Pathfinders: Yo-Yos a-Go-Go (2015)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

What on earth is going on with the price of oil? For the past five years it’s been stable at somewhere north of $115 a barrel, but since last June it’s fallen by 40 percent to below $70.

The fall in price has caused pandemonium in energy boardrooms just as companies have been sinking unprecedented amounts into R&D looking for new sources of the increasingly hard-to-get black gold and other fossil fuels – an estimated $670 billion last year alone. Samsung are just in the process of launching Prelude, the biggest ship ever built, with a water displacement equal to the world’s six largest aircraft carriers combined (BBC Online, 16 December 2014). Its purpose? To act as a giant floating platform to exploit deep-ocean natural gas fields and liquefy the gas on the spot instead of pumping it through expensive pipelines to existing facilities on shore. Prelude is supposed to be the prelude to an entire fleet of LNG monsters, but now that the rug has been pulled from under it, it may turn out to be the world’s largest floating white elephant instead.

Environmentalists will be delighted that new drilling projects in the Arctic are likely to be shelved, ditto further exploitation of the super-dirty Canadian tar sands. Meanwhile anti-fracking campaigners in the north of England will be ecstatic that Lancashire County Council have vetoed Cuadrilla’s plans to drill for shale gas at two sites near Blackpool, and even more so at the fact that fracking companies who have sunk millions into new drilling sites across the world have been left high and dry with ‘stranded assets’ as the oil price crash has wiped out the value of ‘alternative’ shale and left their operations uneconomic.

Motorists too will be able to celebrate by flooring it in their gas-guzzlers, while shrinking gas bills are expected to lead to a warm glow among household consumers. Providing of course that the energy companies heed the government’s urgent demands to lower their tariffs in line with the price fall. But energy companies won’t be too keen to respond, and not just for the obvious reason that they make more money out of customers that way, but also because, as they are fond of pleading, oil prices can go up as well as down, and they don’t want to catch themselves flat-footed with a price cut just as Brent crude decides to go stratospheric.

So, good news all round then? Well not exactly. Low oil prices will encourage consumption, which will wipe the smile of the faces of those environmentalists, considering that 14 out of the last 15 years have been the warmest on record (BBC Online, 16 January) and that sea level rise is now estimated to be 25 percent steeper than previously thought (BBC Online, 14 January). Still,New Scientist finds reasons to be cheerful, with an optimistic guess that the price-crash might spell the beginning of the end of the world’s oil dependency (‘Over a barrel’, 17 January).

Wholesale gas prices have also dropped 20 percent since November, and may drop further. China is moving away from coal and towards gas, which will stiffen the price, but then on the other hand, Japan is moving away from gas and back towards nuclear, which will weaken it.

Worse news is to follow for the benighted energy corporations, bless ‘em, with a new paper (Nature, 8 January) which could be seen as kicking them when they’re down. Building on estimates by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that, in order to keep within the target global temperature increase of 2^oC, total carbon emissions from now until 2050 cannot exceed 1,240 gigatonnes, the report authors quietly went about their sums, totting up the actual potential gigatonnage that’s left in the ground. Their conclusion was that with remaining reserves (defined as recoverable under present economic conditions) equating to nearly 2,900 gigatonnes, and total recoverable resources around 11,000 gigatonnes ‘the disparity between what resources and reserves exist and what can be emitted while avoiding a temperature rise greater than the agreed 2^o C limit is therefore stark.’ In other words, about a third of oil reserves, 50 percent of gas and 80 percent of coal must be left in the ground. To the industry’s argument of mitigation through proposed Carbon Capture and Sequestration schemes (CCS) the authors give short shrift. CCS is too little, too expensive, too uncertain and too late anyway. The damage has already been done. There’s no more wiggle room.

Worried, the Bank of England is conducting an enquiry into the risk of a global economic crash if governments are reckless enough to pay attention to climate scientists and start tightening the climate change rules, rendering fossil assets essentially worthless. However Shell and other firms are more sanguine, seeing no great risk to their business model because they don’t believe that politicians, for all their bluster, will stick to their promises on carbon limits (BBC Online, 7 January). Which sounds about right.

So why did the price drop? Partly because, with global warming, northern winters are getting milder. Partly because the recession has led to low economic activity and therefore low oil consumption. Partly because America got carried away with its fracking bonanza and stopped importing oil, unintentionally creating a world glut. And partly because Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s leading producer, is refusing to curb output because it’s having a price war with Iran and Russia. With $900 billion in cash reserves Saudi Arabia can easily afford to sell low (their extraction costs are around $6 a barrel) thus murdering the opposition, as well as all those Yankee frackers who thought they were riding the gravy train (Economist, 8 December 2014).

In other words, the price drop is due to a number of contingent factors which may or may not apply at any given point in the future. Now that quantitative easing has been applied in Europe, the oil price has seen a 2 percent uptick. If OPEC decides to curb output, the oil price will rocket and with it the value of shale assets. The plan to turn the Arctic into an oil well will be back on the table, and the Canadian tar pits will start to look inviting again.

What’s so weird about capitalism, and not in a good way, is how a global fall in the price of one key commodity can reverse global policy overnight. It’s even worse with ‘long latency’ commodities where changes at industrial source take years to feed through to the market, by which time they may have precisely the wrong effect and start a panic.

How is humanity supposed to plan for the future, given this yo-yo economics? How are we supposed to make our civilisation sustainable, and guarantee a planet in good health for our descendants? We can’t, basically. For that we would need a steady-state economy, with patterns of production and consumption that didn’t keep yo-yoing up and down unpredictably and didn’t depend on thousands of fast-buck investors who at any moment might either blow it into a giant gas bubble or drain every last gasp out of it. Gambling in a casino might be fun, if you can afford to flutter. But it’s no way to run a planet.

PJS

Editorial: A Century for Socialism (2004)

Editorial from the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to this special edition of the Socialist Standard, a commemorative issue marking one hundred years in the political life of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When our Party was formed on 12th June 1904, in a hall in a little alley off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, London, the founder members would rightly have viewed the possibility of our existence a century later in something of a negative light. The aim of the Socialist Party has always been ‘socialism and nothing but’ and the founder members conceived the Party as a mechanism through which socialist ideas could be rapidly spread and, potentially, through which the working class of wage and salary earners could come to political power. The subsequent creation of socialism would render the need for a socialist party redundant and so, one hundred years on, the very continued existence of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is indicative of the fact that the system of society the founder members were dedicated to overthrowing – capitalism – is still with us.

To this effect, today, ownership of the means of living (the factories, farms, offices, communication systems and so on) is still in the hands of a minority social class that can live a luxurious existence without having to work.Virtually all the useful work in society is being done by the majority, a class of people forced by economic compulsion to sell their working energies for a wage or a salary that is less in value than what they produce. It is a society characterised by extremes of wealth and poverty, by wars and chaos and by a meanness of spirit that undermines much that is decent about human beings. For the  last hundred years the Socialist Party has been waging a war of our own – against capitalism and for  socialism. We have waged a war too against all the political parties who have supported capitalism, including those that have done so while paying lip-service to socialism. The achievement of socialism has been our sole objective, because our understanding of capitalist society and its working has told us that it is a system capable of change over time but not change that can abolish its fundamental defects. Capitalism has altered over the last century, but not fundamentally so and all the problems associated with it in 1904 are still present today, with some new and unforeseen ones too.

