Editorial: Which kind of capitalism – or the alternative? (2011)

Editorial from the June 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Around the middle of the last century there were a group of nice people who called themselves Moral Re-armament. They saw some nasty things about the world in which they lived, but they put this down to miscreants who behaved in illegal or immoral ways. They approved of well-earned profits, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and all that jazz. The Socialist Party debated with them.

Then came the unacceptable face of capitalism, in the shape of the ‘bad cops’ who did a bit too much of what the ‘good cops’ were doing routinely. Greed was good, but too much of it by the wrong people was bad. Workers who wanted more wages or salaries were to be deplored. Capitalists who wanted more profits were OK – they helped to ‘grow the economy’.

The latest take on the profit system is that we have two kinds of market – the fundamentalist and the free. The fundamentalist market is the one in the black hat. It is part of a bidding culture that sets one group or interest against another. If one wins the other loses.

According to Philip Pullman (Guardian, 29 January), this bidding culture has “imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market”.

But Pullman is not optimistic about the future. “I’m afraid these fundamentalists of one sort or another will always be with us. We just have to keep them as far as possible from power.”

Now the oxymoronic free market. Very beneficial to the capitalist class, not so beneficial to the working class. Owners of capital are free to invest in it to ‘earn’ rent, interest or profit. Workers are free to offer themselves on the labour market – they may or may not get employment. Whether they do or not – especially if they do not – they suffer material and mental deprivation,.

Moral or immoral, with or without an acceptable face, involving fundamentalist or free markets, capitalism shouldn’t be supported by the majority it exploits.

We don’t have to choose the lesser of two evils – we can help towards something better. A world where the resources of the planet have stopped being the property of rich individuals, corporations or states and have become the common heritage of all. On that basis goods and services can be produced directly to meet people’s needs without the intervention of markets. Neither a free market nor a controlled market but a non-market society.

Cooking the Books: Brown re-invents the wheel (2011)

A Cooking the Books column from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gordon Brown has written a book. Not gossip about what went on between him and Tony Blair but about the Crash of 2008 and what he thinks should be done to avoid another one. Called, Beyond the Crash, the subtitle of the first part could well have been “How I saved the world from financial meltdown.”

He writes that by 26-27 September “the choice was clear: either we had to step in and accept all the associated risks, or simply leave the free-market system to collapse”:

“We were facing a situation that risked becoming worse than 1929. No one trusted anyone in the banking system, and people were predicting not a recession but a depression. People were panicking, asking which would be the next bank to collapse. The financial system was looking over an abyss.”

Brown puffs himself for discovering that the way to end a financial panic in which banks and other financial institutions are afraid to lend to each other is for the government to make more money available. As if governments hadn’t done this in the past, even in Marx’s day.

In Volume III of Capital, Marx quoted extensively from the parliamentary reports into the financial panics which occurred in 1847 and 1857. This from the Report on the Commercial Distress, 1847-8:

“[T]he bankers and others finding that they would not rely with the same degree of confidence that they had previously done upon turning their bills and other money securities into bank-notes, for the purpose of meeting their engagements, still further curtailed their facilities, and in many cases refused them altogether; they locked up their bank-notes, in many instances to meet their own engagements; they were afraid of parting with them… The alarm and confusion were increased daily; and unless Lord John Russell…had issued the letter to the Bank…universal bankruptcy would have been the issue.”

Lord John Russell was the Prime Minister and his letter to the Bank of England suspended the Bank Charter Act of 1844. Engels explained in a footnote what this meant:

“The suspension of the Bank Act of 1844 permits the Bank to issue any quantity of bank-notes regardless of the gold reserve backing in its possession; thus, to create an arbitrary quantity of fictitious paper money-capital, and to use it for the purpose of making loans to banks, exchange brokers, and through them to commerce.”

Marx wrote of “a point where either the entire industrial world must go to pieces, or else the Bank Act”, and went on:

“Both on October 25, 1847, and on November 12, 1857, the crisis reached such a point; the government then lifted the restriction for the Bank in issuing notes by suspending the Act of 1844, and this sufficed in both cases to overcome the crisis.”

So Brown did nothing extraordinary. He merely did what the capitalist class expect their government to do when there’s a financial panic that threatens to seize up commerce and production – make more money available to the banks. As in similar circumstances in the past, this stopped the immediate financial panic. But it didn’t stop the coming slump, as GNP fell from that quarter on and is nowhere near its pre-crisis level even today.

Lord John Russell was more modest. He didn’t write a book about how in 1847 he had saved the world from universal bankruptcy.

Editorial: What then must we do? (2011)

Editorial from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, kicked off a speech he gave earlier this year by stealing the words of the 19th century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. (The speech is available here.) King turns the opening sentence of the latter novel to his own purposes, stating that, ‘all happy economies are alike; each unhappy economy is unhappy in its own way’. He then goes on to tell us what ‘happy’ economies look like: they ‘combine growth, stability of prices and of the financial system, fiscal sustainability, supply-side flexibility and low unemployment’. He leaves aside the puzzling coexistence of such blessed happiness with historically unprecedented levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and presses on instead to give some of the reasons for the present unhappiness.

One reason we might be feeling glum, speculates King, is that most of us are getting poorer. Real take-home pay has already fallen 12 percent and is likely to fall again in 2011 to 2005 levels. ‘One has to go back to the 1920s to find a time when real wages fell over a period of six years,’ says King. But this ‘squeeze in living standards is the inevitable price to pay for the financial crisis and subsequent rebalancing of the world and UK economies’. Here King inadvertently invokes the ghost of another 19th century radical thinker, but does not mention this one’s name: it was Karl Marx who taught us that capitalism inevitably goes through periods of ‘rebalancing’ (i.e., of restoring profitability by destroying capital and devaluing labour), which inevitably leads to a squeeze in living standards (for the working class).

King concludes his speech with Tolstoy ‘s conclusion to Anna Karenina. This is that, despite life’s ups and downs, happiness is less important than trying to live in the right way. King must have been smugly proud of his intellectual prowess, connecting something as dull as a long speech on inflation with the words of one of the world’s best loved novelists. But the result is revealed as putrid when you compare King’s intent with that of Tolstoy’s.

