Cooking the Books: Labour power shortage (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘So what’s wrong with labour shortages driving up low wages?’ asked Larry Elliott, economics editor of the Guardian (29 August). Nothing, but it does bring out the commodity status of the human capacity to work, what Marx called ‘labour power’:

‘By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description’ (Capital, Vol 1, ch. 6).

It’s the energy a human can expend on some work activity. Under capitalism it is something that is bought and sold, sold by workers and bought by employers.

It is sometimes said that what workers are selling is their ‘labour’. This can be passable as a shorthand for ‘labour power’ (as in ‘labour market’ or ‘labour shortage’) but can be seriously misleading insofar as it suggests that what workers are selling is the product of the exercise of their labour power; that they are being paid for their work and at its full value. But they’re not, because a part of their work, over and above the part corresponding to their wages, is provided free to their employer. In the case of those working for the government and its agencies (civil service, local government, health service, education) this saves their employer from having to spend so much. In the case of those working for an employer selling some product or service, it is something their employer converts into money as their profits, what in fact makes the capitalist economic system go round.

This is admitted by orthodox economists and national statisticians as they define ‘value added’ as the revenue generated in productive activity, not just wages but profits too. If workers were paid for the whole of the value added in production – and only human workers add it — there would be no profits. What they are being paid for is their labour-power, not their work.

This is why socialists are not being pedantic when we insist on drawing a distinction between ‘labour power’ (the capacity to work) and ‘labour’ (the outcome of working).

Generally speaking, workers receive the value of their labour power in that they are paid the value of what it costs them to produce and reproduce it, appropriately called the cost of ‘living’. As it is sold on a market, just like commodities the actual price paid for a particular kind of labour power varies with market conditions. When demand exceeds supply, the price goes up, the quicker if workers are organised to press for this. When supply exceeds demand, it goes down, though again if they are organised workers can prevent it falling as much as it might otherwise do.

The present shortage of lorry drivers, hospitality workers and social care staff is being called a side-effect of Brexit. Boris Johnson claimed, on 7 September in the House of Commons debate on paying for social care, that this was intentional. Wages in low-income occupations, he said, were going up ‘in exactly the way that those of us who campaigned for Brexit hoped’. Whether or not this was intended (and the financiers who funded the Brexit campaign would not have minded as this wouldn’t affect them), it has happened.

HGV drivers are benefitting – temporarily while more are trained – but many of the lowest paid will be no better off as the tax credits they are paid (the subsidy the government pays to low-wage employers) will go down.

There is, or rather should be, an elephant in the room: how come most humans are put in the position of having to sell their mental and physical energies to another group of humans?

Obituary: Tim Hart (2021)

Obituary from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tim Hart discovered the Socialist Party only after he had retired, when he saw an advert for it in a newspaper. He was originally from Sussex but at that point was living in South Wales and soon became a member of Swansea Branch (now South Wales Branch) of the Party. He quickly became convinced by the Party’s case and also took a keen interest in its history and development. He often said he only regretted that he’d come so late to his political home and the clear, rational understanding of the world it gave him. He’d been involved in various causes and organisations but inevitably became unsatisfied with the illogicalities and inconsistencies of their ideas and actions and above all with their ‘single-issue’ approach to things according to the particular issues and circumstances of the day. He found the ‘all-round’ approach of the Party – the way it took on capitalism as a whole and not just its symptoms – a far more satisfying way of looking at the world.

Once in the Party he quickly became involved in various activities, including being its Assistant Treasurer, a member of its Executive Committee and writing articles for the Socialist Standard. So interested did he become in the Party’s history that he had plans for making sure that knowledge of all its activities and publications could be made available electronically for future record and reference. A project that he had in mind but didn’t come to fruition was to interview some of the Party’s longest-standing members, so that the interviews could then be published in the Socialist Standard.

Yet, though he espoused the Party’s ideas for the explanation they gave him of history and the current world, he never lost his ‘doubt everything’ mindset and was never anything if not fiercely independent. In his life he had changed jobs and occupations a number of times (e.g. banking, management consultancy, law, teaching, landscape gardening), often because he found it impossible to tolerate the submission to authority and frequent abuse of power inherent in employment. And indeed, even while agreeing with the fundamental tenets of the Party’s case, he differed, for example, from the Party’s view that the liberal democratic type of capitalism represented an advance on the more ‘backward’ one-party state forms, considering them all at bottom equally authoritarian and oppressive. He also had a more draconian view of the climate crisis than usually expressed by the Party, considering that it was probably too late now, whatever action was taken, for the environmental situation to be rescued.

He was a kind person to have a discussion with and you always knew that anything you said, whether he agreed with it or not, would be responded to in a comradely and tolerant way. He was a keen swimmer and cyclist, activities he continued with even during his short final illness. He was also a marvellous grandad to Luke and a devoted father to Elaine and Della, to whom we convey our sincere condolences.

Howard Moss

South Wales Branch

Cooking the Books: The limits to tax and spend (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Raising tax on businesses will kill off investment, CBI says’, was the headline in the Times (11 September) about a speech to be delivered that day by Tony Danker, the Director-General of the employers’ organisation, in which he said:

‘I am deeply worried the Government thinks that taxing business… is without consequence to growth. It’s not. Raising business taxes too far has always been self-defeating as it stymies further investment’ (Link).

He would say that, wouldn’t he? Yet businesses have to be taxed, whether directly or indirectly, to pay for the upkeep of the government and the services it renders them as a whole. Capitalist enterprises recognise this and Danker himself qualifies his statement by saying that it is raising tax ‘too far’ that risks discouraging investment.

He does have a point. There are limits to how much tax governments can raise from businesses. The capitalist economy is driven by business investment for profit and, if governments tax too much, this will provoke an economic slowdown or even downturn. It is something Keynesians learned the hard way but which has yet to be learned by the ‘Modern Money Theorists’ and the Green New Dealers.

Danker went on to make another point:

‘It’s clear that consumption is likely to rage in the short run. Consumers have saved and will spend… But unless investment catches up, rather than falls behind, that story will be short lived’.

True again. If investment doesn’t pick up, the post-lockdown consumer boom will peter out when all the pent-up demand has been spent.

We don’t suppose that it will contribute to Danker’s ‘rage’ in consumer spending, but if you live in Northern Ireland you’re lucky. Well, sort of.

The devolved administration there is giving away £100 to anyone who claims it under its ‘High Street Voucher Scheme’. Actually, it’s not a voucher that they will be given but a plastic card with £100 pre-paid on it which they can use in local shops and eating places to pay as they would with their bank card. The money has to be spent by the end of November.

It is not exactly the ‘helicopter money’ that some economists propose as a way to get the economy out of a recession. Not that that would work anyway since what drives the capitalist economy is not consumer spending but business investment, as the CBI’s Director General pointed out. The aim of the scheme is simply to support local businesses. It will to a certain extent.

When Marxists hear the word ‘voucher’ they tend to think of the Labour-Time Voucher Scheme that Marx mentioned in passing a couple or so times. Under this, people, in the early days of socialism, would be issued with vouchers based on the amount of hours they had worked and which they could redeem for consumer goods at the local distribution centre. It wouldn’t have worked and Marx didn’t go into any detail (it wasn’t his idea anyway) about how the goods to be redeemed would be ‘priced’.

In any event, given the tremendous development of the forces of production since his day, socialist society should now be able to go over very rapidly to free access and free distribution and there would be no need for vouchers. Or plastic cards.

Religion and Freedom? (2021)

From the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some expressions are on the face of it contradictory, military intelligence being one. Another possible example would be liberation theology: what can possibly be liberating about belief in a hierarchy of religious leaders and a god that influences events on earth? Nevertheless, so-called liberation theology has had a reasonable amount of influence within the Catholic church, though it has declined in popularity and influence since the 1990s. Its impact has been especially felt in Latin America, home to nearly one third of the world’s Catholics, and where the traditional church was seen by many as part of the social and political establishment. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and other peoples was often justified in terms of missionary endeavour, even if its main aim was plunder.

