Playing the world's smallest violin

From the Marx and Coca Cola blog

You can imagine how sad I was to see this story on the front page of my local fish wrapper: Rich are not so different when economy is down. I cried a little. The story does briefly raise one interesting point:

"To be sure, the poor and middle class are being hurt more, but upper-crust thriftiness could reverberate across the rest of the economy.

The 10 percent of households with the highest incomes account for nearly a quarter of all spending, according to data compiled by research firm Moody's Economy.com from a 2006 federal survey....

Other government data show households in the top one-fifth of the U.S. population ranked by income earn about half of all total personal income before taxes — an imbalance that gives the wealthy immense economic clout, said Sara Johnson, an economist at the research firm Global Insight.

"Consumer spending makes up 70 percent of gross domestic product, and when one group accounts for a very substantial share of consumer spending, they also account for a large share of the economic activity that creates jobs," Johnson said."

The richest 1% have the largest share of the national income in two decades. According to the Wall Street Journal this is due in large part to that group's declining tax rate.

Instead of a story about how an accumulation of wealth, and by extension economic power, in the hands of fewer and fewer people is having a disastrous impact on the economy at large, the story instead focuses on the "hardships" endured by the not-working class:

"Many are asking their personal shoppers and private-jet providers to seek the best deals rather than over-the-top extravagances."

Boo-hoo. They'll have to start eating the nonorganic arugula.

"He also may buy a hybrid to supplement the two Mercedes in his heated four-car garage."

So sad. Think of his children.

"A lot of our clients stop by a deli on the way to the airport, rather than have a catered meal on the plane" costing $50 per boxed lunch, said Justin Sullivan. Sullivan is the founder of Regent Jet, an Andover, Mass.-based broker that buys blocks of aircraft time to trim costs for high-end clientele whose multi-leg itineraries can sometimes exceed $100,000."

Eating from a deli! What is this, Mexico? And this quote from the managing director of investments at the beleaguered Wachovia Securities:

""People are examining, 'Do you keep the yacht, do you go to the classic-car auction, do you take the private jet?' Those sound like nice problems to have, but at the same time, they are issues."

(Marx and Coca-Cola will be on hiatus while JM recovers from his rage-induced coma.)

JM

About Solzhenitsyn

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

According to the BBC today, Solzhenitsyn "opened the eyes of the world to the evils of Soviet Communism". No, try again. "He exposed the brutality of the Stalin era." Much better. By way of contrast, the Socialist Party has held the same, consistent and correct attitude towards Russia since before Aleksander Solzhenitsyn was born!

Searching our website, you could be forgiven for thinking that we have had nothing to say about this world famous author. This is not the case as at present only a only a fraction of our published material going back to our inception in 1904 is available online. The Socialist Standard of January 1972, for example, has a piece titled 'From a Russian prison camp':

"...We are not concerned here with his stature as a writer but rather with the way he adds to our sketchy knowledge of Soviet society. In 1945 he was sentenced to 8 years for comments he made about Stalin....His three novels dealing with the Soviet scene are 'One Day', 'The First Circle' and 'Cancer Ward'. Respectively they describe the world of the manual worker, the intellectual and the chronically sick.
In 'One Day' we learn how starving and frozen prisoners labour on a construction site (temperature minus 39 degrees), queue for fuel, munch their ration of dry bread and try to wangle a smoke or an easy job. As in the outside world, "you feathered your own nest as best you could". You knew that you were cheated of your rations by all who handled them. Graft was everywhere, and so were the informers. But prisoners spared their energy, needing it for survival.
In 'The First Circle', he describes an expensive top-secret research institute in Moscow where class enemies, saboteurs and other top scientists, imprisoned in the Thirties and Forties, enjoyed relative luxury. Yet the State is cruelly oppressive here too: the cruelty is of a different type, that's all. At Karaganda it was physical cruelty - hunger, cold and overwork; at Mavrino it is psychological - pressure to meet impossible deadlines successfully, dread of a transfer back to labour camps and fear for their persecuted families. As at Karaganda, and as in all parts of Russia, informers abound - the hallmark of a police state.
If you ever wondered what has happened to ordinary Russians, these books will tell you much. In the two books together, Solzhenitzyn has covered a lot: from the lowest camp drudges, the wives at home on the collectives, ex-Party members who helped collectivize the countryside at gunpoint and their wives, unable to get work without disowning their husbands, right on up through the secret service rat-race to the Minister, Abakumov, and the Immortal One himself.
Finally in 'Cancer Ward' he underlines the idea that his real subject is not a prison society but Soviet society. The whole of Russia is a sick society, all alike are sick - doctors and patients, jailers and prisoners. All Russia is a prison where every fifth man is an informer.
For all Russians, he says, life is an endless sentence without amnesty, measured by months of deprivation and humiliation. The proletarian is everywhere a prisoner of the system: we are all doing time. Some prisons are plush like Mavrino "the first circle of hell." Others are unspeakable. His explanation of the lush conditions at Mavrino applies equally to the so-called middle-class here: "It has been shown that the better sheep are fed and looked after, the higher their yeild of wool."
Solzhenitzyn earned the right to claim: "I've got an advantage no spy can make me lose: what I've been through, and seen others go through, should give me a good idea of what history is about, don't you think?"

