Our shifty paymasters. (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

The debate on the Finance Bill in the House of Commons on October 13th was a typical expression of the shuffling methods of our masters. Those who call the tune were quarrelling over the payment of the piper.

The course of this debate exhibited, as usual, the truth of the Socialist’s contention that economic interests are the prime factors in all historical movements, no matter how much idealistic puff is put into the movements. The attitude of the international money-bags has shown the mercenary motives at the bottom of the present war, in spite of the “sanctity of small nations” twaddle.

Here, in this debate on the distribution of the expenses of the war, we have the clashing interests of all sections of the capitalist class.

The business was opened by a certain Mr. Lough, whose main bone of contention appeared to be the Excess Profits Tax, and he proceeded to set forth the views of our masters on business generally, which views are very enlightening ! “Profits in business,” says he, “seem to me the same thing as victories in war.” The noble gentleman was not far wide of the mark that time, and he evidently adheres to our position that the profits of the masters are made out of the blood of the workers. Further on he says : “It is a serious thing to plunge into the question of measuring too closely with a 12 inch rule the exact profits that have been made during the few months since the commencement of the war.” We should say not ! It might, perhaps, awaken some suspicion in the minds of those who are giving their blood—for what ? “Trading Companies are generally collections of poor people” ! ! Such as the Northcliffs, the Liptons, the Brunner Monds, etc., etc. !

Further on he says, tearfully: “It has been suggested that the bloated people in the trading concerns of the country are not doing their duty in the war. I repudiate the suggestion altogether. As far as I know, every one of the great trading concerns has its Roll of Honour. A large percentage of their men have gone to the front, and many of them have paid the penalty.” How truly blind the trading community really is. They have sent their men (their wage-slaves) out to die.

Here is another gem: “Profits are the wages of our class and wages are the dividends of another class.” There is one difference—wages are on an average the smallest sum that will suffice to keep together the body and soul of a worker and reproduce the necessary working-power, while dividends are anything up to millions of pounds. One is the price of a worker’s labour-power, and often of his life ; the other is the idler’s revenue.

“Do not take a weapon that will damage interests of the greatest importance,” he wailed, but not a word of regret as to the damaging of human flesh and blood.

The sycophantic Philip Snowden then rose and delivered a long address, taking great care not to tread on anybody’s corns; in fact, he comported himself as a “thorough gentleman.” In the course of his remarks this professional toady said: “I am very glad to be able to join in what is the universal testimony and tribute of this country to the sacrifice of life which both the middle and aristocratic classes have made, but in the matter of wealth they are not paying their fair share of the cost of the war.” Fancy thanking our masters for the paltry few who have risked anything in their war in comparison with the myriads of wage slaves ! This is the man deluded workers once called a “Socialist” !

Sir G. Younger also objected to the Excess Profits Tax on the ground that it would put English firms who are now on war work in a disadvantageous position with American firms at the end of the war.

T. M. Healy, in the course of his remarks, made the following enlightening statement with reference to the Income Tax: “You are charging those unfortunate professional men, clerks and others, with incomes of £2 and £3 per week. The Government are going to call upon them for £2, £3, and £5, out of their incomes, and all in connection with a war from which they gain no practical benefit, and these people in Ireland belong to the very classes who have given their sons and brothers to fight.” Tim had better be careful as he is sailing very close to the wind in his excitement. Healy makes use of the above to appeal for a fair share of munition work on behalf of the Irish manufacturers, who, he is afraid, are likely to lose in competition with the English. What he is really out for, of course, is cheap labour, being of opinion that increased taxation will mean higher wages.

Sir Alexander Henderson let out a wail of woe on behalf of the poor devil who, through the proposed tax, would be compelled to exist on the paltry sum of £1,800 per year ! Listen, O ye slaves, to this tale of woe ! “The man that has £4,812 a year would find it, and does find it, very difficult to reduce his expenditure down to the reduced amount of £3,600. If he is only to spend half of that and his expenditure, which was £4,812, is to be reduced to £1,800, take the figure of £5,000 as an example to us how impossible is the suggestion. All a man’s plans in life are more or less made up and fixed according to the income he has had for many years, and to suggest that an expenditure of £4,800 can be reduced to £1,800 is a practical impossibility.” Of course it is ! The idea is simply absurd. Now you starvelings of the workshop and factory who are only called upon to give your life blood in the business, surely you will have pity on the noble lord in his dilemma ! £3,000 a year to be chucked overboard ! Why, it’s preposterous.

