Scarce Resources (2015)

Book Review from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir: Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough. Penguin £9.99

Scarcity is defined here as ‘having less than you feel you need’. This is applied not just to material goods and services but also to time-management and, less obviously, to dieting and loneliness. The basic idea is that scarcity can take over your mind, sometimes leading to a focus on an up-coming deadline that makes you more effective. But more often it can reduce our mental capacity, what the authors call our bandwidth, making it hard to take proper account of other matters. So if you are really busy, you may focus on urgent tasks, neglecting those that are important but not so urgent. And poverty may lead you to forget to take your medication.

The Socialist Standard is not a journal about how to deal with your to-do list or how to keep to a diet, so let’s focus on the book’s remarks on poverty. Mullainathan and Shafir argue that ‘the reason the poor borrow is poverty itself’. You might think that you don’t need the combined efforts of a Professor of Economics and a Professor of Psychology to tell you that, but in fact it is not quite as mundane as it appears. The point is that borrowing (often at high rates of interest) is not caused by predatory lenders, financial ineptitude or a common tendency to think about the immediate future rather than the long term. Poor farmers or market traders, in Africa or India for instance, borrow in order to tide them over periods when they have less income or bigger expenses, since they do not have enough financial slack to cope with shocks to their budget.

Various solutions are offered to these and other problems of scarcity. Give or lend people money at the right time to avoid problems with insufficient financial slack. Reduce the chance of people taking out ruinous payday loans by showing them the cost in dollars rather than in abstract interest rates. Or get employers to provide advances on wages.

But what is missing in all this is any real understanding of the causes of poverty. Mullainathan and Shafir note that half the children in the world live below the global poverty line, and that half the children in the United States will at some point be on food stamps. But they simply do not mention exploitation, the extent of inequality, the wealth of the super-rich or the feasibility of growing enough food for all. A proper study of scarcity requires rather more depth than is shown here. 

Paul Bennett

The Day Is Coming (1944)

Book Review from the November 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

The above is the title of a book by William Cameron (MacMillan, New York). It is the story of a craftsman who commenced work in the 'eighties. The story finishes just before the outbreak of the present war. The book is divided into three periods: the first is concerned with the establishment of the Arts and Crafts Guild in the East End of London; the second describes the transfer and establishment of the Guild in the beautiful little old town of Westencote in the Cotswold Hills, where it flourished for ten years and then collapsed, killed by commercial competition: the third period covers the privations of the craftsman and his family back in London, and the way he climbed up to comfort again.

It is the life of a man singularly fortunate in the beginning who, immersed in the early crafts revival and in an almost self-contained community, loses contact with the world until he reaches middle age. Then, on the dissolution of the craft community, he returns to face the pitiless world of capitalist competition and cheap production into which he has difficulty fitting. He sinks for a time into despair, passes through the horrors of a great war, loses his treasured possessions, loses his faith in the possibility of social change, and, finally, accepts and fits into a cheap and nasty world for the sake of economic security. As an escape from the things that he hates, he builds himself a dream world of his own which goes back to mediaeval times. Into this world he retires in his leisure moments, letting the world of reality go by and accepting all its evil manifestations with an "of course and of course." In his old age the ominous rumblings that herald the impending catastrophe of 1939 set him searching for a safe place to live in the country, and he goes back to Westencote. But the town has become almost unrecognisable. The motor car, the aeroplane and the jerrybuilder have swept away the beauty he used to enjoy. The reaction drives him to the bottle, and in a drunken dream on the hillside above the town he is revisited by William Morris and the old circle of craftsmen, who show him a vision of the hell to which civilisation is heading, reproach him for his supineness, and urge him to take up again the struggle for social change lest the people, and their capacity for beauty and happiness, sink to utter destruction. Waking, he makes the great decision that converts him to a man again. 

Reading this book brings back to the mind memories that crowd of times long since gone by. The vigorous and youthful 'nineties, the beginning of the new century with its hopes and promise. 1914 and the shattering of a world; the hansom cab, the motor car, and the aeroplane; dreams, enthusiasms, and the starkness of reality. The author has told his story well, and his vivid descriptions of the East End, its people and its ways are excellent. So also are the criticisms of society, social movements and social products which are threaded through the book—sometimes with gentleness, sometimes with savagery, and sometimes with cynicism. It is a pity that nearly all the characters he has chosen to make these criticisms are the less cultured working men, thus giving some support to a false idea of the intellectual capacity of workers, which will inspire in some readers a sympathetic and patronising pity.

We would like to have given some representative selections from the book, but our restricted space will not permit it. We will, however, give one extract from the first few pages as a specimen.

The story opens with an account of a meeting held by the Socialist League on a foggy November night in 1887 in the East End. A beer crate is set up in the market place in the midst of fish, whelk, tomato, cabbage and old clothes stalls, and the meeting is accompanied by drunken brawls and the stall-holders shouting their wares. William Morris is the speaker, and his audience consists of a few poverty-stricken and decrepit people of the neighbourhood. To these people Morris addresses burning words, of which the following is an extract:-

France is arming and Germany arming! The whole civilised world rumbles with the threat of war on the most monstrous scale of modern times! At this period of crisis, this is the message of the Socialist League to the working men of England: Turn a deaf ear to the recruiting sergeant! Refuse to be dressed up in red and taught to form a part of the modern killing-machine for the honour and glory of a country which gives you only a dog's share of many kicks and few halfpence!

There are many other meetings, lectures and conversations in which Morris and others of his group express in forthright language their condemnation of present society and their propaganda in favour of a new social order from which poverty and ugliness will be banished. A social order in which the things that are made will be useful and beautiful and the makers will work happily because they will find joy in their work. One of the main threads woven into the story is a hatred of ugly, scamped, and shoddy work.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain appears in a few places in the story, and there are quotations from our principles and our 1914 War Manifesto. We are sorry that its chosen representatives should belong to the less cultured group to which we have already referred. They drop their aitches, put them in where they don't belong, and express themselves in language that does not suggest great reading. This does not convey a correct impression. The early members of the Party were bent on building a higher form of society and made great efforts under difficult circumstances to acquire as much culture as they could in all directions because they wished to be worthy of a place in the society they intended to build. A few of those active in the early days were Watts (a carver), Fitzgerald (a bricklayer), Anderson (a house-painter), Elrick (a civil servant), Gray (a railway clerk), Jacomb (a compositor), Kent (a commercial traveller), and Lehane ( we forget what he was except a wild Irishman!). Some of these men were genuine craftsmen. They did not use the pronunciation of Oxford or Earls Court, but plain, accurate and forcible English, and their aspirates were in the right place!

A further criticism we would make concerns certain remarks that could have been left out without marring the pictures of a character or an event—in fact, in places the picture would have been strengthened without them. We will give an illustration of what we mean.

When the Westencote community collapsed and the craftsman realised a dream had vanished and he would have to go back to the old grind, he packed up and then went for a walk up the hill for a last look back at the little own.