Technological powers

In one sense, capitalism is the most successful social system that has ever existed in that the working class, through its collective efforts, has been able to develop the powers of production to previously undreamed-of heights, from putting a man on the moon to mapping the human genome. But these powers of production are wasted and distorted by a system that puts profit before needs as a matter of course and where collective effort is destabilised by competition and division. A society that can now send spaceships to Mars but which cannot adequately feed, clothe and house the world’s population despite the massive technological resources at its disposal is a society that is seriously and fundamentally flawed.

One hundred years ago the men and women who founded the Socialist Party came to a significant political conclusion, which is just as important now as it was then. This was that capitalism, through creating an interconnected world-wide division of labour and unparalleled leaps in productivity (whereby ten years in its lifespan is equal to one hundred years and more of previous  systems like feudalism), has created the conditions of potential abundance necessary for its own replacement and also a social class of wage and salary earners with the incentive to organise for this. What pioneers of the socialist movement like Marx, Engels and Morris envisaged as socialism or communism, had become a practical possibility and tinkering with an inherently defective system like capitalism a waste of time and energy in the light of it.

The founders of the Socialist Party recognised that the time was ripe for the working class to organise itself consciously and politically to democratically take control of the state machine in countries across the world, dispossessing the owning class of capitalists and socialising production on an international basis. In doing so the working class would consciously create a system where human activity would be carried out solely and directly to meet the needs and desires of the population, and where all the defining categories of capitalism had been abolished: production for profit, money, national frontiers, the class system and – as a result – the enforcer of class society itself, the state.

Reformism

At the time of our Party’s foundation other politicalactivists agreed that this type of society was possible and desirable, but disagreed about how it could be created. Due to what they took to be the backward intellectual development of the working class, they thought that  capitalism would need to be gradually transformed into socialism by a series of reform measures. They labelled the founder members of the Socialist Party and others who thought on similar lines ‘impossibilists’, people who were demanding the impossible when piecemeal and gradual reform was all that was realistic. This was the substance of our break in 1904 with our parent body, the Social Democratic Federation, and the basis for our criticism of other organisations of the time like the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society.

Organisations like the SDF that had a paper commitment to socialism were in practice swamped by people who were attracted by their reform programmes rather than their supposed commitment to abolishing capitalism. In these circumstances, those who viewed reforms as a stepping-stone to socialism were themselves swamped by people for whom reforms were simply an end in themselves, palliating the worst excesses of the system. The history of the Labour Party – formed out of the Labour Representation Committee in 1906 – is a case in point. More than any other organisation in Britain, the Labour Party developed as a body hoping to reform capitalism into something vaguely humane. Today, in 2004, the modern Labour Party stands as an organisation which has instead been turned by capitalism into something rather more than vaguely inhumane. From Keir Hardie and  Ramsay MacDonald onwards it has steadily drifted towards where it is today – a party which has abandoned any hope of seriously changing society for the better but which now markets itself as the most efficient managerial team for British Capitalism PLC instead.

Over decades, millions of workers the world over have invested their hopes in so-called ‘practical’, ‘possibilist’ organisations like the Labour Party, hoping against hope that they would be able to neuter the market economy when, in reality, the market economy has successfully neutered them. As such, the damage these organisations have done the socialist movement is colossal. That they turned out to be the real ‘impossibilists’ – demanding an unattainable humanised capitalism – is one of the greatest tragedies of the last century, made all the greater because it was so utterly predictable.

Vanguard politics

Unfortunately for the socialist movement, the reformist distraction has not been the only one, however. Another political tendency emerged, principally out of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, claiming that they had found another route to socialism. However sincere some of their number may have been at the outset – and whatever their laudable success at curtailing Russia’s part in the First World War – Lenin’s Bolsheviks proved to be a political tendency that set the clock back for socialism at least as much as reformism did. In claiming that socialism could be created by a political minority without the will and participation of the majority of the population, and through their wilful confusion of socialism with nationalisation and state-run capitalism generally (a type of opportunism also shared – over time – by the reformists), they shamelessly distorted the socialist political programme.

The Socialist Party was the first organisation in Britain (and possibly the world) to foresee the disastrous state capitalist outcome of the Bolshevik takeover but we gained no satisfaction in doing so. Even now, years after the collapse of the Kremlin’s empire, the association of socialist and communist ideas with state capitalism, minority action and political dictatorship is one of the greatest barriers to socialist understanding. Today, both reformism and Bolshevik-style vanguardism stand discredited. As ostensible attempts to create socialism they didn’t just fail, they were positively injurious to the one strategy that could have brought about a better society during the last century. The modern far left – by combining the two elements together in an unfortunate mix – have opted for the worst of both worlds and rightly are politically marginalized because of it.

Looking forwards

From our standpoint in 2004, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties abroad in the World Socialist Movement regard our situation with both pride and sadness. Sadness because two political currents we warned against most vehemently – reformism and vanguardism – succeeded in derailing the socialist project so spectacularly, but pride because of the part we have played in keeping the alternative vision alive.

The political positions of the Socialist Party were not handed down on tablets of stone in 1904. With the Object and Declaration of Principles as our guide we have developed our own analysis and political viewpoints as the last hundred years have worn on. Occasionally we may have made mistakes, but we are confident that our record over the last century stands for itself – of propagating the case for real socialism, in exposing the promises and trickery of the reformists and the vanguardists, in opposing the senseless butchery of the working class in two world wars and countless others, and in presenting a clear analysis of capitalism in language readily understandable to those whose interest lies in socialism.

In the pages of this special issue you will read about the remarkable men and women who have been members of our Party over the last hundred years and about the political input they have had to make. Without doubt, their contribution has been an immense one and we pay public tribute to them for it, but there is a lot more work still to be done.

Capitalism today stands as a social system that bears with it little by way of a positive perspective for humanity. In the major industrial centres of the system, significant rises in productivity coupled with trade union action by workers to win a half-decent share of the gains, have led to rising purchasing power for many. But capitalism and insecurity continue to go hand in hand and in the so-called ‘Third World’ millions starve every year while literally billions now live in disgusting conditions with no hope in sight for them. Everywhere on the planet capitalism has spread its malignant influence: creating a society where everything (and everyone) can be bought and sold, where an ‘every man for himself’ culture leads to escalating brutality, crime and violence and where the social codes built up during the system’s formative years have been undermined by a rampant drive to commercialisation, fostered by a distorted and ruthless individualism. In 2004, nationalism, political gangsterism, religious fundamentalism and terrorist atrocities are the order of the day in a system that neither knows or cares where it is heading.

In the first edition of the Socialist Standard we called upon our readership to “help speed the time when we shall herald in for ourselves and for our children, a brighter, a happier, and a nobler society than any the world has yet witnessed”. One hundred years later we are still here, and make the same plea, with the same force and urgency. No matter how inconvenient it may be for our political opponents, we are not going away until our job is done.

