Capitalism is not freedom (2026)

From the November 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ideology of capitalism as freedom only ever made sense when it was contrasted with the brutal and oppressive laws found in feudalism or slavery. However, there was no reason why private ownership had to persist as an institution once forms of democracy were accepted and established throughout much of our social organization. But private ownership was confused with invention, entrepreneurship, and innovation. At no point were inventors with capital able to magically realise their dreams by their genius alone, but instead they required an army of workers ready to execute them. This confusion was the beginning of unnecessary complexity in our society, and the perpetuation of a society, as with earlier class societies, that did not prioritise human needs, in contrast with the avowed intentions of scientists.

Although capitalist apologists insist that the market system is best at meeting needs, they are merely persisting in this confusion out of a redundant identification with ideology. For every great idea there is almost never accompanying capital to realise it. Once an idea is married to capital investment, it suddenly takes on a commodified form, owing to its embodiment of not just use-value but also exchange-value, further and further distancing itself from meeting needs. Suddenly, this imagined, drafted, and then built object must be concerned with such features as how to entice consumers, how to package it, how to save money, potentially making it shoddier. Such concerns are not the priority of the innovator or inventor. We live today in a mad society with this increasing distance between needs and commodities which has propped up irrational, wasteful and disquieting complexity. Instead of the aforementioned concerns, production criteria should be asking more rational questions. Will it be safe? Will it be healthy? Will it last as long as possible? Can the parts be recycled? Can the parts be standardised with other producers elsewhere? Might it be both useful and beautiful?

The marriage of industrialism to the market economy led to the continued division of humanity into economic classes. It also condemned industrialism to serving the aims of whatever political regime might develop, such as the destructive goals of its military, which presumably led to scientists abandoning their fields’ hallowed ethical and pro-social standards.

Not all of capitalism exists with a liberal democracy. Much of it has persisted and still persists under autocratic rule, under welfare states with oppressive governments, under religious rulers who continue to keep children believing in the invisible and impossible while at the same time churning out advanced machines such as cell phones and automobiles. Because this society is inherently unstable owing to its market nature, tending to sudden changes in commodity prices, availability, quality, and affordability, it leads political activists of all shades to exploit such instability to further their identified interests. Thus, society at the cusp of developing mass production began also to mass-produce ideologies that have divided humanity to the point at which, today, adherents of one are ready to murder the other either by hand or by vote.

Being wedded to an ideology entails an emotional identity with an idea, doubtlessly constructed out of varied biases and woven pretty tightly into a personality. A liberal, fascist, leftist, theocrat, military ruler, or a conservative is a human being overly identified with values and beliefs that become justified through a delusion of varied intensity. Ideologies are similar on the psychological level to commodities, possessions, inasmuch as they beckon for your consumption, and weave us into complex and appetitive webs from which our own minds and lives will be consumed. They also yearn for exchange. They make it difficult to understand the whole, to follow evidence, or to find the way out.

A human failure to reinforce values of reason, equality, and progress through the community standing together to put industrial civilisation at the behest of all humanity has led today to levels of confusion among workers that are pitiful and depressing to encounter. Just as capitalism led to a vast complex infrastructure that was completely unnecessary for the progress of humanity — its banks, insurance companies, advertisers, state departments, and armies — all of which consume vast planetary resources, so the thoughts and emotions of humankind must also in this era be dominated by highly complex and completely unnecessary political ruminations about ‘preventing the communists,’ ‘protecting the family,’ ‘standing behind God,’ ‘keeping out the immigrants,’ or ‘protecting/dominating pregnant women.’ Ideology has become as significant in our psychology as commodity production. We all take our stances, we all stand for something, we are always angry, we never make things better.

In the United States the worthy goal of fighting racism or sexism on campus must violate free speech and prevent even moderate thinkers from speaking and teaching, with billions of dollars in grants distorting real science to support a social justice ideology. Capitalist ideology is by nature sneaky and divisive, locking our minds into a quasi-reality from which it is difficult to escape, and which always distorts. It has the power to split your family, your sense of belonging to your community, your very mind. Truth itself is under scrutiny by post-modernists. Society finds itself more and more impossible to understand. We live in virtual universes at the very time when we need to more and more defend the earth and all the creatures we share it with. In short, it’s time to get real.

All of this is because of a failure to abolish capitalism in an earlier phase, which was clearly a realisation that entered a vast number of heads in the 19th century, partly in response to the writings of Marx and other anti-capitalists, but also in response to a growing body of workers organising for a new world. Though philosophising about it, they were far too naive about ideology. The socialists of the 19th century did not sufficiently promote the essential features of a socialist society, nor did they rail adequately against the reformist ideas that were to lead to the Australian Socialist Party of 1899, the UK Labour Party of 1906, the French Guesdists of 1902, the Russian Bolsheviks, and so many more pseudo-socialists. Except among a very few small organisations such as the SPGB and some anarchist-communist groups, revolutionary thinking turned reformist, yet still referred to itself as ‘socialist’, ‘communist’ and ‘Marxist’. The rest, we may say, is history. Perhaps there was insufficient history back then to support the hypothesis that all reform would only perpetuate our servitude to power, bosses, money, and the state.

With our planet arguably dying, it is hoped that a new generation will finally put an end to reformist thinking, although there are few solid signs of that at this time. What is required is the formation of groups in every town and city of the world standing for one thing: the ownership of the means of production in the hands of a democratic community, a refusal to reform capitalism, knowing from history that it cannot be reformed, an end to money and exchange, and a replacement of the commodity with objects and services with only use-value. This must be done in a manner that promotes freedom and community, overcoming the hierarchy and rule of despotic governments. We call also to all parties using such words as ‘Worker’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Communist’, and ‘Marxist’ to transform their parties only into organs for the actual abolition of money and the state, for the conversion of their platforms to those advocating the abolition of the wages system. Only its abolition is truly socialist or communist, and only its abolition will deliver humanity from a world in which the community is prioritised, to a world where needs come first. Any other goal makes a mockery of their name.

Dr. Who

Spain: The ‘Maricarmen’ Effect (2026)

From the November 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 7 October this year, an elderly woman, María del Carmen Abascal Martín (‘Maricarmen’), died in Madrid’s Gregorio Marañón Hospital. She was 87 when she died and, for a short while, unintentionally became the centre of a political firestorm that has engulfed Spain. Not just Spain but far beyond.

Indeed, her case has attracted global attention. She became a symbol of growing anger over Spain’s housing crisis. The problem isn’t just the rising cost of buying a home (last year, house prices rose at three times the rate of wages) but also the rising cost of renting.

These two aspects are interconnected. Currently, 73 per cent of Spaniards own their homes (down from 80.6 percent in 2007). Yet, paradoxically, while Spain has among the highest levels of homeownership in Europe, it is also among the worst affected by the housing crisis.

When a growing number of people can’t buy, demand for rental properties rises, and so do the rents tenants pay. Unsurprisingly, more than half of 18 – 34-year-olds in Spain now live with their parents or depend on them for living costs.

Maricarmen’s case was somewhat atypical. She had lived in the same flat in Madrid’s Retiro district for 70 years, a relatively affluent part of the city. The original tenancy agreement (a ‘renta antigua’ or rent-controlled lease) was signed by her father in 1956. After a succession of inheritances, the building in which her flat was located was eventually purchased in 2018 by a real estate investment firm called Urbagestión.

The firm then sought to raise her monthly rent from around €500 to a mind-boggling €2,650 for what is a modestly sized apartment. The figure was later adjusted to €1,650, but even that exceeded Maricarmen’s pension income of about €1,350. After she contacted the Tenants Union, the landlord made four eviction attempts beginning in the autumn of 2025. The first attempt was suspended after a large neighbourhood mobilisation. Two more attempts occurred in the summer of 2026 but also failed due to mounting public pressure, with even the United Nations calling on the evictions to be halted (El País, 8 October).

