Bird’s Eye View: War without end (2022)

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

War without end

One hundred years after the war to end all wars (1914-18) started, Russia’s current war against Ukraine began. February’s major escalation has made it the largest war in Europe since the end of WW2. The mass exodus of millions of children, women, and men too old to be conscripted is similarly record breaking. In 1914 we were told that German ‘militarism’ had to be rebuffed and ‘plucky little Belgium’ supported. Today we are told by the US Ambassador to UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, that ‘There can be no fence-sitters in this crisis’ (pl.usembassy.gov, 21 February) and are encouraged to #StopRussia and #StandWithUkraine. But the truth is wars are always and only waged for largely commercial reasons – access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic positions from which to defend them all. ‘Russia’s president knows exactly what he wants, and it’s not eastern Ukraine. His interests are all about oil and gas and supply routes. The rest is smoke and mirrors’ (Daily Beast, 1 March 2015, bit.ly/3M0FAmK). Socialists oppose all capitalist wars, so-called ‘progressive wars’ or struggles for national liberation. Workers have no country. ‘Russia’s 500 Super Rich Wealthier Than Poorest 99.8% ‘ (Moscow Times, 10 June 2021, bit.ly/3M0FAmK). Similarly, ‘in total, the top 100 wealthiest business people in Ukraine control around $44.5 billion, according to Forbes, which accounts for 27% of Ukrainian GDP in September, 2021’ (en.wikipedia.org, bit.ly/3wmpmiz). Indeed elsewhere, ‘since the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, the combined wealth of the 650 American billionaires has increased by nearly $1 trillion’ (commondreams.org, 30 November 2020, bit.ly/3L4dypj). The overwhelming non-owning majority, those who do the fighting and the dying, effectively get nothing. Would any worker, apprised of this, raise even a paintball gun? Hence the need for Wilfred Owen’s ‘old lie’: ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’.

Class war

‘Would you stay and fight or leave the country? A bare majority, 55 percent, said they would stay and fight, while 38 percent said they would leave. “When confronted with a terrible hypothetical that would put them in the shoes of the Ukrainians, Americans say they would stand and fight rather than seek safety in another country,” said Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy. That’s one way to spin it, I guess. For me, the fact that just under half of my friends and neighbors would hypothetically abandon their homeland and all it stands for in the face of a foreign invader is less than encouraging. Many people don’t even seem to have hypothetical patriotism, let alone fortitude. Further disheartening is that the youngest Americans, those ages 18-34 and most physically capable, were even less likely to stay and fight. Only 45% said they would remain, while 48 percent would flee’ (postbulletin.com, 17 March,).

Less than encouaging? Disheartening? Not at all! We said at the ‘start of WW1 ‘…that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood’ (Socialist Standard, September 1914). Let the capitalists fight it out themselves:

‘SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is offering to fight Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that if he wins, Putin will have to withdraw his military forces from Ukraine. “I hereby challenge Владимир Путин to single combat,” Musk tweeted, using Cyrillic in an apparent bid to make sure Putin understood him. He added, “Stakes are Україна” — Ukraine’ (dailymail.co.uk, 14 March).

War and want

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, to eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide an adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. ‘Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Feb 27th proposal to ramp up defense expenditures by tens of billions of euros, spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine, has defense officials in Berlin scrambling to identify spending opportunities that promise fast results, according to several company officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations’ (yahoo.com, 11 March).

Hypersonic

‘Russia unleashed nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles for the first time ever in combat, obliterating an ammunition depot in western Ukraine, its defense ministry said Saturday, as embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky made an urgent plea for “meaningful and fair” peace talks and the strategic port city of Mariupol was on the precipice of falling to the invaders’ (nypost.com, 19 March).

No WW4

‘”The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ (axios.com, March 14).

