Running Commentary: Russia yawns (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In face of the conspicuous indifference of the Russian working class, the weeping news-reader announced that their leader, Leonid Brezhnev, was dead. Within a week the non-weeping masses were told to mop up their tears, for a new Tsar (official title: General Secretary of the Communist Party) had been appointed by the Politburo. Like the dictator who preceded him. Yuri Andropov. ex-KGB chief and Russian ambassador in Budapest in 1956, will preside over the Russian state capitalist empire. All leaders, be they elected like Thatcher and Reagan, or installed by totalitarian regimes, like Andropov and Jaruzelski. can only rule within the limitations of the anti-social profit system. Brezhnev’s tyrannical policies, which sent dissidents to the freezing wastelands of Siberia or the mind- manipulating confines of psychiatric asylums, were not the expression of his own hatred of the working class, but of capitalism’s inherent inability to satisfy working class needs and still produce maximum profits.

The new leader of Russian capitalism lives in a luxury apartment at Kurtuzov Prospekt — a home which is said to compare favourably with any owned by the richest capitalist parasites. How does he get his privilege and luxury? Simply by being one of the class of Party bureaucrats who control the state, which formally owns the means of wealth production and distribution. In short, Andropov and his fellow Communist Party dictators over the proletariat, live off the fruits of the labour of the Russian working class. To speak of such a system as socialist — as do certain gullible folk on the Left — is to totally distort the meaning of the word.

Capitalism is characterised by wage labour and capital, social phenomena which clearly exist in Russia. The only difference between Andropov's capitalism and Reagan’s is that in the latter capital tends to be privately owned and controlled and workers have some opportunity to choose their leaders, whereas under the former the state owns and controls most capital and workers have very limited democratic opportunities.

Within the field of capitalist politics, the so-called Left wing favours state capitalism and the Right wing prefers private capitalism. Both are prepared to accept either form of capitalism when the needs of profit-making dictate: for example, for all his rhetorical commitment to “the Soviet system” (state capitalism) Brezhnev was always happy to trade with the West. Whatever new policies Andropov may introduce, the capitalists of the West may rest assured that he will not cease to involve the Russian state in international commercial competition in which the wage slaves always lose.

Socialists oppose capitalism in ail its forms; we oppose it for the simple reason that it has outlived its usefulness as a way of organising society. Opposing the idea that there must always be leaders and led. socialists regard the passing of Brezhnev and the inauguration of his successor as of no consequence to the working class. The class which produces all social wealth need not mourn the death of one of those who legally steals that wealth from us. 

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Costly votes (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

History was not made by the high level of debate, nor by any prescience of the voters' decisions, in the recent American elections but records were broken by the amount of money laid out in the candidates' campaigns.

Something like £150 million was spent in this massive effort to persuade the American workers, against what should have been their better judgment, that capitalism would be good for them under Republicans or Democrats. Some staggering sums were afforded by the candidates themselves.

A Democrat in Minnesota spent a total of $8 million, half of which he paid himself. In Texas a Republican spent $12 million — and was not elected. But most spectacular of all. in the battle for Governor of New' York State, Republican Lewis Lehrman’s election expenses came to $15 million, half of it from his own pocket.

Lehrman was another loser, at least in the election. In other ways he is a winner; "I will." he announced, "go out to work and make the money back." He was only fooling because his millions came not from his own work but from that of his employees, whose exploitation yielded the profits which enabled Lehrman to make his flamboyant bid for power in New York.

Expensive election campaigns, which imply that only the rich can mount an effective contest, make a lot of people fear for democracy. Such anxieties miss the point, which is essentially in the fact that millions of New Yorkers voted for the big spending Lehrman and millions more for Cuomo, the Democrat victor, who also spent millions of dollars in the election.

Workers who are enlightened about capitalism, who are aware of the impotence of its politicians to run the system in the interests of the people, are unimpressed by gaudy, costly electoral stunts. Such workers are. in the end, the only certain guardians of democracy.

The fact that at present working class voters are so misled as to support candidates like Lehrman and Cuomo is not a measure of how much money was spent in their campaigns but of the low level of workers' consciousness.

Running Commentary: On the gridiron (1982)

The Running Commentary Column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the baseball players of America went-on strike in the summer of 1981, we pointed out the similarities between their action and that of industrial workers trying to defend their standard of living. Most American workers, with a fair bit of prompting from the media, took a cynical attitude to the dispute, which was seen as a squabble between two sets of rich people. Now the players of the National Football League, who perform in steel helmets and liberal amounts of padding and look more like spacemen than footballers, have also taken “industrial action”.

