Full House (2009)

Book Review from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sarah Glynn, ed: Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World. (Pluto Press)
Social housing (also known by various other names, especially council housing) has generally been aimed at workers on below-average incomes, though its extent has varied from country to country. This book studies the effects on social housing of the implementation of ‘neoliberal’ policies, which involve the partial dismantling of the welfare state and of Keynesian government initiatives. Its particular strength is its coverage of developments in a number of countries.
In the UK the 1890 Housing Act made it easier for local authorities to build and manage houses, though these were still expected to make a profit. A further act of 1919 allowed for government subsidies but was seen as a temporary measure in the immediate post-war period. It was not until the mid-twenties that a major programme of building council houses began. Social housing has generally been regarded as subordinate to the private sector, and as too expensive for the very poorest, who were forced into privately-rented slums. Housing associations may have started as self-help organisations, but are now just part of the whole housing industry.

Social housing has been more widespread in Scotland than in England, and once housed over half the population. Stock transfers and demolitions, however, have drastically reduced this figure. A chapter on the recent situation in Dundee notes that only one-fifth of houses there are currently council-owned, there is a backlog of over six thousand homes, and only two hundred new council homes are built each year.

The proportion of home ownership in France is considerably lower than in Britain. In 2008, more than one million French people were classed as homeless and over two million as poorly housed, with six million at risk of losing their homes for one reason or another. As might be expected, the US has never had more than a marginal role for social housing. Under neoliberalism, even this has been scaled back, with houses demolished and tenants given vouchers that can be accepted by private landlords, but inevitably private rents are driven up and people are forced to live further out in cities.

Of course there have been various forms of resistance, such as rent strikes and the tent cities set up in Paris and other French towns. Sadly, these can do little to alter the fact that under capitalism, whatever the role of social housing and the state, decent and secure housing is unavailable to large numbers of workers. Neither Keynesian nor neoliberal policies can deliver good-quality affordable homes. And a lot of council housing is shoddy and badly-designed.

In our review copy one batch of pages was bound upside-down. Possibly an unintended comment on the topsy-turvy priorities of housing under capitalism.

Paul Bennett

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 128

Dear Friends,

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"The Agrarian law, or the partitioning of land, was the spontaneous demand of some unprincipled soldiers, of some towns moved more by their instinct than by reason. We reach for something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of goods! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all." Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals, Manifesto of the Equals, 1796.

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Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

A plea for human survivaI (1962)

Book Review from the November 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is a brilliant, powerful, bitter book.

The military machine is one of capitalism's ugliest children. Ugly not only because it is a killer machine, but also because of the discipline, stupidity and wastefulness which its killer motive compels it to have. Some workers glory in these things. They never forget their days in the Forces; they join ex-servicemen's associations, parade in their campaign medals, perpetuate the slang they learned in the Nissen huts.

Catch-22 looks at all this with the searing eye of remorseless satire. Colonel Cathcart commands a squadron of American bombers based on a small Mediterranean island. He is the sort of man the medal-janglers love; military bearing, tough on the outside, contemptuous of weaklings. Contemptuous, too, of Yossarian. Although the Colonel never actually flies on any of them, he is always ready to volunteer his men for the most dangerous raids on schedule. And he persistently increases the number of missions they must carry out before they are allowed to go home.

Yossarian - the hero (if that is the right word) of the book - is a bombardier who is afraid of being killed or wounded for the simple reason that he enjoys the sensations of living. He knows nothing and does not care about the causes and motives of the war. He only knows that he is scared stiff all the time he is in the air and he is not reluctant to show it. Anybody who wants to fight, he thinks, is crazy. He discovers, in fact, that the Army thinks so as well. But:

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. "That's some catch, that Catch-22," he observed. "It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed. "

In a world gone mad with drums and bugles and medals and guns, Yossarian openly and persistently pleads for human survival, As persistently he is asked, "What if everyone thought like you?" and has his answer ready: "Then I'd be a damn fool to think any other way, wouldn't I?" He has seen through war and through religion and is aghast at the struggle human beings go through to exist. A psychiatrist screams at him:

"You're antagonistic to the idea of being robbed, exploited, degraded, humiliated or deceived. Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Slums depress you. Greed depresses you. Crime depresses you. Corruption depresses you. You know, it wouldn't surprise me if you're a manic-depressive!"

Let's keep the book in perspective. Joseph Heller is another of the people who, without being Socialists, can compose impressive indictments of capitalism. He is a writer of enormous impact, who constructs and times his sentences to perfection. He can make us laugh and he can grip us horrified with sensitive, compulsive prose. His description of Yossarian brooding through Rome, watching human behaviour decay all around him, will haunt us for a long time. All in all he makes the post-war wave of British novelists, with their startling discovery that a lot of people under capitalism have to work for their living and that in their spare time they sometimes get drunk and have illicit sexual relations, look pretty sick.

Because Heller goes for the lies and hypocrisy which are used in such abundance to sustain capitalism's wars:

"Men went mad and were rewarded with medals, All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb Line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives. There was no end in sight."

At the moment, Catch 22 is sweeping the United States, where cars carry window-stickers which say "Better Yossarian Than Rotarian." Nobody need think, because of that, that if capitalism throws up another world war the people who have laughed at, been moved by, and agreed with Heller's book will not turn the required mental somersault and join up with a will. We know now that working class ignorance runs that deep.

For all that, Catch-22 deserves to be read and to find its place among the books which stand out against the lie that war is romantic and glorious and necessary but which say unmistakably that the people have nothing to gain from war and that war is sordid and obscene and futile.

Ivan

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 127

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 127

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 127th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

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Too Good to be True

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"Those who busy themselves with State-Socialism, that is to say, those who demand the nationalisation or municipalisation of certain services, do not trouble at all about the lot of the workers engaged in them; but even admitting that they sought to improve the lot of those employed would they be able to do so? If they can, let them begin by improving the conditions of the underpaid workers in the Post Office, in the State tobacco factories, railways and State ironworks. The workshops of the State and municipality are prisons quite as bad as private workshops, if not worse."
Paul Lafargue, Socialism and Nationalisation, 1882.

