“S.S.” difficulties (1941)

Party News from the January 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have had some difficulty in getting the “SOCIALIST STANDARD” out this month. The type for the issue was set up ready for printing but was destroyed during one of the bomb attacks on London. Some of the articles have been lost and the continuation of the “War: Offensive and Defensive Methods” will have to be re-written. Portions of other articles have also disappeared.

ED. COMM.

Appeal for the “Socialist Standard” (1941)

Party News from the January 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

Readers will be aware that during recent months we have been losing heavily on THE SOCIALIST STANDARD. Sales have fallen owing to the difficulties of holding meetings and of distribution. On the other side, costs have risen. One method of reducing the loss is to cut down the number of pages. This will have to be done unless other methods are found. We therefore ask all those who can afford to do so to send donations to enable us to keep the “S.S.” at its present size. The need is urgent. Send donations to the Treasurer, 42, Great Dover Street, S.E.1. Postal Orders and cheques should be crossed.

Voice From The Back: Never Steal Anything (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Never Steal Anything 

The owning class through their schoolrooms and churches are forever telling young workers never to steal, but in reality the capitalists turn out to be the biggest thieves of all. “Fraud is costing British business £72 billion a year, according to a report out this week. Despite the warning of recent corporate scandals involving Enron, WorldCom, Parmalat and Refco, UK companies are still estimated to be losing 6 per cent of their annual revenue to fraud and corruption, says a study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners and international lawyers Mishcon de Reya.” Observer (20 November) £72 billion a year! It seems to be a case of never steal anything .. small.

Room At The Top 

Good news for the homeless in France, according to a recent report on hotels that have some vacancies. “The least expensive room at the George V, is about £390 per night including bedroom, bathroom and breakfast. The most expensive suite at the Plaza Athenee costs almost £10,000 per night and includes four rooms and breakfast.” Times (30 November)

Old, Cold And Hungry 

Malnutrition amongst elderly Scots has soared in the past ten years and pressure groups blame the Scottish Executive for allowing pensioners to live below the poverty line. In 1995, 40 Scots died from malnutrition, but last year that figure had soared to 99.” Times (21 November) Even more alarming figures have been released for the UK by the charity Age Concern. “150,000 people over 65 have died as a result of the cold in the past five years.” Times (25 November)

The Slaughter Of The Innocents

Capitalism’s record of murder is even more horrific when looked at from a world perspective. “Nearly six million children die from hunger or malnutrition every year, The Food and Agriculture Organisation says. Many deaths result from treatable diseases such as diarrhoea, pneumonia, malaria and measles, the agency said. They would survive if they had proper nourishment, the agency says in a new report on world hunger.” BBC News (22 November)

Our Masters’ Voice 

The Confederation of British Industry expresses the views of the British capitalist class. Here for instance is Sir Digby Jones, the chairman of the CBI, on trade unions and international competition: “Trade unions in the private sector in the 21st century will become largely irrelevant…. There are 1.3 billion Chinese out there who want your lunch and a billion Indians who want your dinner.” Times (22 November). Sir Digby is of course indulging in wishful thinking, he knows that the British working class’s greatest protection against the profit-mad owners on the industrial front is the union. A greater threat to all the capitalists of the world would be the world’s working class uniting politically. (See Rigg’s view below).

Ah, Progress 

The rapid growth of capitalism in China and India has been greeted with acclaim by all its supporters. There is another side to the story though, illustrated by two recent developments as reported in the Observer (27 November)  The Chinese city Harbin, population 3.5 million, has had no water supply for four days because of the pollution caused by 100 tonnes of benzene – a colourless, odourless carcinogenic chemical – spilling into the river upstream after an explosion at the local chemical factory. “The poisoning of the Songhua river has exposed the murkier side of China’s spectacular economic growth; the emphasis on business rather than environment, the tendency to cover up health risks and splits within the government.” From India comes news of the exploitation of children to feed the rapacious growth of capitalism. 400 children were found working in factories in Delhi. “Housed in a night shelter for beggars, the embroidery workers, aged 5 to 14, were waiting yesterday to hear their fate.”

Pathfinders: The Tomorrow People (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tomorrow People

Future society will be populated by very special people. Within their ageless bodies will exist rejuvenated organs cloned from versions of their cells that have been made younger; youthful hearts and youthful lungs that will beat and breathe forever. Beneath their skin will scamper nanobots: blood-cell sized robots which, like highway maintenance vehicles, will rove their bloodstreams destroying pathogens, removing waste, correcting errors in DNA and reversing the ageing process. The same tiny machines will also enable brain-to-brain communication – telepathy of sorts – via the internet and ensure a vast expansion in human intelligence. Arguably, those special people may become less human as their bodies merge with a technology so advanced that it gradually begins to exceed and replace mere flesh and blood. At least, that’s the prediction of Ray Kurzweil, a Massachusetts-based inventor and writer, in his article ‘Human 2.0’ (New Scientist, September 2005). As is all too common with techie gurus, he has only the vaguest concept of political realities, so it doesn’t occur to him to question whether the future in question will be capitalist or socialist. If Kurzweil even grasped the difference, he probably still wouldn’t understand why the question was relevant. He observes certain anti-progressive tendencies in modern society, and ascribes them to some anomalous general human behaviour, rather than class, specifically capitalist class, behaviour. Consequently he proffers dire warnings about what we ought to do with our collective human knowledge, without ever addressing why we, the vast majority, are not in a position to control or determine what is done with that knowledge. Those of us who take an interest in the scientific adventure feel frequently piqued at the tendency of ‘futurologists’ like Kursweil, Toffler et al to overlook the fundamental political issues arising from the fact that human society is class-based. Scientists can be very far-sighted but at the same time have only a very narrow field of view, like a blinkered racehorse. Still, given our interest in the implications of science for a future socialist society, his predictions are interesting nonetheless and could be seen as relevant to it.

Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic musical keyboards. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and technological singularity. He is also an enthusiastic advocate of using technology to achieve immortality. He predicts that ‘we won’t experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century – it will be more like 20,000 years of progress’ due to exponential rather than linear techological change which will result in the Singularity, ‘technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history’ (http://en.wikipedia.org).

The concept of a singularity, a new technological ‘big bang’, is an exciting one, and Kurzweil is clearly very taken with it. It is fairly obvious that science does not progress in linear fashion, like a train along a railway, but in geometric fashion, doubling and doubling again. Revolutions in science are almost a weekly event these days, and it is therefore not hard to imagine a ‘super-revolution’, a point where the whole of human society has to change very suddenly. In a way, a socialist political revolution is almost implicit in such an event, as the fetters and restrictions of outmoded social practices are blown to pieces in a matter of days or weeks by the devastating power of the singularity.

Of course, he could be wrong. There may be no singularity, despite all the indications. Alternatively, the powers that be might be able to prevent or limit it. You don’t get rich by giving things away for free. There is every reason to suppose, for example, that nanotechnology, one very likely factor in causing the singularity, will be strictly controlled and limited, a bomb kept in a concrete box.

Tellingly, Kurzweil comments that ‘to proscribe such technologies will not only deprive human society of profound benefits, but will drive these technologies underground, which would make the dangers worse’ (New Scientist, September 2005).

It’s not difficult to see how the proscriptive tendency of capitalism, governed by the rule of production for profit not need, could put a dampener on Kurzweil’s technology-enriched version of humanity. If such technology does come onto the market, to whom will it be available? All of humanity without exception, as Kurzweil perhaps hopes, or only those wealthy enough to afford it? After all, it is likely to be expensive treatment, making its beneficiaries not only economically superior, but genetically superior also. Yet another proscriptive tendency is intellectual property right (see Patent Absurdity, and also ‘Intellectual Property: a further restriction on personal freedom’ for a fuller discussion of this subject).

Kurzweil likes to define humans as ‘the species that seeks – and succeeds – in going beyond our limitations’. But we will really start making some progress when the scientific community succeeds in going beyond its own limitations, and recognising the political dimension of the human project. Many scientists individually seem to understand the restrictive and anti-progressive nature of current practices, but somehow assume that explicit political positions are outside their remit, or even beneath them. In fact, all humans take a political position, whether they admit it or not. Science does not sit in a rarefied world above politics, it is part and parcel of it, and scientists who care about the world’s future ought to have the courage and honesty to declare themselves, and stop worrying about peer-group pressure. It’s not the professional suicide it once was. If you oppose the restrictive practices of capitalism, then you oppose capitalism. It doesn’t take an Einstein or even a Kursweil to work out what that means.