That day will come when the working class has seen through the lies and false promises that have proved such a distraction this last one hundred years. And it will come when the supposedly incredible idea of creating a world without wars and worries, money and markets is accepted as not only necessary for the sake of humanity, but recognised for being just as realisable as other once ‘impossible’ projects are today . . . like a man on the moon,or a spaceship to Mars.

Help The Aged (1977)

From the April 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well this here's the story of old Jake Twist
Who wrote him a letter to a Socialist.
He said I do declare I like what I hear
About free cigarettes an' a glass o' free beer.
I was also told there'll be no cash
An' I must confess it sounded pretty brash
But when I got to thinking an' usin' my brain
The whole of the Case became mighty plain.
Singin' Hey Ho — Watcha know! 

There'll be no more fightin' in these here hills
An' no more trouble 'bout old folks' wills
There'll be nobody to lay down the law
Cos there'll be no point in robbin' no more
Well all o' this sure does seem fine
But you see I've reached the end o' the line.
I'm gettin' mighty close on seventy two
An' it seems too old to be helpin' you.
Singin' Hey Ho — Watcha know! 

Well Old Jake's letter was put in the post
An' he settled him down to skunk on toast.
Three days later there came a reply
And what it said hit him in the eye.
It said: Well ole man I'm ashamed o' you
Thinkin' you're too old at seventy two
Y'oughta know it ain't never too late
Cos I'm still here an' I'm a-ninety eight.
So it's Hey Hey — Watcha say!

Paul Breeze

Economics (2012)

Book Review from the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Remaking Scarcity – From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy. By Costas Panayotakis, Pluto Press.

The subject of economics is commonly understood as being the problem of unlimited wants in the face of finite resources. Likewise socialism, communism and common ownership are seen as arising out of conditions which bring about the elimination of scarcity. Panayotakis, who describes himself as a “recovering economist”, frames the issue a little differently. For him scarcity itself is not necessarily the problem but rather it is the “the undemocratic determination of the configuration of scarcity that people live under” that leads to the social-ills of today.

This book is in effect in two halves, the first is a well written critique of many of the underlying assumptions that make up neo-classical economics and the second explores what Panayotakis calls “economic democracy” and compares two models for the operation of such a society. Panayotakis uses economic democracy “the principle that all citizens should have an equal voice over the goals and the operation of the economic system” as a yardstick to measure how successful an social system is. According to this measure and as would be expected, capitalism fares badly.

David Schweickart's conception of economic democracy is also put up against this measuring stick. Schweickart sees his system as achieving a balance between democracy, planning, and markets. Workers have democratic control of the companies they work for, firms trade between themselves and the general public and should the smooth functioning of this worker ran market economy be disrupted the State will step in to ensure that all is returned to a happy state of bliss. How close this proposal is to the current economic system is striking. Schweickart does not seem to realise that the problem with the market economy is not so much that the workers do not have democratic control of the means of production but that market forces ultimately control any decisions that have to be made, “accumulate or die” will remain the mantra until the competitive struggle for profits is removed. Panayotakis seems aware of these criticisms but does not really drive the point home.

To contrast with this “market-socialist” blueprint Panayotakis offers up the schemes of Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel. Commonly known as “Parecon” this system of participatory economics sees productive decisions co-ordinated by a network of workplace, neighbourhood, and facilitation councils which communicate amongst each other until pricing and production levels are agreed upon. However, in this system competition between enterprises is not eliminated, the law of value still operates, enterprises that fail to compete would go under and so the tension between profit and wages remains. Albert and Hahnel are trying to find political solutions to what is essentially an economic problem.

What is missing from this book is the argument for the type of classless, stateless and non-market system of free access which we would call world socialism. Economic democracy is as much a problem of economics as it is of democracy. A truly democratic economy cannot be realised until the economy is governed directly by human need.

DJP

How I became a Socialist (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Looking back, I can see that I was nearly a middle-of-the-road floating voter, swayed by whichever tricky-slick talker promised me the most in the shortest possible time—be he Conservative, Liberal, Labour, Communist or whatever. How your head swims at election times when all the MPs and prospective MPs are in top gear! All they need, they say, is to get into Power and everyone's worries will be over. What bloody optimists!

I was born and live in Stoke-on-Trent, the grimy industrial city somewhere in the middle of England. And take it from me, the air isn't much less murky now that can be seen in those old photographs taken during the bottle-kiln days. It's just that when you live in a certain kind of atmosphere for most of your life you tend to take it for granted. It's only on a return to the Potteries after a day in the country or seaside that you notice what a depressing place it is.

Like most people, I grew up with ambitions of becoming someone famous—great footballer, pop star, TV personality, anything that would make me plenty of money, enable me to live a life of luxury. Then BUMP! I left school. Oh yes, marvellous at first, money in my pocket, high hopes of climbing from the lowly dogsbody of junior employee to the dizzy pinnacle of Chairman. "It can be done," they drill into you. But of course, the time comes when reality seeps in—no matter how hard you try to thwart its progress. At that point you take a stone-cold look around. And what do you see? Thousands and thousands of ordinary people just like you, dreaming exactly the same impossible dreams, people who you come to fear and regard as competitors—or putting it in its sober perspective, deadly enemies. You grow to hate them, despise every penny they make more than you, completely unaware that you are giving life-blood to the system that thrives on such emotions.

Then came the time when I gave up such hopes of becoming somebody and settled down to accept my lot. But when I'd reached this stage I became frightened: no overstatement, I can assure you. I saw myself in five years, ten, twenty, thirty, maybe even longer, working at the same place, doing the same job week in week out. It's enough to make anybody contemplate suicide if dwelt upon. So what was the answer? Change jobs. I trued that: clerk, factory worker, labourer, cleaner. Still I had that nagging sensation that something wasn't right. So what was the answer? I couldn't see one. I tried to tell myself that there are people a lot worse off than me, people dying of starvation, homeless, living in poverty. But that type of negative thinking gave no lasting satisfaction but led to questioning more deeply the whole set-up, adding even more questions to my tired mind. Questions like: Why are people starving? Why are people homeless? That's when I turned my hopes for a solution towards the field of politics.

Being a city of mines, pot-banks and other factories, it's not surprising that the Labour Party has held a monopoly in Stoke. The false, though understandable, theory is that as most people in the area "labour" for a living, it follows that the "Labour" Party have their interests at heart. I was no exception in arriving at this conclusion, helped by the older generation's barrage of remarks to the effect that Labour was on the side of the underdog. (When I think of the breath I've wasted in the past defending such notions myself, I honestly struggle not to blush, even in an empty room.)

Anyhow, I was then a Labour man, and with my vote helped the LP into Power. The slow realization crept over me that the Labour Party dealt in nothing more tangible than promises.

Facade

Sad and shattered I looked around, increasingly aware of the injustices in the world. I'm too sensitive, I tried to console myself, so started to listen to the Conservatives and Liberals, but for all their expressions of sincerity I could see through the facade. There's no difference between the lot of 'em, just various methods of giving nothing, So what's left? The Communists: I inquired of a couple of self-confessed reds but there seemed to be no clear aim. "Overthrow the Government! Put our Leaders in power like in Russia!" In fact they were merely another version of all other parties, wanted to dictate to the masses—namely me—what they wanted us to do. That wasn't freedom. 