But notwithstanding such insights, another article - 'About Solzhenitsyn' - from the April 1974 Socialist Standard reveals some serious flaws in his thinking:

"..Before weighing in with criticisms of his manifesto (Sunday Times, March 3), we must make it clear, first, that we have always opposed all forms of censorship, and secondly, that in criticising his ideas we are no way defending the Kremlinite creed, to which we have consistently expressed our hostility. But however sympathetic we may be to one who has struggled successfully and made his views heard in spite of all the Soviet censorship and suppression machine, we cannot applaud his political views.
We should like to have greeted him as a world citizen, an internationalist, not a nationalist. But his views are based on an insular patriotism and Russian Orthodox Christianity. He believes in the myth of the "national interest": indeed he bases his argument against a Russian war with China, not on the view that working-class interests are not at stake, but simply on the calculation that Russia could not win such a war and therefore it would be against Russia's "national interest"..."

By way of conclusion, his writings did not as the BBC claim help "expose and bring down the Soviet Communist system". Since the collapse of the brutally oppressive system of state capitalism in Russia, can it be said that the life of the working class there has improved dramatically? The same question can be asked about South Africa since apartheid. Another novelist, D.H. Lawrence, gave the answer when he stated "earning a wage is a prison occupation".

Robert Stafford

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (58)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 58th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1316 friends!

Recent blogs:

Poles Apart? - The Arctic, Capitalism and Global Warming

The Curse of Money

History as mystery

Quote for the week:

"Et non dicatis aliquid proprium, sed sint vobis omnia communia": 'Call nothing your own, but let everything be yours in common'. [St. Augustine, ca. 400AD.]

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Reclaiming Marx's Capital (2008)

Book review from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reclaiming Marx's “Capital.” By Andrew Kliman. Lexington Books, 2007

After Karl Marx's Capital was published it has come in for criticism from a particular direction. In Volume One of Capital (1867), Marx argued that the value of commodities (goods and services produced for sale and profit) are determined by socially necessary labour-time. Profit comes from unpaid surplus labour appropriated as surplus value. In Volume Three of Capital (1894), Marx explained that commodities tend to sell at prices of production, which is the price sufficient to yield the average rate of profit on capital advanced, and commodities actually sell at market prices which fluctuate around prices of production (assuming no monopolies). Marx indicated in Volume One that in a later book he would show the difference between value and price, as his analysis moved from the abstract to the determinate. And we now know, though Kliman does not mention this, that the notes which comprise Volume Three and edited for publication by Engels after Marx's death were written before the manuscript of Volume One.

However, many economists (including some who claim to be Marxist) maintain that prices cannot be derived from values in the way Marx described. In economics this is known as “the transformation problem”, but it has implications for other aspects of Marx's theory of value. What are the objections? The critics start by making a couple of assumptions about Marx's theory. Firstly, it is assumed that value and price must be two separate systems. Secondly, it is assumed that inputs into production and the outputs that subsequently emerge must be valued simultaneously, and the input and output prices must be equal. When these assumptions are made, so the critics claim, Marx's theory of value becomes “internally inconsistent” and breaks down.

However, these assumptions are mistaken. In Marx's theory, value and price are interdependent; profit exists when, but only when, surplus labour has been performed. The assumption that value and price must be two separate systems implies that there can be profit without surplus labour, which is a major misinterpretation of Marx's theory. And the assumption concerning simultaneous valuation and the equal prices of inputs and outputs flatly contradicts the main principle upon which Marx's value theory is founded, that value is determined by labour-time. It is because valuation necessarily involves labour-time that input and output prices can differ. Kliman shows that the “internal inconsistencies” appear when the theory is viewed as a simultaneous valuation and disappear when not viewed as a simultaneous valuation. In short, the critics have badly misunderstood Marx's theory of value.

Lew Higgins

Is it the Big One? (2008)

Editorial from the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a joke amongst stock exchange gamblers about the analyst who predicted nine of the last three bear markets. The same could be said about some critics of capitalism who have been predicting the next Great Depression since 1945.

Capitalism is an uncontrollable system and another 1930s slump cannot be ruled out. But history never repeats itself exactly, not even as a farce (not that a repeat of the horrendous 1930s could be viewed as a farce). Every slump or recession is different because capitalism is anarchic and unpredictable. In fact, if it wasn’t then capitalist governments might have a better chance of developing some policies to avoid them.

The socialist case against capitalism is not dependent on capitalism being in a slump. Even in times of “prosperity” capitalism does not, and cannot serve the interests of the majority who are obliged to sell themselves for a wage or a salary to get a living. Unemployment may be lower and real wages may be rising slowly, but the basic fact of profits being derived from the unpaid labour of those who work remains. And profit-seeking dominates decisions about what, where and how to produce. Priorities are distorted as profits always come before meeting needs.

Obviously more people are discontented in a slump than at other times but history does not provide any evidence that slump conditions are consistently better for getting across the socialist message. The priority for an unemployed person is a job or rather the money needed to buy things that goes with a job. Socialism could indeed immediately solve this problem by ensuring that everyone’s material needs were met, but socialism cannot be established until and unless a majority want it and are prepared to take the necessary political action to get it. Socialists, however, cannot produce this immediately by waving a wand. In the meantime unemployed people want a job and have been known to follow all sorts of demagogues who promise them this.