Patent Absurdity

Patent and copyright laws exist to ‘protect’ their authors and to provide a profit incentive to develop new ideas and technologies, according to the lobby which advocates strengthening patent law. But this lobby generally consists of large companies who have zealously bought up libraries of patents in order to lock out competitors, while the opponents of patent restrictions tend to be small companies unable to get a foot in the door, and who argue that such restrictions hold back development.

Human Genome Sciences of Maryland are well known for patenting much of the human genome, and once tried to patent one of the bacteria that causes meningitis, while Incyte Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, California own the patent on Staphylococcus aureus, a species whose study is crucial because it is known to evolve resistance to antibiotics (New Scientist, May 16, 1998).

An independent commission on intellectual property rights reported in 2002 that the World Trade Organisation were strong-arming developing countries into signing intellectual property rights (IPR) agreements which were of no benefit to them, because they had very little to patent, but instead force up prices and inhibit technology transfer. The report concluded that IPRs effectively rip off poor countries (New Scientist, Sept 21, 2002).

The issue of patents is always going to be thorny, because both arguments are correct – in capitalism. Ownership of intellectual property has to be protected in a property owning society, as anyone who has had their house burgled, their car stolen or their idea robbed will tend to agree, but there is no denying that intellectual property rights do indeed stifle innovation in every field, because of the tendency of patents to concentrate into the hands of the intellectual property rich. The scientific community is divided on the question, between those who believe in knowledge for its own sake and therefore wish to pool ideas, and those who wish to profit personally from their research by denying others access. Since this is precisely the same debate as between socialists and those who support capitalism, one might describe scientists who wish to abolish patent and copyright restrictions as closet socialists.

Paddy Shannon

Capitalism and the quality of life (2006)

Richard Hamilton

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is a society where nearly all the things that humans need or want are articles of commerce, things made to be bought and sold. This is not a complete definition since under capitalism one thing in particular becomes a commodity – the human ability to work and to create things, what Marx called “labour power” – and this is in fact the defining feature of capitalism. It’s a commodity society in which labour-power is a commodity.

This has two consequences. The first is that there is not simply production for sale but production for profit. And secondly, most things that humans need or want tend to become commodities, i.e. have to be bought. It is not difficult to see why. The wages system means that most people are dependent, for satisfying their needs, on the money they are paid for the sale of the one saleable commodity they do possess (their labour power), money which they then use to buy what they must have to live. So the “commodification” of labour power means the commodification of food, of clothes, of accommodation, and of other, less material wants too.

One of the things that the spread of capitalism meant, in concrete terms, was the spread of money-commodity relations. It’s a process that’s still going on in parts of the world and which even conventional economists speak of as integrating formerly largely self-sufficient subsistence farmers in Asia, Africa and Latin America into the “money economy”.

What we are talking about here is the commodification of people’s material needs. Some people might not find this objectionable. Some even find it a progressive, even a liberating development. In fact this is one of the standard defences of capitalism – that the money economy gives people the freedom to choose what to consume by how they spend their money and that this is the most efficient way of organising the satisfaction of people’s material needs and wants. Of course this isn’t true in that it assumes that the economy responds to consumer demand, whereas in fact it responds to changes in the rate of profit, while most people‘s “demand” is limited by the size of their wage packet or salary cheque.

That capitalism is not the most efficient way of providing for people’s material needs – and that socialism as a system of common ownership, democratic control and production just for use would do this much better – is the traditional socialist case against capitalism. And it retains all its validity. But, after the last World War, in the 50s and 60s capitalism in North America and Western Europe appeared to live up to its promise of material prosperity for most people through the emergence of the so-called “consumer society”. But then another, different criticism of capitalism appeared: that while it might have solved more or less adequately the problem of “bread”, of dire material want, for most people in these parts of the world, it had still not created a satisfactory society.

Books began to appear in America with such titles as The Lonely Crowd, The Organization Man, The Hidden Persuaders, The Waste Makers, One-Dimensional Man, all critical of various aspects of the “consumer society” as a society in which people were encouraged to regard the acquisition of more and more consumer goods as the main aim in life. In Europe, such criticism took on a more explicitly anti-capitalist form. In France the critical books bore such titles as A Critique of Everyday Life and the Society of the Spectacle. The argument was that in the “consumer society” (called instead, more accurately in fact, “commodity society”) the logic of buying something to passively consume had spread from the purchase of material goods to other aspects of everyday life – to how people spent their leisure time and to how they related to each other.

This type of criticism added another dimension to the socialist case against capitalism: that it not only failed to organise the satisfaction of material needs properly but that it also degraded – dehumanised – the “quality of life”.

It’s not clear to whom the credit for developing this “cultural criticism” of capitalism should go. The Frankfurt School of Marxism (Fromm, Marcuse and others), the Situationists, even radical journalists in America like Vance Packard, would be among the candidates. In any event they were all working on the basis of the observable fact of the degrading effect capitalism was having on the quality of everyday life by spreading commercial values more and more widely.

It’s a powerful criticism of capitalism. Perhaps even these days, in this part of the world, a more powerful criticism than the traditional socialist one that capitalism brings material poverty to most people. Certainly, on a world scale, there are hundreds of millions in dire material poverty. And there are few millions in this country – around 15 percent of the population – who are materially deprived. But we can’t say this of the majority of the population here. Most people in Britain don’t have a problem about getting three meals a day, decent clothes, heating, don’t have to go to the pawnbrokers or live in vermin-invested rooms. In fact, the commodification of the “wants of the mind” is based on the fact that most people have money to spend on satisfying wants over and above those of “the stomach”. If people didn’t have this discretionary purchasing power after having satisfied their material needs, then there would be no market for cultural and entertainment products for capitalism to stimulate, manipulate and exploit. (As to why people have this “extra” money to spend on entertainment, it will have something to do with increased intensity and stress at work requiring more relaxation – more escapism – for people to recreate their particular ability to work.)

The criticism of “consumer society” was not just that it represented the invasion and colonisation of every aspect of social life by money-commodity relations, but that it also encouraged passive consumption rather than active participation. There is a great deal of validity in this point – that the “consumer society” is one where, sometimes literally, people sit in armchairs watching the passing show provided for them. This is a criticism of people’s lack of participation is shaping their lives, a lack that was also reflected politically where “democracy” is conceived of as merely choosing every four or five years between rival would-be elites (using in fact marketing techniques to attract support). Instead of people making their own sport or their own entertainment – or politics – they consume them as a pre-packaged commodity.

There must be something wrong with a society in which, instead of people living their own lives and interacting with their neighbours in a human way, they sit in front of a screen watching actors perform artificial scenes based on exaggerations of everyday life and identifying with the fictitious characters in these programmes. And in which the most widely-read newspapers don’t discuss real events so much as the artificial ones portrayed in these programmes and the lives and loves of the leading actors who play in them – as well as those of other so-called “celebrities” from the world of sport and entertainment.

As long as capitalism lasts, the quality of life will continue to decline. There’s nothing that can be done to stop this within the context of capitalism as it is due to capitalism, representing, as it does, the dissolving effects on society of the spread of money-commodity relations into all aspects of life. So, despite the slow, but undeniable increase in material living standards in certain parts of the world the case for socialism as a non-commercial society in which human welfare and human values will be the guiding principle retains all its relevance. With the common ownership of the means of life, there could and would be production directly to satisfy human needs and wants and not for sale with a view to profit – the death of the commodity, the end of what William Morris called “commercial society” – and a classless community with a genuinely common interest in which humans can relate to each other as human beings and not as social atoms colliding with each other on the market-place as commodity buyers and sellers.

Adam Buick

Catholicism in disgrace (2006)

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Canada, the United States, Australia and elsewhere, but especially in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church stands in disgrace, following the plethora of revelations about the activities of paedophiles and other types of abusers among its clergy. Obviously the structure of the Church and the often uncanny power its priests and bishops have over a subservient laity must make it a target for paedophiles and sadists. But the real and utterly appalling shame of the Church was its subsequent treatment of the abused and its frenetic efforts to cover up by lies and other deceits the contemptible behaviour of its servants.

