Pensions, pay and poverty (2002)

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The class war, between the owners of the means of production (the capitalists) and those compelled by threat of poverty to sell their capacity to work (the workers) is an essential and continual feature of capitalist society. Romantic notions of class struggle – of rowdy mass meetings, strikes, battles on the barricades – concentrate on the exceptional forms, rather than the brain-throttlingly dull reality of the class struggle of every day life. In this category we can place things as seemingly dull and complex as retirement pensions.

Pensions account for a massive proportion of economic activity in the UK. According to the Office of National Statistics self-administered pension funds (funds set up by employers to pay occupational pensions, or private pension schemes) had a market value of £765 billion in 2000, paying out a total of £29 billion in benefits in the same year. Between them they account for some £300 billion-worth of shares in businesses, giving them considerable voting power in publicly quoted companies. This is alongside the £38 billion paid out by the government in state retirement pensions.

All capitalists now?

This concentrated ownership through pension funds has led some commentators to claim there has been a fundamental change in the basis of society. It’s not just overt pro-capitalists who look at things this way. Many leftists have seen controlling pension investments as a way of bringing the economy under social control. Indeed, the Labour government still see encouraging pension schemes to invest in riskier long-term venture capital projects as a way of overcoming the British productivity gap.

Funded pension schemes operate by investing the money paid in by or for scheme members on the stock exchange, and paying pensions from dividend income to those members who have contributed enough. Through the investment decisions of the pension trustees, the commentators maintain, the pensioners have control of vast investments. Thus, workers, they claim, must own part of the means of production, and have a vested interest in receiving a share of the profits. They would point out that in 1996 57 percent of pensioners reported to be receiving income from such occupational pension schemes.

The changes made by pension funds, though, are largely illusory. For starters, “an individual’s stake in an occupational pension scheme cannot be ‘cashed-in’” (Social Trends 2002, ONS, p.102), i.e., the pensioners do not own the capital of the pension funds. Coupled with this is the fact that the pension fund trustees are bound by strict legal guidelines regarding the manner of their investment: their first duty is to invest to maximise the profitability of the funds. That is, via their control of the state, the capitalist class exercise a form of collective control over the pension funds to ensure that their investment decisions are aimed at maximising their income from profits. Finally, even though 57 percent of pensioners receive an occupational pension, this accounts for only 27 percent of their total income. In other words, most workers do not earn enough to pay for a pension that will entirely support them on retirement.

From a Marxian perspective huge pension funds still mean capitalism as per usual. The need for pensions arises from the fact that as workers get older, they become less able to work, and become surplus to the requirements of capital. Those workers have spent their lives selling their capacity to work, in return for a wage which represented the cost of maintaining and reproducing their capacity to go on doing that work. If they cannot work, they have no other means of securing their means of living. Since the capitalists do not want to hire them, and workers are unwilling to work until they drop, the capitalist class has to pay out to keep workers alive upon retirement. So in this sense pensions reflect the existence to the class struggle.

As pension payments are a huge burden on them the capitalist class have an interest in ensuring that the pensions paid out do not get too out of hand. The capitalists at the sharp end of wage negotiations are well aware of this, as Larry Elliott noted in his Guardian column, when discussing TUC plans to make it compulsory for employers to make full occupational pension contributions. This, he wrote, “would eventually be paid for by workers through lower wages”. (Guardian, 24 June). That is, pensions are effectively deferred wages, with employers weighing their expected contribution to the pension fund off against current wages laid out (in the 1970s, this calculation was used as a way of circumventing wage restraints via reducing immediate employee contributions or just raising future pensions).

Maximising profits

Capital is always seeking to maximise the profits made from pension funds. In 2000 pension funds paid £3 billion in commission to stockbrokers alone, and paid £329 million in tax. As can be seen from the pension mis-selling scandal, there is plenty of incentive there for private pension funds to want to attract investors, to the extent of fraudulently persuading people to invest. The size of their repayment, £12 billion, indicates the scale of the scandal and the amounts they stood to gain from it.

As the TUC point out in their document Pensions in Peril: the Decline of the Final Salary Pension (http://www.tuc.org.uk/pensions/tuc-4672-f0.pdf), Inland Revenue statistics indicate that employers have netted a sum of £19 billion through reducing pension contributions or taking contribution holidays on the back of the surpluses in the pension funds between 1988 and 2000. That is, they pocketed profits from the pension funds by the back door, using the revenue they generated to cut the amount of money they need to pay to wages out of current receipts. By way of contrast, over the same period the workers only got back some £10 billion out of the surplus by way of reduced contributions and increased benefits.

 

Of course, these are just the legal ways that capitalists seek to gain from pension funds. As has been seen over the years, pension fund present a fabulous opportunity for fraud and chicanery on the part of our masters. Robert Maxwell famously stole £400 million from the Mirror group’s pension fund. “I own the pension scheme,” he declared, and proceeded to use its wealth to prop up his empire. This resulted in substantial changes to the law, including preventing pension funds from investing more than 5 percent of its funds in the employers’ companies.