Rosa Luxemburg offered us a prescription in 1918: ‘During the four years of the imperialist slaughter of peoples, streams and rivers of blood have flowed. Now we must cherish every drop of this precious juice as in a crystal glass. The most sweeping revolutionary action and the most profound humanity—that is the true spirit of socialism. A whole world is to be changed. But every tear that is shed, when it could have been staunched, accuses us’ (marxists.architexturez.net). 

Friends for Life (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity. By Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods. Oneworld £10.99.

The title is a reference to the ‘survival of the fittest’, Charles Darwin’s alternative formulation of the idea of natural selection. This raises the issue of how fitness is measured: it is sometimes seen as a matter of physical strength, intelligence and power, and some racists even regard it as a justification for white supremacy. Here, however, Hare and Woods argue that it is friendliness and co-operation that have led to humans’ evolutionary fitness. The argument is in some ways similar to that of Rutger Bregman in Humankind (discussed in the May 2021 Socialist Standard), though the evidence here is more based on human (pre)history and psychological experiments, rather than discussion of human behaviour in the real world.

The essential concept here is that of self-domestication: ‘natural selection acted on our species in favour of friendlier behavior that enhanced our ability to flexibly cooperate and communicate … we thrived not because we got smarter, but because we got friendlier.’ Female preference for male friendliness is claimed to have caused a friendlier society to evolve. Other human species besides sapiens went extinct since they could not co-operate and communicate in the same way. Friendliness resulted in larger social networks and hence better technology, which meant bigger groups and even better technology, in a positive feedback loop. Human self-domestication happened before eighty thousand years ago. Dogs and bonobos are also ‘built for cooperative communication’, but chimps are not.

However, there is a negative side to the formation of larger groups of people: outsiders can be treated with fear and even aggression. They may even be dehumanised, considered less than fully human, and simianised (looked on as similar to apes). This occurred as part of the justification for the slave trade, and one recent study of Americans found that Muslims were regarded as only 90 percent fully human by the group tested. Dehumanisation seems to be central to explaining why some people do terrible things, along with obedience to authority and a desire to conform (note that all this is in the context of a society that sets people against each other). But contact with other groups reduces conflict, by removing the sense of threat and increasing empathy.

Unfortunately among this presentation is a truly bizarre claim that ‘communists’ (who support ‘extreme forms of egalitarianism’) and anarchists are dehumanisers. Naturally no explanation or justification is offered for this.

On the whole, though, this is a worthwhile account of aspects of human evolution, where co-operation and friendliness have played a crucial role in making modern-day humans such an intelligent and technologically-advanced species, with the potential to live in a world of equality where all needs are met.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Russian gold (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Bank of Russia has resumed gold purchases this week, but more importantly, the regulator is doing so at a fixed price of 5,000 rubles ($59) per 1 gram between March 28 and June 30, raising the possibility of Russia returning to the gold standard for the first time in over a century,’ RT reported on 2 April (bit.ly/3juJTda)

This led to speculation that, in a further bid to get round Western sanctions, Russia’s next move might be to require all its exports be paid in roubles that would in effect link their price to the price of gold. This would not be a return to the gold standard that existed up until 1914 but would be more like what the US did up until 1971 when it agreed to buy gold at $35 an ounce. This was part of the ‘gold exchange’ system where other currencies had a fixed rate of exchange with the dollar and so were linked to gold that way.

The US decision to end this in 1971 led to the present era of floating exchange rates where rates go up and down depending on the demand for a particular currency to pay for imports or to invest abroad. In practice the dollar remained the main, but by no means the only, ‘reserve currency’ as the currency in which central banks held money for their country’s international transactions.

The West’s decision to deny the Bank of Russia access to its dollar reserves may be more significant than anything Russia might do. It will be a signal to other countries that holding dollars is not as safe as they assumed and may lead them to find alternatives, even to rely more on gold. It could be the beginning of another change in the international payments system.