Dejected I concluded that the world was as it was, that there was nowt anybody could do. There'd always be poverty and starvation. All we could so was to send a few bob when we could afford it to one of the hundreds of charities in the vain hope that we'd relieve the suffering of some poor soul whose belly was forever rumbling. But what satisfaction was there in that when you could see and hear of people spending hundreds of thousands on paintings, jewellery, driving round in chauffeured Rolls, going on cruises of the world three times a year, never having to lift a finger, yet never going short of a thing?

That's how I was feeling when I came across the Socialist Party of Great Britain in an advert in the Socialist Worker, the organ of the then International Socialists, a so-called left-wing group, whatever that might mean. It was the first time I'd heard of such organizations as IS, testifying to my ignorance of how the world revolved. I bought the paper in the hope that it would shed some light on how to get a better deal from life. It offered little hope at all, concerned itself mainly with slagging off the other political parties, not even sparing the Labour Party who it urged people to vote for. Very confusing! The little hope turned out to be the small advert asking the reader whether he would like to see One World, a classless, moneyless system of society based on the common ownership of land, buildings, means of production, ect., and democratically controlled by free individuals. Sounded like a set of cranks to me. Still, what had I got to lose? I'd tried everything else so I sent off for literature.

Suspicious 

Naturally, the proposition of a world without money and of co-operative human beings put to a person in a state of mind whereby he thinks things can never alter and is suspicious of all politics seems ludicrous. What about human nature? Who'd do the work? Surely there'd be leaders to influence and coerce people? All these questions and many more come to mind to batter these mad views. How else can you react when right from childhood you've been conditioned into thinking purely in terms of money, buying, selling, competition, winning, etc.

Gradually, after reading the straightforward articles which explained how nearly every problem on earth is caused primarily because of the system known as capitalism that we live under, it dawned on me that not only was such a new system desirable—indeed essential—it was so easily possible with majority understanding.

At last here was hope for the future, something positive to aim for, I'd broken free from the muddled thinking of my past, un-brainwashed myself from the conditioning we are all subject to. What a sense of enlightenment! And what's more gratifying is that I am now in the knowledgeable position of being able to urge you to do the same, to find out about the REAL Socialism of the SPGB and its companion parties abroad.

It's a fact that the world we live in is sickening but it need not be so. Don't just accept things as they are. Do a little enquiring, question all you see and hear, and you'll discover that Socialism is the ONLY way of making life a pleasure instead of a burden!

Paul Breeze 

Roots (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Okay you Smiths, Joneses, Bloggs and Leeses
I bet your roots go back as far as the Breezes.
Right! There's me, a wage slave, and also me dad,
And me dead and buried grandfather, and none of us mad.
Further back than that I'm unable to go
But I'll bet a pound to a penny we were all pretty low.
Perhaps I'm Spanish or German or Welsh
But the truth of it is I'll never know. 

And what do I care? Not such a lot.
Apart from a purely academical point of view
The best I can say is it's all so much rot. 

Now don't get me wrong, don't twist what I say,
We're here 'cos of history and that's how it'll stay
But let's get it straight, put it all nice and clear,
The past is the past, but it's the present that's here.
Right!Stop looking back with your complacent shrugs
And clinging to tradition with your endearing hugs.
Wake up to the present, take a cold look around,
Observe the ness that should be razed to the ground.
Pull up the rotten capitalist roots,
Jerk them, yank them free.
Pick up your spades, exercise your brain
And help to plant the Socialist Tree.

Paul Breeze

The Breakthrough (1977)

From the March 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

I once asked a Labour man,
"Are you a Socialist? Answer me if you can".
"I'm a Labour man", he answered.
"So it's obvious I am". 

"There's nowt obvious it", says I,
And he looked at me strangely before he said,
"Are you quite alright, mate,
Or are you goin' funny in the head?" 

"No", says I simply, saddened by his manner,
Reflecting that all Labour men
Say they wave the Socialist banner.
But you ask 'em what Socialism is
And they haven't got a clue.
They think it's Nationalisation
Or some other pathetic view. 

I say, "Do you think it's a world system
That has no need for money?"
And he looks at me again in that same old way
As though he thinks I really have gone funny. 

"Well that's Socialism", I say.
"No buying, no selling, no spending, no pay.
There'll be no need, you see,
Everything's readily available,
Everything's free". 

"What about work? he says.
"Who's goin' do it for nowt?"
"That's no problem", says I.
"That's not hard to figure out.
You'll work cos you want work
Not cos of what they pay ya.
If you had a choice of doin' summat
           or nowt all day,
I'm sure you'd choose summat, what say ya?" 

"Mm, reckon so," he says. "You might have summat after all."
"There's no reckon about it," says I, "it's a fact
Or my name ain't Paul".
"Well, when's this free world going to come about, then?
Tell me how long we've got?"
"As soon as folk like you come and join us
Instead of listening to that Labour rot". 

He nodded reflectively,
As though he'd just seen the light,
And I knew in my heart
He was going to say what was right.
"Are you a Labour man?" I asked again.
"Or cab you now see clearly through the mist?"
"Nay, lad," he replied smilingly,
            I'm no Labour man.
I'm a Socialist."

Paul Breeze

Einstein and Socialism (2005)

From the April 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year sees a double anniversary for Albert Einstein: fifty years this month since his death, and one hundred since the publication of his first seminal papers on quantum theory and relativity. No doubt there will be fulsome, and well-deserved, tributes to one of the great names of twentieth-century science. But it is likely that there will be little if any reference to Einstein’s political views, especially his opposition to capitalism, including his acceptance of the labour theory of value.

In 1949, Einstein published an article ‘Why Socialism?’ in the first issue of the American left-wing journal Monthly Review. It is available on the web at various places. e.g. here.  In it he argued that class society is an instance of ‘the predatory phase’ of human development (in Thorstein Veblen’s phrase). Yet humans depend on society to provide food, clothing, a home and so on. We have a fixed and unalterable biological constitution, but during our lives we acquire a ‘cultural constitution’ which is subject to change. Anthropological research shows that people’s social behaviour differs greatly, so our biological make-up does not determine the way we live.

But small groups of humans cannot be self-sufficient: ‘mankind constitutes even now a planetary community of production and consumption.’ This dependence on society, however, is seen as a threat to our existence rather than as a positive asset. This is largely due to ‘the economic anarchy of capitalist society’. All those who do not share in the ownership of the means of production, Einstein calls workers. Workers’ wages are determined not by the value of what they produce but by their minimum needs. As private capital becomes more and more concentrated, it achieves a power that even democratic politics cannot check.

Under capitalism, he continues, production is for profit, not use. Unemployment exists almost always, and workers are in fear of losing their jobs. Unlimited competition results in an enormous waste of labour. The worst evil of capitalism, he says, is the ‘crippling of individuals’, as education inculcates competitive notions.