Normally games are televised live on Sunday afternoons and Monday evenings but since the middle of September the networks have been showing instead Canadian Football, old “classic” games, or baseball, now in the last days of its season. None of this satisfies National Football League addicts.

Television income is one of the points at issue. The players have asked for fifty per cent to be allocated to them, to be divided on a seniority scale, and changes in the system of medical checks. They are unhappy about the way drug testing is conducted, want each player to have the right to a second medical opinion and a surgeon of his choice, and to be told all pertinent information about his injuries. The very fact that these medical demands have to be made shows how dissatisfied the players are with the present situation. At the time of writing, labour and management remain deadlocked on all these points.

The point about the players’ high wages deserves some further comment. In a number of cases high salaries can be the front behind which surplus value reaches the pockets of wealthy capitalists. However, the American brand of football is hard, bruising work and the great majority of players come from the working class, often from the desperately poor. Under capitalism wages represent the value of labour power — that is. the average cost of producing and reproducing the worker. American football is such a dangerous game that even in a deep recession — with welfare checks (dole) a probable alternative — it is only the high pay and other lucrative trappings that induce men to make a living of it.

American football is well able to pay such wages: with only a few top clubs widely scattered over a large country, even the unsuccessful play in front of near capacity crowds. On top of this is the large income from television. This contrasts sharply with the situation in Britain where a large number of clubs are in competition and many are near to bankruptcy. Recently the Rugby League players in England threatened to strike, but this dispute has been smoothed over. The threat of being driven out of business is often used by capitalist spokesmen, sometimes in defiance of the truth, in order to dissuade workers from pursuing pay claims. In the case of the Rugby League, however, a prolonged stoppage may well have closed many clubs. The Rugby League game is only part professional anyway, the players’ main income deriving from other jobs when they are lucky enough to have one. There is no suggestion however of the NFL clubs going to the wall, even though a long strike is considered possible.

To dispel any lingering doubts about whether the issues in the footballers’ strike are indeed the same as in an “ordinary” industrial dispute, we give two quotations from the International Herald Tribune of 2 and 3 October 1982. Gene Upshaw , Union President, said:

It is a tragic situation to be dealing with these people. They don’t care about you. We’re replaceable parts. We asked them what gives them the right to give 1500 players a physical examination. Then we said "what if 1500 players refuse to take them?” They said they would get 1500 other players.

Jack Donlan, director of the League’s Management Council, presented the management view:

Their proposals, we perceive, are designed to control the game. They’re always talking about their wage scales, their medical program. They’re trying to take away everything that has made this game and this League great.

There you have it; we have been wrong all the time. The crowds don't turn up to see the players play. They don’t even go to see the managers manage, which can be a spectaclc in itself in the United States. They go to see the owners own. 

E C Edge 

The dispute was settled shortly after this piece was written. None of the players’ demands was met and they returned to work.

Correction (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the item Sunshine in the October Socialist Standard we may have inadvertently given the impression that if only politicians and "experts" could predict the course of capitalism's economy, slumps and booms could be eliminated. In fact both are impossible; capitalism is anarchic and can be neither predicted nor controlled.

Editors.

50 Years Ago: Shorter Hours No Cure for Unemployment (1982)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Various Labour leaders, having therefore rejected the idea of shorter hours with reduced wages, have stood firmly by the notion that the problem can be solved if hours are reduced and wages left unchanged. The Transport and General Workers’ Union have made much of an agreement fixed up with Mander Brothers, paint manufacturers, of Wolverhampton, under which hours are reduced from 47 to 40 without reduction of the minimum rates of pay. The agreement may or may not be a satisfactory one in other respects, but it certainly does not show a way of remedying unemployment, for the change is accompanied by a reorganisation of the works and the introduction of a new system of piece-rates winch will increase the output per head of the workers and will result in eventual dismissal of redundant staff. The only guarantee is that no dismissals shall take place for six months and that the dismissed men will then receive some “compensation.” In the meantime, the increased output at smaller costs will enable Manders to undersell their competitors and throw their workers into the ranks of the unemployed.

[From an editorial in the Socialist Standard December 1932]

SPGB Meetings (1982)

Party News from the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

Audio recordings of the following meetings from the December 1982 Standard are available on the SPGB website.

