Right Direction (2020)

Pamphlet Review from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food, Health and Capitalism. Covid-19 and Beyond. Published by the Anarchist Communist Group, June 2020. 45 pages.

The Anarchist Communist Group (ACG), formed in 2018 by former members of the Anarchist Federation in Great Britain, states its aim as ‘a complete transformation of society’, explained as ‘the working class overthrowing capitalism, abolishing the State, getting rid of exploitation, hierarchies and oppressions, and halting the destruction of the environment’. Among the group’s activities is the production of pamphlets arguing their case, the latest of which looks at the way capitalism produces food and the part this has played in the Covid-19 virus.

Despite its limited length, this is a well-researched and highly informative publication which outlines very effectively how the profit system, the driving force of today’s world capitalist economy, dictates an increasingly intensive exploitation of land and animals, leading to a ‘perfect storm environment’ for diseases which are likely to be infectious. It outlines the conditions of industrial farming that, after causing previous virus epidemics such as MERS, Ebola and SARS, have now led to the current Covid-19 pandemic which in its indiscriminate worldwide spread is causing panic and threatening social and economic breakdown. It explains how these viruses stem from a form of intensive agriculture, in which ‘the more you can produce with fewer inputs, the greater the profit’, with the effect on human health (not to speak of the welfare of animals) always a secondary consideration.

So, for example, both intensive factory farming of domestic animals and the slaughter, preparation and sale of an increasing range of wildlife in the Far East in crowded and insanitary conditions provide an ideal breeding ground for deadly viruses to ‘jump’ from animals to humans and then spread indiscriminately. In addition, the quadrupling of global meat production in the last half century has resulted in most land resources being used to feed animals destined for slaughter rather than to grow food directly for human consumption. This has led to an epidemic of obesity among some populations, but at the same time, as the pamphlet points out, in many parts of the world people die of starvation and, even for example in the UK, it quotes estimates that, even before the present virus hit, at least 3 million were going hungry, while 14.6 million were suffering from food insecurity. The entirely irrefutable reason given for all this is that, while some people get obese because of the cheap, unhealthy food that they eat, others go hungry because they do not have the money to buy enough food of any description. This, the pamphlet insists – again irrefutably – is quite simply the outcome of a system that puts profit before need. As it says, ‘capitalism has penetrated everywhere on earth in its search for profits’.

What remedy then does the ACG propose to resolve deadly industrial farming practices, food produced for cheapness rather than quality, and, even in the more economically advanced parts of the world, poverty amid plenty? It advocates ‘the need to create an agriculture system which is not based on the need to compete in the market economy and in which human need and health is the main priority’ and goes on to say that ‘instead of tinkering with the system… we need to get rid of it altogether and replace it with a food system that can truly meet the needs of everyone… the aim is for food to be free’. So far so good. This seems to mirror the aim of the Socialist Party, ie a society of free access with production for need not for profit. But then, this pamphlet, in its final section entitled ‘Basic Principles of a Revolutionary New Food and Agriculture’, seems to water down this objective advocating not a free access society as such but rather single initiatives such as ‘land reform’ ‘collectivising agriculture’ and ‘developing co-operatives for distribution and consumption’. All it seems within the framework of the current overall capitalist system, this being implicit in the characteristically reformist call to ‘begin to transform our society now’. A pity, because the way to truly transform society is not for individuals or groups to fight capitalism’s imperatives within the current system but to band together to persuade the majority of wage and salary earners to take democratic revolutionary action to usher out the whole framework of capitalism (profit society) and bring in socialism (a free access society based on the satisfaction of human needs).

Howard Moss

Letter: Working Class Self-Organisation (2021)

Letter to the Editors from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have received the following email from the Anarchist Communist Group on our review of their pamphlet in last month’s Socialist Standard.

We thank you for what is a mostly positive review of our pamphlet, The Politics of Division. We are heartened to see that the areas we agree on are many and substantive.