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Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Debating the “S-Word” (2009)

From the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is any word more over-used and misunderstood today than “socialism”?

In the United States, the “S-word” appears in almost every other sentence uttered by Republicans, who depict the Democratic Party as marching – or at least creeping – towards socialism.

“Socialist” has replaced “liberal” in their vocabulary as an insult to hurl at political opponents, while the meaning remains unchanged as a term to indicate an advocate of government intervention in production and the social infrastructure.

Everything from Keynsianism to Communism (= state capitalism) falls under this blanket definition, which means that Republicans must feel terribly outnumbered by their socialist foes. If Republicans didn’t seem to relish that paranoid feeling, which certainly helps to rally the Party faithful, we could point out to them that socialists are in fact a rather rare breed at this point in time. Although that would also require explaining how our concept of socialism has nothing in common with their understanding of the term.

Of course, if the distortion of socialism were limited to the world of Republican ideologues it would hardly matter – as their ideas are not taken all that seriously, even by themselves. But the fact is that many of the supposed proponents of socialism share that same mistaken view of what socialism means.
The controversy between the pro- and anti-socialists is just a sterile debate over the extent to which the government should “intervene” in the capitalist economy – with neither side advocating or even fathoming a post-capitalist society.

One recent example of how both sides share a common misassumption was a debate on the website of the New York Times regarding the topic: “What is Socialism in 2009?” This mouthpiece of the capitalist class solicited the opinions of a small number of supposed experts, for the most part university professors.

Without exception, these reputable figures shared the notion that “socialism” fundamentally concerns an economic system in which the government plays a key role in production. Following this line of thought, any aspect of society involving government intervention, regulation or management can be described as “socialistic”. This allowed those experts to attach that adjective to everything from public health care and education to highways and the armed forces. Stretched to this point, the concept of socialism loses all meaning – it is used to describe too much and ends up elucidating nothing.

Some participants in the on-line debate did try to offer a more essential definition of socialism as “public ownership and/or control of the major means of production (mines, mills, factories, etc.) for the benefit of the public at large” or “central economic planning and public ownership of the means of production”. But even those more precise definitions are basically descriptions of state capitalist systems – not any sort of post-capitalist society that exists beyond production for profit.

None of the debate participants describe socialism as a money-free society where production is democratically organised to meet human needs, displacing today’s production for the market. Nor did anyone even suggest that the state would have no room to exist in that class-free society of the future.

There are simply no points in common between our conception of socialism and the view of socialism that currently prevails – and with regard to the role of the state the views are in fact polar opposites.

Some might argue, then, that we should let the reformists and reactionaries twist around the word “socialism” to their heart’s content, while choosing a different term to describe the new society we are aiming to realise – some word less marked by confusion.

Karl Marx used the word “Association” to indicate the society he envisaged as replacing capitalism. And this term is useful in terms of emphasizing how the members of that society will freely enter into production relations with each other to produce social wealth. One obvious drawback, not to be overlooked, is that it would be rather awkward to describe oneself as “Associator” or “Associatist”.

But even if the World Socialist Movement comes up with the perfect word to replace “socialism” it would not necessarily bring us any closer to our ultimate goal, for our task as socialists is to convince our fellow workers that capitalism has got to go and that there is in fact an alternative. One word alone, no matter how well chosen, cannot accomplish all of that. The key point is the concept or content of the future society as the solution to the social problems we face under capitalism, not the word used to indicate that new mode of production.

It may very well happen that a word other than socialism emerges out of the movement for the new money-free society. And it would be absurd in that situation to be a word-fetishist who clings to the word “socialism” as if it were the principle or concept itself.

But it is also quite possible that the growth of the revolutionary movement will breathe new life into the word socialism, freeing it from the connotations it has been burdened with by those who cannot see beyond capitalism.

The task is the same in either case: revealing the limits and contradictions of capitalism and explaining how socialism (or whatever it may one day be called) resolves the problems that are irresolvable as long as that capitalist system prevails.

It is certainly annoying that the word “socialism” is almost invariably misused today, but the current over-use of the term may bring unexpected results, even encouraging the curious to begin pondering what a truly post-capitalist society could look like.

Michael Schauerte

The World Around You (2009)

From the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Someone employs you, and you work for them, and they control a big part of your waking hours.

Look around you at the world you live in. You may live in a scenic but desperately dull village, or in a lively but overcrowded city. You travel to your work, which is a mixture of routine and interest, and you enjoy a drink and a laugh with your work colleagues. Or you stay at home, concentrating on housework and childcare. Or you wish you could find a job but there are far more people searching for work than there are jobs. Most of the time you have enough money to keep your head above water and take a holiday once a year. But you know that your job is not all that secure, and a couple of your neighbours have been sacked in the last few months, as a result of the recession, and you realise that the same fate might await you or your partner.

You read the paper and watch the TV news, so you are well aware of the problems in the outside world. In fact, there seems to be little other than problems, from companies going bust and workers being laid off, to wars and riots and floods and electoral chicanery. At least, you think to yourself, it’s not as bad here as it is there (where ‘there’ might be any number of countries). You know that things are bad, but you’re too busy with work and family to do much about it, and in any case you don’t really have much idea as to what can be done. Putting a different political party in power doesn’t appear to make much difference, and maybe none at all. Some of the people you work with blame immigrants, or Muslims, or scroungers, or the unions, but you appreciate that these are just scapegoats, latched on to by those who want a simple fix but have no real clue what’s going on.

One weekend you have the chance to reflect a bit on your life, and to consider what’s wrong with the world. There are many good things in your life, especially your partner and the rest of your family, and you value your friends. Yet you’re worried about your future: will you still have a job in five or ten years’ time, will you still be able to afford a holiday and new clothes and furniture, might you even lose your home if things really take a turn for the worse? The internet, cheap flights, high-definition TV, these are all very well, but they aren’t really what make someone happy, because you just don’t feel in control of your life and your future.

