Cooking the Books: No Profits, No Growth (2013)

The Cooking the Books Column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Growth –the accumulation of capital –is what capitalism is all about. There can be a debate about whether this growth is a good (increasing society’s ability to produce and so, in theory, to eliminate poverty and deprivation) or a bad thing (damaging the environment and depleting resources because of the unplanned way it happens), but this is rather academic as it’s going to happen anyway. Or not. Growth under capitalism is not a straight line but more like the blade of a saw with peaks and troughs. At the moment the economy is in a trough, with production 4 percent below the last peak in 2008.

Governments know enough about capitalism to realise that the way-out of the current situation for them is ‘growth’. This would lead not only to increased consumption and a fall in unemployment but also to a rise in government revenue from taxation and so ease its debt problem. Which is why the Coalition has adopted a ‘growth strategy’. But growth is not something governments can control.

Growth comes about by profits being re-invested in expanding production and productive capacity, and so depends on profits being made. The flip side is that if profits are not being made there can be no growth. In fact, growth stops precisely because it has become unprofitable to produce at the same level as previously. Which is what happened in 2008.

Growth won’t resume until it again becomes profitable, as the government has found out by the failure of one of its policies – encouraging private investment in infrastructure projects. Philip Lachowycz, of Fathom Consulting, noted in the Times (26 November):

‘The main plan has been to kick start investment for around 500 proposed infrastructure projects with pension fund capital worth £20bn. So far the proposals have completely failed to take-off. The government has been unable to encourage the private sector to invest in new roads, housing or anything else for that matter. Official data show that infrastructure spending is down 11 percent from a year ago and the government has raised less than £1bn.’

The CBI demanded that the government insure capitalist firms against any losses from this but the government has refused so the private investment has not materialised (so much for the much-vaunted ‘risk-taking’ that capitalist apologists trot out to justify profits). But, says Lachowycz,:

‘There is a simpler explanation –the chronically low rate of return. At Fathom Consulting we calculate that the real rate of return on all fixed capital expenditure has collapsed in recent years and stands at only 0.5 per cent. For infrastructure specifically, it is lower still, and may even be negative.’

On their website accompanying the article is a graph of the ‘real rate of return on fixed capital investment’ from 1988 to 2012, showing a fall from 4 percent in 2007 to 0.5 percent today. But it is not only the return on investment in fixed capital that is too low:

‘OK, but surely everybody agrees that the UK has a severe shortage of housing and should now embark on a major house building programme? Not us. For housing specifically, we find that the rate of return is deeply negative, as house prices remain significantly overvalued relative to income.’

What a condemnation of capitalism this rather cynical but eminently realistic comment represents! People need houses, hospitals, schools and other amenities but they are not going to get them because the ‘rate of return’ is too low or negative. Time to get rid of the profit system.

The Death of Trotsky (1940)

From the September 1940 issue of the Socialist Standard

Through the attack of an assassin Leon Trotsky is dead. The Press reports that the attack was made in Trotsky's own home, the assailant having wormed his way into the aged revolutionary's friendship through many visits to his home in Mexico.

Thus the murderer avoided the usual search which the guards of Trotsky's person carry out in the case of all visitors, and so managed to conceal a small axe, with which the attack was made. Trotsky's dying words were to accuse the Russian Secret Police of the crime.

So ends the amazing career of one of the outstanding men of to-day. Trotsky (his real name was Bronstein) was the son of a well-to-do Jewish farmer in the Russian Ukraine. In early youth, whilst he was yet studying at High School in Odessa, he became an active member of the Russian Revolutionary Movement, whose fundamental aim was the overthrow of Czarist Autocracy. So far he was merely expressing the general need and feeling of Russian intellectuals, teachers, civil servants and such like, whose scandalously low pay added fuel to their intellectual abhorrence of a medieval despotism.

Soon, however, the character of the Russian Revolutionary Movement changed completely. The doctrines of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, interpreted and disseminated in Russia by theoreticians like Plekhanov, Struve and Axelrod in the first place, swept aside the curious mixture of destructive Nihilism and Western Liberalism so typically represented by the Party known as “Narodnaya Volya" (People's Will).

To understand the apparent contradiction of the spread of Marxism among "intellectuals" in a country so agrarian and backward as Russia, it would be necessary to go deeply into the subject, but perhaps one of the most important, certainly the immediate factor, was the absence of a strong, coherent capitalist class who could have directed the opposition to Feudal restrictions along orthodox capitalist lines.

Instead, the ferment was organised and led by “intellectuals," who took their cue from the most advanced social science which Europe then had (and still has) to offer.

In his own life-story, Trotsky tells us of the enthusiasm with which he plunged into Socialist study and the light which then suffused even the darkest and most perplexing problems.

It is curious, therefore, that a man so gifted as a writer as Trotsky undoubtedly was, has left little, if any, literary trace of his Marxist education. This is in contrast to men like Lenin, Martov, Riazanov, Bukharin and many other Russians, who have given us ample proof of their familiarity with the theoretical system of Marx.

After spending some time in Russian prisons and Siberian exile, years of hardship and suffering which left their mark on Trotsky's health, he managed to escape only to be arrested again as one of the ringleaders of the revolt at Petrograd in 1905.

Escaping once more, he left Russia and spent the intervening years until the Bolshevik uprising in October, 1917, in various European countries and, finally, the United States.

During this time he was continually in touch with the exiles who were planning revolt, and he played an important role in the deliberations of the Russian Social-Democratic Party, although he was then only a young man in the twenties.

When the split in this organisation took place at a conference in London in 1903, Trotsky took an individual stand.

It is not true that he was a Menshevik, for, although he, like the Mensheviks, opposed Lenin's plan for an organisation of revolutionary conspirators to be controlled by a dictatorship in the centre, his fundamental views differed from both factions.

Trotsky himself made it clear that he did not consider the controversy important enough to warrant a split, and continued to work with both groups in an attempt to re-establish unity.

But whereas both factions were agreed that the coming Russian Revolution would be essentially capitalist and that Russia would consequently have to pass through an era of capitalist democracy, Trotsky was alone in proclaiming that the overthrow of Czardom could be accomplished by the Russian movement alone, which could maintain itself in power and so cut out completely the period of capitalist transition.

This point of view he elaborated into a theory called "Permanent Revolution."

The basic points of this theory rest on the assumption that power could be held by Socialists in Russia long enough to enable the workers of the more advanced Western countries, helped, of course, by their Russian comrades, to introduce Socialism. Then the material backwardness of Russia could be overcome through the united efforts of a Socialist Europe.

None of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, accepted this view until after the seizure of power in October, 1917.

This theory is still the kernel of "Trotskyism," and from the S.P.G.B. standpoint that kernel is rotten with error.

Lenin himself had to admit that their hopes for a Socialist revolution in the West had been frustrated, but he and Trotsky blamed this on bad and treacherous leadership.