After Sir Arthur Markham (shareholder in mines) had suggested that all working men ought to be taxed during the war (their lives are not enough !) in accordance with their ability to pay, urging that “there are many working men earning very high wages who can well afford to make a contribution towards the expenses of the war,” (think of the poor, poverty-stricken £1,800 a year merchant, and weep !) our old friend, Mr. Samuel Samuel, rose on behalf of the trading section. “We are the wealthiest country in the world,” says he, and a little further on, “I am sure the Chancellor of the Exchequer will appreciate that the wealth of the nation is in the main the wealth of the individuals who make up the nation,” (what marvellous insight and subtlety !) “those people who spend their lives in business (Lipton, Rothschild, Duke of Devonshire, Duke of Sutherland, etc.) and who by their industry give employment to the millions of working people..” Dear, kind, benevolent souls ! Further on he says: “If you take away not only the surplus profits during the period of the war, but impose large taxes besides, then, when the time comes and we have to enter the markets of the world in competition with other countries, the industrial and commercial classes will be unable to meet that competition with any prospect of success.”

It is strange what things leak out when the thieves are squabbling. Lough pointed out that the Cabinet were not taxing themselves under the excess profits tax, and Sir Alfred Mond drew attention to the “fact that a deputation of a certain number of English motor-car manufacturers waited upon the officials at the Treasury in order to press for a Protective Tariff,” and asks if the new motor tax is the result. Lough also said: “We know that motor-cars are being taxed because of a certain motor-car which is imported into this country from America, with which at the present time English motor-car manufacturers are not able to compete, and consequently British manufacturers require protection against that import until the time comes that they will once more be able to compete with it.” (What is the difference between Free Traders and Protectionists ?) He also pointed out that the “Evening News” had vigorously defended the tax on films imported into this country and pointed out that one of the Directors of the Association that owns the “Evening News”—Mr. Tod Anderson has 3,000 shares in Regal Films Ltd. This is letting the cat out of the bag with a vengeance.

(All the above quotations are taken from “Parliamentary Debates.” Vol. 74, No. 101.)

Thus the debate went on. Each interest squabbling sordidly as to who shall bear the least part of the expenses of the war—each trying to shift the burden on to other shoulders. If space would permit and the patience of the readers held out I could quote enough to fill columns showing the cold-blooded, mercenary spirit of the masters throughout this debate. While they are spending hours shifting the burden of payment, the latest returns show, according to Mr. Outhwaite (Parliamentary De­bates. Vol. 74, No. 103, p. 1571) that British casualties up to 10th Oct. in the Dardenelles alone amount to 96,899 !

Such are the men who run “our” Empire; and such are the exalted views that guide them !

Now, fellow slaves, what are you fighting for ? Think !

M. G.

Be a man! (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

To be content with overwork, harsh treatment, and a starvation wage is to be—well, a working man. Be a man!

Acknowledgements. (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

I don't usually make a point of posting the journals received column from the Standard but it's occasionally worthwhile to do so to correct the mistaken impression that the SPGB was isolated from the wider political left - especially the global left - during these early decades but also to show that even by as late as November 1915 there was an air of 'business as usual' in the columns of the Standard, despite the world being in the midst of war.

Of the journals listed above, a few have their partial archives over at the Marxist Internet Archive. Follow the links:

• "Appeal to Reason." (Kansas)
• "Washington Socialist." (Washington)
• "Weekly People." (New York)

Life & Times: Advertising for a gardener (2024)

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

I recently posted a message on my local Facebook page asking if anyone could recommend a gardener to tidy up my overgrown but not too large back garden. I got 28 (yes 28) replies from helpful members of the group. My quandary now was deciding which one to contact with a view to getting the work done. I proceeded to draw up a short list – entirely unscientifically – and from it I chose one one – Tom the Gardener –on the basis that his address showed he lived close to me. Tom said he’d come round later that day to look at the work to be done, and he did. The main question during his inspection was whether I wanted the fairly large laurel bush, which was almost a tree and was cutting out light, cut down completely or to just have the top part taken off it. We got back into the house and I was pretty gobsmacked when he told me that the cost of tidying the garden and doing the ‘small job’ (ie, removing the top part of the laurel) would be £1,700 and, if I wanted it, the ‘big job’(ie, cutting it down completely) would be £4,000. He told me he could start the next day. I said I’d think about it, but he seemed to twig that the answer was likely to be no, since he began to talk about how costs had ‘skyrocketed’ in recent times and how just to deposit the green waste at the Council site ‘cost a fortune’. Anyway we said our goodbyes and I knew I’d have to find someone else.