"He was glad May wasn't with him—or the children. He wanted no one. He sank down on the grass, and peered down into the great valley below. At that moment, if the most beautiful woman in the world had been lying naked with him in that lonely spot, he might have thrust her aside as a nuisance.
"'Might,' he thought with a grin, as he saw once again the bodies of the girls and women with whom he had shared adventures since his marriage." (Page 328.)

Imagine a man who has just seen the bottom fall out of his world having thought to spare such a grin. Curse, foam at the mouth, shake his fists at the sky—yes, but a sly leer? We cannot imagine it.

Again, after the birth of the craftsman's child, another craftsman said to him, referring to the former's wife :—

"She's a good cow, Arthur; just like my ol' missis. . . . A woman, Arthur, ought to be a good, well-fed cow. If she ain't—why, then, she's udderly useless!" (Page 294.)

Does it sound credible that a member of the Socialist League would talk like this at a time when woman's position in society was a burning question? 

For some peculiar reason, modern novelists who aspire to "Leftishness" feel that they must indulge in his kind of thing. Perhaps they fear a charge of squeamishness, or they are staking a claim for popularity: When it was necessary to shock the reader there was some ground for it, but modern readers are past shocking. Fortunately, Cameron has not allowed much of this to creep in, but we wish he had kept it out of this type of book altogether, as it is a blemish here and brings the reader up with a nasty jerk.

We make these criticisms because the book was well worth doing, is well done, and is well worth reading. It is a vivid and authentic picture of a vital section of the life of the last fifty years. It should stand the ravages of time.

Gilmac.

Cooking the Books: Saving Greek Capitalism (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The new Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has been variously described as a Marxist tinged with Keynes or a Keynesian tinged with Marx. He certainly has a knowledge of Marx.

A blog item of his from 4 April 2012, entitled ‘On Keynes, Marx and the value of models at a time of Crisis’, showed that he recognises that Marx advanced a theory that capitalism could recover from any economic crisis because these eventually created the conditions for a recovery.

‘What Marx did was to take the model of capitalism that had the most kudos in his time (i.e. the theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo) and show that, by their own criteria, and under the force of their own assumptions, even the most efficient, most competitive, corruption-free capitalism would, unavoidably generate crises. To show this, Marx strove to demonstrate that, even if all profits were automatically saved, capitalism would periodically fall in deep holes of its own making.’

However, Varoufakis went on to claim:

‘There is something important missing in Marx’s analysis of crashes and crises. What? The possibility that, when the ‘faeces hits the fan’, and some monumental, as opposed to run-of-the-mill, Crash occurs (as it did in 1929 and then again in 2008), capitalists will simply fail to play the game that Marx said they will. What game is that? Of investing in capital goods, production, labour, every penny they have accumulated as a result of past and present profits.’

But Marx did not make this distinction between ‘run-of-the-mill’ and ‘monumental’ crises. It might take longer but capitalism could still recover from a Crash with a capital C. Capitalism could always get out of the holes it periodically dug for itself -- and will until its gravediggers come along to bury it.

According to Yaroufakis, Keynes

‘instinctively understood something important about capitalism that Marx did not allow himself to dwell upon: that when capitalism digs a hole and then falls into it, it is perfectly capable of failing to climb out again. You see, the difference between Keynes and Marx was that Keynes believed in capitalism; he thought of it a little like Churchill thought of democracy (a terrible form of government but the best of all available alternatives). In fact, Keynes was eager to save capitalism from itself; to identify faults in its functioning and fix them so as to prevent crises from turning into implosions with the capacity to undermine its long term future. Marx, on the other hand, had an agenda for transcending capitalism (socialism, he called the ‘next’, more developed, phase)’.

Because he doesn’t think that the economic and political conditions during a big crisis are good for a socialist transformation of society, he argues that Keynes’s policy recipes should be tried to save capitalism from collapse so as to buy time for more favourable conditions for a changeover to socialism to emerge.

This won’t work. Surprisingly, Yaroufakis himself admitted this when he wrote in the same blog:

‘Marx was right: capitalism cannot be civilised by means of some benevolent government that applies the right dosage of fiscal and monetary policy at the right time.’

Another economics professor, who is advising the Syriza government, even understands what socialism involves:

‘The transition from capitalism to communism is necessarily related to the abolition of value form, i.e. money and commodity, and the form of enterprise’ (John Milios, The Critique of Political Economy as a Critique of the Left, Thesseis #101, 2007).

It’s not going to make any difference, though. The Syriza government won’t be able to civilise capitalism even if saves Greek capitalism.

Action Replay: Dulwich Hamlet F. C. and Ultras (2015)

The Action Replay Column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dulwich Hamlet F. C. are a non-league football team who play less than twenty minutes away from the head office of the Socialist Party in South London.

Vice magazine described them thus: ‘London's Left-Wing Utopian Non-League Ultras Are Reclaiming Football’ in the rather sensationalist title of their article (January 5). Ultras are football fans known for fanatical support and devotion to their club, primarily existing in Italian football. Ultras may use smoke flares, banners, wave flags, get involved in fanzines or instigate chants and songs at matches.

Like most, if not all, non-league clubs – at Dulwich, ticket prices are much more affordable than Premier League clubs. The fans at Dulwich call themselves the Rabble and, although the club has played since 1893, more recently some of the fans have been involved in creating a particular culture around the club.

Although the club is currently owned by a private company, the Hadley Property Group, a group of keen fans called ‘Dulwich Hamlet Supporters Trust’ seeks full or partial supporter/ community ownership of the club. The club culture commits to combating the prevalent homophobia in football, and the club’s players wore rainbow laces to this effect (the first non-league club to do so). The fans even publish their own website (dulwichhamlet.org), regular podcast ‘Forward the Hamlet’ and fanzine ‘The Moral Victory’ edited by Louis Daly.

A smaller group of fans, distinct from the Rabble, call themselves ‘the Comfast chapter’. The Comfast chapter, as with non-league Clapton F. C. ultras in North London, are more akin to famously left-wing ultras following F. C. St. Pauli in Germany. The Comfast chapter have slogans such as ‘Communism is inevitable’. Robert Molloy-Vaughan who runs Comfast was involved in a podcast called ‘This is Deep Play’ which was against commercialisation of football but described this as ‘For Future Football’ as opposed to the more negative ‘Against Modern Football’ slogan. However, Molloy-Vaughan does also write ‘football is actually a deeply flawed way of expressing yourself politically… [its] oppositional nature means you have guaranteed swathes ready to disagree with you no matter what you say, for tribal reasons.’

DJW

The capitalist state (1999)

From the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The state is based on minority rule. It was set up and exists in opposition to the majority and so can never be truly democratic.

The current state is owned and run by the kleptocratic class of capitalists, a tiny proportion of the population. Thus their state is predicated upon an opposition between the desire of the masses and the will of their clique. Their state is set up against the majority, because they can never be a majority. Their ideas, thinking, and tactics, are all those of a tiny minority. Could you ever imagine a counter-demonstration by capitalists: men in sharp pin-stripe suits converging on Trafalgar Square, chanting through loud-hailers "They say fight back, we say cut back! Tax the poor and make them pay!" It would never happen. It is not, and cannot ever be their way of making politics.