There are some differences, of course, and we are happy to reply to these. Your reviewer takes issue with our support for autonomous groups. As you know, we support working class self-organisation, and our support for autonomous groups is primarily based on two principles. First, these groups come from within the class and are organised on a class struggle basis. Secondly, it cannot be denied that in the past, revolutionary organisations have often been tone deaf to the voices of other oppressed groups within the working class. This is a failing on the part of revolutionary organisations for which we are not prepared to await the outcome of the revolution to address. Our criticism of such organisations attempting to operate without a clear class analysis remains.

Your reviewer also takes issue with our anti-parliamentarism. This must indeed be tangential, since we do not directly address it in the pamphlet. However, it is true that, as anti-parliamentary communists, we do not believe there is a parliamentary road to socialism. In the words of Kropotkin, “The representative system was organised by the bourgeoisie to ensure their domination, and it will disappear with them”.

Many in the early Labour Party said capitalism and the laws in place to sustain it could be legislated away once enough working-class parliamentary seats had been won. This didn’t work. They were co-opted into the system. We believe that genuine liberation can only come about through the revolutionary self-activity of the working class. Direct action is the political and social intervention of the working class in solving their problems without external mediation. Only this self-organisation, arising out of the social conditions, can end the present social arrangements. This is the social revolution. The current system and its institutions will not facilitate it. Parliament is structurally incapable of representing our interests; it is designed to represent the interests of capital.

For us, this is both a theoretical and operational issue. It is our praxis to continue to encourage and facilitate working class self-activity, and we will work with other anti-authoritarian socialists in furthering this aim whenever interests coincide.

Our Reply:

Since our differences with anarchists have tended to centre on the matter of the use of parliament, it was difficult for our reviewer not to make a connection between the support voiced in your pamphlet for ‘autonomous groups’, whose activities are distinctly reformist rather than revolutionary, and the rejection by most anarchists of what we see as the most likely path to achieving a liberated society of voluntary association and free access to all goods and services, i.e. by a class conscious majority voting for it democratically.

You mention the early Labour Party as an example of the failure to achieve socialism through parliament, but the fact is that that was never the aim or intention of those involved in that party. Far from being ‘co-opted into the system’, they were from the very beginning an integral part of the capitalist system – an alternative team to run it – and even the most militant among them never thought of abolishing that system and replacing it with a moneyless, wageless society of free access. At best they thought to try to make capitalism operate in the interests of workers – an impossibility of course.

As for the role of parliament, we would not dispute that, under capitalism, it is there, as you say, ‘to represent the interests of capital’, but that does not mean that it could not be used by a class-conscious majority of workers to democratically vote capital out of existence and thereby bring about the social revolution you refer to. This is in fact the only kind of ‘direct action’ that can bring about the qualitative change in social relations that we all agree is necessary, the only truly ‘revolutionary activity of the working class’.

And if not this, what other kind of ‘direct action’ could bring about that change? A mass insurrection of some kind? We would hope not, since it would be likely to provoke considerable violence – which is capitalism’s stock-in-trade – and would be doomed to failure, since governments have a monopoly on the means of violence. But using parliament tackles the problem ‘from the inside’ so to speak and gives a majority who vote their socialist delegates to parliament an automatic ‘legal’ right to take over the state machine in the name of the great majority of the population and then to abolish the state itself along with those coercive powers and agencies necessary to the maintenance of class society but superfluous in socialism. Would the capitalist class then attempt some kind of coup d’etat? Could they really do this against an organised class-conscious, determined majority committed to establishing socialism once there had been a democratic mandate via the ballot box for the changeover to socialism? We would argue not and we would strongly recommend anarchists and others who share our aim but may be sceptical of our views on parliament to read our short pamphlet on this subject, ‘What’s Wrong With Using Parliament? The cases for and against the revolutionary use of Parliament’, which can be found on our website. Especially relevant to the matter at issue here is the chapter in that pamphlet entitled ‘Anti-Parliamentarian and Anarchist Objections

Editors

Misidentity (2021)

Pamphlet Review from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Politics of Division. An Engagement with Identity Politics. Anarchist Communist Group. ACG/Stormy Petrel, 2021. 26pp.

