What the heck is Cultural Marxism? (2024)

Wojak Karl Marx

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

You may have seen it on a clumsy wojak speech bubble via a Facebook group or on Twitter, more than likely in a 4chan meme, but the buzz phrase ‘Cultural Marxism’ has entered the political lexicon. A term rooted in the theoretical work of the Frankfurt School, which sought to apply Marxist theory to culture, it has also been appropriated to denote a sinister conspiracy theory. That is to say, it initially referred to Marxist critiques of culture but has been adopted by some right-wing and far-right groups to describe perceived threats from progressive social reforms. Members of the Jewish community and anti-racist groups hold that using this term perpetuated antisemitic conspiracy theories.

In 2019 the Guardian, referring to Suella Braverman, reported ‘Tory MP Criticized for Using Antisemitic Term “Cultural Marxism”.’ Other Tory MPs have been criticised for this including the Croydon South MP and multi-millionaire landlord Chris Philp (tinyurl.com/skkrr33e). Somehow he retained his seat in this constituency that has large parts among the country’s lowest twenty percent deprived areas.

This portrayal of Marxism is a misrepresentation that conflates a broad and complex set of ideas into a monolithic threat. As a party with a strong basis in Marx’s actual writings, we can easily dismiss this definition as not only inherently incorrect but also because the term serves not as analysis but as a dog whistle for any type of racist, misogynist or bigoted behaviour.

In politics, a dog whistle is the use of coded or suggestive language in political messaging to garner support from a particular group without provoking opposition or for avoidance of true understanding. Much like ‘woke mind virus’ and ‘social justice warrior’, what ‘Cultural Marxism’ means isn’t as important as who it is being used against and who’s listening.

Cultural Marxism 1.0

‘Cultural Marxism’ initially referred to the work of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist theorists established in the 20th century, intellectuals like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, who aimed to expand on Marx’s work by applying Marxism to cultural and social phenomena. The goal was to understand why capitalist societies had not yet collapsed despite the inherent contradictions that Marx had drawn attention to.

The Frankfurt School theorists argued that culture, ideology, and mass media play significant roles in maintaining the status quo by shaping public consciousness and discouraging revolutionary thought. They explored concepts such as the ‘culture industry,’ which describes how popular culture is mass produced to reinforce consumerism and passive acceptance of the capitalist system. These ideas were not about destroying ‘First World culture’ but about critiquing how cultural forms are manipulated to maintain the capitalist dominance.

Gramsci contributed to this school of thought with his concept of ‘cultural hegemony’. He posited that the capitalist class maintains control not just through force or economic power, but by dominating cultural norms and values, peddling the capitalist worldview as common sense. This notion emphasized the need for a counter-hegemonic culture to challenge and replace the dominant capitalist ideology with socialist ideas.

Appropriation and distortion by the far-right

In the cold dead claws of the alt-right, Cultural Marxism loses its meaning as a critical theory and is presented as a pejorative term engineered to invoke the conspiracy theory that Marxists are covertly campaigning to subvert ‘White’ culture by accepting the value of equality between race, genders and sexuality. The distorted view accuses these socially progressive changes as part of a coordinated effort to destroy ‘White’ culture. Popping another red pill and through fash-tainted glasses, this conspiracy theory goes on that Cultural Marxists are waging a war against traditional and Christian values to weaken the West from within. This reframing is a gift to the alt-right fash, reformed to paint itself as the victim of a red terror and saviour of Western civilization against a perceived cultural invasion.

The alt-rights use of ‘Cultural Marxism’ as a catch-all term for everything it opposes — feminist, multiculturalist, LGBTQ+, atheists, even the vegans — serves to rally the right and reactionaries against imaginary bogeymen (but usually minorities) and anyone really. This approach allows them to cosplay as the last line of defence against an existential cultural threat. As Slavoj Žižek noted in The Sublime Object of Ideology, ‘The more we discuss the impact of political correctness, the more we lose sight of the actual economic struggles’. This diversion helps the alt-right avoid engaging with tangible issues of capitalist exploitation and economic hardship and racial inequality. Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism added ‘The conspiracy theory of “Cultural Marxism” is an attempt to reduce complex social phenomena into simplistic and unfounded narratives.’

Let’s make sense of the frothing-at-the-mouth rhetoric.

From a socialist perspective the appropriation of Cultural Marxism is a deliberate calculated distraction from hardships and truths facing workers. By focusing on cultural battles it serves the interests of the ruling class by preventing the working class from recognizing its own power. Meanwhile, the capitalist class continues to exploit labour, accumulate wealth, and consolidate power, largely unchallenged by a fragmented and tired populace.

Rosa Luxemburg argued that ‘the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening’. Thus we argue that the real struggle is not over culture or identity but over who controls the wealth generated by the working class. The focus should not be on fighting imaginary cultural enemies of fictional conspiracies but on the working class organizing to liquidate the capitalist system that exploits them.

This alt-right myth is a convenient albeit dangerous tool for the ruling class to attack the working class, keeping us divided and distracted. By promoting fear of cultural change, the capitalist class can avoid accountability for the economic exploitation and inequality that capitalism perpetuates.

Who smears wins

The tactics used by the alt-right in promoting the Cultural Marxism narrative is a direct lift from the 20th century fascist propaganda tactic of scapegoating with fear-mongering. Smears and vitriol, less blood and soil, more shite and bile. Fascist states thrived on dread and fear of the external enemy — whether it be other nations, communists, a minority, or immigrants — this all served to unify their base and justify extreme political violence. By positioning themselves as defenders of traditional ‘White’ values against a supposed cultural onslaught of the unknowable hordes and heathens, they seek to rally disaffected individuals around a nationalist identity and exclusionary vision.

In The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in Europe, Paul Hanebrink, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, points out that ‘for much of the twentieth century, Europe was haunted by a threat of Judeo-Bolshevism myth’. He examines the unfounded and damaging narrative that falsely connects Judaism with Bolshevism. This myth emerged in early 20th century Europe and falsely claimed that Jewish people were behind the rise of Russian ‘communism’. The conspiracy theory was employed as a propaganda tool to justify antisemitic policies and actions, contributing to the persecution of Jewish communities and supporting authoritarian regimes. He underscores the myth’s impact on European politics and society, demonstrating how such harmful narratives can distort public perception and fuel discrimination.

Fascism relies on an us-versus-them mentality, which is why the alt-right’s use of ‘Cultural Marxism’ as a bogeyman is so effective. It allows them to present themselves as the last line of defence against a cultural apocalypse, even as they promote intolerance, exclusion, and violence. As political theorist Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, ‘The essence of totalitarianism is not merely a system of government but a state of mind that relies on fear and hate to unite and control’. The alt-right’s approach is not new; it’s a recycled form of demagoguery used to maintain control through division and fear.

This approach ultimately serves the interests of the capitalist class as by promoting cultural conflict, it enables them to continue to exploit labour and amass wealth without facing unity of resistance.

Socialism offers a world where the wealth we create together is used to meet our needs, not to enrich a privileged few. It’s about a future society where we work cooperatively, where resources are shared equitably.

Socialists have a clear-eyed understanding of the challenge we face and reject the false narratives peddled by the alt-right, other bad faith actors and their allies. It’s essential to recognize that the real struggle is not over culture but over economic power and control. By dismantling the capitalist system, we create a society where cultural diversity is celebrated and where all people have the opportunity to participate fully in shaping the world around them.

A. T.

Lenin was wrong, Marx was right (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 125 years or so since the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Socialist Standard has published numerous articles about that event and its acknowledged leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). The view those articles have taken is that what Lenin and the Bolsheviks did in 1917 and after, despite their claim to be following Marxist ideas, ran entirely counter to Marx’s advocacy of a democratically run, marketless, socialist society based on production for use not profit and on the idea of from each according to ability to each according to need. Instead, Lenin set up a tyrannical one-party regime run by and in the interests of a small group of bureaucrats with the market mechanism still operating even if commanded by the state, amounting to a form of capitalism – state capitalism. Furthermore Lenin’s – and then Stalin’s – Russia failed Marx’s ‘test’ for socialism (or communism – he used the two words synonymously), which was that such a society had to – could only – arise from advanced capitalism, not from what existed in Russia in the early 20th century, ie, an economically underdeveloped, largely agricultural society in which capitalism had barely begun to take hold. It could not possibly ‘jump’ the capitalist stage and somehow go straight to socialism – something in fact that Lenin, from his speeches and writings, showed he knew, even if this did not stop him from claiming to follow Marx and to have the aim of establishing socialism.