What the Bolsheviks did not grasp, then any more than their would-be imitators can do to-day, is the need for an understanding of Socialism by a majority of the working-class. This understanding alone would make leadership, good or bad, impossible.

But Trotsky who himself failed to grasp all the implications of Socialism, continued to nourish these illusions to the end.

Hence his bitter opposition to Stalin, whom he accuses of having betrayed the "Socialist" Revolution in Russia.

Trotsky's role in the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was second only to that of Lenin. This fact is generally recognised, except by the hide-bound followers of the present Russian Dictatorship.

His talent for military organisation and strategy helped to save the Bolsheviks from being defeated by the armies of the Czarist generals and the half-hearted intervention of the Allies.

This was often asserted by Lenin and, at the time, admitted by Stalin.

But Trotsky did not achieve this military success without ruthless discipline, a ruthlessness which showed itself again in his suppression of the revolt of the sailors at Kronstadt.

When charged by Kautsky with using methods of terrorism, Trotsky replied with a defence justifying the means by the end, as if the two could ever be separated.

Socialism, the pinnacle of human development, can never be achieved by methods that are themselves reactionary and anti-human; it is more than the irony of his logic that Trotsky himself should have met his end in such a violent manner.

How can the fall of Trotsky be explained?

Trotsky himself ascribes it to the chicanery of Stalin and his associates, but this explanation is both shallow and misleading.

Fundamentally, Trotsky fell from power because his theory of Permanent Revolution and his consequent insistence on continued revolutionary agitation abroad would have cut off all technical aid from the Western world, and so made any attempt at industrial development more difficult in Russia.

Another important factor was Trotsky's standing in the party clique which ruled the country. For although his military successes had probably made him the most popular man with the Russian masses, the Bolshevik party-machine, controlled by the secretary, Stalin, regarded him as an interloper. As already explained, Trotsky had maintained an individual stand until the October upheaval, therefore his hold on the Bolshevik party was not strong and was finally broken by the Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev clique.

The last two have since been legally murdered by their former associate; in this way Stalin has attained a personal power unequalled by any Czar.

Trotsky's misunderstanding was further exemplified by his contradictory attitude towards the Soviet Union. Bitterly hostile towards the regime, yet he urged that should Russia be involved in war, it would be the duty of all workers, inside or outside Russia, to fight in “defence” of that country, whilst at the same time working for the overthrow of Stalin.

This inconsistency he defended on the grounds that the Russian economic system, i.e., state control, was essentially working-class, and apparently required only a change in its political administration to perfect it for working-class needs.

This error is bound up with Trotsky's confusion between State-capitalism and Socialism, evidence of which can be found in his writings.

Trotsky's personal qualities are of minor interests to Socialists. As a political pamphleteer he was outstanding and he was also a first-class orator. But unless the world-proletariat can harness such gifts to serve the struggle for Socialism, they will be wasted and even harmful to workers' interests, although, and as in the case of Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that his whole life was sincerely dedicated to their cause.

Sid Rubin

Lessons from the American Elections (1929)

From the January 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

The results of the elections for President make interesting reading. The Communists, masquerading as the Workers' Party, had a programme of immediate demands or reforms running into considerably over 100 and calculated to sweep the country. They polled 40,000 votes, or less than half the membership they claimed when they began in 1919 and before they adapted their name and programme to appeal to the masses.

The Socialist Labour Party polled 21,000 votes, against 30,000 four years ago. Their periodicals were full of "Electionitis," although the S.L.P. believes that "only the trade unions can set on foot the true political of labor," a claim which they have fathered on to Karl Marx, but can't find where and when he said such a thing.

With a party like the S.L.P. claiming that religion is a private matter, in a country chock full of belief in spooks they should have polled a heavy vote. The Socialist Party of America received about 250,000 votes, or about one-quarter of what they received when they ran Debs for President. With a long reform programme appealing to Labour as well as to "all classes," they can't stop their vote from falling.

To trim their sails a little more, the Socialist Party of America have recently decided to eliminate from the application for membership form, all references to "class struggle," "Capitalist Class," and "collective ownership," and replace this with a sentence affirming belief in independent political action.

These bodies with popular appeals and reform programmes are continually asserting that their method is one calculated to get the masses with them, but as these Election results show, the policy of dangling political carrots in front of the workers fails.

In America, Al Smith, the Democratic Candidate, was able to offer all kinds of captivating reform  promises, and with a fair chance of election. So Al Smith got all the reform votes.

If the Socialist Party of America had preached Socialism and got votes for Socialism, neither Republican nor Democrat could have enticed their votes away.

Adolph Kohn

They all go the same way home (1950)

From the January 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

After 14 years of Labour government in New Zealand and eight years in Australia, the general elections in November and December saw those Labour governments rejected by the voters who had earlier put them into power. Some of the political commentators in this country have been speculating about the effect those results may have on the forthcoming General Election here.

They suggest that the British workers may be influenced to vote against the Labour Party because of what has happened in New Zealand and Australia. It is a fallacious view. If the Labour Government here had been able to make a success of its efforts to run capitalism in a manner pleasing to the workers they would not be influenced at all by what has happened on the other side of the globe. It may be that the British Labour Government will next year be returned to power for another five years, though the Labour Ministers are clearly resigned to suffering some loss of votes and seats. What we can say with complete confidence is that sometime or other, either at the 1950 elections or later on, the workers in Britain will turn out the Labour Government. The now lengthening history of Labour governments in many parts of the world shows that they are merely the alternative that the electors choose when they have become tired, sick or resentful of Liberal or Tory government. Just as 19th century Britain witnessed the game of political ins and outs, with never any fundamental change in the position of the working-class, so the 20th century gives us the same game but with the Labour Party in place of one of the older Parties.

Labour Party supporters are often amazed that this should happen. After Labour governments had introduced so much legislation and so many seemingly important changes how can the workers be so blind and ungrateful as to turn their Labour Party friends out of office? That is how it appears to Labour Party members.

It is all a myth. The more capitalism is changed in detail the more it remains at base the same—a system resting on the exploitation of the working class. It is true that, for electioneering purposes, the politicians have to pretend that there is a fundamental gulf between the Parties, hence the pretence that in New Zealand, Australia and Britain the fight is one between capitalism and Socialism. Just the same pretence was made when the contending Parties were Liberal and Tory, yet during war or at a time of acute economic crisis Liberal, Tory and Labour Parties find no difficulty in reconciling their differences in order to form coalition governments.

