Life and Times: The legal drama (2022)

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

There’s a trendy bar in my area which displays greetings and various other comments on its front hoarding so that they can be read by everyone going past. They sometimes cause a bit of a stir and a recent one certainly did. Large block capital letters said ‘AMBER IS IN DEPP SHIT’. It was a reference of course to the celebrity legal case in the US between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Most people will have cast it out of their minds by now, but the reactions it provoked show just how indicative matters like this are of the interests and priorities of many ordinary people in the kind of society we live in.

Nasty

Polls taken at the time suggested that many Americans were more interested in this legal drama than the war in Ukraine or what was being called a potentially historic ruling on abortion expected from the US Supreme Court. Each twist and turn of the trial, televised and livestreamed, was watched by millions of people, and many turned to social media, mainly to express support for Depp and vilify Heard. Heard declared that, apart from intense mockery, she faced hundreds of daily death threats, while on the TikTok platform the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp got around 19 billion views.

Locally to me, after the sign in the trendy bar was discussed on my local community Facebook page, the page was flooded with further comments. So many in fact that, after just an hour, the page administrator turned off further comments on the grounds that it was ‘getting nasty’.

In the event, as readers will know, the prediction on the bar sign turned out correct, with Heard ordered to pay Depp some $10M for defamation. As the verdict was announced, screams and chants of ‘Johnny, Johnny, Johnny’ erupted outside the court and Heard announced herself ‘heartbroken’. Yet the verdict was a surprise to many people, given that, in a similar legal process between the same two parties in the UK not long before, the verdict had gone in her favour. In the US court Depp’s legal team was said to have used a common defence tactic in sexual assault and domestic violence cases known as ‘Darvo’, meaning ‘deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender’. This strategy turns the tables on the victim, shifting the conversation away from ‘did the accused commit abuse’ to ‘is the alleged victim believable’. This tactic is said to be often effective in trials involving domestic violence where juries can be persuaded that a female victim is herself guilty. This is said to happen less when the trial is in front of a judge alone, as happened in the UK, rather than with a jury. The judge will apparently better understand the tactic being used and so is less likely to be emotionally affected by the proceedings and more likely to take a sober, objective view of the evidence. Whether or not ‘Darvo’ was used to deliver the wrong verdict, there’s no question that Heard was convicted in the court of public opinion.

Meaningless thrills

What to make of this? A recent book with the subtitle ‘A Manifesto for a Life Beyond Capitalism’ talks about how ‘distraction technologies and the entertainment industry sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’. And this seems an apt characterisation of the spectacle this trail offered to the public. One commentator remarked that the televising of the trial turned it into ‘almost a sports game’. People’s avid immersion in this spectacle does indeed seem reminiscent of the vicarious worshipping of, say, a football team or a tennis player that so many engage in, such worship serving as welcome relief from everyday lives of utter mundanity spent largely in the sale of their energies to an employer. If, in the sport context, the team or the player they support wins, they feel it as a victory for themselves, a form of power uncommon in a life usually experienced as powerless. It’s not hard to see a similar process operating in the act of following a public trial involving celebrities and of supporting one against the other. It provides an interlude of escape from the docility and routine that capitalism, with its worship of paid work, imposes on its subjects.

Alienation

‘This is so intensely gross’ was one of the few comments on that local community Facebook page that this writer was able to empathise with. But at the same time the ‘grossness’ of people’s interest in this event should not be an occasion for condemnation of individuals. It should be seen as a lack of connection by people with the human beings immediately around them produced by the competitive and adversarial nature of the system we all live under. It should also be seen as an expression of the fundamental powerlessness of workers, from which those ‘meaningless thrills’ give some short-lived relief. The alienation from mutual cooperative activity inherent in obsession with celebrities – people they do not know personally and have nothing in common with – is a million miles away from a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with one another.

Of course we do see that power and potential demonstrated in the many communal and collaborative activities that people manage to engage in despite – and in hopeful contrast with – the deadening uniformity the wage and salary system imposes on lives. It is this that will inform human activity in the genuinely democratic society of free access characterised by peaceful cooperation rather than intense competition that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

Steven Pinker, the modern Pangloss (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a fearful angel, you don’t need to tread far into the recent works of Steven Pinker, particularly The Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Enlightenment Now (2018), to get the gist of his popular thesis that today is better than yesterday and tomorrow will be better still, so long as states maintain control and reason triumphs over savage instinct. Better Angels is Bill Gates’s favourite book, and it’s not hard to see why.

The appeal is in the sensationally anti-intuitive optimism and the simplicity of the argument. A clear line is drawn from barbaric prehistory through the murderous Middle Ages all the way to the relatively placid present, in a bid to demonstrate the ‘civilising process’ embodied by states, which has led to universally declining levels of violence. Pinker doesn’t claim it’s a new idea, and indeed bases much of his argument on Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process, published in Germany in 1939 (a not-insignificant date, as we shall see).

It’s also an idea with some good prima facie evidence supporting it, at least for Western Europe during the last few centuries, at least for average civilian homicide rates. Few historians would argue that murder rates in this part of the world have not declined substantially over that period.

But zoom out, and the price of this simple linear argument seems to be that all other lines and details have been overlooked, rather like a large-scale geographical map from which all roads and features have been erased, apart from the one single highway that Pinker wants you to follow.

Predictably, this has enraged academic historians, who liken Pinker to a visitor who enters your house in muddy boots and then sticks his feet up on your living room table. Now, frustrated by the fact that ‘Pinker’s message is reaching the masses, and ours is not’, many of these historians, some of them from Pinker’s own Harvard University, have joined forces to deliver a devastating counter-blow (The Darker Angels of our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence, edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, Bloomsbury, 2022). There are 18 chapters written by experts in pre- and medieval history, early modern Russia and Japan, the Enlightenment, the British Empire, and histories of the environment, sexual violence, race, and the myth of a universal human nature. Some contributors offer a cool and detached evaluation of Pinker’s methodology, while others write with barely concealed rage at his blithe effrontery and cavalier lack of scholarship.