Marxism-Leninism?

One of the inevitable outcomes of such claims by Lenin has been that, over the period since these events, the cry has gone up – and continues to from many ill-informed quarters – that Marxism (or socialism) has been tried and failed. Not only, so the story goes, did it preside over unbridled violence and brutality, starvation and other unimaginable horror in the years of ‘war communism’ (1918 to 1922) and show itself to be an entirely undemocratic authoritarian form of society for decades after that. It also, though Lenin himself died in 1924, sowed the seeds for a dictator – Stalin – to take absolute power and establish an authoritarian tyranny in which people were arrested, deported and slaughtered in their thousands at the arbitrary whim of an all-powerful leader.

There have of course also been others – not just writers in the Socialist Standard – who have studied the ideas and events in question closely, seen through these arguments and concluded that the Bolshevik takeover under Lenin and what happened later in the Soviet Union can in no reasonable sense be seen as Marxism or socialism in action. A recent example worth citing is the 2021 book by Steve Paxton, Unlearning Marx. Why the Soviet Failure was a Triumph for Marx, which, by careful analysis of the social and economic situation of Russia in the period leading up to 1917, illustrates ‘the failure of capitalist production to penetrate the lives of the mass of ordinary Russian producers’ and the inevitably premature nature of the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks ‘in the name of the proletariat’ (June 2022 Standard review). The writer’s conclusion is that, since ‘Marx specifically predicted that projects like the Soviet Union would fail’, such an outcome does not in any way mean that ‘socialism has been tried and found wanting’. Another interesting example arises from the 2005 discussion on Marx on the BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time. The presenter, Melvyn Bragg, urged the three participants, all well known as practitioners of political ideas and philosophy though not necessarily as socialists or adherents to Marxist ideas (A.C. Grayling, Gareth Stedman Jones and Francis Wheen), to confirm the ‘received’ wisdom that Lenin’s imposition of revolution from the top down (as well as that of later dictators such as Mao, Pol Pot, etc.) was a reflection of Marx’s ideas. But all three disagreed vehemently. One stated that Marx had become a ‘magical name’ that people liked to quote but whose ideas had been distorted by figures such as Lenin, who in fact had ‘turned Marx on his head’. Another said that others ‘took, adapted and twisted him’. The third participant was even more robust in stating that what happened in Russia (and later elsewhere) ‘vindicated Marx’s point’, ie, that revolution imposed from above by ‘heroes on horseback’ inevitably ‘leads to a police state’ and so was ‘a negation of everything he [Marx] stood for and argued for’. In this light the association implicit in the claim to be ‘Marxist-Leninist’ often made by those on the left can be seen as a stark contradiction in terms. This also receives confirmation from parts of Lenin’s own speeches and writings of 1921-22, in which, with Russia in a piteous state after the mass violence, destruction and brutality of its civil war, he admitted defeat by stating ‘our attempt to implement socialism here and now has failed’ and talked about the need ‘to fall back on state capitalism in many economic spheres’.

Lenin in context

Of course, there are those who find value and relevance in Marx’s ideas but are not necessarily averse to their ‘adaptation’ by later political figures such as Lenin who claim Marxist inspiration. An example of this is to be found in the recent book by the American left-wing academic, Paul Le Blanc (Lenin, Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. Pluto Press, 2023). The key to the association Le Blanc is prepared to make between Lenin and Marx is to be found in the title: ‘Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution’. Implicit in this is the idea, often repeated in the pages of an invigoratingly written book that sweeps us informatively through the whole of Lenin’s personal and political life, that the Bolshevik leader, while following in Marx’s footsteps, had to adapt and respond to the circumstances he and Russia found themselves in at the time, to be ‘flexible’ (a frequently used word). Hence Lenin’s work becomes a kind of Marxism in action, ‘open, critical-minded’, adapted to ‘a particular historical situation’ and conditioned by ‘interactions with others’. In support of this, the author quotes a reference by Lenin to the words of Marx and Engels that ‘our theory is not a dogma but a guide to action’. So, according to Le Blanc, Lenin, while sharing and aiming for Marx’s fundamental goal of a free, classless, stateless society, found himself having to deal with ‘living realities and actual struggles, not abstract revolutionary “correctness”’. In this light, therefore, according to the author, far from the ‘architect of totalitarianism’ Lenin is often presented as by conservative commentators, he was rather a leader ready to face the twists and turns of a reality that was ‘complex, ever-changing and contradictory’ and to take action accordingly – the justification for which Lenin himself framed as the application of ‘revolutionary dialectics’.

Yet Le Blanc is not always or unequivocally ready to accept such justification, and it would be unfair to characterise his study as some kind of uncritical rehabilitation of Lenin. It is, however, difficult not to sense a ‘benefit of the doubt’ tendency and this throws up a number of seeming contradictions in the way Lenin’s thought and actions are presented – the author seeming on occasion to want it both (or all) ways. So, while keen to present Lenin as a Marxist in action striving for socialism, he also states (realistically as pointed to by the evidence) that Lenin saw ‘the upcoming revolution’ as ‘not a transition to socialism, but a transition to a capitalist social and political order’. Again he refers to Lenin’s understanding of nationalism as a ‘secular faith’ and ‘the great rival of socialism’, while at the same time pointing to a view he expressed that ‘there were different forms of nationalism – some worthy of support, others worthy of denunciation’. He refers with brutal frankness to the ‘emergency measures’ taken by Lenin’s ‘new Communist regime’ in the period of Russia’s civil war (‘one-party dictatorship’, ‘Red Terror’, ‘persecution of party dissidents’) and the ‘repressive bureaucratic dictatorship’ that came after, yet this does not prevent him from describing the early years of the ‘Communist International’ which Lenin was closely associated with as demonstrating ‘heroic and impressive qualities, crackling with insights’.

Even-handed?

All this could of course simply be regarded as a form of ‘even-handedness’ on the part of the author, and so entirely positive. But it could also perhaps be understood by reference to the phenomenon of ‘cognitive dissonance’ which Le Blanc himself spends a paragraph explaining. Under this dynamic, confronted with evidence that conflicts with our well-established worldview, we experience an uncomfortable mental conflict which tends to make us dismiss that evidence and simply carry on as before. Examples he gives of this are people currently denying ‘the documented reality of climate change’ and others ‘not wanting to acknowledge the horrific realities associated with the Stalin regime’. So, in the case of this author’s take on Lenin, while himself presenting evidence of the ‘horrific realities’ he presided over and what most people would regard as outright distortions (not just ‘adaptations’) of Marx, we have an ongoing attachment to the man, the Bolshevik takeover and the overall claim that Lenin’s ideas seem more relevant than ever now.

Of course, even if the Socialist Party will see this as a serious blind spot in the author’s analysis of the historical struggle for a socialist society from Marx onwards, there is much in his book that socialists would accept and agree with. We would not, for example, want to challenge the author’s brilliantly incisive description of modern capitalism (‘a voracious market economy designed to enrich already immensely wealthy elites … intimately connected with environmental destruction engulfing our world’) or his clear characterisation of class society in capitalism ‘(the working class is those who make a living (get enough money to buy basic necessities and perhaps some luxuries) by selling their ability to work (their labor-power) to an employer. Out of the labor-power, the employer squeezes actual labor in order to create the wealth that is partly given to the workers (usually as little as possible), with the rest of this labor-created wealth going to the employer)’. On the other hand, we would see as misguided various of the ‘remedies’ for this often heard on the Leninist or Trotskyist Left which the author seems to quote with approval, for example the need for workers to have the correct ‘leadership’ for a new society to be established and ‘experiences of struggle that will convince working people of the inevitability of revolution and the significance of communism’. We would also challenge that other commonly held left-wing perspective found in this book of ‘Lenin good, Stalin bad’ (ie, that there was no continuity between the two), though we would heartily agree with one commentator’s view noted here that ‘Stalinism was as different from socialism as the hippopotamus from the giraffe’.