Having given a pretty decent sketch of how capitalism works and of what’s wrong with it, Einstein goes on to advocate a planned economy which guarantees a livelihood to everyone and adjusts production to the needs of the community. But a planned economy, he recognises, is not socialism, as it may involve ‘the complete enslavement of the individual’ (so perhaps he had Russian-style state capitalism in mind?). And after a few misguided remarks about so-called problems of socialism (how to limit the power of the bureaucracy? etc), Einstein closes his contribution. It’s a shame that he is so inconclusive, but his article is still well worth reading, even if you can’t get through it at the speed of light.

Paul Bennett

‘Abenomics’: Japan Retests a Failed Experiment (2015)

From the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Japan’s prime minister is so confident in his economic policy that he has named it after himself. But will his ‘Abenomics’ cure what ails Japanese capitalism?

Increased stimulus or austerity? This has been the key choice for policymakers seeking to lift their national economies out of the crisis that has dragged on since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008. It’s the question of whether government should try to cushion the blow of a crisis or rather let it run its course.

But Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has put forward an economic strategy, dubbed ‘Abenomics’, that seems to adopt the belief that there is no need to choose. The basic idea is that, first, government should aggressively introduce fiscal and monetary policies to stimulate demand, and that, once the ball is moving, the government can back off and let the free market work its wonders.

More specifically, the prime minister says he has three ‘arrows’ in his quiver to slay economic recession and prod the economic growth that has eluded Japan and the rest of the world. Those three key policies are: monetary policy centred on quantitative easing, fiscal policy aimed at stimulating demand, and structural reforms to deregulate the economy.

For Abe and his government, the root of Japan’s economic problems is thought to lie in deflation. Following a simplistic Keynesian logic, Abe is convinced that the expectation of continued deflation has discouraged investment and led consumers to defer purchases. If Japan were in an inflationary period instead, the argument goes, this would stimulate economic activity and raise consumption.

The ‘first arrow’ of Abenomics in particular aims to reverse the deflationary trend. This has involved the Bank of Japan, under Abe’s yes-man Haruhiko Kuroda, implementing an ultra-loose monetary policy. Kuroda announced in April 2013 that the BOJ would double the ‘monetary base’, aiming to deliver 2 percent inflation within the next two years. This involves purchasing around 7 trillion yen worth of Japanese government bonds and other assets every month, rivalling the amount the Federal Reserve has been pouring into its own ‘quantitative easing’ policy. The BOJ has also left interest rates for commercial banks at around 0 percent in the hope that this will encourage lending.

Abe’s second arrow is fiscal stimulus; the building of more ‘bridges to nowhere’ and other lavish spending on infrastructure. In early 2013, just a few weeks into office, Prime Minister Abe introduced a 10.3 trillion yen stimulus package. And, in January of this year, he announced a supplementary budget of 3.12 trillion yen to fund further stimulus spending.

Given the Keynesian dimensions of the first two arrows, it’s not too surprising that a right-wing reactionary like Abe could win praise from a number of liberal economists, most notably Paul Krugman. In a May 2013 column for The New York Times titled ‘Japan the Model’, Krugman wondered why the ‘Western world’ was ‘overtaken by economic defeatism’, instead of taking a ‘sharp turn toward monetary and fiscal stimulus’ as Japan was doing. ‘A short-term boost to growth won’t cure all of Japan’s ills’, Krugman wrote, ‘but, if it can be achieved, it can be the first step toward a much brighter future’.

In short, for Krugman and other Keynesian economists, Abenomics has been seen as an alternative to the austerity policies that they believe are at the root of the current economic stagnation.

The long-awaited ‘third arrow’

But Abe has had quite a few fans among conservatives and free-marketeers as well. They are looking to the prime minister to follow through on his pledge to carry out structural reforms that will free capital from its chains. This is the aim of the ‘third arrow’ of Abenomics. The non-Keynesian fans of Abe have hoped (although their hope is fading) that the benefits resulting from the structural reforms would make up for the debt incurred from the lavish fiscal and monetary policies.

In June 2014, Abe finally unveiled some of the third-arrow policies he hopes to introduce, including cutting corporate income tax to below 30 percent, creating special economic zones with fewer regulations and lower tax rates, and lifting the ban on online sales of drugs. The list of specific proposals was fairly long, but the combined effect was underwhelming, at least in the eyes of the foreign business press, which had been looking forward to the third arrow with great expectation.

‘Misfire’ was the title of an article in the Economist that described Abe’s structural reforms as ‘timid’. In particular, the magazine’s editors were disappointed that Abe did not promise more measures to reform the labour market and the agricultural sector.

The prime minister’s ‘timidity’ is not surprising, however, since the potential third-arrow reforms concern issues of keen political importance to influential lobby groups within the ruling party itself as well as issues that could divide the public. The LDP is far from agreement on matters related to free trade and agriculture, and cutting taxes for corporations while raising the consumption tax is not likely to win over the public. If the political headwinds are strong enough, Abe could easily end up the target of his own third arrow.

Roundabout solutions

The idea (or hope, really) behind Abenomics is that each arrow hitting its bull’s-eye will have a combined ‘synergistic’ effect capable of lifting the crisis-laden economy out of its rut. The optimistic charts presented to explain how this might all happen tend to look something like the diagram of a Rube Goldberg machine; a chain reaction where the initial steps bring improvements that in turn generate other improvements.

For instance, a chart created by the investment bank Nomura Holdings plots out how the aggressive monetary policy will drive up stock prices; this in turn will boost corporate profitability, which will expand capital expenditures and increase wages; while the lower yen will drive up exports, thereby also boosting capital expenditures. And while this is going on, the fiscal stimulus is expected public investment, thus also raising consumption, wages, and capital expenditures. On top of this, the structural reforms are expected to boost all of the drivers of growth. All of this combining to allegedly raise the level of effective demand and break away from deflation.

It is incredibly convoluted, but then again capitalism itself is an incredibly convoluted system of social production; a system where hardly any problem lends itself to a straightforward solution. The reason in most cases is that all of the production decisions are made by the capitalists who own or manage the means of production; each of these actors making decisions on the basis of their own profit calculations. Any effort to influence how capitalists choose to behave can only be attempted in a roundabout way, since private ownership and the rights stemming from it are sacrosanct under capitalism.

Those capitalists are in charge of production; certainly not society as a whole, or even the government, despite its pretentions to leadership. What the government can do, in attempting to coordinate the private (and fundamentally selfish) activities of capitalists, is to introduce this or that incentive or regulation to encourage behaviour thought to benefit capitalism as a whole. The problem, though, is that capitalists will not budge, no matter how strongly cajoled, if they do not see the point (=profit) for themselves of such behaviour. This fundamental reality leaves a ‘leader’ like Abe with few options except to throw money at the problem in the form of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the hope that it will spur productive activities.

How different the situation would be in a socialist world, where no minority has a stranglehold on the means of production, which are instead held in common. There the questions related to production are transparent; no longer economic problems at all, actually, but mere ‘technical’ issues related to how to go about producing whatever the members of society have determined democratically to be necessary. No need for the domino or billiard-ball approach where every problem is only dealt with indirectly or at an angle.