Liberation theology is of course controversial within Catholicism. It has been described as ‘a social and political movement within the church that attempts to interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ through the lived experiences of oppressed people’ (Kira Dault in uscatholic.org, 14 October 2014). But for another writer, it is a ‘combination of Marxist philosophy with certain biblical motifs’ and involves ‘radical revisions to every traditional Christian doctrine’ (John Frame at thegospelcoalition.org). In the words of Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest, ‘For me, the four Gospels are all equally Communist. I’m a Marxist who believes in God, follows Christ and is a revolutionary for the sake of His kingdom.’ Cardenal was at one time the Sandinista Minister of Culture, though he later left the movement, describing it as a dictatorship, and saying that he preferred ‘an authentic capitalism’ to ‘a false Revolution’ (Wikipedia).

Overcoming poverty is a central aspect of liberation theology, with a decent life on Earth seen as at least an alternative to freedom in the afterlife. In one formulation, it ‘advocates orthopraxis (right action) over orthodoxy (right belief)’ (philosopherkings.co.uk). Critics within the church see liberation theology as advocating people gaining salvation through their own efforts, rather than from god, which is for some reason seen as objectionable. Many liberation theology supporters regard Marxism as a set of ideas that can be partially adopted or agreed with, so they do not see Marx’s critique of religion as a problem for them.

Another criticism is as follows: ‘The missing link in liberation theology is the absence of a concrete vision of political economy. It refuses to say how safeguards for human rights, economic development and personal liberties will be instituted after the revolution’ (Michael Novak in nytimes.com, 21 October 1984). But this point can be taken much further, in that liberation theology has little concrete to say about how society should be organised at all. Wanting to do away with poverty is something that few people would disagree with, and the appeal to Marx’s ideas is at best confused and probably better described as being as much of a distortion as Leninism.

And liberation theology is indeed a contradiction in terms. Religion of all stripes teaches reliance on a supreme being of some kind, on prayer, on submission. Catholicism in particular involves the rule of the pope, oppression of women and rigid social policies. Liberation of the ninety-nine-plus percent of the earth’s population must come from their own efforts, to gain control of the planet and its resources, not from the mystification of religion and some confused supposed mix of religion and Marxism.

Paul Bennett

Remoulding The Activist (2021)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lurking as embarrassments in the TV archives are the series cancelled after a few episodes following complaints from offended and disgusted viewers, such as the 1930s Berlin-set sitcom Heil Honey I’m Home! and the disturbing Minipops. One recently made show has managed to get pulled due to negative reactions even before its first episode has aired, CBS’s The Activist.

Initial publicity bragged that The Activist would be ‘a first-of-its-kind competition series that will inspire real change’. Six specially selected activists campaigning for health, education and environmental issues would ‘go head-to-head in challenges to promote their causes’, with tasks such as ‘missions, media stunts, digital campaigns and community events’. Their efforts to win each episode’s challenge would be judged by singer Usher, actor Priyanka Chopra and dancer Julianne Hough, and their success would be ‘measured via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input’. The series climax would see the activists attending the G20 summit in Italy to ‘meet with world leaders in the hope of securing funding and awareness for their causes’. ‘The team that receives the largest commitment is celebrated as the overall winner at the finale, which will also feature musical performances by some of the world’s most passionate artists.’

The programme-makers and whichever focus groups they tested their ideas on didn’t think that setting important issues against each other and turning activism into Reality TV would sound tawdry and exploitative. Yet this was the overwhelming response from critics and commentators on social media when the series was announced. Several tweets pointed out that the show was like the plot of a Black Mirror episode. One Alejandro Villegas tweeted ‘How corporate America appropriates and trivialises advocacy… monetising the imagery… channelling dissent into meaninglessness’ and made a comparison with the derided Pepsi advert launched during the Black Lives Matter protests which featured model Kendall Jenner healing rifts by handing a cop a can of cola. Some of those involved with The Activist joined in with the criticism by saying how its approach sought to simplify and mould the activists’ work. Clover Hogan of climate change campaign group Force Of Nature withdrew her application for a part on the show when she realised that they wanted marketable activists. She said ‘having been gaslit by this whole process personally, I can absolutely understand why you could be manipulated into saying yes to this type of opportunity’, adding that the competitive element of the format was downplayed when she was interviewed. The backlash against the programme led to Chopra resigning from her role as a judge, while Hough said ‘the judging aspect of the show missed the mark, and furthermore… I am not qualified to act as a judge’.

The series, due to air in America on CBS in late October, was produced by Global Citizen, an international education and advocacy organisation aiming for extreme poverty to be eradicated by 2030, and Live Nation, mostly known for ticket sales. When all the criticism went viral, they released statements solemnly stating that ‘It has become apparent the format of the show as announced distracts from the vital work these incredible activists do in their communities every day’, adding that ‘global activism centres on collaboration and cooperation, not competition. We apologise to the activists, hosts, and the larger activist community – we got it wrong’. For the programme-makers to do a complete U-turn on their stance shows how out of touch with their target market they were, particularly awkward for Global Citizen, which promotes itself as an international educator and advocate. Presumably the lure of publicity and money clouded their judgement.

The programme, which has already been filmed, will now be remade as a one-off documentary, removing the competitive aspect, with the same activists who took part originally. ‘We hope that by showcasing their work we will inspire more people to become more involved in addressing the world’s most pressing issues. We look forward to highlighting the mission and lives of each of these incredible people’ grovelled Global Citizen, CBS and Live Nation. They’ll now be hoping the new version of The Activist showcases, inspires and highlights enough to rebuild any reputational loss, as they would call it.

The Activist’s original format was scuppered because of how distasteful it sounds for campaign groups to be set up to compete against each other for influence, through corporate-driven media. But this is exactly how they have to function in the real world. Campaign groups have to compete for funding, hoping to convince us to support their single-issue campaign rather than any of the other countless single-issue campaigns. If they can package their message so that it’s acceptable enough, without any threat of fundamental change, they can attract more mainstream exposure. They become part of the marketplace because they’re only aiming to work within it and not challenge the system itself. Commodifying activism further by turning all this into a TV show weirdly makes the reality clearer. Writer Naomi Klein made the point with her sardonic tweet, ‘I’m confused: Is this an advanced Marxist critique to expose how competition for money and attention pits activists against each other + undermines deep change? Or just the end of the world?’

Mike Foster

Philosophy for reformists (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism for Soloists. By William Edmundson. (Polity. 2021)

This is an attempt to present a case for socialism – as a society without private ownership of means of production – on the basis of classic liberal-democratic political philosophy. Edmundson’s ‘soloists’ are individualists, what in the US are called ‘libertarians’, people who believe that individuals have natural rights that no government should override. He imagines them in a ‘state of nature’ (as this philosophical tradition does) and sets out to convince them that it would be logical for them to sign up to a ‘social contract’ which would exclude private ownership of means of production. His basic argument – which is valid – is that such private ownership is incompatible with political equality and democracy as it gives the owners more say in decision-making than non-owners.

However, he has a peculiar definition of ‘means of production’. Normally this means the materials (which will all have originally come from nature) and instruments (buildings and machinery) used to produce wealth. His definition is that they are production facilities that can neither be ‘commons’ to which everyone has free access nor be operated by separate individuals. Besides large-scale manufacturing plants this includes transport, utility and communications networks and also online sales platforms and banks.

So he ends up, if by a different route, advocating what the Labour Party used to years ago, namely, the public ownership of ‘the means of production, distribution and exchange’. He writes that ‘one common misconception about socialism is that it dispenses altogether with markets.’ This is wrong on two counts. It is not a misconception and, unfortunately, is not that common. His ideal society still involves the continuation of production for sale, working for wages, and unequal money incomes. The blurb on the back calls it ‘market socialism’ but that’s a contradiction in terms. In fact, it would still be capitalism.

