Life and Times: Being your own boss (2024)

The Life and Times column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

There used to be many local shops in my area. Now, as almost everywhere, they are few and far between. Yet this doesn’t stop some people, whether brave or foolhardy, from trying to buck the trend and open a new shop of their own. For example, not too long ago a gentleman knocked on my door and told me he was going round the area asking residents what they thought of his idea of converting the empty shop on the corner of my street into a sandwich bar-cum-delicatessen. Did I think it would work? Would many people use it? Would I use it? I didn’t want to knock his obvious enthusiasm, but I felt obliged to tell him, that, though I might use it occasionally, I didn’t think he would get enough customers for it to work. He carried on knocking on doors but the shop never opened and I’m sure he made the right decision. It was a venture that would have involved time and energy in abundance not to speak of significant financial outlay, so he was obviously right to do his ‘market research’ first.

Doughnut shop vs cafe

But not everyone is equally strategic. Earlier this year a new shop did open just round the corner from me – a doughnut shop. It offers a wide range of doughnuts to take away or to eat with tea or coffee or chocolate at tables. It’s an inviting ambiance and the doughnuts look – and taste – very nice indeed (I’ve tried them myself). I saw the local family who own it spend literally months setting it up with all the work, energy and expense that involved and they’re now running it with the utmost friendliness and obvious efficiency. But my first thought (perhaps I’m a born pessimist) was that it couldn’t survive. It’s offering a non-essential item at a time when, by common consent, there’s a cost-of-living crisis. Yet maybe I was wrong, because initially there were queues down the street. And even when things settled down, there always seemed to be people in there. But now, as I pass by, custom seems increasingly sparse. The many students who live in the area have gone home for the summer and it seems empty most of the time. It has begun advertising ‘special offers’ – eg, 3 doughnuts for the price of 2 – and is advertising itself on the local community Facebook page as a place which groups can use free of charge for their meetings. But that doesn’t seem to be working and, though, at the time of writing, it’s still open, I seriously wonder how long it will last. The return of the students is some way off and it’s obvious that a small business of that kind needs consistent and ongoing trade to be successful. That’s not happening now and will it happen even when the students get back?

Then, to make things worse, down the road, no more than a couple of hundred yards away, another shop is about to open up – a sandwich and cakes café in a premises that’s been derelict for years. It’s bound to constitute competition to the doughnut shop, while at the same time, after perhaps an initial flourish, being itself unlikely, at least in my judgement, to attract enough regular clientele to be commercially successful. And this, just like the doughnut shop, after much time, energy and expense put into it by its hopeful owners.

Domination

So what’s happening here? Well, for those people who own little but their energies and skills as a means of making a living (ie, the vast majority), the only option – if they can find it – is employment by a boss of some kind for a wage or salary. But a small number see an escape route in trying to set up their own business and so becoming self-employed. In this way they will at least escape the domination of a boss. The trouble is that, as many find, this is also a risky and insecure route, since they do actually remain subject to a boss – a different one that dominates the system we all live in – that unfathomable, uncontrollable force called the market. It’s true that a few such businesses – very few – will succeed, provide a living for their owners and even prosper and grow. But the vast majority fail, often fairly quickly and with severe financial and other consequences to their owners and families. So, in the case of my local doughnut shop, no matter how friendly and efficient its owners are, the sad bottom line is likely to be that all their trouble and expense will be in vain and they will end up regretting they decided to try and become their own bosses.