Dominos still standing

So what has been the effect of Abenomics so far? Initially, the outlook was pretty rosy. Not surprisingly, the aggressive quantitative easing and 0 percent interest rate policy quickly sparked a stock exchange boom. By mid-November 2014 the Nikkei average had risen to 17,490 points, a 70 percent increase compared to the time Abe took office. The fall of the yen was equally dramatic, with the currency losing around 40 percent of its value against the dollar since Abe took office in December 2012. GDP growth also looked promising (at first), increasing in the first three quarters of 2013.

But the first flaw in the mechanistic logic of Abenomics became increasingly clear as the year 2014 progressed. The stock-market boom has done little to lift the real economy. In fact, the boom itself reflects the fact that most of the money pumped into the economy is ending up in speculative (rather than productive) activities. This reality is seen in the figures for Japan’s GDP which shrank in the second and third quarters of 2014 by 7.3 and 6 percent respectively.

Even the dramatic fall in the Japanese yen has not ended up lifting the country out of its trade deficit, as Japan recorded an excess of imports over exports of 893 billion yen in November, marking the its 29th consecutive month for trade to be in the red.

Wages also have not risen much either, despite Abe’s appeals to corporate leaders. In August 2014, real wages (adjusted for inflation) fell by 2.6 percent year-on-year, the 14th straight month of declines. The bottom-line of profit has again proved to be a weightier concern to capitalists than the opinions of politicians or the public.

On top of all these setbacks to the plan, the Bank of Japan is even having difficulty reaching its 2 percent inflation target. This is particularly troublesome for Captain Abe and his obsessive crew, since deflation has been their White Whale that had to be slayed at all cost. Rather than admit defeat in this quest, the BOJ has decided to  increase the monetary stimulus by enlarging to 80 trillion yen the annual target for expanding the monetary base, as compared to the previous 60 to 70 trillion yen range.

In short, although the first two arrows may have hit the mark insofar as their immediate goals, few of the expected knock-on effects have materialized. This should not be too terribly surprising to anyone, especially to the members of the LDP, since for well over two decades Japanese governments have experimented with similar monetary and fiscal policies in the hope of economic recovery.

It goes without saying that the experiment failed (again and again). Slashing interest rates to zero was not the answer; nor did previous stimulus packages provide much incentive to the real economy. Japan introduced no fewer than 15 stimulus packages between 1992 and 2008, averaging around 2.3 percent of the country’s overall GDP.

What grew as a result of these efforts was not the economy but government debt; to the point where it is now 780 trillion yen, which is roughly 240 percent of Japan’s GDP, forcing the government to channel around 40 percent of its revenue to the servicing of this debt.

Abe himself seems to be well aware that ‘Abenomics’ will hit the wall sooner or later, if it hasn’t made contact already. His decision to call a snap general election in December, even though he had two years left in his current term, was widely recognized as stemming from his expectation that things are likely to get worse, economically. Better to call an election now, he reasoned, while the opposition is in disarray, than to wait another year or two.

The ploy worked, as the LDP and its coalition partner Komeito preserved their two-thirds parliamentary majority, while around half the population abstained from voting at all. But Abe may have been too clever by half; in making Abenomics the centrepiece of his campaign, he has laid further claim to his responsibility for the performance of the Japanese economy. The prime minister is free to remain in office another four years, but with his 'three arrows' looking more like damp squibs he may not last that long.

Michael Schauerte

Half Marx: Flanders Flounders (2012)

From the November 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whenever capitalism gets into an economic crisis there is a revival of interest in Marx, and not just amongst critics of capitalism. So it was to be expected that Marx’s ideas should be examined in BBC Economics Editor, Stephanie Flanders’ recent three-part programme for BBC2 and the Open University: ‘Masters of Money’.

She examine first the ideas of Keynes (who advocated government intervention to save capitalism), then the obscure and slightly batty Austrian School economist Friedrich August von Hayek (who wanted to free capitalism from all government interference, which not even his great admirer Thatcher dared to try). Marx’s turn came last, on 1 October.

Flanders got two things right. First, that Marx analysed capitalism as an economy that pitted two classes – profit-seeking capitalists and wage-dependent workers – against each other. Second, that Marx saw capitalism as an inherently unstable system under which economic crises and downturns were bound to occur from time to time.

But she got it wrong on two other, crucial points. First, her claim, repeated several times, that Marx had offered no alternative to capitalism. Second, she made Marx have an “underconsumptionist” (workers can’t buy back) theory of capitalist crises.

Marx’s alternative

It is true that Marx did not believe in drawing up recipes for the cookshops of the future, but he did describe the basis of the society he thought was going to replace capitalism: “an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common” (chapter 1 of Capital); “a co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production” (Critique of the Gotha Programme); “abolition of private property”, “the Communistic abolition of buying and selling”, “the conversion of the functions of the State into a mere superintendence of production” (Communist Manifesto); “abolition of the wages system” (Value, Price and Profit). In short, a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society based on the common ownership of the means of production.

It was probably inevitable that what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe would be seen as a failed attempt to replace capitalism, with disastrous results. So Flanders went to visit a former Stasi prison in East Berlin but, to be fair, she didn’t overdo this and at one point hinted that Marx might not have approved. Indeed he wouldn’t. He would surely have recognised this as a form of capitalism, based on the exploitation of wage-labour by a minority which controlled the state – state capitalism.

What Marx did not say

According to Flanders, Marx’s theory of crises was that they are caused when the total income of the workers falls too low so that they are unable to buy all the products that the capitalists want to sell to them. So capitalism is in a bind: capitalists seek to maximise profits and this can only be done at the expense of wages. But, if wages are reduced, so is the market for goods. On the other hand, if wages go up, the market does expand, but profits go down, reducing the capitalist’s incentive to invest in production.

The trouble is that this simplistic theory has been put forward by people who regard themselves as Marxists. They argue that the crisis of the 1970s was caused by workers pushing up wages and so squeezing profits and that this provoked a fightback by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s on behalf of the capitalists. This, in turn resulted in the workers’ share in national income falling. For a while workers’ consumption was kept going by their going into debt, but when their credit ran out, the crisis caused by a fall in total workers’ income broke out. This is the view put forward, for instance, in Richard Wolff’s widely viewed video When Capitalism Hits the Fan.

Flanders accepted this as Marx’s view. But it wasn’t. This theory is based on the fallacy that capitalism is a system geared to meeting consumption and that the market is made up of paying demand for consumer goods only. In fact, the market is also made up of paying demand for producer goods (machinery, raw materials, intermediate goods and energy) so what the workers can’t buy the capitalists can. It is this business reinvestment of profits in expanding production that is the driving force of the capitalist economy, and it is variations in this – not in workers’ consumption – that causes capitalism’s instability.

Capitalism is a system geared to capital accumulation which falters, as now, when the prospects for profit fall, resulting in capitalists choosing not to spend their share of national income. This inevitably happens sooner or later in a boom when capitalists in one key sector of the economy in their pursuit of profits overproduce in relation to the demand for their products and this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy, leading to a more general economic downturn.