Tolstoy was disturbed and horrified by the high levels of poverty and misery in the towns of the Russia of his day, and turned his mind to identifying the cause of the misery in his book, “What Then Must We Do?” Tolstoy followed Jesus in arguing that the first thing rich men like himself (and Mervyn King) could do would be to ‘get off the backs of the poor’ by giving up their own wealth. King misses this advice.

Tolstoy recognized that even such grand gestures of charity would not make a dent in the problem, because the problem is rooted in the whole system of property ownership and money, backed up by the tyranny of the state machine, which Tolstoy said must all be abolished. King strangely missed these lessons too. Tolstoy was on the right lines because he had the courage and intellectual honesty to pursue social problems to the root, and to state his conclusions regardless of the harm it might do to his previously existing beliefs, or social status or wealth. That makes Tolstoy a truth-telling hero.

What it makes Mervyn King we leave our readers to decide for themselves.

Pity about the politics (2011)

Book Review from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hobsbawm: History and Politics. Gregory Elliott, (Pluto Press, 2010)

Once upon a time, the teaching of history in Britain was a fantasy world in which the emphasis was on the doings of kings and queens, statesmen and Prime Ministers, the role of Empire and ‘facts’ to be learned by rote. About 60 years ago this began to change and to some extent this can be attributed to the thinking of Karl Marx and his insistence that history had to be understood in its material contexts – that is, how wealth was produced, the parts played by social classes and the technology they used.

E.J. Hobsbawm along with other notable historians of this period such as E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hiil and Rodney Hilton produced works informed by Marx’s theory of history. Hobsbawm gained critical and commercial success with The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848, (1962), The Age of Capital: 1848-1875 (1975), The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987) and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994). These and other works of Hobsbawm have been reprinted many times and have gained him a reputation as probably Britain’s best known historian and Marxist.

However, when it comes to Hobsbawm’s politics a very different picture emerges. Hobsbawm, Thompson, Hill and Hilton were at one time all members of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). But whereas Thompson, Hill, Hilton and many others saw the error of their ways – especially after the suppression of the uprising in Hungary by Russian military in 1956 – and resigned, Hobsbawm remained in the CPGB until its dissolution in 1991. As a cheerleader for the CPGB and the Russian empire, Hobsbawm defended the leading role of the party advocated by Lenin, and dismissed the view that the emancipation of the working class had to be the work of the working class itself – the cornerstone of any Marxian politics. Even now, aged 93, he is still unapologetic about his political beliefs. Hobsbawm the historian had some interesting things to say, but his politics remain anti-Marxist.

Lew Higgins

Editorial: Libya: brutality and hypocrisy (2011)

Editorial from the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the popular movements against long-standing despots in the Arab world spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Libya the Western powers thought that something they had long wanted – regime-change in Libya – was about to be handed them on a plate. But they didn’t have the same control over Gaddafi as they did over Moubarak and Ben Ali and so could not arrange for him to bow out. His own man, and true to form, Gaddafi chose to try to brutally repress the movement. With the support of mercenaries and some sections of the population armed with superior military power, it was looking as if he might succeed.

Faced with this prospect, the Western capitalist powers have decided to play the military card too and have launched a series of bombing and missile raids against the armed forces loyal to Gaddafi. Since, under the UN charter, wars not authorised by the UN are “illegal”, they have had to present their action as being to protect the civilian population against the very real exactions of the Gaddafi regime. Even so, when claiming that the military intervention is motivated by humanitarian concerns, British Prime Minister Cameron has always added that it was also in the “national interest”.

The “national interest” is in fact that the interest of the capitalist class of a country, not of its population. Their interest in this instance is, as in Iraq eight years ago, to have a friendly and reliable regime in an important oil-producing country. That’s what the bombings are really about.

If a desire to protect civilians from being shot down by governments was the real motive, why are the Western capitalist powers not also intervening to stop the despots in Yemen, Bahrain and now Syria from doing this (as they have done)? And why did they not intervene to stop Israel slaughtering civilians in Gaza three years ago?

At least they haven’t had the effrontery to claim that their aim is to bring political democracy. How could they when their bombing campaign is being partly funded by the despotic regime in Saudi Arabia? And in which war planes from the hereditary despots who rule Qatar are taking part?

It is not so much that the Western powers have double standards as that the foreign policy of capitalist states is not conducted according to any abstract standard. There is no such thing as an “ethical foreign policy”. What motivates their diplomatic and military activity abroad is a desire to protect and promote the economic interests of their capitalist class.

Some are urging support for the Gaddafi regime on the ground that, despite everything else, it is “anti-imperialist”. Not us. As Socialists, we naturally sympathise with workers anywhere struggling to get the added elbow-room to wage the class struggle that political democracy represents, but we denounce the hypocrisy and cynicism of the ruling classes of the Western powers in invoking humanitarianism to once again resort to killing and destruction in pursuit of their sordid “national” interests.

Cooking the Books: Was the crisis just a mistake? (2011)

From the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission set up by the US government reported at the end of January. They concluded that the crisis of 2007 and 2008 was the result of “human action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire”, but “of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds” and so avoidable (http://www.fcic.gov).

Obviously, the crisis was the outcome, even if unintended, of decisions by humans to behave in particular ways, but that’s not at issue. We need to know why the economic decision-makers involved took the decisions they did. What was the context of their decisions? What were the constraints acting on them?

The driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profits by competing enterprises. As the Commission put it, “in our economy, we expect businesses and individuals to pursue profits…” If there is a chance to make a profit from some activity then the businesses in that field will go for it. If the profits are high enough then other businesses will enter the field to share in the bonanza.

This is what happened in the US. From 1997 until 2006 there was a boom in house building and buying. Big profits were to be made from lending money either directly to housebuyers or to businesses that did so. Easily able to borrow funds at relatively low rates of interest, the Wall Street investment banks decided to get in on the act, and in a big way,

“The large investment banks and bank holding companies,” the Commission reported, “focused their activities increasingly on risky trading activities that produced hefty profits.” The prospect of making “hefty profits” out of lending money to build and buy houses led them to borrow more and more money to take part in the chase after them:

“In the years leading up to the crisis, too many financial institutions, as well as too many households, borrowed to the hilt, leaving them vulnerable to financial distress or ruin if the value of their investments declined even modestly. For example, as of 2007, the five major investment banks – Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley – were operating with extraordinarily thin capital. By one measure, their leverage ratios were as high as 40 to 1, meaning for every $40 in assets, there was only $1 in capital to cover losses.”