The fourth and final attempt to evict her on September 23 proved successful, despite hundreds of people spending the night outside her apartment to offer resistance in the face of a significant police presence. Maricarmen was carried out on a stretcher and taken to the hospital, where she later died.

The protests that subsequently erupted throughout Spain have been enormous. Waves of demonstrations have swept many cities, and tent encampments have sprung up in places like Madrid’s iconic Puerta del Sol square.

The despicable callousness shown towards this single frail old woman seems to epitomise so much of what is wrong about present-day society and its twisted priorities.

As one might expect, politicians on both the Left and the Right have cynically jumped into the fray to make political capital out of it. The Sánchez government, no doubt trying to leverage these developments to stem the decline in its popularity, particularly since the Ceuta crisis, hurriedly sought to introduce two bills to tackle the housing crisis. The opposition PP and the far-right Vox party voted against these measures and, with the help of the business-friendly Catalan nationalist Junts party, succeeded in having them quashed.

A clue as to the opposition’s motives for doing so is provided on the France 24 website (2 October):

‘Friday’s defeat increases pressure on Sanchez’s minority government and could intensify opposition calls for an early election. The leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, said earlier Friday that “the sooner elections are held, the better”’.

If the intention was to force an election, the Right succeeded, and Sanchez subsequently decided to hold a snap election on 29 November. At this point, and despite the Right being ahead in the polls, it is difficult to say whether its political manoeuvres might not backfire, given the level of public outrage the housing crisis has generated.

Structural problem

But, in a sense, what politicians do or say matters little. The roots of the problem run much deeper than any legislative measures can reach or effectively address. The housing crisis is a structural, or systemic, problem.

According to Al Jazeera (7 Oct):

‘Spain has a deficit of about 750,000 homes, which is set to grow to more than a million by 2028, according to⁠the Bank of Spain. The average rental price of 1,176 euros ($1,315) is equivalent to about 98.7 percent of a young person’s average monthly salary in Spain, Youth Council of Spain figures show’.

The percentage of people spending more than 40 percent of their disposable income on housing costs is significantly higher in Spain (28.1 percent) than the European Union average of 19.2 percent. As Ashifa Kassam notes:

‘It was, as newspaper El País said in an editorial, a glimpse of a housing market that had become completely unmoored from the average income in Spain, as rents rose 80% in a decade, while the cost of homes had climbed by 63%. “The law was upheld, and the market worked. But it is the law of the jungle in a broken market, and it is a failure”’ (Guardian, 27 September).

However, when we talk about a ‘deficit of 750,000 homes’, we should remember we are looking at this issue from a market-based, commercial perspective. In reality, there is no deficit; in fact, the opposite is true. In a recent press release dated 30 June 2023, the National Statistics Institute (INE) revealed that ‘according to the consumption of electricity in a full year, 3,837,328 dwellings were classified as empty and 2,514,511 as occasional use’.

This data comes from the 2021 Population and Housing Census. Needless to say, there are many other vacant non-residential properties, such as offices, shops, and even warehouses, that could be converted into habitable dwellings but are not included in the statistics. So we’re talking about a market-driven shortage, not an actual shortage. There are a number of factors that might account for this.

One is geography. Drive through Spain, and you will be struck by the enormous contrast between the bustling cities along the coast (Madrid being a notable inland exception) and the near-empty interior. Population densities in some places are extremely low — as low as parts of the Sahara, in fact.

Since Franco, increasing urbanisation and industrialisation have exacerbated this contrast. Over 3,000 villages in inland Spain stand abandoned. Small farmers struggled to make a living, and changing weather patterns worsened their plight. It’s no surprise that more and more people left the countryside because of poverty and better job prospects in cities.

Another factor is tourism. Spain is the second-largest tourist destination in the world, behind France, and the growing tourism industry has significantly affected the local housing supply. Many properties have been converted into short-term rentals and Airbnbs. As elsewhere in Europe, this has given rise to protests against ‘overtourism’, particularly since 2017.

Yet, another factor is the continuing fallout from the 2008 crisis. Before that, Spain experienced a frenzied construction boom fuelled by easy credit. When the bubble burst, many developers went bust, leaving a trail of empty or half-completed projects, particularly along the Mediterranean coastline. Residential building is far more modest these days, partly because planning permission tightened up after the 2008 crash but also because the developers are more cautious. Shortages exist, particularly in areas experiencing an influx of newcomers. Despite Spain’s declining birth rate, the population continues to grow because of migration, with most immigrants heading to the big cities.

Some suggest that, to overcome this housing shortfall, more so-called public housing should be built. In Spain, only 1.2 percent of the housing stock is ‘publicly owned’, according to the OECD, far below levels in countries such as Britain, France and the Netherlands. Since the Franco era, Spanish housing policy has emphasised home ownership over public housing. The reluctance to provide more of the latter has been compounded by Spain’s highly decentralised political system, with responsibility divided among the central government, autonomous communities, and municipalities.

Corporate landlords

Regarding privately rented properties, Spain’s Ministry of Consumer Affairs published a report in April 2026 showing that landlords with multiple properties, legal entities, and public entities together held about 61 percent of the habitual rental market, while landlords with just one rental property accounted for around 39 percent.

In Maricarmen’s case, the former type of landlord was involved. The share of rental properties owned by corporate landlords such as private equity funds is increasing, but still quite low. Most private landlords are individuals who own one or more properties.

Much has been said about the role of ‘vulture funds’ in the housing crisis, but in reality their role has been mainly limited to hotspots like Madrid and Barcelona. Critics argue that such funds have bought properties cheaply and pursued evictions more aggressively than smaller landlords. Supporters counter that without corporate investment, tackling the alleged housing shortage would be harder. They say investors will be deterred from building projects if they have to contend with too much bureaucratic red tape and overly restrictive regulations.

Indeed, this was one pretext for why various right-wing parties decided to vote down the two housing bills the Sanchez government put forward. The bills aimed to ensure rental contracts automatically renew when they expire as well as restrict the eviction of vulnerable tenants.

The Junts party, for instance, argued that it was unreasonable to lump small landlords who depend on rental income together with large real-estate companies. They suggested this could have ‘negative and irreversible’ effects. Some properties could be withdrawn from the rental market or converted to holiday rentals, to the detriment of tenants.

The bills also targeted corporate investors seeking higher returns. As Kassam notes:

‘The head of one of the country’s biggest labour unions called for investment funds to be “kicked out” of the housing market. “Homes are for living in, not for large corporations to do business,” said Unai Sordo of the Workers’ Commissions (CCOO) as he called for a tax system that would make “the business of hoarding homes unprofitable”’.

Who could possibly object to the idea that ‘Homes are for living in, not for large corporations to do business’? The problem, however, is that we live in a capitalist society, with all the moral hazards and dilemmas it creates.

Ultimately, it’s nearly impossible to isolate one part of the system from another. Everything is connected. Directly or indirectly, the repercussions of a capitalist cost-benefit calculus will filter through to affect our lives and the homes we live in.

It’s a bit like water finding its own level. Like the mould that returns every winter, we cannot insulate ourselves from the consequences of living in a society where most things, including our homes, are commodified. We may think of our home as our castle, but even castles can be repossessed by the bank if push comes to shove.

As Friedrich Engels put it in 1873:

‘The housing shortage from which the workers and part of the petty bourgeoisie suffer in our modern big cities is one of the numerous smaller, secondary evils which result from the present-day capitalist mode of production’ (The Housing Question).