Was it purely coincidence that the greatest abuse outside Ireland took place in Canada, the US and Australia, in mainly Irish Catholic areas and under the tutelage of the Irish Christian Brothers and Irish priests? Here we look at the historic role of Catholic priests and of Catholic institutions in Ireland over the centuries and for the source of the awesome power and the cavalier attitude of a now-disgraced Church.

The Roman Catholic Church (and, to a lesser extent, its Christian derivatives) arrogated onto itself the role of arbiter in things appertaining not only to matters of what it called ‘morality’ but to all forms of human behaviour and even juridical practice. Canon Law was the ultimate determinant superior to all other legal forms.

As feudalism yielded to capitalism in Europe and modern nation states were freed from the political hegemony of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, the Popes and their cardinals were forced to concede to widening democratic forms which were historically anathema to Rome. Still, even in countries where Roman Catholicism had been politically and morally overshadowed by various forms of Protestantism, different Popes cautioned against democratic concessions to the people.

According to Pope Leo XIII (Encyclical, Immortale Dei ‘On the Christian Constitution of States’, November 1885) canon law is effectively superior to the civil law, having derived from Jesus Christ through Peter and the apostles to the Church:

“In very truth, Jesus Christ gave his apostles unrestrained authority in sacred matters together with the genuine and most true power of making laws, as also with the duplex right of judging and punishing which flow from that power.”

By then, of course, such nonsense was a fatuous Popish aspiration which was in conflict with the material conditions of life in most of Europe. The power to make and enforce laws and the right and the power to punish in pursuit of such laws was now in the possession of the bourgeoisie and its god was profit.

Ireland

Ireland nestled on the western flank of Europe, its natural development frustrated by its proximity to its powerful neighbour, England. According to legend, Ireland had been Christianised by St Patrick in the fifth century AD but, as in many other places, the Christian proselytizer appeared to have fashioned the new faith to suit the territory, or the native Celtic tribes adjusted it to suit their customs. Druidic Ireland might have accepted the Christian God but it did not give up its Druidic ways nor did it submit to the authority of Rome.

Effectively, the Celtic Christian Church was set within the organisational norms of the clan system. Each clan elected its own bishops and priests, which meant that there were a great number of clan-nominated bishops whose episcopal authority was the writ and the power of the clan.

Eventually in the 12th century Pope Adrian IV in a bull Laudabiliter gave authority to King Henry II of England to invade Ireland and “enlarge the bounds of the Christian faith to the ignorant and rude and to extirpate the roots of vice from the field of the Lord”. In the “Lord’s Field”, as perceived by Rome, the easy moral attitudes and forms of social organisation enjoyed by the Irish were proscribed and as the historian P. Beresford Ellis points out, “The Irish clergy had embraced feudalism (the social system underpinning Roman Catholicism) a system repugnant to the ordinary Irishman long before it was enforced in Ireland”. Whatever the wishes of the Church, the de facto imposition of feudalism in Ireland would take another five torturous centuries.

Outside that area of Leinster, known as “The Pale”, on the eastern side of Ireland, the native Irish clans resisted the incursion of English authority. Initially, within the Pale bishops and abbots, in accordance with the feudal system, became barons under the crown but later Anglo-Norman clerics were rewarded with appointments to Irish livings – inevitably to the chagrin of the native clergy.

In the centuries that followed ownership of land and other forms of property were increasingly denied to the native Irish. But England was still a Catholic country and thus priests and bishops in Ireland, while being denied the more influential positions within the Church, did not suffer any other forms of proscription from the government. Outside the Pale the power of the priest and the Church within the atrophying world of the clans prospered, especially within the province of education.

The war of the two kings

It is argued that it was this ‘prospering’, the strength of the Church and its priests in Ireland, that withstood the force of the Reformation when England became Protestant. Certainly, after the Reformation, and especially after the defeat of the English Catholic Stuart, King James II, in 1691, the Catholic Church and its priests were to suffer legal proscription and vicious persecution. Ironically, James’s defeat in Ireland was at the hands of the Central European powers organised under the terms of the Treaty of Augsburg, and the commander of the victorious forces was William, Prince of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law – the famous King Billy, who, despite the subsequent persecution of Presbyterians as well as Catholics by his government is immortalised in the folk memory of Ulster loyalists.

This persecution of Irish Protestantism’s largest denomination as well as Catholics ‘and other dissenters’ was the result of the Establishment of the Episcopalian Church, which made the practice of other religions illegal and subject to severe penalties, including confiscation of property. Later, in 1719 Parliament passed an Act of Toleration granting relief from the Penal Laws to Presbyterians but the Act made no concessions to Catholics. In the years following the formalisation of laws against the Catholic Church and its members some 5,000 Catholics became Anglicans, but the overwhelming majority of the native Irish were mere ‘tenants-at-will’ on smallholdings without either security of tenure or fixity of rents; in fact they were outlaws in the land of their birth.

It was in such conditions that the Catholic Church and its priests, not always speaking with the one voice, gained overwhelming influence over the minds of the people. All forms of agrarian unrest, inevitable under persecution, were roundly condemned by the Church. But the priests were close to the people, their only articulate ally and, almost in spite of the contempt of the hierarchy for the peasantry, their influence over the minds of the people became more telling. The English government was a brutal foreign power visibly persecuting priest and people. Inevitably the Church, in the form of its priests, became the powerful institutional stabilising factor in the bitter lives of an inarticulate, harassed and brutalised people.

Excommunicated IRA members

The Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829 gave formal legal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland; by then the power of the Church and its religious fraternities was awesome. It wasn’t only in matters of birth, marriage and death that the power of the church was evident; almost every sort of activity, business, political or sporting had the ubiquitous priest and in the structure and content of education the power of the Church was paramount.

As the Church-supported Irish National Party fell into decay before the burgeoning power of Sinn Fein after 1905, clerical influence was transferred to the latter party though the official organ of Irish Catholicism condemned the Republican Rising of 1916 as ‘an act of brigandage’ and supported the British execution of the rebel leadership. Similarly, during the subsequent guerrilla war (1919-22) the Church condemned the IRA and excommunicated its members, but in the main the old priestly stalwarts were there to lend support and comfort – and, perhaps, save the Church from its own error of judgement.

The guerrilla war ended with a British government-enforced partitioning of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. For the zealots and bigots of Catholicism and Protestantism it seemed a red-letter day, for it lent to each in their respective areas virtually untrammelled political and social influence.

In the north the political agents of the linen lords and the industrial capitalists declared that they had a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people, while the Protestant churches cosied up to a system of sectarian discrimination designed to hurt workers who were Catholics and fool workers who were Protestants into believing that their slums and their miserable life styles made them superior to their even more miserable class brethren.

Surrender

In the south, all the political parties surrendered to the arrogance and deceits of the Catholic Church and its institutions. The minds of the young were given over to priests, nuns and Christian Brothers for an ‘education’ unquestionably based on a morbid, insular Catholicism. As if that was not bad enough, as we now know, in many of the institutions run by Catholic religious orders children were being physically and sexually abused and the Church was tolerating this abuse.

The scandal of the Magdalene laundries, which was highlighted by BBC, ITV and to its credit RTE, demonstrated the quite remarkable power the priests had over an acutely educationally deprived people. The laundries were operated by the Sisters of Mercy (sic!) who brutally exploited slave labour to carry out their function. The slaves were young women who had been abandoned in pregnancy, or who showed promise of behaviour alien to the views of their families. In many cases a priest requested or persuaded a child’s parents to abandon their child to these institutes of brutality and slavery for ‘the good of the child’s soul’. One old woman who had only been released in the late sixties from this dreadful servitude told a television audience how the priest had approached her parents when she was young and advised them that their daughter’s good looks could “present an occasion for sin”.

When a young doctor who in his practice had experienced the ravages of tuberculosis became Minister of Health in the Coalition government of 1948 he promulgated a Bill to give free medical care to expectant mothers and children under the age of five. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin wrote to the then Taoiseach complaining that such state interference could not be tolerated in a Catholic country. In France, Italy or any other Catholic country such absurd temerity would have been laughed at; in Catholic Ireland both the Bill and its political sponsor were dropped.

But the bishops could not control the airwaves nor could they control Irish capitalism’s demand for widening of the education curriculum. Irish Television still placates the bishops with a silence for the Angelus; it is an acknowledged embarrassment but as in all other countries the value-system and vulgarities of global capitalism’s unitary culture overshadows the morbid doctrines of the Church and sometimes even exposes its institutions for the moral cesspits they are.