Socialists do not subscribe to the view “the worse, the better”. Even so, slump conditions do expose the irrationality of capitalism. Closed factories alongside unemployment queues. People in bad housing alongside stockpiles of bricks. People in need of food alongside food mountains and, worse, food bonfires. In short, poverty amidst potential plenty.

But are we heading for another big slump? Nobody knows. Capitalist opinion is divided. Anatole Kaletsky, writing in the (London) Times (17 July), reported that “according to the overwhelming majority of financial analysts in the City of London and Wall Street, the world is now in the worst economic crisis since the 1930s”. He disagrees. He regards this merely as a panic reaction amongst bankers who are seeing their expected profits disappear.

Socialists don’t know either but the very fact that another big slump cannot be ruled out confirms in itself that capitalism is an irrational and uncontrollable economic system. The sooner it is got rid of and replaced by a system under human control and geared to serving human needs the better.

Pieces Together: The Wasteful Society (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

THE WASTEFUL SOCIETY

"World military spending grew 45 percent in the past decade, with the United States accounting for nearly half of all expenditure, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said Monday. Military spending grew six percent last year alone, according to SIPRI's annual report. In 2007, 1,339 billion dollars (851 billion euros) was spent on arms and other military expenditure, corresponding to 2.5 percent of global gross domestic product, or GDP -- or 202 dollars for each of the world's 6.6 billion people. The United States spends by far the most towards military aims, dishing out 547 billion dollars last year, or 45 percent of global expenditure. (Yahoo News, 9 June)

THE SCIENCE OF DENIAL

"The Bush administration has worked overtime to manipulate or conceal scientific evidence — and muzzled at least one prominent scientist — to justify its failure to address climate change. Its motives were transparent: the less people understood about the causes and consequences of global warming, the less they were likely to demand action from their leaders. And its strategy has been far too successful. Seven years later, Congress is only beginning to confront the challenge of global warming. The last week has brought further confirmation of the administration’s cynicism. An internal investigation by NASA’s inspector general concluded that political appointees in the agency’s public affairs office had tried to restrict reporters’ access to its leading climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen. He has warned about climate change for 20 years and has openly criticized the administration’s refusal to tackle the issue head-on." (New York Times, 4 June)

JAILHOUSE BLUES

"The United States has 2.3 million people behind bars, more than any other country in the world and more than ever before in its history, Human Rights Watch said Friday. The number represents an incarceration rate of 762 per 100,000 residents, compared to 152 per 100,000 in Britain, 108 in Canada, and 91 in France, HRW said in a statement commenting on Justice Department figures also released Friday.” (Yahoo News, 6 June)

PAY KILLERS MORE SAY THE CITY

"Now working in the City, Mr Galloway is also involved in campaigning against the limitations of Armed Forces Compensation Scheme. He hopes that by speaking out he can highlight the plight of men and women accustomed to risking their lives. "Everyone always wants a pay rise. But soldiers really do need to feel appreciated," he said." (BBC News, 5 June)

Workers against the Bolsheviks (2008)

Book review from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Russian Revolution in Retreat, 1920-24. Soviet workers and the new communist elite. By Simon Pirani, Routledge, 2008.

One of the consequences of the fall of state capitalism in the USSR at the beginning of the 90s has been the opening up of the archives of the old regime, including those of its secret police. This book is a fascinating study, based on the minutes of meetings of soviets and factory committees as well as police reports, of the fight put up by factory workers in Moscow in the period 1920-24 to defend their interests under, and at times against, the Bolshevik government. Pirani also describes the beginnings of the emergence of members of the Bolshevik Party as a new, privileged elite.

In 1920 and 1921 during the civil war and its immediate aftermath, conditions in Russia were dire. Workers were paid in kind, but the rations often arrived late and were sometimes reduced. This led to protests and strikes, which the Bolshevik government was prepared to accommodate as long as these were purely economic and did not challenge their rule. The government was particularly edgy in 1921 at the time of the Krondstadt Revolt, whose demands for free elections to the soviets and a relaxation of the ban on private trading, had the sympathy of many workers. In fact, in the still not entirely unfree elections, to the local soviets that year members of other parties (Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries, anarchists) and non-party militants made gains at the expense of the Bolsheviks. Pirani concentrates on these “non-partyists” who seemed to have been factory militants who wanted to concentrate on economic issues, but with an acute understanding of the balance of forces and what could extracted from the government.

In 1923 the government cracked down on the other parties, including their factory activists, and stopped them carrying out any open activity. Pirani notes that “no non-communist political organization worked openly in Moscow again until the end of the Soviet period”. The non-partyists survived a little longer while the Bolsheviks tried to co-opt them into their party. What political opposition there was was confined to dissident Bolsheviks, inside and outside the party, some of whom adopted a pro-working class stand over wages and conditions, but eventually they too were silenced and many of them joined the members of the other parties in the labour camps of Central Asia and Siberia.

Lenin’s attitude was typical of the one he had displayed twenty years earlier in his notorious pamphlet What Is To Be Done? : that workers were not to be trusted to know their own best interest; judging this had to be left to an intellectual elite organised as a vanguard party. Pirani summarises part of Lenin’s speech to the 11th Bolshevik Party Congress in 1921:

“Lenin argued that the Russian working class could not be regarded as properly proletarian. ‘Often when people say ‘workers’, they think that that means the factory proletariat. It certainly doesn’t’, he said. The working class that Marx had written about did not exist in Russia, Lenin claimed. ‘Wherever you look, those in the factories are not the proletariat, but casual elements of all kinds.’”