When I had another look at my ‘short list’ to try and decide where to go to next, there was one name on it I rather liked – GreenspaceSOS. I looked at their Facebook page and website and my first impression was reinforced. It said ‘GreenspaceSOS is a non-profit Community Interest Company. All profits made by our garden and estate maintenance service go towards delivering free services for vulnerable people and groups throughout our communities struggling with their overgrown gardens and green spaces. We recognise the physical and mental health benefits that access to good quality green space can provide.’

It then added (and this caught my eye in particular): ‘Due to receiving an overwhelming number of enquiries asking whether we deliver a normal ‘paid-for’ garden maintenance service, GreenspaceSOS have decided to open our books to paying customers who would like a reliable, trustworthy, professional, friendly, clean, and ethical garden service for 2024!’ Bingo! Or so it seemed. And actually it was. I wasn’t looking to have my garden done for free, but the ‘paid for’ option gave me hope. So I duly emailed Greenspace SOS and got a quick reply. Paul offered to come round and look in the next couple of days. And he did. I immediately took to him. He was obviously knowledgeable about the work and his friendly, courteous manner inspired confidence. He quickly told me that, though he could cut back or cut down the big bush, he didn’t want to reduce its height to any great extent, because it was likely that birds were nesting in it and they shouldn’t be disturbed. I hadn’t thought of that and I was obviously sympathetic. He asked me if he could take photos of the garden with a view to sending me a quote and promised to get back to me soon. He did that a couple of days later, quoting a sum of £140. In its own way, this shocked me as much as Tom’s £1,700. A friend suggested that maybe he’d inadvertently left off a nought at the end.

Anyway I got back to him to say fine. But when he came to do the work the following week, the first thing I said was I thought £140 was incredibly little. But he said it was all right and that at least cleared my mind of the missing nought suspicion. It was a good number of hours work for Paul and he did a truly excellent job of pruning, shaping and clearing as well as leaving everything very clean. I asked him how they (their website said that he, Gav and Ian were a team of 3) managed financially if most of their work was done for free and they seemed to charge little even for paid work. He told me they applied for various grants that were available for assisting disadvantaged individuals or groups (eg, elderly and disabled, extra care housing schemes, an animal rescue centre, St John’s Ambulance), and also canvassed donations from local businesses. They were content to live on relatively little themselves and had the satisfaction of knowing they were in some way lighting up the lives of people who had little materially and were contributing positively to the health of communities. When I asked him how they disposed of the waste, he said they had to pay for that at the council site – at which I insisted that £140 really was too little and he had to take a few more tenners, which, thank goodness, he accepted.

Since then I’ve recommended GreenspaceSOS to two friends, both needing work in their respective gardens, and they’ve both agreed terms with him. Paul has emailed to thank me. But I’ve also mused about how to account for all this. As I see it, Tom, who I’ve actually got nothing against, is bowing to capitalism’s everyone-for-themselves ethic, whilst Paul, Gav and Ian are resisting this and preferring instead to embrace a community and mutual aid ethic. Good for them, and it also provides at least a glimpse of evidence that, when we get a socialist world of common ownership and free access to all goods and services, human beings, eminently flexible as ‘human nature’ is, will be perfectly capable of acting in the interests of the community as whole, especially as it will also be in their own interest to do so – and that includes Tom the Gardener’s interest as well.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Boeing: out in the cold (2024)

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

After nearly three months on the International Space Station, two astronauts are to be marooned there until next February as their proposed transport home, Boeing’s Starliner capsule, remains out of service after a host of thruster failures, software glitches, parachute problems and helium leaks. The astronauts are being philosophical about it, but Boeing will be aggrieved at losing credibility points to its arch-rival NASA co-contractor, the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX, which will now take on the responsibility for bringing the astronauts home (tinyurl.com/3bj3ua2t).

