Suicide Bombers: Heroes or Villains? (2007)

From the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the morning of 7 July 2005 the inhabitants of London awoke and prepared to go out for the day. Fifty-six of them were to die the victims of terrorist bombings. For twenty years in countries across the globe members of our class have been subjected to other such murderous outrages. What motivates the bombers and who supports their actions?

One common response to an unpleasant or disturbing occurrence is to attribute bad intentions to others more often than we should given the evidence we have about their states of mind. If we believe we are under threat or are likely to be harmed by others there are at least four explanations we can adopt for their behaviour:

1. It was unintentional – an accident.
2. It was unintentional but arose from an unavoidable clash of interests.
3. It was intentional and arose out of malice or the wish to cause deliberate harm.
4. It arose from some personality or character defect in the other.

In the case of terrorist attacks a common reaction is to attribute malice or other defect –an understandable reaction to emotionally disturbing events. But politically it is a dangerous one as it disposes of the need to examine the actions of the perpetrators more closely. This unconsidered reaction can be encapsulated in a catchy slogan such as "axis of evil". Each subsequent event can then be explained by this slogan and difficult or time-consuming analysis can be avoided. Thus in the popular imagination terrorist bombers remain "lunatics" and their activities labelled "irrational".

Socialists challenge these reactions. We insist that emotion itself is not enough. Indeed while we share the understandable revulsion expressed by the majority of our fellow workers we insist that emotion must be accompanied by careful thought and analysis. Explaining suicide terrorist activity by reference to the make-up of the individual perpetrator while ignoring the social and political environment from which they come is inadequate. What needs to be understood is that far from being mad or lunatic or irrational, people and organisations who engage in suicide terrorism are in reality rational killers who employ violence to achieve specific political objectives.

Terrorism uses violence, or the threat of violence, to achieve its ends. It is designed to have far reaching psychological repercussions beyond the immediate victim or target. It is at bottom political in its aims despite the high sounding phrases used to disguise that fact.
One political analyst has examined the phenomenon in depth and has produced the following useful summary:

"Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the leverage, influence and power they otherwise lack to effect political change on either a local or an international scale." (Bruce Hoffman: Inside Terrorism)

The suicide terrorist differs from the "ordinary" criminal or lunatic assassin in that the suicide terrorist is not pursuing purely egocentric goals. They are not in the main driven by the wish to line their own pockets or to satisfy some personal grievance. It is important to see the suicide terrorist as fundamentally an altruist. He or she believes that they are serving a 'good' cause designed to achieve a greater good for a wider constituency (real or imagined) which the terrorists and their organisation purport to represent.

Suicide terrorism has its own strategic logic. To treat it as "irrational" or driven by religion or personal economic gain fails to take account of the facts concerning the social, historical and political conditions which give rise to it. Academic and other research in the field reveals a number of things not commonly believed or understood about suicide terrorists.

Audrey Cronin – a researcher for the United States Congress – has reported that "most terrorist operatives are psychologically normal". Their attacks were always premeditated and the perpetrators were aware of the consequences of their actions to themselves and others. Scott Atran – a Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan – concludes that "Suicide terrorists on the whole have no appreciable psychopathology". A CIA study concluded from their investigations that there was: "No psychological attribute or personality distinctive of terrorists."

The findings of a number of studies can be briefly summarised as follows:

- Terrorists tended to be young men aged between 18 and 30.
- They are in the main well adjusted in their families and liked by their peers.
- They are often better educated and economically better off than their surrounding populations.· Personal despair is not a significant factor in their actions.
- They are willing to sacrifice themselves for others and for what they see as the welfare of future generations.

Not motivated by religion
Despite the religious language in which the claims and statements of some terrorist organisations are made when looked at in a world wide perspective it has been found that religion is not a strongly motivating factor. Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has compiled the world's largest database on suicide terrorism including information on every attack reported between 1980 and 2004. His conclusions are:

"The data show that there is far less of a connection between suicide terrorism and religious fundamentalism than most people think", and "Overwhelmingly suicide-terrorist attacks are not driven by religion as much as they are by a clear strategic objective: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that terrorists view as their homeland". Such attacks are: "Mainly a response to foreign occupation and not Islamic fundamentalism".

To underline this one has only to recall that at the top of the suicide bomber league table are the secular nationalist Tamil Tigers operating in Sri Lanka and India. Other secular nationalist or separatist organisations who indulge in suicide bombing include the PKK and PFLP. Even in ostensibly Muslim countries secular groups are responsible for one third of all attacks.

What then is there in it for the terrorist organisation?

The characteristic mode of a terrorist attack is that of hit and run. For a relatively small organisation to directly take on the might of the armed state invites complete annihilation. Instead terrorist organisations use "cowardly" tactics such as ambush or hidden explosive devices set off by remote control. These tactics ensure a high survival rate for the terrorists. This is not the case with the suicide bomber where success inevitably means death. What are the calculations made by groups using these tactics?

Suicide attacks are attractive as they offer a range of advantages:

- The suicide terrorist has been described as the ultimate "smart weapon". The bomber can control the time and location of the attack so as to maximise the number of casualties and/or damage done to the target.
- Suicide attacks attract wide media coverage giving maximum publicity to their supposed grievances and their determination to have them resolved.
- The publicity for their cause leads to increased support by way of new recruits and political influence locally and also to increased funds. Following one female bomber's attack on an Israeli supermarket Saudi TV ran a 'telethon' which raised $100m for the organisation concerned.
- Suicide bombings are often spectacular – think of those images of the Twin Towers – and they are frightening, disorientating, intimidating and psychologically disturbing.
- They are cheap – typically around less than $100 for an attack on a target in Palestine – and success is virtually guaranteed. Moreover they do not need complicated and potentially expensive mechanisms of escape and safekeeping.
- A successful suicide attack leaves no survivor to be captured and interrogated with the danger of their passing on information that might endanger other activists.
- As killing operations they are effective – in the period mentioned earlier suicide bombings formed 3 percent of all attacks world wide but accounted for 48 percent of all deaths due to terrorism. In Palestine 2000-2002 suicide bombers accounted for 1 percent of all attacks but for 44 percent of all deaths due to terrorism.

This is an impressive list of operational advantages for the organisation using such tactics. What then are the advantages or benefits for the perpetrators themselves?

Researchers have found that what motivates most suicide bombers is a sense of outrage at a situation they find both oppressive and undignified. What must be understood here is that the term "suicide" is misleading. Those of us from a different culture find it difficult to comprehend that young people should deliberately undertake a course of action knowing with almost complete certainty that they will not survive the experience.

Martyrs
The perpetrators and their families and communities do not see it like that. In particular activists operating within an Islamic frame of reference know that committing suicide is forbidden by the Koran. However they believe that there is a divine command to protect their religion and way of life from attack by infidel unbelievers. Verses from their holy texts can be quoted to justify this. By undertaking such attacks the activist is seen not as a suicide but as a martyr and as acting in a highly commendable way in line with a long and noble tradition.

In addition a potential Islamic martyr is assured by elders and clerics that they will suffer no pain, will avoid the supposed horrific purification period in the grave, and will go straight to heaven. Martyrs are also allowed the privilege of ensuring that 70 members of their family also go to heaven.