Right or wrong?

So was Lenin a Marxist (or a socialist)? Perhaps in the end what Paul Le Blanc’s eminently readable book can be taken as saying is that he would have liked to be and considered himself one but that circumstances prevented it. But wasn’t that what, if you were a Marxist, you should have known was bound to happen, since Marx saw socialism as arising from advanced capitalist development not from the chronically underdeveloped society that was early twentieth century Russia?

Howard Moss

Should ‘we’ consume less? (2024)

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his recently published book Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth, Kohei Saito contends that:

‘Almost every one of us living in a developed country belongs to the world’s richest 20 percent’ and that our exploitative ‘imperial mode of living’ allows us enjoy an ‘extravagant lifestyle’ at the expense of workers in the Global South – an echo of the discredited Leninist theory of the ‘labour aristocracy’.

Moreover, suggests Saito, it is ‘we’ who are ‘coddled by the invisibility of our lifestyle’s costs’ who inflict far more damage on the environment than do they – our fellow workers on the other side of the planet. ‘We’ will ‘not be able to truly combat climate change if we all fail to participate, as directly interested parties, in the radical transformation of the Imperial Mode of Living’. That means disengaging, starting now under capitalism, from consumer culture ‘while also reducing the volume of everything we consume’. At the end of the day there seems to be little here to distinguish Saito from what the de-growth eco-pessimists have to say, apart from his invocation of ‘communism’.

Matt Huber and Leigh Phillips make a valid point in their review of Saito’s book:

"Saito also sees this primarily not as a battle between classes of workers and capitalists, but global regions: “the injustice of socially vulnerable people in the Global South countries bearing the brunt of climate change although the carbon dioxide was emitted, for the most part, by the Global North, which brought on this disaster.”

When it comes to who in the Global North is responsible, Saito is more liable to point at himself and other workers than capital: “Our rich lifestyles would be impossible without the plundered natural resources and exploited labor power of the Global South”’ (Jacobin, 9 March 2024,).

Was Marx productivist?

Saito also claims that, as far as Marx was concerned, there was an ‘epistemological break’ in the latter´s writings that began sometimes during the 1860s.

This epistemological break has been characterised as representing a move away from a ‘“linear, progressive view” of history, marked by “productivism” and “Eurocentrism”, and towards a new vision of communism’. Saito does at least accept that ‘communism’ means a moneyless, wageless, classless and stateless alternative to capitalism which is based on the twin principles of free access to socially produced wealth and voluntaristic labour as the basis of wealth production.

In short Marx, according to Saito, abandoned historical materialism and the acceptance of capitalist technological progress in favour of ‘de-growth communism’ in which the needs of the population would be catered for within clear limits imposed by nature itself.

Marx did indeed acknowledge the necessity and importance of capitalist technological progress in preparing the ground for a future communist society, but his standpoint cannot plausibly be called a ‘productivist’ one. There are many passages in the early writings of both Marx and Engels that suggest a deep concern with the environmental impact of economic growth and are hardly compatible with the kind of Promethean or productivist outlook sometimes attributed to them. Their assessment of capitalist technological advancement as being ‘progressive’ was contingent inasmuch as it suggests there will come a point when it could no longer be characterised as such. At this point it would become redundant or even reactionary as a mode of production.

Limits to lifestyle changes

You cannot expect capitalism to gradually disappear through the incremental accumulation of minor adjustments to the way we live and do things. The whole system is fundamentally held together and underpinned by the brute fact of minority ownership and control of the means of wealth production and the consequent alienation of the great majority from these means. It is only when the latter take matters in hand and seek to democratically bring about fundamental change from the bottom up that capitalism will finally disappear.

We cannot hope to bring about the fundamental change required through mere lifestyle changes within the framework of existing capitalist society. This is not meant to discourage individuals from wanting to make such changes. These could conceivably help even if only in symbolic, more than practical, terms. But the basic problem we face as a society is not really the result of individuals somehow having made the wrong lifestyle choice.

Saito is not entirely wrong, however. ‘Lifestyle choices’ matter up to a point insofar as they are bound up with the question of social values. After all, a working class, still receptive or responsive to the values that underpin a capitalist consumer ideology, would surely not yet be ready to undertake the transformation of society itself. Their readiness to do that surely presupposes a transformed worldview on their part. In other words, a shift in values.

It is difficult to see how a strategy of, today within capitalism, ‘reducing the volume of everything we consume’ is going to succeed. Reducing consumption means reducing the market demand for the good in question. Normally, the response of businesses in these circumstances would be to reduce the price of this good. In other words, to reboot or stimulate market demand.

You as one individual might indeed have the strength of will and moral resolve to resist the lure of a bargain offer but there is nothing to say that your neighbour will follow suit. This is the problem with the system; it has the uncanny knack of being able to pick us off one by one so long as we confine our thinking to its conceptual parameters.

We cannot buck the market while we live in a market economy. It is this that sets limits on what we can achieve by way of lifestyle changes. Only by eliminating capitalism will we be in a position to adapt how we produce and consume in ways that suit ourselves and our long-term future on this planet.

Robin Cox

Missing revolution (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

If We Burn. The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. By Vincent Bevins. Wildfire, 2023. 336pp.

The years 2010 to 2020 saw a possible record number of protest movements over a single decade in different parts of the globe. In many places change of one kind or another was being sought. This book chronicles and seeks to make sense of many of the movements in that ‘mass protest decade’. These include protests that took place in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ countries (Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen), in Latin America (Brazil, Chile), in Hong Kong, South Korea, Ukraine and Turkey, and also, if fleetingly, in Algeria, Bolivia, Syria and Libya as well as via the Occupy Wall Street movement. What is found by the author as a common feature of almost all of them is that they ‘failed’, in the sense that the activists didn’t get what they wanted and in some instances (eg, Egypt, Brazil, Hong Kong) unleashed outcomes that were worse than what existed before. The author’s detailed knowledge of these events arises from his actually being present on the ground in some countries in his role as a foreign journalist for an American newspaper (The Los Angeles Times) but also of multiple personal interviews conducted later in many countries with key protagonists of the happenings in question. This result is a wickedly intricate account that takes us fascinatingly close to the lived experience of those directly involved.

In searching for answers to the failures he catalogues, the factors the author tends to see as most important are faulty methods of organisations and too much ‘horizontalism’ (ie, lack of hierarchical leadership). But, despite the grasp he has of the social and historical background of the territories in question, both through research and personal experience, and his presence on the ground in some of them, this book suffers from a failure on the part of the author to get to the bottom of the underlying nature of and reasons for these protests. He seems determined to frame them as attempts at fundamental social change, even revolution, on the part of those involved, yet if examined closely, a better explanation for the protests and the street demonstrations is a far less radical one. They are largely attempts by people feeling oppressed, disadvantaged or outraged by one aspect or another of how their society is run to try and push those who govern into ways of managing the system they live under more benignly, more ‘fairly’. But key is the reality that they are looking for that system – capitalism – to be reformed, not overthrown.

Throughout the history of capitalism, in different parts of the world, such protests seeking piecemeal changes have come and gone and will continue to do so, sometimes achieving small improvements but, inevitably, failing to change the basic nature of the system we live under. Their precise targets vary, but what unites them is that they involve tinkering at the edges of the ongoing problems and crises that capitalism throws up. Above all, they do not stem from a consciousness that the buying and selling system needs to be replaced by a different one of voluntary cooperation and free access to all goods and services – which we would call socialism. So the decade of false dawns the author delves into here is only actually part of a century or more of similar campaigns aimed at trying to make capitalism work in ways that run counter to its needs and its nature.

A further reservation this reviewer would have is the author’s ‘sloppy’ use of the words ‘socialism’ and ‘socialist’, employed as a kind of catch-all to mean either some form of state capitalism or any kind of protest or revolt looking to reform certain aspects of capitalism — to make the lives of workers, the majority class, more liveable within it. So we are told, for example that: the Students for a Democratic Society movement in the US in the 1960s ‘advocated for a more socialist economy’; the fall of the Soviet union led to ‘the rapid collapse of allied socialist states’; Tunisia had taken on ‘elements of Nasser’s socialist model’ and was not the same since ‘the end of Arab Socialism’; and in Hong Kong ‘the movement contained elements that … defended aspects of the old socialist system’.