Boeing is fast becoming a byword for ‘omnishambles’ with a recent history that showcases just how capitalist competition and corporate profit-chasing can result in highly uncreative destruction.

When Boeing swallowed up the last of its US aviation rivals in the 1990s, it saw the chance to adopt a less product-oriented and more shareholder-focused and monopolistic approach which sought to maximise returns by outsourcing not just part production but the cost of part development too, while also extorting price reductions. This put the squeeze on suppliers, who were faced with a Hobson’s Choice of a bad deal or no deal at all. But outsourcing creates complexity, and this compartmentalised approach on the wide-bodied 787 Dreamliner resulted in delays and overruns and never delivered the savings expected (tinyurl.com/fsmbd8mz).

While Boeing wrestled with a problem of its own making, its major European rival, the joint venture Airbus, announced the re-engined narrow-body A320neo, which it claimed could cut fuel use by up to 35 percent. This caused consternation at Boeing, whose 50-year-old 737 had previously dominated the core-segment single-aisle market. To compete, Boeing really needed a brand new plane, but the lead-time to mass production of an all-new design, outsourced or not, would be far too long, and Boeing were already haemorrhaging buyers to Airbus. So bosses resorted to the least-worst option, to re-engine the 737. Morgan Stanley said of this ‘reactionary’ solution, ‘Boeing’s hasty decision to re-engine the B737 is a clear indication of the success and strong competitive positioning of the A320neo’ while another business analyst was ‘astounded at the Airbus smackdown’ (tinyurl.com/36rkdsrr).

Enter the 737 MAX. But when you put new and bigger engines on a 100-ton aircraft they alter its centre of gravity and flight characteristics. Normally this would necessitate costly flight simulator retraining and recertification of pilots. Instead Boeing used a background software fix known as the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), which altered the plane’s rear flaps in response to sensor signals. As long as it worked properly, they reasoned, the pilots didn’t need to know about it. So Boeing did not tell them about MCAS or include it in the pilot manual. The Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t too worried, despite whistleblower allegations of its regulatory capture by Boeing, and agreed with the company to give pilots just an hour of training on an iPad, without mentioning MCAS. Boeing weren’t worried either. They had calculated the likelihood of a ‘major failure’ (one not resulting in the loss of a plane, which is termed ‘catastrophic’) as once in every 223 trillion flight hours – around 2 billion years of annual MAX fleet service (tinyurl.com/549z2ahj).

In the event they had two catastrophic failures in less than 6 months. The sensors and control panel light didn’t work properly, and pilots did not know about MCAS or how to override it when it malfunctioned. In October 2018 a Lion Air 737 MAX 8 crashed in the Java Sea, killing all 189 people. Airily dismissing this as ground crew and pilot incompetence, Boeing announced record $100bn earnings the following January. But in March 2019 an Ethiopian Airlines MAX 8 also fell out of the sky, killing all 157 on board. Clearly this was no coincidence, and Boeing immediately saw its orders, stock prices and reputation plummet. Its CEO promptly resigned, though with a cosy retirement package of $80m in stock options (tinyurl.com/498cvau4), and the new CEO issued a mea culpa to the US Senate, accepting the company’s responsibility for the deaths and agreeing to pay compensation and submit to regulators.

And then, despite all the regulation, a door panel blew off an Alaska Airlines flight in January this year, because bolts were missing. How could this happen? Multiple whistleblowers had faced company reprisals after drawing attention to falsified inspection reports and a string of unsafe practices due to cost-cutting and inadequate staff training. In July Boeing pleaded guilty to criminal conspiracy after being found to violate the terms of the regulatory agreement, meaning the company now has a criminal record (tinyurl.com/mv4av7m2).

On top of that, Boeing workers have been on strike against a union-busting and bullying culture, pay rates that have not increased in 16 years as the cash-strapped company grinds down on its own workforce, and ‘panic mode’ as managers hound staff to keep quiet over quality concerns (tinyurl.com/ysjh9mnc).

