Between the Lines: Utopias and First Tuesday (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Myopic Visionaries

Somewhere in the basement of Channel Four there is an office in which is to be found a team of timewasters whose lifelong project is to make lengthy documentaries about "socialism" or "Marxism". Over the years the C4 audience has been subjected to numerous programmes of this kind. We wait excitedly, expecting a serious analysis of the subjects so seductively advertised in the titles — and with regularity we are left feeling frustrated, cheated and wondering when the case for socialism would at least be mentioned in passing.

Utopias (C4, 10.45 pm, 1 May) was a classical production of the basement timewasters. The programme lasted for over an hour. It was clearly produced with enormous technical care, using props and recordings of speakers which looked like they were going to serve as a backdrop for something more than superficial. The title was intriguing. Socialists are often called utopians, and here was a programme offering eight "socialists" the chance to discuss their visions of what socialism means. Within the first few minutes that sinking feeling began: the declaration was made that this would not be a programme about definitions. Which meant, more precisely, that it would be a programme in which anyone who felt like it could call themselves socialists without being under the least pressure to explain themselves.

Then the visions commenced. Eight miserable bloody visions of capitalism run better than it is now, with the occasional reference to such limited dreams as being elements of socialism. Jack Jones, the first lofty dreamer, who as head of the TGWU advocated the so-called Social Contract whereby trade unions would agree to take lower wages in order to assist a Labour government to manage the capitalist economy, offered the vision of "fair pensions" and an incomes policy as his taste of utopia. Then came a "socialist" economist who talked a bit about the need for morality and the impossibility of doing away with market forces altogether; followed by some ex-strikers from Silentnight who had set up a furniture-making co-operative business and saw this little dot on the market map as their own piece of socialism in practice; Sheila Rowbotham's utopia had been and gone. It was the GLC, and if that was utopia, then Birmingham's a tropical holiday resort.

Rarely has so much valuable TV time been wasted upon such vague and limited visions of what could be. Here was a chance for a socialist to really show what life could be like in a world set free from the bondage of the profit system. A world of abundant resources in which people could give according to their abilities and have free access to the goods and services that they desire. This would have been something to make them sit up, make them now that there is something more that we could have if only capitalism was not here.

Instead of that we are offered neither socialism nor utopia, but the stale reformist outlooks of capitalism's tame leftwing. As is often the case, the worst contribution of the evening was provided by the SWP. David Widgery, who is an SWP Leninist, a GP and a very pleasant fellow, trotted out the usual line that workers must organise to get reforms out of capitalism. As he put it, "In these times, to be a revolutionary means to try to hang on to reforms". So, the total destruction of the capitalist system is to be postponed a while; there are prescription charges to be fought over. We can only hope that the men in the basement (or wherever they are) take a long time before producing their next intellectual tease.

The Practitioners of Genocide

First Tuesday (ITV, 10.40 pm, 2 May) contrasted strikingly with Utopias. It did not claim to deal with any grand intellectual theme; its subject was the My Lai massacre carried out by the US army twenty years ago. It was the most forceful and moving documentary to be shown on British TV for a long time. It should be seen by anybody who has illusions about the glory of war.

The documentary concentrated upon the way that military training brutalised a group of American workers, whose average age was twenty, into Nazi-like sadistic thugs. One of the few surviors in My Lai was interviewed. Like most villagers, her entire family had been killed in the massacre: "The more I think about it, the more I want to cry" she said, two decades after the atrocity had been committed. She had been thrown into a ditch with scores of dead villagers piled in on top of her. She explained how the soldiers had indiscriminately shot old men and women and infants and babies, how they had raped the women and done worse to young girls, how they had tortured the villagers and then lined them up in rows to be shot. Nearly every one of them was murdered in what the US press called the 'Pinkville' massacre.

The interviews with the screwed up soldiers who are still around to tell the tale demonstrated just how much both killer and killed are the brutalised victims of war. To be sure, the uniformed murderers survive, but with what memories? Psychologically, these men were wrecked; Vietnam had taken their minds and left them badly injured. One black ex-GI sat shaking and twitching. He is on major tranquilisers. He cries a lot. He looks over and over again at press cuttings of the massacre. He recalls, self-torturingly, how he personally shot dead about twenty-five villagers. including several little children. He sits next to a photo of his own son who was murdered in a street attack — and he explains that this must have happened as a punishment for his action in Vietnam.

But, as the documentary clearly showed, these men did not decide to go to Vietnam and slaughter innocent people. They did not act upon a whim. They were driven into a frenzy of violent hatred against the unknown enemy as part of their preparation for the job of being good soldiers.

The documentary ended with pictures of the modern US army being trained, explaining that what is happening to the soldiers is not different from the brutalising process which had turned those of twenty years ago into the practitioners of genocide. No doubt there will be some who will have seen this powerful documentary and concluded that this only demonstrates the awfulness of human nature. That would be a false conclusion; these soldiers were not born thugs, it was the system which required them to be that way. It is capitalism which makes killers out of decent men and women. These men should not feel self-guilt about what they have done, but angry about what they were made to become.

Steve Coleman

A Free Market Guru Gone Wrong (2007)

From the January 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The death of the economist Milton Friedman at the age of 94 last November has robbed the free-market of perhaps its greatest advocate of modern times, but his views were wrong in theory and a failure in practice

Friedman did much to prepare the ground for the resurgence in free-market economics that occurred once capitalism had entered a new phase of economic crisis in the 1970s, and was the main driving force behind what became known as ‘monetarist’ economic theory.

Friedman was a New Yorker by birth but made his name at the University of Chicago, where he was Professor of Economics from 1948. His particular brand of free-market economics gave rise to the ‘Chicago School’ of economists who provided much of the intellectual impetus behind Mrs Thatcher’s early years as UK Prime Minister and influenced countless other governments across the world. After his retirement from Chicago, Friedman joined the Hoover Institute and spent considerable time on the lucrative US lecture circuit preaching his free-market creed.

Friedman was a prolific writer on economic matters for much of his life, but his two most well-known works were also the most transparently political: Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free To Choose (1980), the latter written jointly with his wife, Rose. Most of his other writings were concerned with monetary economics where he became the guru of those opposed to the dominant economic orthodoxies of the post-war period, particularly Keynesian economics.

The position of Friedman and the Chicago School can be divided into two (related) parts. Firstly, the view that markets are the most efficient way of allocating resources and that government intervention in the economy should be as limited as possible, leaving firms and individuals free to maximise their wealth in competitive markets. Secondly, the view that the massive and persistent rise in price levels across much of the world since the Second World War has been essentially a monetary phenomenon, causing dislocations in the normally efficient workings of the market mechanism, eventually leading to rising unemployment and other economic problems.

Free market voodoo

Friedman and the Chicago School viewed capitalism – if left to its own devices – as a largely unproblematic way of organising society, with its own in-built regulatory mechanisms for successful wealth generation and allocation. The key problem with society was not capitalism, but governments. Throughout the twentieth century governments had become more involved in every aspect of economic life and, in the view of Friedman, were creating problems under the guise of preventing them. State ownership, direction and fiscal policy meant that firms were unable to operate in ways that would otherwise be encouraged by free and unregulated markets, causing economic inefficiencies and blockages. The solution was to ‘free the market’ and reduce as far as practicable the interference of the state.