WILLIAM MORRIS’ VISION OF SOCIALISM (Part 1, Part 2)

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 12th December 1982

Speaker - Steve Coleman

MARTOV AND THE ANTI-BOLSHEVIK APPROACH TO REVOLUTION

Part of the series Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made

Date: 26th December 1982

Speaker - Steve Coleman

Paid to Kill (2024)

Book Review from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army. By Jack Margolin. Reaktion Books £15.99.

Mercenaries have existed through much of history, at least since Ancient Greek times. A well-known recent example was the US firm Blackwater, which has since undergone a number of name changes after some of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007 (the killers were imprisoned, but later pardoned by Trump). The term ‘private military contractor’ is sometimes used as supposedly sounding less nasty. Here Jack Margolin recounts the history of the Wagner organisation; his work is diligently researched, though quite a lot remains unclear.

The boss of Wagner was Evgeniy Prigozhin, a thug who had spent nine years in prison for theft but later became a business-owner. After the collapse of the USSR, private military companies began to flourish, often doing the dirty work that state security services preferred to steer clear of. Wagner seems to have originated in eastern Ukraine in 2014, as pro-Russia separatists endeavoured to set up regimes not linked to Kyiv, and it may even have been created by the Russian state.

In 2015-6 Wagner soldiers fought in Syria, defending the Assad government on behalf of Russia but also making a profit from Syrian oil. Many front companies were put in place then and later, and an agreement was signed with the Syrian regime that entitled Wagner to up to a quarter of the revenue from oil extracted at sites they had ‘liberated’. Attention was then turned to Africa, fighting and making profits in Sudan and then the Central African Republic with its sizeable mineral resources. Wagner established a regional hub in Libya and in 2022 its fighters were responsible for a massacre at Moura in Mali, where at least five hundred people were killed and women and girls were raped. It is not possible to put a figure on Wagner’s income from government payments (including the Russian state) and its profiting from resource exploitation.

Wagner probably became most notorious for its part in the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2022, though it took a few weeks for it to play any role. It was allowed to recruit from prisons, promising amnesty to those who ‘volunteered’. They had perhaps five thousand fighting in Ukraine, most of them convicts, which helped the Putin regime to avoid introducing conscription. Deserters were killed, often with a sledgehammer, which became a kind of symbol of Wagner.

But as the invasion wore on, Wagner and Prigozhin began to distrust Russia’s military leadership, a feeling that was mutual. In June 2023 it was decreed that private military companies would have to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence. This would put Wagner and others in a subordinate role, Prigozhin refused to accept it, and a mutiny or putsch took place. A convoy of Wagner vehicles and fighters occupied the city of Rostov, in the hope that Russian army soldiers would join them. A march towards Moscow started, but this was abandoned after an intervention from Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus (though it is not clear precisely what happened). Wagner forces were evicted from Russia and moved to Belarus. Then in August a plane carrying Prigozhin and other Wagner leaders crashed north of Moscow, killing all those on board. According to Margolin, it is pretty likely, though not absolutely certain, that it was Putin who ordered Prigozhin’s assassination, just as other rivals and critical journalists have been killed.

Margolin suggests that embattled governments may well continue to make use of private military forces, as will rebels too, with the state not having an absolute monopoly on violence. But whoever does the fighting, it will be in the interest of rulers or would-be rulers of one kind and another, and it will be ordinary people who will suffer and be killed.

Paul Bennett

Newport Radical Book Fair (2024)

Party News from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month marked 185 years since the historic Chartist uprising in South Wales. It was celebrated by the Newport Rising Festival, a series of commemorative events in and around the city. One of these was the Newport Radical Book Festival held at the Corn Exchange and advertised as ‘a free entry book fair featuring radical publishers, campaign groups, and activists running stalls selling new and used books, posters, stickers, pamphlets, zines and merchandise, plus workshops and talks’.

The South Wales Branch of the Socialist Party had a stall there run by a group of branch members. Among publishers, groups and other organisations in the hall were Resistance Books, Eco-Socialists, Stand up to Racism, the Bristol Radical History Group and the Carmilla Distro Anarchist Queer Collective. In engaging with visitors and other stall holders, we found more than a little interest and sympathy among them when we put to them our view of how capitalism fails the vast majority of people and the need to replace it by a society of free access to all goods and services. Visitors took away with them a significant amount of the literature we had brought with us, with Socialist or Your Money Back, our book of collected articles from the Socialist Standard, particularly popular. We were offering copies of this handsome volume left over from when it was published at the time of the Party’s 100th anniversary free of charge, but several visitors insisted on offering payment – £10 in one case, which we managed to bid down to £5, and £20 in another case with the ‘purchaser’ insisting on the ‘donation’.