Pirani comments that “the practical consequence of this was that political decision-making had to be concentrated in the party”. This distinction between the actual working class (who cannot be trusted) and the “proletariat” (organised in a vanguard party who know best) has been inherited by all Leninist groups ever since and used to justify the dictatorship of the party over the working class.

Pirani’s book should be read by those who think, or who want to refute, that the state in Russia under the Bolsheviks could ever have been described as “workers”. The workers there always had to try to defend their wages and conditions against it, even in the time of Lenin and Trotsky.

Adam Buick

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (57)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 57th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1319 friends!

Recent blogs:

Marx's Basic Theory

Another world

Marxian Economics in the Modern World

Quote for the week:

"In conflict with them ['social democrats'] for a generation are those who would sacrifice immediate success to sound principles, who have been content to be fewer in numbers if clearer in understanding, who have given transient political issues the 'go-by' and have harped upon social revolution, who have expounded economics and the class struggle, when others were shouting against taxes and tariffs, who have earned for themselves the name of Impossiblist, and have been content therewith. The war has justified them. . . The 'practical socialists' are cutting one another's throats in the trenches." [Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Canada, 4th Edition, 1915.]

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Cooking the Books: Profits Before Homes (2008)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

“One of Britain’s biggest brick makers is to close two of its largest factories”, reported the (London) Times (9 June). A few days later the same paper was reporting, as an example of what is happening all over the country in the building trade, that “Heatco Midlands has laid off its apprentices and told its employees that it cannot afford to pay them for a full week’s work because building work has dried up in the space of a month” (12 June).

Why? Why are brickworks being closed? Why are building workers being laid off or put on short-time? It is certainly not because the need for new or refurbished houses has been met. According to Shelter, “England is suffering a massive housing crisis. There simply aren’t enough decent, affordable homes.” Here are some of the figures they provide to back up this statement:

8.1 million homes in England fail to meet the Government’s Decent Homes Standard.
more than one million children in England live in bad housing.

in 2006/07, 554,000 households in England were overcrowded.

in 2007, almost 100,000 households were found to be · homeless by local authorities - almost twice as many as in 1997.

at the end of December 2007, 79,500 households were living in temporary accommodation arranged by local authorities. Nearly 60,000 of these households had · dependent children.

Nearly 1.7 million households are currently on local authority housing waiting lists.

So, the need for more houses and better housing is still there. The problem is that under capitalism houses are not built with the primary aim of providing somewhere for people to live. They are built to be sold on a market with a view to profit. And, at the moment, there’s a slump in what is openly called “the housing market”. Which is expected to last for years; at least that’s what the speculators think. On the futures market, “traders are betting that house prices will fall 50 per cent in four years and they do not expect prices to recover until 2017”

(London Times, 12 June).

Wienerberger’s chief executive, Wolfgang Reithofer, was perfectly frank about why the two factories were being closed: “It is a question of finance and this has impact. It will impact the strategy of housebuilders. They will not start new projects or will delay some other project.”

He thinks that demand will eventually recover but by “demand” he doesn’t mean the needs identified by Shelter but only paying demand, what the economists cynically call “effective” demand. The demand of the millions of people suffering from bad housing doesn’t count – isn’t effective – because it’s not backed up by money. This, in accordance with the harsh economic law of capitalism of “can’t pay, can’t have”.

The building industry has set up a charity to help the homeless called, ominously, “Crash” (www.crash.org.uk). This handing out of a few pennies to charities for the homeless while cutting back on housebuilding is just adding insult to injury.

Not that the solution to the housing crisis is to give people more money to spend on housing. That’s not going to happen anyway. The solution is simple: build houses just for people to live in. But that’s not going to happen until and unless we move on to a society where things will be produced precisely to satisfy people’s needs instead of, as under capitalism, to make a profit and leave people homeless or in bad housing if they can’t pay.

Stimulating packages

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Tourism: can it be green? (2008)

From the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

For those ‘green consumers’ who have adopted the principles of a green lifestyle eco-tourism fits neatly with the now familiar slogan to ‘Think Globally – Act Locally’ as a counter to environmental destruction. The adoption of a green lifestyle can include: Buying only organic food; keeping a record of your carbon footprint; using bio-degradable products; ensuring your savings and pension fund is ‘ethically’ invested in bio-diversity products or sustainable projects; supporting ‘fair trading’; participating in recycling schemes; be sparing on the use of plastic bags; and even endorsing the Body Shop empire. The solution is presented as an individual act rather than the collective action of individuals struggling for social change to put a stop to environmental destruction. Of course you can do all of these, but you shouldn’t think that such activities will necessarily lessen the impact on the environment.

For instance, despite the claims of the eco-tourism operators that their priority is sustainability and biodiversity, the green consumer lifestyle facilitates the opening up of a new market where environmental concern is transformed into a commodity. When the market is presented as the saviour of the environment then green consumers, and eco-tourists in particular, need to be aware that they cannot disregard the logic of production for profit. Nevertheless, for socialists the idea of adopting a green lifestyle is not to be derided, because – despite these shortcomings - it is a tentative step towards working with nature, rather than against it.