One of the ways in which the capitalists have managed to control the vast network of offices and bureaucracies that is the modern state has been through ensuring that most of the jobs are not up for democratic election. This has been managed through the power of appointment, and through the Public Appointments Unit (formerly Bureau), which was in fact secret until 1975. Before then, it had vetted and selected those "eligible" to serve as appointees of the state. This effectively meant that office-holders could be moulded to suit the requirements of the state and its masters. Cold War ideology strengthened this selection process, through using the threat of enemy "agents" as an internal control device (just as, on the other side, Stalin used "petit-bourgeois" and "Trotskyite" "traitors".) 

Unelected appointees

Nowadays, as a result of the Nolan Committee, the Public Appointments Unit publishes lists of appointees and selected details about them. A quick glance at the statistics suffices to show the scale of the operation. The Department of Social Security has 3,689 appointees listed by the PAU, the Department of Trade and Industry has 632, all of them placed upon committees or planning groups with significant powers over many people. Whether the appointments are paid or unpaid, they still carry a deal of responsibility, power and status with them, such that many wish to find themselves in such positions; thus not only can a government select the people that run the country. They can use this capacity to buy servility and toadying from such as want those posts.

The ultimate expression of this power of patronage and status, is the entire honours system, with the House of Lords at its apex, as was recently pointed out by those few MPs in parliament with a genuine commitment to democracy, when they proposed an Amendment to the Lord's Bill to have an elected second chamber. This debate is sure to show the real intents of the vast majority of power-seekers, when they vote to allow the government to retain the power of patronage to appoint people to the Lords. Tony Blair has already shown his zeal in using such powers of patronage, elevating Simon and Sainsbury so that he could have them in his government, and employing Lord Jenkins to conduct the commission into Proportional Representation. The existence of a non-elected second chamber means that only a minority of Parliament are elected; the ending of hereditary peerage appears to be more about ensuring that future governments can exercise power and patronage over the second chamber, rather than any genuine concern for democracy.

The way in which power is exercised through the executive's patronage, rather than through the democratic control of either parliament or the electorate, was brought out in an article in a recent issue of Private Eye (22 January), entitled "Return of the Whigs—or How the SDP (defunct) and Lib Dems (17 percent of the vote) got into Government". It featured a diagram, showing the relationships between several past and present members of the Lib Dems/SDP, (including Lord Jenkins) and how they all had privileged access to Whitehall, via Peter Mandelson, and a particularly powerful lobbying firm. This illustrates the direction of "the Blair Project", of using his Prime Minister's power of patronage to elevate people of like political opinions into positions of power, and side-line his reliance upon the elected party in Parliament. This tendency alone keeps power concentrated into the hands of a tiny few.

Elite selection

The campaigning leftwing journalist John Pilger has written about another feature of undemocratic practice in the existing state in his New Statesman column (16 October, 13 November, 27 November, 8 January). He discussed "The Successor Generation", a social networking group established by (among others) Rupert Murdoch, Sir James Goldsmith, Howard J. Pew (a right wing oil millionaire) and the Institute for Policy Research (founded by William Casey, a former head of the CIA). The aim of the group being (according to Ronald Reagan who presided over the 1983 launch at the Oval Office) "to have [Britain and America] work together on defence and security issues". Its foundation was due to the rising distrust of NATO in Britain among Labourite members, and its aim was to include the up and coming stars, the leaders of the future, among its "alumni".

Five members of Blair's original cabinet were alumni of the Successor Generation: George Robertson (now Defence Secretary, toadyingly supporting the Atlanticist line on attacks in Iraq and anywhere else that displeases America); Mo Mowlam (Northern Ireland Secretary, and Blair's Campaign manager for the Labour leadership contest); Peter Mandelson (formerly Blair's right hand man, and Minister for everything); Baroness Symons (Foreign Office Minister, up to her neck in the Sandline affair); Chris Smith (Culture Secretary) together with Jonathon Powell (Blair's Chief of Staff). All of these now powerful people were wined and dined by the Successor Generation, and made contacts there. It is not just politicians that are alumni, a number of BBC journalists, including Newsnight's Evan Davis, attend Successor Generation functions.

To highlight the Successor Generation is not to cry conspiracy theory, or allege corruption. Indeed, those that attend scoff at any idea that they may be being influenced by these little soirées. The point is, however, that it provides a framework, deliberately constructed, so that people who are going to be "the leaders of the future" (a highly undemocratic concept from the start) can network, form bonds and an identity, and get to know each other on a personal level, be friends. Evan Davies, to reject that any notion it is a sinister organisation, pointed out that British Airways back it and that this was a "respectable company". This is precisely the mind-set the organisation wishes to promote: that this is all just the harmless socialising provided by the rich and powerful, whose intent is benign. What once was accomplished solely through Eton and Oxbridge and other institutions of class privilege now has to be remade through private funding of millionaires—elite creation.

The involvement of William Casey with the Successor Generation hints at another form of elite control in the capitalist state, the secret agencies. The CIA currently has a budget of some $28 billion, a small fraction of which was able to be diverted to help the Successor Generation and like organisations in US client states. Likewise, the British secret services have long been a means of watching and controlling the political scene. MI5 agents have been implicated in the funding of fascist groups and Loyalist terrorists. Being secret, beyond accountability, and being powerful, they can form a state within a state, to unsubtly correct things when the usual systems of power run out of the elite's control.

Will of the majority

All of this goes to show how desperately the kleptocratic masters in this country try to keep mass involvement and democracy out, so that only the fig-leaf of parliamentary democracy exists to cover it over and give the state a semblance of democracy. It has been thus ever since the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688, and the institution of the Bank of England and the National Debt, which combined to exercise control over the state (a role now performed by the IMF). Where once in a feudal state the warrior class kept power through warlike duties, the capitalist class exercises power in their state through ownership of money. The working class, likewise, must exercise its power through its sole asset—its work, and its collectivity. The tiny elite collectively own the state through money, the working class must take control of the state through democracy.

The form of the capitalist state is inherently predicated upon minority rule, and to re-create such a state as part of the workers' revolution would be to re-create minority rule. The one-man rule and dictatorship of the Soviet Union was not what Marx understood by the phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat". For him this simply meant the dominance of the working class, the unequivocal, absoluteness of telling the capitalists "NO! that is no longer your factory!", "NO! Your money is now worthless!", an action that must be carried out by the will of the vast majority.

Since workers are only workers by dint of their positioned opposition to capital, and the masses only masses by dint of their opposition to an elite, the instant the working class performs that revolution, abolishes the minority state, abolishes capital, it abolishes itself as a class, and all classes along with it. Creating a new state upon the same lines as the capitalist state would only result in re-creating a ruling elite; which is precisely what happened in Russia. The working class is the agent of socialism not because of some objective superiority, or because of economic power, but because it is the class that undoes class—the negation of class and so of the state.