We are told by Conservatives in this country that the issue in Australia was for and against the continuance of "Socialism". There was no Socialism in Australia and no intention of introducing it. A less glaringly inaccurate description is that provided by Mr. Menzies, the new Australian Prime Minister. He says "the election was fought on the question of freeing the people from an all-powerful State—Nationalisation has taken it on the chin" (Sunday Express, 11.12.49). What Mr. Menzies calls freeing the people from an all-powerful State simply means such things as the promise of the new Government to end petrol-rationing and other controls carried on from the war: but as The Times points out: — "Actually this form of rationing has nothing to do with Socialist doctrine, but is necessary, at any rate in the view of the outgoing Government, to protect dollar reserves" (Times, 2.12.49). It is just as much a distortion to claim that the defeat of the Australian Labour Government means that nationalisation has been knocked out. Nationalisation has nothing to do with Socialism and no government in Australia or Britain which continues capitalism will undo nationalisation. All that is involved between them is whether to apply nationalisation a little more or a little less. In the election the Australian Labour Party went out of its way to assure the electors that its own proposal to nationalise the private banks was now a dead issue because of a legal decision which showed that it would require constitutional to bring it into effect. On the other side Mr. Menzies declared, just as did his Labour opponents, "that if any utility were not being conducted efficiently in the public interest, or were exploiting the public, it should be nationalised" (Economist, 10.12.49).

On the issue of the so-called "social services" the Labour Party asked the workers to vote for them for what has already been done, while the Conservatives slipped in with a promise to give the children's allowance to the first child instead of restricting it to the other children as is done at present.

One of the significant features of the election was the heavy defeat of the Labour Party in Queensland and its loss of votes in New South Wales, both of them former Labour strongholds, and New South Wales a largely industrial State containing much of the coal industry. What undoubtedly helped to produce this anti-Labour vote was the way the Labour Government behaved in the strike on the Queensland nationalised railways in 1948, and in the coal strike in 1949. In both disputes the authorities obtained emergency powers to deal with the strikes and there were bitter clashes between the police and the strikers. Thus does history repeat itself; for it was a similar savage struggle with strikers on the railways and in the sugar industry that preceded the electoral defeat of the Queensland Labour Government in 1929.

On that occasion, a trade union journal in Australia (The Worker, Brisbane, 7.9.1927) made the revealing comment: —"The impression is getting abroad that it is not possible for a Labour government to govern in a capitalist state, but that seems to be absurd." Here we have the crux of the matter. A Labour Government can certainly govern in a capitalist State, but it can only do so in much the same way as any other Party trying to run capitalism. In the last resort it must use the forces of State to break strikes and force the workers into submission because if it doesn't capitalism will relapse into chaos.

The only road of escape from this dilemma is to get rid of capitalism and introduce Socialism and that is a task for which the Labour Parties have no mandate. It is a task for the workers of the world and it cannot be begun until they understand and want Socialism and organise politically to bring it about.

Edgar Hardcastle 

Socialism before reformism (1983)

From the April 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many objections to the case for socialism are rooted in the argument that, while a social system based on common ownership of the means of production and distribution with free access to wealth is highly desirable, something must be done now about the problems which afflict the human race.

This argument, which on the face of it has much merit, for the problems of capitalism are urgent and horrific, makes a number of concessions to the socialist case. It agrees that capitalism cannot satisfy the needs of its people, that it must continually throw up wars, poverty, famine and the like. It concedes that the customary political parties do little to alleviate the situation; it does not raise any objections that socialism is somehow at odds with "human nature", that people are naturally so divisive, aggressive and greedy that a co-operative society could not survive. It does not waste time in questioning whether a moneyless, classless society is practicable. It accepts that what are now everyday blights on our lives simply will not exist when we have socialism.

But such concessions, though important, are not conclusive to the reformists. Millions dies each year, needlessly, in famines; the world's power blocs possess an obscenely high level of destructiveness, enough to kill each one of us again and again; in this country alone there are millions living in slums, or homeless, or in the direst poverty. Such problems—and there are many others—say the reformists, must take priority over any efforts to revolutionise society. We must act now to get rid of the bomb, to organise food supplies to the famine victims, allow special state benefits to the needy. When we have cleared up these matters it will be time to turn our minds to socialism.

The reformist argument then spells out, often in impressive detail, the current social troubles. It tells us, with the help of graphs, tables, statistics, about the scope of these and their effects on people's lives. Thus CND has a wealth of knowledge about the numbers of nuclear weapons in existence, their destructive power, the area which one bomb could wipe out, how many it would kill at once, how many it would leave suffering a slower, more agonising death, how it would cripple millions of survivors with radiation diseases. As an indictment, an encouragement to question why a modern society should devote such effort to destroying itself, it is impressive and valuable.

From that type of indictment the reformists proceed to an assumption that the problem can be eliminated by applying some piecemeal remedy to it. CND is sure that nuclear weapons can be abolished simply by persuading the government in this country to do just that, on its own. Oxfam workers are convinced that food shortages can be dealt with by rushing supplies of the stuff to the areas which are suffering from famine. It needs, runs the reformist argument, no more fundamental action than that.

In fact, in terms of logical argument, there is a massive, unbridgeable chasm between the indictment and the policies which the reformists put forward as the solution. There is no evidence to support the assumption — for it is no more than that — that capitalism's sickness can be cured by taking each symptom separately without any reference to the cause and to the fact that all the symptoms spring from a common basis.

In the case of CND, despite over a quarter of a century of marches, demonstrations, sit-downs, terms of imprisonment, the weapons are still there, growing worse and more threatening as they proliferate across the world. We live less securely now than we did when CND first came into being. This applies also to the other issues we have here discussed; the most sanguine of reformists can offer no hope that they are diminishing in intensity. Indeed, such is their grip on our lives that the reformist campaigns cannot relax in the assurance of success; all the time they must keep up the pressure and start new protests, each making the same claims as their discredited and exhausted predecessors.

The unbridgeable chasm bars the way because the reformists are following the wrong route. An effective indictment of social problems should lead to an analysis of them and then to their cause. Nuclear weapons spring from the fact of modern war, which is directly attributable to the basic nature of capitalism. A similar approach to the other problems will point to the conclusion that they also have the same root cause. And from there it is a small, irresistible step to the final argument, that only by abolishing capitalism will we rid the world of its problems.

But abolishing capitalism is not the end of it; as human society must continue, what is to replace the system of class ownership of the means of life, of war, famine, poverty, avoidable disease, insecurity? The only other basis possible is the opposite of private ownership — it is communal ownership of the means of production and distribution and their democratic control by the entire human race. That is socialism.

An examination of capitalism, then, leads by a series of logical steps to the conclusion that socialism is the next, necessary, step in social evolution. Capitalism is critically sick and there is need for urgent treatment. The human race need not continue to suffer the nuclear threat, or endure famine and poverty and we must act at once on that knowledge. Only socialism will answer human needs; only socialism will enable us to build a world which allows the people to live co-operatively, in abundance and freedom and to contribute to the limits of their abilities.

The priority is socialism.