Then you start to look at things in a wider perspective. You come to realise that most people manage to battle through the day, to get through their dull jobs and accept what their boss says while silently telling him or her to get lost. They look forward to their two weeks’ holiday and their time off at Christmas, in the knowledge that job cuts and a pay freeze may be round the corner. You soon accept that most people are unhappy with a great deal about their lives, and you start to wonder why this might be.

First you think about work and employment, and you discover that these aren’t quite the same. You enjoy the voluntary work you do at a local sports club, and get a lot of satisfaction from it, yet you don’t feel the same way about the job that brings in your wages. That’s basically what it is, a job to earn money. Once you had visions of a worthwhile career, but now you see that it just means working ever harder and accepting more responsibility and never truly being in charge of your work time. Others may have it worse – in jobs that are physically unpleasant and even dangerous – but yours is unrewarding except in financial terms, and even the pay isn’t as good as you were promised. Someone employs you, and you work for them, and they control so much of your waking hours. It’s not so much your manager as the big boss and other shareholders who own the company and take the profits. They, you decide, are the people who benefit from your labours.

Then you start thinking about your time outside the hours of work, where you spend the money you’ve worked so hard for. You’re still paying off your mortgage and it takes a big chunk of your monthly cheque, but at least you aren’t in negative equity or about to have your home repossessed. It would only take a month or two of unemployment, though, to leave you and your family in a very difficult situation. You become aware, too, that many people have real housing problems: their place is overcrowded or unsanitary, or they are homeless or sleeping on a friend’s sofa. But on your journey into work you see building sites that have closed down, as there is no way the houses and flats will be sold in the recession. And you realise that there is something drastically wrong when people are homeless or living in slums yet others who could be building homes for them are on the dole. The idea of profit rears its head again, and you see that houses and flats are built to make a profit for someone, rather than to provide places to live.

And profits seem to govern many other areas of life too. Cheap food at the supermarket is there not because anyone wants to buy it but because that’s all some can afford to buy and cheap stuff is the only way that a profit can be made by selling to the poorest. A light begins to go on in your head, and you can see that much of what is produced is poor quality, intended to be sold cheaply and still bring in a profit, so it’s often dangerous as well as shoddy.

Then you start to wonder about who benefits from the profits made as a result of all this labour and production. You already know about millionaires and heiresses and the landed aristocracy, and now you see that they are the ones who benefit. With their multi-room mansions, private jets and luxury yachts, they don’t suffer from the same problems that you and your friends and relations do. You haven’t quite worked out how they got rich, but you’re sure that it didn’t happen through their own hard work: nobody can work that hard, and your own parents worked hard all their lives and ended up with very little.

And other countries are no different, not in important respects anyway. Things vary a bit of course, but there are still problems of poverty and homelessness, while a few live very nicely, thank you. On your holidays abroad you’ve seen that the same problems as here exist more or less everywhere. And some parts of the world are far worse off, with famines and wars and heaven knows what. You aren’t sure of all the facts, but you’ve heard that even famine-stricken countries usually produce plenty of food, it’s just that the poor can’t afford to buy it, so it’s mostly exported. And wars often seem to be fought in areas with rich or potentially rich natural resources, and you wonder if that’s the real reason for them taking place.

All in all, you have come to see that the world is dominated by profit, and that a relatively small number of people, the owners, benefit in terms of wealth and power. The way things are run, you decide, needs to be changed. You think about it a bit and, while you don’t have anything like a full-scale plan in your mind, you do have some general ideas about how things should be arranged. There shouldn’t be this division into the rich and everyone else, and people should not have to be employed by others. It might even be like the sports club where you help out: everybody mucks in and contributes in their own way, without there being a boss or wages. You still don’t have a proper notion of what should replace what exists now, but the more you think about it, the more you become convinced that some new way of organising the world would be a big step forward.

Then one day, outside your local library, you see someone selling the Socialist Standard …

Paul Bennett

Material World: The advance of capitalism (2009)

The Material World column from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The advance of capitalism throughout Europe proved to be a disaster to all the old institutions of feudalism. The feudal landlord was displaced by a capitalist one. The once all-powerful land owners were now to be rivalled for power by the merchants and industrialists of modern capitalism. In a series of epoch making changes in Britain we had the Enclosure Acts and the Highland Clearances. In many places centuries old villages were replaced by sheep enclosures as agricultural labourers were forced into the growing towns and cities of capitalism to seek a pitiful existence. It’s what Marx described in Capital in 1867 as the "so-called primitive accumulation". As he so aptly put it: "The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process." It is still going on in parts of the world.

Primitive accumulation
A recent Channel 4 programme entitled Unreported World, Peru: Blood and Oil, depicted the bloodshed and military violence that has accompanied the Peruvian government’s decision to auction off large parts of the Amazon countryside that has been used for thousands of years by the indigenous people. "For the first time isolated indigenous groups are uniting to fight the government's plans to auction off 75% of the Amazon - which accounts for nearly two thirds of the country's territory - to oil, gas and mining companies. ... These would allow companies to bypass indigenous communities to obtain permits for exploration and extraction of natural resources, logging and the building of hydroelectric dams." (London Times, 9 October).

In another part of the Amazon region capitalism’s lust for profit was carried to an even more awful extreme – the complete destruction of the Akuntsu people. A once proud group of several hundred now have only five survivors. "Much of the Akuntsus' story is – for obvious reasons – undocumented. For millennia, they lived in obscurity, deep in the rainforest of Rondonia state, a remote region of western Brazil near the Bolivian border. They hunted wild pig, agoutis and tapir, and had small gardens in their villages, where they would grow manioc (or cassava) and corn. Then, in the 1980s, their death warrant was effectively signed: farmers and loggers were invited to begin exploring the region, cutting roads deep into the forest, and turning the once verdant wilderness into lucrative soya fields and cattle ranches. ... The only way to prevent the government finding out about this indigenous community was to wipe them off the map. At some point, believed to be around 1990, scores of Akuntsu were massacred at a site roughly five hours' drive from the town of Vilhena. Only seven members of the tribe escaped, retreating deeper into the wilderness to survive." (Independent, 13 October)

Ruthless system
The recent speed-up of the development of capitalism inside China has also led to even more misery for the working population of that part of the world. In an effort to compete with more established industrial nations the Chinese owning class have ruthlessly swept aside small peasant-like production for the mass production of modern capitalism. The resultant displacing of labourers and the mammoth increase in water and air pollution has led to a near catastrophe of unimaginable proportions.