In a socialist world the whole population would be the state—so the state as such would cease to exist, replaced with the free, co-operative, democratic association of human beings. Hence the battle cry of socialists is "to convert the ballot box from a means of fraud into a means of liberation", and not to perpetuate the fraud of the democratic state in the name of a so-called "workers' state" ruling over the real individual lives of real members of the working class.

Pik Smeet

Marx's Basic Theory (1998)

From the February 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx and Friederich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago. In this article we look at the basic theoretical position that Marx developed.

Any analysis of society and its problems must, according to Marx, start in an examination of its processes of production. All human societies have to be concerned, before anything else, with the production and distribution of the means of life. By using tools and instruments to effect changes in nature, humans are able to satisfy their material and other needs through productive labour. It is this activity which Marx saw as being at the base of all societies.

Before humans can do almost anything at all they must satisfy certain basic needs, they must feed, clothe and house themselves. Production is "the first premise of all human existence . . . men must be in a position to live in order to be able to 'make history'" (The German Ideology).This approach, called by Marx and Engels the Materialist Conception of History or historical materialism, was for Marx, as he put it in his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the "guiding thread" in his political studies.

Because humans produce their own means of life the means available to them to do so determines their level of existence. These are what Marx called the "productive forces" of society. The productive forces consist of means of production, and labour power. Means of production include tools, machinery, premises and infrastructure ("the means of labour"-what humans work with) and raw material ("the objects of labour"-what humans work on). Labour power (which enables them to work with means of production) includes strength, skill, knowledge and inventiveness.

It is the level of development of productive forces, and the way in which society organises their operation, which marks out the different stages of human development. It is "the multitude of productive forces accessible to men" which, Marx says, "determines the nature of society" (The German Ideology).

Marx took for granted that human beings are inventive and are continually improving the productive forces, and will not voluntarily give up advantages gained in the field of productive activity. This is the evidence of history. Productive advance is independent of the social form production takes. It is improvements in technology, improvements in the ability of human beings to win a living from nature, which cumulatively result in major changes in society. As an analogy we may take the invention of gunpowder making the reorganisation of armies necessary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Marx had discovered that throughout history changes in the productive forces of society had made it necessary to radically change the organisation of human society. As a result of changes in the productive forces the economic structure of society (the "relations of production") had to change to accommodate the new situation. Because they were standing in the way of further development the old production relations had to make way for new ones.

Production relations

Production relations are of two kinds. Firstly there are those pertaining to ownership by persons, either individually or collectively, of productive forces. These regulate and control access to, and use of, the means of production. Secondly, relationships that structure the labour process but which are not that process. These depend on which type of ownership relations dominate a given society. In turn they regulate and control what is produced and when, in what quantities, and for what purpose. The economic structure of feudal society, for example, had to be changed because it had developed within it means of production that were being hampered from further development by the way that that society produced and exchanged wealth. The feudal relations of property "became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder" (Communist Manifesto). It was at this point that feudalism gave way to capitalism.

Marx believed capitalism had reached a similar stage in its expansion of the productive forces. They could not be further developed without plunging world society into periodic crises of overproduction. "The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them" (Communist Manifesto). The production relations of capitalism had to be replaced by new production relations, namely common ownership of the productive forces-communism (or socialism). Private ownership (that is property in the means of production) which still regulates and controls access to, and use of, the means of production has become "a fetter". They are operated in the interest of profit-making only, and not simply to satisfy human needs. In terms of technological knowledge the means to produce abundance now exists. Capitalism has solved the problem of production, but it cannot solve the problem of distribution. More and more can be produced with less and less labour. There is a "monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product". As has happened in the past social relations must change to accommodate expanding productive capability.

This was the conclusion reached by Marx and outlined in a passage in the Preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859. It explained his views on the development of human society:

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general.

It appears from this passage that historical materialism is deterministic in at least the following senses:

1. Human beings cannot develop apart from society, and as material production is social they enter into social relations that are "given" by society.

2. That the society in which people live is the outcome of historical development and is by implication changeable.

3. The economic structure of society depends on the stage to which the productive forces have developed, and by implication cannot be changed by individual acts of will that ignore or try to circumvent these stages.

4. That the ideas of society are "conditioned" by the mode of production.

5. That changes in the economic structure that is the base (the "real foundation") of society give rise to changes in the "superstructure" and to changed ideas about how society should be structured.

From capitalism to socialism

Marx's analysis revealed that developments in the productive forces of society are working in favour of change. Marx showed that capitalism had outlived its social usefulness. It had fulfilled its historic role-that of developing the productive forces to such a point that it was both feasible and desirable to end class society and exploitation. It had compelled "all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production . . . to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image" (Communist Manifesto). Capitalism itself was producing the conditions for its own destruction by implementing changes that constantly increase productive capacities on a world scale. But it is unable to cope rationally with the productive resources of the planet and is constantly lurching from crisis to crisis. In other words the "material productive forces of society [are] in conflict with the existing relations of production" (Preface to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy).

Marx's analysis shows that the socialist revolution must be world-wide and cannot be achieved in one country alone. Because capitalism has become a world-wide system the society to replace it must also be world-wide. Class emancipation must mean the "freeing of the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggle . . ." (Engels's Preface to 1883 German edition of Communist Manifesto). Capitalism has made abundance a possibility, and made workable the "Communistic abolition of buying and selling . . . the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised" (Communist Manifesto). As we in the Socialist Party predicted at the time of the Bolshevik insurrection it was not possible to have a socialist revolution in those countries in which capitalism had not yet fully developed and then to wait for the rest of the world to join in. The Bolsheviks had no possibility of introducing socialism. There is no "short cut" that can be implemented by a minority "vanguard" on behalf of the working class.

The change from capitalism to socialism requires the deliberate actions of men and women-it is not an automatic or mechanistic process. The task must be carried out democratically by those whose interests are most involved and who have the most to gain: that is, the working class. Changes to the economic structure of society have to be brought about through action on the political field. The owners of the means of production must be dispossessed by those who must first " . . . win the battle of democracy" (Communist Manifesto).

Before it is possible to have socialism a majority of the working class must understand what needs to be done. To be successful the socialist movement must be "the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority" (Communist Manifesto). In addition to the struggle over wages and conditions at work, the working class has to contest with the owners of the means of production on the political field in order to change the economic structure. It must "thoroughly comprehend the historical conditions and thus the very nature of this act . . . and the meaning of the momentous act it is called upon to accomplish" (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).

Marx's "guiding thread" had led him through his studies to the conclusion that capitalism had brought into being a class that would be able to free itself from exploitation without having to rely on leaders to do it for them. "We cannot therefore co-operate", said Marx, in a criticism of Leninism before its time "with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above" (Letters to Bebel, Liebknecht and others, September 1879).