To this end, within a year of Mrs Thatcher’s election as Prime Minister in the UK, Friedman latched upon her government’s stated intention to ‘roll-back the state’ as the first example of his free-market solution in action in the developed world. Friedman advocated ‘the elimination of all government interference in free enterprise, from minimum wage to social welfare programmes’ and told the Washington Post in 1980 that Mrs Thatcher’s economic experiment ‘could mark the turning away from the welfare state back to the free-market economies of the nineteenth century’.

But this view was problematic for two reasons. One, that no economy, even in the nineteenth century, was a genuinely free-market one. Indeed, the free-market economy is a construct or model – a postulate of economists – and has never existed in reality. Because of the way the capitalist economy works in practice, it almost certainly never will as capitalism, a competitive and necessarily class-divided society, is dependent on state intervention and regulation as an arbiter (and enforcer) of competing interests. Indeed, ironically enough, it was brought into being in large part because of the actions of the state itself in removing feudal peasants from the land through the Enclosure Acts and other devices, so as to create a pool of available wage-workers (without which capitalism would have no producer class).

Second, while the economies of the nineteenth century (and other economies too admired by Friedman in more recent times such as South Korea and Malaysia) were closer to this model than most, there is little about their economic structure which is suggestive of a desirable environment for human beings. In fact, countries with the most rampant free-market economies tend to exhibit characteristics of mass poverty, social polarisation and raging crime above all others.

In many respects then, Friedman’s conception of the free-market was a utopian one, a notion that existed in the heads of the Chicago School economists but not in reality. It could never exist in actuality and the nearer one got to it, the less desirable it appeared anyway.

But Friedman’s resurrection of the totem of the free-market betrayed its unoriginality too. From the outset, Friedman had been a follower of some of those in the earlier ‘classical’ school of economics (such as Alfred Marshall) who thought that governments and trade unions were the economic villains preventing the effective operation of the market economy as the most efficient mechanism for allocating scarce resources. Whatever the inadequacies of the Keynesian School that had replaced their thinking as the dominant one, the very reason classical economics from Adam Smith to Marshall was overturned as the orthodoxy by Keynes was precisely because it had failed to explain – let alone provide a cure for – the most persistent and endemic problems of the capitalist system, such as poverty amidst plenty, mass unemployment and economic crises.

So Friedman’s solution to the emerging economic crises of the 1970s and 80s was an old, discredited one, resurrected for a new audience but where – as the mass unemployment record of the Thatcher government testified – the second performance was no better than the first. That right-wing US politicians such as the former President George Bush were driven to describe the Chicago School’s tax-cutting, free-market approach as ‘voodoo economics’ is in itself quite some testimony to its failure.

Monetarism

The second distinctive aspect of Friedman’s economic thinking was often – and loosely – labelled ‘monetarism’. This was the idea that inflation is a monetary phenomenon with a monetary cause, but – just like free-market economics – this was really an old idea given new life by Friedman and the Chicago School. As an attempt to explain the persistent rises in the price level that had taken place since the Second World War, together with the Keynesian failure to deal with the problem, monetarism represented an attempt to get back to economic basics.

If persistently rising prices had become a noticeable issue after the war, by the 1970s it was a serious problem across much of the world, reaching double-digit figures in most countries, including the most advanced. The explanations for it advanced by economists and politicians of every hue were many and varied. The most prominent were that it was caused by factors such as:

1 the profiteering of the big corporations

2 excess levels of overall demand in the economy

3 wage increases above rises in productivity/ coupled with trade union power

4 excessive government expenditure

5 excessive government borrowing

6 the expansion of bank deposits and credit

7 psychological ‘expectations’, i.e. that price rises are a self-fulfillingprophecy

8 low interest rates

As the problem got worse and the analysis of it more desperate, some of these explanations interlinked. The monetarists at various times indicated some agreement with all of these explanations except the first two, though it was the monetary aspect of their argument that won them most attention and separated their approach most clearly from what had become the prevailing Keynesian orthodoxy.

In essence, monetarism was based on the Quantity Theory of Money and a formula for it developed by Irving Fisher which is the notion that changes in the money supply, all other things being equal, have a direct impact on the general level of prices. Friedman even went so far as to explain that in this respect Karl Marx was one of the first monetarists, holding to an explanation of inflation that focused on the supply of money as the key variable.

Friedman’s argument was that persistent inflation caused a serious imbalance to the successful operation of the market economy, leading to market distortions and failures (which, in turn, explained high unemployment and other contemporary phenomena). Its cause was once again mistaken government interference, this time governments failing to conduct monetary policy based on the equilibrium formula identified by the Quantity Theory of Money as being essential for a stable price level.

Friedman summarised his view in the Financial Times (7 September 1970) by claiming that ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon – in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output’. This indeed sounded like the analysis of Karl Marx based on his labour theory of value. Marx’s view was that the over-issue of an inconvertible (such as into gold) paper currency above and beyond that needed to carry out production and trade in an economy at any one time, would cause a commensurate rise in prices. This was because such an excess issue of paper money caused an artificial bloating of monetary demand, injecting purchasing power into the economy that was not based on the production of real value embodied in commodities. As demand increases, caused by this excess of circulating money, prices rise in response to it.

For Marx as well as many of the earlier classical economists, inflation was properly called ‘currency inflation’ as it was based on an artificial bloating of the currency leading to a diminution of its purchasing power. Individual prices of commodities could rise and fall too, of course, and the trade cycle would cause the price level as a whole to rise in booms and fall in slumps, but currency inflation was a different phenomenon, caused by governments over-issuing an inconvertible currency.

If this is what Friedman had really meant too, it would have no doubt had some effect on the conduct of monetary policy in a way that could have tackled the problem – but in the eventuality it was not quite what the monetarists meant at all. In fact, the monetarists got themselves into the ridiculous position of agreeing that inflation was caused by an excess supply of money, without being able to agree on what actually constituted ‘money’ in the first place.

Applying his labour theory of value, Marx had taken the view that ‘money’ in capitalism was really the money-commodity, typically gold, through which other commodities acquire a price, and which denotes how much of the money-commodity they will exchange for. In the situation of a currency that is not convertible into gold, this underlying relationship is merely expressed by paper token money (as today) and its purchasing power is determined solely by its quantity in relation to the amount of gold the token paper money is supposed to represent.

Lacking a labour theory of value to underpin their analysis and – just like the other conventional economists who content themselves with examining surface appearances in the capitalist economy rather than underlying relationships – the monetarists decided that things that had often been termed ‘near-money’ were so close to money as to become indistinguishable from it and should therefore be included in any definition of the money supply. This primarily included bank deposits.

This seemingly theoretical distinction had a real, practical impact. When Jim Callaghan’s Labour government from 1976-9 signalled a move towards rejecting Keynesianism in favour of monetarism – and was then followed by the more full-blooded version of monetarism from 1979 onwards when Mrs Thatcher’s Conservatives came to power – their stated aim was to ‘watch and control’ the expansion of the money supply. But the favoured money supply indicators (labelled ‘M1’ and ‘M3’ at the time) consisted primarily of bank deposits and it was no surprise that their movements bore little relationship to what was happening to the price level. Indeed, Thatcher herself was later to comment that these indicators were ‘often distorted, confusing and volatile’ (The Downing Street Years, p.688), with their control soon being abandoned as a policy instrument.