By increasing our understanding of the interaction between the natural environment and the impact of human activity society will be in a better position to minimise the damage on natural resources, and be able to arrive at rational judgements on whether or not any interference in the natural environment is justified and warranted. But be warned that such environmental concerns are not on the capitalist agenda. For the priority under capitalism is to make a profit by exploiting the environment through market forces.

We travel for relaxation. We travel for adventure. We travel to escape the familiar and venture into the unknown. Tourism brings in money and creates employment: one in 16 jobs worldwide is directly or indirectly related to tourism. In Thailand, tourism is the leading source of foreign exchange. And although tourism can help to maintain a country's interest in its own cultural and artistic heritage and, at it its best, can foster genuine friendships between different members of the human family this all comes with a price attached.

Increasingly, 'alternative travel' as eco-tourism is known in the tourist trade, is being marketed as the only way to see the world these days. And as more and more people venture off the beaten track to experience unique cultures and unspoiled nature, ecotourism is considered the fastest growing market in the tourism industry, with an annual growth rate of 5 percent worldwide. According to the World Tourism Organisation this represents 6 percent of the world gross domestic product and 11.4 percent of all consumer spending.

Whereas, previously, you enjoyed the values of the natural environment by joining the Ramblers or Youth Hostel Association, now its considered more adventurous (and expensive) to take part in white water rafting down remote rivers, or to go native in the Australian bush, stay with the indigenous people in the Amazonian rainforest, enjoy the delights of the local wildlife and the taste of organic food at an eco-lodge in India. These eco-travellers are setting out on foot safaris in Africa, camping in the Mexican rainforest, and trekking to hill tribe villages in Thailand. You can also have a holiday in a tree-house in Costa Rica and enjoy the delights of a ropeway through the jungle canopy. And if none of these at to your taste what about some whale watching in Victoria B.C. where you can disrupt the breeding habits of the grey whale and walrus?

There are many more such holidays on offer and they are increasing by the day. At the last count taken in 2007 ten percent of the global travel market is now eco-tourism. And though the 21st century is considered an era of environmental sensitivity and climate change remains firmly on the global conscience, with remote locations becoming more and more accessible many countries are beginning to promote their natural wonders to bring in the eco-minded tourist. But in doing so the market system is faced with a conundrum of trying to preserve natural resources and also try to accommodate the vast numbers of tourists they will attract.

The ideal of eco-tourism, as defined by Martha Honey, the executive director of the International Ecotourism Society, reads like a travel agents dream:

"Travel to fragile, pristine and usually protected areas that strives to be low impact and usually small scale. It helps educate travelers; provides funds for conservation; directly benefits the economic development and political empowerment of local communities; and fosters respect for different cultures and human rights."

However, this ideal in many instances fails miserably to achieve its aim and in fact contributes to environmental destruction. For the reality is that in terms of human impact eco-tourists are no different – other than in scale – to the everyday tourist on a package holiday to the Costa Bravo. This is what an official for the World Wildlife Fund told Leo Hickman about on the impact of tourism in Thailand:

“The tsunami was nothing compared to the impact of tourism. It is a much larger, long-term problem. . . . I was born in 1972 and when I was eight or nine it was still largely virgin rainforest here on the island. By the late 1980s, though, it was mostly developed. We have now lost so much of the biodiversity and primary forest and the soil is destabilising in many places. The construction of hotels upstream is creating a lot of sediment in the water and this causes damage to the coral reefs when it washes out to sea. It also affects the mangroves on the east coast. A lot of our waste water – about 40 per cent – is still being pumped out to sea on the west coast where all the resort areas are.
Land is now so expensive here due to tourism; the cost of living is even higher than Bangkok – it has meant that many local people have been forced to sell off their ancestral home and have now lost their only real asset. There is even competition for schools here for the first time. And there is a lot of overfishing here; this is for export rather than for the tourists per se, but lobsters are now being brought in from Burma to meet the tourists’ appetite for these vulnerable creatures. The corals are also damaged by tourism. Snorkellers actually cause more damage than divers because they touch the coral more often….”

(Leo Hickman, The Final Call – In Search of the True Cost of our Holidays, 2007).

In Costa Rica, whose parks are wildly popular with the millions of people who visit the country each year, the behaviour of some wild animals has been altered - some monkeys attack and bite tourists when not fed. Along the trail to the Mount Everest base camp in Nepal, deforestation is getting worse as locals cut down trees to heat meals and to provide hot showers for foreign eco-trekkers. And Mount Everest itself is becoming infamous for the amount of discarded rubbish left on the routes towards the summit. Some estimates put it at over 2000 tons which don’t include the remains of a helicopter. And in the lower regions of the Himalayan foothills the popularity of backpacking is not only causing serious soil erosion but water pollution.

And what has happened in Nepal is only one example where eco-tourism is becoming transformed into eco-vandalism through the insanity of the profit system. Another example is what is happening in Kerala in India which is marketed either as, ‘God’s own country’, or as, the ‘Gateway to Paradise’. Kerala is a unique water region famous for its lakes, rivers and back waters and distinct wildlife and fauna and is also an attractive stopover or base for the eco-tourists who visit the nearby National Reserve. However, what is not marketed by the Kerala Tourist Board is the lack of sewerage facilities and rubbish collection for its thousands upon thousands of houseboats and hotels and so called eco-lodges. Before Kerala became invaded by tourists the indigenous population ensured their impact on the natural environment was sustainable or recyclable. Now water courses are becoming heavily polluted with sewerage and the plastic debris of a throwaway society.