Gwynn Thomas

Socialism: Keeping it in the Human Family (2015)

From the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The most common rebuttal of socialist society is that it is impossible to achieve because ‘you can't change human nature.’ Some people think that socialism sounds great but will never work in practice. They say it would only work in a world with perfect people. However, not only has ‘human nature’ changed many times in the past but there is no such thing as a static human nature. We are products of our environment, particularly of the wealth-producing system in which we live. People living under feudalism are motivated by feudal motives and think them natural and fixed, just as people living under capitalism are motivated by capitalist motives and mistakenly think those natural and fixed.

Many people fall back on this human nature argument. Unfortunately for them, the argument supports our position. Human beings lived for 200,000 years communally, and as recently as the 19th century in North America, Native Americans lived that way. They shared pretty much everything. It’s natural for us to do so. It’s natural for us to work together for the betterment of the family, the neighbourhood, the tribe, cooperatively. We evolved in that way, knowing we needed each other to survive and then building from there. The vast majority of us do not want to rule over others. We want to get along and live in harmony and cooperate with our fellows.

The monetary system doesn’t work. Money has outlived its role. Every human transaction is tainted by the influence of money. We are shackled to it, deprived of our liberty. It is not money we really need. We cannot eat money, or build houses with it. The money, private property and the exchange economy is just a hindrance. Socialism envisages a worldwide social system where the resources are considered the heritage of all the inhabitants of this planet. It’s not a utopian dream, it’s just a possible direction for society to take. It is the next step in the evolution and development of society, if we want it to be. Money and barter were required in times of scarcity. Today we live in abundance. There is enough on this globe (despite what the nay-sayers claim) for all to thrive – and what’s more – sustainably. We now have the knowledge and technology to provide easily for all human need. There is no shortage of land, food, building materials or the capacity to produce the things we need. There is plenty for all, for the benefit of all.

Socialism is feasible. We all know this first hand. A family operates as a form of socialism. From each of us come goods and services according to our abilities. To each of us, those goods and services are provided according to need. One or both parents go to work and provide the wherewithal to keep house. The children do not do outside work yet eat well every day. Everybody shares the domestic chores the best they can, everyone pitches in, does their bit. Parents bring home food and share it out equally. They strive to make sure each child is given his or her equal share of clothing, gifts for their birthdays and Christmas. Family members look after one another, taking care of each other when sick, and caring for frail elderly grandparents. The system works. Families also help out other families by simply being good neighbours. When we invite friends over, we share the meal, offering the guest first pick, the most generous portions, the choicest cuts and we don’t charge prices for it. Nor do we ration our advice and wisdom according to who can afford it. At work, throughout the day, we work cooperatively with our co-workers. We give of ourselves, our knowledge, sharing our skills, without asking for money in return, expecting nothing more than a ‘thank you’. So why don't we apply these rules to society at large? In fact, in various forms we have. Free access to health care for all via the NHS. Free primary and secondary school education. Free access to parks and. This is natural for the vast majority of us.

If you still need to be convinced and want to see an example of socialism in action, simply visit your local public library. Anyone can use the public library for free. Anyone can go to the library, browse its books, use their computers, check out its CDs, all for free. It is a community resource of many dimensions. The library is somewhere to go when there’s nowhere else to go. Marx had nothing against public libraries, having sat in the reading room of the British Library doing his research. Even an avowed capitalist such as Andrew Carnegie couldn’t deny the social benefit of libraries and used his philanthropy to build them. Use of the public library is not means-tested. No one is making a profit.  It provides a social good that cannot be measured in pounds and pence. The same model can be applied to every aspect of society. The library shows people on a daily basis that there is another way to do things besides relying on the private-owned for-profit capitalist market. Libraries are a model that must scare those powerful men and women who cannot abide the idea of a common public good not built on a profit model. Libraries are highly subversive. Perhaps that is why they are endeavouring to shut as many as possible down and a reason why we should resist these closures.

In the world socialist ‘family’ we will still have planning, a list of ‘household chores’ requiring to be done to achieve social justice and prevent ecological catastrophe. But it doesn’t have to be centrally planned by Big Brother. We do this locally, primarily. Local control, with integration into larger areas; neighbourhoods, towns, districts, regions and the world as a whole. As we get further away from the local, the planning becomes more and more generalised, with specifics left up to local economies. Within the plan, or more accurately, the plethora of linked plans basic questions are asked and answered. How can we grow the widest range of crops in a sustainable fashion? How can we have the widest range of foods in a sustainable fashion? How can we do all of this and treat animals in a humane, compassionate manner? How to make sure our water supply is always safe and clean? Does the product serve the social good? Is the product environmentally safe? Is it safe for individuals, for the young, the elderly? Is it sustainable? Does it work and play well with others, with other locales, different regions, and the planet as a whole? Do we actually need it? Broad guidelines create the umbrella, the boundaries, the general goals and pathways and all localities are represented in all other bounded areas. Localities are then free to implement the specifics according to what works for them, as long as these also fit in holistically with the rest of the communities. One family pulling together. And that one family owns the means of production. As in, all of us, together.

ALJO

So Near and Yet So Far. (1913)

From the December 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Saturday, November 29th, Capt. G. V. W. Lushington took Winston Churchill up in an aeroplane: on the following Wednesday he was killed. The accident might have happened at a much more opportune moment.

Greasy Pole: Fables And Fabians (2015)

The Greasy Pole Column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not much longer now. One of the priorities of the Coalition government was to legislate to introduce fixed term five year parliaments so that the next election would be in May this year. At the time the discussion was about the need for some stability in government to ensure that any presented remedies for the recession would be able to run their course until the country emerged into blissful prosperity. There were of course other reasons – for example to discourage any prospective dissident Lib Dems from causing trouble when their seat on the Front Bench, with its treasured place at the upper reaches of the Greasy Pole and the right to pontificate on the chaotic futility of the efforts to control the vagaries of British capitalism, no longer depended on a particular government being in power.

Miliband

It has not turned out to be like that and the prospects now are for a ‘balanced’ House of Commons where political leaders are under pressure to reveal their present plans to establish a benignly humane society for us to flourish in. Capitalism continues on its vandalistic way while we are subjected to a series of insidious evasions by the party leaders. Ed Miliband, becoming more desperate each day to ward off those in his party who are haplessly impressed by the images recorded by sneak photo sleuths which expose his problems with eating a sandwich or dropping a coin or two to a street beggar, has been spouting the usual style of re-assurances on issues such as British capitalism's financial crisis, immigration and the like. Labour's back room strategists have worked hard to establish the delusion that these matters should be of serious concern to the voters. Which means that Miliband must pose as a leader who has the power and talent to deal with them.

National Health

And then, of similar anxiety, there is the National Health Service which is daily revealed as inadequate for anyone who is unable to afford treatment in some lavishly costly clinic. Miliband has seen the reports of problems in Accident and Emergency departments and on the wards and in GP surgeries. So he has promised that a Labour government will flood the service with doctors and nurses and GPs all of which, he says, will be driven by '...care, compassion and co-operation, not competition, fragmentation and privatisation'. Such alliteration may disguise the fact that a former Labour government began restricting the NHS on the grounds that it was being misused by hordes of hypochondriac cheats. On similarly shaky ground is David Cameron who has been promoting the false notion that the level of tax should be of concern to those who depend for their living on selling their labour power for a wage. There is, he assures us, an '...economic, moral and practical case' for lower taxes which a Tory government will be sure to apply, because '...it is people's money not government's money and we should leave them with as much to spend as we can rather than frittering it away on wasteful government projects'. But, like Miliband, Cameron is ignoring a vital reality; his government has worked devotedly to hold down 'peoples' money' as wages and to dis-empower any organisation such as a trade union which resists that policy.