Despite this, there are moments in this book where the author does show a clear understanding of the system we are up against, one whose purpose, in his own words, is ‘to make all the world’s states porous to international capital and open up all the planet’s resources for extraction and commodification’. And he does also come close to glimpsing the kind of world marketless, leaderless society that would transcend the kinds of problems, constantly and inevitably thrown up by capitalism, that the protests examined here focus on. That glimpse can be found, for example, when he talks about ‘constructing a movement that can stand the test of time, in addition to remaining democratic and accountable’ and ‘a world when artificial distinctions and narrowly self-interested activities melt away’ and … ‘our society truly is participatory’.

Howard Moss

Cooking the Books: The ‘overriding financial objective’ (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Pay ruling “threatens Next stores”’ read a headline in the Times (20 September), reporting on an employment tribunal ruling that women workers in the company’s shops should have been paid the same as men working in its warehouses. Next’s chief executive, Lord Wolfson (the son of the founder), was quoted as saying:

‘Whether we open or close stores will depend on the individual store’s profitability. So you would never expect a retailer to open a store that wasn’t planned to make a profit.’

Knowing how capitalism works, we certainly wouldn’t expect that. In fact, we wouldn’t expect a capitalist enterprise like Next to do anything if it didn’t plan to make a profit from it. As Next put it in this year’s half-yearly report to shareholders:

‘The overriding financial objective of the Group remains the same — the delivery of long term, sustainable growth in Earnings Per Share’ (tinyurl.com/44zkry3h).

In other words, to provide shareholders with a growth in the value of their shareholding. ‘Earnings Per Share’ (EPS) is, basically, profits per share, a company’s after-tax profits divided by the number of its shares. To increase this is the ‘overriding financial objective’ not just of Next but of all companies.

A company’s profit is typically the difference between what it receives from sales less what it costs to run the business. In Next’s case, in the first half of this year its sales (and other) revenue was £2,860m and its costs £2,408m, resulting in a before-tax profit of £452m, which is about 16 percent. This is its ‘profit margin’. It means that for every £ of what Next sells they pocket 16p as profit, the rest going to cover their costs (including wages). After-tax income was £341m, the amount used to calculate EPS.

A company increases the value of its shares by increasing its profits. One way this can be done is by reducing the costs of running the business. This is why Next is so dissatisfied with the legal ruling on equal pay; implementing it will increase their costs and so reduce their profits.

Another way is to increase revenue from sales. As companies don’t normally have control over the prices they charge — they are limited by competition to what the market will bear — the main way to do this is to sell more, to ‘grow’. But the aim is not simply to increase revenue. It is, as Next puts in their report, referring to new areas for growth, ‘to maximise profitable growth’ (their emphasis). The increase in sales must outmatch the cost of bringing this about.

However, not all the profits a company makes are re-invested in growing the business. As Next says in its report:

‘Our established businesses generate more cash than we are able to profitably invest in the Group, so managing our capital to ensure high returns, and returning cash that cannot be profitably invested to shareholders, remains a central discipline of the Group.’

In Next’s case, they invest some of this surplus cash in other companies, the income from which adds to their overall profits. Another part is used to buy back some of its shares which besides distributing money to some shareholders also increases EPS (profit per share) by reducing the number of shares in issue, reducing their supply and so other things being equal pushing up the price. Yet another part is paid to shareholders as dividends. Other companies have a different mix. Some pay no dividends and re-invest all their profits in profitable growth, from which shareholders benefit through the value of their shares going up.

Whatever a company decides to do, the aim is maximise the financial benefit to shareholders. This reflects the logic of capitalism of increasing the value of invested capital (though shareholder capitalism is not the only possible framework for this).

Material World: Cosmetic tourism (2024)

The Material World Column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent Daily Mirror headline ran ‘Mum of five dies after butt-lift treatment’. It explained how Alice Delsie Preet Webb failed to recover from an operation by an unregistered practitioner which involved injecting hyaluronic acid and dermal fillers into the backside (a so-called ‘Brazilian butt-lift’). This apparently was the first time anyone in the UK had died from this procedure. But, as confirmed in a recent article about ‘cosmetic tourism’ in the Times by Sarah Ditum, such outcomes are far more common when people (largely women) decide to take a holiday abroad and at the same time have cheap surgery done on various parts of their body they consider need improvement. She referred to a website which asks the question: ‘Why not take full advantage of the charming beaches and sunshine while sparing some time for dental treatment?’

The trouble is that it sometimes goes wrong and people end up with wonky teeth, a lopsided smile, uneven size breasts, tummy folds rather than tucks, and even worse. In fact, since 2019, as the article tells us, ‘at least 28 British medical tourists have died following treatment in Turkey’. And that’s not counting the much larger number who return home with complications which they then need to try and get fixed by the NHS. Of course, many of the thousands who do this each year are lucky and for them it works out as they would want. But it’s definitely a gamble and, according to the article, the reason women are prepared to take that gamble is that they want to be, as the article puts it ‘the best version of themselves’ and not ‘substandard’. And, given the prohibitive cost of such surgery in the UK by regulated medical professionals, they see no alternative but to seek it out more cheaply in less regulated countries – Thailand, Mexico, Slovakia or – the most common destination – Turkey.

Society of the spectacle

But why is it that people want to look different from the way they are in reality? In the late 1960s the French writer Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle, which presented the idea that ‘all that once was directly lived has become mere representation’. His point was that, because of the atomised and consumerist nature of capitalist society, an obsession with outward appearance (ie ‘the spectacle’) had taken the place of the authentic reality of social life and relationships. People’s lives were mediated by images of perfection which they were made to feel they had to live up to. This led them to focus on the superficial and become alienated from their fellow humans and from socially beneficial interaction.

Though this was theorised more than 50 years ago, it is surely more relevant than ever today. While it is true that, in any kind of society, people may find certain aspects of their physical being less than satisfactory, they are more likely to focus on that if other aspects of their life fail to offer them satisfaction and the ability to fulfil their natural talents and capacities.

This is precisely the case in modern capitalism where the vast majority of us are obliged to expend most of our energies working for an employer in activities we are unlikely to have chosen freely but are dictated by the needs of the market on the employer’s side and the need to keep the wolf from the door on the worker’s side. And this work, including the conditions in which it is carried out, is unlikely to represent any kind of real fulfilment of the individual’s personal needs or aptitudes. So is it any wonder if, outside working hours, workers’ minds are occupied with superficialities – sporting spectacles, stars of entertainment, the lives of royalty and other ‘celebs’, and also perceived flaws in their own physical appearance?

Life blood

Capitalism’s need to constantly find ways of supplying its life blood – profit – means that it can only seek to relentlessly sell things, to provide the means for workers to cultivate and spend money on those superficialities. So it’s no surprise that, for example, music concerts starring people’s ‘idols’ are promoted with ticket prices as high as they are likely to be able to scrape together money or credit for. Nor is it any surprise that, held back as they are from fulfilling their real talents or needs by lives dominated by wage and salary work, the feelings of powerlessness and inferiority this engenders make them easy prey to the cult, to the idol, to the hero, to the conspiracy theory, and to the cheap cosmetic procedures promised by potentially dubious practitioners.

In the society of the ‘quick buck’ we live in, tainted as it is by money and the profit system, should we therefore be surprised if the products we are offered for purchase do not serve the purpose they claim to but upset our expectations, and even – in the case of botched cosmetic procedures – make our life even more uncomfortable than we perceived it as in the first place? It’s time we got rid of the false value system that puts appearance before substance, that puts ‘looking good’ over being truly human.

Howard Moss

How we live and how we might live - Part 3 (2024)

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

In his London talk in November 1884 William Morris admonished his hearers that if they wished to be honest, they would ‘call competition by its shorter name of war’. He was referring to the war that rumbles on at the very heart of capitalist society. To engage with our world, that war is something we have to track down and confront.