In effect, what Friedman had done was to encourage governments in the UK, US and elsewhere to resurrect what had been known decades earlier as the ‘bank deposit theory of prices’. This was a long-discredited theory that had been comprehensively demolished by (among others) one of the last of the classical economists, Professor Edwin Cannan of the London School of Economics, who, in his Modern Currency and the Regulation Of Its Value (1931) claimed with a remarkable sense of prophecy that ‘this is one of the most obstructive of all modern monetary delusions’. Like Marx, and like his fellow classical economists, Cannan adhered to a theory of value which allowed him to underpin what happened on the ‘surface’ of the economy with what was happening in the sphere of real wealth production and distribution. His argument was summarised in his Money: Its Connexion With Rising and Falling Prices (1923):

‘A[n] . . . error, which has, unfortunately, been countenanced by many high monetary authorities in recent years, is to suppose that the aggregate of deposits is a kind of money (sometimes it is called ‘bank-money’) which should be added to the actual stock of coins and notes existing at any moment. The individual, no doubt, finds ‘money in the bank’ much the same as ‘cash in the house’, but the aggregate of all the individuals’ balances at their banks is only an amount which the bankers are liable to pay, but which they could not possibly pay in cash at one moment. A liability to pay cash is certainly not cash: both debtors and creditors are painfully aware of the fact. When additional currency is put on the market by some one who has the power of issuing it, prices are raised, because the issuer’s offer of money in exchange for goods and services is additional, the power of nobody else to spend money having been reduced. When, on the other hand, a person increases his balance at his bank he increases the bank’s power to lend only at most by the amount which he forgoes, so that the aggregate money-spending is not increased’ (p.81).

An inability to recognise this fact (compounded by a general adherence to the mistaken view that banks can create vast multiples of credit from a single deposit base) meant that Friedman’s ‘monetarism’ amounted to little more than the advocacy of a discredited economic theory with predictably disastrous results.

Legacy

The modern legacy of Milton Friedman is not a strong one. Where free-market solutions to problems are not in open retreat, they are being questioned with renewed vigour and ‘monetarism’ has deservedly died something of a death, even among many of its previous adherents. And while Friedman hugely exaggerated the role governments have played in market failures such as economic slumps (his book A Monetary History of the United States 1867-1960 being something of a case in point) where he was right – with inflation being a government-promoted monetary phenomenon – it was not always for the right reasons.

In most developed countries the creeping inflation of the currency that started at the time of the Second World War is still with us, partly because Friedman’s ‘monetarism’ ended up obscuring the issue. The amount of currency in circulation in the UK in 1938 was under £600 million, now it is around £45,000 million having steadily increased year-on-year, being far in excess of what is actually required for production and trade. The result is that the price level has risen every single year since and – despite the current downward pressure on many prices caused by world competition – continues to do so. And capitalism’s other attendant social and economic problems are still with us as they always are, whether there is inflation or not.

Seen in this light, Professor Friedman’s most important interventions verged between the disastrous and the useless. In promoting a free-market dogma which refuses, against all the evidence, to countenance the fact that there is something intrinsically wrong with the capitalist system of production for profit he was seriously misguided; furthermore, in effectively resurrecting the formerly discredited ‘bank deposit theory of prices’ he did little but add further confusion on the principal issue that made his name.

In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Little did they probably suspect at the time that it was for breathing life into two economic corpses that would have been better left dead and buried.

DAP

This "Honours" Business (1935)

From the July 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

The awards of honours to prominent trade union officials, Messrs. Pugh, Citrine and Edwards, is of sufficient importance to call for comment. It mirrors the attitude of mind of the trade union movement on the one side and of the ruling class on the other. It is a by-product of the crisis and of the uneasiness of our masters in face of international difficulties.

When war broke out in 1914 the British capitalists knew that they were facing a situation full of danger for themselves. If the German capitalists' appeal to arms were to succeed the flow of wealth derived from the exploitation of the black, yellow and white workers of the Empire would be re-directed to the advantage of the German capitalist victors.

To overcome the danger the British Government had dire need of the unstinted support of the working class. To secure it they called in the trade union and Labour leaders, gave them office, pay, honours and flattery, and got in return a sufficiently docile working class, content to die for capitalism and be enthusiastic about it. There was, of course, a minority who were never misled, but the majority was large enough to serve the capitalist purpose. Shortly after the war, in 1921-22, there came another crisis for capitalism—an economic crisis. Again the trade union officials and Labour leaders played their part in smoothing things over and restraining their followers. Then, in 1924, a Labour Government was allowed to function on a short lead, as an instrument for securing an adjustment of foreign relationships, particularly with Germany. When that was finished, out it went. In 1926 the workers, against the advice of their leaders, came out on strike as a spontaneous gesture of sympathy with the miners. This time capitalism preferred fighting to negotiation, so the labour leaders were not wanted, and were hardly even allowed to save their faces.

A few years later, in 1931, capitalism had another economic crisis. Again it was necessary to have the workers won over, or, failing that, to have them confused and divided.

MacDonald, Snowden, Thomas, etc., responded to the capitalist call for aid and enabled capitalism to solve its problem cheaply and expeditiously. Now we come down to 1935 and the distribution of knighthoods to the trade union inner circle. What os capitalism's problem now? and why does it not continue to make use of tried and trusty turn-coats like MacDonald? The answer to the second question is a simple one. To be of use to the other side a leader must be a man of commanding influence and popularity, otherwise his defection will not serve the desired purpose of destroying his party. But once the desertion has taken place, the influence and popularity steadily diminish. MacDonald and Thomas in the past four years have become less and less influential with the working class. So the exit of MacDonald from the premiership coincides with the advancement of his former associates—who are now his opponents—to the honour of titles.

And what is the crisis for which capitalism requires working class aid this time? The answer is no doubt to be found in the re-arming of Germany and her demand for the restoration of colonies. If the British Government should want to take a strong line in the councils of the international capitalist banditry it may again require the support and sacrifice of the British working class, so again it uses the time-honoured device of seeking to nobble the leaders.

Doubtless the men concerned do not see it that way. They either do not see anything—although one would have supposed that Mr. Citrine for example could realise the helpless position in which he is placing himself—or else they honestly believe it is their duty to support English capitalism against Nazi capitalism. It matters little which attitude is really theirs. The result is the same in either case, and it spells disaster for the working class. Working class interests require that the workers shall line up as one solid body against capitalism and capitalist Governments everywhere, and for Socialism at all time times and in all places. Even on the short view, looking only at the question of the danger of war, the international standpoint is the soundest common sense. The Governments in every country, when seeking the support of their own working class for some policy of national defence and war, invariably stress the alleged unity of workers and capitalists abroad as an excuse for strong armaments at home. The only answer to that is for Socialists to seize every opportunity of making known their own untarnished independence and loyalty to Socialism. Nothing will so dishearten internationally-inclined workers in Germany, France and elsewhere as the impression that Socialism in Great Britain has sold out to the capitalist class. And nothing will so hearten Socialists in Germany as absolute confidence that in no circumstances whatever will Socialists in Britain ever desert Socialism, no matter what specious argument is advanced by Socialism's enemies and false friends.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain is able to assure the workers of all countries that there will be no compromise with capitalism as far as we are concerned. We are and will remain Socialists, independent of and hostile to capitalist parties of all kinds.

So far from helping capitalism to tide over its difficulties the working class should adopt and alter the slogan of the old Irish nationalists and avow that capitalism's extremity is Socialism's opportunity.