Fabian Opinion

Emerging from the background, the Fabian Society recently offered a paper – In It Together – designed to provide some constructive advice to the Labour leadership: 'A Labour government is going to need all the help it can get to achieve its social mission and so needs business as an ally, not an enemy. Rather than seeing markets as needing regulation to prevent them being socially destructive, the left needs a greater focus on how they can be helped to create social good . . . What matters most is for Labour to engage business in a dialogue and then 'co-produce' a set of solutions that can achieve its vision of a more responsible capitalism . . . (but) Simply put, business doesn't trust Labour.’ This argument, apart from anything else, does not fit in with the behaviour of the last Labour government under Tony Blair (who has since shown us how advantageous a 'dialogue' with 'business' can be) and its attacks on our standards of survival as a discipline favoured by ex-ministers like Alan Milburn – now approved by the Fabians as one of the 'New Labour ultras'. In opposition to this, the Guardian on 5 February listed some of the more powerful chiefs in industry who support the return of a Labour government. Like Lord Allen of Global Radio; Graham Cole of the helicopter firm Agusta Westland; Lord Noon the 'leafy meal' millionaire; Martin Littler of Inclusive Technology.

Socialist Candidates

The Fabian Society was formed in January 1884, named after the Roman general Fabius Maximus – 'The Delayer'. It has been associated with a variety of objectives, from its earliest pamphlet which urged '. . .you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently . . . but when the time comes you must strike hard' to the present when its stated aims are rather less military: 'To promote greater equality of power, wealth and opportunities, the value of collective action and public service.' Its reformist objectives have included a national minimum wage, health service and education system, a welfare state. Among its members have been Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson, Tony Benn – and er – Tony Blair who saw Fabians as '...often born relatively wealthy but who were indignant about inequality...They were like the Georges Duhamel character who says “I love humanity; it's just human beings I can't stand”'.

During the coming weeks we shall be subjected to a barrage of propaganda from the parties contesting the general election. We shall hear promises which will never be kept. Excuses for those given in the past which are now forgotten. Already there has been a contribution to this from the Fabian Society – an organisation claiming to be above such campaigning. We will have witnessed it all before, and been angry and frustrated before. The vital exception to this will be the ten candidates of the Socialist Party who will make no promises or attempts to re-write history. Their campaign will be on the single issue of the need to replace the inhuman system of capitalism with a world of freedom.

Ivan

What To Do With Your Vote. (1929)

From the April 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a few short weeks you will again be invited to attend at various schoolrooms and public buildings labelled: "Polling Booth," and there inscribe against the name of some individual or other a little cross. Quite a simple little process, and one which, in our dull world, becomes every now and then invested with an air of excitement and festivity. Some of you will be voting for the first time in your lives, most will have voted at several previous elections. The great majority will feel that the occasion is such a rare one, and the excitement so general, they must, if only from a sense of duty, affix their little cross upon the ballot paper. There will be no lack of advisers. The hoardings will groan beneath ten-feet posters calling your attention to the enormous achievements of the party whose power is expiring, and, in contrast, to the millennium about to dawn if you vote for the other side this time. Each side—so called—will call your attention to the shocking lies now being disseminated by the other. Each will tell you that a vote for the other is a vote for catastrophe. Little windows in shabby streets will break out in a rash of cards, begging the passer-by to "Vote for Spoofem," or some other. Halls and schoolrooms will be hired, street corners and market places annexed, whereat hoarse and fervent orators will pour forth tales of their opponents' rascality and the stained-glass, saintly purity of themselves. The newspapers and the Press generally will join in the national fever, and if report be true, the ether will be exploited by means of the radio. Leather-lunged loud-speakers are to squawk their message from touring vans, and altogether we are in for a hell of a time.

In the face of all this racket and excitement, to ask you to make no use of your vote seems rather feeble, doesn't it? In point of fact, we do not ASK you to do anything. When you try and quietly figure it all out, the feebleness lies in a rather different direction.

In the first place, why all this pother, why this hectic atmosphere, why these repeated emphatic appeals for your vote? Very briefly, it is because they want to GOVERN you. There is a tremendous emphasis on that word "govern." Familiarity has dulled appreciation of its essential meaning to most people, but it is worth pausing just there, and saying the word "govern" over and over again to yourself until it takes on a little flavour if strangeness, and you try and realise what government means. Time was when people were not asked to vote for government. They got it, hard and heavy, and they knew it. And when it hurt too much, rebellion was born, and riot, insurrection and discontent. Now, after generations of struggle, you have gained the right of being asked whom you wish to govern you. But notice, in particular, you are still to be governed. Even the Labour Party promises you a Labour Government. Now, if you still retain enough of the flavour of strangeness about that common word, government, you should ask yourself, "Who are the governors, pray, and who are the governed?" and "Why Government at all?" A critical survey of the world around you should supply you with the answer. The governors are the rich, those who hold the keys to our means of life. The governed are the poor, those who have to hire themselves for wages to the rich and powerful. The rich govern the poor, that is, they keep you in order and stamp upon any sign of revolt or discontent, and by long experience they have found that the way of retaining their power to govern you is by getting your assent to its continuance. So they arrange themselves into two or three groups, whose opinions differ upon trifling administrative details, and represent themselves to you as dire and bitter antagonists and ask you to choose or the other for master. Now, in theory, this is a dangerous proceeding, for you might see through the trick and say "A plague on all your houses." In practice, it has worked out very satisfactorily for the rich, for as they own the Press, the Pulpit, the Schools, the Broadcasting service, and your means of livelihood, any alternative opinion is heavily handicapped. But in spite of all, no monopoly can be complete, or eternal. The little sheet you are now reading is a proof of that.

The system in which a small rich class own the means whereby all live, and a large class have to hire themselves for wages in order to live, is called Capitalism. It is the system in which we are living to-day. The Socialist Party of Great Britain suggests as an alternative that the means of living should be taken away from the small parasitic class at present owning them, and commonly owned and administered by the whole people. That alternative is called Socialism. You will be asked some day to vote for the one or the other. That question will not be asked of you at the next General Election. What you will be asked is: "Do you still want to be governed; do you still believe in Capitalism? If you do, it will not matter to Capitalism whether you put your little cross against the Conservative, the Liberal, or the Labour candidate. They will have secured your voluntary assent to the continuance of Capitalism, and your willing acceptance of the fact of being governed. That is all that matters to them. If, where a Socialist candidate is not running, you write the word "Socialism" across your ballot paper, your vote is spoiled. True, but at any rate you have not signified that you are a willing supporter of Capitalism. The best thing, of course, is to join the Socialist Party and see that at the next General Election there is no need to spoil any ballot paper.