Of course, it’s not just private employers who try to plunder these shimmering hordes of money. When the bus companies were privatised in 1986 in England, the state withheld £300 million from their pension schemes, and a further £250 million in Scotland. It took until last year, through countless legal wrangles, to get the money back, and even then the treasury held on to £100 million of the money from Scotland.

Due to burgeoning costs, employers are currently scaling back drastically the number of final salary (or defined benefit) pension schemes, that is, pensions where the final annuity is guaranteed as a proportion of the employee’s final salary by the employer. That is, the onus is on them to make up any shortfall in receipts from the fund and pay the pension. This is as opposed to defined contribution pensions, wherein returns are not guaranteed and will only apply according to the sums invested, as with any other personal pension. This exposes the pensioners to the full market risk of investing in the stock market casino. According to the TUC, there were 5.6 million workers on defined benefit schemes in 1991, and this is projected to have fallen to 3.8 million in 2001. This change in pension terms means a fall in employer contributions (defined contribution schemes are cheaper for them) and exposes them to less risk.

Whilst many point to changing demographics – with an increasingly ageing population in Western countries – as a key reason for the pensions problem, there are several other factors impelling capitalists to try and cut back on their pension costs and liabilities. As we have seen recently, one is the problem of a falling stock exchange.

Declining value

Between 1999 and 2000 pension funds’ total value fell from £812 to £765 billion. Contributions from employees and employers remained relatively stable over that period, but the value of shares held by the pension funds fell from £353 billion to £295 billion. This had the knock-on effect of reducing income from dividends – in 2001 dividend receipts fell from £13.02 billion for the previous year to £11.85 billion. According to the Guardian (2 July), over three-quarters of local authorities have deficits in their pension schemes, some of which will be compelled to increase council taxes to cover the cost.

On top of this, changes in corporate accounting, some which were inspired by the ongoing problem of transparency over pensions, mean that companies must quote their potential pension liabilities in their accounts, making them less potentially attractive to investors as they weigh against current profits. When British Airways changed to a defined contribution pension scheme their chief financial officer is quoted as having said that “the change to a defined contribution pension arrangement for future new UK staff is a measured and necessary response to the competitive environment in which British Airways operates”. That is, the competition for investment and profits between capitalists.

Given the scale of the problem, it’s no wonder that pensions are becoming an increasingly large political issue. Several trade unions, mostly noted for their quiescence over most matters, are actually threatening strike action over pension funds – largely since a great deal of the importance of unions lies in their role of negotiating and guarding employees pensions. The Tories, likewise, have begun to harangue the government over pensions, trying to win over workers’ votes by being the party of prudent finance and protectors of pensions.

The government themselves are still recovering from the outrage caused by their pensions increase of 75p in April 2000, and are currently trying to make up for it by providing a series of means-tested benefits. That is, rather than give extra income to pensioners, they guarantee to pay directly for certain items (e.g. winter fuel), with lots of strings attached. Currently, with the ongoing goal of reducing the size of the state sector in mind, the government aims to have 60 percent of pensioners on personal pensions rather than state pensions, moving risk to individuals and moving more money from the current consumption through taxes onto investment and accumulation on the market.

By moving more pensions to the personal and occupational sector, the government will be transferring dependence over to people’s employers and direct wage packets, thus increasing the level of market discipline on the labour force. That is, it is part of the continuing function of the state to impose the wages system on the majority of people and maintain its existence both in terms of physical maintenance of the system and providing its ideology.

There has always been strong ideological side to the pensions system. The Tories, for instance, favour private pensions and individual savings because it promotes the consciousness of personal responsibility and property (and also has the fringe benefit of moving some of the administration costs of pensions off onto the commons of peoples’ free time). Labour, however, historically said it believed in the state pension as a means of generating a sense of social belonging and responsibility.

These, of course, also relate to the different interests between different forms of capitalist appropriation of surplus value and the interests of different sections of the capitalist class. That is, the Tories’ friends in the City of London versus the labour intensive industries backing Labour.

For workers, the struggle is not only over the size of pensions, but over identity, security and, ultimately, working conditions too. The pensions problem within capitalism once more proves the market economy’s incapacity to go beyond the limits of the wages system, and adequately provide for the needs of those who have worked all their lives. As the capitalist class endeavours to encourage us to share their interests, we find our lives opened up to the chaos and insanity of the stock market casino. But the market system cannot provide any security for us in the long run, which is why we need to turn the class struggle on the economic front into a fight for a society based upon the direct satisfaction of needs.