Besides environmental damage there can be profound social and cultural consequences to travel as well. For example, what is occurring in Northern Thailand, home to many different 'hill tribes,' is a case in point. Uniquely individual in language, customs and dress, these semi-nomadic peoples share a history of ancestor worship and a close relationship with the land. However, with the introduction of eco-tourism they also share the experience of being in something akin to a human zoo. Hill tribe trekking operations sell 'authentic visits’ to see 'primitive peoples`. But what the eco-tourists are not told is that much of the so called culture on show has a tenuous relationship with the actual culture of the people they are visiting, for in actual fact the ‘traditional’ culture has been transformed into a commodity to meet the demands of the tourist market. In short the eco-tourist is being sold an illusion that the culture on display is ‘authentic’.

The ravages of eco-tourism and tourism in general are becoming so self-evident it raises the question what can we do to lessen the impact of human activity but nevertheless still enjoy a holiday – both at home and overseas? Firstly, it is essential to acknowledge that when market forces literally encourage an irrational human impact on the environment and natural resources, how can you also realistically expect those self-same forces to solve the environmental problems they created in the first place? Therefore, in the search for solutions it’s become vital that we look outside of the capitalist box where the social relationships of private ownership of the means of living constrain and restrict our constructive abilities to remedy environmental destruction.

In socialism where the principle of free access underpins the common ownership of the means of living our options and choices on travel and holidays would be extended and influenced by what positive contribution we can make to the country we are visiting. And with package holidays and mass tourism a thing of the past it is most likely holidays in socialism would not be restricted within a timescale of 10 to 14 days of hectic hedonism but transformed into an unique opportunity to stay in a particular location for as long as it takes to understand the history and culture of that region. In effect the transformation in the social relationships from private property ownership to common ownership will radically alter our perception of travel.

Under such conditions eco-tourism will come into its own with visits to particular regions becoming combined with studies on the wildlife, fauna and local culture. On the other hand you may wish to take part in making housing improvements by demolishing shanty towns or transforming a former holiday hotel into flats for the local population. Alternatively you could help out in a health clinic, or even give a hand to clean up polluted waterways. In effect whatever your particular choice of holiday the aim will be to combine it with an understanding that the framework of socialism will assist everybody on the globe in meeting their needs for shelter, food, clothing, education and health. Indeed it’s time to start thinking of trashing capitalism not the planet.

Brian Johnson

E. Hardy's lecture on Monetarism

The final lecture from Edgar Hardcastle's series of talks on economics:

First Part
DOWNLOAD LINK: Monetarism (Part 1)

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Second Part
DOWNLOAD LINK: Monetarism (Part 2)

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Further Reading:

Edgar Hardcastle's Marxist Internet Archive page

E. Hardy's lecture on Rent, Interest and Profit

The third economics lecture from Edgar Hardcastle:

First Part
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LENGTH: 1:02:43

Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: rent, Interest and Profit (Part 2)

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Further Reading:

Edgar Hardcastle's Marxist Internet Archive page

The SPGB and the Guesdists

From the La Bataille socialiste blog

When the Socialist Party of Great Britain was being founded in 1904, as a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation which had pioneered Marx’s ideas in Britain, the main issue confronting the international Social Democratic movement was “Ministerialism”, or whether or not Socialists should participate in a “bourgeois government”. In 1899 a prominent member of the French section, Alexandre Millerand (a later President of France), accepted a ministerial post in a left-of-centre Radical government. This led to a split in the already rather amorphous movement in France, with the walk-out of the “Guesdists”, as the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français (French Workers Party) was known after its most prominent member, Jules Guesde, but which also included the more well-known, outside of France, Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law.

The Guesdists had once before, twenty years previously, split off from the reformists, who they called “possibilists” and were in return dubbed by them “impossibilists” (probably the origin of the term). They were implacably opposed to socialists participating in a government of capitalism and in 1902 joined with other anti-ministerialist Social Democrats to form the Parti Socialiste de France (Socialist Party of France). The ministerialists, led by the parliamentary orator, Jean Jaurès, joined together in the Parti Socialiste Français (French Socialist Party) which was a pure and simple opportunist, reformist party.

The issue had come up at the congress of the Social Democratic International in Paris in 1900 when a resolution, proposed by Kautsky, was passed which, while opposing as a general principle socialist participation in a capitalist government, left the door open for this in exceptional circumstances. Naturally, the ministerialists pleaded that the situation in France in 1899 had been exceptional. The Guesdists were not satisfied and at the next congress of the International, held in Amsterdam in 1904, moved a stronger anti-ministerialist resolution, which was passed. The SPGB was represented at this Congress (but didn’t like having to sit as part of a single British delegation, alongside representatives of the ILP and the SDF from which they had just broken away) and applauded the carrying of this resolution.

Later that year an SPGB member obtained an interview in Paris with Paul Lafargue, mainly about the implications of the Russo-Japanese War that had just broken out. This was published in the November 1904 issue of the SPGB’s monthly journal, the Socialist Standard. In his write-up the member, after roundly condemning the attitude of Jaurès, commented:

“It was not for nothing that our comrades of the Socialist Party of France moved the resolution at the recent International Congress, which declared against compromise and intrigue with capitalist parties. The Socialists of France have fought and are fighting the same battle against treachery and folly of opportunism, which we of The Socialist Party of Great Britain are waging in this country.”