Note the matter-of-fact acceptance here that banks cannot create money out of thin air but are dependent on themselves borrowing the money they lend.

The Commission criticised the investment banks and other financial institutions for taking such risks but could those involved in making these decisions have decided otherwise? Could they have decided to forgo the chance of making the ‘hefty profits’ that were there to be taken? No, because if one of them decided not to pursue these profits, the others would have enthusiastically taken their place. It wasn’t a mistake on their part. Given the competitive, profit-seeking nature of capitalism they had to take the decisions they did. In that sense the financial crisis was not avoidable.

It was outside the remit of the Commission to examine the housing boom whose collapse in 2006 triggered the financial crisis. They merely recorded that “when housing prices fell and mortgage borrowers defaulted, the lights began to dim on Wall Street”. If they had gone further into the housing boom and why it ended, they would have discovered that it was a classic case of the pursuit of profits leading to overproduction (too many houses being built in relation to what people could afford to buy) and perhaps revised their view that “the profound events of 2007 and 2008” were not “an accentuated dip in the financial and business cycles we have come to expect in a free market economic system.”

Look back, move forward

Cross-posted from the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

Two things are utterly predictable whenever there is a mass protest, or a demonstration of significant size, and the anti-cuts demonstration organised by the TUC on 26 March was no exception. The first is that the police will do their best to turn it into a riot and to intimidate all present with violence. The second is that, regardless of police actions, most people will come away with a new sense of purpose and meaning in their lives – awake and invigorated, full of the collective joy that spontaneously arises when human beings get together to show their strength of feeling or merely their urge for festivity. After many decades of a relatively lonely and boring struggle to survive, a struggle that those in power have faithfully promised us will get worse in the coming years, people will have come home on 26 March at the least relieved that "I'm not alone".

That's the positive side. Unfortunately, with the decline of the traditional left and trade unions in this country and around the world, and the accompanying lack of faith in democracy and political parties, it's hard to know what exactly to do with those feelings – how to transform a feeling of solidarity and commitment to opposition into something that will last, something capable of delivering long-term, lasting change for the better.

That lack of faith is not just confined to the mass of people who are not ordinarily involved in politics. It is sometimes declared to be a positive thing from those committed to radical change. The thinking is that the traditional political parties and trade unions and so on have held us back – their ideas have been tried and failed and defeated, and their hierarchical structures and outmoded ideas are boring and not fit for purpose. Instead, we are to celebrate spontaneity and freedom – to get together in small groups and do exactly whatever we want.

There is something to the argument, but it has lost its appeal in the face of a major attack from the ruling class and its representatives who control the state machine. An extremely serious economic crisis that started with the banks has changed the game. The rich were rescued by huge state bail-outs. The costs of the crisis were shifted instead to the state – and the state intends to shift the burden to us, by slashing our jobs, pensions, social services, benefits, and so on. The attack is organised and centralised – shouldn't the opposition be too?

There are no easy answers to these questions, and we don't pretend there are. But perhaps it's time to hear once again a voice that has been marginalised for over a century. From the formation of the Labour party in 1906, and then the Russian revolution in 1917, socialism has come to mean either state management of welfare capitalism, or state dictatorship over a centralised economy. But these rightly discredited ideas marginalised a previously existing conception that it might be worth reviving. The word socialism was already beginning to lose its original meaning by 1894, which caused William Morris, one of the Victorian age's greatest polymaths, to say:

"I will say what I mean by being a Socialist, since I am told that the word no longer expresses definitely and with certainty what it did ten years ago. Well, what I mean by Socialism is a condition of society in which there should be neither rich nor poor, neither master nor master's man, neither idle nor overworked, neither brain-sick brain workers, nor heart-sick hand workers, in a word, in which all men would be living in equality of condition, and would manage their affairs unwastefully, and with the full consciousness that harm to one would mean harm to all—the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH."

The 20th century did its best to let the curtain fall for ever on this vision of socialism, but a small number of dedicated activists have done their best to keep it alive. We in the Socialist Party count ourselves among their number. We say that it is right that people have lost faith in traditional politics – it has proved by its actions what it is all about. But to say that therefore we must give up on a vision of the future, and an organised commitment to attaining it, is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The inspiring struggles for democracy and against austerity we are seeing emerging around the world have a common cause – they are the divided and isolated battles of workers against the relatively united attack of the world's ruling class in its attempt to resolve its economic crisis. We need to follow the ruling-class example – come together and organise in order to resolve the crisis in our way. That is, by organising a political party dedicated to taking state power out of the hands of the ruling class, and to establishing socialism. And given the extremely serious nature of the ecological catastrophe we are all facing, this is not just a nice idea. Increasingly, it's a matter of survival.

Stuart Watkins

Egypt: The hard road to political democracy (2011)

From the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

What will happen in Egypt now? Will the army keep control until a new leader acceptable to the West emerges?

At the time of going to press, the “revolution of anger” in Egypt seems to be entering a new phase. Tahrir Square has been reopened to traffic and commerce. Massive political demonstrations are over, at least for the time being, but strikes and protests by various groups of workers continue. The employees of the National Bank of Egypt have forced the resignation of its chairman, a Mubarak ally. Ambulance drivers, public transport workers, and even the police are demonstrating for better wages and conditions.

Many Egyptians are dissatisfied with what has been achieved so far, and with good reason. Mubarak has gone. But what sort of democrat is the man who took over from him on 31 January – Omar Suleiman, assassin and torturer-in-chief of the dreaded Mukhabarat (General Intelligence Service)? The demand to suspend the emergency law that permits detention without charge has not been met, nor have political prisoners been released. The ruling military council has set no firm timetable for elections and transition to civilian rule. They have made plenty of promises, but who is naïve enough to trust them?

To understand what is happening in Egypt, we must first understand the nature of the ruling regime.

A military oligarchy
The regime is not a personal dictatorship. It can survive the removal of Mubarak or any other specific figure. It is a military oligarchy. The main power centre is the supreme command of the armed forces (the eleventh largest in the world). In addition, there is a ruling party – under Nasser the Arab Socialist Union, renamed by Sadat the National Democratic Party – but its role is secondary.