W. T. Hopley 

Cooking the Books: This ‘Anti-business’ Business (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the March 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s quite amusing really. The Labour Party has long since given up any opposition to capitalism and its profit-making and merely offers itself as an alternative manager of the capitalist state and economy in Britain.

Yet some capitalists and their mouthpieces in the media don’t believe them – or feign not to – and accuse Labour of being ‘anti-business’. Labour politicians protest. And grovel, the worst example to date being the historian Tristram Hunt, their spokesperson on education, who wrote a rather disparaging biography of Engels. Under the headline ‘We’re furiously pro-business, Labour MP tells private sector’, the Times (9 February) reported him as saying.

‘I’m enormously enthusiastic about businessmen and women making money, delivering shareholder return, about making profit’ (Times, 9 January).

There is a certain logic in this position. If you accept capitalism and that productive activity under it is driven by the need for firms to make a profit, then you have to accept that they should, and not do anything that might discourage or endanger this. Otherwise you will provoke an economic downturn.

Writing on this issue in the Times (5 February) their financial editor, Patrick Hosking, claimed:

‘It has taken decades to establish an enterprise culture in Britain. There are now only small pockets in Britain that refuse to acknowledge that profits are a good thing.’

This may well be the case since most people, unfortunately, think there is no practicable alternative to capitalism and understand that if you have capitalism you have to have profits, otherwise the system won’t work. The opposite is true as well of course. If you are against profits you should be against capitalism. Not like some reformists who shout ‘tax the rich and their profits’ and then expect the capitalist system to function normally.

Not that anything Labour is saying or proposing to do is anti-business or anti-profit. Miliband might have been unable to disguise his boredom when meeting capitalists but the most Labour has done is to criticise and say that they will put a stop to the practices that some capitalists and capitalist firms have engaged in to boost their profits such as tax-dodging, customer-cheating, supplier-bullying and market-rigging. This is to go no further than Ted Heath, when as Tory Prime Minister in 1973 he labelled one action of the businessman Tiny Rowland as the ‘unacceptable face of capitalism’.

Which of course is not a criticism of capitalism as such but merely of the way some capitalists behave, a criticism that can be shared by other capitalists such as that of tax-dodging capitalist firms by other firms which don’t have the chance to do this and so have to pay more tax. Though Hunt, with his enthusiasm for profits not just as the driving force of the capitalist economy but also as ‘delivering shareholder return,’ can’t logically complain about this because the various sharp practices that capitalist firms engage in do increase ‘shareholder return’, at least in the short run,  and are engaged in precisely to do this.

That the Labour Party is in any way anti-capitalist, anti-business or anti-profit is a joke as the capitalists who are raising this spectre must know full well.  Labour has thoroughly absorbed enterprise culture.

Focus on Anti-Semitism (1959)

Book Review from the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Focus, by Arthur Miller (Ace Books, 2s. 6d.), is that brilliant playwright's first and only essay in the novel form. As with all his work, it is an impassioned tirade against a social evil—in this case, race prejudice.

Although the novel is ostensibly concerned with anti-semitism, the moral is clearly intended to apply to all forms of racial intolerance, as where the victim of anti-semitic bullying refuses to help a Puerto Rican woman who screams for help in the night. "She could take care of herself because she was used to this sort of treatment Puerto Ricans were, he knew."

Its principal character is Lawrence Newman, a less-than-ordinary middle-aged American who looks like a Jew, though he isn't one, and is ill-treated for it. Weak, conventional and wife-ridden, he has, however, a tiny spark of dignity and character; the story is of the development of this spark.

It leads from Newman's own persecution, to his talks with the victimized Jewish shopkeeper, down to the time when he finds himself side by side with Jews, fighting off thugs who are intent on beating them up. At this moment he throws off his fears and prejudices; he is able to ignore his wife's pleas to knuckle under, and at least to recognise his kinship with his fellow humans, Jew and gentile, black and white.

The story is told in a compelling and convincing manner, and although one feels the burning indignation of the Jew writing about the wrongs suffered by Jewry, the style never lapses into crudity, over-statement, or tub-thumping. The reader, too, feels indignation building up within him as Newman is subjected to one cruel indignity after another.

If this is an accurate picture of anti-semitism in American, and there is no reason to doubt that it is, then we have a long way to go before society finally eradicates the festering sores of race-hatred, along with its other problems.

Miller vividly portrays the poverty of thought and lack of understanding of those who would blame their poverty and drab lives on a racial minority, and seek to defend their "way of life" by anti-social acts. He clearly indicates that it is not they who are to blame, but rather the nature of the society which throws up these antagonisms and produces the racketeers and demagogues who foster race hatred to serve their own ends. This is not to say that Miller appreciates the revolutionary nature of the social change required to solve this problem, along with all other social problems.

Nevertheless, it is refreshing to find, among the flood of paper-backed detective stories, travelogues and war adventures, a book of this kind which deals in a serious way with a serious problem, and at the same time provides an absorbing story of real people in a situation which we can recognise as being true.

Albert Ivimey

Let Us End It. (1917)

From the August 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

As I write we enter the fourth year of the war. Arm-chair warriors of every nationality, who support the rigors of the struggle with such remarkable courage and endurance, are exchanging greetings and reaffirming their will and determination to stick it as long as they can find men to fight for them - or women for that matter when the supply of men no longer meets the military needs. Politicians are made and broken in the service of Mars; millions are piled on millions in the tale of the cost of it in treasure; the country bristles with hospitals crowded and overcrowded with the poor wreckage that testifies to the cost of it in blood and suffering; no family in the land is there but sorrows for cruel losses, and goes about its daily business in the gloom of catastrophies to come, but the war drags on.

With each succeeding season the strife is waged on a lower plane. One after another more brutal methods of slaughter are adopted, by both sides alike. One by one the scruples which have survived all other wars between civilised peoples are found to be impediments, and are abandoned. The British "gas" which was not going to be of a poisonous nature, is now found to accomplish awful things, and not the "huns" only go into battle under orders to take no prisoners. Indeed, we have advanced beyond this, and if persistent tales are to be believed, on one side at least which shall be nameless, prisoners of war—men whose surrender has actually been accepted—are driven into dug-outs and bombed to death!

The war seems now to have settled down to a definite policy of "manning" on the actual fronts—a policy of man for man, with the hope of a favourable balance in the long run. It is openly and repeatedly stated by people of importance that the business of the war from the allied point of view is to kill Germans, and no doubt corresponding views obtain on the other side. The logical result of this must be that the collapse must come from that source of all armies, the civil population. Much as has been said about the Russian crumple having robbed the Allies of victory this year, there is not the slightest indication that this is the fact. The evidence all points to the limits of any push being the effective range of its artillery mass, even in the face of comparatively weak numbers. If so, then attrition is the only process on the battlefield, a process which must become slower as the cost mounts up, and the only result of the entry of America into the conflict can be to prolong this agonising progress to the long-predicted stalemate.