Greasy Pole: Darling turns the screw (2000)

The Greasy Pole Column from the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

When New Labour came to power, it was assumed by many that knee-jerk government was over. But as Labour climbed the greasy pole, "principles" and beards were quickly shed

The governments of John Major and Margaret Thatcher did not go down in history for creating a harmonious country free of poverty, stress and disease but they will be remembered for a few other things—handbagging opponents, rampant unemployment and sleaze. And in response to these things, knee jerk policies—the rushing out of a parliamentary bill or some other measure after some sudden, media-motivated panic about a problem which, until then, had existed for a long time unmolested by any attention from frantic ministers. The idea of the knee-jerk was to give the impression that the government was alert to the concerns of the voters and would act on them with all possible speed. What really happened was that polices were trotted out which quickly ran into trouble precisely because they were so badly designed and so had to be withdrawn or reshaped, to the acute embarrassment of their originators.

When Blair's Labour Party came bounding into power in May 1997, overflowing with youthful vigour and optimism and fresh ideas, a lot of their supporters assumed that knee-jerk was a thing of the past, with the rest of the nightmare of Tory rule. From then on every government action would be weightily considered, carefully worked out after proper consultation and responsibly presented. It was, they triumphantly assured each other, the only way of dealing with any problem. New Labour, New Sobriety.

Benefits 

Well it did not work out like that. Just like the Tories before them, the Blair government gives every sign that they are not in control of the situation, that they are in a continual state of panic, cobbling together policies as each emergency hits them in a desperate attempt to keep the voters' confidence until it is time for the next election. We have seen several examples of this recently, as things get worse and worse for the government. We have seen Jack Straw's infamous crackdown on asylum seekers and his blundering attempts to reduce the crime statistics. We have seen Tony Blair's astoundingly mad suggestion to give the police powers to drag public order offenders to the nearest cash dispenser to pay an on-the-spot fine.

Another knee-jerk which has caused the government some embarrassment is the attempt to suspend state benefits for people who breach community penalty orders. The government's original idea was that the matter should not be tested in the courts, where the breach would have to be proved. It would need only a probation officer or a community service officer to allege that there had been a breach and to summons the offender for the Department of Social Security to cut the person's benefit—entirely in the case of Job Seekers' Allowance and partly in the case of Income Support—for up to 26 weeks.

A predictable objection to this proposal was that to cut the benefit of a person who had no other means of support was more or less inviting them to go out and commit a few more crimes just to get by. The Tory peer Lord Windlesham who, as a past chairman of the Parole Board has some experience in the matter, condemned the measure as ". . . rooted in deep ignorance of deviant behaviour and the most effective ways of countering it". The Penal Affairs Consortium described the proposal as ". . . retrograde, counter-productive and bound to increase crime". Such arguments did not impress the government, who are among the small minority who, in face of overwhelming evidence, deny that there is a link between crime and the levels of poverty. Nor were they impressed when it was pointed out that cutting benefit would not affect offenders who are in employment and who could therefore breach their community orders without fearing a cut in their income. The lawyers' argument, that courts, and not some government agency, should deal with breaches of their own orders was similarly dismissed.

Darling's beard 

The person with the job of implementing the policy is Alistair Darling, who glories in the title of Secretary of State for Social Security. In fact there was a time when Darling had strong reservations about the proposal but these were not based on any principled objections, nor concerns about the welfare of people whose only income he wanted to take away. Darling was worried about which ministry was going to have to pay to administer the measure. When he lost that battle he enthusiastically supported the idea. Which is just what would have been expected of him for he is a man who might politely be described as a pragmatist but more realistically as an unprincipled, ambitious climber. Just how ambitious was illustrated in the matter of his beard which, when he first came onto the political scene, was almost as luxuriously dense as Frank Dobson's. Darling liked his beard; his wife liked it a lot. But in 1996, when he was opposition spokesman on Treasury and economic affairs, Darling was visited by some of Gordon Brown's heavies who tactfully informed him that the beard had to go. It did not, apparently, inspire trust in what is known as the financial community (the people who make profits and losses from useless fiddles like selling and buying currencies all day long) and so could work against Labour's interests. Of course Darling, who is rumoured to have once been a Trotskyist, could have told these people that he had not come into politics to butter up financiers, except that that was why he had come into it. So gradually, over a short period, the beard came off. So Darling kept his job. And got promoted.

And the "financial community" was very happy. "In opposition," said the Financial Times on 14 June 1997, "Mr. Darling was widely praised for his handling of his City brief . . ." The admiration for him did not flag after the election, when Darling got into government, as Chief Secretary to the Treasury: "He is about as unscary as they come . . . Just the sort of person the City could deal with . . ." rhapsodised one senior banker. "Flexible on regulation and willing to listen . . ." burbled a City chief executive, who may have been nervous about what regulation might do to his firm's profits. With those kinds of commendations, Darling was not likely to lose sleep over measures designed to drive desperate and alienated people even deeper into impoverishment and despair.

Contracts 

When the attacks began on the proposal to deny benefit to people who breach their community penalty orders Darling did not show up so well; his admirers in the City would have been disappointed. Apparently devoid of any valid argument to support the cuts, he fell back on a spurious one: “Surely it is not unreasonable to say to someone if they enter into an agreement they should stick to it? . . . We are all responsible for our actions. Society is built on a contract. There are rights, yes, but there are responsibilities too” (Guardian, 24 June 2000).

That argument may have pleased one or two Labour dummies (one noble lord moaned "Why can't these people toe the line when they know the issue with which they are faced?") but it did not answer the case. As a lawyer Darling should know about the desirability of a contract being between equals. This would not have been the case with many community penalties, which are imposed on an offender waiting trembling in the dock to hear their fate from a judge or a bench of magistrates sitting on high. Community penalties were designed by the law to be direct alternatives to imprisonment, which brought an element of coercion into the acceptance of the "contract". In any case the ex-solicitor Darling seemed to have overlooked the fact that the need for an offender to agree to a community penalty was abolished some years ago; courts can now make such an order whether the defendant agrees or not.

But enough of Darling as a lawyer. What about him as a politician? Society is indeed built on a contract—or rather this society is built on the "contract" between the class who monopolise the means of wealth production and distribution and the rest of us, who "contract" to be exploited in order to live—and to lubricate and maintain the whole system. This is another contract between unequals because the working class have the choice to submit to their own exploitation or live on, or below, the bread line. For example, as Darling himself has pointed out (Guardian Special Reports, 22 August 1999), of the 2000 children born every day in Britain a third will be born into what is officially known as poverty. Left as it is, he said, many of these children will not only be born poor but will die poor. That is a fair measure of the effects of the capitalist society which Darling and his party support.