Richard Montague

Kenya Referendum farce (2006)

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 21 November referendum conducted by the Electoral Commission of Kenya to vote for or against the proposed new constitution was just a waste of money.

The clamour for a new constitution commenced in earnest with the advent of multi-party politics in the early 90s. Since then it has reached crescendo. Lives have been lost, limbs broken and some of those who have been at the top relegated to the lower levels of society.

During the regime of former president Daniel Arap Moi, short-term political reforms were introduced to keep at bay those clamouring for a new constitution. Mr. Moi succeeded in that he was able to rule for long but, at his departure, left the issue of the constitution unresolved.

With the coming to power of President Mwai Kibaki and his national Rainbow Coalition (NARC), constitution reform was one of the promises given to Kenyans in the 2002 general election campaign. In 2003 a constitutional assembly was instituted at the Bomas of Kenya venue which deliberated on the views collected from Kenyans about the constitution by the Kenya Review Commission in early 2002. The assembly sat for one year.

Its final submissions in early 2004 formed part of what has been argued about. The so-called Bomas draft was viewed as flawed as well as having good contents for the country. Or so those who took part in the deliberations said.

Since the draft which came out of Bomas wasn’t agreeable to all, Kenyan MPs met to discuss the contentious issues (on power sharing, devolution and so-called religious courts). It was from their deliberations that a new draft emerged (the so-called Wako draft). The government gave deadlines for the passage of the draft, the final of which was the referendum of 21 November.

Kenyans overwhelmingly rejected the draft, by voting 60 percent against the passage while those for the passage only managed to garner 40 percent of the vote. It’s back to the drawing board.

A new constitution or not isn’t the panacea for what ails Kenya. The country has only two tribes: the rich and the pathetically poor (though there are 42 ethnic tribes). The rich own factories and employ the labour of the poor, who they exploit to the last sweat. The poor are in the majority but their thinking, lives and even their way of going are controlled by the other tribe.

The new constitution even if it’s coated with sweet words will never solve the imbalance in society. It will never make the poor rich. The rich tribe want to use the constitution to perpetuate their hold on the lives of the poor tribe. They have no intention of making any tangible changes in the lives of the other tribe.

And that’s why I never support or participate in any activity designed to make a new constitution. I’ll only participate in a meaningful activity which is intended to bring a system which has no frontiers, a society in which production is for use not profit, where there are no leaders and where money isn’t worshipped.

Only when such a society is established can we say that we’ve arrived. And arrive we will.

Patrick Ndege,

Nairobi.

Life and Times: To Vax or Not To Vax (2022)

The Life and Times column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To Vax or Not To Vax

A woman in my own home town has made the national headlines by vowing not to apply the Wales Covid pass rule to people visiting the small independent cinema she runs. She said it was ‘nonsensical and unnecessary’ and she was determined ‘to take a stand’. The Covid vaccine passport for cinemas, theatres and concert halls was, she said, ‘an infringement of our human rights and discriminates against those exercising their right to bodily autonomy’. The Wales government said it was introducing the scheme in response to a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and the local authorities responded promptly to the cinema owner’s defiance by shutting down her venue and sticking up closure notices on it. When she attempted to defy the Council by re-opening, she was taken to court where she was ordered to pay the Council’s £5,000 legal expenses and faced imprisonment if she failed to comply. All this elicited a mass of comment on social media and very quickly, in an online appeal, several thousand people raised some £60,000 in support of the cinema and its owner.

Right and Left

What to make of this? Well firstly the issue was taken up and quickly became a cause célèbre among far-right groups. One group in particular calling itself ‘Voice of Wales’ and known for its open Islamophobia and anti-Semitism seized on this to urge people to attend the cinema and its café and form a ‘defence force’ to keep it open. This brought condemnation from the local left-organised ‘Stand Up To Racism’ group calling upon the owner to publicly distance herself from ‘Voice of Wales’ and its supporters. The owner announced that she owed no allegiance to any of these organisations and would not accept any money collected. She repeated that what she was protesting about was ‘an infringement on our fundamental and inherent rights’ (though later she said she would use the money ‘to support others’).

‘Rights’ and freedoms

But what are the ‘rights’ being talked about here and indeed frequently talked about over the last 20 months or so as, in an effort to combat the spread of Covid, governments have brought in laws and rules to curb or limit activities previously permitted? It’s a common belief that, under Western democracies at least, people have inalienable ‘rights’ which it’s illegitimate for governments to try and limit or remove. Among these are said to be the right to ‘free speech’, to peaceful assembly, to move around freely, to use our bodies as we wish, and so on. That’s one reason why the regulations brought in to try and deal with Covid have irked many people, since this has been seen as meaning that these ‘rights’ no longer exist, or at least not to the same extent as before. Of course some of the protesters, those from the extreme right wing of capitalist politics or harbouring fantastical conspiracy theories, have deliberately seized on the Covid restrictions to try and recruit supporters for their views or movements. But there are also many people who genuinely regard the measures, even if seen by most as sensible precautions, as irksome limitations on what they see as their rights or freedoms. The measures we are talking about are such as the compulsory wearing of masks, the prohibition on assembly and now the various regulations to push people into having anti-Covid vaccinations. Hence the protests about people needing to be in possession of ‘vaccine passports’ to attend cinemas, restaurants, etc.

Yet, without judging the efficacy or otherwise of mass vaccination (though this writer finds it hard not to see it as a sensible precaution), it is quite mistaken to think that, in trying to make it compulsory, governments or other authorities are somehow crossing a ‘rights’ line that is fundamental. We all know that the very idea of ‘rights’ is relatively recent. It’s an invention of governments overseeing the system we live under, that of wage and salary work and production for profit. Its underlying purpose is to gain the relative consent of those carrying out the work and ensuring profit is made for the owners of capital. So ‘rights’ form a sort of peace treaty between the ruling capitalist class and the working class allowing routine matters of potential conflict to be resolved and the system to operate in a way which is considered broadly fair by the wider population. But when that peace treaty breaks down, for example through war or unexpected external events such as a killer virus, those ‘rights’ can be easily modified or removed and then there can be open fighting between those who mistakenly considered the previous ‘rights’ situation ‘fundamental’ (such as the owner of ‘Cinema & Co’) and the authorities seeking to impose the new less ‘free’ regime. Disruption can take place and, as we have seen, can happen not only in this country but in the wider world.

Which system?

The plain fact is that, in the system of society we live in, ‘rights’ are not guarantees but, like all reforms instituted by that system, contingent and easily disposable measures. Some readers may remember the hapless ‘right to work’ campaign of the 1980s which fizzled out when it became obvious that the system that rules us does not and can never guarantee such a right. In the moneyless, wageless society of economic equality based on free access to all goods and services, instead of rights on paper, we would have the practical fulfilment of human needs with equal access to the democratic control necessary to secure those needs, making the whole concept of ‘rights’ redundant.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Final Frontiers (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A spectrometer is haunting the universe, the spectrometer of the James Webb Space Telescope. Or it will be if, at the time of writing, the Ariane 5 launch goes ahead on 22 December as planned and doesn’t face yet another delay. The spectrometer will measure the differing light signatures of the various elements making up planets and stars, and space boffins are hyperbolic at the prospects for new science that this might bring. For one thing the JWST is much bigger than the Hubble telescope, about the size of a tennis court, with a gold-covered reflector the height of a 4-storey house (it had to be shipped in secret to South America because of the risk of pirates). The large size means it can see what Hubble can’t see – a lot further into space and so further back in time, almost to the doorstep of the big bang. It’s also an infra-red telescope, because stars are more red-shifted with distance, and spectral patterns show up better in IR than in the visible spectrum. Among other things, scientists are hoping to see very early stars made of nothing but the three lightest elements, hydrogen, helium and lithium. If they see any heavier elements, they’ll know their cosmology needs a rewrite.

What is all this is costing and who’s paying for it? The cost is around $10 billion, stumped up mostly by the US government but with a whip-round from others including the UK and Canada. This is fairly small potatoes to the US, whose 2019 military budget was $686 billion, but still, a capitalist beancounter might ask, why pay good money to discover something which can’t possibly be of any practical use to anyone? Well, government-funded science is always a gamble. They might get nothing out of it, or they might get the next computer revolution. Or just the next Velcro. Either way, you’ve got to be in it to win it, and the Chinese and Russians are in it, so other governments are too.