Now Boeing has $60bn of debt and is ‘one level above being potentially downgraded to non-investment grade status – junk status’. But nobody wants Boeing to collapse, not the airlines, who are faced with a global shortage of aircraft and fear an Airbus monopoly even more than the current Boeing-Airbus duopoly, and not the US government, which relies on Boeing’s aerospace defence arm and fears market capture by a major Chinese competitor like Comac (Economist, 20 June).

Airbus has seen A220-300 engine failures, diversions, groundings and supply chain problems but no crashes, and its stock has gone up, not down. The story of Boeing shows what can happen when market competition tightens the screws, and things like quality control, adequate training, product performance and company honesty begin to crack and splinter. Accidents will still happen in non-market socialism, but not because someone is eyeing the balance sheet instead of the safety inspection reports.

Meanwhile the astronauts continue to float in the ISS, patiently above it all. Compared to what many others have suffered at Boeing’s hands, they might consider themselves lucky only to be left out in the cold.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: ‘The markets’ before people (2024)

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

It was always a bit of a mystery why Rachel Reeves was so insistent on presenting the Labour Party as the ‘Party of Business’ and emphasising that, if she became Chancellor of the Exchequer, she would enforce stringent government spending rules with a rod of iron.

This can’t have been aimed at catching votes; that would be too much like asking for turkeys to vote for Christmas. Nor even to reassure British business; these would know from past experience that a Labour government would be a safe pair of hands as far as looking after their interests was concerned. It seemed that the only explanation could be to reassure ‘the markets’ so as to avoid the fate of the unfortunate Truss government; to reassure, in other words, the international speculators who buy and sell currencies and who lend money to governments by buying the bonds they issue.

That this may well have been the reason was revealed on Sunday 1 September by the member of the Cabinet sent out that day to tour the radio and TV studios to defend the Labour government’s decision to take away the winter fuel allowance from most pensioners. Newspaper headlines the following day reflected what Lucy Powell, the Leader of the House of Commons, had said:

‘WINTER FUEL PAYMENT CUT HELPED STOP “RUN ON THE POUND” SAYS LUCY POWELL. “We would have seen the markets losing confidence”, Leader of the Commons said’ (iNews).

‘UK FACED ECONOMIC CRASH IF WINTER FUEL PAYMENT WAS NOT AXED, POWELL SAYS. The Commons Leader says Rachel Reeves’s decision to cut the payment was a “difficult decision” with “no alternative”’ (Belfast-based Irish News).

Her exact words, as recorded by these newspapers, were, respectively:

‘ . . . why we had to do that was because if we didn’t, we would have seen the markets losing confidence, potentially a run on the pound, the economy crashing . . . ’ (inews)

and

‘If we hadn’t taken some of these tough decisions we could have seen a run on the pound, interest rates going up and crashing the economy. It’s something we were left with no alternative but to do’ (tinyurl.com/yhs7t6se).

What she meant couldn’t have been clearer: that to retain the confidence of the international speculators and investors who trade in currencies and government bonds, the new Labour government had no alternative but to cut government spending.

Some might question whether the situation was that drastic. But that’s not the point. The government considered that it was and, in their role as guardian of the general interest of the British capitalist class as a whole, took the required action to maintain the confidence of ‘the markets’ by cutting its spending. In theory they could have cut something else — so-called defence spending, for instance — but, presumably to convince the markets how serious they were, deliberately chose to cut some social benefits, in this case those for pensioners.

In any event, the markets were satisfied. Under the headline INVESTORS DEFY ECONOMIC GLOOM WITH SCRAMBLE FOR UK BONDS, the Times (4 September) reported:

‘The record demand for gilts suggests that financial markets are shrugging off worries about the UK’s fiscal sustainability for now, after the government said it needed to carry out immediate spending cuts to prevent a collapse in the pound.’

How we live and how we might live - Part 2 (2024)

From the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month)

It is November, 1884. William Morris, designer, author and revolutionary socialist, stands before an audience assembled at his London home delivering a talk: “How we live and How we might live”. Six hundred miles away across the North Sea in Berlin, representatives of the European powers are gathered, negotiating, bargaining, manoeuvring, carving up the African continent into agreed spheres of influence and exploitation. The British are becoming anxious and a bullish jingoism is percolating through society. The United Kingdom has recently lost its world lead in manufacturing to the rapidly growing capitalist powers of continental Europe. Rivalry among them is heating up.