Unlike many academic books, this one is easy to read and might perhaps be of some use to philosophy and politics students to refute some of the arguments in favour of private ownership that they will be taught.

Adam Buick

Blogger's Note:

The author of the book, Bill Edmundson, replied to the review of his book in the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

More on Populism (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Psychology of Populism. The Tribal Challenge to Liberal Democracy. Edited by Joseph P. Forgas, Willian D. Crano and Klaus Fiedler. (Routledge, 2021. 386pp.)

The stated aim of the 19 essays making up this book is, according to its editors, ‘to contribute to a better understanding of the nature and psychological characteristics of populist movements’. They further state that they ‘hope to highlight the fundamental threat that collectivist popular beliefs and strategies, both on the left and right of the political spectrum, present for the core values and the very survival of liberal democratic systems’. The shared understanding, implicit where not explicit, of all the authors is that the combination of the market with capitalist democracy constitutes ‘the most successful civilisation in human history’, and that modern populism, arising from both left and right, has certain common features such as rejection of liberal democracy, ethnocentrism, tribalism, xenophobia, emotional and/or identity-based politics, and feelings of personal impotence.

Current examples of governments considered populist whose features are analysed here are those of Poland, Hungary, Turkey and Russia, while strong populist movements in countries like France, Germany, Austria and the US are also subjects of study and discussion. Support for populism in these countries is seen as arising from such sources as simplistic beliefs, feelings of frustrated self-importance, ‘self-uncertainty’, a ‘need for personal significance, and the ‘human search for a meaningful world view’. And the detailed supporting analysis is often interesting and well evidenced.

But even though much of the analysis in these essays is acute and telling, many of the authors are too quick to identify what they term as left-wing populism with ‘Marxism’. In their introductory chapter, for example, the editors refer to Marxism as one of the ‘clear and well-articulated populist ideologies’ and the sworn enemy of any kind of individualism or tolerance. Referencing writers from the past with particularly strong pro-capitalist and anti-Marxist agendas such as Arthur Koestler and Karl Popper, they describe Marxism as featuring ‘the same degree of authoritarianism, dogmatism and intolerance also found in right-wing totalitarian movements’. The problem here, as with the ‘authorities’ they quote, is that by Marxism is meant dictatorial states which bear no relation to the thinking of Marx, regimes such as the Soviet Union or Mao’s China (well described as ‘a famine-wracked disaster’) and, in more recent times, countries often referred to as ‘Marxist’ such as Cuba and Venezuela, but again representing a travesty of any lesson to be drawn from Marx’s writings. And, again, on the ideological front, they refer not to Marx’s own writings or prescriptions but to Lenin’s distorted version or implementation of these and to modern-day theorists, often self-styled ‘Marxists’, who ‘share a strongly critical attitude to Western liberal values, a romantic attachment to anti-enlightenment communalism, and a cold-eyed focus on power as the major social issue of interest’.

The trouble is that what the authors are describing here has nothing to do with the analysis and theory which is at the root of Marx’s writings, seeking as it does to transcend so-called ‘liberal values’ and pointing to the need for a world society of common ownership and democratic control and of free access to all goods and services, where human beings, far from their individualism being denied or oppressed, are in ultimate control of their own choices and their own individual existence.

While this volume contains much that is instructive and thought-provoking for an understanding of how populism arises and is practised, it fails on the whole to see that it is the political and other divisions produced by capitalism’s so-called ‘liberal democracy’ that are the real lightning rod for the very populism it is dedicated to exploring and critiquing. And the notion with which it is shot through that individual freedom is incompatible with collective organisation is fundamentally wrong-headed. The ‘collectivism’ it continually refers to and deplores is that of dictatorial or semi-dictatorial regimes or ideologies, not that of a world society organised democratically to satisfy everyone’s needs.

Howard Moss

Exploited and Spat Out (2021)

Book Review from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (Swift £12.99.)

There are eleven million ‘undocumented’ people in the US, mostly Latinx (a term that covers both men and women). The author was one, having followed her parents to New York from Ecuador aged four, though she has since received her green card, which makes her a permanent resident (her parents still aren’t). Her book gives a vivid and personalised account of the lives of undocumented workers.

The undocumented have no access to health care (other than Emergency Rooms), and an example is given of a man who died of brain cancer after being turned away by a number of hospitals. They have no retirement plans and few savings. Many come in order to send money back home for their children to get an education, but find themselves barely able to make ends meet: ‘This country takes their youth, their dreams, their labor, and spits them out with nothing to show for it.’

Several thousand undocumented workers are forced to be day-labourers, waiting on street corners for contractors to choose them for a day’s work. They are often cheated of their wages, and even left stranded in the middle of nowhere. Some worker centres have been set up to try and give them some kind of protection. Lots of undocumented immigrants were killed on 9/11, though it is impossible to say who or how many, and many helped to clear up in the aftermath, and working there has left some of them with severe medical conditions, from cancer to arthritis.

A chapter deals with Flint, Michigan, former centre of the car industry and notorious for having lead in its drinking water. Flyers on this were issued only in English, and when people went to houses to tell residents not to drink the tap water, many undocumented did not open their doors, for fear the visitors were from the immigration authorities. Distribution centres handed out bottled water, but only to those with a state ID, which the undocumented in Michigan were barred from having. A mother with lead poisoning breastfed her baby, and this resulted in the child being temporarily blind. She regained her sight, but nobody knows the possible long-term effects on her.

The main government body that creates problems for the undocumented is Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), ‘the creation of 9/11 paranoia’. Some ‘vultures’, as Cornejo Villavicencio calls them, claim (for a price) to invoke spirits that can protect against ICE. The threat of deportation is, however, real, and a few seek sanctuary in churches, which ICE do not enter.

The author agrees with the statement that Americans treat their pets better than they treat immigrants. Her book demonstrates how much US capitalism makes use of cheap labour power and how the whole system regards people at the bottom of the heap.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: The Death of Krushchev (2021)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The former dictator of Russia, who died last month, was not a member of the SPGB so this is not that kind of an obituary. Nor is it a salute to the passing of a “great man” in the manner of the capitalist press (whether so-called left or right). Rather do we take the opportunity of the passing of the former despot (one of the rare cases in the Soviet Union of an ousted top man who managed to die of old age), to point out that this man, who started to climb the ladder of Russian power nearly fifty years ago, has contrived to die with his country as far from justifying its assumed title of socialist as ever it was. In fact it is probably true to say that nowadays there are far more people around who fail to register shocked surprise at our contention that Russia is a capitalist country, like all other countries in the modern world. The fact that it is state-capitalist (instead of only partly thus and partly private enterprise capitalist like England) is a matter almost of indifference compared with the salient fact that it is not socialist and has never remotely justified its claim to that title. Khrushchev’s country is just as much a wage-slave economy as the USA.

The capitalist papers (such as the Morning Star and the New Statesman) can safely be left to recount the career of the Stalinist today who danced the gopak for his master (and also acted as his henchman in the slaughter of untold thousands of his fellow countrymen). (…)

There is no Socialism in Russia and all the millions of deaths have been merely to establish a capitalist tyranny where, pre-Khrushchev and post-Khrushchev, the propagation of Socialism is punished as treason. A grisly and tragic story.