As noted in last month’s article, there is a growing awareness that the origin of modern crises like human-induced climate change, species loss and pollution have a single origin in the mechanics of a capitalist economy. We ask, therefore, what is capitalism? The answer we get, unfortunately, is usually an ideological one designed to obscure rather than reveal the system’s true identity. Often it is a paper-thin definition such as ‘capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production’. Dissatisfied with this, we might plunge into the tangled world of capitalist economic theory, with its abstract analyses of markets, money, scarcity, demand schedules, etc. Common descriptions of capitalism get abstract very quickly. However, we can start to address this question another way by putting some solid ground beneath our feet. We can start by asking: what is an economy? The answer, at the broadest level of generality, is that it has something to do with humans and how they relate to one another in society. So let’s start with humans.

The first thing we can say is that whatever real or outlandish claims we make about ourselves, one thing stands out: we are physical beings in a physical world. We have biological needs for food, clothing, shelter and social contact. These needs we must satisfy continually if we are to survive. Second, we don’t survive well on our own. We have always lived together in communities. Evolutionary biologists tell us that we are a social species and that we are evolved cooperators. We operate with high levels of trust and sociability. The bloke next to us on the tube train may be irritating, but we generally find ways of getting along together for our mutual convenience. This behaviour contrasts sharply with that of our nearest relative. Cram a random collection of chimpanzees into the confined space of a rush hour tube train and the result will be soaring stress levels and, ultimately, carnage. We are, in fact, hyper-cooperators. We cooperate with strangers and even with other species. Social media is bursting with videos of humans supporting each other as well as rescuing cats, elephants, dolphins, kangaroos, eagles, sloths – you name it.

Not only do we live together in communities but we also work together to create the things we need. Levels of economic dependence vary between human societies, but we have never lived by producing individually for ourselves and consuming only what we have individually produced. We have survived by dividing up tasks among ourselves which are required to produce the things we need, and then sharing out the results according to some agreed method. And that gives us a pretty good definition of an economy: an economy is the way we organise ourselves to collectively produce and distribute the things we need.

At different points in time and in different parts of the world people have organised themselves in different ways. Some of our societies have similar features to our own; others are remarkably, even bizarrely, different – so different, that if we didn’t have the published field research of anthropologists, we might have dismissed them as fantasies or as unworkable.

Employers and employees

So, what is a capitalist economy? How do we divide up tasks within it to produce and distribute what we need? Central to the organisation of capitalism is an apparently simple social relationship – one that is reflected across most of society. It’s so familiar to us that we rarely question it, yet it has enormous consequences for our lives. This is the relationship that exists between the roles of employer and employee, between those who buy labour power and those who sell it. It is the wages system. People can to a limited extent move between these roles, but the roles themselves are fixed. This is not a relationship that is central to all human societies, and in many, it does not exist at all, but its existence and its centrality are what define capitalism.

An important feature of this relationship is that employers and employees are mutually dependent. Neither can exist without the other. Eliminate one and you eliminate both. The relationship is held together through a process of exchange: labour power for money (wages). It’s a process of buying and selling. And this requires the existence in society of a system of individual ownership – private property. Like the employer/employee relationship itself, not all human societies are built on the institution of private property. Some, like those of immediate return societies, own everything in common. People who own things in common do not exchange them; they do not buy and sell.

We think of property in terms of the objects we own. But this can be misleading. Pick up and examine a mobile phone, for instance, and describe it thoroughly. It has a certain shape, colour, weight, design. It feels a certain way in the hand. It has a definite set of functions. However, no matter how carefully and minutely you examine it, you will find nothing about it that tells you it is someone’s property. Property is not a natural attribute of things; it is a social relationship between people, an agreement to behave towards certain objects in specified ways. And for those who don’t behave towards them as society demands there will be social consequences.

A capitalist society, therefore, gives us rights and powers over things that are agreed to be our property, but denies those rights and powers to others. We accept this arrangement because we have been born into a pre-existing system of property owners and we have learned its rules. Property relationships occur in several different kinds of society, but a property relationship that expresses itself centrally through the employer/employee relationship is unique to capitalism.

One major consequence of a society founded on a property relationship is that it isolates individuals, families and groups from one another and divides them into defined property units. We can think of these units as property bubbles. You live in your property bubble with the things that society agrees to treat as your property, and I live in mine. Property is transferred from one bubble to another by means of exchange. An arrangement like this creates a tension between our cooperative way of living and producing things, and our individual ownership of them. That tension manifests as competition.

The property-based employer/employee relationship is the source of most forms of competition we experience throughout our lives and occurs at many levels of society. Employees, who live by selling their labour power for a wage are forced to compete with one other for their income at job interviews. Those who have jobs often find themselves in competition with others for promotion. In the world of employment, every penny that an employer pays to their employees is a penny less for themselves and vice versa, a condition that sets up a competition for how the company’s income is shared out.

Businesses exist in their own individual property bubbles, causing them to compete with each other in the market for the money in consumer’s pockets. They lobby governments for legislation that will favour their business or their sector over that of others. Governments and businesses compete in our globalised economy for access to the world’s resources, markets, and trade routes. Governments negotiate and deploy their militaries to secure strategic advantage or forceful control over them. All this competition has its source in the fundamentals of a property-based employer/employee relationship.

Property-based competition

In his address, Morris reminded his hearers that, ‘Our present system of society is based on a state of perpetual war’, that is, on perpetual competition and perpetual conflict. When we compete over something as crucial as the means of life itself, or over a means of access to it – money – competition turns inevitably to conflict. In every kind of society, there are conflicts of interest, but the degree to which such conflicts exist and the degree to which they are resolvable depends on how extensively competition is built into a society’s structure. In capitalist economies, competition is universal. It is an objective feature of the system which gets turned ideologically into a positive value. It is taught in schools, it is often deliberately built into workplace relationships. It is a game among the wealthy and powerful that is played for high stakes. In our world, competition is impossible to eradicate without eradicating capitalism itself. Government reforms can do nothing. Even at their occasional best, they succeed only in providing temporary, partial and inadequate relief for competition’s many negative consequences. Competition and the conflict it creates are unending. Attack one problem here, and another breaks out elsewhere.

By its nature, capitalist property-based competition creates and exaggerates conflict at every level of society, and results in every degree of harm. It exists in the trivial and in the catastrophic, in the occasional awkward splitting of the cost of a restaurant meal, and in the devastation of vast mechanised warfare that rumbles on endlessly around the globe. Property-driven competition penetrates into the heart of the family. It erupts in arguments over domestic incomes; it tears family members apart over legacies. When relationships fail, it often turns acrimonious and ends up in the divorce courts. During disputes over pay and conditions the implicit competition between employer and employee breaks out into open conflict. Such conflicts can go on to have side effects which ripple out across society causing social disruption and individual tragedy as recently seen in the action taken by rail staff and junior doctors.

Capitalism is a cockpit of competing interests. It leads to clashes of all kinds. It provokes racial conflict and social ‘unrest’. It expresses itself in disinformation and propaganda wars. Competition over access to wealth and the status it brings drives people into conflict with the property system itself and leads to corruption, theft, embezzlement, fraud and many acts of violence and murder. Competing firms engage in industrial espionage and resort to strategies to put their competitors out of business and to extract money out of the pockets of workers. Governments attempting to protect or further the interests of companies within their territories introduce tariffs leading to trade wars, rising international tensions and diplomatic breakdowns. Conflicts over access to markets, resources and trade routes lead to threats and sanctions and ultimately to military actions and mass carnage.

When addressing the harm wrought by poverty and military conflict on our world we frequently point the finger of blame at surface causes such as government and business practice or at intangibles such as greed and ‘human nature’. We shy away from their real root causes which lie hidden in plain view in the operation of capitalism’s international property system. Emerging crises, such as climate change, loss of species and pollution get blamed on individuals: profit seeking capitalists, grasping politicians or bankers when, in reality, they are the inescapable consequences of capitalism’s property-based employer/employee relationship. Under present conditions, these problems are insoluble.

Next month we will look in more detail at how capitalism’s conflicted nature underlies these social ills.

Hud.

A mental state (2024)

From the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

An acquaintance recently confided that he now avoids news media, broadcast and printed. Because it is generally so depressing it is adversely affecting his mental health. A constant round of outrageous reports of depressing episodes of inhumanity.