With such a gloomy prospect facing them, it is full time the people of the world rose to the occasion. The international authors of the war, unable to reach a settlement through their usual instrument, militarism, find themselves ever more helpless in the toils of the child of their own loins. The more they have spent in this bid for supremacy in the world markets, the greater is the force compelling them to persist in their efforts to retrieve their fortunes by victory or stall off ruin by averting defeat. These cannot stop so long as they can find the men to fight for them, and keep their civil populations at work for them and acquiescent in their sordid and awful aims.

Are we, then, to drift on through further years of torture? Are we to go on losing our loved ones—our sons, our brothers, our comrades, our friends—in order that statesmen may splutter about teaching the Germans to say "reparation"? What is reparation to the toiling masses? What reparation can there be for the dead? Can they be made good by sacrificing still other lives to the fetich "reparation"? No! There is only reparation for property, and what concern is that of the propertyless?

Along the road our masters are driving us lies ruin. It is for the working class of the world to save civilisation from the threatening destruction. Let us, then, make ourselves heard ere it is too late. There is plenty of room in the world for all workers: it is the parasites that crowd us. Let us have done with them.

A. E. Jacomb

Pathfinders: Capitalism in its Element (2015)

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

Remember how boring chemistry lessons were at school? To most kids there is something deeply unsexy about learning the properties of the elements, especially if, as is not uncommon in school, the deeper logic of it all has somehow passed them by. This is a shame, because elements are very curious things, with quite unique ‘personalities’. Some are snooty and aloof, never deigning to notice anyone else. Some are content, rarely getting worked up over anything, little interested in being a team player or going out on dates. Some are looking for that special someone while others can’t stand being alone and will run off with just about anybody. Some of these will fizz and pop in your sink. Some will take out your sink. One or two could take out your kitchen.

Still, you could easily get through the rest of your life successfully without knowing much about the Periodic Table, even after watching Breaking Bad. You probably know that iron is the only metal that rusts, that copper is the best conductor (actually silver is better), that lead and mercury are bad for you, that helium makes your voice squeak, that aluminium is used for saucepans (and might be associated with Alzheimer's Disease). You probably don’t know that arsenic was once known as ‘inheritance powder’ because it was untraceable and therefore the poison of choice for ruthless heirs in a hurry to collect. Or that chemistry students like playing ‘disappearing coffee spoon’ jokes on each other using spoons made of gallium, which melts instantly in your hand or in your coffee. It’s not toxic, but just for laughs it turns your skin brown (The Periodic Table, Paul Parsons & Gail Dixon, Quercus, 2013).

Elements are able to change into other elements, often by natural processes, a fact which fascinated alchemists. When you combine some elements, you don’t just get the sum of their properties added together, you often get completely new and different properties not present in the originals. This oddity lay behind the prehistoric technological revolution of the Bronze Age. Copper and tin are both soft metals. Neither is any good for making edged weapons. But someone must have discovered, by accident presumably, that melting them together creates an alloy – bronze – which is much harder than either, and makes a good sword. It becomes harder still if you throw in some ‘inheritance powder’.

The dull subject of chemistry is of course behind most of the technological revolutions of the past century, as more properties and combinations have been discovered. It’s also behind a lot of the politics of capitalism. Think gold. Think carbon. Think  cobalt, a ‘conflict element’ used in gas turbines and jet engines, and mined in the ‘Democratic’ Republic of Congo. Think phosphorus, used globally in fertilisers, which aside from causing run-off resulting in dead fish and huge and revolting algal blooms, is virtually monopolised by Morocco, which invaded Western Sahara for more of the stuff, causing a war (BBC Online, 8 November 2013).

Not so long ago we were just using the basic, well-known elements, though even these came with interesting properties that are still being developed. Aluminium oxide produces sapphire crystals, industrially grown to the size of buckets and now made into bullet-proof glass for VIP limousines. And that’s nothing compared to the cornucopia of elements that goes into a smart phone. As Andy Ridgway eloquently puts it, ‘like Michelin-starred chefs, we are combining this material menu in increasingly exotic ways’ (New Scientist, 14 February).

The problem is getting reliable supplies in a world of competing economic blocs hell-bent on screwing each other over. In 2011 there was a global panic when China, producer of around 90 percent of rare-earth metals, decided to cut exports by forty percent. Prices, predictably, went through the roof, and doom-merchants everywhere bewailed the imminent collapse of civilisation.

What actually happened was that the crisis went away by itself – solved by capitalism’s adaptive way of working. Rare-earth elements are only rare in relation to abundant elements, but not in absolute terms. China held a monopoly only because they were the cheapest producers and other countries had shut down their mining operations. Once China cut the supply, new mines, or old ones recommissioned, magically opened up in places like California and Greenland as investors saw a profit to be made. In fact over 200 mining companies got in on the act with the result that rare-earth elements are not only not rare anymore, the price is in danger of collapsing just like it did with oil, and the mining companies are now struggling to extract a decent return.

For socialists this is interesting because it demonstrates something we are always pointing out, that capitalism is not likely to collapse of its own accord, because it has a knack of working around problems. It’s not just supply that adapts. Manufacturers needing rare elements and facing high prices for them soon figured out solutions that designed out those particular elements.

A peculiar aspect of the recycling industry, pointed out by Ridgway, is that as recycling increases, these same rare elements may become rare again. Many elements are found together in the same ores, meaning that when demand for the cost-bearing element declines through recycling, the other ‘freebie’ elements don’t get extracted. Worse, they often can’t be recycled because they are used in such tiny amounts that they are not economic to reclaim. Worse still, they are often blended together in alloys like a baked cake from which the ingredients cannot feasibly be re-extracted.

What is more worrying is that rare elements tend to involve more pollution both at the extraction end and the disposal end than other elements. In the West, most electronic devices are not recycled but left to gather dust as new models come out, or they’re dumped. Even when electronic waste is collected as per regulation, that’s not the end of the story. As New Scientist’s editorial points out, ‘Interpol estimates that one in three shipping containers leaving Europe is packed with e-waste destined for illegal dumping in the developing world. This results in major health hazards to people doing the dirty work of recycling’ (14 February).

It’s easy for anti-capitalists, and socialists too, to get into the habit of seeing the worst in every single thing that goes wrong, forgetting that capitalism is quite good at getting itself out of a lot of scrapes. But at what cost to humans, in the long run? Four million people died in Congo’s civil war, which was largely about control of valuable rare elements destined for use in our must-have gadgets. In wider terms, capitalism’s exploitation of the Periodic Table involves a level of human exploitation that leaves nearly all of us impoverished and enslaved, while making just a handful of ‘Nobles’ the only winners. That’s a problem that capitalism, by its very nature, has no solution for. Whatever short-term supply crises it might adapt its way out of, it can’t transform its own nature and magically, in the way elements are able to do, change itself into a different system. For that you need not natural processes but large-scale human intervention.

PJS