Edgar Hardcastle

Harry was a Bolshie (1993)

Book Review from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keeping My Head. By Harry Wicks. Socialist Platform £5.95

Subtitled "The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik" this is a posthumous autobiography, based on tape recordings, of a pioneer British Trotskyist who died in 1989 covering the period 1920-46. At first sight not a title likely to appeal to Socialists like ourselves who fought the influence of Bolshevism on British workers since day one, but no one can write an account of working-class politics in this period without mentioning the Socialist Party.

Wicks grew up in the Battersea area of London which was in a sense the birthplace of the Socialist Party, as he himself explains:

Another pre-1914 organisation with influence on Socialist thought in Battersea, particularly in the building trade unions, was the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It was the Battersea branch of the SDF which had become the springboard for the attack on the Hyndman leadership that resulted in the SPGB being formed. From 1904-05 Sydney Hall in York Road became the centre of their activity and propaganda. It was from amongst the bricklayers that several powerful and erudite speakers and bricklayers came to the fore. The Irish bricklayer, Jack Fitzgerald, was one outstanding example . . . but there were others too, bricklayers and impressive SPGBers (Sloan, Cadman, Fenn and others). I believe each of them, in their day, taught their craft at the Ferndale School of Building, then sited in Brixton. Here. they pioneered or upheld extremely high standards of craftsmanship.

Wicks recalls attending an SPGB class on Marx's Capital in 1922, but was never attracted to join. He recounts how he was shocked at being told by an SPGBer at the time of the 1922 General Election that he would be writing "socialism" across his ballot paper and not voting for the Communist Party member Saklatvala who was standing as the official Labour candidate. Wicks had been canvassing for Saklatvala (who was elected), but was told "you are wasting your time and energy, young man, Socialism, not reforms, is what is necessary".

Technically Wicks was a founding member of the Communist Party, at the age of 15, through being a member of the Battersea Herald League which was represented at the founding conference of that party in 1920. In 1927 he was sent for three year's training at the Lenin International School in Moscow. In his account of this period he remarks on the corruption of many of the officials from aboard of the Communist International who lived in the Lux Hotel and enjoyed a life of luxury compared with the lot of the Russian workers.

On his return from Russia he became more and more dissatisfied with the line of the British CP and was eventually expelled with a group of others in 1932 for trotskyism. Naturally, Wicks came across the SPGB in his existence as a trotskyist too. He has recounted how, at a meeting organised by the Communist Party in Conway Hall to justify the trial and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936, he was able to answer from the platform thanks to protests from the floor including from SPGBers.

The Socialist Party debated with some of the trotskyist groups Wicks mentions (even then they were divided into at least four competing sects): against Raj Hansa for the "Bolshevik-Leninists" in December 1936 and against CLR James, of the "Marxist Group" in January 1938 (James was later to be one of the first Trotskyists to realise that Russia was state-capitalist and maybe this debate helped sow doubts in his mind about the official Trotskyist position that Russia was still some sort of "workers state" however degenerate).

Unfortunately what was said at these debates was not recorded in the Socialist Standard but we can be sure that the Socialist Party speakers denounced the idea of the workers needing to be led by some elite vanguard to get socialism and saw the way to socialism as being through a majority of socialist-minded workers organising democratically and politically without leaders.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Value added, but who by? (2006)

The Cooking the Books Column from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sir Digby Jones, director-general of the employers’ organisation, the CBI, has his own economic theory. Interviewed in the Times law section (22 November) he expounded his view that British capitalism could no longer rely on just producing “commodity” goods which “sell only on price” (by which he seems to have meant basic material goods), but should switch to “value-added” services. Britain, he argued, cannot compete with countries such as India and China in producing cheap “commodity goods”, but should let these countries make money from doing this which they could then spend on buying “value-added” services from Britain.

But what does he mean by “value-added”? In Marxian economics it would mean the new value added by labour in the process of production to the previously existing value of the raw and other materials. And which is divided into wages (the replacement value of the workers’ mental and physical energies used up in production) and surplus value (which goes to the capitalist employer and is the source of profit).

In a talk to businesspeople in Birmingham last April, he did make a little clearer what he meant. There were“fewer and fewer widget makers in the region”, he said, “but we are creating more and more work in the higher value, quality, branded sector”. And he gave an example. We should not be worried, he said,

“if we went into Tesco to buy a Harry Potter toy for ú10 to discover it had been Made in China. Because of that £10 just £1 ends up in China. The rest stays in Britain via the likes of licensing and intellectual property rights, advertising, copywriting and marketing” (Birmingham Post, 27 April).

But neither advertising, nor copywriting, nor marketing add any value since there are concerned with selling not producing goods, while licensing and intellectual property rights are claims on profits, i.e. on value produced elsewhere.

So where does the £9, which Digby Jones calls value-added and which is the source of the income of the advertising agencies, etc. come from?

The workers in China who made the toy (and the transport workers who transported it to Britain) added a value of between £9 and £10 to the value of the materials from which the toys were made, out of which they received well under £1 (since the cost of the materials and the profits of their employers also had to come out of the £1 that ended up in China). The Chinese capitalists who exploited them had to pay licensing and intellectual property right fees to firms in Britain, which swallowed up a part of the surplus value they had extracted from their workers.

If they had had the facilities to advertise and market the toys they could have done this themselves and kept more of the surplus value. But, not being in this position, they had to sell the toys below their value – well below their value, it seems – to a whole series of go-betweens (advertisers, marketing consultants and the like) who each took a share of the added value, the last one (Tesco) selling it at its full value of £10 to the final consumer.

So, what Sir Digby calls “value-added” is rather “value-realised”. It is not the capitalists with money invested in advertising, marketing and other activities to do with selling who add new value to the goods made in China or India. It was added by the workers there, but sold below its value by their immediate employer to selling capitalists in Britain.

In capitalist terms, Sir Digby’s strategy for British capitalism could make sense: within a global division of labour, China, India and others produce the material goods and Britain and others sell them. But, if his figures for the Chinese toys are right, what a condemnation of capitalism: nine-tenths of the selling price of a good made up of non-productive on-costs to do with selling and only one-tenth with actual production! If that’s the figure for all goods, socialism – where goods would not need to be sold but would be free for people to take – would have no problem producing enough for everybody, in China and India as well as in Europe and North America.

Wars Today: Iraq and Syria (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first of a series of three articles on wars currently going on in different parts of the world.

It was the fall of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city with a population of about two million people, to the army of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) on 9 June 2014 that propelled the name of ISIS into the global consciousness. The fall of this strategic city on the crossroad between Syria and Iraq was seen as a turning point, and clear evidence that the war in Syria had spread into Iraq. In Mosul, ISIS captured government offices, the airport, police stations, the Central Bank holding 500 billion newly-printed dinars (equivalent to $430 million or €308 million), military equipment such as Black Hawk helicopters, Humvees, thousands of guns and ammunition rounds, and they freed from prison 2,500 Islamist fighters. It is estimated that ISIS which now controls swathes of first Syria and now Iraq has about $2 billion in its war chest.

On 29 June ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the new Caliphate and changed its name to Islamic State (IS). This new Islamic State is expanding by the day and now covers an area larger than Great Britain and inhabited by at least six million people. Baghdadi declared the Syrian city of Raqqa the capital and in celebration IS paraded a captured Scud ballistic missile in the streets of Raqqa. Baghdadi proclaimed 'Rush O Muslims to your state. It is your state. Syria is not for Syrians and Iraq is not for Iraqis. The land is for the Muslims, all Muslims. This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills' (Washington Times 2 July). Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, picked his pseudonym for its resonance with the first Caliph in AD 632 also called Abu Bakr, the first ruler after the death of Mohammed.