Pinker’s approach to evidence is variously described as shoddy, egregious and cherry-picking. He quotes sources that suit his argument, even if they’re only coffee-table books (like The Great Big Book of Horrible Things), and ignores vast swathes of respectable research that don’t. For instance, the medievalist Sara Butler writes: ‘Pinker has never seen a medieval court record, nor does he understand how the law worked in the Middle Ages… When he measures medieval against modern statistics, he has no idea that they are measuring very different things… without valid statistics, Pinker’s entire argument falls apart’ (p136).

If you ever wondered how Pinker could possibly know the murder rates in medieval times, with its patchy records, or in prehistory, with almost no records, you’ll find academic historians asking exactly the same question. Pinker doesn’t know, he’s guessing, and relying on estimates which are themselves sometimes wildly inflated and ideologically suspect, like those of Catholic missionaries estimating the supposed violence of heathen Native Americans. If you as an archaeologist dug up two Iron Age skeletons, and one had had its head bashed in, you wouldn’t automatically conclude that the murder rate must have been 50 percent. Archaeologist Linda Fibiger certainly wouldn’t. She studied 1,000 human remains from 150 sites spanning 3,000 years and made tentative conclusions on interpersonal violence only for that period and only within that geographical range. Pinker makes continent-wide conclusions based on 21 individuals from one Jutland cemetery (p.115).

What we discover, in chapter after chapter, is that Pinker is massaging the evidence, upwards in the case of the past, to make violence and ‘savagery’ look much worse than it really was, and downwards in the present, to make the world seem more peaceful than it really is. To take one example, he cites one claim that the Spanish Inquisition executed 350,000 Jews in 350 years, which was nearly twice the total population of Jews in Spain during that period (p.128). He also name-checks an eminent researcher but without mentioning the researcher’s own estimate of executions for the same period at around 810, a figure widely considered more reliable. This figure generates its own irony, as it would mean that Pinker’s own ‘civilised’ USA, with 1,526 executions between 1973 and today (p.270), has executed almost twice as many people as the Spanish Inquisition, and in a fifth of the time.

In reality, much of the historical evidence suggests the opposite of what Pinker claims. The Middle Ages was not addicted to cruel executions, which were in fact rare, and most punishments were in the form of fines. Early modern Russia, considered ‘uncouth’ by Western standards, executed far fewer people than its neighbouring European countries, and with less Grand Guignol cruelty. The Enlightenment, rather than civilising society, served to justify unparalleled colonial and racist violence, while excluding whole categories including women from supposedly universal notions of human rights. There’s a pattern to all this, and you can easily find other examples yourself. For instance, the ‘Wild West’ was arguably less violent than the modern USA and had more robust gun laws (bit.ly/3wYwj7S).

Pinker is unashamedly a neo-Hobbesean, arguing that in ‘non-state societies’ we humans are ruled by our inner demons – predation, dominance, revenge, sadism and ideology (‘ideology’ here meaning fascism, Marxism etc, but not his own perspective, which doesn’t count), whereas the benevolence of disinterested elites (like himself) and the ‘gentle commerce’ of capitalism have ‘gifted’ us modern civil liberties and allowed the predominance of our ‘better angels’ including empathy, self-control, a moral sense and reason. At no point does he consider that these modern freedoms had to be fought bitterly for, and in fact sees any social dissent or struggle as counter-productive and ‘de-civilising’.

And here is where Elias, a German Jew writing in 1939, becomes relevant again. His theory of states as a civilising influence presupposed that the state itself was benevolent. Elias ended up doubting his own assumption (p.101) precisely because of what subsequently happened in Europe. Yet Pinker skates over all this, dismissing the Holocaust as a statistical outlier that doesn’t affect his main argument. Awkward details don’t trouble him, as he ‘only travels on the sunny side of the street’ (p.66), trading in ‘comfort history’ and ‘Pinkering’ the evidence (p.305). Though Better Angels, at 800 pages, seems to follow the principle that ‘if you say it enough, it becomes true’ (p.176), Ben Kiernan’s Blood and Soil – Sparta to Darfur (2007) concludes, in 700 pages, that genocidal violence is as bad today as it’s ever been (p.332). With Pinker, one is irresistibly reminded of Voltaire’s Dr Pangloss, for whom everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Finally, modern historians are suspicious of linear historical narratives, because linearity always involves leaving stuff out. Nowadays they prefer more ‘webby’ approaches which reflect the diverse and often contradictory nature of the evidence. Marx the dialectician would have approved of this approach, so it’s a shame that one or two contributors in this book see him as part of the problem, a linear teleological thinker plotting a deterministic path to the future. This is to take the same one-sided view of Marx that Pinker takes of history. In all probability, judging from the withering scorn that Marx levelled at the half-baked and self-serving bourgeois thinkers of his own day, he would have given Pinker a roasting that even the sharpest condemnations in this collection would struggle to match.

Paddy Shannon

What has the monarchy done for us? (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

How does a technologically and industrially advanced 21st century nation come to have an unelected head of state that is at the centre of extravagant and expensive medieval-inspired rituals such as coronations and jubilees? Many countries have adopted, in various forms, a constitutional monarchy but none go to such lengths to celebrate monarchical decadence as do the English. It is all the more surprising since it was the English bourgeoisie who were historically the first to cut off a king’s head during their quest for power in the 17th century. Far from being a symbol of Englishness the present queen comes from an ancient line of German princes who, in many of their inbred incarnations, actively opposed English imperialism. We can answer some of these questions historically but how are we to explain the admiration of so many of the working class for this symbol of their slavery?