In the meantime the families left behind are assured of material support from various religious, charitable and philanthropic organisations – many of them with their own political agendas. The martyrs' families are also the recipients of a number of less economically tangible but nevertheless real benefits – the honour and respect of the community for example.

Where they exist then the religious beliefs of suicide bombers act as an enabling factor and not as a motivating one - they are the lubricant in the engine not the petrol in the tank. And just as the IRA bomber did not intend to turn Protestants and agnostics into Catholics so Muslim suicide bombers are not in the business of religious conversion.

There are patriotic, political, and nationalistic aspects to these altruistic acts which demonstrate how altruism – the undertaking of tasks primarily for the benefit of others – can be warped and distorted by political interests. The result is that this otherwise admirable human trait is made to work for the political interests of a minority bent on achieving political change often of an overtly nationalist kind

Political agenda
A brief examination of the political agendas of three organisations among many that advocate and pursue a policy of suicide bombing will illustrate what has been said above.

Osama bin Laden's messages to the world are invariable couched in religious terms but in reality his first and abiding concern relates to political conditions in Saudi Arabia. He is driven by a strong desire to replace the present rulers there – possibly with himself though this is never explicitly stated – and with an obsession to end United States presence in the Middle East. Two thirds of all Al Qaeda attacks originate from countries with a US military presence not from for example Sudan or Iran – both strongly Islamic states.

He castigates the United States because it supports regimes that he considers are corrupt, and because "It wants to occupy our countries, steal our resources" They should "Deal with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of subjugation, theft and occupation."

These demands seek alterations to geopolitical realities rather than changes in religious affiliation. After an analysis of bin Laden propaganda video tapes Fawaz Gerges of Columbia University has concluded that bin Laden and Al Qaeda are "religious nationalists" and that "under the thick layer of bin Laden's rhetoric and Islamic trans-nationalism lies an unconscious Saudi nationalist."

The Islamic Resistance Movement – better known as Hamas – aims "to raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine." That phrase is of course is double speak for the destruction of the state of Israel – not for religious reasons but for economic and political ones mainly to do with the dispossession and displacement of the Arab population living in Palestine prior to 1948.

Article 12 of their "Covenant" or manifesto reads: 

"Nationalism, from the point of view of the Islamic Resistance Movement, is part of the religious creed. If other nationalist movements are connected with materialistic, human or regional causes, [the] nationalism of the Islamic Resistance Movement has all these elements as well." (Emphasis added).

Islamic Jihad - also known as Hizballah (the Party of God) - is a radical Shia group formed in Lebanon in 1988. Their stated objectives include the expulsion of the United States and the French from Lebanon thus "Putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land" also expressed as "destroying American hegemony in our land." They claim to reject both Capitalism and Communism as both are incapable "of laying the foundations for a just society."

Here again we have a radical group that has gained seats in the legislature of a country only to find that the economic realities are not capable of political manipulation to the extent that they might wish. Faced with a number of intractable economic problems and increasing social unrest Hizballah has had to act like any other capitalist party and enter into negotiations over competing interests so as to maintain a hold on political power.

One further thing unites these organisations. They are led almost exclusively by members of what is an emerging privileged class. This class has its sights on political power and is intent on replacing the existing elite in societies and states that are not yet fully formed capitalist ones. They encourage and facilitate others to carry out acts of murder that they themselves are unwilling to undertake. In effect they are attempting to emerge as a new ruling class by clambering through the blood and over the bodies of our class.

Gwynn Thomas

In Theory . . . (2007)

Latest post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back:

Socialist Party of Great Britain member, Brian Gardner, reflects on the SPGB's 2007 Summer School that took place this past weekend in Birmingham.

FIRCROFT SUMMER SCHOOL

This weekend some 40-plus members, sympathisers and Standard-subscribers from as far afield as Italy, Turkey and USA gathered for a weekend of discussion and debate at the annual summer school organised by Birmingham Branch.

Under the theme “Thinkers of the 20th Century” a range of ideas – from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, information technology, literature and philosophy - were reviewed from a socialist perspective and much heated debate followed.

It's not surprising that a recurring issue throughout such a themed weekend is that of “freedom”. Much abused in everyday currency, “freedom” often translates as little more than lower taxes and fewer regulations, issues of little or no concern to world socialists. In contrast, socialists are intensely interested in freedom, whether its the freedom we have to surpass the gene as a constraint on how we live, the freedom to work co-operatively in software development/use software without restrictions, or the more abstract freedom of the individual under the state.

The dystopian visions of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) and George Orwell (1984) then, formed a large part of the discussions around the first two talks from Richard Headicar and Mike Foster respectively. What sort of state do we live in now? Which dismal projection has survived the best? Probably a bit of both is the answer: Orwell's boot stamping on the face is still prevalent in many parts of the world as the market system emerges to an ungrateful population of new wage-earners. “Late” capitalist states on the other hand have clearly evolved more complex and subtle forms of oppression, including of course the diversions of Big Brother (the TV “reality” show) and the dubious freedom of consumer choice.

To what extent can you separate the thinker from the thoughts? While Orwell got his hands dirty down mines, in hotel kitchens and most famously on the frontline in Spain, Aldous Huxley in common with most of the other thinkers risked little more than a paper cut in the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury. Does this influence how we read each author?

As Marx famously noted, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world the point is to change it”. Someone who has done very little interpretation of the world, but by contrast has undeniably changed it is Richard Stallman. A software engineer turned intellectual property activist, Stallman developed GNU software, CopyLeft and the free software movement. This has inverted contract law to ensure that CopyLeft software (such as Linux operating system) gets the fullest expression of its use value (ie it is free to copy and use), but has effectively no exchange value as users have to agree to make available and not restrict access to any amendments made to it. Tristan Miller discussed how this little oasis of “socialistic” production has grown unstoppably within the body of capitalism and effectively mirrors – albeit within the software and digital music communities – all the features of “from each according to ability, to each according to need”.

The subject of freedom of the individual phenotype (eg human) as opposed to the dubious constraints of biological determinism arose during Adam Buick's introduction to the cultural anthropologist Ashley Montagu, who is best known for his contributions during the middle part of last century to the nature v nurture debate. It is likely that his writings will stand the test of time better than the more recent fashions of biological determinism - sociobiology and evolutionary psychology - as typified by the “popular" science writers Richard Dawkins, E O Wilson and Steven Pinker. If human nature is slowly becoming less of an ideological “barrier to socialism” than it once was, it will be due to the painstaking work of real scientists such as Montagu.

Simon Wigley got the short straw in having to present the ideas of the Frankfurt School of philosophy shortly after a large Saturday lunch. He stuck to the brief given to him admirably however, particularly given that he had little enthusiasm for these ideas, as he made clear. Whilst some in the audience wanted to shoot the piano player, others were grateful that Simon had done the hard work of reading this stuff and translating it from the English for our benefit.

Personally speaking I gained most from this talk – even if it was only to gain confidence that the Frankfurt emperors were indeed just as stark naked as I had always suspected, and that rather than being extensions to marxist philosophy, the ideas of Adorno, Habermas et al (along with the post-modern ideas they set the scene for) are negations of class-based analysis, of the enlightenment, and even of the scientific method that drove it.