The end of capitalism

Flanders also talked of Marx arguing that economic crises would get worse and worse and would eventually lead to, as she put it, “the total collapse of capitalism”. It is true that in the Communist Manifesto, a political manifesto rather than a work of economics and written before Marx undertook his detailed study of capitalism, he did refer to “more extensive and more destructive crises” but never expressed the view nor expected that capitalism would collapse of its own accord through its inherent economic contradictions. He saw capitalism coming to an end, but through the political action of those he called its “gravediggers”, the exploited working class. In other words, capitalism had to be done to death. It still needs to be.

Adam Buick

The Sweet Life (1961)

Film Review from the January 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

La Dolce Vita, the Italian film now showing at the Columbia and the Curzon, is worth attention. The action is centred in Rome over seven days and nights (a sly dig at the story of creation?). The opening sequence sets the scene for the bitter, searing and uncompromising revelation of our diseased society. A helicopter is carrying an effigy of Christ low over Rome followed by another occupied by a newspaper reporter and photographer. Subsequently we learn that these two are attached to a scandal-mongering tabloid but we surmise that in the meanwhile that this is a stunt and that the occasion is one of the not infrequent religious holidays. Suddenly we see St. Peter's Square below. Thousands are gathered receiving benediction from the Pope. We are left in no doubt of the relationship of the events—two stunts both concerned only with a cynical exploitation of ignorance, fear and uncertainty.

That evening we see the same reporter in one of the more exclusive night-clubs of Rome smelling out sensation and scandal and noting the useless itineraries of the notables of "society". Eventually he finds himself alone in the company of a rich young heiress who takes him to her palace (the term is used literally) in her fabulous car. There they encounter two prostitutes. The rich young lady, sensing a common bond with one of these (for as we are made well aware, they are two opposite sides of the same coin) offers to take her home. The contrast between the affluence of the rich and the dismal quarters of the prostitute is driven home cruelly. The more so since the rich young thing, weary no doubt of the boredom of her parasitical existence decides to fornicate with the young man in the prostitutes' own bed, suffusing herself, as she imagines with the sensuous pleasures of promiscuity. Of the coarseness, the soliciting, the squalor, the pimps, the degradation, she knows—or wants to know—nothing.

Another episode is in an altogether different vein. A little boy and girl claim to have had a vision outside their home and to have spoken to "Our Lady". The credulity and hysteria which follow lay bare the blind belief and ignorance which go with religion. We see the maimed and crippled gather for succour. Others come out of curiosity, anxious not to miss any possible "modern" miracles. All this is exploited shamelessly by the methods of modern mass communication. The pent-up frenzy and the latent violence that is its accompaniment bursts forth at the end into the immolation and despoilment by the crowd of the tree where the vision is said to have appeared. Symbolic this of the brutality and violence underlying blind faith and belief so characteristic of our time.

Another episode takes us into the palace of a rich aristocrat where a party is taking place. The utter depravity and stupidity of these people are hammered home in scene after scene. Lechery, promiscuity, avidity, inanity are all ruthlessly exposed. We are never allowed for an instant to forget that these people are possessed of enormous wealth and resources. The great disparities of wealth ownership so characteristic of capitalist society are made clear for all to see. These people are portrayed for what they are—useless, parasitic, diseased.

The final orgiastic episode may be said to crown this unsparing condemnation of hypocritical capitalist morality with one code for the poor and one for the rich.

Max Judd 

Irish eyes (1982)

Book Review from the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Frank Faces of the Dead by Richard Montague, New Horizon

This short novel (190 pages) set around a street riot in Belfast which later develops into a bloody battle between the two IRAs (official and provisional) and the British army is essential reading for an understanding of the situation in Northern Ireland.

Written by a socialist, it succeeds well in introducing the socialist argument (through one of the characters, Nora Quinn, a nurse in a Belfast hospital) without turning the novel into a political tract. But even without this the basic story, bringing out the utter futility of violence, is itself an illustration of the socialist case.

Here, for instance, is how the "hero", Johnny Cairns of the Official IRA, recalls one of Nora's arguments, in the course of the battle:

Freedom . . . freedom . . . FREEDOM!
Before man can be anything, Johnny, Catholic, Protestant, English, Irish, black or white, freeman or slave, he must be LIVING—not dead!! In order to live he needs food, clothing, shelter, Johnny, and in order to live in freedom, he needs free and equal access to these things. Will your Luger create the conditions of abundance for freedom, Johnny? Is your gun the great revelation? The precursor of universal knowledge? Have you revolutionised the gun? Changed its historic role of enslaver to that of emancipator? Is it to be the voice of the people with the alchemistic power to make freedom, the fruit of knowledge, grow on the barren boughs of ignorance and acceptance?

And how Nora explains the historical background to a young recruit to the Provisional IRA:

Dermot, I don't want to go back into history; suffice it to say that the propertied class in Ireland, at the turn of the century, the established capitalists in the North and their fledgling class-brethren in the South, were politically divided. In the South, they wanted control over their own political affairs in order to legislate conditions in which they could nourish their developing capitalist economy—they needed to restrict competition with tariff walls and import quotas.In the North, on the other hand, capitalism was well established, developed against the British home market. So the Northern capitalists needed to maintain the link with Britain to sell their wares and the Southern capitalists needed protection from British capitalism.
The workers, North and South, because they mistakenly associated their interests with the fortunes of their masters, were lined up behind the capitalists in their respective areas. The Southern capitalists rallied the people there behind them by appeals to patriotism and the notion that if they had their own government they would be free. The Northern gentlemen achieved their end by exploiting historical fictions and blatantly promoting religious bigotry.

There's more too on the futility of leadership and the need for socialist knowledge, on the state capitalist nature of Russia and nationalisation.

Adam Buick

Richard Montague's dedication in the book.

Editorial: Patriots without countries (1982)

Editorial from the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among the more disturbing and threatening features of the Falklands crisis has been the way in which it has been bolstered by a mass of patriotic nonsense. So intense has this been, that to stand out against it has been something of an act of courage—and this in a country whose government claimed to be fighting for human liberty. So receptive have British workers been to the nonsense that at one stage it might have been feared that they would swallow any deception provided it came from "their" side. It was reminiscent of the lurid deceptions about atrocities committed by German troops at the beginning of World War One—of babies tossed onto Prussian bayonets, of buckets-full of eyes torn from Belgian heads.

Patriotism is not supportable with fact and reason but by deception and prejudice. That is why it is so quickly inflates into mob frenzy, bullying and repression. In the case of the Falklands, workers were told that the British forces were sent out to protect the 1,800 Islanders. In the light of history of the ruthless, instant repression and murder of millions of people by the governments of capitalism, when it suited their interests to do so, this sudden concern for the fate of the Falklanders is a sick joke. It needs very little thought to dismiss it as a cruel deception which will cost many working class lives and much suffering.

The Falklands struggle is actually a dispute over the possession and exploitation of mineral resources, trading routes, the political pressures in states under severe economic stress and the wider, long term strategic aims of the Argentine ruling class, which present a threat to an established power. Whatever the outcome of this struggle the lives of the mass of people in Argentina and Britain will not change. In other words their interests are not involved; their suffering and their deaths are contributions to the fortunes of their respective ruling class. This goes too for the people of the Falklands. The war is not worth a moment's effort on the part of the working class, not the spilling of a single drop of their blood.