The Tudor dynasty had adopted (rather half-heartedly) the Reformation and developed a centralised state that made the evolution of the modern nation state possible in the following centuries. When the last of them (Elizabeth I) died the Scottish Stuart dynasty took over with an inbuilt autocratic tendency that was to prove ill-suited to deal with the rise of the ‘middle class’ and their rising hegemony within parliament (House of Commons). The resulting revolution convulsed the country with some quarter of a million casualties (making the French revolution look like a bar brawl) and a republic whose leaders executed the king (Charles I) for treason. This regime was soon to degenerate into a military dictatorship that was thoroughly disliked by the people and a deal was done with Charles II for his return on the understanding he would respect parliamentary power. This again soon degenerated into an attempt at counter revolution led by James II, which proved once and for all to the English bourgeoisie that they could not trust the Stuarts and that their only hope for a truly constitutional monarchy was to call on William of Orange who had proven his credentials in this respect within the Dutch Republic. This proved to be successful in giving the illusion of both historical/royal continuity and also liberating capitalist trade from the threat of monopolistic autocracy.

Subsequent ‘Whig’ historians dedicated themselves to creating a history where the English revolution was relegated to a religious civil war followed quickly by a ‘restoration’ that hardly troubled the calm national continuity of the English class system. This myth became very convenient when the international power of the English ruling class was threatened by the French Revolution and the subsequent rise of the European Napoleonic Empire. The political convulsions of continental Europe were contrasted to the stability of the British system and it is indeed true that the first of the French revolutionaries wanted to create a constitutional monarchy on the English model but the duplicity of their king (just as with Charles I) made this impossible giving the militant Jacobins their chance to create a republic. Another difference between the two revolutions was the relatively quick integration of the bourgeois and aristocratic classes in England. The ruling class was now economically entirely capitalistic but the old families of aristocratic origin retained an air of cultural superiority and the nouveau rich could not help but admire this ancient elitism – when it didn’t conflict with profit making. The other element of aristocratic culture that the English bourgeoisie absolutely adored was the warrior tradition and pageantry. No coal magnate, however rich, could compare with the mythology of Henry V and his victory at Agincourt!

To this day the glamour attached to the aristocracy and the royal family in particular, is used to sell the illusion that the English are a united country which all have a common interest to preserve. As with all hierarchical social structures there is a need to condition those without wealth and power to believe that those who possess it are somehow different and special. Along with the myth of the ‘self-made man’ capitalism needs a symbol of nationalism/militarism and what better symbol than those descended from murderers (warriors) to stand on balconies wearing pantomime military uniforms. For socialists the queen stands for: nationalist tribalism, class privilege, massive unearned wealth, Christian superstition and unelected power. They cannot even preserve the image of an ideal bourgeois family that serves as a model for us all given the continual scandals emanating from what must be one of the most dysfunctional families in existence. Such criticisms are commonplace and feel like an exercise in the proverbial ‘shooting ducks in a barrel’ but somehow these people continue to be admired by many within the working class.

Given the history above and the usefulness of the royal family as propaganda we can see how they are placed at the centre of UK capitalism’s greatest shibboleth – ‘patriotism’. No mainstream politician dares question this tribal loyalty in public just as they would not criticise its royal incarnation. Perhaps to the younger people the royals are merely celebrities but for those of an older generation they represent a perverse feeling of community and continuity despite the reality that it is their existence and the class they represent that continually destroys communities by fuelling the relentless class struggle.

Wez.

Marxism and Leninism in Myanmar (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A sympathiser sets out the history of ‘socialism’ in Myanmar.

Myanmar is a ‘Global South’ country with long borders shared with India and China. Before its independence, it was ruled by the colonial British as a province of British India. It was also known as Burma.

The earliest record of Marxism in Myanmar is 1923, long after the death of Marx and Engels. The Second International had already been replaced by the Third International. Most of the writers who represented orthodox Marxism were no longer alive or active. It was a time when most of the most talented scholars of Marxism had lost their influence and Marxism was being dictated by Stalin under the name ‘Marxism-Leninism’. Leon Trotsky also started the left opposition to the Bolshevik government in that year.

The very first localised literature of Marxism in Myanmar was Das Kapital in a misleading translation inspired by nationalism. Since then, ‘Bolsheviks’ and ‘communism’ were the kind of keywords that could be seen in some of the publicity released. In 1930, Dr Thein Maung brought back some left-wing books from London to Myanmar. Those were the first books the radical youths in Myanmar encountered about Western communism. They influenced Thakin Nu, who later became the Prime Minister of Burma, and Thakin Soe, who founded both the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) and the Red Flag Communist Party; together they founded the ‘Nagani book club’ for distributing left-wing books and articles. Dagon Taya, later a renowned writer, was one of the chairmen of the Rangoon University Student Union and once wrote a slogan on a wall claiming ‘Long Live Soviet Myanmar’ while he was travelling in 1939.

In 1939, a new chapter was opened for ‘Communism’ (‘Marxism-Leninism’) in Myanmar. Aung San (the ‘father of the nation’), Thakin Soe, a handful of Chittagong radicals and some other leftists together founded the Communist Party of Burma. The CPB managed to link with the Third International as soon as it was founded because of the link between the Chittagonian Bengali founders such as H. N. Goshal and the Indian Communist Party. At that time in 1939, the Third International had already become a tool of Russian foreign policy, under the leadership of Stalin, and had successfully sabotaged strikes under the Popular Front government in France and the social struggles of the CNT-FAI in Spain. The CPB was thus also bound to adopt disastrous tactics, including a series of mistakes that even orthodox Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky had described as ‘ultra-left’, ie, the CPB chose not to take part in elections, but instead to wage war against the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League which was the acting government at that time. Later, the CPB didn’t stop with Stalinism; it went further to Maoism which had rejected the class struggle and advocated the alliance of four nationalist classes. It ended up killing its own founders like H. N. Goshal in 1967 during the cultural revolution era.