Sykes-Picot is dead

Patrick Cockburn in the London Review of Books (21 August) claims that 'the birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War.' In fact it is safe to say that as the Druze leader in Lebanon said to correspondent Robert Fisk of the Independent (13 June): 'Sykes-Picot is dead' considering that IS bulldozed the berm ('berm' is a level space, shelf, or raised barrier separating two areas) dividing Syria and Iraq which was the 'border' based on the 1916 Sykes-Picot demarcation of Arab lands, those artificial, arbitrary boundaries imposed by western capitalism. Cockburn concluded that 'a new and terrifying state has been born.' So, what had begun in Tunisia and Egypt, the so-called 'Arab Spring' as movements for economic and social reform has been well and truly hijacked by the Caliphate of the Islamic State. On 29 September Canon Andrew White, the Vicar of Baghdad who runs the last Anglican church in Iraq, posted on Facebook 'ISIS are now just 5 miles away from Baghdad.'

IS are not something from TE Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom; 'a Bedouin raiding party that appears dramatically from the desert, wins spectacular victories and then retreats to its strongholds leaving the status quo little changed' (Cockburn). IS are a military force capable of waging war on three fronts – south towards Baghdad in Iraq, west to Aleppo in Syria, and north and east towards Kurdish territories. On 2 August IS had also invaded Lebanon and was only pushed back into Syria after a five-day battle. IS is a religiously reactionary organisation, fundamentally anti-working class, which believes that the world's Muslims should live under one Islamic state, a capitalist state ruled by Sharia law.

IS have taken over the capitalist state structure in occupied Syria and Iraq, efficiently running public services, administrative and military control systems, taking over banks, ministries, law courts and operating a taxation system which demands less than Assad's Syrian government. IS effectively secure the water, flour and hydrocarbon resources of an area, centralising distribution, providing services, such as supplying bread, and activities including Koran classes for children, all run by 'an effective management structure of mostly middle-aged Iraqis' (New York Times, 27 August). IS control of Syria's and Iraq's oilfields has added wealth to its funds, it exports about 9,000 barrels of oil per day at prices ranging from about $25-$45, some of this goes to Kurdish middlemen up towards Turkey, some goes for domestic IS consumption and some goes to the Assad regime in Syria. With grim irony only possible in capitalism IS 'has also secured revenue by selling electricity back to the Syrian government from captured power plants' (New York Times, 11 June).

Military effectiveness

The military effectiveness of IS has been possible because IS has established a military command of former Iraqi Army officers from Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime which had been overthrown by the US military in 2003. These officers include two Colonels, Adnan al-Sweidawi and Fadel al-Hayali, from Saddam's army. But more telling is that Field Marshall Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who was Saddam Hussein's Deputy of the Revolutionary Command Council, the ultimate decision making body in Iraq before the 2003 invasion, has been pointed out as one of the main commanders responsible for successful takeovers of North Iraq and the city of Mosul in June. It was reported that fellow Ba'ath generals Azhar al-Obeidi and Ahmed Abdul Rashid had been appointed as governors of Mosul and Tikrit. Izzat al-Douri is the most high profile Ba'athist official to successfully evade capture after 2003, he was the 'king of clubs' in the infamous most-wanted Iraqi pack of playing cards. After Saddam's execution in 2006 he became leader of the now banned Ba'ath Party. IS have the support of many Ba'ath Party loyalists, former intelligence officers and soldiers in Saddam's Republican Guard. This explains the battlefield success of IS, it is in effect a hybrid of Sunni insurgent rebels and a Ba'athist organised army. This combination of internationalist Islamic theocracy and the Bonapartist Arab nationalist secularism of Ba'athist Army officers rests on 'not the revolutionary, but the conservative peasant' (Marx 18th Brumaire), and is a heady capitalist mix for the Middle East.

 Mr Erdogan [President of Turkey] questioned the motives of the anti-Isis allies and accused them of meddling in the region's affairs for the past century. "Do you think they come for peace, with their planes and their missiles?" he asked an audience at Marmara University, Istanbul. "No," he said. "They do it to get the petrol wells under their control." (Times, 14 October)

Respect MP George Galloway pointed out that 'ISIL could not survive for five minutes if the tribes in the west of Iraq rose up against them' (Guardian, 26 September). Largest sections of the Sunni Arab working class and peasantry in Iraq and Syria support Islamic State because IS promises them preferential treatment and better economic opportunities than they could ever hope for under the current Shia-dominated leadership in Iraq and Syria. Since 2003 economic deprivation has hit the Sunni Arab faction hard since it lost its former dominant position in society and the Sunni has now become the most oppressed section of Iraqi society and many ended up unemployed and even destitute. The Sunni peasantry has been hit hard by a series of poor harvests and food shortages in the last ten years which is ironic since Iraq is in the Mesopotamian fertile crescent of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates but it has suffered severe agricultural decline, neglect and conflict. Agricultural productivity declined by a devastating 90 percent after the 2003 war, and there have been six years of the driest winters since 2004. Once a major exporter, Iraq is now reliant year-round on food imports while many Sunnis have been working hard on the land, and yet struggling to eat but perceiving metropolitan Shias in Baghdad and the east to be living in luxury. Thus IS have been successfully recruiting mostly young Sunni men who are poor, unemployed, lacking education and underprivileged.

The religious strictures applied by IS are also attractive to Iraqi Sunnis as the adherence to conservative conventions, and the clarity and simplicity of Sharia law always appeals to downtrodden peoples who tend to prefer robust law and order to instability. This and resentment of metropolitan Shias is reminiscent of what Engels wrote in 1894: 'Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e., on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the 'law'. The Bedouins, poor and hence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades' (MECW Volume 27).

Financial support

Before IS gained access to oilfields in Syria and Iraq and later banks in Mosul, wealthy members of ruling families in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Persian Gulf countries provided financial support laundered through the compliant Kuwaiti banking system. IS also benefited from money smuggled via a Turkish border left deliberately unchecked. The then Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki stated 'we hold Saudi Arabia responsible for the financial and moral support given to ISIS' (Daily Telegraph,17 June) although German Development Minister Gerd Mueller said 'who is arming, who is financing ISIS troops. The keyword there is Qatar' (Reuters, 20 August). Günter Meyer, Director of the Center for Research into the Arabic World at the University of Mainz writes 'the most important source of ISIS financing to date has been support coming out of the Gulf states, primarily Saudi Arabia but also Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates' (Deutsche Welle,19 June).

The Western capitalist powers, now with the support of Persian Gulf monarchies, are engaged in military air strikes against IS in Iraq and Syria but there are some sane political voices even amongst bourgeois politicians such as backbench Tory MP Adam Holloway who pointed out 'This is a political problem. ISIS in Iraq are Sunni tribesmen who were fed up with the Maliki government. They are international jihadis and they are former Ba’ath regime elements. The only way you are going to get rid of the foreign jihadis is if the Sunni tribes and the Ba’athists do it themselves. If your answer is to start bombing ISIS in Iraq then what you are actually doing is bombing the tribes and the Ba’athists who are exactly the people you are going to need to get rid of ISIS' (Guardian, 25 September).