Such an observation remains as relevant today as it was back then, 150-plus years ago.

Robin Cox

Sting in the Tail: Superstition in India (1995)

The Sting in the Tail column from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Superstition in India

Superstition still flourishes in India as elsewhere. Guru Busters (BBC2, 10 September) showed how hordes of self-styled “Gods”, Fakirs, fortune tellers, quacks, etc., hoodwink millions by using simple conjuring tricks, elementary chemistry and seemingly impossible physical feats.

It was amazing to hear wealthy, educated men justifying their allegiance to one God-man, Sai Baba, on the ground that he had given them gold trinkets which he had created “out of nothing”. Strangely, this God’s poorer followers received no gold, only “holy ash”.

Opposing these frauds are the Rationalists who tour the countryside showing audiences how anyone can perform the various “miracles. What they do is worthwhile, but it will be the continuing development of capitalism in India which will most effectively attack the ignorance and backwardness on which superstition feeds.

Meanwhile, our comrades in India get on with the really worthwhile work of spreading the ideas of scientific socialism there.

Must do better, Desmond

So disappointed is Archbishop Desmond Tutu with South Africa’s ANC-led government that he can only award it an alpha minus for its performance so far. (The Herald, 4 September).

The well-publicised scramble by some ANC leaders to climb aboard “the gravy train” was bad enough, but now the government has been caught selling arms to Rwanda through Armcorp, the state arms corporation.

The Archbishop notes that: "Almost everywhere, and certainly in Africa, armies are not for the defence of the citizenry, they are instruments of repression. ”

For this he deserves an alpha plus, but he continues:

“What we want ultimately is to see Africa demilitarised. If you have countries that claim to he democratic, and are friendly with one another, what do you need huge armies for? We should start by dismantling Armcorp. ”

Archbishop Tutu is a humane and well-meaning man, but for being so naive as to imagine that demilitarisation can occur within the conflict-ridden, money-grubbing capitalist system, well, we can only award him a beta minus for that.

Greens in dreamland

Many “Greens” pin their hopes for a greener world on persuading governments to become eco-friendly within the profit- motive economy.

An article in the Observer (17 September) shows what forlorn hopes they are. The British government’s pollution watchdog. Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Pollution (HMIP), reports that a severe shortage of inspectors meant that it carried out only 60 percent of scheduled checks on factories during 1994-5, and as a result pollution spills into the air and rivers doubled.

And the government’s response to this? It is to merge HMIP with the National Rivers Authority next year, a cost-cutting measure which is expected to reduce the number of inspectors still further.

The outlook of these Greens surely amounts to the triumph of hope over experience.

Who are they kidding?

Some Labour MPs have been complaining about Tony Blair’s undemocratic style of leadership, but when was the Labour Party ever democratic?

At the top, Labour’s leaders have a long history’ of simply ignoring conference decisions they didn't like, while trade union bosses cynically cast millions of votes at Labour conferences on behalf of their members, many if not most of whom didn't even support Labour.

At local level there are claims that an influx of new Asian members into Govan Labour Party is connected with the ambition of an Asian councillor to replace the present MP as candidate at the next election. A party official explained on TV that nothing unusual was happening as vote-rigging is the norm prior to candidates being selected.

And West Renfrew MP Tommy Graham has been trying to secure his re-selection by

“recruiting pensioners in pubs and at Linwood DayCare Centre. Many did not even know they were joining the Labour Party" (Observer, 3 September).

Those dissident Labour MPs will be well aware that their party is undemocratic from top to bottom.

Tunnel vision

As commuters and lorry drivers race through the tunnels under the Tyne and the Clyde few of them will think about the crippling condition of osteonecrosis. The victims of this condition, who constructed these tunnels in the sixties, can think of little else.

Osteonecrosis is the direct result of working in compressed air pumped into the tunnels when they were built to stop the walls collapsing. The workers were not warned of the dangers and they were not properly decompressed before returning to the open air.

"Hugh Davey, A Tyne tunneler said: There's about 50 of us from the Tyne. We look like a bunch of old men. I'm 56: I look like a man of 70. I've already had one hip done and I’m on constant pain killers. I had to stop work in 1981. We didn't know what would happen. We thought, we can't come to no harm—they must know what they were doing. We thought they’d look after us. It's destroyed my life ’ ” (Observer, 17 September).

The firms did know “what they were doing”. They were producing a commodity as cheaply as possible. Cutting corners on the health and safety of the working class is just “good business practice”. It is not the function of capitalism to “look after” the welfare of the workers—it’s the profits and the shareholders that have to be looked after.

Who needs Socialism? (1995)

From the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a superficial level capitalism is enjoying a triumphant
 period at present, but the old socialist warning that the system
 creates its own gravediggers is as relevant now
 as it was in the past

When socialists utter the slogan “One world and one people!” we are describing our conception of a world in which every single human being will be guaranteed the material needs of a full and happy life. It would be fatuous, of course, to say that socialism can deliver a “full and happy life” to every human being, but common ownership and democratic control of the means of life will not only guarantee every human being the right to contribute their skills and energies to the provision of goods and services, it will also give every person throughout the world the equal right to freely avail themselves of the goods and services they require. They will have the same free access to their self-determined needs; everyone will have complete material security and the idea of accumulating wealth, either in its material form or as represented by money, will have no place in a socialist world.

This is not the case today. According to the various charities and the United Nations relief agencies, over fifteen million people on average die each year from hunger and hunger-related diseases. Additionally, millions of the deaths that are noted as resulting from “natural causes” are the result of indirect poverty and could be prevented by the provision of decent food, good housing and proper medical care. If we had socialism now the millions threatened in the year ahead would be spared. These millions desperately need socialism!

The Belfast Telegraph recently cited the case of a young worker employed by Burger King who, for a five-hour stint earned £1.00—yes one pound sterling, not enough to buy himself a hamburger! His employers, it was stated, make casual staff clock off and wait in a staff room during slack periods, paying them only when they are actually working during busy periods. The newspaper did not indicate that Burger King had developed a new twist in the crime war, because robbing workers is, of course, a legal practice in capitalist society.

In Northern Ireland, the case is of some interest because all the mouthpieces of capitalism are assuring us that the infamously low-paid slavery' associated with tourism is part of the “peace dividend”. More generally, it reflects the condition of workers in Britain and further afield now that government has emaciated the unions and given the green light to employers to intensify the exploitation of their workers through part-time working and contract employment.

Beneath official poverty line

Again, local, but reflecting the national scene, is a report issued on 25 September by the Save the Children Fund. The report backs earlier research in claiming that 37.5 percent of children in Northern Ireland are living beneath the official poverty line and that the death rate among these children is 50 percent higher than among other children. This in Britain, one of five richest states in the world where the incautiously comfortable would vehemently deny that part of the “Third World” is situated in a housing estate a mere couple of miles from where they live.

Symptomatic, too, of working class life today in Britain are the notices appearing in Job Centres encouraging workers to accept the low-paid jobs on offer with the happy news that they might be entitled to state income support to bring them up to the recognised poverty level.

But it is not only the poor and the low-paid who are suffering the lash of a triumphant capitalism. Professionals and middle and junior management are being hounded for increased “efficiency”—in other words, better results or else! Ironically, the hounding comes from the top, from overpaid directors who themselves are frequently as secure as a football team manager. Often the house, cars, schools and status are appurtenances of the job and these invariably impose a sickening servility and tension on people who thought the reward for acting as Gauleiter for a bunch of capitalists was a life of economic security.