As a long-time member of the Labour Party he is already disillusioned by the Starmer administration. The ready acceptance of gifts of substantial financial worth, while, with seemingly ill-considered haste, snatching the winter fuel allowance from many pensioners who really need it.

He is an example of the contention that though the Labour Party is not, never was and never will be, socialist, there are some with socialist ideas, however inchoate, within it. This friend came with me to hear a Socialist Party speaker in Sheffield. After the meeting he told me that he agreed with the analysis of capitalism put forward and that he was pleased to hear the case for democratic change, rather than revolution through violence too often voiced by Trotskyite and other Leninist groups.

However, he did have a major caveat, the frequently proffered defence of reform. The Tories, then the governing party, were doing increasingly dreadful things to workers and their families. It’s all very well having a principled view of socialism, but the priority is to effect change, however marginal, immediately.

There remains, for him, a strong notion that for all the failings of Labour in government, many clearly outlined by the speaker, nonetheless the welfare state in general and the NHS in particular were a triumph of socialist ideas enacted by the 1945 Attlee government.

So it is that the Labour Party continues to occupy the ‘socialist’ political ground on which even those disaffected continue to stand. The siren song of the Starmer Labour Party consists of one word, CHANGE!

Although that political vessel very quickly ran aground on the economic rocks of capitalist reality (no change there then) this particular crew member, even now, isn’t prepared to abandon ship. He is not alone.

Murderous conflicts

Then there is the Middle East, the Ukrainian attrition, and various other murderous conflicts going on. Yes, the socialist analysis of capitalism may be absolutely correct, but socialism?

A worldwide commonwealth based on the principles of production to freely meet self-defined needs in a moneyless society to which all contribute, also freely, whatever they are able? Even accepting there are frequent instances of people working together and for each other’s benefit, where is there any indication that enough human beings will ever collectively pursue such a course?

These are my friend’s questions, and why he has turned off the news. His mental health is suffering as he desperately tries to hang onto socialist notions that are constantly denied by the dystopian world as it is.

As a socialist I too at times find it difficult to square socialist principles with the evidence of human limitation I witness when I turn the TV news on. He is not alone in wondering why humanity appears so incapable of learning from its history.

Surely Russian military authorities must be aware that the reduction to rubble of Stalingrad not only did not bring victory to the invading army, but rather served as an exemplar of resistance that completely thwarted Nazi imperial ambitions.

Then, four decades later, Russian forces were driven from Afghanistan despite being in nominal occupancy of the country. Such aggression doesn’t subdue but engenders determination to fight back. Why would there be any expectation that Ukraine would be different?

America, for all its technological superiority, was defeated by a force employing the humble bicycle to transport supplies along the Ho Chi Minh trail. And following dreadful loss of life, military and civilian, the two sides then, eventually, became reconciled.

War becomes mythologised and integrated into national ideologies. Remembrance Sunday in the UK has elevated the ‘fallen’ into heroic defenders of freedom, rather than the reality of terrified young men dying in mud, squalor and savagery. When the next instalment of the war to end all wars led to the deliberate bombing of towns and cities this horror became the spirit of the Blitz, supposedly a demonstration of a character unique to the British.

The Middle East is the present martial spectacle. Recently, the BBC carried two reports illustrative of the pervasive twisted logic such conflicts produce. One was an Israeli spokesman insisting that his country is acting in proportionate self-defence. This was followed by an Iranian supreme something or other who was equally insistent that the missiles launched at Israel were a proportionate act of self-defence.

Putin, of course, claims the non-war war was launched against expanding NATO influence and Nazis in Ukraine, an act of self-defence. It would appear that most wars are merely conflicting ‘self-defences’. It seems that it’s always the other side that is the aggressor; most definitely, ‘not us!’

And while this and similar sophistry is spewed out across news media we sit and watch as the appalling death toll, mainly amongst non-combatants, including a horrendous number of children, continues to mount. As mere spectators there is an ever-growing sense of powerlessness. Critical voices raised are all too readily accused of anti-semitism or Islamophobia. But most can only look on and despair, or press the off button on the remote. Such is the source of the impact on my friend’s, and many, many others’, mental health.

Alienating effects

War is the extreme expression of the alienating effects of capitalism. All the financial problems afflicting people, public services failing because they are too expensive to be adequately run and myriad other difficulties people have to deal with that, ultimately arise from the profit imperative.

There is a general awareness that all is most definitely not well, either nationally or internationally. However, a political cognitive dissonance prevents serious engagement with how to treat those widespread ills.

The ‘Christmas Truce’ of 1914 on the Western Front is illustrative of this. Soldiers from both sides laid down their arms, including British imperial troops from India who didn’t have the Christmas imperative for peace on earth. They fraternized openly, defying their high commands, and there emerged a shared realisation that the propaganda that had convinced them of the barbarism of their ‘enemies’ was a lie. Within days they were killing each other again at the behest of their nation states.

Ukrainians and Russians, Israelis and Palestinians similarly have far more in common than might be guessed listening to their comments when interviewed. The ‘other’ remains the barbarian who must be vanquished for the general good. And so the slaughter goes on.

Is it any wonder that mental health problems have become an increasing issue in society? Talking therapies and/or pharmaceuticals may, in some cases, act as first aid. However, there is only one cure, socialism. Unfortunately, at the moment, the ‘patients’ remain reluctant to take it.

Dave Alton

Dismal (2024)

Book Review from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Shortest History of Economics. By Andrew Leigh, Old Street Publishing, 2024

Thomas Carlyle described economics as ‘the dismal science’. But Carlyle was a racist, writing in 1849, who believed slavery should be reintroduced in the West Indies. The ‘dismal’ view he was attacking was the economics of the time which he saw as regarding all peoples as equal (and not, as is commonly supposed, to the dismal Malthus doctrine of overpopulation and famine). Andrew Leigh’s book on the history of economics is, he tells us, ‘the story of capitalism’. Capitalism is defined as the existence of markets and economics studies how people ‘maximise their wellbeing in the face of scarcity.’ Scarcity is an important assumption made by most economists. Just as the slaves in the markets of the West Indies were subjected to deliberate scarcity, it avoids economists having to confront the artificial scarcity of modern capitalism for wage slaves.

Leigh endorses Thomas Hobbes‘s view of human life as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. ’Hobbes was right’, declares Leigh, and he argues that human history has been a long struggle to overcome that condition. With the application of the correct economics, of course. However, Hobbes’s view was not based on anthropological or archaeological evidence but on the English Civil War of 1642 to 1651. He fled to France while the civil war raged and while there wrote Leviathan, published in 1651, from which the above quote is taken. In Hobbes’s hypothetical ‘state of nature’ (that is, human nature) a ’war of all against all’ exists and this calls for an authoritarian state to keep the peace. There can be no doubt that much of human history is a record of struggles, but if Hobbes was correct the ‘war of all against all’ should have meant that we would all still be living in caves, without hope for the future.

The fact that human productivity has increased enormously since settled agriculture took place about 10,000 years ago has mainly been due to the adoption of new technologies, not the following of economics wisdom. Leigh claims that at the turn of the twentieth century the Englishman Alfred Marshall ‘was the world’s most influential economist’. In academia perhaps, but the accolade surely belongs to Karl Marx. Leigh doesn’t mention him, and that’s probably just as well. A running argument of this book is the alleged superiority of capitalism over communism in practice. The 1917 Russian revolution was a ‘communist revolution’. Cuba established a ‘communist dictatorship’. East Germany had ‘communist rule’. North Korea has had ‘decades of communism’. They all failed miserably, of course, but none of those regimes claimed to have established communism. Leigh is by no means alone in making this mistake but it is a serious flaw in his book. So when he writes of Russia and China that they have recently ‘transitioned from communism to capitalism, this is simply not true. No country in the world has claimed to have established communism. Ever.

Lew Higgins

The Fruits of Anarchy. (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Curious effects of divergent interests.

When a period of trade activity has been unusually protracted, the inevitable crisis invariably startles the economists of the ruling class in the midst of ruminations on their good fortune, or genius, in having at last overcome trade epidemics. As with the trade crisis, so with war comes as a bolt from the blue, shattering theories, exposing contradictions, dissipating hopes, and falsifying prophecies.