(Socialist Standard, October 1971)

Rear View: It’s not rocket science (2021)

The Rear View Column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s not rocket science

Following his trip to the edge of space, billionaire Branson asked us to ‘Imagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space’ (free-media.info, 18 July). Indeed. Iain M Banks’s Culture series is a highly recommended imagining of such a post-capitalist/scarcity society. But to get there, we need to abolish capitalism on Earth. We could make a start by understanding where one-time Democratic Party Ohio State Senator, Assistant Professor Nina Turner, errs. She recently criticised billionaire Bezos who, following his first rocket trip, said ‘I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.’ But the ‘Blessed By God! Wife, Mother, Sister, Host of Hello Somebody Podcast, Ohio State Senator, Professor’ @ninaturner (20 July) disagrees: ‘Correction: employees didn’t pay for this — their wages were stolen to pay for a billionaire’s space vacation. Jeff Bezos can thank his workers by treating them with dignity and paying them fair wages….and he can thank us all by paying his damn taxes.’ Oh no, not again – a call for ‘fair’ wages and taxation! There is nothing fair about wage slavery. We work, they take and do their best to avoid paying taxes which serve to maintain this system of legalised robbery. On 25 July Turner tweeted to remind us that the Federal minimum wage of $7.25 has remained unchanged since 2009. An earlier re-tweet proclaims, correctly, another world is possible. She, unlike Marx, fails to join the dots. He wanted us to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon us, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ we ought to inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system’.

A Professor of the dismal science

‘If the Socialist Party of Great Britain is an authority on such things, it is official: in light of recent anti-communist protests and civil unrest, Cuba has been demoted to “Not Real Socialism” and reclassified, along with the USSR and other failed socialist experiments, as “actually state capitalism”’ (independent.org, 20 July). The author of this ahistorical drivel is Art Carden, an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University. For the record, in the December 1906 edition of the Socialist Standard we stated: ‘We are not concerned with State capitalism. We are concerned with Socialism. Socialism is the negation of capitalism. Consequently State capitalism cannot be the ideal of any Socialist. Ergo those who preach State capitalism or collective exploitation are not Socialists.’ Further, we said Russia had state capitalism in 1920 and similarly Cuba in 1968. Ironically, the island’s present dictator made a speech recently (liberationnews.org, 11 July) that was surprisingly succinct and free from mention of communism or socialism! This did not deter the loony left, eg. workers.org, from proclaining ‘U.S. HANDS OFF CUBA! END THE BLOCKADE! DEFEND SOCIALIST CUBA!’ or the rabid right from declaring ‘Cuba is a tragic case, but it is not our problem…. Except for China and North Korea, after the fall of the Soviet Union communist regimes have all ultimately collapsed ‘(vdare.com, 19 July). Even the moribund middle contributed: e.g. ‘Biden Says Communism Is A ‘Universally Failed System,’ And Socialism Is No ‘Useful Substitute’” (dailycaller.com, 15 July).

Doctor in need of a second opinion

Another professor, Jody Rawles, M.D., writes: ‘Homelesssness is complex… Anybody claiming to have a plan to fix this problem with only one remedy is like a mechanic claiming to be able to overhaul your engine with only one tool — it won’t work’ (yahoo.com, 20 July). Yes, homelessness is a complex issue. For every homeless person there is a raft of interrelated reasons why they may be in that situation. Some are simple: loss of housing through relationship breakdowns, inability to pay for housing, drink, drugs, mental health issues, abuse and domestic violence. For some, all they really need is a house or flat. For others, more complex social help is required from specialists perhaps in drink and drug rehabilitation, or social workers to support individuals through crises. The US-based professor of psychiatry and human behaviour recognizes that individual human needs can be complex as well as unique, but he is clearly igmorant that we are existing in a sick social system which responds only to market rather than human needs. Consider, there are on any given night over 500,000 homeless in the US alongside over 17 million vacant homes. The Ending Homelessness Act of 2019 which provides additional funding for, and otherwise addresses, assistance to homeless individuals and families will fail. There is in fact a housing shortage for those most in need. Nearly 150 years ago Frederick Engels wrote: ‘This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it.’ Engels saw that there was no possibility of a rational approach to housing within capitalism. ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question, 1872).

Pathfinders: Say It Loud (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Say It Loud

If you want to take a pessimistic view of humanity’s future, there’s no shortage of evidence. And because the news cycle feeds primarily off bad news, it’s the easiest evidence to find. You have to look a bit harder for the positive news stories to back an optimistic view, but they do exist.

Like the story about the massive expansion of sharing app Olio, where people go out of their way to provide free stuff for people who are in need. Volunteers collect unsold produce from Tesco supermarkets, list it all in an app, and then superintend the hand-out process as local people come in to collect whatever is available.

What’s in it for Tesco? Cynically, one might say it’s good optics, as they are being seen to care, plus it saves them the costs of disposal. Less cynically, they are to some extent undermining their own profits by giving stuff away, so this is at least a concrete act that is a world away from the empty rhetoric and vapid virtue signalling of most capitalist companies.

What’s in it for the volunteers? A nice feeling, presumably, of doing some good in the world, to counteract all the loudly advertised bad stuff. ‘If everybody did something small but meaningful, we’d live in a much, much better society,” says one volunteer, who gets up at 7am every Saturday to collect Tesco cast-offs. And he’s right, of course. But any sentence that starts with the phrase ‘If everybody did…’ is really a political statement about how the world ought to be, and as we know, politics is about more than people just being nice to each other. It’s about thinking big.

Socialism is about thinking on the largest, global scale. And we know that’s a problem because a lot of people don’t seem able or willing to think at that scale. Not even when it comes to an existential threat like climate change. Even though the capitalist money-machine has blindly bulldozed its way across the planet destroying lives, cultures, landscapes and wildlife, people still have a dogged faith in the market system and its governments and politicians to find solutions to the very problems they’re causing.

And here’s a little anecdote about Glasgow and the run-up to COP26 in November which is nothing if not ironic.

Property owners in Glasgow are exploiting the shit out of COP26 by hiking their rents to astronomical levels during the conference period, in a bid to make big bucks out of a climate emergency. Greedy, grasping bastards indeed, but this is capitalist logic at work. If you’ve got a commodity that’s in high demand, you charge the maximum price you can get for it, and never mind scruples.

So it turns out that many climate activists from around the world who want to go to Glasgow to demonstrate their belief in the market system’s supposed magical ability to clean up its own mess, now can’t afford it because of the normal operations of the market system.

Fortunately, not everyone is a greedy, grasping bastard, even when capitalist logic tells them they ought to be. A network of Glasgow house owners has come together to express solidarity with climate activists by offering them very cheap accommodation over the course of the November climate summit (bbc.in/3mnSIbc). There aren’t enough of them, and they’re already oversubscribed, but still it’s some comfort to know that, destroy whatever else it may, capitalism never quite manages to destroy the capacity of humans to treat each other with decency.

Given this, the failure of people including climate activists to engage with the concept of a decent society at a global scale is astonishing and alarming. All kinds of cognitive biases are at play here, as people perform mental contortions to rationalise the irrational world around them, when it would be so much easier to say ‘you know what, capitalism is turning into a catastrophe, let’s get rid of it.’

The problem is the alternative. Influential environmental campaigner George Monbiot has publicly acknowledged the fact that capitalism is the problem, ‘a weapon pointed at the living world’, a conclusion he freely admits he came to slowly and reluctantly, after he had run out of ways to excuse it. Unfortunately he is under the impression that the only alternative is state (ie. soviet-style) ‘communism’, a prospect he is understandably not attracted to and which he recognises had ‘more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit’ (bit.ly/381QB4p).

In fact, soviet ‘communism’ is no alternative at all, it’s a travesty. We said so in 1918, mere months into Lenin’s coup d’état, but it seems our voice is not loud enough to reach Monbiot’s mighty ear. Meanwhile he’s wrestling with a mishmash of trendy behavioural and economic models that stand little chance of being put into practice and in any case don’t address the core problem, the existence of private property and markets, which results in a tiny class who own all the world’s resources and enrich themselves by impoverishing the rest of us and the planet.