It was easy, in the period of relatively full employment, for many workers to have the illusion that capitalism had changed. There had in fact been no basic change but the illusion was fed by the employment situation following the war and the effect of this on the bargaining power of the unions in some sections of industry. But, even then, in what might be regarded as the halcyon days of capitalism, the age-old problems of the system flourished and it was largely hope, expressed in the rhetoric of the Left, that created the illusion that life was going to get better.

In the different countries of the world we have had capitalism run by “communists”, labourites, liberals, conservatives, et al. By the Right, the Left and the Centre. Surely, if the system could have been civilised, there has been the motive, the intent and the collective intelligence to extirpate its problems long before now.

Distribution

The problem of production has been solved. Unquestionably, today the potential exists to provide adequately for the whole of the human family but we have failed to solve the problem of distribution which remains fatally flawed by the needs of the profit system.

Today, for millions of people throughout the world there is only despair. In Britain the official figure for unemployment is disguised by the fact that for many there is no monetary incentive in registering as unemployed. Increasingly now, too, employers are employing part-time or contract labour which not only denies workers the notion of security and such benefits as holiday and redundancy pay but which acts as a means of intensifying exploitation. In its totality, the new regime (which is in no way threatened by the prospect of a Labour government), represents the death of hope for meaningful reform and the return of a particularly virulent form of working class exploitation.

The reader may put the question that heads this article to his or herself. Do you need socialism? If you really think about it, about the present and about the future, we can only conclude that you will add the word “urgently!”.

Richard Montague

Press Exposure: Reporting the lies (1995)

The Press Exposure column from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reporting the lies

Saturday September 30 and it’s the beginning of a really special weekend for British sport. For a start it’s the day before Eric Cantona returns to the Manchester United team. He has served—need we remind you—his term of suspension for his over-athletic response to an opposition fan’s opinions on him being sent off. Then there’s Will Carling, the captain of England's rugby union team. He’s in sparkling form for his club Harlequins even if the tabloids are in pursuit of him over his relationship with the Princess of Wales. Yes it looks like being a great weekend—for sport, for the players. for the hacks who are supposed to tell us all about the games and for the people whose lives are briefly lightened by reading about them.

But first a word or two more about Cantona and Carling. They are two very different men, with Carling seemingly unable to express himself except in mind- numbing banalities while Cantona is always liable to launch into rambling, obscure epigrams which come from nowhere and lead into nothing. Cantona is swarthy and brooding while Carling—at least until he excited the media as the latest victim of the predatory princess— was boringly clean cut and affable. Each in their way supplied an element essential to the sustenance of attention from the tabloids. Yes. you’ve guessed it—sex and violence.

Romps

Violence is never far away from how the hacks report sport. Matches are “clashes” or "battles"; strikers are “deadly"; teams "pack a real punch"; losing sides are "sunk" like the General Belgrano. Any suspicion that stars of the games have what is laughingly called a private life more interesting than the average will send the tabloids into a hysteria of pursuit, observation and, when all else fails, plain and simple fabrication. This will often involve the discovery of some alleged partner in what are called “sex romps" (celebrities never have just plain sex—they always have "romps") who is willing to tell all, for a price.

One effect of this is that anyone who reads the sports pages of the tabloids because they want to find out what happened during the games will often be disappointed. They will see a lot about those romps or the addiction problems of the players or what has been happening lately between the managers and their wives but not very much about the game. A lot of space is regularly given over to the complaints of outraged managers who are sure that their team was deprived of a well-earned victory by a blundering referee. A lot more is devoted to disputes between managers about whether their players played dirty or, as in a recent match between Tottenham and Wimbledon, over whether one team had the right to use a substitute who had arrived late. Anyone could be excused for concluding that—in the case of the popular sports like football, cricket, rugby, boxing, the actual performances are of secondary importance, except to the long-suffering hordes who have paid to watch other people kick a ball, punch each other or pretend to be injured. All of this revolves around the fact that what is called sport is really big business into some big money involved—money often supplied by a few very rich people who need to be reassured and placated and have their ego regularly inflated by the crowds and the media.

Distractions

But isn’t sport also a distraction? Well yes and very useful it can be for anyone who needs some re-organising after a week in the office or the shop or on the factory floor. And in this the tabloids, with their extravagance and selective wording, headlines and pictures, are important agents. But what do people need to be distracted from? Well for one thing there is the fact that, according to government figures, there are 50,000 homeless households in England (in 1982 there were 9,300) living in temporary accommodation. Barnados point out (as if it were needed) that parents in that situation suffer so much despair and frustration that their marriages may crumble and they may become violent towards the children they love: ". . . and the consequences can last long beyond the time . . ." but realities like that get scant attention in the tabloids and what attention they do get is overshadowed by the page-after-page devoted to sport, with heavy type headlines and hysterical language.

What this amounts to is that this social system is so harsh, so repressive and threatening that its people need distractions and fantasy because reality is too awful to face. How many of the children in those homeless families sustain themselves with dreams of running into the turf at Highbury or Twickenham while the massed fans cheer, if scoring the vital goal or try, or spraying out autographs to adoring kids, or having "red-hot sex romps” for the tabloids to rhapsodise about next week?

Debate

Whether this is preferable to the older style of treating sport as if it were war (and on other pages treating war as if it were sport) is a matter of debate. In any case the end result is the same; no-one gets near the kernel of the matter. No-one grasps the fact that sport is capitalism in essence—ruthlessly competitive sometimes disguised as caring and co-operative. The fantasies it stimulates are a usefully cynical conditioning for a life of exploitation. The tabloid sports pages make a significant contribution to this and the whole sorry, sordid mess will go on until we all blow the whistle.

Ivan

Wage share falls (1995)

From the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists do not enjoy being the bringer of bad tidings, though it is a familiar enough role to us, especially during times of economic or social crisis. But facts are facts, and when they act as a further indictment of the capitalist system, we certainly do not shirk from saying so. The most recent dose of bad news for the working class has been hidden away by the newspapers, or more often simply ignored completely. It is that according to data released by the Central Statistical Office, wages have fallen to their smallest share of die British Gross Domestic Product since records began—forty years ago. Capital is king it seems, but it wouldn’t do for the capitalists to gloat in public in case the working class took offence.

The working class, as is so often the case, have something to be angry about. In the second quarter of 1995 statistics show that income from employment accounted for just 62.1 percent of GDP, down from about 72 percent in the mid-1970s after the “Barber boom", when trade union membership was nearing record levels. If wages had remained at this level of GDP, the gross income of the working class from employment would have been over £60 billion higher than it currently is. This amounts to an average of £50 a week for every worker lost to the capitalist class.

Officials acting for the Central Statistical Office explain this fall in the share of wages and salaries in GDP (a share which was still as high as 66.3 percent in 1992) by saying that the mini-recovery from the slump has led to company profits rising faster than wages, with this exacerbated by economisation on labour. Their recent report states that “companies are producing more from fewer staff. We are thus working for proportionately less per person". However, bad though the situation is, there are other factors at work too. One is that income from “self-employment” has carried on increasing in recent years, with a formal changing in the tax and benefit status of some wage workers as firms “contract out" jobs. Also, tens of thousands of unemployed workers have been encouraged to set up their own businesses by the Department of Employment providing services that real capitalists find unprofitable These workers existing often on the equivalent of poverty-line wages, topped up with Family Credit. There are now more window-cleaners and mobile hairdressers than ever, and if their average income is anything to go by, their lot is not a happy one. What their presence does do, though, is make the share of wages from employment lower than it would otherwise be, as they are not officially classified as wage workers at all.