The material conditions of capitalism really haven't changed that much in the last century – and our philosophies really dont look like they need to change much either. Anyone who thinks that world socialists are intellectuals, academics or armchair philosophers would have been pleasantly surprised at the disdain with which these ideas – far removed from anything actually to do with working class experience – were discussed. Habermas could have dug coal during the Spanish Civil War for all I know, but – judged on their own merit - his ideas still should not be taken seriously.

In summary, there is of course a perpetual tension between theory and practice that no political organisation, whether liberal, marxist or anarchist, gets right all the time. However, assisted by a plentiful supply (according to need of course) of the local Black Country beer, and the opportunity to catch up with old comrades and new sympathisers, most attendees I spoke with left the weekend feeling stimulated, reinvigorated and better-prepared for the more practical need to spread the socialist case. Surely, the ideal balance between ideas and action.

Brian Gardner

Greasy Pole: Blair bites the hand that fed him (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It must have taken a considerable effort of amnesia for Blair to attack the very media he has courted and manipulated"

Among the associated discomforts of the event, the process of dying is said - by some who have yet to experience it - to activate a flash review of the more guilt-worthy episodes in one's life. So was it that Tony Blair, as he clung on in the dying days of his prime ministership, became moved to look back on the style of, and his government's relationship with, the media. Astonishing though this was it was made more so by the distortion which Blair applied to his recall of certain events and his disregard of others.

About a fortnight before he was due to hand over to Gordon Brown Blair revealed to the waiting world the fruits of his meditation about the media. They were not those of a satisfied, reassured man:

"The fear of missing out means today's media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no-one dares miss out . . .  the media has become dangerous because of its desire for stories with "impact" that will allow it to stand apart from the rest of the media. This comes second to accuracy."

Morgan
The use of the word "feral" is interesting in that it does not chime in with the usual vocabulary of Blair's oratory. More often it is a word resorted to in panic-inducing media reports of offences by youth gangs in the frenzied centres or hopeless estates of the cities. Used in that way it encourages a concept of crime as a social ailment more susceptible to cure by harsh, confining penalties - behaviour to be tough on - rather than as a doomed response to conditioned alienation - a cause to be tough on. It recalls the time when Blair was eagerly grasping for power, showing a budding skill in using the very media he now condemns to stimulate the kind of impulsive, ill-considered response to a social problem he judged would yield him the support he needed to realise his ambition.

Among those under the lash of Blair's criticism there was one who cheerfully admitted to being a "feral beast". Piers Morgan, during a long, and not always reputable, media career, was editor of the Daily Mirror for about nine years until May 2004. At that time he was sacked after the Mirror had published photographs, on its front page as well as inside, which seemed to be of British soldiers assaulting and humiliating Iraqi prisoners of war. The Mirror hailed this as a world exclusive and there was an appropriate response, from the Chief of the General Staff ("…appalling conduct…contravenes the British Army's high standards of conduct"); Downing Street ("We expect the highest standards of conduct from our forces in Iraq"); and the then Defence Minister ("…behaviour clearly unacceptable"). Rival newspapers were sourly envious while much of the world media clamoured to be allowed to publish the pictures. Without a doubt, this was a story with what Blair later called "impact", designed to drive up circulation and thereby inflate profits. The problem - for Morgan and for the Mirror - was that the pictures had been faked. And a problem for Blair was that the Mirror and its embarrassing editor were Labour supporters; in the midst of the crisis over the photos, Blair sent a handwritten note to Morgan: "Thank you for the Mirror's renewed support, it's come at a good time". Although the "renewed" support did not include backing the Iraq invasion, which Morgan described as "a senseless, illegal war".

Marr
A media rival of Morgan, also thrown off an editor's chair, is Andrew Marr, whose amiable, interesting face has recently invaded our homes with his TV series The History of Modern Britain (in which some of his conclusions are open to debate). One of the upward steps in Marr's journalistic career saw him, in 1996, editor of the Independent, a newspaper apparently well-suited to his reputation as a centre left commentator on the seamy world of British politics. His design for the Independent was for it to be tough and serious, read by about 200,000 tough, serious people. Not, in other words, at all like Morgan's Mirror. This promised to be hard going in the ruthless broadsheet circulation war in which the victor was likely to be, not the best written, most courageous, widest informing, newspaper but the one able to compete for sales through cutting its price or with promotions like give-away CDs. Most to be feared in this struggle was The Times which, backed by Murdoch's riches, was able to sell below its market price.

At the time the Independent was almost half owned by the Mirror Group, which put it under the influence of the odious David Montgomery, who was himself struggling to resuscitate his employable appeal to newspaper proprietors after being fired by Murdoch in response to a disastrous launching of Today. Montgomery's vision of the Independent was very different from that of Marr; he saw it as a kind of yuppie version of the Daily Mirror, appealing to Rolex-wearing, Porsche-driving, "aspirational" (another word in present favour with New Labour) people. This style was supposed to raise productivity through savage budget cuts and sacking a host of people, especially those whose function was to report the news as distinct from composing a column about those "interesting" people. Marr did not see this as the way out for the Independent which was why he had to go, although he did have the consolation of the staff giving him a send-off which included the honour of "banging out" – an old ritual involving the wielding of printers' hammers. In fact, soon after being sacked Marr was enticed back but it was not long before he finally left.

Sucking Up
Like Morgan, Marr is no blind supporter of Blair and his party. In his book My Trade he comments on Labour's "sophisticated, endless media strategy" and its "ruthless discipline on its main figures". Tony Blair, he writes was "adept at telling people what they wanted to hear…Tough on crime with the Daily Mail; tough on the causes of crime with the Guardian" . And this was before New Labour had got into power. One of Marr's conclusions is that the party's "relationship with rich, and sometimes dodgy, characters was no purer than the Tories' had been in the bad old days of 'sleaze' ". Clearly, it must have taken a considerable effort of amnesia for Blair to attack the very media he has courted and manipulated, sucking up to Murdoch and his rags, playing on the neuroses of Daily Mail addicts. The media reflects the society it operates in, poisoned by the reality that its first regard must be for sales and profits, a society where feral beasts roam because only the most savage survive.

Ivan

The Mentality and Criminality of War

Latest post from the Mailstrom blog:

the mentality and criminality of war

"The brutalisation of American soldiers and the inhumanity of the Iraq war has been reported by The Independent".

Everything Free (1999)

Book Review from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nous qui desirons sans fin. By Raoul Vaneigem.

Vaneigem is a Belgian writer who was active along with another, Guy Debord, in an organisation called the Situationist International in Paris during the 1960s. The international bit was the triumph of hope over fact—there must have been all of a dozen of them.

Nevertheless a book he wrote at the time The Revolution of Everyday Life achieved a sizeable distribution and was translated into several other languages. It was well-received in the US which, like France, was going through a political upheaval at the time, caused mainly in the US by the Vietnam War and in France by the Algerian War. Britain at the time was contenting itself with the Beatles, Carnaby Street fashions, and the Mini, both the car and the skirt.