The Socialist Standard was still calling the Guesdists “our French comrades” in 1908. The January and February 1905 issues carried a translation of Guesde’s basic socialist pamphlet The Social Problem and its Solution.

Although the Guesdists had succeeded in pushing through a strong anti-ministerialist resolution at Amsterdam this turned out to be something of a pyrrhic victory for them in that the congress also voted that all the affiliated organisations in one country should take steps to unite into a single organisation. The SPGB refused this in Britain and eventually (1907 conference) decided not to be represented at the next International Social Democrat congress, in Stuttgart in 1907, but to try to enter “into communication with the known representatives of that uncompromising policy of which the SPGB are the exponents in Great Britain” and who one delegated named as “Ferri, Michels, Guesde, Lafargue and others”. The Guesdists, however, went along with unity call and in 1905 the Socialist Party of France and the French Socialist Party united to form a party with the unwieldy title of “United Socialist Party (French Section of the Workers’ International)” or, in French, SFIO, by which name it was known until the 1970s.

In the beginning the Guesdists were able to dominate the united party’s executive but soon the open reformists under Jaurès got the upper hand, relegating the Guesdists to a minority tendency within the SFIO. In 1907 the Guesdists started their own publication, Le Socialisme. The SPGB hoped that the Guesdists would split off from the reformist-dominated SFIO and form their own independent party. An article on “The International” in December 1907 commenting on the proceedings of the SFIO’s congress in August predicted:

“In France there was until the International Congress in 1904 at Amsterdam, a body of real revolutionaries, the Guesdists. But in consequence of the ‘unity’ craze these revolutionary fighters fused with the Reformers, the followers of Jaurès, about two years ago ( . . . ) The Reformers have, at least temporarily, bamboozled the Guesdists; but judging from the proceedings at the last Congress of the Party, some weeks ago, there are already many bad sores which can only lead to a split in the future.”

This never happened and the Guesdists remained in the SFIO. Despite seeing this as a mistake, the SPGB continued to regard them as “real revolutionaries”. In the year 1908 the Socialist Standard carried in separate issues five articles translated from Le Socialisme and a sixth from Lafargue. A further four articles or news items from this journal were published in the following years, the last appearing in November 1912. The translations were done by French-speaking SPGB members, at least two of whom were working in France at the time.

What was Guesdism?

What was it that the early SPGB found in the Guesdists that led them to regard them as “real revolutionaries” and “our French comrades”?

Firstly, their Marxism. The Guesdists were the group which first introduced Marxist ideas into France in much the same way, and during the same period (1880s, 1890s), as the SDF in Britain. So, some of the articles chosen for translation were on aspects of Marxist theory. Three of them were translations of articles by Charles Rappoport on historical and philosophical subjects: “Evolution and Revolution” (July 1905), “The Society of Tomorrow” (September 1908) and “Fatalism and Historical Necessity” (given front page treatment in April 1911). Another theoretical article, on “The Evolution of Society”, by the leading Guesdist Eduoard Fortin, had appeared in the September 1905 issue. Lafargue’s article, in May 1908, dealt with “The Law of Value and the Dearness of Commodities”. In February and March 1912 the Socialist Standard carried a translation of an 1882 article by Lafargue on “Socialism and Nationalisation” in which he argued that nationalisation was a capitalist reform not socialism. In fact, although the early SPGB did contain German as well as French speakers and the German Social Democratic Party was generally considered the most Marxist of such parties, apart from a translation of Karl Kautsky’s The Erfurt Programme (published in the Socialist Standard and then as the Party’s first three pamphlets) most translated articles on Marxist theory were from French not German.

Secondly, their position on socialist tactics. This was “the economic expropriation of the capitalist class by their political expropriation”; in other words, that the way to socialism lay via the conquest of political power by the working class. To this end, said the Guesdists, the working class needed to organise into a mass socialist party and it was the “first duty of socialists” (the title of an article by Charles Verecque, translated in the June 1908 Socialist Standard) to build such a party by incessant propaganda and organisation. Socialists were, in a perhaps unfortunate phrase of Guesde’s, to act as “recruiting sergeants” for this party. “It cannot be too often repeated”, wrote Verecque,

“that what keeps the proletariat from its emancipation is the fact of its ignorance. If it could only understand it would free itself. The new form of Society is ready to take shape under its direction and for its benefit. Its consent is the only thing lacking. The daily task of Socialists is therefore to prepare the workers for the historic mission which they have to accomplish.”

“The vote,” wrote Guesde in an article on “Legality and Revolution” published on the front page of the February 1908 Socialist Standard, “however legal it may be, is revolutionary when on the basis of class candidatures it organises France of labour against France of capital”.

Thirdly, and as a consequence of this basic position, their implacable opposition to anarchistic notions of minority “direct action” and “the general strike”. Of what might be called the leftwing of pre-WWI international Social Democracy—the intransigent anti-Revisionists, anti-ministerialists, and anti-reformists—the Guesdists and the SPGB were almost alone in taking up such a position. Others such as Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek were influenced by these ideas, though they talked about “mass action” and “the mass strike” to distinguish themselves from the anarchists. In America Daniel De Leon embraced industrial unionism to “take and hold” the means of production rather than “the economic expropriation of the capitalist class by their political expropriation”. So too, in fact, did some of the founding members of the SPGB, one of whom, EJB Allen, became a prominent “industrial unionist” and “revolutionary syndicalism”. This tendency was represented in the SFIO by Gustave Hervé (and in the Italian party by one, Benito Mussolini).