Promises 

When parties like New Labour present themselves to us at elections, wheedling and cajoling, they offer to enter a contract with us: give them our votes and they will organise capitalism so that it behaves as if it were not a society of privilege and exploitation. For some reason this kind of appeal, from Tory as well as Labour, is seductively successful at one election after another. It was effective in 1997, when millions of people contracted with Labour over its promises, for example to provide " . . . better schools, better hospitals, better ways of tackling crime . . . one nation, with shared values and purpose . . ." The Labour Party did not say then that their part of the contract would involve the deeper humiliation of the more vulnerable members of the working class while they fawned on wealthy capitalists and "celebrities". They did not say that, in knee-jerk policies and many other ways, they would run British capitalism in a style distinguishable from the Tories only because, as in the case of Darling's benefits cut for offenders, it would be even harsher.

Ivan

Marxism and Russia (1933)

From the February 1933 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mrs. Barbara Wootton has a reputation as an economist and is accepted by many people as an authority on the theories of Marx. She holds views on the relationship of Marxian theories to the social system in Russia which are fairly common. In the Highway, organ of the Workers' Educational Association (December), she sets out to interpret Russia for the benefit of non-Russians who wish to understand what is going on in that country.

Her explanation is a simple one:

“The Soviet Mind is a single mind. It is this which gives life in present-day Russia its peculiar flavour. ... In other countries no such common collective purpose is known, unless it be the purpose of making war. . . . The Soviet mind not only knows what it is after; it is also after very strange things. . . . These strange things are, of course, nothing less than those embodied in the philosophy called Marxism.”

Mrs. Wootton describes briefly some of the strange things. Among them is concentration on increasing the productivity of industry, what she calls “the glorification of economic output.” This, she says, leads the Russians to esteem sobriety because the sober worker has a bigger output. He must shun “licentious pleasures.” He must get up early and be punctual.

Another of the strange things is that the Russian child is taught to study phases of the class-struggle in other countries, but not in Russia. (According to Mrs. Wootton the children are taught that the class-struggle no longer exists in Russia.)

These and various other examples are given by Mrs. Wootton to “illustrate the extraordinary unity and consistency of Soviet ideas in every field.”

The whole of this is rubbish. There is no “common collective purpose” in Russia. The “strange things” are not strange. They are perfectly familiar to every student of capitalism everywhere, and Marx is not responsible for them.

Let us first take the “single mind” of Russia. Not a week passes without authoritative reports of the shooting or imprisonment of peasants and others who have come into conflict with the Russian Government. Frequent armed punitive expeditions are sent against rebellious groups of private peasants or members of collective farms. Dissident Communists are disgraced, exiled and imprisoned. At the moment a wholesale purge of the Russian Communist Party is taking place. The “single mind” is that of the Communist officials who control the vast repressive forces of the State. The appearance of unity is like its counterpart in every other country: it is imposed by those who have power on those who have not. Mrs. Wootton's analogy of the alleged “common collective purpose” of the nation making war is not a bad illustration of the absurdity of her argument. The war-making governments had to use conscription, supported by intensive lying propaganda and the savageries of military discipline to drive millions of unwilling or indifferent men into the trenches. Mrs. Wootton thinks that this is a common collective purpose. It did not look like that to the conscripts.

Then for the boosting of big output. Here Mrs. Wootton herself has to admit that the Russian “strange thing” bears a resemblance to the propaganda used in the U.S.A. before the present depression. She might also recall the official British “increased production” campaign of 1919-1920, backed by politicians in the three big parties (Labour included) and made the subject of innumerable newspaper articles, coloured posters in the streets, platform speeches and divinely-inspired sermons in the pulpits of churches of every denomination.

Then there is Mrs. Wootton's discovery that in Russia the children are taught to ignore the class-struggle at home and fix their eyes on the shocking state of unrest abroad. This is precisely what happens in every capitalist country. We are allowed to know that there were class struggles in the past and class struggles in benighted foreign countries, but the educational system does not recognise the existence of a class struggle here and now. There is no need to deal with her belief that the class struggle has disappeared from Russia. The rulers of that country officially admit that it is more acute than ever. That is why they have to depend for protection on their huge police and military forces, and that is why, in spite of Mrs. Wootton's nonsense, they do not trust to the “common collective purpose” supposed to have been derived by the Russian population from the theories of Marx.

Anyone acquainted with Marx's writings would know how he denounced the inhumanity of capitalism, sacrificing the comfort and health of the workers in order to build up huge production plants for the profit of the investors. Yet Mrs. Wootton holds Marx responsible for precisely the same process imposed on the Russian workers by the dictatorship. While the majority of Russian workers tighten their belts the home and foreign bondholders get their 10 per cent, or more on their investments out of the proceeds of the workers' labour, and specialists and bureaucrats draw their high salaries.

Mrs. Wootton shows by her article that she knows little of Russia, not very much about capitalism elsewhere, and understands nothing at all of Marx. Her views are not in themselves of special importance, but unfortunately her misrepresentations of Marx are widely held and do great harm to the Socialist movement.

Edgar Hardcastle

Obituary: Comrade Norman Taylor (1954)

Obituary from the November 1954 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with regret that we have to report the death of our Comrade, Norman Taylor, who died on August 27th after a life of suffering from one of the most pernicious diseases which this detestable system throws up. Despite this our comrade was active in the initiation of the Croydon Group and subsequently the Croydon Branch, which he was secretary of for many years.

We will all, I'm sure, share in expressing our sympathy and condolence with his wife, Comrade Rhoda, who we hope may find some measure of consolation in the fact, that her husband, Comrade Taylor, despite his enormous disabilities, was always on  hand to carry out for and behalf of the Party, which fell within his capacity.

M. A. C.

Exit Oskar the pink (1999)

From the April 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March the man the Sun once called the most dangerous man in Europe resigned as Germany's Finance Minister. The Sun—or rather Rupert Murdoch as a capitalist himself—didn't like him because they thought he had plans to increase direct taxes on profits in Britain up to the same level as in Germany.

Oskar Lafontaine was chairman of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) which returned to power in October after years in opposition. Politicians who are out of office for long periods often loose their grip on capitalist reality—that governments must nurture profits and provide an environment in which they can flourish since they are what makes capitalism go round—and imagine that governments can work wonders simply by political will.

Sometimes, when returned to power after years in the wilderness, they try to put this mistaken idea into practice. The classic example was the French leftwing government, with Communist Party participation, that came into office when Mitterrand was first elected President in 1981. They really believed that they could "relaunch the economy" by "increasing popular consumption" and so they brought in measures to increase the minimum wage (which in France affects all wages since they are tied to it) and social benefits.

The result wasn't long in coming. Instead of economic growth being relaunched, inflation increased, leading to three devaluations of the franc in as many years. Within a year the new government adapted its policies to capitalist reality; they clawed back the reforms they had introduced and imposed austerity as a means of shifting the balance back from consumption to profits. They had learned the hard way that you cannot run capitalism in the interests of the excluded majority.

Since, with Kohl winning election after election, the SPD had been out of power for fifteen years, the big question after their September 1998 election victory was: would they make the same mistake as the first Mitterrand government, especially as they were in coalition with the Greens who also had ideas which if seriously pursued would threaten profits?