The introduction to this short pamphlet states: ‘We want to create a society in which exploitation is abolished and all resources are held in common. We also struggle for a society without a State and in which no group oppresses another: a society without hierarchies. We envisage a society of co-operation, mutual aid, equality and freedom.’ This clear expression of the Anarchist Communist Group’s aim mirrors very closely the kind of society we seek to see established. We are also in agreement with what ACG have to say about the system we currently live under, capitalism, in which ‘only a few own and control the earth’s resources’ and the vast majority (ie, the working class) ‘need to sell their labour power in order to survive’, with the explanation that they ‘use the term working class to include all those of us who cannot live on the proceeds of their property or capital’.

And the point of this pamphlet is to explain how, if progress is to be made towards establishing that completely new society, the common interest of that vast majority must override the divisions and diversions that are constantly arising within it associated with race, gender, disability or any other type of so-called ‘identity politics’. It gives a readable account of how capitalism has, in its development, used those divisions to its advantage and how, even today, ‘identity politics sets us against each other’ and divides us as a class. It points out how ‘cultural diversity’ is used to divert attention from the shared working-class issue of wage slavery and insecurity and to divide workers from one another, when, in a different kind of cooperative, materially secure, tolerant society, diversity between different people or peoples would be a cause for interest and celebration among everyone. The pamphlet sums up the situation well: ‘Class is the fundamental division in our society, not because it is more important in terms of affecting people’s lives than oppressions such as racism or sexism, but because it is the one thing that unites us into a potential revolutionary movement.’

It follows from this that it is in the interest of the class of wage and salary workers (ie, the vast majority of us) to be as free as possible to spread the idea of a revolutionary change of society, not to be hampered by fear of the kind of censorship that seeks to silence discussion in case it may offend a certain identity group. This is an argument summed up in a section of the pamphlet entitled ‘Identity politics kills freedom of expression and suppresses debate’, which then however goes on to say that ‘a more effective approach is to support the self-organisation of oppressed groups into autonomous groups’. And it is here, in its closing pages, that the pamphlet somewhat loses its way.

Its attempt to argue that ‘autonomous groups’ are less of a diversion from the united interests of workers than identity groups, because the latter focus ‘only on the oppression of the group’, while in the former ‘there is no anti-capitalist perspective that may see other workers as the enemy’ is far from convincing, drifting as it does into discussion of how these autonomous groups might go about influencing, for example, trade unions or the operation of professions, such as the legal one. A far cry this from the earlier call for ‘a completely new society’.

This drift into a focus on relatively minor details of how the capitalist system operates flows, one suspects, from a refusal, endemic among anarchists (even those who share our ambition of a stateless, world society without frontiers, without leaders and led, without money and buying and selling, and based on free access to all goods and services), to contemplate using parliament and the ballot box as democratic revolutionary instruments. The fact is that, as socialists, we cannot reasonably see any other way of achieving the end that both we and many anarcho-communists envisage and we fear that the anarcho-communist rejection of the ballot box marks them out as a tendency which misunderstands an important element of how capitalism works and thus removes credibility from their arguments about how socialism (or anarcho-communism) can be achieved. Our basic point is that the ballot box is a sort of genie that has been let out of the bottle and, though currently used to run and bolster capitalism, once socialist consciousness is widespread, it cannot be put back in but instead can be the tool for getting rid of capitalism, ‘legally’ so to speak.

Howard Moss

Ruthless (2022)

Pamphlet Review from the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Truth About Trotsky. Anarchist Communist Group. ACG/Stormy Petrel, 2021. 81pp.