That the fall in the share of wages over the last twenty years according to these figures had been bad—though not as catastrophic as first appears to be the case—is the silver lining. The real position of the working class is in actual fact worse than that presented by the official statistics. This is because the current figure of 62.1 percent as the share of wages in GDP is a gross sum which includes taxation paid by the workers. But wages—the cost of producing and reproducing workers’ energies—are a real amount intended to provide workers with enough purchasing power to keep themselves and their families in a fit condition for their jobs, given their skills, education, standard of training and so on. They are the real amount received for this purpose, not a “gross” hypothetical sum. A gross wage may be £15,000 per annum, but a large proportion of this is taken out in taxes, some of which—like income tax—the worker doesn’t really receive in the first place. When direct and indirect taxation are taken into account, the real wage income of the £15,000-a-year worker will be found to be substantially less—and by thousands not hundreds.

As was realised by economists as diverse as Adam Smith, Ricardo and Marx, taxation is in reality a burden on the capitalist class and not the workers—if it was abolished overnight the real consuming power of the workers would not increase at all. When this point is grasped it can be seen that the real share of the working class in British GDP is much less than 62.1 percent, even if we include the self- employed. And it should be remembered that these taxes which are nominally “paid” by the working class are higher now than ever before in the peace-time history of Britain. Real income from employment in Britain is now almost certainly well below the 50 percent mark.

The price to pay

The latest data on prices and incomes show that the position of the working class with regard to capital is worsening. The Retail Price Index, helped along by a continuing dose of currency inflation which has outweighed downward pressure on prices from the slump, is currently registering an annual rise of 3.6 percent, a figure which is slowly moving up. Average earnings meanwhile, are increasing by only 3.25 percent annually, with the majority of workers getting much less than this. Real wages, therefore, are currently falling.

While in Britain the workers’ share of the wealth they produce has been declining, in other countries the situation is worse still. In the United States, for example, many sections of the working class (like car workers and steel workers) receive lower real wages now than they did twenty years ago, let alone a smaller share of the product. Whether Britain and similar countries will go the same way is difficult to tell. Certainly, Britain’s comparatively high level of trade union membership will help mitigate against this, but the same forces unleashed by capital in America to maximise accumulation at the expense of the consumption of the workers are finding expression here: shift-work, union-busting, market deregulation and short-term contracts to name but the most obvious.

Workers must unite in the face of this onslaught from capital to protect their interests—the battle of wage labour against capital must be fought vigorously, and workers must democratically organise on the economic front to fight their corner. This struggle must be fought on a wider front than the economic battleground within capitalism, however. The market economy is based on an unfair and antagonistic system of income distribution which causes industrial disputes, economic crises and vast wealth amidst poverty as a matter of course. It tramples on the working class with impunity and continues to laugh in the face of the reformers. If the workers are really to have any lasting victory over King Capital worth speaking of, the whole system of wage labour most go, and the sooner the better.

Dave Perrin

World View: "Mankind's most toxic pollution" (1995)

From the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

On his return from the Inhumane Weapons Convention in Vienna in early October, the British delegate and Foreign Office minister, David Davis, announced that “landmines remain an effective defensive weapon", and that it would not "be right to deny other responsible countries the right to have landmines" (Guardian, 3 October).

The above raises questions. A convention called to debate "inhumane weapons” suggests some weapons are considered "humane", which is absurd—they all kill. Again, what is a "responsible" country? According to David Davis it would include those who ratified the original IWC protocol some fifteen years ago and so including countries like the former Yugoslavia and Guatemala. Can any country, for that matter, which plants landmines, be classed as "responsible"?

Thanks to such "responsible” countries the world is now littered with 100 million landmines. The UN. though, put this figure closer to 200 million! At the top of the landmine league is Africa with 20 million, 10 million of which are buried beneath Angola's soil. Elsewhere in Africa you can step on landmines in Mozambique. Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Libya, Egypt, Mali, Djibouti, Rwanda, Morocco, Western Sahara and Chad. Most of Libya’s 5 million landmines are still active more than fifty years after they were planted. Meanwhile, Mozambique boats the widest variety of mines—32, manufactured in 15 different countries.

Other countries with a high concentration of landmines are Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. Together they have 33 million mines and a combined population of 57 million— more than one mine per family.

Despite the work done by anti-landmine organisation, some 2 million continue to be planted each year—a figure that flies in the face of UN de-mining programmes that clear only 85,000 landmines per year at the cost of $75 million. The beaches of Kuwait alone have cost $80 million to de-mine and it is estimated that a further $57 billion would be needed to clear every mine in the world.

Mine clearing has become so dangerous, expensive and time-consuming that Britain has now abandoned its operation in the Falklands, preferring simply to cordon off land that contains 20,000 mines. The hills and forests that surround Dubrovnik are so which with mines that experts believe it would take 8 years to clear them.

The UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs recently reported that "if the proliferation of landmines was stopped in 1996, at current rates of funding and clearance it would still take almost 1,100 years to rid the world of all the landmines in the ground" (New Statesman. 4 August).

In the past four years. Britain has donated £16 million towards mine clearance projects, and has "officially” (stop laughing) not exported landmines for 10 years. Mines, however, with the "made in Britain" logo, have been unearthed in Croatia. Bosnia. Afghanistan, Vietnam, Somalia and Mozambique. While the British government does not sanction the selling of landmines it does have a preference for a special type of mine—the "smart” mine, for which David Davis recently commented there lay a "safer future" (Guardian, 3 October).

Not so smart

"Smart" mines are supposed to be able to self-destruct after a number of years and are said to be able to be deactivated from a distance. Critics, however, point out that the failure rate for "smart” mines is between 10 and 25 percent. Furthermore, in Laos people are still being killed by US mines that were supposed to have self-destructed 25 years ago.

Mines have great patience. They recognise no cease-fire and can’t distinguish between a bazooka-laden soldier and a child carrying firewood. This is why they kill and maim 500 people each week. In Poland, as late as 1977, mines laid during World War II were killing up to 40 people per year, and mines planted during that same conflict continue to kill and maim in France, Germany, Belgium, Russia and the Netherlands.

Mines take not only lives. They also wreak havoc on the societies infested with them. UN Secretary-general Boutros-Ghali stated several months ago that "by neutralising essential infrastructures. mines present a virtually insuperable obstacle to post-conflict peace-building" (New African, May 1995).

Mines are often planted around key economic installations such as electricity generating plants, water treatment stations and port facilities, thus hampering their use. They lie buried beneath countless paddy fields and across millions of acres of arable land. In Afghanistan alone half of all land that could be cultivated is not for fear of explosions. Mines drain a community's resources, as victims who are maimed are made economically inactive and require intensive medical care.

As well as over-stretching medical resources, hundreds of thousands of people remain virtual prisoners in refugee camps because their passage home is not safe—putting a further strain on host countries.

It costs as little as $3 to lay a mine and up to $1,000 to remove it later on. All governments are aware of this fact and other mentioned. But the social system they rule over makes the challenge of addressing such contradictions impossible. The quest for profit—macro profit—comes first, and a few million wasted dollars is well worth the gamble for military and economic power.

Stuart Maslen of UNICEF cited a typical counter-argument put to the advocates of a ban on landmines: "If we give in to humanitarian organisations on landmines, they are going to come back and question the legitimacy of other weapons" (Guardian, 5 October).

The argument can be taken further. To campaign for a ban on landmines, presupposes that other weapons are not objected to, such has lasers, which David Davis believes "are vital for the armed forces" (Guardian, 3 October).

Socialists believe not only in the abolition of landmines, but in the abolition of all weapons. We realise, though, that this will only come about when we abolish the motive that necessitates their use—profit; when we make the motive for war— mineral wealth, resources—the common property of the world’s people, and free from private interests, trade routes, overseas markets and areas of influence. Only then can we get down to the task of allocating workers and resources to the clearance of mines, or what the US State Department has described as "Mankind’s most toxic pollution”!