The World Bank recently estimated that China has experienced an annual industrial growth of 10 percent over the last 25 years, and reckoned the number of deaths from pollution alone in 2007 as 760,000. To grasp an inkling of this social disaster it is probably better to look at two local horror stories than quote mere statistics.

"The residents of Shuangqiao village say that their homes are now nothing but places in which to wait for death. In the paddy fields surrounding this small community in Hunan province, southern China, the rice is neglected and strewn with weeds. The vegetable plots stand empty, stripped of the green beans and cabbages that were grown as cash crops. Underfoot, the earth has been poisoned to a depth of 20cm (8in). The water in the wells is undrinkable. Tragedies like this – the legacy of China's rush to get rich – are all too common. Yesterday more than 600 children in Shaanxi province were found to be suffering from lead poisoning caused by a nearby lead and zinc smelter. The plight of Shuangqiao, however where three people have died and 509 are sick from poisoning by the heavy metals cadmium and indium, produced by a nearby factory, has drawn wide-spread attention since residents took to the internet to air their grievances." (London Times, 15 August)

What lies behind this seemingly callous action by the owning class on their own national working population? It cannot be mere coincidence that the price of indium soared from $600 (£360) a kilogram in 2003 to $1,000 by 2006. China now meets 30 per cent of world demand and at its peak the Xianghe factory produced 300 kg of indium a month. Capitalism is an insatiable monster as far as profits are concerned. Human misery is of no concern where the profit motive reigns supreme.

One farmer's plight summed up the hopelessness of the situation when he was told by officials that his land would be unusable for 60 years but that he could grow non-edible crops such as cotton or trees to clean the soil. "Farmer Yang has abandoned hope, "It's the children, the children," he lamented. "We want our children to have a future. We have to leave."

RD

On modern life (Eric Fromm ) (2009)

From the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Capitalistic society is based on the principle of political freedom on the one hand, and of the market as the regulator of all economic, hence social, relations, on the other. The commodity market determines the conditions under which commodities are exchanged, the labour market regulates the acquisition and sale of labour. Both useful things and useful energy and skill are transformed into commodities which are exchanged without the use of force and without fraud under the conditions of the market.”

“Modern capitalism needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.
What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature. He has been transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action.”

“Man becomes a ‘nine to fiver,’ he is part of the labour force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed by the organization of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole structure of the organization, at a prescribed speed, and in a prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction.”

“From birth to death, from Monday to Monday, from morning to evening – all activities are reutilised and prefabricated. How should a man caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and fear, with the long for love and the dread of the nothing and of separateness?”

“In the modern work process of a clerk, the worker on the endless belt, little is left of this uniting quality of work. The worker becomes an appendix to the machine or to the bureaucratic organization.”

(from The Art of Loving, 1956)

See Also: To Have or To Be . . .

Pieces Together: Capitalist Paradox (2009)

From the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

CAPITALIST PARADOX

"Scientists and development experts across the globe are racing to increase food production by 50 percent over the next two decades to feed the world’s growing population, yet many doubt their chances despite a broad consensus that enough land, water and expertise exist. The number of hungry people in the world rose to 1.02 billion this year, or nearly one in seven people, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, despite a 12-year concentrated effort to cut the number. The global financial recession added at least 100 million people by depriving them of the means to buy enough food, but the numbers were inching up even before the crisis, the United Nations noted in a report last week. “The way we manage the global agriculture and food security system doesn’t work,” said Kostas G. Stamoulis, a senior economist at the organization. “There is this paradox of increasing global food production, even in developing countries, yet there is hunger.” (New York Times, 22 October)

DRUG PUSHERS PAY OFF

"Could you imagine how much money you would have to have to be able to spend $609,000 a day? What would you expect to receive for that amount of money? Who has that kind of money to spend, especially during a “recession”? According to the latest issue of Time magazine, in the first 6 months of this year, the pharmaceutical industry spent about $609,000 a day to influence lawmakers. Can you imagine the financial payoff they must expect to get to be able to spend that kind of money. This does not include all the money they spend on advertising as well. The drug industry has 1,228 registered lobbyists. This equals 2.3 lobbyists for every member of congress. Obviously, the pharmaceutical industry does not want to be left out of the current healthcare reform debate and are willing to pay handsomely to make sure they aren’t. The return on that investment has already been considerable. As drug lobbyist Jim Greenwood says, “we’ve done very well.” (Dr Brian's Blog, 26 October)

ALL RIGHT FOR SOME

"As workers up and down the UK sat at home last week worrying about whether they would still have a job in a month's time, a raucous crowd of hedge fund managers and investment bankers at the Whisky Mist nightclub in Mayfair pulled yet more vodka out of their huge ice bucket and called for the waiter to bring another bottle of Dom Perignon, served with a sparkler. ...In London nightspots last week, the City's finest were spending with a swagger. ...As City workers once again prepare for corporate excess, and investment banks such as Goldman Sachs get ready to pay record bonuses, new bars, restaurants and nightclubs are springing up around the office tower blocks in the City and Canary Wharf to feed demand." (Observer, 1 November)

Market analyst (2009)

Book Review from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why not socialism? By G. A. Cohen. Princeton University Press, 2009

This pocket-size 83-page book is easy to read and it’s easy to agree with some of what the author writes. But it’s hard to see him as he no doubt saw himself (he died in August just before the book came out): someone who understands the different between capitalism and socialism.