The Guesdist position, shared by the SPGB, was put in an article by Paul-Marius André translated in the November 1908 Socialist Standard. Entitled “The Two Possibilisms”, it argued that the anarchist direct-actionists were just as much reformists as the parliamentary gradualists since they, too, were not prepared to knuckle down to the longish haul of winning majority support for socialism and of building up a strong socialist party that would eventually be able to gain control of political power and abolish capitalism, but wanted “something now”—reforms; the only difference between them and the parliamentary reformists was that they favoured “direct” as opposed to “parliamentary” action to try to get them. Not only was this ineffective as a reformist strategy, but it unnecessarily put working class lives in danger.

The Socialist Standard of the period carried a number of articles, some written by members on the spot in Paris, recording the failure of the tactics of the anarchist leaders of the main French trade union grouping, the CGT, to hammer home the same point as the Guesdists: that the way to expropriate the capitalist class was not by industrial action with the state still controlled by their representatives but by political action once socialists had won sufficient working-class support to take over the state.

Were they really real revolutionaries?

But were the Guesdists the “real revolutionaries” that the early SPGB considered them to be?

While the SPGB was an organisation of a few hundred working men and women, the Guesdists had thousands of members, more than a dozen MPs and controlled a number of local authorities, including Lille, the third biggest city in France. This reflected itself in the different attitude towards reforms, which the Guesdists party had some chance of influencing. On paper, the Guesdists took the view that, as long as capitalism lasted, working-class problems would continue so that reforms would at most only be palliatives and single-issue campaigns were diversions from the struggle to win political power to expropriate the capitalist class and make the means of production the common property of society, which alone could provide the framework within which these problems could be solved.

However, unlike the SPGB, they did advocate reforms. So, their MPs, mayors and councillors had not been elected on a straight socialist programme but on a programme of socialism and reforms. Which meant that, in practice, they were just as much the prisoners of their reform-minded, non-socialist voters as were Jaurès and his supporters. No doubt this was why in the end, contrary to what the early SPGB hoped and urged, they were not prepared to break away from the reformist-dominated SFIO and branch out on their own in opposition to it. So they stayed in, with the result that, as an article in the Socialist Standard in October 1910 on the Copenhagen Congress of the Social Democrat International (the same article which represented the SPGB’s definite break with the International, which was described as having been taken over by pro-capitalist elements), noted:

“In France, the Guedists, who at one time, in spite of their small numbers, wielded enormous power for Socialist enlightenment, are absorbed by the reformist followers of Jaurès and Vaillant”.

Another mistaken, or at least ambiguous, position of the Guesdists was their attitude to patriotism. This was an issue that had been discussed within the SFIO in the light of the anti-militarist and anti-patriotism campaign launched by Hervé. Even though Hervé was not a Guesdist, the members of the SPGB who followed affairs in France were aware that some of his views on this question were similar to ours. Thus, the June 1907 Socialist Standard carried a translation of his views:

“The workers are disinherited and ill-treated in every existing country. All nations are equal, or nearly so, in this respect, particularly now that the capitalist regime renders more and more uniform the material, intellectual, and political conditions of life for the labouring class in all countries; and now that the introduction of the capitalist system in Russia will compel even Tsarism to accord to the Russian workers the essentials of political liberty. No country at the present day, is so superior to the others that the workers of that country should get themselves killed in its defence.”

The article agreed with this position, but went on to disagree with Hervé’s conclusion that, in the event of war breaking out, the workers should stage an armed uprising to try to overthrow capitalist rule (“Rather insurrection than war”, as he put it), pointing out that this “would be courting a shambles that would make war peace by contrast”, with workers sacrificing their lives in “a fruitless and bloody” action. The article also pointed out that as militarism was the product of capitalism the only way to end it was to end capitalism; the efforts of socialists should be aimed at this rather than at mere anti-militarism.

Guesde and the Guesdists made the same two points in the debate within the SFIO, but they did not join Hervé in denouncing patriotism. The full implications of this refusal to denounce patriotism did not become evident until the First World War broke out. Guesde himself entered the French War Cabinet. Hervé, it has to be added, did a complete U-turn and became an ardent patriot and nationalist, joining the army to go and fight. Jaurès, who was assassinated before the war started, went down in history as an anti-war hero, even though there can be no doubt that had he lived he too would have rallied round the French flag and joined the war cabinet instead of Guesde. This of course completely discredited Guesde and the Guesdists with the SPGB.

After the war, some Guesdists, Charles Rappoport for instance, went over to the Communist Party. Others remained in the SFIO (including Guesde who died in 1922 at the age of 77) and represented a strand of anti-Leninist Marxism in France that survived until a few years ago.

E. Hardy's lecture on the Labour Theory of Value

The second economics lecture from Edgar Hardcastle:

First Part
DOWNLOAD LINK: Labour Theory of Value (Part 1)

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LENGTH: 1:04:40

Second Part

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LENGTH: 36:21

Further Reading:

Edgar Hardcastle's Marxist Internet Archive page