There are several problems for an English reader with this new book. Abstractions in English are derived from Franco-Latin but in French the same words are not necessarily abstractions, so the book will seem to be more abstract than it actually is. Add to this the author's love of paradox, irony and wit and English readers could have a hard time. Nor are we helped by the way the book is put together. There is no sustained argument but, as the back cover puts it, only "brief analyses and theses which offer a critical examination of a market society in decline and of a living society called upon to replace it".

Vaneigem is no reformist or derivative from Leninism. He is firmly on the libertarian socialist side of the line. His earlier book had a curious choice of heroes: blood and guts characters like the 19th century thief and murderer Lacenaire, who went to the guillotine, and was introduced to us as a character in the great classic film Les Enfants du Paradis. Another was the poet Lautreamont, who also lived and died violently. But that book was thirty years ago.

Now, after many other books, he writes:

Market civilisation is founded on forbidding anything for free. From this comes the blocks placed on our wants, on their refinement, on their harmonisation, and the on the fulfilment of a human future. This has been the first era to achieve this. It will be the last when, stimulated by the gifts of our natural energies, we have decided to no longer pay for anything at all in whatever way.

Ken Smith

Free Access to What? Some Problems of Consumption in Socialism (2007)

From the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We say that socialism will be "a society of free access" (see article in last month's issue). However, one obvious but rarely clarified question is: free access to what? Even if everything produced is made freely available to people, how will the range of goods and services to be supplied be determined?

One answer might be: if producing a thing is technically possible and if someone somewhere wants it, then it will be supplied. But most people might feel that a single individual should not have so much leverage over others' work. A rule might be established that a new product will be supplied once a certain number of people have registered a request for it. The number of requests required could vary, depending (say) on the difficulties involved in providing the new product, but also on how essential it was to those asking for it. Thus, specialised medications and prosthetics would surely be prepared even for very small numbers of people suffering from rare conditions – something that capitalist firms are reluctant to do because it is unlikely to yield a profit.

However, it is possible that socialist society may decide, either by a formal procedure or spontaneously, not to produce certain things even if quite a few people want them. Such decisions might be made for a variety of reasons, good and not so good.

Dangerous products
First, majorities may vote against producing certain goods on the grounds that they endanger the consumer and/or other people. Examples might include guns for hunting, explosives for demolition, porn, and highly addictive substances (which might be made available only through treatment programmes). Conceivably, majorities might go too far and refuse to authorise some goods and services on vague and inadequate grounds such as being "inconsistent with socialist values."

Second, the production of certain goods may be judged too unpleasant or dangerous, to producers or to local residents, even after all possible safety precautions have been taken. Consider bird's nest soup, a delicacy treasured by gourmets for its supposed medicinal and aphrodisiac properties. Collectors stand on bamboo scaffolding to harvest swifts' nests from high up on cave walls, at considerable risk to their lives. Capitalism resolves such conflicts of interest in favour of the consumer because people will do just about anything to survive. But members of socialist society, like the wealthy of today, will be free of economic duress: their needs will be met as of right. This will not undermine their willingness to work, but they are likely to be rather picky in choosing the work they do.

Few miners (to take a more important example) will be keen to go on working underground. Whether or not society adopts a formal decision to abolish the most unpleasant kinds of work, people will "vote with their feet". The issue is how society reacts. Unless people can be gently persuaded to continue temporarily with work they want to leave, society may have to accept the situation and adjust to the resulting change in the range of products available.

Free access to outer space?
What about goods that may not be dangerous to consume or produce but do incorporate large amounts of labour, energy, and materials, with a correspondingly large environmental impact? Will socialist society ensure free access to luxury goods like those currently consumed by the wealthy – for instance, the "off road vehicle" sold as a boys' toy by Harrods (see http://www.harrods.com)?

It may be objected that the members of socialist society will not want to ape the lifestyle of the idle rich under capitalism. However, a demand for highly intricate products need have nothing to do with frivolous self-indulgence. It may arise from a spreading interest in artistic self-expression and scientific exploration. There may be numerous amateur scientists clamouring for the latest sophisticated equipment for their home labs. Will socialist society provide free access to electron microscopes? Or to space travel for the millions of people who dream of venturing into outer space? (At present the Russian Space Agency offers trips to the International Space Station for $1 million.)

There is also a class of "locational" goods that can never be supplied in abundance because they are tied to specific locations. Whatever precautions are taken, for example, the number of tourists allowed into nature reserves must be restricted if ecologically sensitive habitats are not to be degraded.

Another knotty question is how the principle of free access is to be applied in the sphere of housing. One of the top priorities when socialism is established will be to replace substandard housing stock so that everyone has access to spacious and comfortable housing. Presumably certain standards will be set for new residential construction – quite high ones, no doubt. But surely the new housing will not be as spacious and luxurious as the most expensive residences under capitalism. People will not have free access to their own marble palaces.

Restricted access?
In short, for certain categories of goods and services free access is bound to be infeasible, certainly in the early stages of socialist society and possibly even in its maturity. The real choice in these cases is between non-provision and restricted provision. So alongside free access stores, there may be restricted access outlets for various kinds of specialised goods, perhaps using some sort of coupon system.

It is conceivable that socialist society will decide that things that cannot – for whatever reason – be produced in abundance should not be produced at all. Such a decision would have obvious disadvantages, but it would preserve the principle of "free access to what has been produced" and avoid the difficult problems associated with restricting access, such as enforcement.

However, we can envision restricted access arrangements that socialist society is much more likely to find acceptable and on which it may, indeed, extensively rely. People may have free access to many facilities at local and regional centres but without the option of taking equipment home. Museums and art galleries that do not charge for entry exemplify this kind of arrangement. Similarly, there could be community centres equipped for specialised cuisine, exercise and sports, arts and music making, and scientific exploration.

There could also be depots where people have access to specialised goods – for instance, do-it-yourself and gardening equipment, and also motor vehicles – on a borrow-and-return basis, as in libraries. The staff at these depots would also maintain the equipment in good working order and provide advice and assistance as needed. This would be much more efficient than keeping machines like lawn mowers at home, where they stand unused 99 percent of the time.

The solution to everything?

To sum up, it would be wrong to play down the scope that socialism offers for the solution of our problems. Enormous resources will be freed up when we get rid of the waste inherent in capitalism. But the new society will face urgent tasks that will also be daunting in their enormity. It is hard to judge which enormity is likely to be the greater. Socialists do not assume that socialism will solve all problems at once, and prefer to think about socialism – and especially about its crucial early stages – in a practical and realistic spirit.

Stefan

The French elections: Mr Nasty wins (2007)

From the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent round of elections in France resulted in the rout of the French Left. Were the workers wrong not to vote for them?

I wonder if you can still buy that little gadget which used to be sold in joke shops. It was a black plastic box with a slot on the top. You put a penny in the slot and it made a weird grinding sound which suggested that something amazing was about to happen. After about 15 seconds a small flap opened and a plastic hand flashed out and pulled the penny down into the box from which it could not be rescued.

Clunk!

The sudden shock of seeing one's own credulity taken advantage of and the resulting gasp of recognition is what many people may have experienced after the French Presidential electoral campaign in May. Nicolas Sarkozy – a kind of Gallic equivalent of Margaret Thatcher – is now in power for the next five years. France is no longer the exception in Europe.