The previous regime in Russia – the one that came to power in November 1917 with the Bolshevik coup d’état – also toyed with the idea of a gold rouble. Trotsky, who considered himself the leader, albeit in exile, of a within-the-system opposition to the Stalin government, was an advocate of this. In an article published in English in 1935 entitled ‘If America Should Go Communist’ (bit.ly/3xjYJuS), he affirmed his belief that a gold-based currency was best:

‘Your “radical” professors are dead wrong in their devotion to “managed money”. It is an academic idea that could easily wreck your entire system of distribution and production. That is the great lesson to be derived from the Soviet Union, where bitter necessity has been converted into official virtue in the monetary realm. There the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes.’

Trotsky mistakenly believed that Russia, even under Stalin, was in a transition from capitalism to socialism and that, during the transition, money was needed, ideally linked to gold. He was, however, aware that socialism would be a moneyless society, but that was only for the dim and distant future:

‘Only when socialism succeeds in substituting administrative control for money will it be possible to abandon a stable gold currency. Then money will become ordinary paper slips, like trolley or theater tickets. As socialism advances, these slips will also disappear, and control over individual consumption – whether by money or administration – will no longer be necessary when there is more than enough of everything for everybody!’

What he failed to realise was that the very existence, due to ‘bitter necessity,’ for money in the Russian economy showed that it was still a capitalist economy. It wasn’t in a transition to socialism. If anything, the state capitalism that existed there in his time was a transition to the more classic type of capitalism that existed in the West, and which largely came into being when the old USSR collapsed in 1991.

Mutual Aid (2022)

by Clifford Harper

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a discussion on the Russian anarchist Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin. The focus was not primarily on his political advocacy, rather it was his book Mutual Aid: a factor of evolution that was the object of consideration.

Published a couple of years before the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded, it is an examination of the role cooperation and mutuality has played in evolution. There was an aggressive strain of Darwinism, personified by Darwin’s bulldog, T.H. Huxley, which emphasised the war of all against all as the motive force behind natural selection.

This view has often been deployed as justification for capitalism being the expression of self-interest as the prime motivation of human economic, political and social relations. It has been a persistent theme, running from Hobbes’s Leviathan, that seemed to draw biological justification from Darwin’s work.

In common parlance, this thinking is often expressed as socialism being a nice idea, but against human nature. If evolution depends on natural selection being driven only by self-regarding motives, then socialists are setting themselves against nature.

Kropotkin however, along with many, many others internationally, insisted that it was this brutalist view that disregarded the actuality of nature. Rather than begin by justifying human potential for cooperation, which might have been regarded as a plea for human exceptionalism, his approach was to examine nature more broadly to see if there was evidence of mutuality being fundamental.

His was no sentimental view of nature, as is demonstrated in the opening lines of the Introduction. ‘Two aspects of animal life impressed me most… One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies’.

This is the antithesis of unbridled idealism, a realistic view based on his own extensive travels, experience and observation. The second aspect arising from his observations is telling:

‘…even in those spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists… as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.’

Then, chapter by chapter, he goes on to demonstrate how it is mutuality amongst animals of the same species that is the primary, and crucial, factor in survival and evolution. He begins with invertebrates and progresses through ants, bees, birds to mammals.

On reaching humans he presents what evidence there is that cooperation in the Palaeolithic period was a necessity for survival in a hostile world, continuing to be so in both the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Primitive communism was not some fancy of Marx and Engels.

He goes on to trace this important feature of human life as it expressed itself, often in adverse political situations, from pre-history into history itself, into the medieval free cities and guilds. He cites examples of insurgent warriors taking land by force who eventually swapped spears for spades and operated cooperative farming communities.

Even in the 19th century he found expressions of mutuality in village communities and the nascent labour movement, although it is through the 19th century and the rise of industrial capitalism that private property became predominant and protected by the state. The mutual gave way to the individual.