Anarchy in Interests Produces—

Conflicting interests must always produce conflicting ideas. A survey of prevailing ideas will consequently give some notion of the underlying anarchy of capitalist interests and conditions.

One group of idealists we can afford to leave to their own shallow cogitations. Those who argue that without war to develop and ennoble—and kill off the fittest—the human race is certain to degenerate. They are backed up by the “war traders” for obvious reasons. Opposed to them are the humanitarians, the anti-militarists, and the peace-loving bourgeois traders, whose ships, heavily insured, are on every sea. These traders, always fearing for their markets, express vehemently their belief in arbitration and their suspicions of diplomatists generally. In the interest of trade Andrew Carnegie subscribes two millions to finance a peace tribunal. At the same time armament firms subsidise the Press and frighten the ignorant with scares, bribe high-placed officials through their agents in all parts of the world, cater for every nation or province that happens to lie inflicted with agitators, whose business it is to keep alive feuds and magnify every action of a neighbouring-State into a sinister threat against the cherished freedom of the people.

Anarchy in Ideas.

The following quotation from the “Daily News and Leader” (15.7.14) presents quite typically the attitude taken up (in peace times) by the peace-mongers :

“If there is not soon a world-wide movement against the tyranny of war and of all the infamies associated with it, it will not be for lack of lessons. Wherever we turn, to France or Russia, Germany or Japan, Italy or our own country, the evidence accumulates of the burden which the war-traders put upon the backs of the people. Their business has no relation to patriotism. It is cosmopolitan in its operations and soulless in its motive. It works upon the fears and hates of ignorant people, uses the Press as the instrument of its purposes and makes tools of the diplomatists and the statesmen, many of whom are financially interested in its success. In Russia, in France, and now in Japan we have seen how it can buy up the very services and make lackeys of the generals and admirals of army and navy. Its maleficient influence overshadows the democracy of every land and until we have found a way of uprooting the whole evil system there will be no real progress made towards peace or an enduring civilisation.”

“Our own country” is not excepted in this sweeping statement. The Prime Minister, when confronted with figures relating to the operations of armament firms abroad, said he dared say the figures were correct, but he knew of no sufficient reason for instituting an enquiry. Shortly after two of the largest British firms entered into a contract with the Turkish Government to carry out extensive works at Constantinople that meant the virtual re-modelling of the Turkish navy, while just before the outbreak of the war, according to a prominent war correspondent, “the British Admiralty was lending missions of naval officers to Greece and Turkey, to hasten in co-operation with the contracting syndicates the preparation of their war forces.” The same writer added : “There is not a feud, or the possibility of a feud, but these tradesmen are at hand to egg on the rival adventurers, and to ‘equip’ them with the latest instruments of the science and art of wholesale homicide.”

Circumstances, you know, Alter Cases.

The peace-mongers forget their former denunciations when their country is involved in war. The “business” of the war traders has a close “relation to patriotism” when the “latest instruments of the science and art of wholesale homicide” must be placed in the hands of the workers to defend capitalist interest. The cry is then “Pile up the munitions ; more elbow room to the war traders.” They forget what they have said—but they cannot unsay it.

Before the war it had become almost a platitude that great wars of conquest, religious wars, etc., were things of the past ; that to-day commerce and industry dictated the policies of the different nations. Since the war every capitalist hack has been busy denying the economic cause—even while crying : “Capture the enemy’s trade”—repeating again and again that the struggle is between “militarism and democracy.”

“Prussian militarism” has become an everyday phrase. Exactly what is meant by it has never yet been clearly explained. According to some supporters of the so-called voluntary system, it is synonymous with conscription ; others affect to see difference between the French and German forms. One fact beyond dispute is that the capitalist class of every country maintain armed forces up to the strength they deem necessary to cope with their enemies within and without ; and it is even more certain that the capitalists of no country hesitate to use them when their interests are at stake. The methods may be slightly different, but the object is always the same—to retain possession or ownership of the means of life.

Relatives are Best Apart.

For instance, the Kaiser, according to Benjamin Kidd (in the “Daily News and Leader,” 7.9.15), appeals directly to his conscripts, saying :

“In view of the present Socialist agitation, it may come to pass that I shall command you to shoot down your own relatives, your brothers, your sons, or parents, which God forbid, but even this you must obey without a murmur.”

while Mr. Asquith, in the House of Commons says, in answer to a question (I quote the “Daily Chronicle.” 24.3.14).

“I think it is a very good rule, where the military force is called in to render assistance to the civil power, in exceptional cases, both as regards officers and men, so far as you can do it, to avoid the employment of those who are locally connected by personal, domestic, or social ties.”

In peace time every increase in armaments raises the war discussion anew and furnishes fresh evidence in the shape of contradictions, confessions, and absurdities. Ten days before the declaration of war the United Methodist Conference passed a resolution “protesting against the ominous growth of armaments.” One rev. delegate declared that

“the war spirit was not in the heart of King George, the Kaiser, the House of Commons, the Reichstag, or in the hearts of the British or German people. It was in the brain of a few irresponsible journalists, who were obsessed with a dastardly kind of Imperialism. He hated strikes, but would be glad to see a strike of the great democratic forces of Europe as a protest against this wicked, inhuman, and sinful waste of money.”

Note how these despicable followers of the mythical Christ are concerned for their masters’ money—a fraction of which comes to them in the shape of livings. One would almost imagine it was of greater importance in their estimation than human life did one not remember that personal ambition overshadows everything else in the mind of the up-to-date Gospel hawker.

Notoriety being their goal, it does not always follow that popular ideas must be applauded ; sometimes the reverse will bring a freak Non-conformist within the circle of the lime-light. At present it is almost criminal to denounce war, even in theory yet the president of the Churchmen’s Union at Rugby goes even further and denounces scientists for their share in it—possibly on principle, because he recognises the antagonism between science and religion. He

“deplored the employment of the latest discoveries of science and the newest inventions of civilisation not in the service of mankind, but to kill, burn, and torture. Men of science and learning had been bribed by the rulers of nations to prostitute their powers to the invention of horrible instruments for the wholesale killing, poisoning, and torture of brave men.”

Parson’s Filthy Job.

Obviously this is a case of the pot reflecting on the sooty condition of the kettle. The priest is equally susceptible to capitalist bribery with the scientist, and just as ready to furbish old superstitions or manustitions or manufacture new ones, to the detriment of the working class, as the scientist is to invent or improve instruments for the perpetration of wholesale murder.

So much for the irresponsibles. There are writers and politicians, however, that are considered authoritative ; but we shall be disappointed if we expect to find their utterances free from similar contradictions and absurdities. Mr. Norman Angell in “The Great Illusion,” we are told by a contemporary,

“Lays down the principle, which he enforces by references to recent history, that in the case of a great war the victor suffers more in the long run than the vanquished. . . . Moreover, because also of this interdependence of our credit-built finance, the confiscation by an invader of private property . . . would so react upon the finance of the invader’s country as to make the damage to the invader resulting from the confiscation exceed in value the property confiscated. So that Germany’s success in conquest would be a demonstration of the complete economic futility of conquest. . . . For allied reasons, in our day, the exaction of tribute from a conquered people has become an economic impossibility.”

In November 1910 Mr. Asquith, speaking on the subject of international relations, furnished the occasion for a Press discussion in which prominent leader writers expressed similar views to those of Mr. Angell. The “Aberdeen Evening Gazette” (11.11.10) said :

“If Germany beat us, she could not destroy our trade : she could not seize any of our colonies or annex any of our territories. She could not exact a ‘thousand million’ indemnity, because credit is now an international business, and to impair British credit would be to shake her own. If Germany smashed us she would smash her own best customer, and her own people would pay the penalty.”

The ”Times” (11.11.10) said:

“They move, as he says, in a vicious circle. They arm because they distrust one another, and they dis-trust one another because they are armed. It is a chronic malady, the cure of which Mr. Asquith is optimist enough to hope for through the growth of a more genial spirit among the nations. A more potent agency will perhaps be the increasing complexity of international relations, which makes it difficult for one nation to damage another without almost equally damaging itself.”