First the positive things in the book. These mostly centre around Cohen’s critical remarks about some aspects of capitalism: “I give as little service as I can in exchange for as much service as I can get: I want to buy cheap and sell dear”. And although he favours market ‘socialism’ he does recognise how similar it is to market capitalism: “exchange under market socialism is no less market exchange than it is under capitalism”.

Now the longer list of things to disagree with: “it is a familiar socialist policy to insist on equality of both income and hours of work”. No, that isn’t a socialist policy. In socialism there won’t be (money) incomes or insistence that we all work the same hours.

Cohen claims that socialism is infeasible “even if people are, or could become, in the right culture, sufficiently generous, we do not know how to harness that generosity: we do not know how, through appropriate rules and stimuli, to make generosity turn the wheels of the economy”. In socialism we shall treat each other as fellow humans not as commodities. It has nothing to do with harnessing generosity or turning the wheels of the economy.

“Market socialism does not fully satisfy socialist standards of distributive justice, but it scores far better by those standards than market capitalism does, and is therefore an eminently worthwhile project, from a socialist point of view.” No, it isn’t.

To sum up, Cohen writes of “We socialists.” But he should really say “We ‘market socialists’ who muddy the water about what socialism means…”

Stan Parker

Greasy Pole: BNP – Question Time Without Answers (2009)

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

We were promised that it would be as entertaining and as cleansing as a mediaeval execution, with the prisoner ritually humiliated then swiftly finished off by the muscular man with the axe. But the BBC's Question Time on 29 October last was less watchable than that because, while condemned man Nick Griffin of the British National Party was surprisingly unprepared for the predictable lines of attack on him, his appointed tormentors on the panel – like Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor Jack Straw and Liberal Democrat Home Affairs Spokesman Chris Huhne – were similarly feeble. The announcement that the BBC had invited Griffin to take part in the programme provoked a storm of protest avowedly because the BNP, for its racism and nostalgia for the Holocaust, is in the line of descent from the Nazis. If that argument had been sustained, it would have provided ammunition enough to liquidate Griffin but in the event what was substituted was little more than a sample of mob hysteria. Perhaps that suited the purposes of the BBC, embarrassed by the protests and anxious to validate their anti-fascist credentials. It would also explain why Question Master David Dimbleby ran the event with no pretence at being impartial; indeed, by confronting Griffin with inconvenient quotes and facts he emerged as something like the BNP's most effective opponent. Which means that, as an example of the frustration of rabble politics, the programme left us with some unanswered questions.

Fascism
The programme was not at all helpful in answering questions about the nature of the BNP. To begin with, Griffin denies that it is fascist – just as groups like the Union for British Freedom and the British League of Ex-Servicemen, which in the immediate post-war years sprang from the ruins of Mosley's British Union of Fascists, argued that fascism was out of date when their concept of the future lay with European Union. Griffin also shows symptoms – in public at any rate – of an unclear attitude to racism. In 1993 the BNP Deputy Leader agreed that “We are 100 percent racist, yes” but this policy has been somewhat modified by Griffin into “ethno nationalism” – which in other circumstances, bearing in mind the reputation of some BNP members, could be as menacing as a “final solution”. Discussing the Holocaust, Griffin is on record as concluding that “. . . the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria” – the kind of statement the origins of which, under pressure from Dimbleby, he said he could not understand. The common thread in all this apparent confusion is Griffin's policy of trying to improve the BNP's electoral prospects by modifying their more extreme tendencies, for example the policy of enforced repatriation has become one of “firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home” .

Elections
As things stand, he can claim some success. The BNP has the organisation to nominate hundreds of candidates in local elections; in 2007 there were 754 of them and at the end of that year after resignations, expulsions and the like, they held 42 seats. In May 2008 they won a seat in the London Assembly and in last year's Euro Elections Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons polled enough votes to see them elected – which apart from other things led to Griffin being invited to take part in Any Questions. Unsurprisingly, the BNP gained from the Westminster expenses scandal, which encouraged outraged voters to look outside the established parties in the unsupported belief that somewhere, somehow there were others who would behave differently if they were in power. And that goes some way to explain the appeal of the BNP and to what success they have so far had – the impression they promote that, among the turmoil and cupidity of the other parties they alone make themselves aware of the complaints and concerns in the everyday, persistent struggles of the working class. In April 2006 Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking (a paid-up, devoted member of the New Labour Islington Tony Blair Fan Club) told the Sunday Telegraph that 8 out of ten white workers in her constituency may be tempted to vote for the BNP in the coming local elections – because “no one else is listening to them” about unemployment, high house prices and the like. She was strongly criticised for these remarks, which may have been linked to her helpful advice to some sacked MG Rover workers to look for jobs at the local Tesco. Meanwhile the BNP saluted their success in winning 12 of the 13 seats they contested by gratefully delivering her a bunch of roses. The only valid response to this evidence of the poisonous results of combining political confusion with prejudice was that the last thing needed by workers in their struggles is advice or sympathy from politicians.

Lies
The other members of the Question Time panel – and a clear majority of the audience – seemed to have proceeded from the assumption that if the BNP had a case it was too feeble – ill-constructed, chaotically developed, driven by malice – to be worth any serious attention. Instead, their comments were moulded from a mix of sweeping assertions and straightforward abuse, on the lines of the BNP being “...filthy, disgusting...” Perhaps this was their method of evading the truth that organisations like the BNP – discriminatory, repressive, as brutal as they wished to be – appeal to voters who are in despair at the manipulative impotence and deceit of the other parties. So Jack Straw sat blathering before the cameras in denial of his government's miserable failure to deal with the social scars of recession, poverty, crime and capitalism's persistent waste of human talents. He did not acknowledge that their making war on Iraq and Afghanistan was based on purposive lies. Their wretched failure invalidates the claims of all capitalism's political parties to be an effective opposition against the likes of the BNP. We have heard enough of such questions; we need some answers.