There’s another reason to invest in big-ass telescopes, of which several more are due in the next few years (bit.ly/3dKcpV3). That is, finding Earth-like planets in other solar systems, since there aren’t any more in ours. Around 4,000 exoplanets have been identified so far, by measuring the relative dimming of stars as large bodies pass in front of them, but this is very low-res and can only detect Jupiter-sized gas giants, which we couldn’t live on, or huge rocky super-Earths, whose gravity would crush us. The JWST should be able to spot Earth-sized planets, particularly those in the relative Goldilocks zones around their stars, by seeing them directly. Spectroscopy will determine if they are Earth-like, ie, with the right life-sustaining mix of elements. If life as we understand it exists anywhere out there, these planets would be the best places to look.

Could we ever live on any of these planets though? The question becomes more compelling the worse the climate situation on Earth gets. But the vastness of space would seem to prohibit that idea. Apollo 11 travelled at a speed of 25,000 miles per hour. The Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, is expected to reach 430,000 mph by 2025. That’s over 250 times the speed of an average bullet, but even at that impressive lick, it would still take over 6,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system.

Not that this has prevented people discussing the possibility. If you loaded up a rocket with 50 breeding pairs of humans (this minimum viable number has been exhaustively calculated, you’ll be pleased to learn – see bit.ly/30isMVK) who didn’t object to themselves and 240 generations of their descendents living and dying in a tin box in space, and if nothing went wrong technically or because they went stir-crazy, they might make it. But the chances are, they would get there and discover that humans were already there, in fact had been there for thousands of years (bit.ly/3pT2jH0). How could that be? Because those left behind on Earth, in the intervening millennia, might have come up with a much faster way to travel, thus passing the first rocket on the way and getting there first, which would defeat the whole purpose of such an unthinkable sacrifice. Given this possibility, at what point would anyone volunteer to get on the first rocket? This is known as the Wait Calculation problem, which concludes that there is no optimal time to volunteer, unless humans somehow manage to invent a Star Trek-like warp drive that can reduce the trip to days or weeks.

Believe it or not, two papers were published last year showing that a warp drive was theoretically possible, ie, travelling faster than light without breaking the laws of physics. Essentially you don’t travel faster than normal, what you do is warp or squash the space-time in front of you so there’s less of it to cross (bit.ly/3DMLaUA). The earliest suggested warp drive technique involved using never-observed negative mass and negative energy equivalent to the mass of the universe. The new papers show how it could be done without either of these.

These are mathematical models only though, so don’t hold your breath. Or maybe do, in cryogenic suspension, with your body and brain embalmed with antifreeze in a container of liquid nitrogen. It might sound unappealing but people are already doing this. For instance, for $28,000 you can have yourself preserved at the Cryonics Institute in Michigan, which already has 137 ‘residents’ (including pets) and 1,273 more on the pending bucket list. It’s cheaper if you only want to preserve your head, by the way. Meanwhile in Colorado a local man is frozen in a shed and the locals supply 700 kg of dry ice a month to keep him that way, and they even hold a Frozen Dead Guy festival every March (bit.ly/3yi7oMQ). Cryogenics might be a way to get to the stars, except that nobody has tried to wake a human up again so nobody knows if it really works.

Would people in socialism be that bothered about visiting or colonising other star systems? Impossible to say. We might regard it as humanity’s ultimate endeavour and a fitting testament to our limitless curiosity. Or we might just see it as a sensible hedge against future extinction when the sun turns red and fills the sky. At first though, we’ll probably be too busy fixing the damage that capitalism has done to the planet. Which brings the question back down to Earth. Whatever else becomes possible later, for now, abolishing capitalism is the frontier we need to cross.

Paddy Shannon

Reading Capital as Crisis Theory: Part 1 (2022)

From the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx never completed a planned book on crisis, but the three volumes of Capital can be read as a theory of crisis that reveals the fundamental contradictions that explode (and are temporarily resolved) in a crisis.

Economic crisis is a troublesome phenomenon for the defenders of capitalism. The problem is not simply the curtailment of economic activities and the bankruptcies and unemployment that ensue. A far bigger problem is ideological because the undeniable reality of crisis exposes that capitalism is not, as economists insist, the ideal engine for satisfying human needs through the creation of wealth. Crisis exposes the limits imposed on wealth creation by production for profit; limits, incidentally, that are always present in capitalism, whether in boom times or bust.

Crisis is the real negation of the argument that capitalism is the ideal means of developing the productive forces of society, an argument that dates back to the emergence of political economy in the 18th century. Adam Smith begins his great work The Wealth of Nations by praising capitalism as the most efficient way to raise the productive power of labour. To be more precise, he uses the term the ‘division of labour,’ not capitalism, but what he has in mind is independent producers creating commodities for the market, a state of affairs that he says gradually emerged from a human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange one thing for another’.

David Ricardo, that other great classical economist, shared Smith’s faith in the ability of capitalism to freely develop productive power, and he was fortunate, in a sense, to die at the early age of 51, in 1823, because had he lived just two years longer, Ricardo would have confronted the crisis of 1825, considered the first economic crisis to clearly arise from the workings of capitalism itself, rather than some external cause. The periodic, general crises of the sort that followed in the 19th century would have put Ricardo’s faith in capitalism to a severe test.

The reality of crisis did indeed test the economists who came after Ricardo, forcing them to choose between continuing to extol the virtues of capitalism or seriously considering the implications of periodic crises. Since the livelihoods of most depended on not understanding those implications, this marked the emergence of what Marx called the ‘vulgar economists’, those ‘hired prize fighters’ who abandoned genuine scientific research to instead act as apologists for capitalism. Each time a crisis occurs, economists point to some external or contingent factor as the cause for the temporary disruption of the supposedly splendid ability of capitalism to self-regulate on the basis of supply and demand.

Crises normal under capitalism

Marx, in contrast, explains economic crises that regularly take place as a normal manifestation of the capitalistic accumulation process. He points to the inherent tendency of capitalism toward crisis, which underscores the limitations of this mode of production. An understanding of the significance of crisis is thus at the core of Marx’s investigation of capitalism.

Marx had in fact intended to write an entire book on crisis. We know this from the plans he sketched for a ‘critique of political economy’ in the 1850s. According to his 1857 version of the plan, the book on ‘the world market and crises’ was to be the sixth and final book of the critique, following the other books on capital, landed property, wage labour, the state, and foreign trade.

Marx never completed (or even began) that book however, so he has not left us a coherent, systematic theory of crisis. Nevertheless, we can consider the three volumes of Marx’s great work Capital as broadly constituting a theory of crisis.

The importance of crisis to the overall investigation of capitalism will come into sharper focus if we consider how Marx generally defined crisis. In his manuscript Theories of Surplus Value, Marx describes the crises of the world market as the ‘real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois production’, and says that those contradictions are ‘strikingly revealed’ in a crisis. In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, we can find a description of how ‘the antagonism of all elements in the bourgeois process of production explode’ in the crises of the world market’. And in the third volume of Capital, Marx calls the crises of the world market ‘the momentary, violent solutions for the existing contradictions’.

Crisis for Marx, in short, is an explosion of all the contradictions of capitalism that brings about a temporary ‘resolution’ of those contradictions, so that through crisis the fundamental contradictions and limitations of capitalism are exposed. This suggests that a theory of crisis must clarify all of the contradictions of capitalism. This is also the task that Marx undertakes in Capital, where he unravels the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, starting with the contradiction of the commodity as a unity of use-value and exchange-value. Reading Capital as crisis theory, in other words, centres on coming to grips with the contradictory nature of capitalism that is manifested in a crisis.

Abstract possibility of crises

Of course, unravelling all the contradictions that explode in a crisis is easier said than done. So immediately we face the question of what step to take first in reading Capital as crisis theory. Fortunately, Marx has left us a passage in Theories of Surplus Value that outlines a basic approach to the investigation of crisis. (This passage can be found in volume 32 of the collected works of Marx and Engels, starting from around page 140.)

In the passage, Marx indicates that the first step toward understanding crisis is a recognition of what he calls the abstract form of crisis or the ‘general, abstract possibility of crisis’ that already exists under simple commodity circulation. The basis for the possibility of crisis, at the most abstract level, he explains, is the fact that there can be a divergence between sale and purchase.

This is something that Marx also points out in the first volume of Capital, where he notes that sale and purchase can diverge since ‘no one directly needs to purchase because he has just sold’. In other words, a person who obtains money by means of selling a commodity is under no obligation to immediately use that money to purchase some other commodity.