People just can’t say the unsayable, which is that we have to abolish private property and markets, and dispossess the capitalist class. Why can’t they say that? In Monbiot’s case, as a regular writer for the Guardian newspaper, he must be aware that the Guardian is known for dumping writers who say anything too radical, as it dumped comedian Jeremy Hardy and even award-winning journalist John Pilger (bit.ly/37ZYFme). Science journalists are in a similar position, depending on employers for their wages. Ditto academics. Ditto social media influencers. No one can speak their mind who relies on the ‘king’s shilling’. Ever wondered why we don’t take commercial ads in the Standard? That’s why.

So there is a lacuna of silence surrounding the biggest question of humanity’s future on Earth. It’s not some deep-state conspiracy. It’s just the normal workings of capitalism. It creates an artificial dependence on money, and then pays everyone money not to question the money system.

As Black Panther activist Assata Shakur famously remarked, no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. People are starting to question capitalism like never before. Well, it’s about time. But capitalism is not going to encourage that conversation. That’s why socialists need to be vocal, and not just vocal but loud, as in Glasgow this November. The world’s people need an alternative to the market system that plays to human strengths of cooperation and mutual support. It’s up to people like us to show them there is one.

Paddy Shannon

UBI: Red Herring or Wild Goose Chase? (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are some critics of capitalism who realise that something more radical is needed than the ‘baby steps’ that common or garden reformists have been reduced to campaigning for. They can see that such tinkering will not solve the problem they are concerned about. However, instead of proposing socialism (common ownership and production for need), which they dismiss as unrealistic, they advocate something else that they regard as more achievable. Actually, it is the other way around. It’s what they propose that is unrealistic and, in any event, would probably take as much time and energy to get enough support for, if it is be fully attempted, as would getting support for socialism. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is a case in point.

This is the proposal, also known as Citizens’ Income, that the government should pay everyone a regular monthly income of a given amount as of right, i.e. unconditionally and without means testing.

The idea is to free people from worry over not being able to meet their basic needs and having to accept a crap job to do so, and to give them a wider choice of how to organise their life. Some advocate it as a way of dealing with the hypothetical mass unemployment they are expecting to occur as AI is applied to more and more jobs.

The bolder amongst them see it as a first step towards breaking the link between work and income, a way of gradually abolishing the wages system with the proportion of a person’s income paid by the state increasing at the expense of that paid by their employer.

The obvious first question is: where is the money to come from? It would cost a huge amount, the more so the greater the payment agreed on. Governments have no income of their own and depend, for what they spend, on taxation and borrowing. Since workers are on average paid only enough to maintain their particular working skill – i.e. to keep themselves in working order – the taxes they pay, whether direct or indirect, get passed on to employers in the form of a higher money wage and so ultimately fall on profits.

So, UBI is basically a proposition to massively tax profits to pay everybody a free income. And its advocates dismiss socialism as unrealistic!

It is true that, if this were ever to happen, employers would be compensated by not having to pay wages at the same level, since a part of the cost of keeping a worker in working order would then be paid by the government. Some UBIers attempt to deny that their scheme, if implemented, would lead money wages to fall, but this goes against all the evidence of the effect of other payments by the state to people in work.

Others pull in their horns and publish detailed calculations showing that their scheme would not lead to much more being spent on government payments to people than at present, since many existing payments (eg unemployment pay, sick pay, family allowances) would be abolished. So, they end up with a UBI payment at the low end (perhaps not even as high as £500 a month) and so are in effect proposing what used to be called a ‘redistribution of poverty’.

Talk of employers, wages and money income shows that UBIers envisage their scheme being implemented in a society that will continue to be divided into employers (owners of a productive resource) and workers (driven by economic necessity to sell their working skills to an employer for money).

As to gradually increasing the state payment until most of a person’s income is paid by the state and a diminishing proportion by the employer, it’s hard to think of a more unrealistic proposal. Capitalism is based on the wages system, on most of the population being forced by economic necessity to obtain the money to buy the things they need to live by selling their capacity to work to an employer. No capitalist state will ever agree to undermine the wages system by weakening that pressure, as giving everyone a sum of money at anything much more than a minimal amount would. It’s just not going to happen.

The aim of breaking the link between work and the amount you get to live on is laudable; socialism will in fact bring this about by allowing the implementation of the principle ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. But this is not something that can be introduced gradually under capitalism. It can only be implemented after capitalism has been ended through replacing class ownership of productive resources by their common ownership by society as a whole. This – socialism – has to come first.

The most that could happen to the UBI is that the idea of an unconditional free basic income is taken up by the state for certain groups it considers deserving and who would otherwise be destitute. Experiments involving this have already taken place. Of course, this would not be UBI as these payments would not be universal. It would completely emasculate the original idea of paying everyone a basic income. Also, the level would be more or less the poverty line which most states bring destitute people up to. Administrative costs would be saved by not having to means-test recipients and check that they continue to be eligible. In the end, then, as a ‘realistic’ proposition UBI would be reduced to a tweak to the Poor Law System (aka the Welfare State). Just another ‘baby step’, but to nowhere.

Rather than waste their time and energy pursuing something that is impossible under capitalism and unnecessary in socialism, those dissatisfied with capitalism are better advised to work for socialism. This will provide the framework in which the problems they are concerned about can be lastingly solved since, with the common ownership of resources by society, the economic laws of capitalism which render reforms such as UBI impossible will no longer operate.

Adam Buick

Sci-Fi, Utopias and Socialism (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘We have described a World-in-which-we’d-love-to-live… The way we see it, this is a world where creative labour is the ultimate satisfaction and the source of happiness for people. Everything else is built on the foundation of this principle. People are happy there when they manage to actualise this main principle. Friendship, love and work are the three main pillars that support the happiness of such humankind. We could not imagine anything better than that, and why would we want to?’ Boris Strugatsky.

What kind of society would appeal to a socialist? What kind of life would we actually enjoy once the logic of capitalism driving the world of today releases its grip not only on the resources of Earth – material or human – but also on the minds of its inhabitants? I believe that in order to promote the socialist cause, we need to have a clearer understanding of answers to these questions. There is a caveat there, of course, that what is appealing to people today may not stay the same in the future.

Dystopias

I have to confess, I am a sucker for sci-fi. And when it comes to sci-fi, I am omnivorous, reading and watching anything I can get my hands on. There is probably a hidden yearning for a better future in this passion, as I am particularly interested in the fiction about Earth-like worlds, especially those that are more developed than ours. But I have recently noticed an interesting feature of the vast majority of the sci-fi visions of the future: they are overwhelmingly dark, presenting rather a failed world than a successfully developed civilisation. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or his post-World War II fascist America in The Man in the High Castle… Cyberpunk is a good example of a genre that produced enormous quantities of dark sci-fi works, and post-apocalyptic fiction writers have been prolific on this topic as well. Seems like the future people foresee in fiction as the most likely is not very bright at all. Beginnings like ‘after an ecological catastrophe wipes out most of humanity…’ or ‘It’s the future, and the planet is a dusty, radioactive wasteland…’ sound like a cliché in a film about the future. And technological breakthroughs gone horribly wrong are a really popular theme, with many examples brilliantly shown in the Black Mirror series.

Of course, there is a sub-genre that focuses specifically on the stories about ‘perfect’ worlds – Utopias. Ironically, when searching for utopias on Google, it is quite hard to find any – the search engine stubbornly shows ‘best dystopias’, and even articles on utopias often discuss mostly dystopian books and films. My first several ‘utopian books’ searches returned the Vulture’s 100 Great Works of Dystopian Fiction, Tales About A World Gone Wrong and a BBC article Science Fiction: How Not To Build A Future Society. Maybe a good drama needs suffering, and this is why tragedies have always enjoyed more popularity than comedies? Whatever the reason, the number of utopian worlds seems to be surprisingly small. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world?

There are some notable examples, such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. These and some other novels describe interesting social innovations, which are often very close to socialist ideals. For instance, the utopian world in Woman on the Edge of Time promotes such values as common ownership and (gender) equality; the inhabitants of the Walden Two community are free to choose their vocation and have no police force that could enforce their will through violence; and on the moon of Anarres in The Dispossessed, everyone is free to start their own productive enterprise, where there is no incentive to grow production or compete since there is no market, so all production is aimed solely to fulfil everyday needs.