In 1937 Leon Trotsky, from his exile in Central America, wrote an account of the murderous rule of Stalin in Bolshevik Russia. He entitled it The Crimes of Stalin. This new ACG pamphlet also deals with the brutal acts of Bolshevism but those carried out not by Stalin but, ironical as it may seem, by Trotsky. Trotsky’s activities pre-date the coming to monolithic power of Stalin in 1924 but are shown to be hardly less savage and ruthless.

In a series of short chapters the pamphlet analyses in significant detail the actions of Trotsky in ordering and directing the elimination, sometimes on a mass scale, of those he considered in any sense obstacles to the consolidation of Bolshevik power in the period of ‘war communism’ after 1917. Chapter titles such as ‘Trotsky as an Advocate of Concentration Camps’, ‘Shootings for Deserters’, ‘Shooting for Drunkenness’ and ‘Trotsky and Poison Gas’ tell their own tale of cruelty and brutality and in their narrative illustrate the utter and perhaps pathological ruthlessness of Trotsky as commander-in-chief of the Red Army. A prime example is the much-documented mass slaughter of the sailors of Kronstadt in 1921. The sailors, who had been staunch supporters of the revolution in 1917 but were now disgruntled over their worsening living conditions and seen to be challenging the new Russian (state capitalist) state. As the pamphlet puts it: ‘The revolt was drowned in blood, with thousands shot and many sent to the Solovki camps.’ The event is re-examined here and Trotsky’s later excuse that the sailors were ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and not the same ones as in 1917 is dismissed as false. And in earlier episodes we read how ‘the Bolsheviks reacted to the strike at the Putilov plant in Petrograd by shooting 200 workers. Then ‘in Astrakhan, the Bolsheviks fired on an assembly of 10,000 metalworkers, injuring 2,000 of them’ and ‘this was followed by 400 executions by the Cheka, with Trotsky, as War Commissar, sending his approval’.

Yet Trotsky still has many followers on the political left. One book recently talked about his ‘extraordinary vision’ and he is often counterposed to Stalin, who is seen as ‘bad’ for the misdeeds he perpetrated in the name of communism or socialism, while Trotsky, banished by Stalin and then murdered on his orders is seen as ‘good’. Soviet Russia, we are sometimes told, would have had a different trajectory if Trotsky and not Stalin had succeeded Lenin as its leader. Yet nothing we know and which is recapitulated here about Trotsky’s ‘crimes’ suggests that he would have been any less capable than Stalin of tyrannous dictatorial rule over a country far too backward at the time for the development of anything other than centralised state capitalism. So his influence today among many who would consider their ideas about social and political change as being progressive is nothing if not misplaced, both in view of his activities when alive, the theories (such as ‘permanent revolution’) that he left behind and the view he shared with Lenin of the need for a Party to ‘lead’ workers to revolution. In the event he ended up a victim of the system he had been one of the prime architects of, ‘consumed’, as this pamphlet has it ‘by a murderous reaction that he had helped to create’.

Howard Moss

Popular Marx (2020)

Book Review from the September 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Compendium of Karl Marx’s Capital. By Carlo Cafiero. Anarchist Communist Group. 2020. 100 pages

Marx’s Capital, first published in German in 1867, is a tome of over 1,000 pages and so not an easy read. As a result, ever since the working-class movement took off in the 1870s its content has been popularised in shorter works. This is an Italian one from 1879. It is accurate enough with long passages from Capital, though Cafiero’s conclusion expresses a rather romantic view of ‘revolution’.

Cafiero was a member of the International Working Men’s Association and met and corresponded with Marx and Engels but who in the end sided with Bakunin when the split came and became a populariser for ‘anarchism communism’, i.e of those anarchists who stood for a society where the means of life were owned in common and the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ applied (as opposed to ‘to each according to their work’ as favoured by other anarchists). His pamphlet Anarchism and Communism puts the case for this (which we call socialism) rather well.