Pik Smeet

Greasy Pole: Money for stale words (2002)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spare a thought for Michael Portillo. Hounded by an ungrateful electorate from his unassailable seat in Southgate, he was forced to spend years in the wilderness until the Tories of Kensington and Chelsea took him to their affluent bosoms. And even then it was not entirely easy for him because there were a few curmudgeons in the party muttering about being forced to accept, in contrast to Alan Clark and Nicholas Scott, so vulgar a standard bearer. Some of them were even mean enough to dwell on Portillos’s Iberian origins. In the event the Portillo won them over – or perhaps they hoped to share in the glory of having an MP who was so clearly the next leader of the Conservative Party and so, in the dim and distant future, Prime Minister. At the time it seemed as if Portillo had only to wait until the Tories got the inevitable thrashing at the next general election for him to win the leadership which destiny – not to mention a bit of back-stabbing and arm-twisting – had set out for him. Except that the Tory membership was as rejecting as the Southgate voters. Back in the wilderness, Portillo was devastated.

What next, he might have asked himself. A life as a run-of-the-mill, barely noticed, constituency MP, holding mind-numbing surgeries listening to the voters’ complaints about rubbish collection and nightmare neighbours, spending his evenings struggling to digest fibrous chicken and Black Forest gateau at ward party dinners? Hardly the stuff of an exciting destiny. Happily, the BBC have come to his rescue, encouraging the prime minister who never was and never will be to develop into a kind of mini Melvin Bragg (well at least they have similar hair styles) by presenting a programme on Wagner. This generated enough publicity to indicate that there may well be more opportunities to enjoy such nice little earners. And in case anyone in still feeling anxious about how Portillo will make ends meet, there is the little matter of his fees for making speeches.

Value For Money

Paying a politician to speak, when that is what they are supposed to do anyway, may seem a little odd. For his words of wisdom Portillo could demand £8,000. Even if he stayed for a while after speaking, pressing the flesh, graciously accepting congratulations, that is still an hourly rate several times what many workers bring home in an entire month (according to the Guardian, a special needs teaching assistant gets £13,800 a year, a refuse truck driver £12,500 a year). So what about that concept, so dear to Tory hearts when Portillo was in government, of Value for Money? He has changed his mind so often, turned his back on so many cherished “principles” , that it must be difficult, for even his most ardent admirers, to give any weight to what he says, let alone pay to hear him say it. This is the man who, when he was a minister, was notorious for being among the most arid of the Tory dries, described by Thatcher as “. . . beyond any questioning a passionate supporter of everything we stood for”, who abruptly became passionate in the opposite direction when he was looking to get back into parliament. This is the man who denied any intention of standing in the leadership election in 1997 while he was busily setting up a campaign office. This is the man who tried to win the gay vote by remembering past homosexual experiences but who did not stand out against the homophobic Clause 28 when his opposition might have counted. This is the man who championed the poll tax on the grounds that it would be a massive vote winner for the Tories.

There are of course other members giving similar value for money in this cosily lucrative way. Thatcher herself, before her doctors forbade her to speak in public, could ask for as much as £60,000 to instruct an audience in how to run capitalism her way, so that the rich stay like that while the poor keep their place. She was never famous for taking a tolerant, balanced view of things so in her speeches she probably made much of her success in hobbling the unions, in tightening the poverty screw so that being on the dole became as stigmatising as having a disease, in arousing the jingoist hysteria about the Falklands which, over the bodies of the dead, did so much to help her smashing win in 1983. She may then have moved on (because she seems quite unable to resist doing so, such is her enduring bitterness) to rail against those she left behind in the Tory Party – including Portillo – who faint-heartedly betrayed the one and only faith. She would not have dwelled on the deep misery of the unemployment which her government presided over, nor on the economic switchback which they were quite unable to control, which led her to describe her Chancellor Nigel Lawson as “. . . brilliant, brilliant” shortly before it all collapsed about him and she changed her opinion to say “ Nigel and I no longer had that broad identity of views or mutual trust which a Chancellor and prime minister should”. She would not have elaborated on the social despair which erupted into soaring crime and street riots in the 1980s. Nor would she have examined in any depth the fact that her party ditched her because she was seen, however inaccurately, as personally responsible for all that suffering and so had become an electoral liability who had to be got rid of, quickly.

Sleaze

There seemed little prospect that Thatcher’s successor would fare any better, which was a sure sign that he would not lack for invitations to earn a little extra by telling audiences about it. For one thing, John Major did not match up to the Iron Lady for a strident talent in blanketing over harsh reality. Faced with capitalism’s typical problems, Major would whinge and wriggle and blunder. It was predictable that his premiership should end in a swamp of sleaze, aggravated by his routine paralysis when confronted with clear evidence of what his ministers and MPs were getting up to. Towards the end he was a wretched man, patently out of control, harassed by members of his own party (including Portillo) who he described as “bastards”. He then led the Tories into historic defeat, leaving them as a party whose enduring grip on power had been transformed into a period of opposition likely to run into decades. None of this affected his reputation as a speaker; to give his doctored account of his catastrophic time at the helm and his advice on how the Tories might do better in future, he can trouser the sum of £28,000.