While many ideas described in these and other books are worth discussing and thinking about, some details are questionable or even disturbing. For example, Skinner’s Walden community has a set of guardians who are somehow wiser than the ‘common people’. Skinner himself believed in the need for elitist rule: ‘We must delegate control of the population as a whole to specialists – to police, priests, teachers, therapies…’ (John Staddon, The New Behaviorism, 2014, p.125). The utopian agrarian community of Piercy’s Mattapoisett (Woman on the Edge of Time) shows a governmentally decentralised egalitarian society, mostly based on feminist and anarchist ideals. The world of Mattapoisett at times comes through as a fantasy, a feverish dream in the mind of a person in a mental institution under the influence of heavy tranquillisers, propelled by the feelings of powerlessness and grief. We are never told in the book if the visions the protagonist had are true or not. Would I want to live in Mattapoisett? Probably not. It seems quite focussed on offering the alternative to the patriarchal and exploitative capitalist ways of life, but more in the way of renouncing something negative rather than by offering something viable and attractive in its own right.

Importantly, it is still not clear on how this set of communities (or the one on Anarres in The Dispossessed) is supposed to work: both rely on self-governance and the structures of meeting and discussion, which might function well on the level of a town but certainly not a planet. Ursula Le Guin is perhaps more realistic in her novel, because Anarres in The Dispossessed is not shown as a Garden of Eden. It is a barren and dirty world, where life is decidedly hard for its inhabitants. Do any of them offer appealing visions of a socialist or a socialist-like world? They also have problems with their PDC (Production and Distribution Coordination), which exhibits some signs of government. In any case, it is probably not the best example to illustrate the advantages of a socialist society. But I guess my biggest problem with most utopias is that they simply don’t appeal to me; I wouldn’t want to live there myself.

I understand, writing utopias is hard. Unlike dystopias, it is not as simple as to show some horrors of destruction or societal decay (which could be easily borrowed from a daily tabloid). New ideas have to be created and, on top of this, put together in a coherent system that would look realistic. When thinking them up, authors would undoubtedly lean on their own life experiences, environment and cultural upbringing. For many of them, the best vision of a progressive society not corrupted by consumerism or greed would be inspired by communities in the countryside, or perhaps by stereotypes of preindustrial self-sufficient settlements. Many utopias share these elements of ‘environmental wisdom’ or even a pre-technological biblical paradise, for example, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, citizens aim for a balance between themselves and nature. Callenbach himself said of his book, in relation to Americans: ‘It is so hard to imagine anything fundamentally different from what we have now… [But] we’d better get ready. We need to know where we’d like to go.’

‘Noon Universe’

There are a couple of authors – two brothers – who borrowed their ideas from a different cultural environment: that of the post-war Soviet Union, and about how their utopian world came out different as a result.

The Strugatsky brothers, Boris and Arkady, wrote their books collaboratively. They needed to pass Soviet censorship in order to get published, so they came up with an ‘approved’ setting for many of their books, called ‘Noon Universe’, in which communism has triumphed globally. Of course, they both loathed the constraints of state capitalism and totalitarianism on the lives of Soviet people, so their utopias went much further, painting a world free of money or coercion – a world where they would themselves want to live and work. Most of those books were written in the 60s and 70s, but to this day a more compelling, believable fictional world of the future where people are happy and lead dynamic lives has yet to be written – at least in the Russian science-fiction literature.

The Noon Universe, named after Noon: 22nd Century, chronologically the first novel from the series, also features in the following books: Hard to Be a God, The Inhabited Island, Space Mowgli, Beetle in the Anthill, and The Time Wanderers, among others. To give you an idea of some features of the future social organisation Arkady and Boris Strugatsky presented in their Noon Universe, without giving away any spoilers, here is a brief overview:

• unequivocal victory of socialism: no monetary system, all production for common good
• absence of institutionalised coercion, such as police or military
• advanced technological progress, ubiquitous robotic assistance
• everyone is engaged in a profession that inspires them

This fairly common set of features then goes on, now with a somewhat different focus:

• the system of education is given utmost importance: students spend at least as much time or more at school than at home; they have very small class sizes and have personal Mentors that lead them on the path of learning about both the world and themselves; they must reach a high level of scientific knowledge, societal responsibility and creativity (arts and humanities)
• ethics/morality is given a very important role, on a par with technological competence
• a new kind of human (intellectually and ethically superior to most modern humans; importantly, much more socially responsible) is raised, who deeply cares about the planet and all its life forms, and is thus willing to both drive and accept societal progress

Finally, what makes this world both believable and appealing, is this combination of on the one hand a democratic and science-based social system without exploitation, and on the other, individuals raised to support such socialist society:

• this way of raising responsible individuals makes it possible to avoid coercion and resolve issues collaboratively, based on evidence and rationality
• this society does have some structure / governance where a number of meritocratic High Councils composed of the world’s leading scientists in each particular field of specialisation provide guidance and rules of functioning

Unfortunately, apart from The Gulag Archipelago, the legacy of Soviet literature is largely unknown in the Western cultural sphere, and the Noon Universe with its bright and highly optimistic vision of the future has not been popularised through films or comic books. I have tried to search for similar utopian universes in English or American books, or shown in films, but, as described in the beginning, found mostly dystopian sci-fi or stories of societies that went backwards ‘to the cradle of nature’ in their attempts to invent a fairer and wiser world. Perhaps the closest to the creation of the Strugatsky brothers comes the Earth in Star Trek: The Original Series, and even that is rife with militaristic and patriarchal themes.

From the vantage point of the 21st century, there are several issues that could also be improved in the Noon Universe, of course. For example, we might want to introduce some features of Marxist feminism and gender equality, and environmental considerations could have been described more convincingly. But the main features seem to all be there: technological progress comes hand in hand with societal progress, which is in turn driven by personal betterment of every member of that society. It might seem utopian, but I think it is fully socialist in spirit, more coherent and credible, and it really makes me want to step into that world and start living there right now.

(Talk given at the Socialist Party Summer School last month.)

Leon Rozanov

Blogger's Note:

There is some discussion of this talk over at the SPGB website.

Cooking the Books: QE didn’t work (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quantitative Easing (QE) was originally introduced by the Bank of England in 2009 with the aim of stimulating a revival of the economy after the Crash of 2008. The Bank bought government bonds, so increasing cash in the hands of the sellers. Depending on who they were, the idea was that they would either invest the money in their business or deposit it in their bank which would then have more money to lend.

It hasn’t worked like that, as a recent House of Lords report confirmed:

‘We conclude, on balance, that the evidence shows quantitative easing has had limited impact on growth and aggregate demand over the last decade. To stimulate economic growth and aggregate demand, quantitative easing is reliant on a series of transmission mechanisms that operate primarily in and through financial markets. There is limited evidence to suggest that these increase bank lending or investment, or boost consumer spending by wealthy asset holders’ (parliament.uk, paragraph 50 – bit.ly/3lOqDcG).

The Report did make the lesser claim that if QE didn’t make things better at least it stopped them getting worse, by helping to prevent ‘a reoccurrence of the Great Depression’ of the 1930s. This is pure speculation as there is no way of proving it since that might not have happened anyway, whereas that QE didn’t stimulate the economy is self-evident.

However, QE benefited some people:

‘the mechanisms through which quantitative easing effectively stabilised the financial system following the global financial crisis have benefited wealthy asset holders disproportionately by artificially inflating asset prices. On balance, we conclude that the evidence shows that quantitative easing has exacerbated wealth inequalities’ (paragraph 68).

By ‘asset prices’ their lordships did not mean the prices of the physical assets used in production such as plant and machinery but the prices of bonds and shares.