While Mutual Aid is an anarchist constructing a scientific basis for communism rather than the historical materialism of Marx, the two approaches are surely not exclusive. Marx gives an understanding of how we arrived at the society we have and identifies the mechanism for change, the conscious action of the working class acting on its own behalf. The object being the establishment of a worldwide socialist system based on meeting need not profit. The question as to its viability will undoubtedly continue to be raised until socialism is actually realised.

Kropotkin indicates that rather than being alien to nature, biology demonstrates the contrary. Modern research and observation has found cooperation to be fundamental in nature. Plants provide each other with nutrients, fish groom each other for parasites, ants work together to build nests, bees sacrifice their lives for the good of the hive and predators hunt in packs.

Evolution requires groups of organisms to act together for mutual benefit. In 2016, research using a new conceptual evolutionary model at Tomsk State University was published. Competition and the struggle for existence were found not to be the main drivers of evolution. Rather, the avoidance of competition is important (bit.ly/3xkTOK9).

So, Kropotkin is vindicated by research in the land of his birth, as well as research more widely throughout the world. His own book refers to many researchers and observers from a plethora of nationalities, just as he draws evidence from every continent. By doing so he not only makes the case for mutuality, but also demonstrates human progress to be a global phenomenon, as socialism, as the practical realisation of mutuality, must be.

This book review might seem to be 120 years late, but not so. There is an abiding interest in the premise of Kropotkin’s argument and it continues to have a resonance for those advocating a radical alternative to capitalism.

Eighty years after Mutual Aid was published Stephen Jay Gould’s essay (1988), Kropotkin Was No Crackpot (marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm) examines the controversy around the meaning for society of Darwinism at the turn of the Twentieth century.

Gould expresses how seemingly contradictory positions do not have to be polarised: ‘Reproductive success … works in many modes. Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis and mutual aid may also secure success…’

He goes on to outline Kropotkin’s work, setting it in the mainstream of Russian thinking as exemplified by N.I. Danilevsky whose expertise in both population dynamics and fisheries led him to critique Darwinism as ‘…the credo of a distinctly British ‘national type’ as contrasted with old Slavic values of collectivism.’ The ‘national type’ he referred to was the line of thought running from Hobbes through Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus, the developing philosophy of capitalism.

In September 2021, to mark the centenary year of his death, PM Press/Kairos published a new edition of Mutual Aid with a new Forward, Introduction, Afterword and Postscript. Some of the terminology is anachronistic – references to savages and red Indians – but it is of its day. When he uses such nomenclature, it is not to disparage, rather to show mutuality to be universal.

Those who would change society need to counter assertions rendered as indisputable facts, such as competition is fundamental to human nature. What Mutual Aid demonstrates, along with subsequent biological research showing cooperation at the cellular level is vital for organic development, is that advocacy of a system based on people voluntarily contributing their abilities so all can receive according to their needs is not utopianism, but natural. Mutual aid indeed.

Dave Alton

Voice From The Back: Class War (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class War

War may be hell, but so is work. Managers now double their chances of a heart attack a week after they fire an employee. For the first time, according to a report in the journal Circulation, significant events at work have been tied to heart attacks “In order to negotiate with employees, we treat them as opponents,” says Dr Joseph Loizzo of New York’s Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. “It’s the kind of thing that happens in warfare, in combat . . .” “These things take a toll,” says Loizzo, who recommends such de-stressing techniques as yoga, meditation and prayer. An even easier solution: Hire your own hatchet man. Financial Mail on Sunday, 19 April.

Creating superhumans

“My fear with genetic engineering very simply is one of the things I try to bring out in my book [Remaking Eden, Weidenfeld, £20]: that it won’t be available to everybody. It will cause greater social injustice. That’s my real fear,” he [Lee Silver] says. “I don’t think it is going to be used terribly: I think it is going to be used to prevent disease. The problem is—in the US—that it is going to be controlled by the market-place. And I am very cynical about the market-place. That’s my fear about genetic engineering. It is so powerful, it is so good, it will only be available to those who have money.” Guardian online, 16 April.