The military regime has its origins in the Free Officers’ Movement, which overthrew the British colonial puppet king Farouk in 1952. Its domestic and foreign policy has changed over time, under the successive leadership of Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak, but the regime itself has remained the same. It has never been in the least bit democratic.

Why then does the Trotskyist International Socialist Review tell us that Egypt “has been ruled by a dictatorship for 30 years, with arrests and torture a constant occurrence” (socialistworker.org/2011/02/11)? Only 30 years? Didn’t Nasser too jail thousands of political opponents? Ah, but those were “progressive” and “anti-imperialist” jails – and that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?

Before regaining independence, Egypt was ruled by a succession of empires. Before that it endured the despotism of the pharaohs. Mubarak too was popularly known as “the Pharaoh”. Egypt has been a dictatorship for 11,000 years.

From Nasser to Sadat and Mubarak
This is not to deny important differences between the Nasser and post-Nasser periods.

Nasser conducted a protectionist policy on behalf of national capital. A state-owned iron and steel industry was created. The Aswan Dam was built. In 1956 the Suez Canal was nationalised, leading to armed invasion by Britain, France and Israel. Social reforms were undertaken. Land was redistributed and rents paid by tenant farmers controlled. A minimum wage was established. There were also reforms in the areas of housing, health, education, women’s rights and family planning. In foreign policy Egypt was formally non-aligned; in reality it became a client state of the Soviet Union.

Nasser’s successor Sadat expelled Soviet advisers, realigned Egypt with the West (and eventually with Israel), and replaced protectionism by an “open-door” policy. Currency controls were loosened and foreign companies invited to invest in tax-free “enterprise zones”. Mubarak went further in the same direction. Cheap food imports were allowed to flood the country, ruining Egyptian farmers. The gap between rich and poor widened. The country fell deeply in debt to the international financial institutions and became financially dependent on US aid.

Much of state industry was privatised. As was later to occur in post-Soviet Russia, valuable state assets were acquired on the cheap by a handful of businessmen with inside connections. That is how Ahmed Ezz, a close friend of Mubarak’s son Gamal, emerged overnight as a wealthy steel tycoon.

Another lucrative scam was the legal requirement that a foreign investor must give (not sell) a local partner a 20 percent stake in his venture. The “local partner” always happened to be a general or high official.

Mubarak and his family were themselves the greatest beneficiaries of this “crony capitalism”. The family fortune has been rumoured to be as much as $70 billion (£43.5 billion). Both of Mubarak’s sons are billionaires in their own right. Most of this money is held in British and Swiss banks or invested in American real estate.

It should be noted that under Mubarak the regime did not serve the interests of the whole capitalist class. Some businessmen did very well, while others lost out. For example, Ezz used his political clout to force other businessmen to buy his steel rather than importing cheaper steel from China. Similarly, it was difficult for businessmen lacking inside connections to obtain bank loans. This helps explain why some businessmen back the opposition.

The clan and the regime
While most Egyptians want an end to the military regime, the immediate target of the “revolution of anger” was the “Mubarak clan” – Mubarak, his family and their closest allies and associates. The demonstrators wisely took care not to offend the military as an institution. According to some analysts, the Mubarak clan had powerful enemies inside the regime (resentful, perhaps, that they were not getting their fair share of the loot) who used the protests to mount a “half-coup” – meaning a coup against the clan but not the regime. Perhaps this is to overstate tensions inside the regime. It is clear, however, that there were people in the ruling group who did not belong to the Mubarak clan and who were prepared to sacrifice it in order to save the regime. (Apparently they were encouraged to take this step by the Obama administration.)

This was one reason why no attempt was made to use the army to suppress the protests. Another likely reason was that the generals judged that the soldiers and junior officers could not be relied upon to obey orders to shoot into the crowds. The security police – the “thugs” who mysteriously appeared “out of nowhere” riding horses and camels – could be used, because they were more isolated from ordinary people and more effectively under clan control, but there were too few of them to scare off the enormous masses of demonstrators.

Youth movements and trade unions
The key role in organising the demonstrations seems to have been played initially by the April 6 Youth Movement. This organisation began as a Facebook group set up to call on all workers to stay at home on 6 April 2008 in solidarity with striking textile workers. (There has now emerged a new umbrella organisation called the Youth Coalition for the Revolution of Anger.)

So the demonstration organisers appear to have been closely connected with the workers’ movement and, in particular, with the campaign to create independent trade unions to replace the old state-controlled Egyptian Trade Union Federation. The textile workers tried to establish an independent union in 2006–2008, but large-scale arrests of activists made this impossible at that time. One of the major gains of the “revolution” was achieved on 30 January, when an independent trade union movement finally emerged in the form of the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions.

An important point that media coverage fails to convey is that the mass political demonstrations are only part of the upheaval. There are also numerous strikes and protests over “bread and butter” issues. That is not surprising when you consider the rising prices of staple foods and the fact that 40 percent of Egyptians have to survive on under $2 (£1.30) a day. While political demands are uppermost in Cairo, it seems that material demands are much more prominent in other cities. In Port Said, for instance, crowds angry over the shortage of housing set fire to the local state security headquarters, the governor’s office and the main post office.

The opposition parties
The regime selectively and intermittently allowed opposition parties to exist but restricted their activity. As a result, these parties are all very small – except for the Moslem Brothers, who despite being illegal were able (like Islamists in other countries) to take shelter in the mosques. Observers estimate that only 5 percent of Egyptians support any of the parties.

Almost all of the opposition parties belong to one of three categories.

First, there are several liberal capitalist parties that advocate civil rights and “free enterprise.” An example is the New Wafd Party. These parties are backed by a number of prominent businessmen.

Second, there are various Islamist parties. The Moslem Brotherhood is the largest of these, but not the only one.

Third, there are parties that regard themselves as leftist or socialist. What this usually means in the Egyptian context is loyalty to the legacy of Nasser, so it is more accurate to call these Nasserite parties. Thus, the National Progressive Unionist Party (known for short as Tagammu) “defends the principles of the 1952 revolution”.