This Saturday event was for us an alternative to the weekend street stall the branch normally runs in Cardiff city centre. But the difference here was palpable. At the street stall, we are the ones doing the approaching trying to get members of the public interested in our ideas and our wares and all too often meeting with apathy. At the Newport Radical Book Festival we found, quite differently and refreshingly, that a fair number of those attending were already broadly sympathetic to what we had to say and were prepared to enter into discussion and exchange ideas with us. So a day well spent.

South Wales Branch

Cooking the Books: Another reformist dreamer (2024)

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

In a speech last year, Rachel Reeves name-checked Mariana Mazzucato who, she said, had long argued that ‘the state’s role is not simply to correct the failures and redress the negative externalities of free markets… Success has always rested upon a partnership between the market and the state’ (tinyurl.com/3m78s2mx).

Although Mazzucato is seen as a radical thinker she has nothing against capitalism as such. Nothing against the private ownership of productive resources. Nothing against production for sale on a market with a view to profit. What she is against is the present ‘dysfunctional form of capitalism’ characterised by ‘the excessive financialization of companies and remorseless pursuit of shareholder value’. As she quotes on her website she is on ‘a mission to save capitalism from itself’. She wants to ‘change’ capitalism, as she put it in her 2020 book Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism, by ‘restructuring business so that private profits are reinvested back into the economy rather than being used for short-term financialized purposes’. In other words, she is a theorist of reformism. Hence her attraction for the Labour Party. Even under Corbyn, John McDonnell went around echoing her call for an ‘entrepreneurial state’.

Mazzucato’s reform to capitalism is for the state to play a pro-active role in the economy by setting an aim to be achieved — a social or economic problem to be solved — and then mobilising the help of private capitalist corporations to achieve it by ‘shaping’ markets for them. Hence the title of her book which argues that the US government’s 1962 mission to get a man on the Moon within ten years is the example to follow.

There are indeed occasions when capitalism’s spontaneous aim of profit maximisation is set aside. When a country is at war, the ‘mission’ becomes to win ‘whatever it costs’ and the state mobilises resources to achieve this. It is instructive that the only successful example of her ‘change’ to capitalism that she can bring forward had a military dimension. The United States government did not want to get a man on the Moon for scientific reasons but to gain superiority over Russia in rocketry.

Mazzucato herself notes this and asks why a state could not similarly mobilise resources to achieve some peaceful aim such as solving the housing problem or creating a good health and care service. The same question was put by reformists to those who in the 1950s and 60s argued that capitalism had been saved from supposed collapse by providing markets through becoming a ‘permanent arms economy’. Why, the reformists asked, couldn’t capitalism become a ‘permanent welfare state economy’; why couldn’t the state provide extra markets by spending instead on social reforms?

The permanent arms economy theorists struggled to find a coherent answer. In the end, life itself settled the matter — excessive spending on arms turned out to undermine a capitalist state’s international competitiveness by increasing the tax burden on its capitalist enterprises and diverting profits that might otherwise have been invested in cost-cutting innovations. Which explained why in the 1960s Germany and Japan, which weren’t allowed to spend so much on arms, did better on world markets. Excessive arms spending wasn’t saving capitalism but was a burden on the states that practised this. The answer to the reformists was that excessive spending on the welfare state and other social reforms was not practicable because it, too, would be a burden on any capitalist state that tried, undermining its competitiveness.

The same applies to Mazzucato’s reformist project. If, outside of war, the state were to set a purpose for the capitalist economy other than profit maximisation and taxed capitalist corporations to pay for it, this would inhibit, not encourage, growth. In seeking to maximise profits capitalism is not being dysfunctional. It is being itself and can’t be changed to function in any other way.

Was capitalism historically inevitable? (2024)

From the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

As with any ‘origin’ story it is notoriously difficult to know where to begin. We might start with the demise of the dinosaurs due to the ‘lucky’ asteroid that struck the Earth some 66 million years ago allowing mammals to flourish in their stead; or we might start with the transition of hunter gatherer communities into private property slave city states; or we might avoid all of these hypotheses and go straight to the Battle of Plataea in Greece in 479 BC.