One Party Rule

On 2 March 1962, a coup d’état took place which heralded the commencement of one-party rule in Myanmar and the army’s political supremacy. The military who attempted the coup called themselves the Union Revolutionary Council (URC) and introduced a programme called ‘The Burmese Way to Socialism’. The CPB denied the ‘socialist’ credentials of URC, however, the URC shared a lot of similar characteristics with Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Tito’s Yugoslavia. The first of these was one-party rule with strong state power and hostility towards opposition. As Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas mentioned in his The New Class, ‘modern Communism is a modern despotism which cannot help but aspire towards totalitarianism’. In terms of Marxism, such one-party totalitarianism has nothing to do with the dictatorship of the proletariat. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote once, ‘Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only of the members of one party, however numerous they may be, is no freedom at all’. Equating one-party totalitarianism with the dictatorship of the proletariat shows a lack of understanding of Marxism. Marx and Engels identified the act of ‘raising the proletariat to a ruling class’ as ‘the conquest of democracy’.

The second characteristic was the act of strengthening the state, which confirms the claim of Milovan Djilas which states: ‘there is no doubt that a national communist bureaucracy aspires to more complete authority for itself’. Thirdly, Ne Win, chairman of the Burma Socialist Programme Party (BSPP) was anti-union just like Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Tito. The BSPP faced much opposition from every side including student unions, workers’ unions, political armed groups, and the government-in-exile.

Student Uprising

The best example of this was the ‘7th July Student Uprising’ which was a series of marches, rallies, and protests against stricter campus regulations and the policies of General Ne Win’s BSPP regime. The BSPP responded to the uprising by violently attacking the students, shooting them with machine guns and using explosives to blow up the whole student union building in University of Yangon, resulting in the deaths of more than a hundred, and the arrest of more than 6,000 students. The BSPP accused the students of being counter-revolutionary and reactionary because they were protesting against the ‘socialist’ state in the BSPP’s view. After that incident, the BSPP attacked the very existence of the unions.

Furthermore, the BSPP implemented a programme like the ‘war-communism’ of Lenin’s time. The BSPP-led Socialist Economy Construction Committee introduced an economic policy aimed at nationalising all businesses across the board, similar to what Milovan Djilas had described the self-styled Communists (Marxist-Leninists) as doing. According to Djilas, the communists wanted to ban strikes because in their view the working class was already in power and owned the means of production via the state. So if there was a strike of workers or students, it meant workers were striking against themselves. Through this tyrannical self-delusion the BSPP, along with all the communist regimes who claimed to follow Marxism-Leninism, responded violently to workers’ strikes. A few international examples would include the Kronstadt rebellion against the Bolshevik government and the Georgian Mensheviks’ soviet rebellion against the Bolshevik government. The CPB argued that the BSPP didn’t represent the legacy of Marxism-Leninism, yet ironically the CPB claimed to follow Maoism while Mao Zedong himself was on excellent terms with Ne Win and his regime. The role of the CPB was ended by a series of battles with the military as well as internal coups resulting from their own inefficient revolutionary strategies and tactics.

Ultra-nationalism

After 1988, a lot of regimes had come and gone, and Myanmar was on the way back to globalisation from ‘socialism’. From 1988 to 2010, Myanmar was governed by purely repressive regimes with no ideological background. However, after the 2007 Saffron revolution, the military regime had to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of the Buddhist monks, students, workers, and the public. So they tried to create an ideological fantasy based on ultra-nationalism, Buddhist supremacy and crony capitalism. From 2010 to 2021 most of the public were under the illusion of living in a democratic nation while minority ethnic groups were being bombed and killed. The oligarchs managed to accumulate capital which was more than enough for three to five successive generations while working-class people struggled to make ends meet. That was when the public enjoyed the illusion of liberal democracy and was the least revolutionary period, until some students chose to protest with an agenda for educational reforms in 2014. During that decade, the military had successfully radicalised the majority of the Buddhist monks with their self-serving ultra-nationalism and Buddhist supremacy. As Myanmar has a unique culture of monks being important (too important) when it comes to social values, a fraction of the working class also chose to give support to the successors of the military regime, bolstered by irrational fear of minority groups and other religions. Such a political agenda recalls Daniel De Leon’s remark that ‘the capitalist class is interested in keeping the working men divided among themselves’.

The National League for Democracy (NLD) was founded by ex-communists, ex-military officers and left-leaning social democrats in 1988. Aung San Suu Kyi, the ‘democracy idol’ of Myanmar, forged a de facto alliance with the military to attain governmental status. Since then, not only did the NLD not achieve its goal of kicking the military out of politics but they also failed to protect minority ethnic groups like the Rohingya from genocide. Under the leadership of ‘the lady’ Suu Kyi, the NLD changed its political ideology from social democracy to liberalism. This was not apparent at first, but as soon as they were elected as an acting government, they failed to implement all the social democratic policies. The NLD lost their social democratic connections with the interests of the working class and with the national self-determinism of ethnic groups. Such reactionary behaviour resulted in some far-left and centre-left youths losing their trust in the NLD, and searching for a third alternative either in some social democratic reformist party or a revolutionary socialist party.