Ivan

Down and out in Mayfair (2009)

From the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

We still live in a society that if you don’t have the ability to pay you ‘goes’ without.

Paying fuel bills can be hard at the best of times but you are twice as likely to fall into fuel poverty if you’ve recently been treated for cancer, according to new research from Macmillan Cancer Support. Following diagnosis, three-quarters of cancer patients in active treatment need to use their heating more, yet those under 60 do not qualify for any help to pay for it. Fuel poverty – having to spend more than 10 percent of your income on heating – is a relatively new phenomenon that is beginning to grip Britain faster than the spread of swine flu and serves as the cold reminder that we still live in a society that if you don’t have the ability to pay you go without.

The true extent of such hardship and poverty in Britain and its impact is conveniently bypassed and generally ignored by mainstream politicians who have more to peevishly whinge about when it comes to their own expenses. As we come to almost the end of this the first decade of the 21st centaury it’s as if the hands on the clock of time have been turned backwards. If it wasn’t for the constant sight of all manner of technology’s advancement from transport to the smallest iPods, cyberspace and the internet you would not be wrong to conclude that some things change but much, very much just stays the same, as I’m constantly reminded when I visit and spend time with my many friends who live their lives out and on the streets of London, the capital city in this the fifth richest nation in the world.

Homeless
The people that I speak of are the visible homeless that no one seems to see. Their numbers are hard to place a finger on, they live in hostels, squats and a growing number sleep rough on our streets. Keeping warm in winter is a battle waged every year by the rough sleeper in his or her skip, but truth is every season brings its problems when you’re forced to share the outdoor life with the birds, urban foxes and city rats.

A great many of my friends on the street live and rely solely upon street handouts and day centres for food, laundry and bathing facilities. Many refuse to claim entitled benefits, preferring not to be a part of a welfare system that incessantly strong-arms the unemployed into taking low paid employment with the use of sanctions and penalties. This is in complete contrast to what Richard Bacon, a Tory MP on the committee which acts as a watchdog over public spending, said:

"The Department for Work and Pensions does not know how many people are out of work by choice, rather than by chance. Properly targeted help must be put in place for those who want to work. Only then will the Government be able to flush out the shirkers who are sticking up two fingers at hard-working families and treating the benefit system like a cash machine." (Daily Mail)

How can anyone not be moved by the spectacle and lines of men and women who gather every night in London’s Lincoln Inn Fields for a meal provided by the Hari Khrisnas or a Jamaican Christian Church. On some occasions I’ve counted up to three hundred people who arrive hours in advance with all their worldly pocessions rammed in to rucksacks and carrier bags, sleeping bags and their wind-up radio. This is no easy life. The streets are fraught with danger for many homeless people; over the last few years people living on the streets have become more vulnerable to violence and attack; this threat can be from other street users and from those who are intoxicated through alcohol and/or drugs.

Rough sleepers are 13 times more likely to experience crime and 47 times likely to be the victim of theft. Crime, and the perception of crime, can play a major role in the decisions of rough sleepers in not only where they sleep but also where they take part in daytime activities. Many rough sleepers avoid danger and stay clear of violence by using the London night bus service to get some rest, as one friend told me: “You take the longest route say to Heathrow Airport and back that kills 4 hours and before you know it it’s morning.” Female rough sleepers are particularly vulnerable to physical attack and abuse, and to protect themselves they tend to be amongst the most hidden.

Rough sleepers are met with a mixture of emotions from the general public ranging from pity and support to anger and distrust. But one thing almost goes unasked and that’s why are people, fellow human beings living, existing on our rich streets; streets that are not paved with gold.

London has seen a big increase in the number of migrant workers left homeless and destitute in the city, without access to benefits or housing help. The effects of the economic downturn, as well as a legal block preventing migrants from certain countries claiming benefits, has meant increased numbers of rough sleepers in the city from eastern European countries.

Every year an official head count of rough sleepers within Westminster is carried out and recorded for official purposesî In recent years allegations of tactics designed to reduce the figure have been made. The Simon Community, an organisation that works and lives with the homeless on the streets, undertook its own street head count at the end of October, and found 247 people sleeping rough in the City of Westminster, almost 100 more than official figures now state. The Simon Community along with some rough sleepers have claimed that diversionary tactics were put in place days before the street count took place. A number of known rough sleepers were offered travel warrants by Police and community officers, in an attempt to transfer them out of the area. In a BBC report on the issue of travel warrants being handed out, the Metropolitan Police denied the allegation that they were shifting people out of the area, saying that they regularly issue travel warrants for homeless people, particularly during the winter months. Allegations have also been made that local authorities exerted harsh measures against homeless people, according to the Simon Community. They received information about a group of homeless people being physically moved out of the Victoria Street area by Police. Similarly, there are accusations of doorways used to bed down in were hosed by cleaners to make them unusable.

There are claims that charities were also instructed to make beds available in their hostels ahead of the count, and emergency accommodation was opened up on the week the count took place.

Reality entertainment
During the summer the BBC screened a very different type of reality television; this involved celebrities who were asked to partake in the programme ‘Famous, Rich & Homeless’. This TV documentary, described as thought-provoking, recruited five famous volunteers who were asked to experience the life of a homeless person on the streets of London for a few days (ten) during the winter of 2008. When I say famous, what I mean by that is household names drawn from the entertainment and media industry. The Marquess of Blandford, the One Show’s Hardeep Singh Kholi, journalist Rosie Boycott, former Coronation Street actor Bruce Jones and tennis commentator Annabel Croft all swapped their lavish privileged lifestyles, their fame and fortune for a time; for a world of soup runs and hostels.