John Bissett

World View: Spooks, crooks and the rape of Russia (1995)

From the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is beginning to dawn on the new rulers of Russia that the advice they have been receiving from transnational companies, Western politicians, businessmen, and "economics experts” is worse than useless. The dogmas and shibboleths that have been unsuccessful for Western capitalism will not succeed in the far less favourable conditions now prevailing in Russia.

Yeltsin and his consorts were swept into power on a wave of discontent following the grey years of Brezhnev and the hollow promises of Gorbachev. A new era was predicted by adopting the “Free Market" economy of Western capitalism. Those responsible for spreading this illusion will inevitably reap a bitter harvest.

A major factor in the decline of the Soviet Union was the ever-escalating arms race with the United States and the NATO powers. The amount of social labour necessary to achieve parity in means of murder left very little to produce better means of life. However when the means of life are scarce, such as in times of war, there is a tendency for black markets to arise. There was a flourishing black market in the Soviet Union for many years, run by criminal gangs in consort with corrupt officials. Goods produced for sale in the shops ended up in the hands of the racketeers, for the benefit of the criminal few and the detriment of the many.

When the Cold War was at its height the Soviet Union was able to recruit agents from the ranks of starry-eyed young intellectuals who accepted the myth that Communism rather than State Capitalism was being built there. The Western powers having no comparable source of naive idealists to exploit, had to rely on criminals and people they could bribe or blackmail into serving their ends.

In addition to bribing corrupt officials the CIA has a long chequered (well documented) history of using criminal organisations; in Cuba, Latin America, and the Far East, not to speak of the Mafia within the United States itself. There are numerous books and television documentaries which have exposed such dealings, so it is no surprise to find they successfully used similar tactics within the USSR and the Warsaw pact countries.

Mafias

The winter of 1990-91 saw increasing hardship, with a “free market" supposedly on its way food disappeared from shop shelves. An Italian TV crew filmed twenty heavily loaded trucks leaving Moscow's wholesale produce market, not one of which unloaded at a retail outlet The food existed but not in the shops. The dearth was artificially created to augment prices on the black market. Police were finding dumps of animal carcasses covered with earth all over the countryside.

The next winter saw $13 billions-worth of food disappear only some of which was sold by black marketeers. Trainloads from Western Europe were shunted into sidings in Moscow and left to rot, others ended up at obscure destinations in Siberia and other remote places. One-hundred-and-twenty tons of frozen meat from Britain was sidelined and labelled "infected with mad cow disease". The strangling of the country’s food supply was a colossal operation to force up prices and expand the range of the black market operators. It demonstrates the size and power of the Russian Mafias.

But when Boris Yeltsin complained to the West about “the Mafia that controls our markets and sabotages our industries" it was ignored and passed over as more babbling from boozy Boris. However, when Yeltsin made this statement there were twenty criminal gangs operating in Moscow, most of them at each others' throats, and people in any kind of business from restaurants to news-stands had to pay protection even if the gang supplied their goods.

In the four years since the demise of state capitalism in the Soviet Union, the country has been stripped of billions of dollars-worth of raw materials, which were exported by illegal means: titanium, timber, strontium, uranium, plutonium, petroleum, and more. The fall in the value of the rouble allowed whole industries, office blocks, department stores, hotels, shops, fleets of buses and trucks to be bought for a song. Military hardware, much of it state-of-the-art, has fallen into the hands of ruthless gangsters. No-one can be sure of the nuclear arsenal, especially since 2,000 tons of gold were spirited out of the Bank vaults in 1991.

Russia is now the main conduit for smuggling drugs into Europe, and the profits of the drug trade are being laundered through Russian banks. The rape of the Soviet Union, which was once the second most powerful country in the world, is almost complete. Its industries, public utilities, transport and real estate, are being systematically stripped of their assets. Criminal gangs control the major cities, often warring among themselves. Attorney-General Stepankov stated there were 18,000 murders in 1992 and there were 14,800 in the first six months of 1993 (Claire Sterling, Crime Without Frontiers, 1994, p. 235). Bankers and policemen are increasingly being gunned down. In the Far East Vladivostok has been taken over by a consortium of the Russian mafias, Chinese triads, and the Japanese Yakuza.

The capital amassed by the crime cartels is now available to be invested in stock markets, money markets and legitimate businesses around the world. In the five years since 1990 the mafias have become major players in the capitalist world. The grief, pain, anguish, and misery that is the lot of the workers of the world is deeper and more widespread than ever. Marx's prediction of the increasing misery of the working class is vindicated with each passing year which brings more war more uncertainty, unemployment, more crises and ecological disasters, more terror, more crime. Capitalism causes chaos.

JORIC

The Socialist Party — who we are and what we do (1995)

From the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is the text (slightly amended) of a leaflet that was recently distributed by our members in Edinburgh

The aim of the Socialist Party

The aim of the Socialist Party and the other parties which make up the World Socialist Movement is the sole objective of achieving Socialism. To us Socialism is a world without employers and employees and the poverty that is caused by this master-slave relationship. We want a classless, stateless, world society where everything that is produced is available free. No money — we take what we need and we make decisions about what is produced and what isn’t. In short, we seek the end of what is usually called Business and Commerce.

How do we achieve this?

If such a democratic community is to come about it must do so because the majority of people want it. It isn’t going to fall out of the sky or be brought about by leaders who are going to sneak such a society upon us pretty much without our knowledge. So the Socialist Party seeks to build support for the end of the Profit System and its replacement by World Socialism. We are prepared to use Parliament and other elected bodies to affect this change. We also believe that as socialist ideas grow there will be developments in the organisation of people at their places of work. Clearly, we don’t just have a parliamentary strategy. The main thing is that the majority are the only people who can bring this change about and sustain socialism.

Do we have leaders?

No. Leadership is undemocratic. It implies, as can be seen from the way virtually every other political party is organised, that certain members have more rights than others. Every member of the Socialist Party joins on an entirely equal footing with every other member.

Are we after Nationalisation?

No. Nationalisation, of key industries or all industries, just means that government bodies administer Business and workers continue to be exploited. Wc want the end of Business.

Do we Vote Labour or suggest that people should vote Labour?

No way. The Labour Party is in our view an anti-socialist party which now has no ideas at all. It is virtually identical to the Tories. Even when it claimed to have ideas these merely amounted to government bodies running business — nationalisation isn’t socialism.

Do we campaign for Reforms?

No. That isn’t to say that some reforms haven’t in the past benefited workers. Like the vote, elementary education, “free” health care. But, as people now know, even these reforms can be wrecked or they can be taken away all together. So we don’t campaign to house the homeless or for more funds for the Health Service — this isn’t because we don’t care - we reject this because campaigning for reforms hasn't worked. Instead we try to get people to look beyond the acceptance of a daily life of relative poverty.

Are we involved in “the day-to-day struggle"?

Yes. No worker can avoid being in the day-to-day struggle to look after ourselves and our families. Most of our members who work are involved in trades unions — and actively resist attempts by employers to worsen our working conditions, but we recognise that unions have many limitations. Our members are also involved in things like tenants’ associations and other community groups.

Russia and all that.

No! For 75 years we have been criticising the methods, tactics and the outcomes of events like the Bolshevik Revolution. The idea of a coup d’etat by a small minority in the name of the working class which then enacts nationalisation measures is totally at odds with trying to build a majority who want to bring into being a classless, moneyless world society. The notion that socialism means this was not in the game at all in Russia in 1917

What do we do?

We hold public meetings, debates, weekend conferences. We occasionally contest local, national and European elections. We produce leaflets for door-to-door distribution and for handing out on the streets or at demonstrations. We sell the Socialist Standard (it’s not compulsory) and in Edinburgh we have written and produced our own free paper/magazine called the International Times. We attend other organisations’ meetings and demonstrations to talk to people, give away leaflets and sell literature. And while we don’t join in demonstrations to demand reforms we are anti-war and anti-racist.

