousands of people enthusiastically cooperate on thousands of collaborative, inter-related projects that bring new “products to market” whilst constantly upgrading and improving existing core “products”. Many of those people work for little or no financial gain, indeed, some have worked to the deficit of their own financial situations. They don't just collaborate in “the office”, they collaborate across the borders of nation states, religious divides and the apartheid walls of economics and race; Russian with Chechen, Iranian with American, Palestinian with Israeli . . , they do it without seeking permission from priest or politician. They do it to fulfill a passion for the skill and knowledge they bring to the work they do and a shared ideal of bringing the very best in computer operating systems and software to the ordinary people of this world . . . free!

I'm talking about Linux based Open Source and Ubuntu in particular. Ubuntu is an ancient African word that means “humanity to others”.

Based on personal experience, there isn't a better or more “socialist” way to do your computing. You can download the whole caboodle if you have the wherewithal free of charge or do as I did and order an installation disc which is also free. And free really means free, Ubuntu is shipped to anywhere in the world post free . . . you're free, and even encouraged, to make copies and give them away . . . as long as they're free!

Installation is seamless and painless; upgrading is seamless and painless. All of the basic programmes you could need and a few more beside are pre-installed, all are Open Source and free (of course) and because they are created by enthusiasts they are fully featured, look attractive and work.

So, now you're up and running and you want a few extra trinkets to handle all those quirky things many of us like to do with our computers. Things like doctoring perfectly normal snap-shots so that they look like something from the crazed world of Dali or personalising our “desktops” (something I'm convinced goes back to school desks, penknives and being summoned forward for institutionalised ritual humiliation). With Ubuntu there's no digging out those CDs you've saved for years from computer mags to see if there are any freebies that'll maybe come close to meeting your particular fantasies . . , you just click on “Add/Remove Programs” (these things always have US spelling) and browse through what seems like thousands of programmes in various categories. Each has been created by an individual or team that loves computing and has poured their passion into making each offering the best it can be. Better still, from the average user's perspective, everything is, yes, you guessed it, free.

I suppose I'm a bit like a new convert or a former smoker, on the one hand full of enthusiasm for the new “reality” and on the other filled with scorn for what had gone before. The enthusiasm is not without foundation; Ubuntu claims to “work out of the box” and it does just that – perfectly. There are no annoying screens telling you that you have to register this or that, no registration keys to be pasted in, no time limitations before you have to pay up and no intrusive demands for personal information or email addresses so you can be deluged with stuff you don't need or want. Under Ubuntu my computer “talks” to all of my cameras and cards without recourse to specialised programmes, something it never did under Windows and my “Photo Shop” type programme is as beautiful on the eye and as functional as the one that ships with Mac. Programmes install and uninstall without leaving behind digital detritus to slow or crash the system and such is the make up of Ubuntu that it is simply not open to outside attacks by virus, root-kit and much else in the way that Windows is. It's like taking a cool shower on a hot day . . . so refreshing! How can something so good be free? I mean, it's not the way of the world, is it? It's not human nature to do something for nothing, is it? Without “market forces” quality goes down the drain and mediocrity becomes the norm, doesn't it?

Look at Microsoft; based on size of usage they must be the world's standard. I've used their products for years in many different incarnations. They've built their fortune off my back . . . have you checked lately what one of their products costs? And not just them. I've lost count of the number of programmes I've paid for to try and improve or protect their bloated, worm-holed operating system from all the nasties out there in cyber-space only to dump them a few months or years down the road. Or worse still have them destroy my set-up and data that I should have backed-up but had put off yet again! Been there? Hey! That's the way it is in this techno-corner of the capitalist world, let the buyer beware; you pays your money and takes your choice. Not any more, comrades. There really is a better way out there and it's called Open Source, it has superior “products” and an ethos that we can each embrace. Computing for human beings.

Is this beginning to sound like a promo for a socialist computing Utopia? Or is it a preview of how the world really ought to be? Much of Open Source is at the real cutting edge of technical development; a huge percentage of the servers around the world, machines that run those multi-national companies and the Internet run on Linux based software. They pay a lot of money for that privilege, money that keeps Open Source afloat and enables we plebs and peons to receive our free CDs mailed free of charge, to freely download free applications and freely make use of this wonderful working example of human co-operation. In fact, every individual user of Ubuntu is encouraged to join the community and contribute in any way they can, from translations to critique to ideas to programing skills; use what you need and contribute what you can . . . where have we heard that before? Next time someone throws “human nature” in your face or tells you that socialism will never work offer up Open Source as proof that human beings are better co-operators and contributors than many give them credit for.