This racket – for that is what it is – is not confined to the Tories. On the Labour benches and a long way down the tariff is Peter Mandelson, who is one of the ex-ministers to have earned the right to have the prefix “disgraced” to their name. In fact Mandelson went one better than the others because, as distinct from most of the ministers who lose their jobs after being found out in some unparliamentary manipulations, he was twice disgraced. Even without those episodes he would have been forever notorious as one of the most ruthless of spin doctors – one whose financial re-arrangements were tailored to assuage his appetite for swanning around the salons of the rich and famous. Like the others who rake in the money from their speeches, Mandelson can use his freedom from governmental responsibilities to criticise those who are still in power – as if he were ever different, more effective, less blundering than they are. Like any other soiled goods, he goes at a knock-down price – to listen to one of his speeches costs a mere £5,000.

At a price

Nobody would bother to listen to a medical analysis by a surgeon with a reputation for having his patients die on the operating table. Nobody would want to fly in an aircraft where the pilot had a nice line in chat but was unable to keep the thing in the air. Yet politicians are allowed, when they have been exposed in all their impotence and in their attempts to conceal how useless they are, to turn their hand to self-justification – at a price. If this is a kind of madness it is because that is typical of what they represent – a social system which works against the interests of the mass of its people.

Ivan

Reflections on elections (2002)

Book Review from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism by Janet Biehl (Black Rose books 1997)

Murray Bookchin is one contemporary thinker and writer who comes close to us on a number of key points. He stands for a democratic society of common ownership where there’d be no production for profit, no working for wages and no money and where the principle “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” would apply, even if he doesn’t call this socialism (though he might if you got him into a corner).

There are differences of course. For instance, whereas we still see the working class (in the broad sense of everyone obliged by economic necessity to sell their mental and physical energies for a wage or salary) as the agent of the revolutionary change from capitalism to such a society, Bookchin has come to the conclusion that the agent is the municipality or rather a federation of municipalities that have come to practise direct democracy (town meetings, citizens’ assemblies, etc).

Bookchin himself is a wordy writer, but fortunately his views have been well summarised by Janet Biehl in The Politics of Social Ecology: Libertarian Municipalism. Although he now prefers to call himself a “social ecologist” or a “libertarian municipalist” he still regards himself as an anarchist. Despite this – and this of course brings him closer to us than to classical anarchists – he envisages both participating in local elections and a future society having a written constitution that would provide for, among other things, majority decision-making:

“It is highly unlikely, when libertarian municipalists demand that existing municipal governments surrender their powers to citizens’ assemblies, that those governments will accede. Libertarian municipalists should therefore run for local elective office themselves, so that ultimately they can change the city charter to create fully empowered citizens’ assemblies at the expense of the State.”

An anarchist who believes in contesting elections is indeed a rarity. In fact, many anarchists would regard this as a contradiction in terms and would, on this ground, deny that Bookchin really is an anarchist.

The standard anarchist argument against the revolutionary movement contesting elections, local as well as national, is that this inevitably leads to it becoming reformist; revolutionary MPs and local councillors, whatever may have been their original intention, end up merely administering capitalism at local or national level. This, they claim, can be seen from the history of, first, the European Social Democratic parties which once claimed to be Marxist and, more recently, of Green parties which said, as in Germany, that they were only going into parliament to use it as a tribune from which to proclaim the need for an ecological society. When, however, it comes to explaining why this happens they fall back on the lame explanation of “power corrupts”.

We can agree that this is what happened to these parties but offer an alternative explanation: that such parties went off the rails because they advocated reforms of capitalism and not just its abolition. The originally Marxist Social Democratic parties had in addition to the “maximum” programme of socialism what they called a “minimum programme” of immediate reforms to capitalism. What happened, we contend, is that they attracted votes on the basis of their miniumum, not their maximum, programme, i.e. reformist votes, and so became the prisoners of these voters. In parliament, and later in office, they found themselves with no freedom of action other than to compromise with capitalism. Had they been the mandated delegates of those who voted for them (rather than leaders) this could be expressed by saying that they had no mandate for socialism, only to try to reform capitalism. It was not a case of being corrupted by the mere fact of going into national parliaments but was due to the basis on which they went there and how this restricted what they could do. In short, it is not power as such that corrupts. It is power obtained on the basis of followers voting for leaders to implement reforms that, if you want to put it that way, “corrupts”.

Bookchin accepts the classic anarchist argument as far as participating in national elections is concerned. As Biehl argues for him:

“If history, from ancient times to the present, has demonstrated anything, it is the implacable fact that State power is corruptive: that an individual who takes State office is inexorably refashioned by that office into a creature of the State, regardless of his or her idealistic intentions.”

His answer, as to how to prevent a revolutionary movement that contests elections going reformist, is that it should not contest national elections but should restrict itself to contesting local ones. Apparently power only corrupts beyond the local level. The trouble is that his mistaken explanation as to why the old European Social Democratic parties went off the rails – corruption through mere participation in state institutions – leads him to propose the same tactics, even if at local level only, that in our view led to these parties becoming openly reformist.