We also do things like organise “socials” which are just get-togethers in pubs with people performing. With more people we could do a whole lot more. One thing we never do, however, is set ourselves up as some kind of leadership of the working class — we leave that short of thing to the SWP, Labour and the like — or to any other conservative groupings who think that workers are sheep in need of leaders.

These Foolish Things . . . (1995)

The Scavenger column from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

World domination

“Last year, there were only seven independent countries in the world in which we (America’s B2 stealth bombers) did not operate. Two do not have runways and one is run by a guy named Gadafy.” US Air Force chief of staff, General Ronald Fogleman.

The threat remains

“I have spent the last four years photographing deployed strategic nuclear weapons at sites throughout the United Stales . . . Consider these facts:

Three new Trident submarines are currently under construction. These underwater missile platforms have no ‘dual use’ or conventional role: Congress recently authorised $50 million for ‘long lead’ production of an additional 10-20 B2 ‘Stealth’ bombers at a cost of $1 billion to $2 billion apiece.

A $4.8 billion program is underway to extend the life of 500 Minutemen missiles until the year 2000.”

Paul Shambroom, Minneapolis, Photographer, Star Tribune, August 13 1995.

Economics defeats sense

Slate from northern Spain is being used to roof homes in North Wales even though the region is pock-marked with quarries which have produced high quality slate for more than 200 years. "But it makes no sense at all that material in bulk is transported thousands of miles and that it is still cheaper to put it on a roof here," (Said Bill Henderson, principal planning officer of Snowdonia National Park). Guardian, 17 August.

Slave trade threatened

The ruling that football transfer fees were illegal came from the European Court of Justice and, if it is upheld later this year, many small clubs could go out of business. It would mean players being able to leave clubs at the end of their contracts without the clubs receiving any fee.

The value of big clubs would be destroyed, with millions of pounds being wiped off their books, while smaller ones would be unable to survive without being able to sell talented youngsters. Evening Mail, 20 September.

First things first

The (I.G. Farbcn) combine which fuelled the Nazi war machine, employed an estimated 350,000 slave labourers during the second world war. At its most notorious factory at Monowitz or Auschwitz III, 30,000 people were worked to death. An I.G. Farbcn subsidiary produced the Zyklon-B tablets used to gas concentration camp inmates . . .

A group of critical shareholders have been trying to force I. G. Farbcn and three chemical concerns created from its break-up—BASF, Hoechst and Bayer—to do more to compensate the victims of the Holocaust. But Ernst Krienke, head of the supervisory board, said the company’s first duties were to its shareholders and creditors. Guardian, 10 August 1995.

The Scavenger

Suckers’ Luck (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a year now and still I have not become a multi-millionaire. Something is clearly serious amiss here. Yes, it was a mere twelve months ago (19 November 1995, to be precise) that share options in mass gullibility were first floated on the open market and, with the descent to earth of the god of Mammon made flesh, we were all informed, in tones designed to elicit guilt from the average Catholic, that IT COULD BE YOU. A finger out of the sky pointed at us from beyond the TV screen: a sort of divine signal that the purchase of a lottery ticket was our pre-ordained path to prosperity if not righteousness.

Out we trotted, fools that we all were (and some still are), to hand over our puny little pound in exchange for the multi-million-pound public fantasy. Yes, I went. The queue was long in that final hour between W.H. Smith closing its doors to us luckless suckers and the balls being juggled before the nation’s wide-eyed mass regression to Christmas Morning aged Two. In front of me stood a grubby man wearing plimsolls with holes in them and a folded-up copy of the betting page from a newspaper with no news in it. There he stood, his life in poverty and his mind on the brink of unbounded affluence. But he was a thoughtful old twit, declaring half to himself and then to anyone who would listen that when he won he was damned if he was going to pay the top rate of income tax. Why should he waste his millions subsidising workshy layabouts with nothing to do all day but sit in the belting shop and complain about the price of pork scratchings? No, he would be moving his new-won riches to tax-free Guernsey, he explained, and let the impoverished wretches of this bomb-site called Britain fend for themselves.

Standing in the queue were others who were fending for themselves by entertaining the hopes of the most easily manipulated as they made their charitable donations to Eton school for parasites, the restoration of Royal palaces and other “worthy causes”. A statistic was later to appear suggesting that if a resident of London were to throw a pound down the toilet and flush it into the expansive urban sewage system they would stand more chance of it accidentally coming back to them through the water supply than being repaid as part of any lottery prize money.

The Labour leader, gifted as he is with the new thinking of an anaemic gnat, has promised that when . . . and if . . . and so on . . . his government will see to it that the lottery is run fairly, and certainly not by profiteers. The name of Richard Branson, a prophet of the fast buck to whom the word profit is like cream to a feral cat, has been mentioned as part of the Brave New Blair World. The suggestions that in future NHS beds will be allocated by an offshoot of Virgin Airlines, offering lucky tickets to cancer patients in return for a crisp new tenner, is merely rumour of the most malicious kind.

Not for Ken Southwell of York all of this faithless cynicism, for as the Northern Echo newspaper reported this January, he won £840,000 on the lottery and still intends to continue working. Contradicting every half-baked heckler at a socialist meeting since 1904, Southwell informed the newspaper that “The reality is you have to do something. You can’t just sit back and do nothing for the rest of your life.” The newspaper reports a Dr Peter Warr of the Institute of Work Psychology at Sheffield University who explains that people like working—it’s natural, for humans to want to expend energy. End of human nature myth, though we fear we might hear it again between now and the coming of a sane social order.

Speaking of which, a question presents itself. How often have we heard the cynics to slavery tell us that socialism is all well and good but it will never come in their lifetimes? Why waste energy on demanding the impossible? Might we have spotted one or two of these hard-headed realists standing in line at the lottery counter, hard-earned fiver clutched in sweaty palm, waiting for their chance to achieve the almost impossible? Given a choice between a massive old fraud of an avaricious fantasy and a serious bid for the people of the earth to take it themselves into their own hands which would you bet on?

Steve Coleman

Is David Icke serious? (1995)

Book Review from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is common—and polite—to describe David Icke’s views as being somewhat ‘eccentric’; a more honest way of describing them would be ‘absolute nonsense’.

Most people will regard David Icke as a nutter, an utter nutter in fact. Which is not surprising since in his talks and books he puts forward a fantastic proposition: that the planet Earth is in the grip of hostile extraterrestrials who are behind a group of humans, “the Global Elite”, plotting to establish a world government under which we would all have microchips implanted in us linked to a central computer; since these extraterrestrials feed off our negative feelings our only hope lies in changing ourselves through substituting Love for hatred, fear and guilt. It’s a peculiar combination of 1960s’ hippyism and far-right conspiracy theories.

Icke is not the only person to put forward such views but, as a former TV sports presenter and Green Party national speaker, he has been able to obtain a much wider hearing for them than they would otherwise get. Since Icke presents them as being literally true they are open to refutation—or confirmation—by the same standards as any other claim about what happens in the world of human experience.

Mind and Matter

Icke’s basic philosophical position is that mind has priority over matter and that in fact matter was created by a mind. As he puts it in his latest book And the Truth Shall Set You Free:

“Creation is the expression of one infinite mind and all life forms are aspects of that one mind what many people call God. We are all God, if you wish to use that term. At the heart of this mind is a consciousness I see as a blinding light— the Source Consciousness from which all has been brought into existence ” (p. xiv).