Morris assesses the situation shrewdly. He observes:

‘it is now a desperate competition between the great nations of civilisation for the world-market, and tomorrow it may be a desperate war for that end.’

That ‘desperate war’ among the ‘great nations of civilisation’ would come eventually in the cataclysm of 1914-18. War, of course, was nothing new, and the ‘great nations’ were no strangers to it. Even as their representatives in Berlin haggled over African territories, the French and Dutch were fighting separate colonial wars in China. Industrial capitalism, birthed in the early decades of the nineteenth century, had shown no capacity for limiting mass violence. Quite the contrary. The nineteenth century had exploded across the European landmass with the muskets and cannons of the Napoleonic and Coalition armies. Throughout the century the long destructive arc of capitalist violence ripped through a multitude of colonial and European territories and states. It began the new century on the southern tip of Africa with Brits and Boers fighting it out in a hail of machine gun fire and rifle bullets.

The slaughter continued in a multitude of conflicts. It failed miserably to end with ‘The War to End All Wars’, rose to new heights of violence between 1939 and 1945, and by the millennium, had left behind it vast material devastation, 230 million dead, and an untold number of broken lives. The arrival of the twenty-first century didn’t disappoint. It opened with a flood of civil wars and insurgencies, and with a cynical and drawn out conflict in Iraq.

Today, some twenty years later our TV screens and news media are filled with narratives of the current slaughter in Ukraine and the Middle East. Elsewhere, less newsworthy but no less deadly conflicts rage around the globe: in Cameroon and Haiti; in Yemen and Mexico; in the deserts of northern Africa, and in the mountains and plains of South America. Warfare appears to be a fixture in human affairs. It changes its colours and pretexts with each new conflict, but never disappears – despite the fact that few sane people actually want it. Once again, this raises the question that Morris asked of another seeming fixture of human life, poverty: why? Why poverty? Why war? Why do we see no end to it, no relief?

Why war?

It would be easy to settle on a simple answer to his question, one we see everywhere online, in the media and sometimes even in academic texts – ‘human nature’. We hear those words pronounced sagely at home and in the pub. It’s just the way we humans are, we say. The truth however, is that we humans like simple explanations, something that we can pin down in a weighty phrase or with a shake of the head, and then tuck away in the back of our minds before returning to the immediate problems of daily life. But is war so simple? It takes vast organisation and resources to conduct a modern war. It takes a great deal of thought and preparation. Human nature, geared to quick instinctive responses does not seem to fit the bill.

In his talk, Morris addressed the questions of war and poverty as they affected British society in his own time, yet he might just as well have been speaking for us today. Poverty and the drive to war persist even though a lot has changed in the scope and impact they have on our lives. Under the competitive pressures of a capitalist market, the advance of science and technology has led to the increased mechanisation and destructive power of war. It has led to the growth of a huge and lucrative armament industry, and to growing stockpiles of weaponry. It has vastly increased the possibility of widespread, even global destruction.

Disarmament agreements that offered some reassurance over past decades have now fallen by the wayside. Competition has once again grown fierce and borders have closed. Poverty, too, continues to scar communities in the capitalist West, and in the countries of the ‘developing world’ subject to capitalism’s long reach and market imperatives. With the capitalist advance and the destruction of traditional economies, however, poverty arises less often these days from a result of natural scarcity, and more frequently from lack of ability to pay.

Escalating crises

Time moves on. This is 2024, not 1884, and in addition to the historical blights of poverty and war, we are now facing potential catastrophes of a kind that Morris never had to deal with. After decades of evasion and denial, few now are unaware of the escalating crises of climate change, loss of species diversity and of pollution. Climate change has made itself felt around the world in the large scale destruction of lives and property brought on by extreme weather systems. In David Attenborough’s well publicised words to the United Nations, climate change has now become ‘widespread, rapid, and intensifying’. It poses threats to food security, access to fresh water and to natural resources. It is altering the migration patterns of human beings, creating social division and disruption. And of course, as always, it is the poor that suffer most.