The capitalist Islamic State is an organisation, it is even a 'state', and is a hundred times larger and better organised than the al-Qaida of Osama bin Laden. IS are insurgents not terrorists, al-Qaida did not attempt to solve the economic problems of the Muslim working class and relied on international terrorist acts which can only be described as 'propaganda of the deed' and did nothing for the Muslim working class. IS on the other hand are securing ground, creating a localised state structure and ensuring peasant and working class support through palliatives to the capitalist system shrouded in a theocratic conservatism. However, reforms to capitalism cannot solve the problems facing the working class regardless of whether the capitalist class wear ties or turbans. In the Middle East the ideology of the capitalist class opposed to western capitalism is now dominated by Islamic fundamentalism whereas in the recent past it was a leftist Arab nationalism rooted in state capitalism such as Nasser in Egypt, the Ba'athist regimes in Syria and Iraq, and the PLO supported by the Russian state-capitalist bloc.

As for IS even Jonathan Powell, Blair's former chief of staff says 'ISIS is not a small movement of middle-class kids like Baader-Meinhof. It's a big political movement like ETA or the IRA which represents a genuine political strand of grievance' (Guardian, 22 September).

Socialists are minded to agree with Engels who wrote 'All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes; and yet, even when they are victorious, they allow the old economic conditions to persist untouched' (MECW Volume 27).

Steve Clayton

Understanding Human Nature (2001)

Editorial from the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have long maintained, on the basis of the findings of anthropology, that human behaviour is socially, not biologically, determined. In other words, that how we behave is not "innate" or governed by our "instincts" or our genes, but can and does vary depending on the sort of society we were brought up in and live in.

Until the end of the 1970s this was the widely accepted view in academic circles—and was, in fact, the scientific basis for our view—and still largely is amongst anthropologists. But, with the end of the post-war boom and the reaction against reformism exemplified by Reagan and Thatcher, theories of biological determinism (discredited by the defeat of Nazi Germany) began to creep back. Its advocates were able to rely on advances in genetics to give their theories a veneer of scientific plausibility. The media, and ideologists who were not merely anti-socialist but anti even trying to reform capitalism, echoed their views; to such an extent that, to tell the truth, they were able to seize the intellectual initiative and to put socialists on the defensive, charging us with basing our theories on the "discredited" views of well-meaning but woolly-minded cultural anthropologists.

It was thus with confidence that they awaited the results of the human genome project. This, they thought, would bring the hard evidence to back their theory that our behaviour as an animal species was governed by our genes much more than by our social upbringing and environment, and that our brains were hard-wired and designed for life in the Stone Age conditions under which we first evolved. The results, released in the middle of last month, came as a shock to them, and as a surprise to the media who had naively believed their speculations about a gene for everything.

Dr Craig Venter, President and chief scientific officer of Celera Genomics (the private firm that wants to patent genes for profit and thus not someone to be suspected of anti-capitalist or pro-socialist leanings) declared in the official press release issued by the journal Science (www.sciencemag.org) which published his firm's results in its 16 February issue:

"There are many surprises from this first look at our genetic code that have important implications for humanity. Since the June 26, 2000 announcement our understanding of the human genome has changed in the most fundamental ways. The small number of genes—30,000 instead of 140,000—supports the notion that we are not hard-wired. We now know that the notion that one gene leads to one protein and perhaps one disease is false. One gene leads to many different products and those products—proteins—can change dramatically after they are produced. We know that regions of the genome that are not genes may be the key to the complexity we see in humans. We now know that the environment acting on these biological steps may be key in making us what we are. Likewise the remarkably small number of genetic variations that occur in genes again suggest a significant role for environmental influences in developing each of our uniqueness."

In a pre-publication press conference, he said: "The wonderful diversity of the human species is not hard-wired in our genetic code. Our environments are crucial."

In an interview a couple of days later he was less diplomatic in his condemnation of the genetic determinists for having misled people:

"The fruit fly genome has 13,000 genes and everyone thought that because humans are so much bigger and smarter, we should have a lot more. If you think we are hard-wired—that everything is deterministic—there should be a lot of genes because we have a lot of traits. This makes me as a scientist both laugh and cry. I laugh at the absurdity of it and I want to cry because it is accepted as fact by so much of society. But we are not hard-wired" (Daily Telegraph, 14 February).

Another scientist, Svante Pääbo, of the Max Planck Institute Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, made the same point in another article in the same issue of Science:

"The successes of medical genetics and genomics during the last decade have resulted in a sharp shift toward an almost completely genetic view of ourselves. I find it striking that 10 years ago, a geneticist had to defend the idea that not only the environment but genes shape human development. Today, one feels compelled to stress that there is a large environmental component to common diseases, behavior, and personality traits! There is an insidious tendency to look to our genes for most aspects of our "humanness", and to forget that the genome is but an internal scaffold for our existence."

Others queued up to ram home the same point:

"The suggestion is that nurture rather than nature may be more important in human make-up than previously thought. Ari Patrinos, of the US Department of Energy, which funded one group of researchers, said: 'There are very, very few traits or diseases that are caused by a single gene. 'It's been an emerging consciousness over the past five years, and recognition that our genes don't control everything'."
"The findings suggest that the human body is set up to adapt to its environment, by cutting up and recombining the protein 'products' of genes to make a protein suitable for the circumstance." "The researchers also concluded that the human genome had come to do much more than it could possibly have been designed to" (Scotsman, 12 February).

What this means is that genetics has confirmed the findings of cultural anthropology that human behaviour is not biologically determined and that the main characteristic of us humans that distinguishes us from other animals is the capacity, as a species, to engage in a great variety of behaviours. This versatility and flexibility when it comes to behaviour has a biological basis of course. Now biology itself has begun to discover in more detail exactly what this is and how it works. It's a great advance in our understanding of "human nature".

Rosa Luxemburg (1987)

Film Review from the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

For someone like myself who rates Rosa Luxemburg among the great socialist theorists, to go and see a film about her life was to take a risk. The risk was that the director would attempt to present a glossy, Hollywood version of the "life of a great woman", devoid of political content - the fate of Reds, the film version of the book, Ten Days That Shook The World, about an American's experiences during the Bolshevik revolution of 1917.

But Margarethe von Trotta's film, Rosa Luxemburg, is a sensitive portrayal that succeeds in bringing together the personal and the political, giving some insight into Luxemburg's politics as well as the woman herself. Most importantly the film doesn't trivialise her politics; they are at all times centre-stage even when we witness the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) New Year celebrations at the turn of the century and are presented with Karl Kautsky wearing a false nose. The optimism of the socialists at that party, that the 20th century would see the dawning of a new socialist era, was short-lived. It was crushed by the insanity of the first world war and the defeat within the international socialist movement of the ideas of democratic socialism by reformists on the one hand and vanguardists on the other. In many ways we are, today, still trying to overcome the legacy of that defeat.

Those unfamiliar with the debate that took place within the SPD, between revolutionary socialists like Luxemburg and the revisionists, led by Bernstein, who were willing to compromise socialism for short-term political power achieved on the basis of a reformist programme, are unlikely to have learnt very much from the film. The theoretical issues are sketched in with broad brush-strokes and very little detail. Instead it focuses on the effects of the first world war which led to those who called themselves socialists urging (in Luxemburg's words) "workers of the world to unite in peace and slit each other's throats in war". While many SPD members supported Germany's war effort, Luxemburg continued to speak out against nationalism and a war fought to protect the interests of the capitalist class which entailed the futile massacre of workers by workers. She endured one of nine terms as a political prisoner for her pains.