Another military coup

In February 2021, the military decided to stage another coup to restore their former golden days and to protect family members who had become oligarchs and cronies. The public at first was hesitant to react with strikes and protests. But the coup sparked enormous protests and dissent which were brutally suppressed by the military, with about 1,500 people dead, either shot in the streets, tortured and murdered in detention, or just disappeared. Even though the military managed to seize power and arrest some influential political leaders like Suu Kyi and Mya Aye, some of the NLD members escaped and formed a National Unity Government (NUG) in exile, in alliance with some ethnic leaders and other small political groups taking the role of consultative council. Even today, the NUG fails to grasp the opportunity to radicalise the public, even for reformist social democratic values. The NUG still acts like a parallel government. Yet third-party alternatives such as the Maoist CPB, Trotskyist organisations and social democratic reformists also failed to radicalise the public for a socialist revolution.

Theo Maung, who describes himself as a libertarian socialist and one of the founders of the Burmese Atheists Association, said that he was expecting a more progressive and secular society from the revolt against the coup. He was confident that people were turning away from authoritarianism and racial and religious discrimination as a result of their struggles against the junta. He pointed out that the CPB managed to recover again after the coup but that the new generation of leftists like him didn’t accept the authoritarian communists. He also said that if there was to be another communist party in Myanmar, he expected a more libertarian-leaning one with little influence from Marxism-Leninism and Maoism. Yoe Thit Aung, an anarchist, also had a view on the revolution: ‘I personally don’t see the revolution as a class struggle but rather a transformation of crony capitalism into corporate capitalism. Traditionally the NLD is a populist and conservative party. NUG is trying their best for more progressive reforms, but they will never go for radical ends’. He thinks that the old bourgeois crony class will be useful as a national bourgeois class in the post-revolutionary period.

To sum up, Myanmar has a lot of experience of Marxism-Leninism (so-called communism) and military dictatorships. It’s unfortunate that Myanmar was never influenced by the internationalist and revolutionary socialism (Marxist) tradition of Georgi Plekhanov, Julius Martov, Rosa Luxemburg and others, which represents the Marxism of Marx and Engels in seeking the democratic emancipation of the working class.

Hein Htet Kyaw

‘Ethical Shopping’: A Luxury (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Count your food miles, buy organic, live without plastics, buy local products, support small businesses – we’re told this is how individual consumers can choose to help the environment.

Really? Don’t get us wrong. We’re all in favour of people taking personal responsibility – the voluntary society we want will depend on that very thing.

But these incitements to personal sacrifice are a gigantic act of misdirection. The powers-that-be love talking about your personal responsibility for the state of the planet, because it’s better than owning up to their collective responsibility for ruining it.

They are responsible for a wasteful system that creates obscene wealth and luxury for the 1 percent while many of us end up struggling just to get by. And they have the cheek to tell us to cut back on our personal consumption!

So be responsible, by all means. But just remember, capitalism never will be.

Now ask yourself these questions:

1. Why is it that most of what we ever buy – food, clothes, electricals, etc., is mass produced?

It’s because of economies of scale, which reduce production costs, so mass-produced stuff comes to dominate the market because it’s always cheaper.

2. Does this stuff have to come from so far away?

The companies that make the stuff are always trying to undercut each other to grab more market share. This has tended to push production out to wherever in the world wages are cheapest, resulting in long, complex supply chains and wasteful global transportation. These two factors have wiped out most local production over the decades, so we have little choice when we shop.

But there’s another factor that restricts our ability to choose. Our wage levels generally are determined by how much we have to spend to keep us in a condition that allows us to keep working. And it’s the prices of the global, mass-produced stuff (battery eggs, not free-range; prosecco, not champagne) that enter into that calculation.

So while some may be able to shop ‘ethically’, it’s a luxury many of us simply can’t afford.

Capitalism – a vampire horror story! (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the capitalist money system, the rich 1 percent are like demented vampires, sucking the life out of the planet until there’s nothing left. The solution isn’t garlic and crosses, it’s social revolution.

In world socialism, there is no money system. There are no rich people. There are no poor people. There are no bosses. There is no war. All decisions are shared. All responsibilities and resources are communal.

This is Earth under new management. Everyone’s.

You could learn to drive a bus or a train, fix plumbing, develop an AI application, plough a field, teach a child, chair a steering group, study marine ecosystems, cure a disease, brew beer, rehearse a play. Your time is your own, to use as you think best. Help society thrive, and discover a job satisfaction that money can’t buy.

Technology has made this society actionable right now, but the vampires are not going to give up their feeding habits. So the 99 percent need to act. Together we need to use the democratic machinery to take control away from the 1 percent and their political glove puppets, and abolish their self-serving property laws. Then we can start restoring this planet to health and sanity.

It won’t be Utopia. No society is perfect. But collective and democratic cooperation will always find better solutions than crazed vampires ever can.

Freedom (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Do you see freedom as having to get into a car every day and drive into traffic, into smog, to go into some contrived glass office building that doesn’t produce anything, and push paper around for 40, 50 hours a week? Is that freedom?

Is it the freedom to be able to walk into a store, if you have money, and buy the food that you need to survive, or is more freedom attached to the idea of not having to purchase anything, and having the necessities of life provided through structure. So instead of having to earn a living in high stress your entire existence, you can actually live your life.”

Peter Joseph

Q&A: The cost of living crisis (2022)

From the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is the cost of living?

The amount of money needed to cover expenses such as food, clothing, housing, heating, travel and entertainment to live at the standard that the average household can afford. As the income of the average household comes mainly from selling their ability to work to an employer, the cost of living is in effect the cost of maintaining and recreating the working skills of an average wage-earner household; the cost of living as a worker.

How is the cost of living measured?