Big Brother

The existence of Echelon was officially acknowledged for the first time two months ago in a report, Assessing the Technologies of Political Control, commissioned by the European parliament’s Civil Liberties Commission. It stated “Within Europe, all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the US National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, Yorkshire. Financial Mail on Sunday, 1 March.

Alarm

Clergy are to be offered a new device for their protection—a crucifix with an integral alarm. Avon Silversmiths plans to launch the product, which costs £169, at the annual National Christian Resources Exhibition next month. One tug is said to be enough to activate the device. Times, 13 April.

Unite for work

A salesman’s damages award has been doubled to £320,000 because a road accident made him a “better person” and he lost the aggression necessary for his job. Charles Cornell suffered serious brain injuries in the accident on the M11 in Essex in 1991 which left him with a “a more pleasant personality”, Lord Justice Stuart Smith said in the Court of Appeal. Although friends and relatives thought the change was for the better, his less aggressive manner robbed him of his thrusting nature and he was now unemployable in a reputable sales force. Evening Mail, 21 March.

Global capital diplomacy

The Multilateral Agreement on Investment, which will ease rules for global capital flow, has been in negotiations since late 1995. Its advocates argue it will promote investment flows that help promote economic growth and technology transfers, and so enable poor countries to catch up with rich ones. To its enemies, it is a charter for multinational companies to observe minimum environmental or labour standards, while giving them the right to sue governments who harm their interests. Guardian online, 16 April.

God embraces Mammon

Canon Raymond Rodger, personal assistant to the Right Rev Robert Hardy, Bishop of Lincoln, and who has helped to set up the first masters degree in church management at Lincoln, said the notion of the Cross becoming a brand image was useful. “It is our job to extract the best that successful corporations have to offer and use it in our context,” he said. “We have to think in terms of exceeding customer delight. What we have to offer is the glory of God, and we have got to give the very best service to our customers in terms of added value and value for money that we can. Our product is quite simply allowing people to come closer to God.” Times, 13 April.

Our society of hatred

When the Nazis invaded in 1941, the Jewish population of Lithuania—the home of their community for 600 years—numbered about 250,000. Four years alter, 200,000 had been murdered in cold blood by Nazi Einsatzkommandos, assisted by numerous and, by some accounts, enthusiastic Lithuanian auxiliaries. Almost all were foully killed within 10 weeks of the Nazi blitzkrieg. The remnant who survived were kept alive as “work jews”, escaped, or were hidden by all too few “righteous gentiles”. The Lithuanian and Latvian Jewish Communities, we learn, “had more of their people killed in the Holocaust, proportionally, than any others in Europe.” Guardian, 16 April (Review of Heshel’s Kingdom by Dan Jacobson).

Don’t tell them!

Powerful American business interests want to stop British supermarkets telling consumers which products contain genetically engineered ingredients . . . US commodity firms are threatening to complain to the World Trade Organisation in Geneva, claiming that labelling by European companies is an obstacle to free trade. Financial Mail on Sunday, 19 April.

From work to welfare and back (1998)

From the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

At one time the Labour Party wanted to reform capitalism into something different and better. Now it isn’t even a genuine reformist party but, in its thinking as well as its practice, is continuing the Thatcherite counter-reformation of whittling away state benefits.

“A new contract that will lift people out of dependence and into dignity” was how Frank Field, the Minister for Welfare Reform, described the proposals in the Labour government’s Green Paper New Ambitions for Our Country–A New Welfare Contract, published at the end of March.

The best form of welfare, declared Field, was work. Everybody able to do so had a duty to work and the Labour government would take steps to ensure that three groups in particular—young people, single parents and the long-term unemployed—fulfilled this duty. Of course it wasn’t presented quite as bluntly as this but in the form of offering these groups the “opportunity” to work and of “helping” them to overcome their “dependence” on state benefits. It was clear all the same that Article I of the new “contract” the Labour government was proposing them reads: Either you take a job or we cut your benefit.