Oskar Lafontaine had written a book in which he proposed, as a way of getting Germany out of the current crisis, that wages and salaries should go up in line with productivity. He repeated this in newspaper articles and interviews after the SPD election victory. Since this would result in wages and salaries going up faster than they had been, it was equivalent to the policy pursued by the 1981 French government. And the thinking behind it was the same: if wage and salary earners had more to spend this would create more markets, so stimulating the economy to grow again.

In the event this turned out to be just another electoral promise but it earned Lafontaine the reputation of being "Red Oskar". Red used to signify revolutionary and has always been the fetish colour of Socialists. But there was nothing revolutionary about Lafontaine's ideas. He was merely putting forward the orthodox Keynesian nostrum that in a period of economic stagnation you should increase spending. Of course by the end of the 1970s Keynesianism had proved to be an utter failure on this point, as Marxists had foreseen years previously. But it is a measure of the very narrow margin of manoeuvre of reformists these days that even milk-and-water Keynesian reformism is denounced as "revolutionary" and "red".

Although, as Finance Minister, Lafontaine never tried to implement his idea of tying wages and salaries to productivity he did introduce some new direct taxes on profits and he kept on calling on the European Central Bank to reduce interest rates. He believed that this would help Germany out of the crisis (even though in Japan interest rates are less than 1 percent and they're still in the economic doldrums). For a Finance Minister to repeatedly call for a lowering of the interest rate was seen as out of order or even counterproductive. The ECB, which fixes the minimum short-term lending rate for the whole of Euroland, had to refuse such calls just to prove it did not give in to political pressure.

It was this that was the immediate cause of Lafontaine's downfall. The interest rate reduction which he and the rest of the German government wanted was being held up by his political interference making it difficult for the Bank to do this. So pressure was bought to bear and he left politics to spend more time with his family. Yet another reformist politician bit the dust. Good, or rather good as long as it helps workers in Germany and elsewhere realise that reformism is a dead-end.

Adam Buick

Are you an abstainer? (1999)

From the May 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

This year has been dubbed the "year of elections". This month there are local elections and elections to the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, next month elections to the European Parliament. We're putting up a limited number of candidates, but are you one of those very many people who doesn't see the point in voting, and can't be bothered with politicians? If so, read on, you just might find this interesting.

You may have noticed that whoever gets elected, nothing really changes. This is because politicians normally have no intention of changing anything. They're really doing very nicely out of the system as it is, thank you, slump or no slump. While they enjoy their executive lunches, cars and kickbacks, the rest of us miserable suckers are supposed to toe the line, "yes" the bosses, and work ourselves into early graves to earn wages that wouldn't buy one of their bottles of claret.

If you're still reading this, you'll notice it isn't your ordinary run-of-the-mill election manifesto, with the usual vague promises and smiley conman confidence. Well, that's because we're not politicians, and don't let our name, and the fact that we are standing for election, fool you into thinking we are. The fact is, we represent an idea which is most unpopular and unfashionable these days, an idea which is ignored by the media, dismissed coldly by politicians, and avoided by anyone who prefers the status quo to stay put. This idea is revolution.

What are we proposing? Well, you must admit it would be difficult in one short article to prove any case beyond question, especially a case as big as this. All we can do is give you the bare bones, so don't be surprised if it doesn't convince you straight off. We're revolutionaries, not magicians. If you don't have questions to ask at the end of this then we're not doing our job properly, or you're not giving it any thought. And if you have questions, we can only suggest you contact us to ask them.

OK, you know that in our world, private property is king, and that the rich make the rules. You probably know that only about 5 percent of the world's population is rich, while 95 percent does all the work and lives in varying degrees of poverty, debt and stress. You may have concluded that this situation causes everything from street crime to international warfare, and you have almost certainly suffered yourself from the effects of overwork, deprivation and other people's "anti-social" behaviour. Considering that private property society, or capitalism in its developed form, was built by human beings, it is an amazingly anti-social and unfriendly system, and it brings out the worse in us. We treat each other with suspicion and we treat the planet with contempt.  

Undoubtedly this state of affairs is bad news all round, but what can be done? The politicians' response is to ignore the problem and talk about trivia instead, hoping nobody will notice. Look at their manifestos. That's why nothing changes. Our response is direct, and simple: the 95 percent need to sort their act out and abolish the private property principle, that mutual agreement that says one person has the right to own and keep what other people need, even if they should die because of it. And every single day, people are dying because of it. The real enemy of humanity is not a person or a group of rich people, it is simply this agreement.

What comes after capitalism?

Privately-owned property is an anachronism in this day and age. There is enough food in the world to make every individual fat. There are ten empty houses to every homeless person. Technology is producing abundance so fast that commodity prices keep collapsing, yet nobody has yet recognised what this all means. It means that there is a higher level of civilisation, of science, or arts, of culture, of personal fulfilment, waiting to come after capitalism—an advanced society which, because it has abolished scarcity, does not contain all the horrors that have dogged human organisation until now. From the standpoint of such a society, we in capitalism are still living in the Dark Ages, with our wars, famines, pollution and other disasters, and our outlook is suitably bleak. And from our present standpoint, a post-scarcity society seems a dim and distant image, a matter for the 22nd century perhaps, but not now. Lulled by the incessant idiotic chatter of politicians and their meaningless agendas, we do not notice that even now, today, we are standing on the very threshold of that post-scarcity world. All we have to do, as individuals, is take one step.

Revolution is a scary word, but it doesn't have to be a scary thing. If you prefer, think of it as a kind of social "upgrade", like building a better and faster computer. We don't advocate violence, although we can't know of course that the rich will quietly abdicate when they see that the game is up. But there is a personal revolution to face, as well, because a free society requires responsible members, not children who just play "follow-the-leader" and do as they are told. It's true that we get the society we deserve. Revolution consists in learning to deserve better.

Well, you've made it to the end of this strange manifesto. No mention of Europe. No mention whatsoever of local issues. No promises of "I'll do this and I'll do that for my constituents", no flattery, no sweet talk. Maybe now you'll sigh and throw this in the bin. If you vote for us you won't get a wage rise or a tax cut, but then again you probably won't anyway. Just remember, all those other candidates are happy to continue with the private property society you know and don't love, and equally happy to assist it in every possible way. They are selling you out, and your kids, and their kids after them. They are politicians. We are private citizens, democratically organised as a party to advertise revolution but not lead it, to abolish political power not keep it for ourselves, to promote a free society without rulers, and to disband when we have served our purpose. So if you vote for us now, it's not because we've conned you into it with charming lies. It's because you've just taken that all-important small step, the step that begins the journey.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Good capitalism, bad capitalism? (2011)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“There is good and bad capitalism,” wrote Will Hutton in a recent article for the left-of-centre think-tank, the Policy Network

He argued that

“The left has to understand what capitalism properly managed can deliver: and then to demonstrate that the paradox is that only the left can provide the political tension that biases capitalism towards the good. While the right is the indiscriminate friend of all capitalism, the left’s mission is to hold capitalism’s feet to the Enlightenment fire – and thus make it work best to meet the ambitions and needs of ordinary people.”