Some parties combine Nasserite with Islamist ideas. For example, the Umma Party stands for “socialist democracy with Sharia (Islamic law) as the main source of legislation” (!). Finally, there is also an environmentalist Green Party.

It is hard to see what can come out of the negotiations that Suleiman is conducting on behalf of the regime with leaders of various opposition parties. None of the parties played any part in organising the “revolution” and few demonstrators regarded the parties as representing them. In fact, due to popular suspicion the negotiations may further weaken the parties’ base of support. A report from Suez mentions mass resignations from the parties participating in the negotiations, including Wafd and Tagammu, and connects this development with the creation of a Council to Protect the Revolution in Al-Arish (near the border with Gaza).

Who would win free elections?
The weakness of the parties makes it very difficult to predict who would win free elections if they were held today. As the theme of social justice has been prominent in the upheaval, the popular appeal of the liberal opposition may be limited. Social protest can work to the advantage of either Islamists or the left. Given the secular nature of the protests (not only were Islamic slogans conspicuous by their absence: there were also slogans in support of Moslem-Christian unity), the left may do quite well. The Moslem Brothers obviously have considerable support, but they themselves apparently do not think they are strong enough to gain power at this stage.

The existing left-wing opposition parties, however, are handicapped by their Nasserite orientation. To the extent that the demonstrators are against the military regime and committed to democracy, they might hesitate to vote for parties that hark back to an earlier form of the same anti-democratic regime. And, of course, only the older generation has direct memories of the Nasser period. So conditions may be favourable for the emergence of a new democratic left, possibly linked to the independent trade unions. There may even be potential for the spread of genuine socialist ideas.

Dragging out the transition
The uncertain outcome of elections is one reason why the generals aim to delay the transition to democracy as long as they can. They may also seek to retain a power of veto and other prerogatives even after a civilian government takes office, as well as an ability to reassert control whenever they consider it necessary – as in the “Turkish model”.

The wish to delay democratisation is clearly shared by the American and European governments on whom the Egyptian generals depend. These governments are great champions of elections, but only provided that the outcome is predictable and acceptable to them. They need time to prepare the ground for such an acceptable outcome – in particular, to select parties and politicians who can be trusted to respect Western interests and then give them financial, PR and other aid to help them win. Candidates for this role – El-Baradei, for instance – are well aware that pleasing Egypt’s Western patrons is at least as vital to their prospects as pleasing their fellow citizens.

How much time is needed? Statements from the ruling military council hint that six months may not be enough. German chancellor Angela Merkel has drawn a parallel between the transition in Egypt and the process of German reunification, suggesting that a whole year may be needed. And just in case the results of political engineering are disappointing, the generals and their patrons probably want to keep open the option of dragging out the transition indefinitely, perhaps co-opting a few handpicked opposition figures into what remains basically a military regime.

In the meantime, it is the job of the regime to restore and maintain “order” and “normality”. Ordinary people must stop making trouble and get back to work! To achieve that, the regime can be expected to combine – or perhaps alternate between – sweet talk and arrests, appeasement and repression. Neither approach will easily succeed.

As socialists, we do not regard political democracy in itself as sufficient to emancipate humanity. But we do recognise that it provides by far the best conditions for the development of the socialist movement. That is why we wish those well struggling for political democracy in Egypt – and, indeed, throughout the world

Stefan

Kropotkin (2011)

Book Review from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mutual Aid. An Introduction and Evaluation. By Iain McKay. AK Press.

Socialists have always recommended Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, including it on lists of books for sale. Kropotkin was an anarchist, but had been a scientist (geographer) himself and in this book was writing as science writer. It was originally written as a reply to T. H. Huxley, the biologist known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”, who had argued that both in nature and in human society “life was a continual free fight, and beyond the limited and temporary relations of the family, the Hobbesian war of each against all was the normal state of existence”.

Huxley was a biologist and an expert on Darwin’s views, but here was expressing a popular prejudice; in fact, more than this, a view that justified the division of society into rich and poor, oppressors and oppressed. As Iain McKay puts it in this pamphlet:

“In its most extreme form, this became ‘Social Darwinism’ which (like much of sociobiology today) proceeds by first projecting the dominant ideas of current society onto nature (often unconsciously, so that scientists mistakenly consider the ideas in question as both ‘normal’ and ‘natural’). … Then the theories of nature produced in this manner are transferred back onto society and history, being used to ‘prove’ that the principles of capitalism (hierarchy, authority, competition, etc.) are eternal laws, which are then appealed to as a justification for the status quo!”

Kropotkin produced the evidence from scientific studies to show that this was not the case, neither in nature nor in society. In nature a “struggle for existence” certainly went on, but cooperation (“mutual aid”) was just as much “a factor in evolution” (the book’s subtitle) as competition. It wasn’t just a struggle of members of the same species against each other to survive and so leave more offspring; in many species cooperation was a survival strategy with the less cooperative having less chance of survival and so leaving less offspring.

McKay goes into detail to show that many sociobiologists, including Dawkins himself, accept this, even if on the basis of mathematical models. Kropotkin can be seen as a bit of a sociobiologist himself in that he too argued from animal behaviour to human social behaviour. Only two of his book’s eight chapters are devoted to biological evolution, the rest dealing with human social behaviour and social evolution. However, these are governed by quite different factors that have nothing to do with genetics. But Kropotkin did at least turn the tables on the Social Darwinists by arguing that it was capitalism, not socialism, that was against human nature.

McKay’s 60-page pamphlet is a useful account of the background, significance and influence of Kropotkin’s book.

Adam Buick

Proper Gander: Brooker's Bile (2011)

The Proper Gander column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Television is a “flickering fibbing machine”, according to uber-critic Charlie Brooker in How TV Ruined Your Life (BBC2). Using a snappily-edited mix of archive clips, flippant sketches and scalpel-sharp observations, his six-part polemic describes how manipulating and distorted television has become.

Brooker bases his argument on ‘Cultivation Theory’. This claims that if we spend too much time gawping at the goggle-box, then our expectations, morals and fears are more likely to be influenced by what we see on screen than what we experience in real life. For example, television has conditioned us to be frightened of dark city streets because this is the setting for so much televised violence. And, he argues, production companies have got away with this by presenting violence in a glossy, titillating way through public information films (“government-approved mini horror movies designed to fear you into not going all dead”) and scare-fests like Crimewatch and Wire In The Blood.