They were helped and manoeuvred throughout by Big Issue founder John A Bird and Craig Last, a former youth worker for the charity Centrepoint. Having watched the show myself; I came away thinking that this type of reality entertainment achieves nothing more than accepting and approving that the daily struggle for life’s existence at the bottom of the pile is a normal part of the structure of society. But the best response to the show came from a homeless person writing in the letters page of Pavement the free monthly magazine produced for London's homeless; they said:

“I found it quite ironic that ‘Famous, Rich and Homeless’ was shown on the BBC. I spent seven months living rough on London's streets, often at All Souls' Church in Portland Place. Having crashed there for several months, rough sleeping with the full knowledge and permission of the church authorities, I was woken one night and "moved on" by a couple of Westminster police officers. When I enquired about the incident at the church reception the following morning, I was informed by a staffer that the alleged complaint had not been lodged by the church authorities but by BBC security staff at Broadcasting House, directly across the road, no doubt because they were irritated by having to constantly step over cardboard boxes whilst filming fearless, hard-hitting documentaries about the plight of London's homeless.”

About the same time as these programmes were broadcast, The Wall Street Journal (15 July) reported; that in the London Borough of Westminster, where Mayfair is located, homes can cost up to £50 million. Yet Westminster is fifth among London's 33 boroughs in the number of unoccupied properties. In 2008, 1,737 homes had been vacant for six months or more, the third highest number among all London boroughs, according to the Empty Homes Agency, a non-profit group that seeks to put empty homes back into use.

Westminster Council have placed according to its website (at the time of writing) 3.000 homeless families into temporary accommodation. Many have been exported to the poorer boroughs of East London because they claim there are not enough temporary in Westminster.

The high concentration of rundown, empty homes is striking for a posh Mayfair, with its ornately gated manses. The hub of aristocratic society before World War II, Mayfair's modern-day image is demonstrated by its prominent place on the British Monopoly board.

Mayfair's homeowners aren't down on their luck, far from it. Rather, there properties serve as investments for owners who pay the bills to keep them empty – something the neighbours and council object to when the homes fall into disrepair. Many owners decline to rent the homes due to local council tax rules, with tax on properties at a lower rate if they are empty and unfurnished, which is a loophole that helps the filthy rich. As the number of homes now priced at more than £1m has fallen by a third during the past two years the problems surrounding the abandonment of posh homes may get worse.

The whole business of empty homes came to light last winter when a group of young squatters occupied two £20 million homes on Park Lane overlooking Hyde Park. Before the squatters settled in, the homes had been empty for seven years. During that time, the Council had tried three times to contact their British Virgin Islands-based property owners: Red Line Ltd. and Perfectil Ltd. Following two years of silence, the property owners surfaced once newspaper reports outed the squatters. The result of such media reports has meant that wealthy homeowners have turned to private security firms to protect their empty London properties from squatters at a cost of up £2,600 a week while according to the Empty Homes Agency there are more than 80,000 empty properties in London (Evening Standard, 11 November). In the recession this is one business that may prove to be very lucrative as a growing number of homes are bought by foreign investors who want a secure asset but continue to live elsewhere.

In our daily press we read much about the housing problem, about lost homes repossessed by the banks and the so-called housing shortage, with thousands stranded and languishing for years on the council housing waiting list or simply held hostage to the private landlord, the cry goes out for more affordable homes or a proposed programme of public works that embraces house building as the desired solution, peddled by those who still offer the dried-out old fig leaf of failed reform. Over a hundred years ago Frederick Engels wrote in the Housing Question: “This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it.”

And then Engels gave an answer to this age old problem. He said, and I repeat, to end the housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.

NL

Editorial: Copenhagen: another predictable failure (2009)

Editorial from the December 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The most recent IPCC’s (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) findings say that rich, industrial countries must cut emissions from 1990 levels by 25-40 percent by 2020 if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding dangerous climate change.

In July the G-8 leaders agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees C above the pre-industrial level at which human civilisation developed. Pre-Copenhagen the EU has pledged 20 percent cuts by 2020, but will increase this to 30 percent if others – like the US – do likewise. Japan has pledged 25 percent reductions by 2020 if others will do the same. Chinese president Hu pledged to cut emissions ‘by a notable margin’ by 2020. The US has given no assurances but a bill Obama has said he supports (the Waxman-Markey bill) would give less than 5 percent reductions by 2020.

Also in July, the findings of a newly completed study by WBGU (a German acronym) – the chairman of which, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, is chief climate adviser to the German government – were given for the first time to an invitation only conference in the Santa Fe Institute, New Mexico. The study has since been published. This WBGU study says the US must stop all CO2 emissions by 2020; Germany,Italy and other industrial nations by 2025-30 and China by 2035, with the whole world needing to be carbonemissions- free by 2050. The study would allow the big polluters to delay their slowdown by buying emissions rights from developing countries, enabling possible extension times of around a decade for some. A fundamental principle of the study is the ‘per capita principle’, meaning that the right to emit greenhouse gases is shared equally by all people on Earth. Applied to a world population of seven billion, each person on earth would have a quota of 2.7 tons of CO2, whereas currently US citizens emit 20 tons per capita.

Schellnhuber claims that meeting these criteria will give humanity a two in three chance of staying within that 2 degrees C limit – although there is no guarantee. To increase the odds in favour carbon emissions would have to end sooner; delaying another decade or so before halting all emissions would reduce the odds to fifty-fifty. Odds are that whatever is promoted at Copenhagen there will be much jockeying and positioning, many fine words and ifs and buts by selfimportant world leaders and another decade down the ever-more polluted and climate change-affected road we’ll look back and see another abject failure – just like Rio, Kyoto, Johannesburg, etc. ad infinitum. What more can we expect from a system which makes a habit of fouling its own and everybody else’s backyard as long as it’s making money by blind pursuit of growth? Come 2020 the King Canutes of capitalism will still be trying to hold back the waves with empty gestures.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 126

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 126th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1563 friends!