This – apart from the philosophical stuff about the Enlightenment (the 18th century intellectual ferment that provided the theory for the American and French bourgeois revolutions) – is what the reformists of the old Labour Party always stood for in practice, despite their talk of socialism (in most cases, actually state capitalism). They believed that it was possible, through legislation and government intervention, to humanise capitalism, to smooth off its rough edges. Only that was not how they (or those of them interested in more than just getting into office and taking on the day-to-day running of capitalism) expressed it. They talked in terms of these measures being stepping stones to something beyond capitalism rather than creating a “good capitalism”.

What Hutton is doing is bringing the theory into line with the practice. As far as Ed Miliband is concerned, he’s preaching to the converted as the Labour leader is already on record as saying he wants “a capitalism that works for people and not the other way around” (Observer, 29 August).

“Bad capitalism”, according to Hutton, is “a universe of bloated incumbents, politically fixed markets, productive entrepreneurs forced to the sidelines and too little public investment. It cares little for the condition and risks of the people.” And good capitalism? It, says Hutton, has

“two key properties – a system of business ownership in which the returns to owners and managers is proportional to the risk being undertaken rather than winners taking all, along with politically and socially constructed institutions that help mitigate risk, thus allowing more to be taken.”

This is how capitalism according to its theorists is ideally supposed to function. But even if it did function in this way, there would still be minority class ownership, production for profit, and the division of society into rich and poor. In fact, for Hutton, there are also good capitalists and bad capitalists:

“Social democrats should properly distinguish between the deserving and undeserving rich.”

He then added, curiously:

“They should also be prepared to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving worker – and the deserving and undeserving poor. Marx made this point to the French socialists in his critique of the ‘Gotha Programme’.”

Hutton may know about the Enlightenment but he clearly doesn’t know about Marx. The fact that Gotha is in Germany should have been a hint that Marx was addressing German rather than French socialists. And there’s nothing in what Marx wrote there about deserving and undeserving workers. Hutton has presumably misinterpreted the labour-time voucher scheme Marx mentioned.

What Hutton fails to understand is that capitalism is based on the exploitation of wage-labour for surplus value and is governed by the imperative drive to accumulate more and more capital out of this. Which is why it can never be made to work “to meet the ambitions and needs of ordinary people” and why it can only work as a profit-making system in the interests of those who live off profits.

There is no such thing as a good capitalism.

Anthropology and politics (1999)

From the March 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the late 1920s and the 1930s a series of books by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead created a tremendous following among the general public. Coming of Age in Samoa, Growing up in New Guinea, and other blue Penguins still to be found on second-hand bookstalls thrilled generations of readers who wondered, after reading the accounts of free love among the people of the Pacific islands, whether they were getting their share. Then came spoilsports to interrupt the dream of what was reported to go on under the swaying palms and around the sleepy lagoons of Polynesia.

The whole thing was a hoax, these academics argued. Margaret Mead spent very little time in the Trobriand Islands, didn't bother to acquire the language, only learned what she wanted to learn, and her interpreters obliged by making it up.

There is a long tradition of hoaxes and forgeries in the human sciences. The fossil of Piltdown Man provided British archaeologists with something home-grown to offer against the French and Spanish with their sumptuous finds of Cro-Magnon people, their art and artefacts at Lascaux and Altmaira. By the time the Piltdown fossils had been identified as the skull of an ape mixed together with the skeleton of a not very prehistoric man the perpetrators were long dead.

The psychologist Sir Cyril Burt was discovered after his death to have produced some very original home-made statistics in his anxiety to prove that people are differently equipped with intelligence. He was one of a long line. A recent book The Bell Curve by another psychologist named Murray and an economist, continued this sterling work among social Darwinists to prove that the poor are poor because they are stupid. A sceptic might argue that if Natural Selection was a reliable hypothesis, then the most intelligent and robust should be sought among those who were products of the most testing circumstances—the historically poor.

These distortions mattered less in the nineteenth century before psychology was invented and anthropological research was carried on by chair-bound scholars like Sir James Frazer in his Golden Bough, which was a hotchpotch of classical mythology, and stories brought back from the Empire by missionaries like Dr Livingstone and army officers like General Pitt-Rivers. This cosy world was burst open by a new breed who took research out into the field. The Pole Bronislav Malinowski went to the Trobriand Islands and brought back to the newly-founded London School of Economics his findings published as Argonauts of the Western Pacific. This was a materialist account of the daily lives of the people. He supplied the sex himself by getting his leg over the nubile Margaret Mead.

American anthropology of this time was dominated by the German scholar Franz Boas, much of whose work had been concerned with the American Indians. The Frenchman Marcel Mauss had also written about the native Americans of the north Pacific coast in his classic essay The Gift, but like the amazingly prescient, and home-grown Lewis Henry Morgan with his Ancient Society of a century earlier, he had come up with conclusions of primitive communism which were clearly unacceptable and mostly ignored in the US. An added disability for Morgan was his being taken up by Engels in Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. It was not until the women's movement in the 1960s that either could be mentioned in academic circles.

Boas was much more interested in a cultural approach and pressed his student Miss Mead for details of the sex lives of her subjects. Her publisher was also pressing for juicy details which would guarantee big sales. The result was a succession of best-sellers which guaranteed her a mass following. Margaret Mead became a living embodiment of the Statue of Liberty. Enter the villains, in particular the Australian Derek Freeman, to the hisses of American academics.

The Australians are frequently anti-American, we are warned; although Margaret Mead "did provide misleading embellishments" to her accounts of native life, they did not materially affect their accuracy. Freeman, for his part charges her with being anti-evolutionary and stuck in a rut of cultural determinism. He pleads for an interactionist view of things. Her defenders counter that he is viewing 1920s' anthropology through the glasses of the 1980s with the benefit of hindsight.

If Americans are charged with reductionism, with ignoring the interaction between factors, then it would not be the first time that they laid themselves open. More recently than Margaret Mead, the biologist Garrett Hardin argued in The Tragedy of the Commons that medieval common land was destroyed by overgrazing until private property arrived to save it. But Hardin's unregulated free-grazing was as false an assumption as Mead's Polynesian lovelies being available to all-comers. There were rules, as wiser American counsels urged, also Karl Heinrich Marx:

"Men make their own history, but not just as they please. They do not choose the circumstances for themselves, but have to work upon circumstances as they find them, have to fashion the material handed down by the past."

Ken Smith 

Party Activities (1930)

From the February 1930 issue of the Socialist Standard

Head Office

The Sunday evening lectures that were commenced at Head Office in the autumn have continued through the winter with considerable success. These lectures are given mainly by members who are developing as speakers, and this offers a splendid opportunity for beginners. The questions and discussion that follow have been usually on a high level and cannot fail to provide valuable information to those present.