Dead company walking

Of course, this can also be the fate of large and established businesses. A current BBC radio series, ‘Toast’ has delved into the demise of once thriving and well-established companies such as Safeway supermarkets and Little Chef road eateries. Its conclusion was that they went under due to ‘market conditions’ becoming unfavourable, then of course causing their employees to lose their jobs and large swathes of all kinds of resource having to be scrapped. Another recent programme, ‘Dead Company Walking’, attempted to find an explanation for the fact that businesses are currently failing at a higher rate than ever. But its explanation remained at a fairly superficial level, one of symptoms rather than causes. Above all it failed to touch at all on the real reason for failure, whether of small or large companies, which is the built-in instability and unpredictability of capitalism with its market system, from whose potential ravages no business of any kind is safe. Nor, of course, did the programme mention that there is in fact an alternative to the colossal waste of time, energy and resources all this involves, which is for workers of all kinds (ie, the vast majority of the world’s population), to act consciously and collectively to put an end to the market domination they live under and opt for a society of free association and free access.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: There will be riots (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The sun is out, the sky is blue, I’m rioting today, how about you? Politicians in the UK have good reason to look with trepidation on the period of their summer recess. It’s not only when the small boat crossings reach their peak. It’s also when riots are most likely to happen. There’s an underlying pressure of discontent that exists year-round and year-on-year, generally simmering through the cold winter months, but ready to explode periodically when reaching a critical mass, if weather permits, and if touched off by some suitable trigger event. This year the pretext was the dreadful stabbing to death of young children in Southport, which certain vicious individuals wasted no time in exploiting with invented claims that the alleged perpetrator was a Muslim illegal immigrant, when he was actually born in Cardiff and had a Christian father.

Comparisons were inevitably drawn in the UK media with the last lot of major riots in England in 2011. There too the trigger event – the fatal shooting of a North London alleged gangster – was obscured by confusion and misinformation, with the police and eyewitnesses providing contradictory accounts. In the ensuing orgy of arson and looting, the original trigger was largely forgotten, having served its purpose.

Echoes of similar misinformation events reverberate back through history. In a particularly notorious instance in 1255, ‘Little Saint’ Hugh of Lincoln, a 9-year-old boy, was alleged to have been ritually murdered in a ‘blood libel’ sacrifice by Jews. The chronicler and Benedictine monk Matthew Paris offered a fantastically ghoulish account in which the boy was tortured, whipped, run through with pikes, crucified and disembowelled before being thrown down a well. The atrocity seems to have been fabricated to incite popular hatred against Jews, and served its purpose admirably. In no time at all, a Jew was found and tortured into confessing, after which he was executed, followed by 18 more Jews who bravely refused to recognise the validity of the kangaroo ‘show trials’. The ritual murder accusation was not the first to be made against Jews, but it was the first to be officially endorsed by the ruling monarch, Henry III. What was not widely advertised at the time was that the king had previously sold his right to tax Jews to his brother Richard, Earl of Cornwall, thereafter decreeing that the property of any Jew committing a crime would be forfeit to the Crown. This gave the perpetually hard-up king a transparent motive for endorsing such stitch-ups. A further 71 Jews were subsequently condemned to death, but by then the fraud had become so farcically obvious that even the Church, and Richard of Cornwall, felt honour bound to intervene, and the victims were released. But the bogus story continued to have legs. It later popped up in works by Chaucer and Marlowe, and was still doing the rounds in 20th century America. In 1955 the Church of England shamefacedly mounted a plaque at Hugh’s former shrine in Lincoln Cathedral, relating how ‘trumped up stories of ritual murders of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives… Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray: Lord, forgive what we have been…’ (tinyurl.com/4zuc47ae).

Probably the most die-hard English Defence League sympathiser would dismiss the obvious historical parallel. Just because blaming ‘foreigners’ is a tactic as old as history, doesn’t mean today’s far-right are wrong. But they should still pause and ask themselves the cui bono question—who gains from this claim? With hindsight it’s clear that the king and the landowners had a clear financial incentive to discredit and persecute people they owed money to, which led to executions, pogroms, expulsions, and the forced wearing of yellow badges, decreed by the Vatican 700 years before the Nazis. The Church too is thought to have had an incentive in creating little ‘saints’ whose shrines would be lucrative draws for pilgrims. Who gains today? Ambitious populists looking to ride to power on a wave of anti-immigrant votes. Capitalist élites who delight in watching workers fight each other. Desperate individuals eager to blame their failings on those weaker than themselves.

Back in the Middle Ages, most people were illiterate, with no education and no ability to fact-check. People today have no such excuse. If they still choose to believe fake tales, it’s not because they can’t help it, it’s because they don’t care about the truth. They have sunk into sociopathy, and are no help to socialists.