By the total price of a basket of goods and services that households typically buy. In Britain this is calculated each month. The contents of the basket are slightly changed each year to reflect changes in buying habits. The result is not expressed as a figure in pounds and pence but as an index, against a given year, the base year, fixed as 100. In Britain the base year for this ‘Consumer Prices Index’ is 2015. In April 2022 it was 119; which means it has increased by 19 percent or at about 2.5 percent a year since 2015.

Is an increase in the Consumer Prices Index a measure of inflation?

That’s the official view but it’s actually only a measure of the average rise in consumer prices. To equate this with ‘inflation’ is misleading as it obscures the original meaning of the term and the fact that there are other reasons why the index can go up. Inflation, as the word itself suggests, is increasing (‘inflating’) the money supply beyond what the economy requires for its transactions. If this happens there is a general rise in prices, all prices rising as a result of the depreciation of the money tokens issued by the government or its central bank. If the economy requires, say, 1 million units of money and the government issues 1.1 million units, then the price level, as measured by the index, would go up by 10 percent. But this is not the only reason why the Consumer Prices Index can go up.

What is another reason?

The price of one of the goods or services in the basket going up because of a supply side problem. If paying demand exceeds supply this will push up the price of the good concerned. This would lead to an increase in the Consumer Prices Index (or CPIH if housing costs are included) but wouldn’t be inflation in the original meaning of the term. In the 12 months to April 2022 the index went up by 7.8 percent, which is a considerable acceleration of the average over the preceding 7 years. In their press release explaining this increase, the Office for National Statistics noted:

‘The largest upward contributions to the annual CPIH inflation rate in April 2022 came from housing and household services (2.76 percentage points, principally from electricity, gas and other fuels, and owner occupiers’ housing costs) and transport (1.47 percentage points, principally from motor fuels and second-hand cars)’ (bit.ly/3GWXRz7).

The index went up, in other words, mainly as a result of the continuing rise in the energy element in the basket, though the prices of some other goods and services went up too due to continuing supply chain problems caused by the pandemic restrictions. The index didn’t go up by that amount due to the Bank of England inflating the money supply.

Can the index go down?

Yes, it sometimes does slightly fall in the summer months reflecting the lower prices then of fresh fruit and vegetables. In fact, because of increasing productivity in the production of material goods, you would expect that the index would tend to fall over the course of time rather than rise as it has done. That it doesn’t is due to deliberate government policy. If prices were continually falling this would tend to encourage people to put off buying some item in the hope that its price will fall. To encourage firms to produce and people not to wait to buy, the government has mandated the Bank of England to keep the rise in the Consumer Prices Index to 2 percent a year.

How does the Bank do this?

By inflating the money supply. This means it can be said that, in theory, at least 2 percentage points in the yearly rise in the index are due to inflation in the original sense of the term and that at the moment anything substantially above this is likely to be attributable to other factors such as supply problems for particular goods or services. When, earlier this year, the index began to move towards an increase of 5 percent a year the Bank was not that worried, arguing that it would only be temporary and that within a year or so the index would fall back to what it had been. Now, with the war in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia, they are not so optimistic and are predicting that the index will go even higher, even to double digits, and that this will last longer.

A real cost of living crisis, then?

Yes, consumer prices, especially of energy, have risen to a level at which the average household cannot afford to live at their previous standard of comfort. A fall in people’s standard of living is worse for the already worst off.

What can we do about it?

Don’t expect the government to do much. Unfortunately, there is not much that those dependent on state benefits can do except take whatever extra the state has decided to hand out. Those dependent on an income from working for an employer can – and should — struggle, through their trade union, to get a higher price for what they sell. Given current labour market conditions they should be able to get this, even if it will just be stopping things from getting worse. The media will blame them for causing ‘inflation’ but even the government’s own statisticians admit that the Consumer Prices Index has shot up for supply reasons and not because of ‘greedy workers’. In any event, wages have always been linked to the cost of living, as this means the cost of living of a wage-worker. So if this goes up it’s normal that wages should too; otherwise we won’t be getting the full price of what we are selling. But the struggle to keep wages up with the cost of living, necessary as it is, is a never-ending struggle which will last as long as the wages system does.

Why is there a cost of living anyway?

Good question. Why should we have to pay to live? It’s only because the means of life are monopolised by a tiny minority who live off profits and which obliges us to work for wages, out of which we have to buy what we need to live. If the means of life – the productive resources of society – were owned in common by society as a whole, then we could produce what we needed and people would have free access to what they need to live and enjoy life. There would be no cost of living and no perpetual struggle to try to keep up with it.

Cooking the Books: No such thing as free shorter hours (2022)

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

The Times (6 June) reported that ‘more than 3,000 workers will begin a four-day week today with no loss of pay as part of a trial involving 70 companies’. The companies concerned ‘are testing the effect of offering 100 per cent of a job’s pay in exchange for 80 per cent of the time and a commitment to keep up 100 per cent of output.’

The six-month trial has been organised by the UK branch of 4 Day Week Global which promotes a four-day week as a business strategy calculated to increase productivity and the ‘wellbeing’ of the workers which will also increase productivity:

‘Adopting a four-day work week is a business improvement strategy centered on working smarter rather than longer, and investing in the wellbeing of the most important asset to any business – your people (…) The four-day work week has been proven to deliver increased productivity in businesses all over the world in a broad range of industries’ (www.4dayweek.com/why-pilot).

Many, perhaps most, people would like to work only four days a week and have a three-day weekend. However, they might not necessarily like the conditions in the experiment to ‘keep up 100 per cent of output’.