Recent blogs:

The illusion of freedom

WSPUS Manifesto on the War, 1917

1789: France’s bourgeois revolution

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Radical Film Forum

Sundays 6pm - 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

29th November - Sicko

13th December - Earthlings

Quote for the week:

"Scientific socialism considers our views dependent upon our material needs, and our political standpoint dependent upon the economic position of the class we belong to. Moreover, this conception corresponds with the aspirations of the masses whose needs are in the first place material, while the ruling class must necessarily base itself on the deductive principle, on the preconceived unscientific notion that the spiritual salvation and the mental training of the masses are to precede the solution of the social question." Joseph Dietzgen, Scientific Socialism, 1873.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Pathfinders: Gullibility Travels (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

One has to feel a bit sorry for Graham Mace who, keen to improve his car’s green performance, bought an online ‘hydrofuel conversion kit’ in the hope that it would save 30 per cent on fuel consumption, only to find that it ran on snake oil instead (‘Fuel boost device ‘does not work’’, BBC Online, 19 Oct). After chucking £700 at this miracle device he hadn’t saved so much as a dribble of fuel, at which point a BBC investigation revealed the awful truth. It was a con.

But one wonders at the thinking here. Didn’t it occur to him to wonder why none of his friends knew about this ingenious gadget, why garages or motor suppliers didn’t stock it, or why it wasn’t fitted as standard at the factory? And what possessed him, after shelling out the original £290 with no success, to spend a further £400 on ‘upgrades’ rather than cut his losses? Even if it had worked, he’d have had to drive to Vladivostok and back to make up for the outlay. What on earth was going on?

Consumer programmes regularly trot out the old standard: if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. But throw in a bit of seductive science and the consumer just seems to melt like warm butter, effectively separated from their money and common sense in equal measure. New Scientist notes that dodgy online companies think they can sell anything if they put the word ‘quantum’ in their blurb, like the ‘quantum pulse device’ that powers a ‘human generator’ and retails for a mere €420,000 (17 October). Hard to believe that anyone is dumb enough to fall for this supposed immortality machine, but you would only need one or two gullible net-travellers and you’d be made for life, so such stuff is always worth a punt to the scruple-free. If people can’t summon the wit to do a bit of comparative research, one feels that they deserve everything they get (or rather, don’t get) for their money.

Daft pseudo-scientific ideas have been around a long time though. Who hasn’t been assured with huge confidence by someone wearing a copper bracelet that it helps them enormously with their arthritis? But in the first properly controlled trial, at York University, these often expensive jewellery accessories fared no better than placebos (‘Bracelets ‘useless’ in arthritis’, BBC Online, 16 October). What undoubtedly explains the popularity, and durability, of such urban myths is the effect of ‘authority’, whether it comes from one’s peers, one’s elders or one’s newspaper, even though not one of these can be trusted as far as you can throw a grandad or a printing press.

As the Observer reminds us in relation to current fears concerning the rise of racism (18 October), we are horribly suggestible. We know, for instance, that we would rather give wrong answers than right ones if it means fitting in better (Asch conformity experiment, 1951), that the ‘only following orders’ defence at Nuremberg is more than a mere excuse (the Milgram pain-inflicting experiment, 1961, and the Stanford prison experiment, 1971), and that it’s a whole lot easier to start a Nazi party among liberal students than anyone would believe possible (Ron Jones and the ‘Third Wave’ experiment, 1967).

It’s not our fault. We’re a social species, with an outsize brain as mad as it is miraculous, and science is about as natural to us as an abacus to a baboon. Gullibility is only another word for ‘faith’ or ‘conviction’, part of the social glue that binds us. It travels by express while reason has to plod on foot. But that’s all the more reason to make an effort with our reasoning capacity, both in buying products and buying into ideas.

Improbability drivers
Who would believe - a vegetarian spider and a stingless wasp? Both of these turned out to be true, in a ‘truth is stranger than April fool’ kind of way, as was the story about the Maldives politicians who held a cabinet meeting under water. While this excellent innovation should be made compulsory for all politicians (minus scuba gear) we look forward to a story about a ‘benevolent species of capitalist’ discovered lurking somewhere north of Basingstoke and miraculously still in business.

Wackier still is the theory put forward by two CERN physicists, that the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged by ripples in time returning from some future cataclysm where, oh cripes, they really do find the Higgs boson and nature revolts (‘The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate’, New York Times, 12 October). That’s the thing about quantum theory. It’s so improbable anyway that theoretical physicists, like celebs, can talk any bollocks they like and still get serious media attention. Maybe we should start talking about ‘quantum socialism’ and thereby grab a few headlines.

Time to call time
After the runaway success of Europe-wide anti-smoking legislation, much is now being made about ‘passive drinking’ as states gear up for a similar assault on that other popular working-class pastime.

Despite efforts by the UK government chief advisor on health, Liam Donaldson, to incite a wholesome evangelism among the public by tarring all drinkers as potential wife-beaters or lager louts, the concept of ‘passive drinking’ is just not going to hold its whiskey and water.

Anyone who’s ever been in a pub knows perfectly well that wild-west saloon brawls do not break out as a rule nor do most customers get arrested or fall off buildings pretending to be superheroes.

The fact that more than half the UK’s population ignore the government safety limits on alcohol (Observer, 18 October) may be because a), the limits are too low to be of any practical value and b), the government has banned every other drug for spurious reasons so nobody believes anything they say. The half who stay below the limits are probably lying about it anyway.

It’s not that there isn’t a problem, of course there is. But the bigger problem is a patronising establishment which, not content with screwing workers into the ground, then presumes to lecture us about what’s good for us using dubious arguments they fully intend to ignore themselves. For let’s not be in any doubt, this is not about anti-drinking among the ruling classes. Let them swill their port and champers and snort their coke until they’re cross-eyed and drooling over the chambermaids. This is about controlling the workforce, saving some police and hospital A&E expenses, and cutting absenteeism in the dark satanic wage-mills.

Maybe alcohol is the fifth biggest cause of premature death and disability worldwide (New Scientist, 14 October), but workers know damn well that capitalism is responsible for the other four, and that’s what drives them to drink in the first place. Capitalists think they can save money by forcing puritanical self-denial on workers, but with the stress of exploitation we face, we don’t need temperance, we need to lose our tempers.

Paddy Shannon