In his second episode, Brooker focuses on how different demographic groups are portrayed on television. Young adults are “mindless jigging gits”, dads are “tragic shuffling pitiful individuals”, and older people are “hilarious irrelevances”. TV encourages us to perpetually look youthful – and makes us feel inadequate if we don’t – through dross like the “devastatingly mean makeover show” Ten Years Younger. This trend manifests itself as ‘aspirational television’, where Brooker’s bile is focused in episode three. The theory behind aspirational programming is that “if you watch beautiful fun-loving people on TV you’ll somehow feel like they’re your friends, whereas in reality of course you’re essentially just a tramp staring at them from the other side of the room”. Some of his examples are jaw-droppingly unedifying, like My Super Sweet 16 UK. This docu-soap follows slappably-spoilt brats, including one who stages an X-Factor-style audition to judge which of his sparkly-eyed acquaintances are fit enough to attend his birthday party. How our relationships are influenced by television is the target of Brooker’s next episode. With hilarious bitterness, he shows us how television perpetuates the myth of ‘the perfect relationship’ through adverts that turn toothpaste into an aphrodisiac.

On first impression, it’s easy to dismiss Charlie Brooker as misanthropic and sneering. But his acerbic tone is really just a way of filtering out those viewers he would consider too shallow to appreciate his arguments. Buy into his style, and Brooker’s work is refreshingly perceptive, even exhilarating.

Mike Foster

Cooking the Books: Capitalism will not be controlled (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gordon Brown will go down in history as a failure. Politically, as a prime minister who never won an election. Economically, as the man who arrogantly and pompously announced that his policies had led to the end of the boom/bust cycle, only to find himself a year or so later presiding over capitalism’s biggest slump since the 1930s.

Philip Collins commented on this claim in his column in the (London) Times on 7 January:

“Weirdly, the Labour Party appeared to have concluded that capitalism had become stable, ordered and pliant. They need to read their Marx again, They’ll find a picture of capitalism as creative, destructive, radical, disruptive and prone to cycles of boom and bust, even when commanded to behave by Labour chancellors.”

But had they ever read Marx in the first place? Not that the Labour Party has ever accepted Marx’s analysis of capitalism. They haven’t even used the word “capitalism” for years. A previous Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, once famously declared that he had never got beyond a long footnote on page 2 of Capital.

Brown, on the other hand, as a leftwing student leader in his youth and as author of a book on the ILP leader Jimmy Maxton, would probably have read some Marx. As would his successor as chancellor, Alistair Darling, if he really was once a member of the International Marxist Group (though he might have therefore been more familiar with Lenin than Marx). The Miliband brothers would have heard of Marx and his ideas from their father and perhaps even read some.

Collins used to be a speechwriter for Blair but he doesn’t seem to have made Blair make this criticism of Brown. They, apparently, had other things to argue about. But his description of Marx’s view of capitalism is substantially correct.

If Harold Wilson had persisted he would have found (some 500 pages later) Marx’s description of the course of capital accumulation:

“The life of industry becomes a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over-production, crisis and stagnation” (chapter 15, section 7).

In a boom the competitive struggle for profits leads to overproduction (in relation to its market) of one sector of the economy that then spreads to other sectors. Capital accumulation stalls. During the resulting slump the conditions are created (through lower wages, interest rates, and asset values and the elimination of unprofitable businesses) for a slow recovery and eventually another boom which, like the previous one, will eventually bust. And the cycle continues.

Brown’s Tory opponents forget that he wasn’t the first chancellor to have claimed to have ended the boom/bust cycle. Nigel Lawson, Thatcher’s chancellor from 1983 to 1989, also believed he had done so. David Smith, the economics editor of the Sunday Times, recounted in his 1991 book From Boom to Bust:

“Even before an economic miracle was being proclaimed in the late 1980s, the Conservative Party’s boosters had declared that Nigel Lawson had achieved something, without explicitly trying for it, that had eluded all previous post-war Chancellors. He had, it was said, abolished the business cycle, a boast that Lawson was happy to live with…” (p. 196). “…until,” Smith added, “it proved to be woefully misplaced,” when the recession of 1990-91 broke out.

So, it’s not just commands from Labour chancellors to behave that capitalism ignores. It does the same to commands from Tory chancellors too. In fact, to commands from any government, including Tory-Liberal coalitions, as the decline in GNP in the last quarter of 2010 showed.

Editorial: What’s the alternative? (2011)

Editorial from the March 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“What’s the alternative?” As capitalism remains mired in crisis, and criticisms of the system become more commonplace and compelling, expect to hear this question asked more and more. It is often used politically and rhetorically – because every sensible person is supposed to know the answer. The idea that “There Is No Alternative”, or TINA, is one of Thatcher’s enduring political legacies. It will often be asserted angrily in political debate, which is revealing. No one feels the need to angrily assert the truth of the law of gravity. No one, then, should feel the need to angrily assert the fact that there is no alternative if there isn’t one. They do because there is.

The Trades Union Congress (TUC), a federation of Britain’s main trade unions, has organised a national demonstration against the government’s spending cuts, which will take place on 26 March. The demonstration has been called a ‘March For The Alternative’. Which sounds great. At last, after decades of ‘TINA’, an alternative! Unfortunately, the TUC’s alternative looks much the same as ‘business as usual’. The alternative, according to them, is ‘Jobs, growth, justice’. This is indistinguishable from what every political party in this country, whether of the left or right, promises every election time. We should not be too surprised by this. The TUC, like all trade unions, exists to win a better deal for wage-slaves. This is a laudable aim, and we support it.

But we do not just want to win a better deal for wage-slaves. We want to abolish slavery. We are wage-slavery abolitionists. As one socialist famously put it, we ought not to exaggerate to ourselves what these trade-union struggles and demonstrations and ‘actions’ can achieve. “We ought not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market.” Instead, we need to organise for something new.

That was Marx in 1865. Unfortunately, his advice has been mostly ignored, including by those counting themselves as his followers, ever since. As the linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky puts it, “the effort to overcome ‘wage-slavery’ [has] been going on since the beginnings of the industrial revolution, [and] we haven’t advanced an inch. In fact, we’re worse off than we were a hundred years ago in terms of understanding the issues.”