Why? Because arguably the global capitalism we see today is mainly of a European origin and, in particular, many of its curses and blessings can be assigned to the little island of Britain. We will try to seek out all of the whys and wherefores of this theory and ask if the described economic developments could or would have happened anywhere else on the planet. Inevitability is the totem of any theory of determinism but can we ever be certain that any area of human activity could aspire to this fatalistic description? So let’s return to the Greece of 479 BC where the story begins and see if it will prove to be a robust theory or even elevate it to a tale of historical inevitability.

The Battle of Plataea saw the Persian attempt to conquer Greece finally come to an end. The outcome of any battle can be unpredictable both in terms of who will win and the long-term implications of an outright victory but on this occasion we see that the colonisation of Greece and all of the cultural implications that this implied did not occur. The subsequent intellectual and political flowering of Classical Athens could not have taken place under Persian hegemony. Thus, the adoption of Greek culture by Imperial Rome would not have happened and its rediscovery during the Renaissance could not have occurred in Europe.

It might be argued that, like Vietnam and Afghanistan in our time, the Greek states could never have been completely defeated by the superpower of its time but it was not close to being inevitable that Greece would become the dominant cultural force in European history. And again if Rome had not finally defeated the Carthaginians at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC the conquest of Europe and the subsequent spread of the death cult of Christianity – albeit in constant tension with the rationalism of the Classical inheritance – would not have evolved into the European Reformation where the protestant cause became the ideology of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.

In its Puritan incarnation in England this ideology would be the foundation of the revolutionary victory of the capitalist class and the release of finance to invest in inventions and their application during the industrial revolution. This was all made possible by the victory of the parliamentary (bourgeois) army at the Battle of Naseby in 1645. In ideological terms it would seem that too much was dependent on the outcome of battles and the adoption of a historically arbitrary religion to maintain that capitalism was inevitable. But if we look at the underlying material economic trajectory and the class struggle it created what do we find?

We can see that all of the ancient civilisations of note were based on a slave economy. The majority of these slaves were captives of war but as the major empires consolidated the wars became fewer and so the number of slaves decreased. This together with the obvious economic advantage of letting the slaves (now called serfs) have a small holding of land for their self-sufficiency (thus saving the lord their upkeep) made the transition to feudalism ubiquitous in Europe.

There had always been trade between cities and principalities (mercantile capitalism) and many of these merchants became rich and yearned for commensurate political power. Eventually this conflict became violent and these merchants (proto-capitalists) displaced the kings and lords in revolutions that enabled capital to invest in wage labour and amass their fortunes from the subsequent accumulation of surplus value.

The particular nature of the ideologies that were used to get the majority to fight and die for their cause seems secondary to the class struggle and productive innovations that provoked them. In this Marxian scenario the classical inheritance and the ideology of Christianity would not be of primary importance – the human capacity for technical innovation would initiate different modes of production which in turn would create antagonistic social groups (classes) which alone could drive progress and be independent of the contemporary ideologies that were used to understand and justify this phenomenon. It would not be until the emergence of socialist thinking that these dialectical economic and social forces could be fully understood.

It is challenging trying to imagine alternative histories – Europe without the inspiration of classical Greece and Rome; the world without the combination of an early bourgeois revolution and a preponderance of surface coal to power the industrial might that allowed the small island of Britain to rule much of the globe; the world without the capricious act of Constantine the Great making the obscure cult of Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire etc.

Yet these phenomena were all dependent on the uncertainties of war and could have gone either way depending on various elements including blind luck. Europe’s state religion might have been one of the forgotten cults of Carthage and the lingua franca of the world might be Phoenician-based instead of English. But the Marxian contention is that we would still have ended up with global capitalism even if it would have taken longer (the French had to wait a full 150 years after the English for their revolution and Germany didn’t have one at all). Speaking of warfare, some soldiers came to believe that if a bullet had their name on it there was nothing to be done other than accept one’s fate – let’s hope that the world can enjoy many years of the equality and peace delivered by socialism before a meteorite crashes into Earth with our species’ name written on it.

Wez.