Workers have no interest in the Falklands because, in spite of the mouthings of politicians and media hacks, they have no country to fight for or to protect. Their "way of life" is the daily grind of exploitation, of producing surplus value to enrich their masters. Whatever Galtieri may say, Argentina is owned by its ruling class and not by the ordinary people who do all the work and some of whom have been sent to fight for the Falklands. However emotional Thatcher may wax, the fact is that Great Britain is owned by its capitalist class and not by the workers who, just as they run British capitalism, have manned the Task Force sent to recapture the Falklands.

All over the world, in every capitalist state, there are masses of people who depend for their living on the sale of their labour power. Internationally, these people have a common interest which is opposed to that of their ruling classes. The workers of Argentina have interests opposed to those of the class represented by Galtieri and the same goes in the case of the workers in Britain and the class represented by Thatcher and Foot.

This has been true for as long as there has been a society of two classes—for as long as capitalism has existed. In both world wars, for example, the workers who were fighting and killing each other were doing so in ignorance of their international common interests. Instead of firing at each other, they should have been extending the hand of fraternal greeting and unity.

For this to happen, it will first be necessary for the working class to come to an understanding of their social position under capitalism. They will need to understand that the roots of capitalism's problems lie in the nature of that society and that those problems can be ended only by the abolition of capitalism. That understanding will arm workers throughout the world with the consciousness to move society, through democratic political revolution, into a fundamentally different phase.

This phase is called socialism. The end of capitalism must lead to its replacement by a social system based on the communal ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. This society will be without classes and therefore will have a unity of human interests. People everywhere will co-operate in the production of goods and services and everyone will have free access to that wealth.

The unity of socialism will unleash, for the first time in history, the full powers of the human race. In one way or another, private property society has been a brake on these powers and at no time has this been more apparent than under capitalism, which has dramatically developed productive powers and then either held back or tragically misused them. One ready example of this misuse has been the fiendishly clever weaponry in use in the South Atlantic.

Socialism will be established by an international people who have seen through the divisive cynicism of patriotism. They will opt for common ownership and free access because they will be conscious that private property society produced poverty, war, famine, disease and a host of other equally desperate social ills. They will want to free human resources and abilities to produce the abundance of wealth of which we are capable. Socialism will achieve all of this; in stark contrast to patriotism, it will be the highest stage of human social organisation.

Star Trek: First Contact (1997)

From the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

It's official: the future is socialist. We have it on no less authority than Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise. In this film spin-off from the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation the crew of the Enterprise boldly go back in time to the twenty-first century to save the planet Earth from an invasion by the dreaded Borg (cyborg, half-organic—half-machine), who not only threaten to take over the world but also the future. Of course the outcome should come as no surprise. But there is one scene on the Enterprise where Picard (played by Patrick Stewart) explains to a bewildered woman from the twenty-first century that in the future (Star Trek's present) money has been abolished.

This is no accident of the script. The creator of Star Trek, the late Gene Roddenberry, framed the series so that, whatever the external threat, the crew of the Enterprise remained classless. No money, no wages, no class struggle. In one episode of the first series the crew rescued a few people travelling through space in a cryogenic stasis. Asleep for hundreds of years, their first thought on re-awakening was that their stocks and shares should now be worth a fortune. Captain Kirk and other crew members implied that stocks and shares no longer existed. And this was the problem Roddenberry had: there was only so much he could get away with (he had already the audacity to get a black female in the crew, at a time when it was rare for black men to get on the TV screen). It was not long into the first series that Roddenberry lost day-to-day control to other interests. Sponsors, the TV networks, actors. In particular, William Shatner (as Captain Kirk) was mainly responsible for introducing a militaristic and hierarchical element into the structure of the Enterprise crew—this was during the Vietnam War—and to this day the other actors of the first series admit to hating his guts.

Roddenberry oversaw the re-birth of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but soon lost control completely to its current producer Rick Berman. The latest TV Star Trek series, Star Trek: Voyager has virtually nothing to do with Roddenberry's original ideas, and Berman has explicitly introduced an element of class struggle into the structure of the crew (perhaps to make up for the uninteresting new storyline). As producer of Star Trek: First Contact, the inclusion of a reference to a moneyless society is a nod in Roddenberry's direction. Besides that this is probably the best so far of the Trek films: check it out on video.

Lew Higgins

Good work in Manchester (1906)

From the December 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Comrade,

Just a brief record of work done on behalf of the S.P.G.B. in Manchester and district during the past few weeks. On Sunday, September 23rd, H. W. Hobart was lecturing at Salford for the S.D.F. and to him we put one or two questions at the close of his address. Not being satisfied with his replies and at the invitation of the chairman the platform was occupied for 10 minutes and the futility of the reforms advocated by the lecturer was shewn.

The Friday following we came upon the S.W. manchester S.D.F. holding forth at Russel Street, and a question or two bearing upon the lecturer's statement that the S.D.F. had always stuck to their principles, led to somewhat of a scene, the whole of the usual stock of compliments being literally showered upon us, but at the request of the crowd, the major portion of whom disagreed with this style of dealing with questions - the platform was once again occupied, the futility of reform agitation exposed, and instances given where the S.D.F. had departed from its principles by allowing men of the type of Thorne to support Liberal candidates and to hide their Socialism as Labour candidates, etc. Receiving an invitation to appear next week and to have our statements publicly exposed as untruths, we appeared at the appointed time and produced samples of Will Thorne's election literature, Mr. G. Belt's programme, likewise his leaflet admitting his endeavour to compromise with the Liberal Party etc., etc. After a vain endeavour on the lecturer's part (Mr. A. H. Watson), to quibble and a tardy admission that the organisation may have made mistakes, the chairman stated that he would not at any future meeting take any further questions from us or allow us to oppose. (# questions were asked and answered and the platform occupied for 10 minutes). A challenge to a public representative debate was likewise ignored, During the remainder of the fine weather meetings have been held on every available evening at various spots, and on two successive Sunday mornings at the corner of Tib St, and Piccadilly we received opposition from S.D.F. speakers. The first was a German member of the S.D.F. whose name I do not remember, the other, J. McGlasson. However, we have not yet stated that we shall not take any more questions or allow opposition, but to one and all we say that we welcome your questions, further. By all means come and discuss with us.

What the average worker cannot see is the reason why the S.D.F. fear debate. To both opponents our words were as follow, "We are prepared to meet in free and open debate, any representative your organisation may choose, whether he be your University educated man or a member of the middle class with all the educational advantages accruing from that position, our organisation will oppose to him a workman, and the workers can decide which organisation is worthy of the support of the working class." Why did McGlasson shake his head so sorrowfully when he publicly received this invitation to his organisation to debate? Did he think of the days gone by when the S.D.F. members boasted that they were prepared to meet all comers? One thing we do know and that is the crowd wanted to enquire for itself and the manifestoes sold well that morning.

Since coming to Manchester we have, up to the time of writing, disposed of over 750 copies of THE STANDARD, 200 copies of the Manifesto, and 52 copies of "Handcraft to Capitalism" and more are on order for.

The Revolutionists.