Chomsky is right, and it’s the reason we in the Socialist Party devote so much of our time and energy to promoting an understanding of the issues. We seem, in fact, to be the only political organisation in this country to take this task at all seriously.

The alternative, then, is not the amelioration of our suffering under the wages system. It is the abolition of modern slavery – the emancipation of labour. Under slavery, you are sold to a master once and for all. Under wage slavery, you hire yourself out by the hour or the week or the month. The basic relationship between master and slave has not changed. We need to get rid of the master, take the means of making a living under our collective ownership and control, and organise our own lives, democratically, and on the basis of freely organised, freely given work. In a word, the alternative is socialism.

Lazy workers?

Cross-posted from the Socialist Courier blog

A defense of capitalism often heard by socialists is that socialism would be impossible because without the goad of the wages system workers would be too lazy to work, but recent statistics seem to contradict that argument:

"A record 5.26 million people worked unpaid overtime last year, clocking up an average of more than seven hours a week without pay, according to a new study. The TUC said workers were missing out on almost £5,500 a year, worth £29bn to the economy. One in five employees regularly put in extra unpaid hours last year, with public-sector workers most likely to work unpaid overtime,said the TUC. The number of workers doing unpaid overtime was the highest since records began in 1992, the research found, with 5.26 million people clocking up an average of seven hours 12 minutes unpaid overtime every week." (Independent, 25 February)

RD

Cooking the Books: Doom and gloom (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In November David Segal of the New York Times interviewed a number of economists to see what ideas they had about how to get out of the current slump (See here).

His opening words were “we are not going to shop our way out of this mess”. Which is true enough since capitalism is not a system geared to meeting consumer demand but one driven by capital accumulation out of profits. Consumer demand merely reflects capital accumulation. If capital accumulation stalls, as at present, so does consumer demand. Consumer demand can only increase if capital accumulation does; it can’t wag the dog.

The silliest suggestion came from Professor James K Galbraith who proposed paying unemployed workers their full social security benefits when they reached 62 which, he claimed, would create jobs because “they would have 22.5 percent more purchasing power than they would if forced to wait until the age when full Social Security benefits kick in”. But where would the money to do this come from? Only by transferring it from somewhere else in the economy, but this wouldn’t increase overall demand. Since he was also recorded as saying that “we’re likely to see a situation that makes people angry and miserable for years” he didn’t seem particularly convinced that his proposal would be adopted.

Professor Gar Alperovitz saw the way-out as via more employee-owned enterprises. “If the economy and the government don’t have an answer to the problem,” he said, “people are forced to try social enterprise.” But such enterprises – small businesses such as laundries – are not going to generate enough investment to get capital accumulation going again. In fact they survive largely by paying lower wages and accepting lower profits than a business normally would. Most will probably eventually go bust anyway.

Others realised that only something that would stimulate capital investment might work. Someone suggested investing in “green energy initiatives” but wasn’t too convinced that this would happen as, not being profitable in the short run, it would require government subsidies to get started. Someone else suggested that as the average age of the population was rising there would be more demand for medical treatment and that this could generate investment in technological breakthroughs in this field.

A mad marketeer from the Cato Institute pointed out, correctly as it happens, that “time was a key ingredient to a recovery”. Yes, time for the slump to create the conditions for a slow recovery, through unemployment exerting a downward pressure on wages and spare capital exerting a downward pressure on interest rates, both of which help to restore the rate of profit. He, however, looked forward gleefully to another consequence: governments cutting their spending to lower taxes on profits. “I think,” he said, “we also have a bubble in the labor market for state and government employees and over the next two years we might see as many as one million of these employees lose their jobs.”

Professor Andrew Caplin saw the answer in a growing inequality of wealth and income providing jobs for “the poor and middle class to cater to the economy’s biggest winners” servicing them as cooks, nutritionists and financial advisers. "Professor Caplin worries,” reported Segal, “that this concept might be caricatured as ‘cater to the rich’.” As well he might, but, given capitalism, he was on the right track. Increased inequality – a shift in favour of property-incomes – is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for a resumption of capital accumulation and, when it eventually does, will lead to a further increase in inequality.

That‘s all capitalism has to offer – periods of pain alternating with periods of increased inequality. It‘s not so much economists as the system they study, capitalism, that‘s dismal.

Ghana – can oil make a difference? (2011)

From the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who fill benefit from the discovery of offshore oil in Ghana?

The fanfare and euphoria that greeted the discovery of oil in Ghana is not only based on the assumption that it will help boost the not-so-healthy economy of this poor nation but more fundamental though unvoiced factors also account for the uproar. The dismal reality of the actions of the global oil magnates in African countries is one such factor. They act in brazen defiance of the norms of civility and dignity of the local populations. The humiliating treatment meted out to Liberia’s Charles Taylor due, in part, to his refusal to do business with Dick Cheney’s Halliburton is a prime illustration of such corporate arrogance. But more importantly, the expectation of Western oil companies to make their super-profits is also a cause of the excitement.

The debates

When the actual pumping started in mid-December, the world media was replete with all sorts of stories about Ghana hitting the jackpot. As discussions on the issue livened up attracting comments and analyses from Ghana and especially the BBC and RFI, the Squealers of the Ghanaian government got down to work. Amidst all this confounding hullabaloo, the spokespersons rebuffed the claims of the ‘prophets of doom’ that Ghana will go the way of Nigeria, Angola, etc, where the oil wealth has become a curse rather than a blessing. They claimed that stringent measures have been put in place to forestall the intolerable prospect of corruption, mayhem, kidnappings and killings that Nigerians have to contend with all these years on account of the petro-dollars.

However, it soon came to light that as of the time the Squealers were frantically trying to convince the doubting Thomases to drop the deep-seated cynicism that makes them attribute negative theories to the project, the legislature had not even deliberated on the matter in parliament yet. Not that parliamentary approval is of any relevance here since, generally, laws passed under this money-dominated economic system are either in favour of the rich and powerful or against the poor. But the fact that it had not yet been done suggests that, contrary to government claims, no precautionary had been taken against the possibility of Ghana going the way of Nigeria, Angola and co. Or, even more seriously, that the Western companies rushed the Ghanaian authorities into having the drilling started without ensuring that adequate protective legal instruments are duly concluded. This creates the impression that, contrary to what the Ghanaian authorities claim, the investors are, and this is obvious, the senior partners of the whole enterprise.