According to the Torah, the Jewish people used to ritually burden a goat with their sins and send it off to get lost in the wilderness. Jesus performed the same function for Christians by getting himself crucified. But the biggest scapegoaters of all are states and their ruling élites, particularly when it comes to violent crimes like the one in Southport. ‘The many causes of and potential solutions to knife crime are well documented in extensive research…. Social issues including poverty and deprivation, serious mental health issues and online radicalisation are all part of the prevalence of knife crime. The lack of a proper home, violence in the home, lack of resources and money, parental neglect, adverse childhood experiences, supply of drugs … are also sometimes part of the picture’ (tinyurl.com/5ey3aam2). What capitalist state could do anything about any of these, even if it wanted to? To abolish poverty, the wellspring of so many social ills, you would have to abolish private wealth ownership, which is the foundation of capitalism. That’s exactly what socialists propose. Capitalist officials will simply lock up the perpetrators as deviants, and look the other way.

Nobody can predict when or where the next riots will happen. But as long as capitalism lasts we can be sure that there will be riots, and usually it will be innocents who get the blame.

Paddy Shannon

Limited Choices (2024)

Book Review from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? By Daniel Chandler. Penguin £10.99.

In 1971 the political philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice. This has had a massive impact in the academic world, giving rise to a great many articles and books discussing its argument, but it has so far had few consequences in practical politics, and that is what Daniel Chandler sets out to alter here. He presents arguments for a ‘fair society’, which Rawls referred to as ‘realistically utopian’. This review will focus on Chandler’s proposals, sometimes looking at the theoretical background to these.

Essentially, a programme of reforms is set out, including universal basic income and a higher minimum wage. There would be increased taxes on capital income, more progressive inheritance tax and an annual wealth tax on the largest fortunes. Employees should have more say in how their workplaces are run, and co-management (which is found in Germany) would mean workers and owners sharing control rights within a company. Worker co-operatives might be an improvement on this, though. Fee-paying schools would be abolished, and more would be spent on children from less-advantaged backgrounds. University education would be financed by combining free tuition and income-contingent loans. Politics could be made more democratic if corporate donations to political parties were banned and there was a cap on individual donations. Each citizen could be given a ‘democracy voucher’, so they could make an annual donation to a party or candidate of their choice. A combination of electoral and direct democracy would make political equality more likely. Communities could be in charge of local budgets, perhaps by means of citizens’ assemblies.

Rawls’ work is based on a thought experiment. In Chandler’s words, ‘we should ask ourselves what kind of world we would choose to live in if we didn’t know who we would be within it’. Presumably people would opt for a world with little inequality or discrimination, with nobody’s life experience dependent on their gender, ethnicity or sexuality, with equality of opportunity as far as possible. But the trouble is that both authors’ views are stuck within capitalism. Chandler writes: ‘We should rely on markets to distribute most consumer goods and services because the alternative would be some form of state-controlled rationing.’ But this is not the only alternative: a society of free access and production for use based on the common ownership of the means of living could provide a decent life for everyone.

The few remarks made here about socialism are not at all enlightening. Chandler says it is not clear what sort of society socialists today stand for. In a note he states that socialists now advocate reforms, rather than the use of public ownership and central planning, as supposedly used to be the case. But acquaintance with the case of the Socialist Party would show that we oppose reformism and have a definite proposal for future society, and this does not involve central planning. A better response to Rawls’ thought experiment would be a world without money or classes or states or borders, and this is entirely realistic.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Trumponomics (2024)

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

‘On the campaign trail, Trump has floated a ten-per-cent tariff on all imported goods, and a sixty-per-cent levy on those from China’ (New Yorker, 15 July). He also wants to devalue the dollar vis-à-vis other currencies. In an interview with Bloomberg Business he ‘called the strong dollar “a big currency problem” and “a tremendous burden on our companies”’ (Times, 29 July). Tariffs and dollar devaluation, that seems to be what his plan to Make American Capitalism Great Again amounts to.

The capitalist class in any country is not a monolithic bloc when it comes to commercial matters. There are differences between those whose business is exports, those who face competition from imports, those who import raw materials and parts, those who neither export nor require imported materials. What Trump has in mind would affect these groups differently.

A 10 percent tariff on all imports would benefit some US manufacturing companies by protecting them from outside competition. But this would mean an increase (not necessarily proportionate but what the market will bear) in the price of their products. Insofar as these are consumed by workers this would exert an upward pressure on wages, which would affect all capitalist employers even those involved in neither exports nor imports. It would also risk, in fact provoke, retaliation by the other country or trading bloc, which would affect exporters, who in the US mainly produce food for humans and animals.