By indicating this fact, Marx was refuting what he called the ‘foolish dogma’ of the French economist Jean Baptiste Say, who had insisted that sales and purchases (and hence supply and demand) are in equilibrium ‘because every sale is a purchase, and every purchase a sale’. This was the popular argument used to deny the possibility of overproduction, which Ricardo also adhered to.

It is true, of course, that in the case of barter a direct identity exists between the exchange of one’s own product and the acquisition of the product of someone else. No one can be a seller without being a buyer or a buyer without being a seller. Marx points out how the introduction of money splits that unity of direct exchange into the two antithetical segments of sale and purchase, allowing circulation to ‘burst through all the temporal, spatial, and personal barriers imposed by the direct exchange of products.’

The introduction of money brings to the surface the latent contradiction under barter between the desire to obtain a specific use value and the desire to obtain a product of equivalent value – in other words, the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value. The mediation of money, which splits exchange into the two separate acts of sale and purchase, gives this contradiction ‘room to move,’ as Marx puts it, and in turn generates the possibility of crisis.

But Marx is careful to note that the divergence of sale and purchase cannot be viewed as the direct cause of crisis. Rather it merely denotes the ‘formal possibility of crisis,’ or what he calls ‘the most abstract form of crisis, without content, without a compelling motivating factor’.

Delay between sale and purchase

In the same methodological passage in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx presents a ‘second form’ of crisis related to the divergence of sale and purchase. This is the possibility of crisis arising from money’s function as a means of payment. This function of money, which is explained in Chapter 3 of Capital, concerns transactions in which a seller hands over a commodity to a buyer while providing a ‘promise to pay money’ at a later date, so that the seller becomes a creditor and the buyer a debtor. In other words, the function of money as a means of payment is at the basis of credit. Money as a means of payment allows for sale and purchase to diverge even further, as if the rope connecting them were replaced by a bungee cord.

The time gap between the handing over of a commodity and the payment of money for it raises the possibility for more problems to arise. Marx notes that if ‘in the interval between the handing over and the payment the value has changed’ so that the commodity is not worth as much at the time of its sale as it was worth at the moment when money was acting as a measure of value, then ‘the obligation cannot be met from the proceeds of the sale of the commodity, and therefore the whole series of transactions which retrogressively depend on this one transaction, cannot be settled.’ In other words, the failure to make good on one promise to pay can set off a chain reaction, leading to other failures to settle debts.

This second form of crisis, based on money as a means of payment, is more concrete than the first, but still quite abstract, Marx emphasises. Neither the first nor the second form of crisis can be considered a direct cause of crisis. Rather, they are what Marx calls the ‘most generalised expression’ of crisis or its abstract possibility. He explains that the abstract form of crisis ‘only implies that the framework for a crisis exists,’ but does not contain the factors that transform the possibility of crisis into an actual crisis; a whole series of other conditions is required in order for the possibility of crisis to develop into actuality and those conditions do not yet even exist, he says, from the standpoint of the simple circulation of commodities.

Interruptions to circulation of capital

We have seen, then, that even at the level of commodity circulation there is the potential of a disruption or crisis. Conversely, in a moneyless society, where production is directly for use (with no market mediation), this possibility of crisis would not exist.

In order to better understand the relation between capitalism and crisis we have to move beyond this abstract understanding of the potential for crisis. So here we face the question of how to take a step toward understanding crisis more concretely.

We can get some hints from the same passage in Theories of Surplus Value. Marx points out there that abstract forms of crisis receive what he calls a content or a basis on which to manifest themselves in the circulation/reproduction process of capital. This means that we need to move on to Volume 2 of Capital, where Marx examines that process.

Marx had to set aside the circulation process of capital in Volume 1 so that he would be able to purely examine the immediate production process. That is to say, in order to clarify what goes on in the production process he had to assume that capitalists have unhindered access to the needed means of production and labour power and can also sell their commodities at their value to realise the surplus value contained in them. This means that he had to assume that the circulation or reproduction process proceeds smoothly. In Volume 2, however, Marx shifts his attention to the circulation process that he had set aside so as to examine the circuit of capital from three different starting points: money capital, productive capital, and commodity capital.

Marx explains in the passage in Theories of Surplus Value that the two abstract forms of crisis identified in the process of simple commodity circulation reappear or are ‘repeated’ under the circulation process of capital, but now the content of those forms is more developed or complex. This is because capital circulation is clearly more complex than simple commodity circulation. Whereas simple commodity circulation, or commodity-money-commodity (C-M-C), is nothing more than the exchange of commodities mediated by money, the circulation of capital involves capital, in its continual movement, taking on and casting off the forms of money, elements of production, and commodity.

The significance of this added complexity as far as crisis theory is concerned is that there are more possibilities for sale and purchase to diverge under the circulation of capital as compared to simple commodity circulation.

In Volume 2 of Capital we can find many examples of how the abstract forms of crisis could acquire what Marx calls a ‘content or basis on which to manifest themselves.’ For instance, in the course of the circulation (and reproduction) of capital, the value of the elements of production (or labour power and the means of production) can fluctuate, making it difficult to carry out production at the previous scale. Another way in which the possibility of crisis acquires a more specific content is that capitalists must build up funds for the sake of accumulation and the replacement of constant capital. So they have to hoard money, which means they make sales without subsequent purchases – an example of sale diverging from purchase. Yet another example concerns large-scale projects, such as the building of a highway or railroad, which for many years require purchases without sales (or demand without supply).

We can see, then, that the analysis of the circulation of capital in Volume 2 points to some of the potential problems that can arise, revealing how the abstract forms of crisis acquire a more specific content. So we have taken some steps towards a more concrete understanding of crisis under capitalism, but it is important to note that we are still only dealing with the possibility of crisis. What has not been made clear yet is what factors transform that possibility into actuality. That is a step that brings us to Volume 3 of Capital (as will be discussed in Part 2 of this article).

The ideas on Marx’s theory of crisis presented here are based mainly on the interpretation by the Japanese Marxist Samezo Kuruma. My translation of Kuruma’s writings on crisis theory will be published in 2022 in Brill’s “Historical Materialism” series.

Michael Schauerte

Bird’s Eye View: Imagine no countries (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Imagine no countries

Caitlin Johnstone in an article titled ‘Nobody Who Says “You Can Criticize Washington AND Beijing” Actually Does’ on her eponymously named blog writes (19 November):

‘The US and its tight network of allies are indisputably far, far more worthy of criticism than the government of China. But in the western world this reality is not reflected in the criticisms that are voiced; in fact it’s as ass backwards as you could possibly get it. China is criticized far more, and US imperialism is criticized far less.’

She is wrong. Here are two examples of China AND USA being criticised:

‘The United States accused China of intimidating its South East Asian neighbours. The United States declare that freedom of maritime navigation is an issue of ‘national interest’ and for another country to challenge America is to effectively declare war upon the United States, which is exactly what China appears to be doing in the South China Sea, a resource-rich and highly contested waterway’ (War Drums in the China Sea, Socialist Standard, August 2020).

And from one section of the Trotskyist left:

‘In terms of wealth rather than income, the wealthiest 1 percent of individuals owned nearly 31 percent of China’s wealth in 2020, up from around 21 percent in 2000. In the US for instance, the share of wealth of the top 1 percent reached 35 percent in 2020. According to the Hurun Global Rich list, the number of dollar billionaires in China hit 1,058 last year, as compared to 696 in the US’ (Behind Chinese President Xi’s populism, mounting social inequality, wsws, 22 November).

Socialists see no reason to have a debate about which nations belong in the ‘imperialist” premier league as we workers have no country. We do not defend China’s annexation of Tibet or their involvement in the killing fields of Cambodia, Korea and Vietnam. Modifying an old leftist slogan, we say: Neither Washington nor Beijing! No war but the class war!

Nothing to kill or die for

‘As the Chinese very well know, Yemen is rich not only in the so far unexplored oil and gas reserves, but also in gold, silver, zinc, copper and nickel. Beijing also knows all there is to know about the ultra-strategic Bab al Mandab between Yemen’s southwestern coast and the Horn of Africa. Moreover, Yemen boasts a series of strategically located Indian Ocean ports and Red Sea ports on the way to the Mediterranean, such as Hodeidah’ (String of pearls: Yemen could be the Arab hub of the Maritime Silk Road, thecradle.co, 19 November).