We don’t now how the universe came into being or indeed that it did “come into being” (it might always have been there), but what we do know about it is that forms of matter able to think arose at a later time than non-thinking matter and non-living (i.e. non-self-reproducing) matter generally, and in fact evolved out of it. So in this sense it is matter that has priority over mind—or rather, since mind is a form of matter, that non-thinking matter has priority over thinking matter—and not vice versa.

But we don’t need to pursue this point further since Icke’s brand of philosophical idealism does not deny that an external world of physical reality exists. It is a theory of how this world came into existence and accepts that it exists independently of our minds.

Icke also puts forward a theory of the nature of the self-conscious mind that humans have:

“Contrary to what medical science is obsessed with telling us, the physical body is not the whole human being. It is a fantastic physical shell through which the eternal us experiences this physical world. There is far more to us than a body . . . Our mental, emotional, and spiritual selves are a series of magnetic energy fields interacting with each other via vortices of energy known by the Hindu and Sanskrit word, ‘chakra’, which means wheel of light. These vortices are spirals of energy which intersect all levels of our being and pass energies between them . . . We are continually absorbing magnetic energy from the cosmos, mostly through the ‘base’ chakraat the base of the spine. After this life-force has passed through our levels of being and we have taken from it what we need, we broadcast our energy through the chakras back to the cosmos and the world around us ” (pp viii-ix).

Despite Icke’s basic philosophical idealism this is a materialist theory of the self-conscious mind since it posits that it has a physical existence. It is a claim that humans are a series of electromagnetic fields and that our bodies are receivers and transmitters of electromagnetic radiation. As it is a materialist theory it can be tested against the facts established so far about the nature of the human body and of electromagnetic radiation to see whether or not it is valid.

Energy and our bodies

The human body is indeed an absorber and transmitter of energy, including some radiation energy. Most of the energy we consume, however, is chemical energy, in the form of food which our bodies convert into, mainly, mechanical energy (to enable us to work and to keep our internal organs functioning) and heat energy (to maintain our body temperature) but also some electrical energy. The electromagnetic energy we absorb is mainly through heat and light but also some ultra-violet, X- and gamma rays, and cosmic rays (which normally don’t do us any good).

So Icke is right to the extent that our bodies do act as receivers of electromagnetic radiation, particularly light, but this is not done via the base of the spine (the Sun may shine in—and out—of Icke’s backside but most people absorb light through their eyes). Heat is another form of electromagnetic radiant energy and some will indeed be absorbed via the base of the spine but equally by the rest of the external surface of the body.

It is also the case that our bodies transmit radiation energy, overwhelmingly as heat but also as some electrical activity (such as that of our brains as measured by an encephalograph) and that to do this the body has to create and maintain magnetic fields.

It may well turn out that our “mental, emotional, and spiritual selves” are actually forms of radiant energy, as Icke claims. Or it may be that they are a form of chemical and mechanical energy that is generated by electrical and radiation energy or a combination of all four forms of energy. We don’t yet know. Icke, however, makes the additional claims that the electromagnetic fields which he believes our selves to be composed of could exist in the absence of our bodies.

This is basically a claim that an electromagnetic field can exist in the absence of atoms, molecules and subatomic particles. There is no evidence at all for this since, from what we know about magnetic fields, they can only be produced by particular movements of these forms of matter.

Changing frequency

To tell the truth Icke doesn’t really know all that much about what he calls “magnetic energy” since he writes of something that “it is like two magnets attracting each other” (p. 453) and that “under the law of like attracts like, this magnetic energy field . . . will attract to it compatible energy fields” (p. x). Actually, the whole theory of magnetism and electricity is based on like repelling like. He should try putting two magnets together and see what happens.

Despite his use of scientific terms such as magnetic fields, wavelengths and frequencies, Icke seems remarkably ignorant of what would be involved in for instance increasing the frequency of electromagnetic radiation. There are various different kinds of radiation energy and these are distinguished not only by their effects but also by their wavelengths and the time within which a wavelength is completed (their frequency). Basically, the shorter the wavelength the higher can be the frequency. But if you go on changing the wavelength and frequency you eventually change the nature of the radiation, from radio waves at the bottom with the longest wavelengths and the lowest frequencies through heat and light waves and on to ultra-violet and X-rays and beyond.

Icke claims that humans can voluntarily increase the frequencies of the electromagnetic radiation our bodies generate. In fact his whole theory of the future fate of the world depends on this (according to him this is what the power of Love will enable us to do, so defeating the evil extraterrestrials and their henchmen who’ve got us in their grip).

Suppose for the moment that this were true—and that we could voluntarily move the atoms and particles in the matter that makes up our bodies in such a way as to increase the frequency of the radiation our bodies emit—what would be the effect? The main electromagnetic radiation we emit is heat. If we increased the frequency the first thing that would happen is that we would overheat and eventually burn up. After that, had our bodies not been destroyed, we would begin to emit light. Then we would become radioactive, in short, we would destroy our bodies. It is fortunate, then, that we cannot in fact change the frequency/wavelength of what electromagnetic radiation we do emit.

Not that Icke is particularly concerned that increasing the frequency of the radiation we emit would destroy our bodies since he believes that:

“at the moment we call death, our mind-emotion-spirit, everything that is the thinking, feeling us, withdraws from the body, the ‘genetic space suit’ as I call it. The eternal spirit moves on to another wavelength of reality, another ‘world’, to continue its evolution ” (p. ix).

But, on his theory of the nature of our ”mind-emotion-spirit” (“a person is a series of magnetic fields”), this cannot be. This is because without matter to be agitated an electromagnetic field cannot exist. Despite his attack on the science “which claims there is no afterlife of any kind and when this physical life is over, the lights go out forever” (p. 449) this is a corollary of the particular (materialist) theory of the nature of mind and consciousness that he has chosen to espouse. The body ceasing to exist or to function is precisely like turning out the light since switching off the current terminates the electromagnetic field on which the light depends.

We don’t yet know the exact physical nature of the human mind and consciousness but we do know that it can’t exist in the absence of a body that functions. This is our only life and only world. Which is why it is so important to concentrate all our efforts on working for a better world for humans to live in, instead of waiting for the Millennium, the Second Coming, the Age of Aquarius, the Appearance of the Maitreya or whatever.

Adam Buick

Letter: Still Trying to Ban the Bomb (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the November 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Still Trying to Ban the Bomb

Dear Editors,

We desperately need your help to stop further nuclear testing in the South Pacific by France which has been condemned world-wide, but with no effect. Economic pressure is the only way to persuade France to change its mind.

Please boycott all French products and don't go to France on holiday and ask your friends and colleagues to do the same. Fax your protest to President Chirac (Fax no. 00 33 I 47 42 24 65) informing him that you are boycotting French products and will continue to do so indefinitely if France continues with further tests. (These will be far more powerful than the first one!)

As Britain is one of France's main trading partners your action will make a difference and any pressure you can put on the Government will certainly help. 

Zerina Tata, 

Wembley, Middlesex

Reply:

While we are opposed to all wars and to all testing of nuclear weapons (which add to the level of radioactivity in the world) we do not engage in single-issue campaigns. Instead, we concentrate on working to achieve a world of common ownership and democratic control in which wars and armaments and armies—and nuclear tests—won't exist.

As long as capitalism and its drive for profits exists, then so will states to further the interests of the various national groups of capitalists. And states, in the jockeying for position with other states, must be armed with the most up-to-date and destructive weapons they can afford. These include weapons of mass-destruction such as nuclear weapons. This is why it is the case that as long as capitalism continues so will nuclear weapons and their testing from time-to-time. Protests and boycotts can’t stop this. The only solution is to get rid of global capitalism and replace it with world socialism.

Editors.