This is also the opinion of Catherine Mann, who has just been appointed to the committee that fixes the Bank Rate. She told the Houses of Commons Treasury Select Committee that financial markets:

‘have pocketed much of the recent stimulus (taking QE to £895 billion and rates to a record low of 0.1 percent) and left the real economy a few coins in loose change. Financial markets have absorbed monetary stimulus in “higher asset prices and greater financial stability risks … rather than transmitting [it] to the real economy” since QE became the Bank’s active policy, she said’ (Times, 27 July).

If she is suggesting that ‘wealthy asset holders’ deliberately refused to invest in producing more real wealth then she has got the wrong end of the stick. The reason the extra, cheap money made available by the Bank of England hasn’t found its way into productive investment is because it couldn’t all be invested at a sufficient profit. That is why it has been used instead on stock market gambling and speculation. As long as it is not profitable to invest the extra money, this situation won’t change. The capitalist economy is driven by business investment with a view to profit, not by abundant money or low interest rates.

Even if the government had spent the money directly into the real economy that would not have stimulated a revival but would have caused stagflation as in the 1970s. QE must have seemed a good idea as it avoided that, but it hasn’t worked as intended and has had the effect of enriching ‘wealthy asset holders’. That’s how it is. Governments can’t make capitalism work the way they want. They propose, but capitalism disposes.

Key work, key workers and shorter hours (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

One effect of the whole Covid experience was so many people discovering the concept of key workers. With the country locked down it was shown just how much work it took to keep the population supplied with food and energy. Of course, this was a reduction to the very core of economic activities, and many of the furloughed or otherwise-reduced occupations remain essential in the longer term. But the experience overall did shed some light on how we could restructure work if we were to rid ourselves of the requirement for each employee to make a profit for an employer.

One consequence of that approach to organising work is that a number of people find themselves working more intensively, while other people are thrown into enforced idleness. One of the goals of the socialist movement is to decrease the burden of work and win more time for us to freely live and meet with each other. That would be a truly meaningful increase in human freedom.

Capitalism has promised to help lift that burden. There is an inbuilt incentive for capitalists to reduce labour. Being able to produce the same products as their rivals with less labour (by employing more or better machinery) enables capitalists to make higher profits. The result of reducing labour though is not leisure, but unemployment, and with unemployment comes a fall in wages generally. That in turn opens up the possibility of making previously uneconomic activities profitable. For example, while automated car-washes are available, when labour is cheap enough, a hand wash becomes more economically viable.

At the turn of the last century, some 1.4 million people were employed in UK agriculture. These days there are some 400,000. The trend worldwide is for agriculture to be shrinking as a share of overall labour activity.

This points to the possibility of lightening the burden of work, generally. Of the 30 million people in employment in the UK, just over 1 percent are involved in producing food. Many more are involved in unnecessary occupations. 60,000 people are employed by the HMRC: a society of common ownership would have no need for taxes or taxation administration. Likewise, we’d have no need for 79,000 to work in the Department for Work and Pensions. For each of those people, at least as many are employed as tax accountants, finance planners and benefits advisers.

If we directly put our efforts into producing useful wealth – food, clothing, housing – then we could create an abundance without needing the cheeseparing restrictions on wealth that capitalism demands. So, that being said, we could free up many of the 3.7 million people employed in retail, who are only there to deny people access to the goods unless they pay. Obviously, stacking shelves and doing stock checks are essential tasks, so not all those people could be redeployed to other work: but many of them might also be part of the 2.5 million underemployed in the UK (that is, people who would work more hours if they could find them).

1.4 million people work in finances and pensions (beyond those involved in taxation above), almost all of whom could do more useful productive work if the opportunity presented itself. We could also add in the 149,000 or so vigorous and able people being kept out of productive work by being in the armed forces.

Of course, these figures are simply coming from the UK alone. If we expand the scope, we can see that there are 15 million unemployed in the EU. Socialism is necessarily a worldwide system, and so will be able to utilise all of the skills and talents of all those millions of people, and thus allow them to develop themselves. The end of borders and sharing the wealth of the world would mean that people could come together to get the most out of our natural resources.

Obviously, there are real world limits to how we can apply labour; we need the productive resources that can accommodate all this available labour. The availability of machinery, land and transport will still limit who can work where, along with educational resources and geography.

After all, we can’t move whole populations easily (nor would we want to) and any economic activity would require pleasant homes for the workers carrying them out, and adequate transport links (after all, would we want to keep the dreary experience of the daily commute? One outcome of Covid has been to free some people from that by promoting home working).

These will all still need administering and co-ordinating: not everyone can be doing the spade work. Instead of administering to make the most profit, they would be administering to reduce the burden of labour on everyone and ensure that everyone has access to the things they need.

For example, agriculture in the UK is currently administered via around 210,000 holdings. Each one of these must do its own accounts and paperwork (as well as compliance with regulations and environmental standards). There may well be good reasons (transport, environmental, etc.) to keep these as distinct holdings, and so, even with a reduced administrative burden, they may delimit how people can be deployed on the land most efficiently (and conversely, they could, much as when farmers buy or sell land today, be altered to make administration easier). To get the best out of this would require co-ordination.

That is why common ownership matters and can be the only basis on which we can get ourselves meaningful freedom. We can all become key workers, so that, by sharing the necessary burden of keeping society running, we can all also benefit from the free time that would result. People ask why would anyone work in socialism without wages or salaries? One answer is that if we can, say, reduce the working week to a couple of days each, why wouldn’t anyone work to secure their own and their friends and family’s access to the means to continue to be able to live well?

Pik Smeet

Superstitions (2021)

Book Review from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Superstition. A Very Short Introduction. By Stuart Vyse. Oxford University Press. 140 pages.

Superstition is basically a belief in magic, that future events can be influenced by invoking or placating some mysterious force. On one level it is relatively harmless, as in the case of lucky charms, star signs, and not walking under a ladder.

Vyse shows that it has a more sinister history. In the West for over 1500 years superstition meant practices that tried to invoke mysterious forces other than those of the dominant religion, which led to those involved being persecuted and/or tortured. He cites the case of Ancient Rome where, when there was an emperor who believed in the traditional Roman gods, Christianity was denounced as a superstition. But, when an emperor embraced Christianity and proclaimed it as the state religion, the boot was on the other foot and the old religious practices became superstition. In fact, both were based on the supposed existence of mysterious forces (gods, angels, demons, spirits of the dead). Superstition is not just part of religion but other practices such as fortune telling, curses and consulting astrologers.

From the 16th century onwards Protestants denounced the practices of the Roman Catholic Church as superstitions, but they still retained some, such as the belief in God and the Devil and that praying to their god could work; and they engaged in more witch-hunting than the Catholics.

The next step was the rise of Science which led to some regarding all religion as superstition. Vyse is reluctant to go along with this, letting religion off lightly despite the fact that the two religions most followed in the world – Catholicism and Islam – encourage and justify superstitious practices, the former in particular. He sees the main problem today as superstition as ‘bad science’ based on unproven mysterious physical forces as in homeopathy, acupuncture and other quack remedies.

Vyse is a psychologist and discusses why some individuals are superstitious. One theory is that it has to do with a feeling of not being in control while personal superstitious practices (gestures, lucky numbers, etc) give an illusion of control. He cites experiments which have indicated this, with superstitions being more prevalent amongst women and the worst off. If so, this would mean there would be a lot less superstition in a socialist society.

Adam Buick

Economics: Theory of Rent (part 2) (1975)

From the April 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to part 1

Generally speaking, commodities sell at their price of production. This is calculated by the amount of the total capital involved in their production — constant capital (machinery, materials, etc.); variable capital (wages); plus a profit. Through the action of competing capitals an average rate of profit is formed, and all capitals, usefully employed, whatever the field of investment, will generally obtain the average.