Capitalist conflicts between states and within states can result from competition over markets (eg, ‘in one of the world’s worse conflict zones, namely Yemen, the air attacks are mostly by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, equipped with arms primarily from the US and UK…’ and ‘since 2011, China has emerged as one of the largest arms suppliers to Ethiopia’ – ipsnews.net, 25 November). Conflict can also stem from competition over sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes, exploitable populations and areas of strategic importance.

All over the world there are conflicts of interest between states which lead to war when other means fail. The vast majority of wars since the end of WW2 in 1945 have been wars within states (‘civil’ wars), in which the victims are overwhelmingly civilians or non-combatants. One such example, Ethiopia, lies across the narrow Red Sea, another resource-rich and highly contested waterway, from Yemen.

‘Ethiopia’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has said he will lead his country’s army “from the battlefront” starting on Tuesday, a dramatic new step as the year-long conflict moves closer to the capital, Addis Ababa. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have been killed and hundreds of thousands pushed into famine conditions since November last year when the prime minister ordered a military offensive against the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which dominated the central government for decades before Abiy took office in 2018’ (aljazeera.com, 23 November).

And the world will be as one

‘The outgoing head of the UK Border Force has triggered a political row by describing ‘bloody borders’ as ‘just such a pain in the bloody arse’… Mr Lincoln, who left his position last month as part of a shake-up by Home Secretary Priti Patel, ended his speech by quoting lines from rock star Shane MacGowan, of The Pogues, saying: ‘People are talking about immigration, emigration and the rest of the bloody thing. It’s all bloody crap’’ (dailymail.co.uk, 14 November).

Another singer/songwriter, John Lennon, put it more eloquently in Imagine. And the Wobblie Syd Kingsford writing a year before the start of the war to end all wars stated: ‘Not content with robbing my class of the major portion of its product, the robber class has the colossal impudence to demand that the sons of the robbed workers shall don a uniform, shoulder a rifle, and be prepared to defend the possessions of the robbers… What does it matter to me if the robbers sometimes fall out and quarrel over the division of the spoil wrung from the workers? The point is that I am robbed with impartiality by the capitalist class, no matter what country I am in, or what nation I happen to belong to. To me, no country is so superior to another that I want to get shot in its defence. I prefer to work for the time when national barriers will be thrown down, and the workers united for the purpose of evading a system of society which causes war’ (New Zealand Evening Post, 8 July, 1913).

Land Grabs, Climate Change and Profits (2022)

From the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time anyone reads this there will have been multiple articles, views and opinions both in print and digital regarding November’s COP 26 in Glasgow. Here the aim is not to examine those events or to critique them but to consider various links and connections between climate change, global agri-business, human rights and profit.

First, COP 26. So-called because the very first meeting of the ‘Conference Of the Parties’ was in 1995 (in Berlin 26 years earlier), and was the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Founded to assess progress in dealing with climate change and to establish obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions – which subsequently became the Kyoto Protocol. Between these annual meetings always held in a different country there have also been many other follow-up meetings around the world but with fewer delegates/attendees and given less public attention.

One of the common criticisms of the Glasgow COP meeting has been the lack of access for the public and protesters while the halls were filled with lobbyists pushing various corporate agendas far removed from the aims of cutting emissions and tailored simply to continuing profit for the corporations.

Clearing the land

‘Land grabbing’ globally has been a talking point for a number of decades now. Basically it is farmland, general agricultural land, forests or common land of indigenous peoples or areas containing minerals which are quite simply stolen from local inhabitants. People affected have probably had access to that land for generations, either as common land, by heredity or in later years by rental from a larger owner. Recent decades have seen more and more thefts by violence, and new laws by local or national decree claiming rights to the land which leave the original users powerless, homeless and without any income. Then there are the deals from big companies which soon turn out to be bad deals putting the original owners in hock to the multi-national companies for annual seed, herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer for a mono-crop which also denies them the ability to even grow their own food. This, in India especially, has been documented as the reason for the enormous number of suicides by farmers deep in debt.

The most recent detailed report from Global Witness reports on human rights and atrocities committed on local populations, forcible removal from ancestral land, documented instances of attacks and killings, especially of protesters and leaders, plus the capture of community water and/or the poisoning of water sources. 317 land and environmental defenders have been killed in Brazil between 2012 and 2020.

Latest figures from Global Witness also show that big agribusiness is responsible for one third of global emissions of carbon dioxide, plus it is the ‘biggest driver of deforestation around the world’. Many people for years have regarded the Amazon region of Brazil as the lungs of the world, absorbing the largest percentage of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, but it has now been shown to have become a net emitter of CO₂ rather than a CO₂ sink (bit.ly/3Gx8t6x). Over a number of years there has been increasing legal and illegal deforestation sufficient to negatively affect the water table over an enormous area, and all to grow environmentally damaging cash-crop monocultures like soy and cotton. Serious consideration is needed on a global scale to define just what is fact and what is fiction regarding approaches to agriculture, eg, monoculture versus organic farming. And also to take account of the huge profits made by suppliers of machinery, fuel and chemicals including fertilizers, compared with generations-old natural farming methods focusing on mixed crops and healthy food.

As usual with food and farming issues, the most crucial element is the financial and security problems facing the world’s population, closely linked to problems for the environment. And we can certainly add the problem of violence, directed in this case at traditional pastoralist communities which have farmed land sustainably for centuries. One particular area is the Cerrado, Brazil’s second largest biome (a large, naturally occurring community of flora and fauna occupying a major habitat, eg, forest or tundra) covering 2 million square kilometres, an area covering about 20 percent of Brazil with a large part in the Amazon region (the same area discussed in the Socialist Standard, March 2021, ‘Externalities and British Chicken’).

Eight of twelve of Brazil’s major river basins and three aquifers rely on the Cerrado as a source for their water. Traditional communities have been for centuries, and still are, reliant on these waters, having taken care of aquifers and streams that are now drying out due to large-scale agriculture which is proving year on year to be absolutely unsustainable.

Brazil’s Cerrado and Soy

The main monocrop in the Cerrado is soy. Soy is the cause of so many problems, indigenous people made landless, vast areas of forest cut down, huge reductions in water availability in the Cerrado, plus the gradual but dangerous destruction of the lungs of the earth – the world’s single largest carbon sink gone. Why? Quite simply, for profit. It is here we witness the root cause of the climate problem. It’s the same all around the globe whether it’s soy, beef, lithium, zinc, rubber, gold, oil and gas – it’s all for profit.

According to Global Witness, ‘Global commodity traders are fuelling land conflicts in Brazil’s Cerrado.’ ADM, Bunge and Cargill are three of the world’s four biggest commodity traders and Global Witness points out a number of transgressions they are party to in the region. Investors attempt to loosen protection measures in the rules and regulations regarding deforestation, fines are given to some of the traders but it seems that until now this, a subject of interest to many, has been largely ignored. The commodity traders are supposed to follow various ‘international conventions’ regarding the treatment of workers, farmers and citizens, plus care of the environment, but we can read daily of transgressions.

All these problems are connected by profit. So much damage to so many people, because of profit. The capitalist system is built on profit, with businesses operating to make a profit and with far less interest in what, how, where or from whom those profits are to be made.

Human rights, land rights, climate change – wherever there’s a profit being made something bad is happening somewhere for something or somebody else. It’s time people considered an alternative approach.

Janet Surman

Early Socialist Standards online (2022)

Party News from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Standard September 1904 to December 1909 at [the following link.]

When the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded in June 1904 there was a Tory government, under Arthur Balfour, in office. The Second Boer War had only ended two years previously. The main issues of concern to workers were unemployment and worker representation in parliament. Propertied women were beginning to step up the campaign to give women the vote on the same restricted terms as men.

The general election at the start of 1906 gave the Liberals a landslide victory and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman took over as Prime Minister. Twenty-nine members of the Labour Representation Committee were elected and formed themselves into the Parliamentary Labour Party. Most of them had been elected as a result of a deal, not revealed at the time, between Ramsay MacDonald and Herbert Gladstone, the Liberals’ national agent. Under the deal, in selected two-member constituencies, where the electors had two votes, the Liberals and Labour only fielded one each, urging their supporters to vote for both. That there must have been such a deal was obvious and an article in the March 1906 issue provided the detailed evidence for this. This policy was defended by Keir Hardie as well as MacDonald and implemented in by-elections too. The early Labour Party was just the tail-end of the Liberal Party.