Strangely enough although he managed to gain a large slice of the working-class vote, Sarkozy actually promised very little to the workers. Indeed he can be counted on to increase exploitation, unemployment and poverty. The reformist "Socialist Party" (PS) represented by Segolene Royal promised a hell of a lot more but the voters seemed unconvinced.

As always the presidential election was presented by some as an almighty struggle between Left and Right with Sarkozy quite effectively playing the role of Mr Nasty. By contrast, Segolene Royal proved to be completely ineffective. Her insipid and uninspired version of social reformism fooled no-one. To make matter worse, she presented herself in interviews as someone with a calling, an instrument of destiny. (Well, she does come from the same area as Joan of Arc).

For his supporters Sarkozy was represented as the epitome of modernity, economic liberalism, dynamism, and Blairism. His early morning jogging sessions contrasting with the more sedate political tradition of the conservatives in the party he inherited from Jacques Chirac. Royal was castigated for having expressed the outdated values of the Left, public sector immobilism, heavy taxes, anti-americanism and (don't laugh) Marxism.

So much for the media Punch and Judy stuff. In reality this was a typical election under modern capitalism. Media constructed stereotypes, disinformation, mystification and rumour crowded out reasoned argument and the impartial presentation of the facts. In the final analysis, the differences between the candidates were often minimal.

European Constitution
Anyone who knows anything about French politics knows that the real agenda of the election was the European Constitution problem. Because of growing distrust of an increasingly free-market Europe, the projected constitution originally dreamed up by Giscard D'Estaing was thrown out in a referendum in 2005. Besides being a set-back for capitalist politicians bent on creating a single competitive space to counter the other big capitalist nations, this was an issue which neatly divided the PS into two groups, the pro-constitution leadership and the anti-constitution left-wing with its popular base.

As a result Royal was obliged to promise yet another referendum on the issue whilst Sarkozy promised to negotiate a mini-constitution which would be ratified by parliament, short-circuiting the scruffy Euro-sceptics who were inevitably enough presented as 'extremists'. With Royal's idea being a clear non-starter, the capitalist money was clearly on Sarkozy from the start, all the more since Sarko's treaty could be ratified with the social aspects of the constitution edited out.

One of Sarko's first moves after the election therefore was to meet Angela Merkel to talk about the issue. With Merkel's government currently putting the German welfare state on a slimfast diet with active help from the Social Democrats this is one obstacle out of the way. In Britain, Sarko can count on New Labour's dyed-in-the-wool opposition to a social Europe.

As for French PS, well, their Mr Europe - Jean-Pierre Jouyet - has just joined Sarko's government. He was already on a train to Brussels on 15 May and nobody is calling him a traitor to the socialist cause (not even Royal, a close personal friend)

Thirty-five hour week
With the one really important electoral issue for the capitalist class out of the way, the secondary but routine issues of screwing the working-class called for more expeditive methods.

Shortly after the election the various trade union leaders could be seen going to see the new President one by one. (Trade union unity is not fashionable in France. Each union leader was interviewed separately.)Wearing the pinched faces of tribal chieftains invited to meet the new colonial administrator, the leaders attempted to gain a little negotiating leeway from a government which is fully committed to ramming home some pretty unpopular measures: restrictions on the right to strike, more flexible employment contracts, attacks on public sector retirement pensions, restrictions on entitlement to unemployment benefits etc.

Strangely enough, there was never any question of abolishing the 35-hour week; the flagship reform of the Jospin government, despite the fact that the conservatives had been moaning about how it penalized (their) business interests for the last five years. In fact, because the 35-hour week permitted capitalists to modulate working hours to meet fluctuations, it gave the employers the flexibility they needed to meet fluctuations in demand at low cost.

This issue did however allow Sarkozy to propose the defiscalization of overtime as a solution to the problem of a low and falling standard of living: 'work more to earn more' being the slogan. Not everyone was taken in by this idea. After all, overtime already tends to be paid at a higher rate and it's the bosses who decide the working week anyway. And it's difficult to see how this could be a solution to the deep-seated unemployment problem of the French economy. Joblessness is currently running at 9 percent.

Other measures introduced by Sarko include the usual neo-liberal medicine of tax breaks for the rich, the reduction of taxes on inheritance, and - a lollipop to the so-called middle-classes - tax allowances for workers with mortgages. The problem is that all these gifts have to be paid out of a state budget severely limited by the heavy and growing national debt currently equivalent to 60% of GNP. The solution is the so-called 'social VA.', the idea of shifting the burden onto the population as a whole remembering that the workers spend proportionately more on consumer goods than the wealthy.

Were the workers stupid?
Of course, it's tempting to see in the election of Sarko yet another illustration of the stupidity and blindness of the workers. This theme is doing the rounds right now together with the Leninist theme of the need for an enlightened leadership.Why didn't the workers vote for their proclaimed friends on the Left who promised them so much more? Why did they vote for their open class enemies?

In fact, on the European issue, as we have seen, Sarko and Sego probably shared a lot more than they are prepared to admit. Royal's party led by Jospin accepted a European agreement which committed France to raising the official retirement age to 65 though this has yet to be take place.

It could be argued that the 'social VAT' issue is conclusive proof of the stupidity of the French workers. But here, of course, there has been deliberate deception by the Sarkozy government. The measure was in fact deliberately downplayed by ministers until Fabius, a former French Prime Minister in the Mitterrand government, craftily winkled it out of the economics minister on TV.(This is already causing chaos in the government's presentation of its 'reforms')

On the other hand, Fabius will be well aware that this type of regressive tax is currently being practiced by the coalition government in Germany. It therefore has the official backing of the Social Democrats, the European allies of the French PS.

As for the defiscalization of overtime issue this has to be placed in context. The PS's 35-hour week has proved to be very unpopular with production line workers who now find their leisure periods moved around at the whim of their employer in a way which is often totally destructive of family life. Many have also suffered from stagnant wages as a result of these changes. The promise of more work for more pay clearly appeals to workers who are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.

Royal's electoral programme was a barely credible wish-list of social reforms, many of them very desirable in themselves: slightly higher minimum wages, more money for hospitals, universities, schools, better pensions and so on. However when she was asked what miracle ingredient was going to be used to finance her programme (somewhat compromised by the profligate State spending of the last 25 years and the resulting heavy national debt) she mentioned 'growth' on the assumption that the French economy was just waiting for a nod from the left to get its arse into gear. In actual fact, whoever won the election a period of working-class belt-tightening was clearly inevitable and only a fool could believe in the promises of the P.S.

But if the official reformists in the PS were prepared to make the most unreasonable promises in order to get elected, the Leninist left was hardly less extravagant. And here there were three official Trotskyist candidates competing with the Communist Party to make bigger promises. All of them promised better public services, higher wages, better pensions and a reduction in unemployment presumably on the assumption that capitalism existed simply for the benefit of the workers. Few took them seriously.

In the end, Sarkozy's triumph was largely due to the confidence which people place in capitalist politicians of both Left and Right. Sarko's programme, which will not in any way satisfy the expectations of the workers who voted for him, seemed almost purpose-built to create a hysterical leftwing reaction. Because the Mr Nasty image presented by Sarkozy provided only a very wispy smoke-screen behind which the Left could hide its manifold weaknesses, the Right had a strategic advantage from the start.