In his view, at this stage contesting elections can essentially only be an exercise in political education, of getting ideas across. We can go along with that. In fact it is why we contest elections today knowing perfectly well that we have no chance of getting elected. But then Bookchin and Biehl say:

“The electoral platform should consist of a series of demands that represent the aims for which the group is fighting – above all the radical democratization of the municipal government through the creation of citizens’ assemblies. But it is not enough merely to call for direct democracy; the platform should offer the steps by which that goal can be met. Indeed, it should make a series of clearly specified immediate demands, then place them in a radical context by tying them to the longer-term goal of fundamentally transforming society. For libertarian municipalism is a revolutionary movement, not a reformist movement, and it aims not to reform the existing system but to replace it with a liberatory one. In programmatic terms these immediate and long-term goals can be called respectively minimum and maximum demands. Minimum demands are those that are immediately realizable within the existing system; they are specific and concrete. Maximum demands, by contrast, are more general; they comprise the rational society that the group hopes ultimately to achieve.”

Exactly the same division of their programme into a maximum and miniumum one as the old Social Democratic parties, and which led to their downfall.

On at least one occasion Bookchin has put his money where his mouth is and put up candidates at local level – in Burlington, Vermont, in the US in 1989. The electoral programme of the “Burlington Greens” is reproduced as an appendix to Biehl’s book. The programme begins by denouncing the grow-or-die nature of capitalism (referred to as the market economy) but, without even stating the full alternative (the so-called “maximum programme”), rapidly moves on listing some “stepping stones” to where they want to go:

“A community-controlled municipal financial resources and low-interest loans for the purchase and repair of homes and for the initiation of innovative ecological housing projects for low-income groups. 

Bond issues and changes in local tax structures to provide for as much housing for the need and elderly as is necessary. A direct network between farmers and consumers to foster local agriculture. Municipal acquisition of open land to be held in public trust for recreation, gardening, and parks. Municipally controlled cooperatives to develop and implement alternative technologies and to produce quality goods in accord with Vermont’s reputation for craftmanship.”

We can only describe this as a common-or-garden reformist programme.

So, although we share with Bookchin the view that revolutionaries should contest elections, we part company very rapidly when it comes to the programme on which to do so. While we advocate only socialism and nothing but (the so-called “maximum programme”, if you like) Bookchin wants to seek a mandate on the basis of a programme of reforms of capitalism. In our view, this would lead to pure and simple reformism. People would vote for the immediate reforms of capitalism not the maximum programme of replacing it, and any “libertarian municipalist” elected to office would find themselves the prisoners of their reform-minded voters and would end up participating in the government of capitalism at local level, just like the other Greens Bookchin and Biehl criticise.

In any event, Bookchin is being inconsistent in advocating contesting local elections but not national ones and has provided no explanation as to why power at national level corrupts while power at local level doesn’t, especially as local councils are part of the state’s administrative structure and local councillors and mayors are little more than elected state functionnaries.

Actually, we agree with Bookchin that power at local level doesn’t have to corrupt. It is possible to envisage a movement at local level (as he does) that would be based on delegate democracy, where those elected to the local council would be the mandated delegates of those who voted for them, being accountable to them and subject to recall if they failed to carry out their mandate. But we go further. We can’t see anything to prevent this applying to elected representatives of the revolutionary movement above local level too: why couldn’t (in the US context) State congress members also be subject to such democratic control? And why not federal congress members too?

Because Bookchin does not believe this to be possible he proposes an unnecessarily dangerous strategy for getting rid of capitalism: confrontation with the state. He envisages that when sufficient municipalities have been won over to the cause of “libertarian municipalism” they should take on the capitalist state, defying it, refusing to implement its decrees and even forming local citizens’ militias to defend themselves if necessary (decidely, Bookchin’s Trotskyist past is coming back to haunt him in his old age). Given that for such a scenario to succeed a majority of the population would have to support “liberatarian municipalism”, all this would be unnecessary. Being a majority they could use their votes not just to win control of municipalities but of States, regions and provinces and the national state itself.

At the very minimum this would prevent the forces at the disposal of the central state from being used against the local councils. But, more positively – since there is no reason to suppose that power necessarily corrupts – it would provide a framework for a less disruptive, more orderly transition from capitalism to a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society of common ownership and democratic control.

Bookchin’s attempted distinction between local and central state level does not hold water. If power doesn’t corrupt at local level – as it doesn’t have to, if organised on the basis of mandated and recallable delegates – then it won’t automatically at state level either. On the other hand, if, as we contend, “a reform programme corrupts” it will do so just as much at local as at central state level.

Bookchin’s formula of only contesting local, but not national, elections on a reform programme is not the right one for avoiding reformism. The correct formula is contesting elections at national and local level but only on the basis of delegates being given an imperative mandate for the sole purpose of carrying through the formalities involved in winding up capitalism.

Adam Buick

World View: Religion, racism and class (2002)

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The absurd claim of racism is that people’s behavioural, physical and cultural traits conform to a certain fixed and immutable pattern; and this determines the superiority or otherwise of a group in relation to others. This is an outlook that has been used to justify some of the most unspeakable and horrendous crimes against humanity, sometimes leading to killings of genocidal proportions.