When in 2018 his administration put a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminium, the EU retaliated with tariffs amounting to nearly $3 billion on US imports. China reacted too. As the New Yorker noted, ‘when Trump imposed tariffs on some Chinese goods in 2018, Beijing retaliated with levies on American imports which hurt American farmers and manufacturers’, adding:

‘If a new Trump Administration introduced universal tariffs, many other countries would face enormous domestic pressure to respond with similar measures. In the worst-case scenario, Trump’s policies could lead to an all-out trade war’.

A world-wide trade war in fact, since Japan, India, Brazil and others would join in as well as China and the EU.

A fall in the value of the dollar compared to other currencies would make US exports cheaper and so be welcomed by exporters. But it would also make imports more expensive and so be unpopular with companies that rely on them, whether to sell or to use to produce something else. Because the dollar is the world’s reserve currency, held by states and companies to settle their international transactions not only with the US but also with each other, a fall in its value would have worldwide repercussions.

It would reduce the value of the reserves held by other states and companies. These are mainly held in the form of US Treasury bills and bonds; in other words, is money lent to the US government and which allows the US to run a trade deficit but also to finance its huge military budget. Making the dollar weaker might benefit US exporters but could make borrowing from abroad more difficult. Some US capitalists disagree with Trump’s approach and the matter (in which workers have no interest) will be settled at the ballot box in November.

Trump may act the boor (and be one) but he is essentially a businessman and wants to use the same sort of tactics — involving bluffs and deals — against US capitalism’s economic rivals that competing capitalist companies apply against each other. States do this anyway but generally more diplomatically. A Trump administration would make it clear for everyone to see that economic rivalry between states is about supporting their companies in the competitive struggle for profits.

Billionaires behaving badly (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Elon Musk, one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet, has decidedly and publicly embraced right-wing ideologies. Not only does he wield significant influence in media, but he now owns Twitter, which he has skewed to the right. He reactivated several right-wing accounts, such as those of Tommy Robinson, and even before purchasing Twitter, Musk publicly stated that he would reinstate Donald Trump’s account.

One of Musk’s more baffling decisions was to ban the use of the biological term ‘cisgender’ as hate speech while simultaneously allowing a surge of actual hate speech on the platform. This coincided with his dismantling of the reporting system, which had functioned relatively well before the media platform acquisition.

Musk’s shift to the right has become increasingly overt. He recently hosted a chaotic Twitter rally for Trump, where the two billionaires discussed various topics, with Musk noticeably struggling with the very technology he paid $44 billion for. From this semi-candid discussion, socialists can discern the deepening ties between these two cheerleaders of capital.

Trump’s attacks on trans people have escalated, as seen in his comments during a rally in Bozeman, Montana. in his usual stilted delivery he made slights about transgender athletes in the Olympics and pledged to strip funding from any school that promotes critical race theory or ‘transgender insanity.’ Trans media commentator Erin from Erin in the Morning noted that Trump is ‘doubling down’ on his anti-trans rhetoric.

Musk’s alignment with right-wing politics wasn’t a road to Damascus revelation. While dating Grimes, mother of his trans daughter Vivian, Elon would espouse his trans-humanist ideas, a kind of utopian technocrat dream. Grimes herself, famously photographed with the Communist Manifesto, claimed to subscribe to ‘Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism’ while Elon described himself in the vaguest of terms as an anarchist despite the anarchists denouncing his claim at the time, citing his emerald mine owning and anti-union activities.

It was by May 2020 that Musk signalled his alignment with alt-right ideas and their misinformation by tweeting, ‘Take the red pill.’ This phrase, from the film The Matrix, has been adopted by reactionary groups as a metaphor for rejecting leftist views in favour of alt-right narratives.

Vivian Wilson describes her father as ‘[throwing] me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life’. Vivian herself made tongue-in-cheek posts in response to Musk’s comments, where he described her as ‘killed’ and ‘dead.’ She wrote, ‘Last time I checked I am, indeed, not dead,’ and ‘I look pretty good for a dead b**ch’. Vivian publicly refuted Musk’s claims that she was influenced by a ‘woke mind virus,’ highlighting his absenteeism and criticising his need for validation from ‘red-pilled’ right-wing supporters.