What this involves is easy to work out. If you are on £26,000 a year take-home pay, your weekly pay will be £500. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that the rate of exploitation is 100 percent, then you produce output worth £1,000 in a week (your pay plus an equivalent amount of surplus value – that’s why you are a business’s ‘most important asset’). When you work a 5-day 7-hour week (35 hours) you produce £28.58 worth of output in a day. With a 4-day 7-hour week (28 hours) this goes up to £37.72. An increase of 25 percent.

Having to work 25 percent harder means that you will use up the energy represented by your labour-power quicker and so will need more rest to restore it, ready to commence the next week’s harder labour. You are going to need that extra day.

One of those taking part in the experiment, Kirsty Wainwright, the general manager of a fish and chip shop in Norfolk, was reported as saying: ‘Having that extra rest and not feeling exhausted means I can be more productive at work too.’

She has got it the wrong way around. It is having to be more productive at work that means she will require the extra rest, and she is being overoptimistic if she expects that she is not going to be more exhausted at the end of each of the days that she works than she is now. She will be because she will have had to use up more of her energy per day than previously.

Maybe she and the others will consider that working harder to get more time away from employed work is a price worth paying. Historically, workers have accepted this deal, as when the working week was reduced from 6 to 5½ and then to the 5 days it mostly is now. So maybe they will too if the 4-day week catches on.

Under capitalism the ideal for workers would be to work fewer days without having to work harder during them. But no employer will accept that as it would reduce their profit. Under capitalism working harder will always be the price for working fewer hours. Employers are not philanthropists.

Reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Failure of Vision: Michael Harrington and the Limits of Democratic Socialism. By Doug Greene, Zero Books, 2021. £15.99

This is a political biography of Michael Harrington (1928-1989) who was the best known ‘socialist’ in the US after the death in 1968 of Norman Thomas, the perennial presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America. Harrington was first associated with the Catholic Worker Movement but then became a ‘Shachtmanite’, an offshoot from Trotskyism based on the ideas of Max Shachtman whose difference with Trotsky was over ‘The Nature of the USSR’. Trotsky maintained that it was basically a ‘workers’ state’. Shachtman could see that this was an untenable position and argued that Russia was best described as ‘bureaucratic collectivism’, a new class society ruled by a new ruling class exploiting the workers. To begin with, he had held that Russia was more progressive than capitalism, but later that it was the other way round and he became a staunch ‘anti-communist’.

Taking this position, in 1958 Shachtman, Harrington and the others joined the Socialist Party of America. This was the nearest equivalent in the US of the Labour Party in Britain and held the same ideas as, at the time, that party did (except that it paid more lip-service to Marx’s ideas, in fact to ideas in general) – that the state capitalism that it called ‘socialism’ would come about gradually as the outcome of a series of nationalisations and social reforms introduced democratically; basically, reformists who wanted to humanise capitalism.

Not getting anywhere as a separate party, in 1973 Harrington and the others (Shachtman had died in 1972) decided to enter the Democratic Party and work to get it to adopt and enact progressive policies. Their political descendants today are the ‘Democratic Socialists of America’ which has recruited tens of thousands of members and succeeded in getting some of its members elected (as Democrats) to the House of Representatives, the most well-known of whom is Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez.

Greene argues that, despite this posthumous relative success, Harrington’s entry into the Democratic Party with a view to ‘realigning’ it was a mistaken strategy; as the Democrats were a capitalist party beholden to capitalist interests, it led to Harrington and his group becoming its tail-end, working to ensure the election of Democratic Presidents and other officials to run the political side of American capitalism. On this point Greene is right. He also argues, again correctly, that capitalism cannot be gradually reformed so as to work in the interest of the working class.

However, he writes as a member of one of the 57 varieties of Trotskyism (a group called ‘Left Voice’). To be fair, he has confined his alternative strategy to get to state capitalism to an appendix in which he criticises Harrington’s ‘Democratic Marxism.’ This was a wise move on his (or his editor’s) part as his ‘vision’ of an insurrection and his defence of the idea that even under Stalin Russia was some sort of ‘workers’ state’ would have led to his criticism of Harrington’s gradualist reformism being taken less seriously.

Adam Buick

Careerist and reformist (2022)

Book Review from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Starmer Project. By Oliver Eagleton. Verso. 2022. £12.99

Just as we’ve become used over the years to all those tedious historiographies of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Union that claimed it would have been alright if wasn’t for a particular bunch of malcontents and traitors who somehow ruined it all, so today we have the Corbynistas. And in particular, here we have Oliver Eagleton (son of Terry) to tell us that Sir Keir Starmer is the new political antichrist and that he is never to be forgiven for undermining The Messiah, aka Saint Jeremy Corbyn. Furthermore, in this craven mission the swine apparently enlisted John McDonnell and a whole list of other Judas-like characters.

There is some useful research and journalism in this book (Eagleton writes for The Guardian periodically). But it is all filtered through such a thick distorting prism that you are left almost feeling sorry for Starmer, political careerist and reformist though he is.

There are four chapters that logically flow one after the other to mirror Starmer’s career: The Lawyer, The Politician, The Candidate and The Leader. Because it suits his purposes, Eagleton rather downplays Starmer’s early time in the 1980s in and around a Pabloite Trotskyist sect, though his time as Director of Public Prosecutions sees him seemingly held personally responsible for almost literally every legal decision at the time that Eagleton dislikes. You strongly suspect the truth lies somewhere in between that narrative and the one of the pious, upright human-rights lawyer that Starmer still likes to project.

But either way, this misses the point – as does much of the book. Eagleton lists the key features of what he calls ‘The Starmer Project’ thus:

‘1) a ‘values-led non-antagonistic election strategy; 2) an unsparing crackdown on the Labour Left, seen as more dangerous than the Conservatives; 3) an Atlanticist authoritarian disposition, combining intervention abroad with repression at home; and 4) a return to neoliberal economic precepts, overseen by Blairite leftovers’ (p.186).