Obituary: Gwynn Thomas (2024)

Obituary from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are saddened to have to report the death in October of longstanding member Gwynn Thomas at the age of 85. Gwynn was born into a Welsh-speaking small farming family on the island of Anglesey (Ynys Môn). After national service in the RAF and moving to London to work in the civil service, he joined the old Paddington branch in 1964. In the course of his nearly sixty years membership Gwynn engaged in the whole range of socialist activity: selling the Socialist Standard outside tube stations, speaking at Hyde Park, indoor lecturer, writer, election candidate. He was a member of the Executive Committee and Party Treasurer for a number years and also on the Editorial Committee of the Standard for a time, as well as the Pamphlets Committee. Latterly he was the secretary of the South London branch. He was a diligent and conscientious man with a particular interest in exposing the horrors of war (and at one stage was engaged in research about political opposition to the world slaughters that occurred last century). Our condolences go to his family

Not reliable (2024)

Book Review from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A World to Win. The Life and Works of Karl Marx. By Sven-Eric Liedman. Verso. 2018.

Liedman is a retired professor of the history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg. This 700-page intellectual biography of Marx was first published in Swedish in 2015. As a description of the development of Marx’s ideas, linked to contemporaneous economic and political events and his changing personal circumstances, it is interesting and informative enough. When, however, it comes to discussing Marx’s economic theory it is far from reliable.

Liedman has Marx as a crude underconsumptionist who explained crises as resulting from the total market-price of what is produced inevitably exceeding, from time to time, total paying consumer demand, resulting in a glut which has to be cleared before production can resume, leading to the next glut. He also sometimes confuses ‘constant’ and ‘fixed’ capital and even ‘variable’ and ‘circulating’ capital.

As a historian of political philosophies Liedman is particularly interested in Marx’s theory of ‘the fetishism of commodities’ (his view that where there is widespread production of articles for sale — commodities — the producers come to be dominated by the movement of their own creation that commodities are) but a passing remark later shows that he hasn’t even understood that Marx envisaged the abolition of commodity-production:

‘Luxemburg can be said to have been correct on another point in relation to Lenin and his followers: in the future society Marx sketched out, there is a market for goods and not a completely regulated planned economy. But the market is equal, in contrast to the kind that characterised capitalist society’ (pp 426-7).

Marx as a ‘market socialist’! Incredible. In fact, the section of Capital on the fetishism of commodities appears before Marx introduces the concept of capital and capitalism; it assumes a market economy with no exploitation of the producers.

Luxemburg too envisaged future society as a ‘natural economy’ where there would be production directly for use and no longer for sale. He also has Rosa Luxemburg (p. 594) as a member of the Reichstag in 1914 when women in Germany didn’t even have the vote.

Adam Buick

SPGB December Events (2024)

Party News from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Action Replay: Games and the Olympics (2024)

The Action Replay column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a 2013 Action Replay we raised the question of whether chess counted as a sport. We felt that maybe it did, as the top players were required to take drug tests. But of course chess does not involve any physical exercise, which is usually counted as an essential aspect of sport.

Similar questions have arisen more recently, in connection with this year’s Olympics, as to whether certain other activities are to be considered sports. This applies to rhythmic gymnastics, skateboarding and breakdancing, for instance, which are certainly physical but somehow do not resemble traditional sports. As another example, people now often see martial arts as a sport rather than a form of combat.

And the same may apply to gaming or esports (electronic sports), competitions involving video games, where people compete either individually or in teams. There is little physical effort, other than pressing buttons and so on, but they can be psychologically quite demanding. They can be played for fun, but there are also professional players, and the whole enterprise is surprisingly big, with plenty of people watching others play. Nearly a hundred million watched the 2018 final of the world championship for one video game, League of Legends, for instance.

Recently the International Olympic Committee announced that the inaugural Olympic Esports Games will be held next year in Saudi Arabia. The country has over 23 million gamers, with a hundred full-time professional esports players, and its Minister for Sport described it as ‘a global hub for professional esports’. Women there are apparently participating more and more in esports, and indeed in sport more generally. Such is the official picture, anyway, no doubt designed to counter claims of how much discrimination Saudi women suffer from.

Just like other sports, capitalist companies have seized on esports to promote their products, in what has been termed esportswashing (nakedcapitalism.com, 25 August). Car manufacturers, oil companies and even the US armed forces have signed sponsorship deals with the esports industry. The fanbase is global, mostly young and overwhelmingly male, and they are a good target for capitalist concerns that need to boost their public image. Saudi Arabia was already using football for more general sportswashing (see Action Replay for October 2023), so this is not all that new.