Alan Fenn

Cooking The Books: Saved by the slump? (2009)

The Cooking The Books column from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was published two years ago, we pointed out that its assumption of a “very rapid economic growth” between now and 2010, on which the more realistic of their assumptions was based, was unrealistic:

“Ironically, the only thing that may save the world from the problems that a 2.8 percent rise [in average global temperature] would cause is that the economic growth and technological innovation will not be as rapid as the IPCC report assumes.( . . . ) The assumption that there will be no world economic slump or prolonged period of stagnation between now and 2100 is quite unrealistic. Given capitalism, something like this is bound to happen during this period, so that the use of fossil fuels won’t be as rapid as this IPCC’s scenario assumes.” (Socialist Standard, March 2007)

We must confess that we didn’t expect to be proved right so soon.

There is, however, another side to this. While the current interruption of growth is reducing energy consumption it has also made coal relatively cheaper compared to its non-CO2-emitting alternatives, nuclear and the renewables (wind, tide, solar, etc). Not so long ago, burning coal was less profitable than burning natural gas (which gives off less CO2) – the non-renewables don’t get a look in here – but now the situation has changed:

“The margin earned from burning coal, according to Société Générale, is about €15 per megawatt hour, compared with €7 from natural gas. ( . . .) At Deutsche Bank, Mark Lewis, the head of carbon research, fears that the price may have fallen to a level at which some utilities may be tempted to invest in conventional coal-fired power stations” (London Times, 18 February).

The slump is also wreaking havoc with the EU’s “carbon trading” scheme, which was touted as the market way to reduce CO2 emissions. Under it power stations are given an allowance of how much CO2 they can emit without being penalised. If they succeed in reducing their emissions to below this level they can sell the unused part of their allowance to other firms that want to exceed theirs. These allowances are in effect licences to pollute and a market in them was supposed to develop, and did tentatively.

What is happening now is that, with the reduction of production and so of energy consumption, power stations can easily reduce their emissions below their allowance and so have been trying to sell them. As most of them are in the same position, supply is exceeding demand and the price of these licences to pollute has collapsed. According to the Times, “in July a tonne of carbon sold for €35, but today it fetches less than €9”. Which means, of course, that it’s now cheaper to pollute.

That’s the way the market works. As the current depression is confirming, the market is far from being, as taught in textbooks and proclaimed by businessmen and politicians, the most efficient way of allocating resources. The magic of the market is a myth. The madness of the market is nearer the truth.

It’s election time again (2009)

The Socialist Party's Election Address for the forthcoming European Elections, which was cut and pasted from the SPGB election blog, Vaux Populi

It’s election time again
Every few years groups of professional politicians compete for your vote to win themselves a comfortable position, this time in the European Parliament. All of the other parties and candidates offer only minor changes to the present system. That is why whichever candidate or party wins there is no significant change to the way things are. Promises are made and broken, targets are set and not reached, statistics are selected and spun.

All politicians assume that capitalism is the only game in town, although they may criticise features of its unacceptable face, such as greedy bankers, or the worst of its excesses, such as unwinnable wars. They defend a society in which we, the majority of the population, must sell our capacity to work to the tiny handful who own most of the wealth. They defend a society in which jobs are offered only if there is a profit to be made.

Real socialism
The Socialist Party urges a truly democratic society in which people take all the decisions that affect them. This means a society without rich and poor, without owners and workers, without governments and governed, a society without leaders and led.

In such a society people would cooperate to use all the world’s natural and industrial resources in their own interests. They would free production from the artificial restraint of profit and establish a system of society in which each person has free access to the benefits of civilisation. Socialist society would consequently mean the end of buying, selling and exchange, an end to borders and frontiers, an end to organised violence and coercion, waste, want and war.

What you can do
You can vote for candidates who will work within the capitalist system and help keep it going. Or you can use your vote to show you want to overturn it and end the problems it causes once and for all.

When enough of us join together, determined to end inequality and deprivation, we can transform elections into a means of doing away with a society of minority rule in favour of a society of real democracy and social equality.

If you agree with the idea of a society of common and democratic ownership where no one is left behind and things are produced because they are needed, and not to make a profit for some capitalist corporation, and are prepared to join with us to achieve this then vote for the SOCIALIST PARTY list.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (92)

Dear Friends,
Welcome to the 92nd of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1480 friends!

Recent blogs:

What is to be done?

Never say oil

Financial wizards or great pretenders?