Musk is more interested in mining space gold and creating an off-planet capitalist fiefdom than in solving the pressing ecological problems we are facing on Earth. His silence on climate change during his Twitter conversation with Trump is very telling. Instead of addressing these challenges head-on, Musk seems to believe that becoming a MAGA technocrat wizard priest is the path to becoming the first Martian king.

As socialists we understand that what snake-oil Musk is selling is the extension of capitalism into space but we advocate for a society where all individuals, regardless of their gender identity, are treated with dignity and respect. It is imperative to challenge the harmful ideologies perpetuated by those in power. We stand in solidarity with Vivian and transgender individuals facing similar struggles, while emphasising the urgent need for a socialist revolution and a society free from the capitalist magnifying glass that uses misogyny as a tool to fracture our class.

A. T.

Cash or cachet? (2024)

From the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the 1860s, William James, one of the founding fathers of psychology, declared that ‘the most deep-seated need in human nature is to be appreciated’. Of course, ideas about ‘human nature’ are many and varied and socialists would argue that there is actually no fixed human nature but simply ‘human behaviour’, which is highly flexible and varies enormously from place to place, person to person and time to time according to the circumstances in which human beings find themselves and the pressures and influences upon them. But whether we call it ‘human nature’ or anything else, there can be little doubt that human beings are, as William James observed, prone to caring deeply about their standing in the eyes of others, about what a recent series of BBC radio programmes called Status.

Ultra-social

The author and journalist, Carl Honoré, who presented the ‘Status’ programmes, traced this tendency to the fact that humans are a highly cooperative species (‘ultra-social’, it is often called) who, had they not been ‘wired’ to cooperate, could not have survived the various different stages of social development they have been through. He pointed in particular to the most long-lived of these stages, the hunter-gatherer one, where survival was based on close collaboration among members of the group in which they lived and where those who excelled at bringing back food to be shared by the tribe were those who would earn the most prestige or ‘status’. This, he went on, was the ultimate reward and, as a driving force, has been fundamental to all the various different forms of human society that followed. So, despite the fact that those societies – and in particular the current one, capitalism – have laid ever-increasing emphasis on competition, this has not prevented cooperation continuing alongside it and at the same time, without which in fact we could not carry on living and working together. And a crucial reason for that, according to Carl Honoré, is that we are built to care intensely about what other people think of us – even if we may not openly admit it. In fact, it is one of the key experiences creating in us feelings of what we know as ‘happiness’.

Of course, modern capitalist society, with its winner-take-all mindset, often frustrates this natural tendency to contribute to the wellbeing of others and the community and the welcome esteem and appreciation it generates for us. This was something emphasised by the programme’s presenter, when he referred to ‘the economic insecurity baked into global capitalism’ as a significant factor preventing us from fulfilling our role as social animals and preventing us from creating ‘relationships and communities that make everyone feel valued’. In capitalism we focus on making a living for ourselves, because we need to, often to the detriment of working together with others, of ‘helping the tribe’ and achieving the satisfaction that creates. Not of course that we never experience such satisfaction. Our natural ‘ultra-social’ urge to help and to be of use to our fellow humans manifests itself in all manner of small ways in our lives more or less every day, helping to offset the ‘zero-sum’ experience that capitalism tends to make of life.

Seeking happiness

In the last of his five programmes, Carl Honoré, called for ‘a political earthquake to fix an economic system that denies basic dignity to so many’ and the need ‘to build a world where everyone thrives’. These ideas sound very much like what the Socialist Party has advocated and campaigned for throughout the 120 years of its existence. He further stated that ‘the first step to settle a problem is to lay it out on the table’ and that too is precisely what we have never stopped trying to do during that period. But it is of course up to workers as a whole, including Carl Honoré, to break free from the current system, to grasp the nettle of that problem and to take the necessary democratic political action to solve it. What is certain – and emerges clearly from what the presenter lays out – is that the natural human tendency to cooperate will be a perfect instrument for the establishment and operation of a moneyless, wageless society of voluntary work and free access based on the principle of from each according to ability to each according to need. In such a society our ‘craving for status’, our desire for the approbation of others, will have full scope for satisfaction, contributing both to the wellbeing of our fellow human beings and to our own personal happiness.

Howard Moss