But then again this is the way elections always take place in capitalism. Voter invest a lot of hope in the mystifying images that are placed before them. There is a lot of noise and movement, a feeling of anticipation.

And then the penny drops.

Malcolm Mansfield

Being Ernest (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Hart: Operation Supergoose. Timberline Press $15. (Available from Amazon)

A satirical novel that pokes fun at America's rulers and makes some good political points in a humourous way - that sums up this book. The hero is Lieutenant Ernest Candide and his military superior is General Pangloss, both references to Voltaire's eighteenth-century novel Candide.

Candide starts out as an all-American hero (sorry, Plunderian hero, as he's a citizen of Plunderland). But Plunderland's president is Buzz Twofer II, and the vice-president is Chain Dickey, so you get the idea of where the satire is aimed. The factory which makes official Plunderland flags is burnt down, and Candide is ordered to track down and kill the leader of the terrorists. The Committee for a World Ascendant Plunderland get the war they want, together with tax cuts.

Like his namesake, Candide is initially completely naive, accepting a rosy-coloured view of Plunderland's history (for instance, the native Plunderians had poor hygiene, hence they contracted smallpox). But after various adventures, including a stay in Guantanamo, he comes to see things differently. Just thinking for himself, rather than accepting what he's been taught, is the big step in his political development. As General Pangloss says when a prosecution witness at one of Candide's trials, 'When a soldier thinks, the whole military raison d'etre trembles and threatens to collapse . . .  not thinking has made me the man I am today.'

A book by Chomsky is among those that help Candide see what has been going on, and his new view of his country's history includes: 'Cubaland, Isle of Haiti, Puerta Rita, Panamaland and others were conquered by U.S. Marines and forced to pay tribute as little colonies, with fruit, sugar, cigars, naval bases and nubile women.' He turns down a request to run for governor on behalf of a new political party and prefers to live quietly with his family (cultivating his garden, as Voltaire had it).

Operation Supergoose is mostly great fun, with some nice swipes at Twofer and other politicians, and good exposes of Plunderian/American actions. Occasionally the satire is dropped in favour of more straightforward presentation, for instance on Zionia/Shrinkistan (Israel/Palestine), and this is less effective. And as Hart says at the end, imagine there really were a Plunderland and how people might act to change it. Or, indeed, to change not just one country but the whole world.

Paul Bennett

Smile, Smile, Smile! But Why?

Latest post to the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back:

Smile, Smile, Smile! But Why?

Pathfinders: Upload, download, freeload! (2007)

The Pathfinders column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine a wall that reaches to the sky and stretches to both horizons. You are standing on one side of it. On the other side is Everything. Everything humanity can produce, its food, its art, its society. There is only one way through that wall, through a tiny hole. You move closer. The hole in the wall is a cash-machine. On the screen it says 'Entry Option 1: Pay Cash'. You have no cash. You press Cancel. The screen says 'Entry Option 2: Build Wall.'

The people who put that wall in place are the builders of capitalism, which claims to provide but really deprives. What choice do you have? You help them build their wall.

From paranoid Pink Floyd, let's cut to an upbeat children's TV favourite, only this time with a Marxist makeover. Enter Bob the Unbuilder. Bob is going to show us a clever trick with capitalism, aren't you Bob? Can we wreck it? Yes we can! And how does Bob unbuild the wall? Obviously, by taking away the bricks. And he's doing a very good job of it, in the one sector of capitalist wealth and endeavour that is hardest to build a wall round - commercial information.

A digital book, a CD, a software program or a movie, unlike chocolate cake or gold bullion, can be 'stolen' an infinite number of times without ever disappearing from the owner's table. In UK law, the act of theft involves an intention to deprive the former owner permanently, but in duplicating data this clearly cannot apply. Thus, for those with a vested interest in depriving us of access, this strange theft /non-theft creates a special category of problem, one which they struggle to make the rest of us take seriously.

The information revolution has given rise to a debate about what it is reasonable to 'protect' - that is, build a wall round, and what ought on the other hand to be free. At one extreme we find the film and music industries, whose main argument is that 'stealing' their produce reduces the population of potential buyers, thus 'permanently depriving' them of revenue. But is that true? At the other end, Bob and his little army of anonymous software diggers and rippers, while busily exposing every encryption key the capitalists can come up with, will argue just as cogently that most of these so-called potential buyers are not really buyers anyway because they don't have £13.99 to waste on a stupid film they'll only watch once in any case. Who is right? Nobody knows. Nobody has ever done an economic study which proved it either way (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection). However, producers are only taking the same line as supermarkets, which are well known for pouring bleach on their skips of discarded fresh fruit and vegetables, to prevent poor people eating for free.

And why should anything be free, after all? This is a world where everyone pays. Would you agree to forgo the money from your magnum opus or your hit single? Well, it's a circular argument. We all want money because everyone wants money from us. That's why capitalism has to be abolished all at once, or not at all. But it's very strange that, while baked beans are even cheaper than chips, you don't see people vehemently debating that they ought to be free, as of 'right'. Yet in the parallel universe of information technology, we see precisely that debate. If software is useful everywhere, say the cybercommunists, it ought to be free everywhere. And Bob and his hackers, not waiting for the gainsayers to be won over, dig in and make it so.

In reality, what is going on is not a moral debate about rights but a digital class war. Those who own and control - or try to control - the means of production and distribution of information, software and entertainment, are doing everything they can to prevent the rest of us getting our hands on it for free. And they would succeed easily, but for Bob the Unbuilder, an unpaid amateur computer nerd who sees any copy-prevention system as a challenge to his ingenuity. System after system has been hacked, broken or reverse-engineered. The industry-standard system for videotape copy-protection was defeated by the sublimely simple act of passing a magnet over the cassette spine. The 40-bit encryption Content Scramble System for DVD was meant to be unbreakable, but was broken within three years, while the industry has been chained to producing the same unmodified system for the following decade for fear of customer backlash from existing DVD player owners. The very latest high definition DVD encryption system has been broken in just three months, with the code-keys published everywhere on the internet and even being sported on t-shirts (New Scientist, June 9).

But in case one is tempted to laugh at their incompetence, the boffins of Digital Rights Management think-tanks have a serious set of problems to face. They can't block data-copying completely because of the many legitimate purposes copying might have. If they do make copying too difficult or the authentication procedure too arduous, they can end up encouraging consumers to prefer no-effort cracked copies over the 'genuine' paid-for article. There can be legal and political objections too, if the barriers created prevent free trade or transgress a nation's own laws, a situation which arose with the film industry's practice of 'region coding' and which was challenged in the Australian High Court in 2005, where it was ruled that "modification of devices to circumvent region lockout is allowed under Australian law" (http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki /Regional_lockout).

Ultimately the wall-builders are up against the irreducible problem of the 'analog hole'. No matter what the encryption system used, at some point the film, or song, has to be decrypted before it gets to your eye or ear, otherwise you won't understand it. All a hero of the free-entertainment movement has to do is intercept that signal after it has been decrypted, at the weakest point of its security, its 'analog hole'. This interception can be very ingenious or it can be very simple, as simple as taking a videocam into a cinema and then uploading the result to the internet.