The Socialist Standard was all for working class representation in parliament but only as socialist delegates elected by socialist votes, not working men elected through deals with the Liberals or even independently of them on a programme of ‘palliatives’ as reforms within capitalism were then called.

The ‘competition’ was the SDF (which became the SDP in 1908), the ILP and Robert Blatchford’s Clarion which had a circulation in tens of thousands. The LRC did not claim to be socialist but were, most of them, working class Liberals or ‘Lib-Labs’. Readers will get a good idea of what these organisations were really like as opposed to the myths that have grown up about them since.

Internal debates on trade unions and the materialist conception of history are also recorded as were debates against other political organisations, ‘whether alleged labour or avowedly capitalist’.

International affairs were also covered such as the 1905 Russian revolution and Rosa Luxemburg’s trial in December 1906 for incitement to violence. During this period the Party considered itself a part of the anti-revisionist wing of international Social Democracy and the Socialist Standard carried translations from French and German. This did not stop it taking Bebel and Lafargue to task for congratulating the Labour Party on its success in the 1906 elections.

Essential reading, then, not only for its presentation of the unchanging case for socialism, but also as a contemporary source of information on politics, particularly working-class politics, in the Edwardian period.

Adam Buick

"The Future Labour Offers You" (1959)

From the January 1959 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old Rags in Glorious Technicolour

Before the First World War political issues were by and large a matter of—on my right—Tory, Protection—on my left—Liberal, Free Trade, and the voters backed their fancy. Then the Labour Party only took part in minor, left contests with the Liberals sometimes in their corner.

But even while Laissez Faire was still the official policy, the system’s bureaucratic and administrative superstructure grew up like Jack and the Beanstalk and political parties found themselves caught up in the fine web of a more complex economy, from which they could never hope to free themselves. All had to do the same things. The job was to persuade the electorate that it was one rather than the other of them who could do these same things, better—or differently.

Today the political maps, whether read from left to right or vice versa, present a vast labyrinth of bureaucratic and administrative detail. Small wonder that when the electorate are taken on conducted tours by rival politicians they are apt to get lost in the maze: as a result the electorate often do not know where the politicians are and the politicians are often at a loss to know the whereabouts of the electorate. This loss of effective contact between the political parties and the electorate has become for the former a major problem. The task has been to establish a more simplified routing system.

The Tories first started this by putting up sign posts all over the place by way of captions and slogans. As a result more people began to find their way to the Tory polling booths than to the Labour ones in two successive elections.

The Politicians take to Advertising

Again, after the first impetus of enthusiasm for Labour had worn off, Tories resorted to the old and more simple device of making elections largely an issue of Conservative blue powders versus Labour pink pills. As in all forms of monopolistic competition they relied upon superior advertising techniques to increase their public sales as against their rivals.

This has caused the Labour Party to let its hair down and pull up its publicity socks. They have just issued a pepped up version of their policy document called. “The Future Labour Offers You.” It is slick and shiny, and all captions, pictures and fluorescent printing. If against their Tory rivals they can no longer be holier-than-thou, they can at least strive to be glossier than thou.

It looks like a Christmas mail order brochure, complete with thumb index, so one can conveniently flick to what immediately interests you. Inside it will tell you all about your job, your home, your health, and your children’s education. In fact, its legislative proposals cover everything from conception to cemetery.

In the main it seeks to win over various categories of “middle class” voters, ranging from “Spam and Wonder Loaf” to “ House and Garden.” It is all cheerful and cosy and has a picture of a rosy dawn, but not a red one. It is the nearest yet to Shaw's ideal of making Labour as acceptable to all shades of opinion, including capitalists, as Tories or Liberals. It looks appetising election fare, only the taste in the mouth is nasty.

Nationalisation almost forgotten

There is only a brief reference to nationalisation in the document and even then it contrives to say as little as possible about it. While as a policy nationalisation has not yet been relegated to the museum of antiquities it has certainly gone in the Labour lumber room and the dust sheets are drawn over it.

For fifty years Labour chanted the virtues of nationalised industry, as against wicked private enterprise —the mines were their favourite theme. Now economic reality has converted it from a day dream to a nightmare. The coal industry is in the red, uneconomic pits are being closed down and miners are in process of being sacked by the thousands. Then there is the plight of the Railways and the plight of Railwaymen facing the biggest of large scale dismissals in Railway history. While the position of other nationalised transport is shaky, nor are Gas and Electricity illuminating examples of prosperous, booming nationalisation.

So nationalisation, which for fifty years was Labour's main policy plank, is found to be full of woodworm and the rot has set in .

Two conferences ago the Labour Party said: “Its housing policy would be the biggest public ownership project ever undertaken in this country.” Now in the document all we meet is the vague phrase: “We shall tackle the problem of tenants' houses by empowering local councils to buy rent restricted property and modernising it as fast as possible.”

Two years ago their emphatic policy was municipalisation of houses. But municipalisation is a word derived from the root of nationalisation which is now among the best Labour circles a swear word, so perhaps the former word ought not to be used in nice “middle class” homes.

Like the Tories, they propose to give mortgage grants via local councils and like the Tories they are prepared to give grants to prop up houses that are falling down. Both the Labour and Tory Housing Plan come within the category of identical twins.

Labourites used to talk of relieving the insecurity and tensions generated by the system. Yet after the successive Labour governments they blandly tell us that nearly half the hospital beds are occupied by people who are mentally ill. Perhaps there is a melancholy satisfaction in the fact that in a social system which more and more comes to resemble a vast lunatic asylum, the percentage of mental illness is not much greater.

One wonders whether Labour leaders along with other political leaders ought to be classified among the mentally sick. If so, it is disquieting to think that instead of being put to bed they may be put in office.

Disarmament hypocrisy

With tongue-bulging cheeks the party that began the biggest peace-time armament drive in English History talks with a nauseating non-conformist morality about the need for disarmament and uses the old smear device of suggesting that it is the Tories who are the real militarist party.

Having approved the atom bomb and initiated at home the making of the hydrogen bomb, they seek to make political capital by their proposal to suspend nuclear tests. It is the sort of morality which would give a man under a suspended death sentence an anti-virus injection to keep him in good health and spirits.

No mention is made of Labour's ambitious schemes, bruited two conferences ago, of buying shares and participating in private enterprise if returned to office and so becoming direct eaters of surplus value. No doubt the marginal voter must be carefully weaned from Tory skim milk to Labour's predigested propaganda pap.

Perhaps the worst section is the one which deals with the Labour proposal to increase the old age pension from 50s. to 60s. per week. Mr. Crossman once said it was inhuman to expect old people to live on 50s. per week. Does he and his party think it human to live on 60s. per week? What an inhuman concept of human needs.

Only a cursory treatment can be made of this document now, and a detailed examination must be the subject of further articles, but enough has been said to show the yawning chasm of their once proclaimed ideals and the political practices they now accept.

Labourism not Socialism

To the old Labour appeal to us, that after all, we were both on the same road, the answer is, yes, but how far we have travelled in an opposite direction since then.

It has been said that when the final draft of this revamped version of Labour policy was run over, leading Labourites were so pleased and excited by it that they forgot to notice the word Socialism had been omitted from it. Perhaps after calling themselves a Socialist Party for fifty years they had guilt feelings and decided to put it in. Perhaps Mr. Bevan demanded it to go in as a concession to his “revolutionary” tradition. So they sprinkled it like pepper, a half-dozen times on the last page and half.

Because Labour’s view of Socialism is more than ever a version of Capitalism with knobs on, the word may now take pride of place in Labour’s vocabulary as against nationalisation, which has become a taboo word. Henceforth the Labour Party might become the party of “Socialism” and not nationalisation. No doubt many shades of opinion, including Shaw's “Capitalists,” would welcome the change.

Even in the full draft policy Keir Hardie is given no mention. One wonders what the founder of the Labour Party would have thought of “his party” being sold on the political market like a soap powder.

More than ever does the struggle between the major parties take on the semblance of rival detergent monopolies on the claims that both “wash whitest” and to which the Labour policy document seeks to add, that Labour adds “brightness to whiteness,” surely to continue the metaphor this is the lowest ebb “Tide” politics has reached.

To paraphrase another detergent caption, for the working class only the cleansing Socialist policy can wash the dirt out of politics which the others can’t.

Ted Wilmott