In Eduardo Galegno’s Open Vein of Latin America, he recounts that before foreign conquerors set foot on the soil of the land the Indians totalled no less than 70 million. But a century-and-a-half later, they had been reduced to 3.5 million; and in 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than two million that had once lived between Lima and Paita. Yet Archbishop Linan by Cisneros exposed how some of the church elders had perfected lies into a fine art. He said: “The truth is that they are hiding out, to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas.”

Racism however is flawed on a number of counts, not just for its barbarism and irrationality. Its fundamental arguments are basically weak. Where are those people who conform to racial purity, let’s say in terms of colour? You will meet a lot of dark-skinned people in Africa, but you will no doubt also come across light-skinned types in southern Africa and eastern Nigeria. How can one also argue that the Yanamani Indians or the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert are less intelligent than people in Norway or Japan. The two groups live in different material conditions, and these varied environments impose on them tasks and solutions that respond to their peculiar circumstances. In spite of the gaping loopholes in racists’ theories racism has been used together with religion to justify the enslavement of other people.

Islam, Christianity and Hinduism 

The Arabs and their Muslim counterparts, according to Dais Brion, were the first people to develop a specialised long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa. They were also the first people to view blacks as suited by nature for the lowest and the most degrading form of bondage. Rotter’s pioneering work and the research of Benard Lewis reveals that for medieval Arabs the blackness of Africans suggested sin, damnation and the devil. Arab scholars most of the time also invoked the biblical curse of Canaan to explain why the sons of Ham had been blackened and degraded to the status of natural slaves as punishment for the sins of their ancestors.

By the 10th century some Muslim writers asserted that Ham begot all blacks and people with crinkly hair and that “Noah put a curse on Ham according to which the hair of his descendants would not extend over their ears, and they would be enslaved wherever they were encountered”. Benard Lewis also quotes a 13th century Islamic historian from Iran who concluded that the Zanj (blacks) differed from animals only because their two hands are lifted above the ground and that many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.

In the 17th century Father Gregorio Garcia detected “Semitic blood” in the Indians, because like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done to them”. When Bartolome de Las Casas upset the Spanish court with his fiery denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council had replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Another justification for holding other people as slaves was found in Leviticus 25:44 which said, “Both they bonds-men and they bonds-maid, which thou shalt have, shall be the heathen that are round you; of them shall ye buy bonds-men and bonds-maids.” But the most popular text on the matter is found in Genesis 9:25 which says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.” Some slave-owners went beyond the bible arguing that it might be wrong to enslave Christians, but that the Negro was not a human being and therefore could not become a Christian. One pious lady said, when asked if her Negro maid was to be baptised, “you might as well baptise my black bitch.” While Bishop Berkeley put the same idea into philosophical language when he said, “Negroes were creaturs of another species who had no right to be included or admitted to other sacraments.”

Similarly, racist sentiments are expressed in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures of ancient India. Indra, the God of the Aryans, is described as “blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the blackskins, which Indra hates”. The account further reports how Indra “slew the flat-nosed barbarians, the dark people called Anasahs. Finally, after Indra conquers the land of the Anasahs for his worshippers, he commands that the Anasahs are to be flayed of (their) black skin.”

The first distinctive feature to be noted in religion and racism is their appeal to a two-category system which presupposes a basic division of mankind into an “in” group and an “out” group. In addition, this fundamental division is supported, initiated and sanctioned by God himself. God has a special concern for the “in” group, and it receives his sustaining aid and grace. By contrast he is indifferent or hostile to the “out” group. In the final analysis God does not value all men equally, consequently he treats them differently. And this difference is not accidental but central to his will and purpose. The two-category system is correlated with an imbalance of suffering in which the “out” group suffers more than the rest of the people. In the account of the Rig Veda, for example, we know that God has less affection for the Anasahs because they suffer more than the Aryans. It is also evident from holy books like the bible and the Rig Veda that God’s favour or disfavour is correlated with the racial or ethnic identity of the group in question. God’s wrath and hostility are sometimes even directed at the physical features of a particular ethnic or racial community.

In the bible Yahveh often sides with the Israelites in the murderous campaigns to grab land from the Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines, Amalekites in the same way that he was used to justify colonialism. Similarly in African traditional religion the God of a particular ethnic group assists it to overcome its enemies and brings prosperity to the “in” group. It stands to reason that whilst there is no rock-solid evidence to support the claim that God created man, there is enough justification in the materialist assertion that God is an invention of man. This is grimly illustrated by the fact that while Saddam Hussein was calling on God to help the Iraqis in the Gulf War, George Bush was doing the same thing. No God caused the death of the young men who were slaughtered; but the misguided beliefs and the greed of the ruling class.