The reason why all this is such a problem now is because the internet has changed the rules of engagement. Thirty years ago, even if you copied a film on video or an album on tape, who could you send it to? Now, with fast broadband connections, clever compression technology and the widespread use of peer to peer file-sharing, which speeds up traffic by taking the strain off central server points, 'freeloading' has gone global. And on the other side of the wall, the telecoms companies have gone global too, merging with the entertainment industry to create a new media mega-sector whose common interests are in beating the freeloaders.

It would be ironic if the freeloading bonanza became a victim of its own success, and the sheer volume of traffic brought the internet crashing to its knees, as some pundits are indeed predicting (BBC Online, June 15). Catastrophic network overload would be followed, one presumes, by a dull cyber-winter in which we rediscover books and boardgames.

A sense of futility seems to hang over the film and music industry in their attempts to stop illicit copying. Many companies have just given up, considering the game not worth the candle. Others are hanging in there, launching new UK commercials aimed at making video pirates look like sad and pathetic losers. "We want to create a social stigma. It's been done before, with drinking and driving," says one such champion of Hollywood's deprived millionaires, "We want to make people feel grubby" (New Scientist, June 9). It won't work though. There is a world of difference between drink-driving and copping a quick freebie off Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Besides, anyone who reads stories about the growing rich and poor divide (Daily Mail, June 21), or the fact that of the hundreds of people in Britain on salaries over £10m a year., only 65 are paying any income tax (BBC Online, June 21), is not going to feel too guilty about their own peccadilloes. In capitalism, most people know who the real 'grubby' thieves are.

The really dazzling question a starry-eyed socialist futurologist might like to contemplate is this: what if, with advances in nanotechnology, we could copy real-world goods, like food, using waste materials? And then what if Bob and his Unbuilders got their hands on the copy-prevention systems?

Paddy Shannon

Bragging Rights (2007)

Book Review from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Progressive Patriot by Billy Bragg (Black Swan, £7.99)

Singer and songwriter Billy Bragg has produced an engaging and enjoyable read, in an attempt to search for a meaning to his working class upbringing and his relationship to the place he was born, Barking in Essex.

This is a romp through political and economic history as well as a look at popular music and culture as Bragg experienced it growing up in the 60s and 70s. The chapters that work best are those where Bragg examines his family origins in East London, analysing key historical events from a family perspective and using the historical artefacts they left behind to do it, from pictures of dockland trade union struggles to wartime diaries and gas masks. As might be expected, the chapters focusing on Bragg's formative musical influences are good too, and he has an ability to set them in a social and political setting in a way that links his personal development to wider developments: most notably the vestiges of the hippy era, punk rock and 'Rock Against Racism'.

His ultimate aim though is to 'reclaim the flag', finding a meaning and purpose in Englishness that transcends and even nullifies the Little Englander nationalism of the Euro-sceptics and the outright racism of the BNP. This is a more difficult task and one that is inherently problematic. For while having pride in tangible places that have meaning to those who live there (in Bragg's case, Barking) is one thing, having patriotic pride in entirely artificial constructs such as nations is another thing altogether.

In effect Bragg tries to create a left-wing English nationalism that rivals the leftism of the nationalist parties in Wales and Scotland, as if Welsh and Scottish nationalism had somehow been a force for radical politics (rather than another nationalist dead-end) that England can emulate in some way. He writes intelligently about England and the Empire, and the methods through which it came about, yet can still find time to bemoan the fact that England was the only country in the last World Cup without its own parliament, passport and national anthem.

If Bragg's anti-racism and pride in his class is highly commendable, then this experimental flirting with nationalism (whether English, British, or any other) is as dangerous and misplaced as his long-documented support for the Labour Party. While the book is entertaining and worth reading, it suggests that his 'search for belonging' that is the book's subtitle, still has some way to go.

DAP

The Play Pen Proletariat

Latest post from the SPGB blog, Socialism Or Your Money Back:

The tv that we watched as kids . . . and the message it holds.

As a parent of a mentally retarded daughter whose mental age is stuck permanently at two, I get to watch a lot of TV programs and videos designed for young children.

While many parents may try to protect their children from the realities of life under capitalism, those realities inevitably start to intrude at quite an early age. Children become aware, for instance, that a mysterious thing called money is needed to get things and that some people have much more of it than others. However, many of the programs they watch present an ideal play world in which a benevolent parental figure like Barney or the Bear in the Big Blue House looks after all their needs and teaches them an egalitarian ethic of give and take, taking turns, and fair shares. The most isolated and self-contained play world is, no doubt, that of the Telly Tubbies, who play together harmoniously in an empty idyllic landscape, fed and kept clean by the robot Noonoo.

Some programs do set the children’s play against a sporadically glimpsed background of adult life. Some attempt may even be made to reassure children regarding some of the adult problems that affect them, such as divorce. And yet the most discomfiting realities remain concealed.

You would never guess from Sesame Street, for instance, that the great majority of Americans live in racially segregated areas. Although Sesame Street is evidently an inner city neighborhood, everyone seems to live in modest comfort, no one is on drugs, and any hint of violence is taboo. The employment relationship, which dominates most people’s lives, is relegated to the margins of awareness by making most of the main adult characters self-employed (Maria and Louis have a fixit shop, Alan has a store, Gina is a vet, etc.). Other programs are set in a community of family farms, achieving the same effect.

Rather than avoiding the issue of employment, one British series openly glorifies the institution. Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends are trains and other animated machines on the Island of Sodor. They all work for a man named Sir Topham Hatt, who is forever telling them off for “causing confusion and delay” when they forget his instructions and follow their own inclinations.

The most honest children’s program I have seen is a cartoon called Arthur (an eight-year-old anthropomorphic aardvark). It confronts the viewer with social inequality as a problematic phenomenon, featuring characters in families at various economic levels, from Buster and his impoverished single-parent mother to Muffy, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy businessman. When Francine is embarrassed at having a trash collector as her father, he demonstrates to her and her friends the social value of his work. And Arthur himself learns that injustice is also a real problem when he is unjustly accused of stealing money that belongs to his school. Of course, he is vindicated at the last moment. Certain limits must be observed, after all, when revealing to children the existence of injustice.

Stefan

Check out this event: 'Capitalism, conspiracies and credulity'

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When: Tuesday Jun 19, 2007 at 8:00 PM
Topic: 'Capitalism, conspiracies and credulity'
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Economists - not on this planet

From the WSM website

Most modern textbooks will contain a variation of the following famous definition of economics as: 'a science which studies human behaviour as a relation between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.'

This makes economics the study of the logic of choice in conditions of scarcity. This is not how most people would understand the term, but check for yourself and you will see that the word scarcity occurs again and again in textbook definitions of economics. Paul Samuelson in his Economics, in a very widely studied economics textbook, speaks of a "large scarcity" and says that if goods were not scarce then there would be no role for a science of economics. So, on these definitions, economics is seen as the study of the production and distribution of scarce goods.