But using this same categorisation, what was the leftist Corbyn project this replaced and was – in part – a reaction against? Arguably:

1) a ‘values-led’ but utopian and incoherent election strategy, doomed to predictable defeat and recrimination; 2) an unsparing crackdown on those elements in the Labour Party who knew how to win elections (ie, by telling the working class what it wants to hear); 3) a quasi-Leninist disposition, combining active or tacit support for repression abroad with intervention at home; and 4) a return to state capitalist economic precepts, overseen by Trotskyist and Stalinist leftovers.

Eagleton – like Corbyn and many on the Labour Left – has a yearning against injustice that is commendable. However, he misunderstands the party he supports. The Labour Party exists to win elections (without power it is nothing) and to then enact mild reforms that can ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalist society – or at least try to. Starmer stands foursquare in this tradition; the Corbyn mirage was that you could somehow more radically transform capitalism with its profit motive and market economy through leftist sloganeering combined with a Biblical proportions wish-list of largely unrealistic promises. This is not something that has ever worked – anywhere, in any country.

Some of what Eagleton says about Starmer hits home, but it is so skewed and partial at times it is not entirely reliable. Indeed, the abiding impression is that the book rather deceives by selection, and is significantly the worse for it.

Dave Perrin

Proper Gander: A Bite From The Apple (2022)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who better to warn us about the dangers of technology and corporate culture than Apple Inc? The recent American drama serial Severance, released through Apple TV+, was an offbeat and engaging thriller set in an office with a unique approach to managing its human resources. Echoing Black Mirror’s template, the series imagines a piece of technology which sounds like it could be invented and embedded within a few years and explains how it’ll lead to a scary alienated dystopia.

The premise is that staff working for the mysterious Lumon Industries have voluntarily undergone a procedure called ‘severance’. This involves a microchip being inserted into their brain, making them an ‘appendage of the machine’ in a more literal way than Marx meant. The chip separates their persona at work from their persona outside, meaning that when they’re in the office they can’t remember anything of their home life and vice versa. Communication between the workplace persona – the ‘Innie’ – and their ‘Outie’ self at home, such as through smuggled notes, is prevented by ‘code detectors’ when they enter and leave the office.

The severance procedure is supposed to put a definite dividing line in Lumon’s staff’s ‘work-life balance’, a phrase which meant ‘how much employment encroaches on our lives’ until the pandemic disrupted everything and a ‘work-life balance’ became a luxury for many. You can tell Severance had been drafted out before Covid hit; working from home isn’t an option for the characters in the drama, and wouldn’t fit in with the premise. Perhaps as a result, the story isn’t set in any particular time; the severance technology is futuristic, while the cars and computers are styled to look like they’re from the last century.

The severance procedure is an exaggeration of how in real life we often find that the ‘version’ of ourselves at work is a bit different from that outside. When we start our shift, our personalities shift to slot in with the culture where we work, with its written and unwritten rules and norms. Many workplaces, especially sleek offices like Lumon’s HQ, feel impersonal and artificial, and difficult to be at ease in. The drama highlights this with the forced fun of the parties thrown for Lumon’s Macrodata Refinement division as a reward for reaching their targets. The story centres on the four members of this team, and the sinister management who ensure that they stay focused on their work. Most of the characters’ conversations, whether in work or outside, are stilted and uncertain, and the only character with any joy is the non-Lumon employee and author of a tacky self-help book which sounds inspirational compared with the oppression of office life.

The work carried out by the Macrodata Refinement team makes little sense, involving sitting at their desks grouping together numbers on their screens according to how ‘scary’ they are. In real workplaces, we’re often put in positions where we have to accept routines we don’t understand and which seem to be there just to prop up a system. Moreover, being a tiny cog in a big machine usually means not having much ability to affect the procedures we follow. In Lumon Industries, the purpose given to the apparently purposeless work is to follow the vision of its founder, a more old-fashioned figure than the real world’s tech luminaries with a messiah complex.

Naturally, the Macrodata Refinement team members each start to question their employment. Political resistance to the severance procedure is mentioned, but the drama’s emphasis is on how it makes them feel uneasy, especially alongside Lumon’s suspicious ways of operating. Annoyingly, the series ends just as an important plot point has been reached and without answering questions about Lumon’s motives, so we’ll have to wait for season two to see how the scenario pans out.

While Black Mirror is the most obvious influence on Severance, it is also part of a long-running trend in science fiction exploring fears of having our personalities moulded by a power-hungry elite. In the 1972 book and 1975 film The Stepford Wives, the women of the well-to-do town of Stepford are replaced by obedient replicas to serve their husbands, a clever critique of conservative attitudes to women’s roles. This came in the wake of the classic 1954 book / 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, about aliens who are surreptitiously substituting bland duplicates for people, interpreted as a metaphor for concerns about ‘communism’ infiltrating America. Its 1978 remake effectively reinterpreted the threat of being turned into an automaton as an extension of how society alienates us. In these stories, surrendering your personality is involuntary, whereas in Severance, it’s chosen as a career move, albeit without realising all the nasty implications. In this way, the series is reminiscent of the 1988 movie They Live, where the ruling class (aliens, again) hide the truth and manipulate apparently content people to conform to the status quo, using subliminal messages in the media rather than implanted microchips. Another antecedent is the impressive 1967 TV serial The Prisoner, also set in a stylised, isolated place with its own strange rules and rituals to protect a secretive system. A message behind all these stories, including Severance, is that conforming to what’s in the interests of those in power is dehumanising, even if this doesn’t come with microchips.

Mike Foster