As sports expand and adopt new methods of playing, much of the marketing and other paraphernalia stay in place.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Whatever happened to ‘full employment’? (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The ‘Queen’s Speech’ on 29th October Mr. Wilson included a pledge about unemployment. ‘My government’, it read, ‘in view of the gravity of the economic situation, will as its most urgent task seek the fulfilment of the social contract as an essential element in its strategy for curbing inflation, reducing the balance of payments deficit, encouraging industrial investment, maintaining employment, particularly in the older industrial areas, and promoting economic and social justice.’

Maybe Labour Party supporters are reassured by this mumbo-jumbo, but they ought to examine the small print very carefully. If they do they will notice how the form of the pledge about dealing with unemployment has been discreetly watered down. Now it is part of a ‘strategy’, along with other aims, all of them dependent on the nebulous ‘social contract’, and the word ‘full’ has been dropped. And all of it stems from the grave economic situation — their euphemistic way of describing a normal crisis of capitalism, aggravated by the inflation that Tory and Labour governments alike have brought about and are still promoting.

When the first post-war Labour government came into office in 1945, buoyed up with the fatuous belief that they had mastered capitalism and abolished crises for ever, their committal to deal with unemployment was in very different words. Then it was ‘Jobs for All’ and ‘Full Employment’. In the early post-war years (due among other things to making good wartime destruction) unemployment was exceptionally low. In several years average unemployment then was under 300,000, about 1.2 per cent., and of course the Labour and Tory governments claimed credit for it.

Since the mid-fifties unemployment has been moving to higher levels, but as late as 1966 in the Wilson Labour Government John Diamond MP, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, boasted that they had got unemployment down from 1.6 per cent, to 1.2 per cent, and ‘that is how we propose to continue doing it’ (Hansard, 6th March 1966). Capitalism, however, was not listening to Mr. Diamond and by the time they went out of office in June 1970 unemployment had gone up by about a quarter of a million to 579,000 (2.5 per cent.). In October 1974 it was 643,000 (2.8 per cent.), and with unemployment rising in most parts of the world the Government’s advisers are fearful that next year it may pass the million mark, as it did in 1972.

(Socialist Standard, December 1974)

Editorial: Trump triumphs (2024)

Editorial from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

So the ‘isolationist’ section of the ruling class has won control of political power in the United States. This was one of those rare elections under capitalism where the choice was not simply between two different management teams to implement the same basic policy. It was one, as over Brexit here, where there were real policy differences between two sections of the ruling class and where the issue was put to the mainly working class electorate to decide. As in Britain, the dominant section of the ruling class was outvoted.

‘Isolationism’ has been defined as ‘a political philosophy that advocates for a nation to avoid involvement in the affairs of other countries, especially in their wars, and only engaging in wars if attacked’. It has always been a trend in US history, explaining their late intervention in both the last century’s world wars. Since the end of the second of these, which resulted in the US becoming the dominant world power at the expense of Britain and France and their empires, ‘interventionism’ as the ‘world’s policeman’ has been the main feature of US foreign policy.

Will Trump end this? He has made it clear that he is not interested in continuing the war in Ukraine — a European war — but he still sees Iran and China as threats, to US commercial interests, respectively in the middle and far east. So, we can’t expect a complete retreat from the unashamed ‘American imperialism’ favoured by the Democratic Party and until recently by the Republicans too.

‘America First’ will have implications on relations between the capitalist states and trading blocs into which the world is divided. If Trump goes ahead with imposing tariffs on all imports, including from the EU, Japan and Britain, this would unleash a world trade war. If he puts US interests as a fossil-fuel producer ahead of the general world capitalist interest to try to do something about climate change this will hinder the already feeble international measures to deal with it.

What about the working class? Properly defined not just, as in American usage, those without a college degree but all those economically obliged to try to find an employer to get an income. They will remain in this same basic position and will still face the problems that the politicians on both sides promised to solve.

Why, then, did so many vote for him? It will have been, in the words of one of Bill Clinton’s advisers, ‘the economy, stupid’. Workers in the US, as elsewhere, have been experiencing the effects of more rapidly rising prices than in the past few decades and voted against the incumbent government which they mistakenly blamed for this (rather than capitalism). There will also have been the mistaken belief that Trump, as a perceived successful and tough businessman, was a good person to deal with it.

Mistaken they were, but they weren’t one reactionary mass voting for a supposed would-be dictator. They were voting for the price of groceries to come down. They will be disappointed in that Trump won’t be able to make them ‘prosperous again’. No government can make capitalism work for the benefit of the working class.