Field was in effect saying that it is better for the poor to be dependent on an employer rather than on the state. But why? To Socialists both forms of dependency are equally undignified, an expression of the fact that in capitalist society the propertyless majority only have a choice of who to depend on for the source of the money they must have to buy what they need to live. What we want is a society in which nobody will be in this position, but where everybody co-operates to produce what is needed and then everybody has access as of right to the common store of wealth to satisfy their needs, a society of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”.

Field, on the other hand, as a manager of the political side of capitalism, has a different point of view. From his perspective, it is better that the poor should be dependent on some employer for an income rather than on the state, for the simple reason that this is cheaper for the state and saving money on welfare benefits is the name of the game.

What Field was announcing was a policy aimed at shifting as much as possible of the burden of maintaining the poor from the state to employers. This has two aspects. First, forcing the able-bodied poor to take any job, however shitty and however low-paid, by threatening to cut their benefits. Second, if the wages are too low, making them up to the poverty line by payments either to the employer or to the person. Subsidising low-pay employers in this way will still cost the state some money but far less than the present system, so Field and his team of accountants at the Department of Social Security have calculated.

This does represent a change of policy, but is one forced on all capitalist governments, irrespective of their political colour, by the workings of the capitalist economic system. Capitalism runs on the profits made in the profit-seeking sector of the economy and most of the state’s income comes from these profits, either through taxation or through borrowing. The state is in this sense parasitic on the profit-seeking sector and when this latter is in difficulty, as it has been since the long post-war boom came to an end in 1973, the state has had to trim its spending.

This is why all capitalist states have experienced a more or less permanent budgetary crisis since the middle of the 1970s. The main consequence of this for ordinary people has been a continual whittling away of the reform measures that existed up until then. This was the policy of the Thatcher administration who carried it out under the ideology of “anti-socialism” by which was meant undoing everything the post-war Labour government had done. This policy is being continued by the present Labour government because, given the economic circumstances, as Thatcher put it, “there is no alternative”.

Christian doctrine

The only difference is one of tone and style. Thatcher and her ministers arrogantly expressed the contempt the ruling class has always had for the lower orders by denouncing the poor as work-shy scroungers. Blair and his ministers preach to the poor that they have a duty to work in accordance with the Christian doctrine that, because Adam and Eve dared to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, all humans have been sentenced by God to hard labour for life. The Tories just cut benefits to the poor but Labour tells them that if they don’t work they won’t get to heaven either.

There was a time when the Labour Party’s ideal was to shift the source of people’s income away from work and more and more towards as-of-right payments from the state. The more daring of their thinkers looked forward to a time when, in return for some socially useful work, everybody would be guaranteed a decent income by the state sufficient to meet their needs. They saw this as coming about as a result of the extension of the system of transfer payments to parents, pensioners, the unemployed, the sick and disabled which already existed. It was an argument that the way forward lay through more, not less, of people’s income being provided by the state.

It was a reformist proposal in the classic sense of the term—a suggested way of gradually transforming existing capitalist society into something different. It was never going to work (since taxing profits to pay people a decent income goes against the whole logic of the capitalist system) and it hasn’t, but at least it represented a view that things don’t have to be as they are. The present Labour government not only disagrees with this classic reformist strategy but wants to move—and is bringing in measures to move—in the opposite direction: away from income-through-the state back to income-from-jobs.

The harsh reality of governing capitalism long ago led to Labour accepting the logic of the profit system. In practice all Labour governments have done this but it has now led to Labour embracing its ideology as well. The Labour Party was set up to try to reform capitalism into something better for workers but it now merely aspires to make capitalism work more efficiently by its own criteria of profitability and competitiveness. Instead of the Labour Party changing capitalism, it is capitalism that has changed the Labour Party.

Adam Buick