We would like to see more members in attendance.

WEST HAM. Meeting at Stratford.

In spite of very bad weather there was an interested audience of 250 at Stratford Town Hall on Sunday 12th, when our speaker dealt with the subject, "How to Get Socialism." Questions and opposition centred chiefly round the problem of doing something in order to check the worst effects of Capitalism. It was interesting to notice that even those who spoke in defence of the Labour Party policy were not prepared to speak enthusiastically about the Labour Government's actions. Instead of the usual Communist telling is that the workers must use armed force, the one Communist opponent who intervened did so in order to deny that the Communists hold any such view. Fortunately the speaker had available the report of the last Communist Congress where that policy was reiterated.

The members of the West Ham Branch who organised the meeting had used it as an opportunity of making the party more widely known. Some 3,000 handbills were given away and 1,000 specimen copies of the Socialist Standard were distributed prior to the meeting.

There was a collection of £2 6s. 9d., and literature was sold to the value of 9s. 4d.

EAST LONDON.

The East London Branch have been very active during the winter and are making good progress. Open-air propaganda in Victoria Park has been maintained and indoor public meetings have been held each month. In addition, the branch is conducting lectures in the branch room at 141, Bow Road, on alternate Fridays in the month.

Potential speakers have been discovered among new members, and are being given opportunities for training. Sales of literature are good.

BATTERSEA.

The monthly meetings run by Battersea branch in their branch room at Latchmere Road Baths have been a great success. Attendance has been good and considerable interest taken in the party point of view. Open-air propaganda has been maintained on Clapham Common, except in very bad weather conditions.

SHEFFIELD. A BRANCH FORMED.

Efforts to form a branch in Sheffield have met with success, and we are looking forward to early signs of propaganda activity in that neighbourhood. Those wishing to get in touch should communicate with E. Boden, 44, Edgedale Road, Millhouses, Sheffield.

EDINBURGH.

Edinburgh members are trying, in spite of difficulties, to make the party known and get a branch going. Not the least of the difficulties is the bad weather, which frequently prevents open-air meetings. When the weather improves their efforts are likely to meet with success. Those wishing to lend a hand should communicate with D. Lamond, at 15, Barclay Place.

GENERAL PROPAGANDA.

Regular open-air propaganda stations are being well maintained. Glasgow especially has been showing good results.

As so much depends on the Socialist Standard to link up the party with friends and sympathisers, and to keep our position before the public, members are urged to make special efforts to increase sales. One way of doing this, we would suggest, is to get subscribers for a period of one year (the cost is only 2s. 6d. per annum, post paid). If each member of the party made it his or her job to get only one or two subscribers annually, our sales would increase by leaps and bounds.

All shoulders to the wheel to forward the good work.

Propaganda Committee. 

Material World: Cars and Socialism (2013)

The Material World Column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month’s Material World examined the terrible price that society pays for the motor car – in pollution and disease, ugliness and noise, social atomisation, injury and death. Does it follow that a socialist community is likely to decide to stop producing cars? How compatible would such a decision be with the idea of socialism as a world of material abundance and free access?

First point. Socialism will make a lot of car travel unnecessary. This applies especially to commuting. Many jobs to which people now commute will disappear with the abolition of money. Over time geographical patterns of habitation and production can be changed to enable most people to live close enough to their work not to need a car to get there.

We can expect new forms of public transport and the restoration of environment-friendly old forms such as trams and perhaps even canal barges (for non-perishable supplies). Sizeable urban areas can be made safe as pedestrian precincts. Some towns in Germany are already car-free and accessible only by rail.

Second point. Replacing petrol-guzzling motor cars by electric cars should reduce pollution from cars and their contribution to global heating, provided that the electricity comes from low-carbon sources (not from coal, as it often does at present).

Sharing systems

Third point. Free access to car transport as a service can be achieved without permanently assigning a car to each family or individual. In social terms, the current arrangement, with most cars sitting unused most of the time, is extremely wasteful. The total number of cars required can be minimised by relying on a pool of cars available through a network of depots.

When people want to go on a trip that cannot conveniently be made by public transport, they will borrow a car from the nearest depot. When they no longer need the car, they will return it to the network (not necessarily to the same depot). The depot staff will recharge, repair and maintain the vehicles and monitor their use.

Such arrangements already exist, though not for cars. The public lending library provides free access to books and cassettes. A free-access sharing system for bicycles was pioneered in Amsterdam by the Provos in the 1960s and now exists in Paris, Hangzhou and many other cities. In socialism sharing systems will expand to cover specialised tools and other things that people need to use occasionally.

In a free-access society people will develop a different psychology. They will view the goods being held for their use in public stores and depots as already belonging to them. As they will have free access to those things whenever needed, they will feel no urge to transfer stuff to their homes in order to make it “theirs”. Such pointless behaviour will appear pathological. People will feel a need for exclusive and permanent possession only of those things which have a special personal meaning for them.

Electric cars still a problem?

So it may be possible to provide free access to electric cars at a social cost lower than that now paid for motor cars. Much lower, perhaps, but still considerable. Switching to electric cars would not prevent road accidents. Electric cars also pose environmental problems of their own.

There are two types of electric car: one runs on a battery, the other is powered by a stack of hydrogen fuel cells. However, the manufacture of both devices depends on the availability of rare earth metals (REMs). These substances occur in very low-concentration ores from which they have to be separated out by means of acid baths and other processes, generating vast quantities of highly toxic waste.

The REM smelting plants in Inner Mongolia dump the waste into a large pool. From there the ‘radioactive sludge’ seeps into the soil and groundwater, destroying local agriculture and the health of local residents. A socialist society could not tolerate such poisoning of the environment, even in a single locality. No local community would voluntarily sacrifice itself to provide the world with certain raw materials. And the world administration would lack the coercive power to sacrifice a local community against its will.

So the waste would have to be reprocessed, stored in sealed vessels and buried in stable geological structures deep underground. This is not done under capitalism because it would cost too much. But even in socialism it will surely be impracticable to store more than a certain quantity of waste in this way, especially as it will be in addition to hundreds of thousands of tons of accumulated nuclear waste in urgent need of similar treatment.

That constraint will limit the amount of REMs extracted. And as REMs will be needed for many other uses (including energy-efficient fluorescent lamps and magnets for wind turbines) it will be necessary to set priorities for their allocation.

Free access to everything?

Thus, we cannot be sure whether socialist society will be able or willing to provide free access to car transport. The social cost associated with maintaining an adequate pool of electric cars may still be judged unacceptably high.

It’s doubtful that there could ever be free access to everything – to space travel, for instance. The world socialist community will have to decide, through its democratic institutions and procedures, what free access will and will not cover, and how to distribute things to which free access cannot be provided.

Stefan