Despite opposing Marx politically, Cafiero accepted Marxian economics, and later anarchists translated his pamphlet into French and Spanish, a tacit recognition that anarchist attempts to develop an alternative analysis of the capitalist economy (as fellow anarchist-communist Kropotkin attempted) had failed. In their introduction the ACG go so far as to describe Capital as ‘a superb contribution to our revolutionary understanding’ and to recommend it to anyone who wants ‘to understand how the system works in order to fight and ultimately destroy it.’ We don’t disagree of course but it must cause raised eyebrows amongst some anarchists.

Unfortunately, it is not a good translation. Why, for instance, are the words ‘currency’ and ‘salary’ used instead of ‘money’ and ‘wages’ as in Marxian economics in English? And there is a glaring error on page 58 where Cafiero is made to say ‘therefore, salary cannot represent the price of labour power’; which is wrong both in terms of what Marx held (wages are precisely the price of labour power) and of what Cafiero himself had written in the preceding paragraph. Socialist Party members familiar with Italian say that a correct translation of what Cafiero wrote in Italian is ‘therefore, wages can represent nothing other than the price of labour power’ (they advise that there are other, though less serious, mistranslations too.) It is a bit odd that the ACG did not pick this up and add a correction as that wages are the price of labour power is a basic part of Marxian economics.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Are we exploited twice? (2018)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent anarchist pamphlet Fight for the City revives the theory of secondary exploitation that was popular in anti-capitalist circles before WWI. This is the theory that workers are economically exploited not just at work through producing a ‘surplus value’ over and above what they are paid for the sale of their mental and physical energies to an employer; they are also said to be exploited outside of work by landlords, moneylenders, shopkeepers and others when they spend their wages. Here’s how the London Anarchist Communists put it in their pamphlet:

  ‘We are already exploited at work. Wages are as low as the bosses can get away with in order to maximise their profits. But we are exploited in other ways. Increasingly, all aspects of our non-working lives involve the spending of our wages on things that make profits for others: landlords, banks, and all the companies providing the goods and services that we buy (. . .); at every stage, whether in the act of producing or consuming, more surplus is creamed off our wages, creating profits and wealth for a few. The fight for the city is therefore a class struggle – a struggle against those who want to squeeze everything they can from us.’

This is economic illiteracy. Marx based his theory of surplus value on the premise that workers are paid the full value of what they sell, i.e., that their wages cover the full cost of creating and recreating their working skills. Surplus value arises from the fact that there is a difference between the value of their labour power (the labour incorporated in it) and the value they add to what they produce (the total new labour they incorporate into it); that, for example, their wages represent 20 hours labour while they add 40 hours labour to what they produce. This difference belongs to their employer and is the source of all non-work incomes.

Suppose that, when it came to spending their wages, workers were not engaged in equal exchange, that they didn’t get goods and services that took 20 hours to produce but, say, only 15 hours’ worth. This would mean that they would not be in a position to recreate the value of their labour power as this requires them to consume goods worth 20 hours. They would not be able to work so intensively or so efficiently for their employer and so not produce as much surplus value.

What workers buy has always helped those they buy from to turn the surplus value produced by their employees into a monetary profit, but that is not the same as creating surplus value for them. This is created by their employees not their consumers.

Individual workers and groups of workers can be, and sometimes are, swindled by landlords and shopkeepers who don’t give them a product of equal value to what they pay, but this is still not extracting surplus value from the workers concerned. If such swindling becomes the norm, then employers would have to increase wages to, in our example, 25 hours to take account of this and ensure that they are getting the full value of what they pay for.

Normally workers do exchange the full value of their wages for goods and services of an equal value. As just explained, that they should do so is in the employers’ interest too and is why there are laws to protect consumers and to limit how much interest moneylenders can charge.

There is no secondary exploitation, only occasional swindling. Of course if they are ripped off workers are going to react but this cannot be described as part of the class struggle between workers and employers as it is essentially a struggle between consumers and sellers that can be settled by ensuring equal exchange.