The Scarcity Dogma
This definition, however, can only be sustained by giving a peculiar meaning to the word 'scarcity.' The normal sense of scarcity is that of shortage, implying that something is in short supply in relation to the claims on its use. The scarcity theory economists, however, define scarcity to mean the absence of unlimited supplies. Since no good produced by humans is, or can ever be, available in unlimited amounts all such goods are, by definition "scarce".

They reinforce this with a second assumption - that human wants are unlimited. This provides a fall-back position, since, if human wants are infinite, even on the normal meaning of scarcity as shortage of relation to uses goods are always going to be in short supply. But this assumption of human wants being infinite is equally dubious since, while human wants might be great, they are not unlimited. Nor do they exist outside particular social and historical contexts but are determined by the society in which particular humans are living at a particular point in time and are in practice always limited.

This school of economics (which is the dominant one today) needs the scarcity assumption - whether based on an unrealistic definition of scarcity or on an unrealistic assumption of infinite human wants, because it is the basis of its claim that the best way to solve the perpetual either-or problem, which they see humans facing when it comes to deciding what to produce, is to have recourse to money, prices and markets. They want to be able to prove that the present economic system, under which most wealth is produced for sale on the marketplace, is the best one possible. They need the scarcity assumption, in other words, so that they can beg this question.

The scarcity school of economics is right to see economics as the study of the way in which what to produce and how to produce it are determined under a market system. Where they go wrong is in making such a system the outcome of "scarcity".

Scarcity, in their peculiar sense, has existed throughout human history, but the market system - where everything, including the mental and physical energies of humans, has a price and where everybody has to have money to obtain what they need - only began to come into existence comparatively recently, about 500 years ago, and has only come fully into existence in places like America, Europe and Japan within the last 100 or so years. It is still not fully developed in most of the rest of the world.

The basis of the market system is not some eternal scarcity, but the separation of most people from the access to the land which enables them to produce their own food, clothes and houses. In other words, its basis is the dispossession of the majority of the population of all productive resources except their own ability to work and the concentration of the ownership of these resources into the hands of a small minority of the population. It is this, not scarcity, that makes money, prices and the market the universal features of life they are today.

We have now reached a definition of economics: the study of the production and distribution of wealth that is produced to be sold on a market. Economics is the study, not of scarce goods but of marketed goods.

What is wealth?
Wealth "is any material object or service that serves to satisfy some human need or want." An individual item of wealth is known in economics as a good.

Some goods essential to human life, such as the air we breathe and the heat and light of the Sun, are provided spontaneously by nature without humans having to do anything and so are called 'free goods'. Most goods, however, including others equally essential to human life such as food, have to be produced in the sense that humans have to exercise their mental and physical energies to obtain them, even if all that it involves in some cases is picking a fruit from a tree. Most goods, in other words, are products of human work.

When humans produce a good they are not creating something out of nothing; what they are doing is transforming parts of nature into something useful to them. This transformation may, as is the case of the picked fruit, only consist in changing the place of some nature-given material; generally speaking, however, a change of form is involved as well as a change of place.

Production, then, is the process of transforming parts of nature into goods. Apart from "free goods", all wealth is the product of human beings working of materials originally supplied by nature.

Any activity that transforms parts of nature into something useful to humans is productive activity. This is so even if the transformation is merely a change of place, so transportation is a productive activity. So is storage, as preserving the usefulness of some good. Some products of labour are intangible, such as a haircut, and are known as 'services'.

Some people have argued that only tangible goods are wealth, and that therefore only labour that results in some physical product is productive. But they are wrong. The only difference between a tangible and an intangible good, or service, is that in the latter case the product is consumed as it is being produced, but it remains a product.

Goods can be divided into two main groups. First, those which are directly consumed by humans to meet their personal needs, or 'consumer goods'. These may be consumed as they are being produced (some services) or in one go (as food and electricity are) or over a period of time (as clothes, and furniture, and houses, are).

Second, those which are used to produce other goods, or producer goods (also known as 'intermediate goods' and as a 'means of production'. These are consumed (used up) of course but to make other goods and now by humans directly. They include materials extracted from nature, semi-finished goods, tools, machines, buildings, fuel and means of transport.

The basis of the market system is not some eternal scarcity, but the separation of most people from the access to the land which enables them to produce their own food, clothes and houses. As Sir William Petty (1623–1687) put it, labour is the father of material wealth, the earth is its mother.

However, humans are tool-making and tool-using animals and, apart from very basic productive activity such as picking fruit from a wild tree, production involves a third element: the tools and machinery humans use to transform nature-given materials into wealth. These producer goods are of course derived from the other two since they will have been fashioned into their existing form by past human labour working on nature-given materials.

The 'distribution' of wealth is simply the way in which what has been produced is distributed - i.e. divided up - shared, amongst the members of society.

The Market System
Samuelson describes the present economic system (his ideal system) as follows:

Everything has a price - each commodity and each service. Even the different kinds of human labour have prices, usually called wage rates. Everybody receives money for what he sells and uses this money to buy what he wishes. (His emphasis.)

So, under the market system the vast majority of goods (though by no means all, as we shall see in a moment) come to be produced for sale. A good that is produced for sale is called, in modern economics, an 'economic good' (or, in Marxian economics, a "commodity"- note the difference with Samuelson's use of the same word above to mean simply a tangible good). The concept economic good excludes a whole range of non-marketed goods such as housework, vegetables grown in your garden, do-it-yourself repairs and voluntary work. This in itself confirms that economics is concerned not with the production and distribution of wealth in general, but only with the production and distribution of wealth that has been produced for sale.

Goods produced for the market have an 'economic value' in addition to their capacity to satisfy some human need or want, or use value. This economic value is measured by the quantity of other economic goods they can be exchanged for. It is generally expressed in money as their price.

This means that under the market system the basic underlying physical factors involved in production - nature-given materials, human mental and physical energies, and producer goods - all come to have a monetary value. They become 'capital'. Hence "capitalism" as another name for the market system.

In its original sense capital is a sum of money lent out as interest and is still used to mean this today. Under the market system there is another way - it is in fact the overwhelmingly predominant way - in which those with capital, or capitalists, can make money, and that is to use it to purchase productive resources with a view to using them to produce wealth for sale. It is this that turns them into capital. (Note: somewhat confusingly, economists also use the word capital in another sense to refer to fixed produced goods such as buildings, machinery and plant only, thus excluding stocks of raw materials and of finished products and work in progress as well as the case to pay wages and for fuel and services, which accountants, more logically, count as capital).

The act of purchasing productive resources to engage in producing goods for the market is called 'investment' and the monetary gain that results is called 'profit'. The total monetary value of the new wealth produced is a given country over a given period is called either the 'national income' or the 'national product' (the two have the same monetary value). It is distributed by being bought by the members of society out of the monetary income they receive and which is initially generated at the point of production in the form of either wages and salaries or of profits.

It is these relationships, which only arise when the great bulk of wealth is produced for sale, that form the subject-matter of economics. Economics is the study of the factors governing the production and distribution of wealth under the market system of production for profit.

Links and then some . . .

From the Socialist Banner blog:

The G-8 Pledge

From the Socialist Courier blog:

Class and the class-room

From the Mailstrom blog:

American Hunger Pains

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog:

The hanging gardens of Bombay

Snapshot on Chomsky

The Haves and the Have-Yachts