Production and production relations 

Consequently the “out” and “in” scheme of analysis has nothing to do with God. It is a manifestation of the concrete and material world of humans reflected in their consciousness in the process of the production and distribution of wealth. Ultimately, production and production relations determine the ideas individuals have about themselves as a group, and about society at large in matters of morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. And it is only when we have identified and understood the material assets and constraints of a society, how it produces goods to meet its material needs, how the goods are distributed, and what type of social organisation sprouts from the organisation of production that we would have come a long way to understanding the culture and religious views of that society.

If the production relations are such that makes it possible for a minority to appropriate the end-product of the labour of the majority the views of the minority become the dominant ones in society, whilst the opinion of the majority are suppressed. The ownership of the means of production is thus important in understanding people’s perception of social phenomena – religion, philosophy, art etc. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that religious perceptions in any class-divided society are not neutral, but a tool in the hands of the dominant class in its struggle to maintain its control over economic surplus. Religious and all manner of spurious ideological theories are contrived by the ruling class or its representatives in the intellectual community and church organisations to keep the downtrodden perpetually entrapped in the vicious circle of exploitation.

As children in a predominantly Catholic community, we used to be told that God was surrounded by a host of angels with archangels. God was the boss and each angel and archangel had a specific assignment to perform in heaven. This was a world-view that sought to give blessing to the master-servant relationship that existed in the feudal era and class society in general.

Some quotations in the bible are also anti-worker if applied in today’s circumstances. Take for instance the saying, “But I say unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek, turn to him the other also.” I suppose that when the Accountant General’s Office slashed as much as a 100,000 cedis from my salary in March, I should have responded: “Please my Lordship why are you so generous with me? Take 400,000 cedis more.” This would have been submissiveness stretched to its idiotic limits, and an invitation to exploitation and despotism. It could mean an acceptance of wage slavery, a system that is inimical to working people’s interests.

The New Testament also advises us to despise and deprecate worldly things in lieu of heavenly rewards. What would this mean for those who have already made material gains here on Earth? If people like Bill Gates are also God-fearing they would have a double reward; one on Earth and the other in heaven, whilst the God-fearing poor will have only one. As for the poor who are not God-fearing the extent of their loss and damnation is inestimable. The end result of these teachings if employed in a class society makes the working people docile and facilitates their exploitation by the owning class.

Convenient smokescreen

But this is not all. It also calls forth the other forms of alienation which are not strictly economic, but are organically linked to it. It is important to note that racism and religion tend to elevate the culture and other virtues of the dominant class; and denigrate that of the oppressed. But the class character of this domination especially becomes difficult to unmask if the oppressor class has a different racial background from the oppressed, as was the case during the heady days of apartheid and colonialism. Skin pigmentation and other physical characteristics subsume the class dimension of the problem, and exploitation is seen through the binoculars of race. One therefore develops a superiority or inferiority complex, depending on one’s physical traits; and the fundamental issue which is class exploitation is lost. Given these circumstances racism becomes a convenient smokescreen with which the ruling class masks its exploitation of labour. Eventually the attention of the working class is diverted from the real causes of its predicament; and a section of it becomes a pliant tool of the ruling class in its attempt to entrench the capitalist system.

The effect on that section of the working class which does not share similar physical characteristics with the owning class is to deny itself as different from the dominant class. It identifies and shares the convictions, doctrines and other attitudes of the dominant class which oppresses it. Guilt and an inferiority complex promoted by the dominant class and imbibed by the oppressed become the result of this process. Consequently the attempt to escape this inferiority by denying and condemning oneself becomes a lifelong struggle.

Let’s consider this for one moment. It is important to note that for many Christians, the traditional African religious individuals is superstitious and worships idols and several gods; there is only one God, though he has a son begotten by the Holy Spirit. This god is white, his angels are white; and when the saved finally go to heaven, they will wear white robes of purity. But the devil is black; his angels are black; sin itself is black and when the sinful finally go to hell, they will be burnt to black coal. It is surprising that the African converts sing in pleading terror: “Wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow?” And is it any wonder that some Africans buy skin-bleaching creams to lighten their dark skins? Is it also surprising that so-called educated and enlightened women often buy red, blonde or brunette wigs to hide their black hair or spend hours on end in hair saloons trying to make their hair curly and long?

Christianity even denies the African the right to their name. A name is a simple symbol of identity. But the African convert would normally be required to discard his African name and give himself such good Christian names as Smith, Verwoerd, Robert, James, Julius, Ironmonger, Winterbotham, Elizabeth, Summer, Winter and sometimes Autumn. This business of getting new names has its roots in slave property relations, where the person of the slave was the property of the owner to be disposed of and used as the master deemed fit. So slaves were branded with the master’s name.

The same story is true in art, dance, music, drama etc, but the ultimate objective in class society is one – to control the productive forces and appropriate economic surplus irrespective of the exploiter’s race or tribe. Economic control however is much more difficult to attain without political control. Political control is therefore established through proxy governments. Even then the vampire system finds that economic and political control are incomplete without cultural and hence ideological control. So the system employs religion and bogus theories like racism to ensure the mental castration of the worker be he European, Asian or African.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Theatre Review: Sand and Glass by Derek Martin (2002)

Theatre Review from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sand and Glass by Derek Martin (Yale College, Wrexham)

There can’t be too many occasions these days when socialist ideas are brought to an unsuspecting public by performance arts students in a College of Further Education. In fact there are not too many occasions when socialist ideas are directly introduced to theatre audiences anywhere, by anybody at present. So for this reason alone, Sand and Glass – a new play by Derek Martin – stood out like a beacon.