After the war Luxemburg continued to speak out against senseless violence when she opposed attempts to get socialism through insurrection. She recognised that just as it is impossible to have socialism in one city, in this case Berlin, it is also impossible for there to be socialism without there being a majority of socialists to make it work. So for sincere and committed socialists to engage in bloody street-fighting in the name of socialist revolution was not only futile but likely to produce a reaction. In Rosa Luxemburg's case the reaction came in the form of a knock on the head by a soldier's butt, a bullet at close range and the unceremonious dumping of her body off a bridge into a river.

Perhaps the greatest strength of this is the fact that it portrays Luxemburg not as a superwoman or heroine but as a woman who, despite her sharp intellect and skills as a political writer and speaker, is also only too human. Often beset with doubts and fears, she had also to come to terms with the contradictions and sacrifices that her political commitment entailed for her personal and emotional life. She was a woman who was devoted to the cause of socialism and yet could still be loving and jealous by turns; a loyal friend to other women in the socialist movement like Clara Zetkin and Luise Kautsky; a woman who, despite her ability to hold the attention of the crowds who attended the meetings she addressed, confessed to feeling happier communing with nature than making political speeches; a woman, who despite everything chose politics when her lover. Leo Jogiches, told her that she had to choose between being a mother and a revolutionary.

Although this film doesn't try to make Rosa Luxemburg into a heroine, it nevertheless shows her to have been an extraordinary woman. My fears about going to see it were totally ill-founded. It is a film both moving and inspiring.

Janie Percy-Smith

What made me oppose the war (1989)

From the September 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

I was born on 22 February, 1914, a few months before the start of the Great War (as it came to be called), the youngest of an Anglo-German family of five children, two girls and three boys. My eldest brother, Edward, was killed on the Western Front in the last month of that war, after having survived its whole course on active service.

He volunteered for the army at the onset, being then aged sixteen. After about two years' service he was discharged from the armed forces because of war wounds, but immediately rejoined another regiment. Over the years I have often wondered about this conscientious heroism of his. When asked why he had re-enlisted although medically unfit, he would always say that he would have been letting his comrades down who were still fighting in France had he not done so.

Some considerable time before I became a socialist I had come to the realisation that warfare was completely inimical to the human condition. As I became older my reaction to the reality of capitalism was to become a rebel without a cause. A combination of particular experiences, and a process of learning by those experiences and coming to conclusions about them, without (as yet) having an all-embracing philosophy.

For example, my mother had to convince the War Office that my brother Edward would have become a major bread-winner for the family, had he not been killed fighting for King and Country, before they would "award" a compensatory pension. After about a year of legal wrangling, the War Office awarded a sum of seven shillings and sixpence a week (in terms of present coinage this would be 37. pence). Such was the reward of a grateful king and country. With hindsight it came to be considered fortunate by the family that this war pension of 7/6d was allocated to my mother and not my father who died relatively young, aged 56; in which case the pension would have died with him, whereas my mother lived to the age of 75.

Another circumstance which profoundly affected my thinking, something that I learned years later, was that in the section of the Western Front where my brother was killed two of his uncles were serving with the opposing German army in that same section at that time. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that my brother could have been killed by them. These were the kinds of experiences, together with my concern for all of the victims of war, which determined my developing an emotional opposition to war and everything connected with it, rather than an opposition based upon a rational understanding of the material causes of social antagonism and war (this came later in my development).

In the late 1920s when the subject of war came up in conversation, I was often asked by relations and others what I would do in the event of war. My reply was that I would oppose its prosecution, to the best of my ability, and refuse to take part in it as an individual. Their reaction to this was usually to say that it is easy to oppose war in peace-time, but that I would probably change my attitude if war should come.

Another factor in my development from childhood was my experience at school. At the age of five I started my "education" at a church school in London which in those days was a school attached to a parish church with an independent board of school governors, but which was funded by the then LCC (London County Council). The lessons at this school were (with overtones of religion) directed towards teaching the children to read, write and count, so that they would be able to appreciate the benefits of patriotism and blind loyalty to their King and Country, and a willingness to die for them and the market economy they represented if necessary. This included the presentation of history as the past battles and wars in which "their" country had been involved. As a pupil I was very unpromising. I was so slow to learn that I was more or less ignored by the teachers and only had any real contact with them when it was a case of receiving punishment for some misdemeanour I had committed.

There were two days of the year in the school curriculum which were regarded as special events in which the whole school took part. These were Empire Day and Prize-giving day. On Empire Day the whole school was assembled in the playground to sing patriotic songs like "Land of Hope and Glory" and to listen to the reciting of the hackneyed sentiments of a Henry Newbolt poem in which an imperialist bloodbath somewhere in the empire was equated with a game of cricket played by "public" school boys on the playing fields of Eton or Harrow. The proceedings were then brought to an end, until the next year, with a homily on God, religion and the Empire given by the vicar.

In the early thirties I became convinced that the Socialist Party's analysis of capitalist society in general and the causes of war in particular was the only valid explanation of the world's social problems and demanded a world-wide solution. I therefore became a socialist ideologically, but I did not join the party until 1946. The reason for this was that I had decided  to object to military service, and my joining the only anti-war political party in Britain might have been seen as merely a personal anti-war tactic and not a complete opposition to the continuation of capitalism, in peace or war. My refusal to perform military service lasted over a period of about two years of close arrest, court martials and prison sentences, terminating in my discharge from military service.

Harry Walters 

BURGESS HILL WAR VETERAN'S MESSAGE TO THE YOUNG

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

NEWS RELEASE

Burgess Hill war veteran and former Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate Les Courtney this week warned young people not to be taken in by the “fake patriotism and glorification of war that the Government is trying to stir up” during what he said was “its celebration of the so-called ‘Great War’.”

Speaking after a lively public meeting held in the town on Remembrance Sunday, Mr Courtney pointed out that “Ordinary people do not want war and do not cause wars. Governments and the rich and powerful interests that support them start wars. But ordinary people of all countries could stop a new war if only they said: no we will not fight for you.”

Having served in North Africa and the Middle East during the Second World War and losing his brother, a Spitfire pilot, his experiences led Mr Courtney to become a Socialist. When Britain again went to war in the 1950’s, he refused to be called up to take part in “more senseless and ridiculous killings”, and was accepted as a ‘conscientious objector’.

Held to discuss ‘Lessons of the First World War’, the meeting heard speaker Steve Clayton remind his audience of the words of Harry Patch “the last fighting Tommy of WW1” who said: “War is a licence to go out and murder for the British government” and “isn't worth one life, it is the calculated and condoned slaughter of human beings.”

The meeting was told the scale and duration of the slaughter the war brought should have been no surprise as Frederick Engels warned in 1887 that “the only war left will be a world war, a world war moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined” which would “strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism.”

Mr Clayton said The Socialist Party had opposed every war in its history and in August 1914 had warned the public that “there were no working class issues at stake in the war: rather, it was fought as a consequence of rivalry among capitalist powers for markets, trade routes, raw materials and politico-military influence.”

Rather it declared in its paper the ‘Socialist Standard’ in September 1914 that: “Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.”

Concluding his talk, Mr Clayton argued that “Socialism will mean the end of war. There will be no more trade routes, markets, property or profit to fight over. If everyone owns everything or, to put it another way, if nobody owns anything, then there is nothing to fight over. With production for use, to meet human needs, the era of real peace will have arrived.”