The “Westminster Gazette” (11.11.10) said :

“Trade is a great pacificator, and the international credit on which trade rests is a thing to which war is abhorrent. The fear of breaking the peace and the difficulty of breaking it grows with the growth of armaments. And at the same time the subconscious conviction that the whole collective process is a kind of insanity must gradually project itself into the conscious proceedings of civilised nations.”

These quotations are by no means isolated. In recent years similar opinions have been repeated so often that they should be familiar to every newspaper reader. But note the change since the outbreak of war. Every possible evil, from economic, annihilation to wholesale slaughter, has been flung at the heads of the workers to frighten thorn into the recruiting office or the munition factory. When the international capitalist class saw no immediate cause for quarrelling, their scribes told us our trade could not be destroyed by Germany, nor could our colonies or territory be annexed. A war indemnity could not be exacted by Germany because it would shake her own credit. Yet Britain’s credit is to be shaken by this very action, according to every responsible newspaper, while the self-appointed “Adviser-in-Chief to the British Nation”—Mr. Horatio Bottomley—says that “we shall need an army of occupation to mind the German capital whilst the war indemnity is being paid.”

Many writers have uttered grave warnings on the horrors of war, and have suggested remedies that were almost laughable—if the subject were not so tragic. Mr. Egmont Hake, in the “Daily Telegraph” of September 6, 1892, prophesied that

“We shall have battles raging for days over extensive grounds, hurried and disorderly retreats, desperate pursuits, and consequently, miles of country strewn with carcases and corpses. Should we wonder if to this tragedy Nemesis were to add her epilogue —pest.”

and the remedy is, “a liberal support of our hospitals” !

Professor Gardiner says :

“It should not be impossible to build upon the basis of the international comity of savants a society of men pledged to use their powers and discoveries not for destruction, but for saving life, not for promoting, but for moderating friction between nations.”

Benjamin Kidd told us in “Social Evolution” that the Christian religion was responsible for an ever-growing altruism and humanitarianism in the “Western civilisations.” He is, perhaps, surprised at the calmness with which these peoples regard the slaughter going on to-day, though, he admits his theory is falsified and that altruism is useless as a force to avert war, when he suggests that the Allies should “declare the United States of. Europe”—and, one might add, arm in preparation for war with the United States of America, or some other combination of powers in competition with them for the world’s markets.

But about the most outrageous thing that has been said on the war question is the reply given to those workers who asked what is their stake in the country. “Their wages.” Those wages that for “millions of the workers do not suffice to replace the energy used up in their daily toil.” The wages system is the most complete and tyrannical form of slavery evolved during centuries of class domination. Wage slavery squeezes every ounce of energy out of the workers and scraps them, condemns men, women, and children to degrading poverty and continual anxiety and, as “John Bull” says, “the sordid atmosphere of the office and the workshop.”

This is the worker’s stake in every land—if he seeks diligently and has the luck to find a master. But if he has knowledge concerning the position he will detest the wages system, and if he has wisdom in addition to knowledge he will work for its abolition and the establishment of Socialism. The nationality of his master in the meantime will not count with him : all members of the master class alike are to him parasites that live by his labour and drive him into the factory with the whip of unemployment and hunger, to be exploited.

F. Foan

Our case in brief. (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

The previous article under the above heading showed how several very undesirable features of our social existence arose from the private ownership by a portion of the community of the means of production and distribution—the land, factories, machinery, railways, raw material, and the like. It was concluded that private ownership would therefore have to be abolished, and it was finally promised that in a subsequent article it would be shown what would follow that abolition and the substitution of common ownership in the means of living.

A necessary preliminary to the proper understanding of the consequences of abolishing the private ownership of property is a thorough realisation of what that form of ownership is and what it produces.

Now as the very basis of life is the means of subsistence, the production of the means of subsistence is the most important matter in human affairs. The ownership and control of the instruments and resources by and from which these means of subsistence are produced therefore become of tremendous importance. As a matter of fact the property condition is not a mere skin-deep feature of our social life, which can be changed with no more than local disturbance in that life. It is the very rock and foundation of the social edifice, and therefore a change in this property condition must involve a change in every aspect of our social existence.

Let us try and build up the main lines of our social system from the basis indicated, i.e., the private ownership of the means of living.

The first result of the means of producing and distributing wealth becoming the property of a few is to divide the community into two classes. These classes are the property-owning class and the property-less class.

These two classes occupy entirely different positions in society—positions which must of necessity create antagonism and strife.

Those who do not possess the instruments of labour have no means in their hands of gaining a livelihood, except by selling their strength and skill to those who own the means through which alone that strength and skill can he productively applied. The positions, then, of the two classes are those of buyers and sellers of labour-power respectively.

It now becomes clear how the antagonism between the classes arises. Fundamentally there is antagonism between buyers and sellers in every market. Everywhere the seller strives to sell as dearly as he can, while the buyer tries to buy as cheaply as possible.

If this is true in the ordinary commodity market, how much more inevitably true must it be in the market where human labour-power is the commodity bought and sold !

For, be it remembered, human labour-power, applied to nature-given material, is the source of all that wealth by which men and women live (except, of course, such forms as are freely supplied by nature, such as air and sunlight). The wealth of the rich, the wages of the poor, are alike the product of the application of labour-power to material. Consequently, the struggle between the buyers and sellers of labour-power becomes a struggle for the possession of the product of that labour-power.

Let us be perfectly clear upon that point. To use the illustration of Marx, the product of the wage-worker is like a stick which is to be divided into two parts. The whole of the stick is comprised in the two parts, and one part can only be larger at the expense of the other. The product of the worker is divided into two parts—one part going to the worker and constituting his sole means of livelihood, the other part going to the employer and constituting his means living. The part which the worker receives is his wages, the price which the employer pays for the labour ; and as the larger this portion of the “stick” is the smaller must be the portion left for the employer, the struggle between the buyers and the sellers of labour-power must be of the very bitterest nature.

Nor is this all. The private possession by the few of the means of producing wealth alters the whole character and purpose of production. While the workers had access to the means of production—while they had rights in the land and owned the tools with which they worked—they commonly produced goods for use. The peasant-proprietor of the Middle Ages wanted corn for his own bread, barley for his own ale, and so on. He set to work, therefore, and grew his own corn and barley, and his women folk turned them into bread and ale.

Now mark the different sentiments with which the old-time peasant-proprietor and the modern baker and brewer would view the articles bread and ale. The former would feel a lively interest in the product of his hands ; he would be glad to know that the bread was wholesome, and he would not have to taste of the ale to know that it was good. For he and his would have produced the bread and beer to satisfy their hunger and thirst, and the idea of producing anything but the most wholesome food and drink, or of adulterating such products, would have been ludicrous to them. With what a different eye would the modern baker or brewer look upon the product of his factory ! The baker would take no interest in the bread as such. Possibly he would take care to eat none of it himself. The brewer’s chief concern would be to see that his beer was not a thirst-quencher but a thirst creator. Neither the baker nor the brewer produces his goods for use ; they both produce them for sale.

A simple illustration will show the difference between the two methods. The peasant-proprietor started out with a need—bread. The master baker also starts out with a need, but that need is money. The former, having produced his bread, had finished his round. If he had recorded his activities which he had no need to do—he might have written “Finis” there. But the modern master baker is required by law to record his activities, and that record commences with money and ends with money.

The baker expends money in the purchase of flour and other material, and labour-power, and he must record the fact for the edification of the Official Receiver. These are converted into bread, but that is a detail of secondary importance which may or may not find a place in some minor book. What is important is the conversion of the bread into money. When that is accomplished, the round is completed, the books, as far as that operation is concerned, may be closed. They record the conversion of money into material, etc., and the conversion of these into money. The money that the record started with can be compared with the money with which it finished, and the difference between the two sums shown. And only this will any man of business accept as the conclusion of the operation.

So is shown the difference in the systems of wealth production in a society based on the monopoly of the means of production by a few and a social system in which the means of production are owned by those who use them. In the one case all wealth produced presents itself as articles produced for sale, in the other case wealth, with a few exceptions, is produced for use.

The exigencies of space prevent the completion in this issue of this brief examination of the manner in which the whole of our social structure arises from and rests upon the social base—the ownership by a section of the community of the means and instruments of producing and distributing wealth. The subject will be resumed next month.

A. E. Jacomb