Then, later, some concerned Ghanaian observers intimated that even before the drilling got started, Ghanaian policy-makers were already using the anticipated oil proceeds as collateral to contract loans from abroad. An ominous beginning if the insinuation is well-founded.

Production relations

The development of modern industry, brought about by the profit-oriented economic system, makes it necessary for the production of wealth to be socialised. This means that the point of production is not the individual factory, goldmine, oilfield, etc but it is society. It follows therefore that those who control society are the ones who effectively control the use of the wealth produced. It is neither those who do the hard labour nor those who manage the workplace, i.e. the factory, goldmine or oilfield.

As the state is the recognised controlling body of any society, it is an undeniable fact that whoever controls the state, whether directly or indirectly, is the de facto controller of society and, by extension, the wealth produced.

It is also common knowledge that the political leadership in Africa, and indeed in all former colonies, have, to a large extent, the same tastes and lifestyles as the ruling elite of the former colonialists. The two groups share the same consciousness. Both work towards the preservation of the status quo – the exploitative relations of production – as it is the guarantor of their luxurious, albeit parasitic, lifestyle.

The so-called New World Order being vigorously pursued by these leaders in the West and their “experts” and advisers is nothing but an attempt at intensifying the exploitation of the world’s resources in the interests of the Western big business community whose interests Western governments serve. This insignificant minority of multi-billionaires control the wealth and political leadership of the West by virtue of their ownership of the means of production and distribution of wealth – land, factories, railways, the media, communication networks etc.

The states and governments of the former colonies are under the complete control of the Western powers and if any of these poor countries shows the slightest sign of attempting to resist Western domination, such a country is brutally forced to ‘cooperate’. That is in conformity with the near-invariable practice of the powers that be. There are too many examples of this state of affairs to need any mention here. Thus the whole of society and its resources are effectively controlled by the rich minority and they alone determine what to produce and how to use the wealth thereof.

Consequently, governments of the peripheral countries, who also represent their local business community, will, in accord with inherited convention, leave no stone unturned in enticing Western multinational corporations to come and invest in their countries. They do so with the hope that the local money-owners may get the chance to pick some crumbs falling from the sanguinary table of the foreign investors.

To facilitate foreign investment, the governments are ordered to create an ‘enabling environment’, an expression which is a euphemism for holding down the ordinary citizenry for the investors to mercilessly exploit them by way of cheap labour.

The Ghanaian reality

In Ghana, those at the helm of affairs, in routine fashion, fail to realise that not all are fools. Gold, bauxite, manganese, diamonds, cocoa, timber, just to name a few, have been produced since time immemorial. If ever any ordinary citizen benefited from the proceeds of these resources by way of, maybe public conveniences, untarred roads, ill-equipped health centres, few schools or some such tokens of basic necessities, then it was an unintended necessity.

That an overwhelming majority of Ghanaians have been wallowing in abject poverty whist a few cabal of the old boy network live in stinking affluence tells a lot. Though information on how the national cake is distributed is deliberately made unavailable or at best scanty, yet it is not entirely unknown. The several coups d’états, firing squads, commissions of enquiry etc are open pointers as to how the cake is shared.

Today, oil is being pumped and, in this world of money-based economy, exploitation cannot be avoided since production is carried out for the sake of making profits. It would be a contradiction to have a money-based system without profit. If investors will not make a profit, they will keep their money, but if they will realise a profit, they are going to do so at the expense of the worker and the host country. Then their collaborators in the form of local politicians and business people will be given the task of using sophistry to cover up the truth. Since the Ghanaian masses are effectively excluded from the decision-making process, except for the periodic elections during which time they are hoodwinked into voting for which bunch of looters to come and rob them, they are left helpless.

Corporate journalism

Those who could have saved the situation are the journalists who, at least, are able to glean into the corridors of power and have an idea of what is going on in there. Now, it is received opinion that Ghana is one of the few countries in Africa where press freedom has developed to a stage that is almost ineradicable. It is therefore expected, and observers of the Ghanaian oil scenario have concurred with this, that the vibrant press will serve as an uncompromising watchdog over the operations of those involved in the business. It is thus claimed that the eagle-eyed vigilance of the ubiquitous journalists will put fear into officials who may try to get involved in any financial misconduct. But the snag is the kind of journalism that is practised in Ghana and, indeed elsewhere in this profit-oriented world.

Corporate journalism is stunted journalism. The media houses operate to make a profit, just like the oil companies pumping the oil. And since the process of making profits necessarily entails shady deals, graft and unconventional methods, the media personnel cannot but play the game according to the rules. And that, exactly, is their stock in trade.

However, it is not to be discounted that there are individual journalists who may profess genuine intent in their work. But corporate media as an institution is an indispensable cog in the profit-making machine and hence works in accordance with the odious practices of the system. And that is precisely why they refer to themselves as the fourth estate of the exploitative ruling class.

Not surprisingly, the media coverage is appallingly terrible. It would not be an overstatement to say that over ninety percent of media activities is devoted to three trivial issues.:

1 Entertainment – to divert attention from real issues of official theft, but not to genuinely satisfy people’s spiritual needs.

2 Advertisements – to promote the consumption of worthless or fancy goods.

3 Misinformation – to keep the masses ignorant.

An instructive case of such disinformation was seen on New Year’s Day when BBC’s Network Africa was summing up the important events of the past year – 2010. It was written by Elizabeth Ohene, a former BBC journalist and also a former minister in the previous government in Ghana. She wrote that she was surprised to learn that Ghana had just been promoted from a least developed country to a ‘middle income’ one. Who did it and why?

All said and done, Ghana may not go through the kind of physical violence and killings that is the lot of Nigeria today. However, it will surely experience the other aspect of what is happening in oil-rich Nigeria. The oil corporations will siphon off more than the lion’s share of the proceeds from Ghana. Then the political and business leadership will stash away as much as they can. And finally, the ordinary citizens, like their counterparts in Nigeria, will continue to live below the needless but inescapable poverty line.

Suhuyini