This means that the range of goods produced by these capitals will sell at average prices appropriate to their classification as use-values. For instance, similar-quality bread produced by one baker would not alter dramatically in price from that of another baker, although their individual prices of production may be different. The amount of profit is the difference between the cost of production and the average price of production, which is not determined by individual prices, but by a socially determined price based on socially-necessary labour which regulates the market. Socially- necessary labour is not measured industry by industry.

It should be borne in mind that no capitalist manufacturing concern by itself produces commodities or value; products only become commodities when they come into contact with other commodities which provide their social equivalent. This means they all contain social labour — the labour of society. The individual labour which has gone into the production of groups of commodities forms part of the social labour. The value of commodities is determined by the amount of social labour, measured in time, and they exchange with one another according to the amount or proportion of this social labour vested in them. It is not individual producers who determine the proportion, but society generally. The realization of the market price (value) of a commodity depends purely on social interaction without regard to the nature of the commodities, whether they be agricultural products, motor cars, pig-iron or coal. Commodities can only average this price of production with reference to the whole field of commodities, and the total social capital, and cannot realize their price of production in groups isolated from other groups.

If we assumed that all commodities sell at their price of production, and that all capitals secured the average rate of profit, there would be no rent available for the landlord. As land in itself does not form part of the social cost of production, it cannot have any influence on the rate of profit. Therefore, rent must come from a profit over and above the average rate of profit — in effect a surplus profit. The individual cost of production for most capitalists within particular industries are generally the same, pro rata to the capital invested. The larger firms may be more efficient, although this is not always the case. Wage rates are regionally and nationally determined, and the cost of materials, machinery, etc. and the other elements of constant capital are similar. This will establish a general average cost of production.

Let us assume that a few factories within a certain country, because of their location are able to drive their machinery with the use of natural hydro power, whereas the great majority of other factories have to use electricity in the production of their commodities. Suppose that for every £100 unit of capital expended the factories using electricity make a profit of £15. The average price of production of the commodities in that case would be £115. (We are ignoring for the moment any temporary fluctuation of the market or any other accidental factors.) Assume that the factory using water power could produce the same quantity of commodities in the same time, but that instead of using a unit of £100 capital they need only use a unit of £90, because the water power was provided by a natural force, and not having to buy electricity they managed to save £10, this brings their production costs down to the £90 referred to above.

In effect, through the use of this force they were able to produce the same amount of commodities with less capital. In the normal way their commodities would contain less value than those of the capitalists using electricity, because less social labour was involved in their production. But the average price of production is based on the socially-necessary labour of the whole of society, not of individual factories. The majority of factories using electricity determine the price of production, because all commodities can only realize their value by acting as equivalents to each other over the whole field of commodity production, and not in separate compartments.

Individual industries do not produce commodities as value; it is society at large which creates the commodity form (e.g. a tailor produces a coat. He does not produce the exchange-value of a coat — that is socially determined.) The capitalist using water power, would, therefore, be able to sell his commodities at an average price of production, i.e. £115 — the same as the others. In that case, he would receive a surplus of £25 per unit of capital, an excess of £10 over all the other capitalists who had to buy electricity. This is a surplus profit; a profit over and above the average rate of profit, and this fact directly arises because the conditions under which he used his capital were more favourable; his exclusive use of the natural force denied to other capitalists, and which could not be reproduced by them and consequently was not at their command. Capital can reproduce electricity at will, but you cannot reproduce a natural waterfall or the land upon which it flows.

In the same way, capital cannot reproduce land, and therefore the landowner holds a position of monopoly. In the final reckoning, the surplus profit of the capitalist using water power was due entirely to this force — something which had no value because no labour had entered into its production, as with all natural power. The labour of harnessing this natural power would add value, and this is taken into account. Nevertheless, the cost of harnessing and supplying electricity has been shown to be greater, and it is this difference in cost which constitutes the surplus profit.

Inevitably the owner of the land over which the river or waterfall flowed would require payment for permission for the use of the land which contained the natural force, otherwise he would forbid its use. If the capitalist were to part with the surplus profit of £10 out of the £25, he had received, to the land- owner, that would constitute a ground rent. He would have, in effect, transferred his surplus profit to the landlord. At the end of the day he would have earned a profit of £15, the same as the body of capitalists who used electricity. If he owned the land it would make no difference to the formation of the ground rent. In that case he would retain the surplus profit of £10 in his capacity as landlord and not as an industrial capitalist, because the surplus profit was not due to his capital as such but to a natural force which he has monopolized.

It is evident that any capitalist who is able to use a natural force based on land, whether it be hydro power, naturally fertile land, natural pasture-land, land where the climate is more favourable, and other natural attributes, will be able to cut down his production cost below that of his fellow capitalists who are not in a similar position. He will always be in a position of earning a surplus profit over the average rate of profit, which he transfers to the landlord by way of ground rent for permission to use the land in question.

Agriculture and mining dominate the use of land. The degree of fertility of the soil and the potential mineral wealth will determine the amount of rent. But the existence of rent is due to the use of the land itself. There is an erroneous view held by the Labour Party and other left-wing parties that if you nationalize land you abolish rent. In fact, at no time has any Labour government taken any action to abolish ground rent. The object of the present Land Nationalization Bill is to curtail by taxation the profits of the landlords the price of whose land has risen because of planning and other consents — external factors. In other words, an attempt to prevent landowners from consuming the whole fruits of social progress instead of sharing it with their brother capitalists whose interests are represented by the State.

This makes no difference at all to the formation of ground rent, nor would it make any difference if all ground rent were paid to the State. It would mean that all land was owned by the State and has been taken from the private owners. How this came to pass, whether by nationalization with compensation or by confiscation does not matter. In point of fact, the State is inevitably the largest landlord in any country, and the State is the embodiment of all capitalists’ interests. It is a fallacy to assume that the State or local authority will act differently from private landlords and refrain from levying a ground rent.

At the moment, the Government owns directly, or through the nationalized industries, over 5¼ million acres of land. There are 345,000 acres of Crown Estates; 183,000 acres Church Commissioners; 248,000 acres National Coal Board (50 per cent, farm land); 220,000 acres British Rail (Sunday Times, 2nd February 1975):

The new landlords are operating on strictly commercial terms . . . the tenant farmers have Crown Estates, the Treasury, and tough minded agents for landlords.

(Wiltshire: Sunday Times 2nd Feb.)

The Crown Estates are one of the biggest landlords in London, owning large blocks of flats and houses in Regent’s Park and Kensington. If anything, the rents charged are higher than those of a private landlord, and furthermore Crown property is not subject to the application of Rent Acts, and courts and Rent Officers have no power to fix “fair rents”. According to the agricultural correspondent of the Daily Telegraph: “Tenant farmers occupy about 40 per cent, of the country’s holdings and farm nearly half of the agricultural land.” Rents vary from £30 per acre for good land to £12 per acre for other land. (Daily Telegraph 28th February 1975).

As the total amount of agricultural land in England and Wales is 27.2 million acres (Min. of Agriculture statistics 1972), tenant farmers alone pay an average of £260 millions rent annually for the use of the 13.6 million acres. The formation of rent over the whole 27.2 million acres would amount to approx. £540 million by present rent levies. Practically the whole of London is in the hands of ground landlords, both public and (very) private family trusts. The colossal amount of wealth which is appropriated annually in rent comes solely from the surplus value produced by the working class. Every advance in agricultural science, every intensification of the use of land, is of direct benefit to those parasites who have literally inherited the earth. In the same way, every advance in technology and science generally is appropriated for the benefit of their industrial capitalist brethren.

If human rights mean anything, they mean the right of every man, woman and child to the best possible existence society can provide. Freedom from paying rent, selling labour-power, and producing surplus value for a wealthy group of international idlers. Capitalist society simply cannot cope with the multifarious social problems which it has created because of the restrictive social relations which hold it together. Socialism is an urgent necessity, and working men and women everywhere must devote their thoughts and energies to its establishment through the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

Jim D'Arcy