As the programme notes make clear, the inspiration for this play was the attempt to establish a moneyless, co-operative community by the Diggers in 17th century England. The plot revolves around an attempt by a contemporary media company (fast disappearing up its own backside in the hunt for something original amongst the postmodernist slurry) to film a Digger-like community living on a desert island. To complicate matters this community (known as ‘The Commune’) is being invaded by imperialistic Taliban-like forces (the “Taheri”) intent on appropriating the land and turning Commune members into something akin to feudal serfs.

The Commune members speak a version of English shorn of its possessive and individualistic language, not even having a word for “I”. Their names reflect their roles in the Commune – Mend is the doctor, Relay the journalist, Digger a land worker, Stanza a poet. With the men imprisoned by the Taheri all the Commune members on show are women.

One of the most fascinating scenes is when Tell (naturally enough, the teacher) initiates a discussion amongst Commune members to explore why the sneering members of the media company filming them have no conception of a how co-operative society could work without private property and exchange. When this leads to an explanation of how people in ‘Western Globeland’ are only allowed access to something provided they have something else to give in exchange for it – and of how they are hunted by “detectors” and kept in small rooms on their own should they transgress this rule—the other Commune members are incredulous. In the Commune, barter, money and crime are alien concepts. Work is undertaken when necessary and goods and services are freely accessed whenever needed.

As the play develops, matters take a vicious turn. Assaulted by the Taheri and manipulated by the visiting journalists, the Commune are eventually forced into a defence of their entire social organisation, both intellectually and physically, leading to a moving series of scenes as the play reaches its climax.

The performance is a powerful one throughout and the play ends with a memorable call to the audience by the female Commune members to rise up against private property and its dehumanising forces as “cynicism is a sin . . . and we have a world to win!”.

It is apparently hoped by the playwright that other theatre groups and venues will be interested in performing or hosting the play in coming months. Though there is always the usual caveat to be mentioned with depictions of somewhat primitive, pre-capitalist societies such as this (with inevitable, unfavourable comparisons of at least some of their features with the modern industrial age) this is most certainly a play that deserves a wider audience. Indeed, for its depiction of the corrosive elements of contemporary capitalism and its call to a better, co-operative future we can only say the wider the audience, the better.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: A Denunciation of Nationalism (2002)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Indian, M. N. Roy, who was at one time prominent in the Communist International, but later broke away and took a line of his own, recently wrote for the Manchester Guardian (21/6/52) an article “Asian Nationalism. Its Roots in Race Hatred.”

In it he puts the case that the Asiatic nationalist movements are not just movements to secure independence from the foreign governments that kept them in colonial subjection, for even after achieving independence they continue to preach the same anti-foreign doctrines as before. He quotes Mr. Nehru, Prime Minister of India, and advocate of Indian nationalism, as having admitted that he does not know what nationalism is:

“What exactly is nationalism? I do not know, and it is extremely difficult to define. In the case of a country under foreign domination it is easy to define what nationalism is. It is anti-foreign power. But in a free country it is something positive. Even so, I think that a large element of it is negative or anti-, and so sometimes we find that nationalism, which is a healthy force, becomes—maybe after liberation—unhealthy, retrogressive, reactionary, or expansive.”

Yet though Mr. Nehru could not define nationalism he went on to declare that it “warms the heart of every Asian” and that “any other force that may seek to function must define itself in terms of this nationalism.”

Mr. Roy says this is nonsense and that what Mr. Nehru’s explanation really means is that nationalism is “race hatred kept alive artificially.”

“Asian nationalism is an unmixed evil. It has not got the saving grace of a cultural and idealist origin as in the case of earlier European nationalism.”

Although Mr. Roy notices that between the wars European nationalism developed into fascism, and quotes the statement of the late Lord Acton that nationality sacrifices everything “to the imperative necessity of making the nation the mould and measure of the State,” he does not appreciate the simple fact that nationalism has been and is everywhere the form in which each capitalist group tries to carve out a place for itself in the world of warring capitalist states. If he did he would not be at all surprised that the politicians who have used nationalism to gain independence from a colonial power need it just as much afterwards in order to persuade the workers to go on fighting capitalism’s battles.

If it is an illusion to think that nations can be friendly in a capitalist world provided that they are all “independent” it is equally an illusion on the part of Mr. Roy to think that the Powers, great and small, could dispense with nationalism.

At least one thing Mr. Roy has correctly summed up. Discussing the disappointing results of national independence from the worker’s point of view, he says that when India and other countries achieved independence, “absolutely nothing changed except the personnel of the State machinery.”

(From an article by “H”, Socialist Standard, August 1952)