Since 1950, that is, within the lifetime of many people, over half of all the world’s species have become extinct, and much of this is driven by capitalist imperatives and human action. From what we now understand of the interdependency of all life on the planet, this loss is not just a matter for sentimental regret. The excessive rate at which species are being lost or diminished is putting severe pressure on the ability of ecological systems to adapt. Ecologists warn that beyond a certain limit these natural systems are likely to become unstable or collapse. Seventy-five percent of the genetic variation in crops has disappeared in the last 125 years through selective breeding for commercial purposes. It is irretrievable. A lack of genetic diversity leaves crops more vulnerable to disease, pests and invasive species but also to the effects of climate change. Not only does this threaten global food security but it can have disastrous consequences for local populations who are tied into the capitalist system and are dependent upon revenue from the sale of crops.

Pollution too, is reaching new levels, and creating new threats. Here in the UK, the media keeps us aware of local problems like our polluted waterways. But this is only scratching the surface. Air, land and water pollution has a significant global impact on ecosystems and on human health. According to the World Health Organisation, almost 99 percent of the global population is now breathing air that exceeds quality limits, creating cardiovascular problems, strokes and respiratory diseases. Today, eight million deaths annually are attributed to air pollution. The land, too, is rapidly deteriorating from an onslaught of pollutants from landfill sites, from agricultural pesticides and fertilisers. These pollutants, along with untreated sewage, leak into the water supply contaminating seas, lakes and rivers. Oil spillages and accumulations of plastic waste kill animals and destroy habitats.

In the face of all these current crises, it seems we have become paralysed, unable to act effectively. And that requires an explanation. Looking around at our advances in science, in engineering, in medicine, and in so many other fields, it’s clear that we are a practical and problem-solving species. The capitalist system which currently dominates our lives and directs our activity is so often credited with a capacity to innovate, and yet when it comes to collective problem-solving in areas such as these, it seems impotent.

It is not that these problems have lacked attention or proposed solutions. A vast amount of human energy has been expended on them. The outcomes, however, have been inadequate, and the solutions proposed have been superficial and ineffective. Globally, we are still pumping huge quantities of climate-altering carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The long string of international gatherings since the first 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm has achieved little. The internationally agreed Kyoto protocols have been established but their targets have remained largely unmet. The annual COP meetings have been attended by heads of state, politicians, and thousands of business representatives, lobbyists, journalists, negotiators and scientists. Weeks have been spent in intense exchanges and negotiations, yet with very little positive result.

A single origin

So what is going on? Why have we made so little progress? In recent years there has been a growing recognition that these crises: climate change; loss of species diversity; and pollution are not separate problems. They influence and magnify one other. They cannot be separately addressed. Fashionable terms like ‘the polycrisis’ or ‘the metacrisis’ have been popping up to describe this new understanding like bubbles on the surface of a rapidly flowing river. There is an acknowledgment that these crises have a single origin. This is an advance of sorts.

Some, at least, have come to the realisation that it is no longer sufficient to blame superficial features of our society like particular industries, businesses or political ideologies. And there is little to be gained by blaming vague abstractions like ‘human nature’. It is becoming acceptable, even in the conventional media, to acknowledge that the problem lies in something much more fundamental, in the way we organise ourselves as a global society to produce the things we need (or think we need) in order to live. It lies, in other words, in the structure of the capitalist economy.

Despite this advance, we soon hit a problem. There is disagreement on what capitalism fundamentally is. It gets defined in terms of its surface features. But superficial definitions give rise only to superficial and ineffective solutions. Economic textbooks and business sites tell us, for example, that capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production (factories, machines, raw materials, etc). ‘Libertarians’ tell us that capitalism is no more than voluntary exchange. These abstract definitions are both highly ideological and highly reductive. They tell us very little about the complex nature of the world we actually inhabit. Worse still, they are inaccurate.

Capitalism is an impersonal system. It matters very little how the means of production are owned, or who owns them. The central feature of capitalism, the accumulation of capital by means of wage labour, remains the same whether businesses are owned by individuals, partnerships, families, cooperatives, groups of shareholders or by the state. So what is this thing we call capitalism, and how is it responsible for so much that appears wrong with our world?

In next month’s Socialist Standard we will dive down into its workings and start to look at the ways in which all these features are generated in our own time by what lies at the heart of capitalism itself.

Hud.