Quote for the week:

The grabbing hands

Grab all they can
All for themselves, after all

It's a competitive world

Everything counts in large amounts

Depeche Mode, Everything Counts (1983)

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!
Robert and Piers
Socialist Party of Great Britain

Capitalism’s reserve army of labour (2009)

From the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government came to power in 1929, unemployment had been at a steady 10 percent of the working population for several years, around 1 million. Within a year, the effect of the Great Depression was to send unemployment rocketing to 2.5 million, causing the collapse of that second Labour attempt to reform capitalism.

MacDonald held steadfastly to classical economic views. He frowned on the dole as a cause of indolence and unemployment, and believed that equilibrium in the jobs market could be found. That is, full employment will come if barriers to wages finding their “natural” level are removed. He was, thus, content to agree to the May Report which included cutting the dole to those two and a half million, in order to balance the government’s budget. That was the move that caused his government to collapse, and for MacDonald to go down in Labour Party history as the great traitor, as he jumped ship to form the National Government.

Manifestly, this did not work, and unemployment remained steadfastly high. Dole or low dole, workers were simply unable to find jobs because the capitalists of the time held steadfastly to their principle of “no profit, no employment”. Their mistake had been to cling to the myth, exploded by Karl Marx more than 60 years before, that full employment is the normal state of capitalism, and unemployment the exception.

Entirely to the contrary, Marx demonstrated that not only was a pool of unemployed workers the norm under capitalism, it was in fact intrinsic and essential to the workings of the wages system for there to be such a pool. He referred to it was the “industrial reserve army”. For Marx, the relative size of this reserve had a direct effect on the level of wages – as it increased, wages shrank, and vice versa. The upward limit of wages was the point at which they began to unduly impact on profitability. High wages would lead employers to either discover labour-saving processes, or simply lay off staff and cut back operations.

This indicates how the industrial reserve army works both ways. Economic historians attribute the rise of the United States as an economic and industrial power house to the relative scarcity of skilled labour in the nineteenth century (exacerbated by the fact that workers could strike out to find frontier land, rather than accept unemployment). This compelled American capitalists to improve the intensive exploitation of their capital in order to be able to effectively use the labour resources to hand. That is, that capital has an incentive in not letting the reserve army get too large.

Another feature of Marx’ theory was that the unemployment is not a function of population. That is, it is not simply growth in the number of mouths to feed that causes unemployment, but that it is a wholly determined variable based on the state of the investment of capital. As more capital is brought into play, so too is more labour. Unemployment is a relative phenomena based simply on the ratio of employees to those seeking work. This can clearly be seen in UK statistics. In 1900 the population was around 38 million, and unemployment stood at around 5 percent, at the end of the Twentieth Century the population was close to 60 million, and unemployment was still only around 5 percent, its changes do not track population growth..

People can be taken out of this reserve army. For example, in the 1960’s Harold Wilson’s Labour government had to seriously debate whether the country could afford to raise the school leaving age to 16, drawing all those young workers out of the labour force at a time of nearly full employment. Nowadays, under the current Labour administration, they have a policy of keeping at least half of school leavers in full time education until they are 21. Many commentators have noted that incapacity benefit has become prevalent in areas of large stagnant unemployment over the years. That, and the dole, allow some sections of the workforce to become economically inactive, and thus no longer contributing to the labour pool and the reserve army.

Interestingly, the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics in the UK suggests that as times become more straightened, these economically inactive people are entering the labour market. At the same time, underemployment has grown. People are working fewer hours (and thus making less money) in order to retain some sort of employment. Although they are not unemployed, they are part of the reserve army, in as much as many of them would, if they could, convert to full time work if it was available.

The latest figures, for January, show that unemployment in Britain has now passed the 2 million mark. Although in absolute terms those numbers are similar to the level of unemployment that destroyed MacDonald, because the total and working populations have increased it is not yet as drastic. Those figures, though, only represent a return to the levels of the late 1990’s. Indeed, in the Thatcher years, figures of nearly three and a half million were seen (and that resulted in collective bargaining by riot in some particularly hard hit areas). It should also be noted, though, that national figures vary regionally, and poor areas, like inner city London, the North East and Glasgow, say, already had higher than national average unemployment, and are likely to be more swiftly affected by the current rises than elseplace.

One new aspect of the current round of unemployment is the role of EU migrant labour. As a highly mobile workforce with little by way of invested roots, it may well soak up some of the costs while leaving the resident workforce of the UK less hard hit, although the figures above seem to indicate, so far, otherwise. Indeed, British citizens are emigrating less, and this off-sets any trend. In the days of the Empire, one way of regulating the reserve army of labour was emigration, and it seems the EU fulfils a similar role today. That said, unemployment is unevan across the EU, and is itself growing.

Pik Smeet