Earlier this year the Socialist Party of Great Britain stood its first candidates for Sussex in the European elections, when Les Courtney joined Howard Pilott from Lewes on the Party’s list.

For more information: contact www.worldsocialism.org/spgb or phone 0207 622 3811.

Obituary: Eva Torf Judd (1941)

Obituary from the September 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Executive Committee of the Party deeply regret to announce the death of Comrade Eva Torf Judd, who was a victim of a recent air raid.

Comrade Judd had been a member of the Party since 1935 and was well known to the London membership.

Born in London of Lithuanian immigrants, her early childhood, which she remembered vividly, was spent in the dingy Metropolitan borough which bears the pleasant name of Bethnal Green. Later, Comrade Judd emigrated with her parents to the U.S.A., and it was there that her interest in Socialism was developed.

Before the last war; whilst living in Boston, Mass., she took part in the struggle for Trades Union rights for the garment workers of that city. But it was in San Francisco, during the post-war years, that she first played an active part on the political field by lecturing at the Labour College.

Although not agreeing entirely with the I.W.W., Comrade Judd gave lectures on Socialism for that organisation in San Francisco and Seattle. Also she addressed many meetings in other cities in the U.S.A.

Returning to London after a sojourn of nearly 25 years in the U.S.A., our late comrade made contact with the Socialist Party, whose members welcomed her valuable assistance in the work of spreading Socialist knowledge. During her residence in London she addressed many successful outdoor meetings for the Party and was a shrewd and lively contributor at Party Conferences.

From 1938 until the time of her death she was active in the Party's cause in Southampton, in which town she met her tragic end.

About two years ago the MSS. of her autobiography was completed, and, in the opinion of those who have read it, it deserves a niche in the records of working-class literature.

To her husband in Southampton, England, and her daughter Judith in Los Angeles, Calif., the Executive Committee, on behalf of her comrades and many friends in the Socialist Party, express their deepest sympathy. Comrade Judd was another good comrade we are sorry to lose.

H. G. H.

But is it Really Capitalism? (2014)

From the November 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Can it truly be the case that capitalism no longer exists? We examine some claims along these lines.

Socialists argue that the dominant economic system today is capitalism, characterised by class ownership of the means of production, wage labour and commodity production. A very small part of the population (perhaps just one percent) own and control the land, factories, offices, raw materials, patent rights and so on. These people form the capitalist class, and the rest of the adult population – the working class – have to sell their working abilities for wages in order to live. Goods and services are produced for the sake of profit, hence the general rule of ‘no profit, no production’.

At the same time there are those, mainly on the so-called political ‘right wing’, who claim that what exists nowadays in much of the ‘developed’ world is not really capitalism at all. Let’s leave aside those who consider that present-day society is socialism or some strange mixture of socialism and capitalism. Instead we shall focus on those who use some such term as ‘corporate’ or ‘crony capitalism’ to describe the social system. Underlying this is a claim, sometimes explicit, that everything would be fine if we could get back to ‘proper capitalism’ rather than the ill-functioning spin-off that has taken its place.

There is no doubt that capitalism has undergone a number of changes since, say, the late eighteenth century, when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, changes surveyed in Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide. In Smith’s day, most capitalist firms and factories were owned by individual capitalists or small partnerships, people who were closely involved in supervising production and, for instance, individually combating strikes. Nowadays, factories, offices, etc are mostly the property of companies, which are themselves owned by large numbers of shareholders; as one example, Superdrug is wholly owned by the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, which has a number of other brands too. Corporations now are often huge, with Walmart, for instance, having over two million employees. With lots of different competing firms, eighteenth-century capitalism supposedly knew far more competition than today, when in some cases a small number of companies are enormously powerful in particular areas (as with Amazon and Boeing in ebooks and aircraft, respectively). The state, too, has a much larger role now, with everything from regulation of competition to the welfare system and investment in infrastructure. But the question is to what extent these changes have altered the basic nature of the economy.

One writer who distinguishes between capitalism and corporatism is Michael Labeit (see here). In his view of the world, capitalism is based on the recognition of individual rights, including that to private property; hence theft and murder are illegal. Capitalism involves the free market, ‘the vast network of voluntary exchanges of property titles to intermediate and final goods’.

Under corporatism, in contrast:

‘the government intervenes aggressively into the economy, typically with political instruments that benefit large corporations and enterprises to the detriment of smaller businesses and private citizens. … corporatist authorities seize control of land and capital goods when they feel it is necessary to do so without regard for private property rights.’

Subsidies, tariffs, anti-trust laws and licences are all seen as examples of government working in the interests of large companies and so against the interests of small capitalists and ‘ordinary’ people. Note that corporatism and government interference do not mean state ownership.

Here is another, very sanitised, depiction of ‘genuine capitalism’ (from here):

‘Capital is invested by individuals to further ideas and enterprises that the investor thinks will create a return on the money invested. If the enterprise in question is a good one, both investor and business owner win. If not – better luck next time.’

The Economist  (15 March) developed a crony-capitalism index, focussing on industries that are particularly vulnerable to monopoly or to heavy state involvement, such as banking, defence, infrastructure and energy. They looked at how rich the billionaires in these crony sectors were, as a percentage of GDP. Top by some margin was Hong Kong, followed by Russia, Malaysia and Ukraine. Britain was only fifteenth, the US seventeenth, China nineteenth and France twentieth. Apparently, ‘French and German billionaires … rely rather little on the state, making their money largely from retail and luxury brands.’ As the magazine pointed out, the data were not always reliable, so the precise results needed to be treated with caution. And the claim of people like Labeit is that the economy as a whole, and not just particular sectors, is subject to cronyism.

So is there any real difference between crony or corporate capitalism and ‘the real thing’? As far as the working class are concerned, the answer has to be, very little. All forms of capitalism involve wage labour and exploitation, and it is of minimal relevance for workers to what extent a capitalist company depends on government interference. And of course all companies benefit from the government’s defence of private property and class rule, its anti-worker legislation and its fighting of wars to protect trade routes and access to markets and raw materials.

The descriptions we have cited above all focus on the capitalist class and how they obtain their wealth, whether simply by investment or by relying on government facilitating their profit-making (by licenses, zoning, import duties or whatever). None of them recognise workers and their unpaid labour as the source of the wealth of the capitalists, or the role of exploitation in profit-making. Big capitalists no doubt exercise more sway with the state than smaller ones, but that should not make us feel sorry for the latter, or accept that they have the same interests as workers. Those who criticise corporatism can be seen as standing for the interests of the owners of small businesses (a point that has also been made about the Tea Party movement in the US).

And what of the free market? Many leftist economic commentators have argued that the recession which started in 2007–8 came about because of the free market and the unregulated nature of the financial industry. Thus Seumas Milne of the Guardian wrote in 2008 that ‘it is the free-market model, not capitalism, that is dying’. But the view of those discussed here is that the market prior to then was not truly free, as there was plenty of government regulation. This position, however, inevitably leads to the conclusion that there never has been a free market, since government has always defended the interests of the capitalist class as a whole: in 1700, for instance, the British government banned the import of cotton textiles from India in order to boost the native textile industry. Tariffs, government regulation and war played a crucial role in the growth and spread of capitalism.

Capitalism can take various forms, including state capitalism, where the major industries are owned by the government. The degree of government interference can vary in its extent and its nature, but whichever variant exists it is based on class ownership, commodity production, the wages system and exploitation. So yes, it really is capitalism, and it needs to be done away with as soon as possible. 

Paul Bennett