Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The unrest reflected much deeper frustrations, including high unemployment, particularly among young people, growing poverty and anger at corruption and mismanagement. People see public resources channelled into luxury spending and infrastructure deals benefiting a few powerful figures connected to the ruling People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), while basic services and jobs are neglected.

[Inter Press Service News Agency]

In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.” James found it so dull that “If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” 

[MSN]

The announced $7 billion would be the biggest official tranche of funding to Ukraine’s drone industry so far. It’s close to the $6 billion that Ukraine’s defense minister, Denys Shmyhal, has said Kyiv needs to cover this year’s production of first-person-view drones, interceptors, long-range drones, and missiles. While new, Ukraine’s drone industry has increasingly been in the spotlight for producing cheap but effective weapons regularly being used to destroy Russian loitering munitions, armor, artillery, and production facilities. 

[Yahoo]

From an anarcho-communist perspective, this moment is not simply about one man’s death. It is about the world that produced both Charlie Kirk and the man who killed him. It is about capitalism’s ever-present violence, about the state’s monopoly on force, about the way political antagonisms are escalating into open bloodshed. It is about what happens when a society soaks every interaction in hierarchy, coercion, alienation, and humiliation, and then acts shocked when someone pulls a trigger…Wage labour itself is enforced by violence. If you refuse to work, you starve, or you are policed, or imprisoned. The entire edifice of private property rests on threat and force. 

[The Slow Burning Fuse]

North Korea’s Kim vows to build a ‘socialist paradise’ [sic]. 

[Morning Star]

Having a home of our own is essential to leading a dignified life, but in Venezuela, where access to housing is enshrined as a right in the Constitution, renting adequate accommodation is an unattainable luxury for hundreds of thousands of families, and buying property is almost impossible. Not only do market prices far exceed the average household income but inflation has also wiped out home loans, leaving citizens without access to financing. 

[Equal Times]

There is no genetic or biological basis for dividing the human race into distinct “races”. There are just groups of human beings — all of whom came from Africa originally — who developed slightly different physical characteristics over time as they travelled to, and adapted to, different climates and environments. 

[The Conversation]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

South African domination (1986)

Book Review from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Apartheid's Second Front: South Africa's War Against Its Neighbours by Joseph Hanlon. (Penguin 1986).

As South Africa once again dominates the news, Hanlon's study provides a valuable addition to the analysis of the situation that exists there. South Africa's aim of domination within this area involves a mixture of military, political and economic action against its neighbours to create a buffer for the system of apartheid. South Africa's destabilisation policy has involved it in a war which has not hit the headlines but which has since 1980 "cost more than 100.000 lives and £10,000 million, and has made at least one million people homeless". This is part of the nightmare of South Africa. The aim of the war is to force dependency on South Africa by undermining the effectiveness of the economic organisation of the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC). Victims of that destabilisation have included Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi and Angola. South Africa also sees itself as a crusader against what it believes to be the rising tide of "Marxism" and for this reason it is prepared to back Unita forces opposed to Angola's so-called Marxist government. Lesotho and Swaziland are totally surrounded by South Africa and use the rand as their currency Along with Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland are also part of the customs union with South Africa. This is a system administered by South Africa in which there is free flow of goods within the four states with high tariffs on imports. Effectively this ensures South African domination because most businesses are located in South Africa and the high tariff rates necessitate purchase of goods from South Africa. SADCC attempts to relieve this reliance on South Africa by an integrated development including coordination and transport but all the neighbouring states are still integrally linked to South Africa. One aspect of this dependence can be seen in energy. South Africa is energy deficient but it still dominates. Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland purchase all petroleum products from South Africa which also supplies significant amounts to Malawi, Zimbabwe and Zambia even though that oil is as much as 50 per cent dearer than world market prices. Similarly about 50 per cent of SADCC imports and exports go through South Africa although this is partly guaranteed by the fact that South Africa has bombed Angolan and Mozambiquan railways so that they could not carry traffic to and from ports in those countries.

The benefits to the South African ruling class of its destabilisation policy are fourfold. They ensure "security" insofar as they involve punitive attacks against ANC bases and escalate the notion of an outside threat. The creation of chaos and instability in neighbouring states allows South Africa to claim that alternatives to the apartheid system are less successful economically. The fact of economic dependence does not permit of a more aggressive policy against South Africa. Chaos elsewhere also makes South Africa appear as a bastion of stability in an economically backward area. Hence they can cry out against sanctions because, as Hanlon argues. “P. W. Botha talks of South Africa bringing 'salvation' to the neighbouring states, and of the west preventing this by actions against apartheid". The irony is that South Africa claims that it is being destabilised by the actions of its neighbours, by supporting the ANC and calling for boycotts and sanctions. It also justifies South Africa's destabilisation programme as retaliation. This includes arming rebels in Mozambique, Angola, Lesotho and Zimbabwe and cutting food supplies, as in Mozambique, Zambia and Lesotho in order that the indigenous populations would direct their frustrations at the individual governments. There have also been varied economic destabilisation tactics that have included limiting access to South Africa's railways, restricting migrant labour, closing borders, curbing imports, regulating exports and cutting electricity. This ensures South Africa's regional dominance, making the neighbouring states "a buffer against sanctions — just as Pretoria hopes to make them a barrier against liberation movements" This is why South Africa is opposed to SADCC which would free the neighbouring states from such reliance.

South Africa sees itself as the regional power of Southern Africa in the same way that USA operates in Latin America and USSR in Eastern Europe. Its incursions into neighbouring territories have been many and as Hanlon points out "commandos have raided seven of the neighbouring capitals and tried to assassinate two prime ministers". Only Malawi and Tanzania have escaped military insurgence. South Africa funds Unita, Mozambique National Resistance, the Lesotho Liberation Army and dissidents in Matabeleland in Zimbabwe. This adds to the claim that majority rule does not work.

There has been verbal support for SADCC from USA. Britain and West Germany but these countries have been less favourable to the notion of breaking with South Africa. Actual support for SADCC has come from countries without substantial investment in South Africa and have included Scandinavia, Italy, Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium, while the USA, Britain and West Germany are more concerned about "their existing investments. markets and sources of minerals" in South Africa. Destabilisation may be a short term answer to South Africa's paranoia but it requires markets for its products and chaotic economies are not such markets. Developing capitalism in South Africa will bring divisions based on class rather than racial differences and a population capable of acting as a market. Hanlon's argument is that, although limited in their effect, sanctions, boycotts and disinvestment should be pursued against South Africa. Sometimes this is a facade pursued by countries, as is the case with Japan who bans investment but allows licences and technology transfer "so Japan is now South Africa's second largest trading partner and Japanese firms have 40 per cent of the South African market". For Britain and USA there has been a reluctance to impose sanctions, not that this is a point of principle (USA has wide ranging sanctions against Poland and Britain has done the same to Argentina). Hanlon argues that Britain must be prepared to suffer as a result of imposing sanctions and that this is a moral question. For Hanlon it is also a belief that this might constitute a long term investment for future majority rule might not look favourably on a Britain that was unwilling to take up such a moral stance There has been a high price to pay and SADCC in its report to OAU in mid 1985 said that between 1980 and 1984 destabilisation cost SADCC member states a total of £7,000 million as a result of war damage, higher transport costs, sanctions imposed by South Africa, production and export losses and caring for the many refugees. SADCC calls for sanctions even at the risk of its own suffering. The case that sanctions against South Africa will cause harm to the "frontline" states is the latest that South Africa has created to ensure its continued existence. It forces dependency as an act of calculated cynicism. Hanlon's answer is to replace one form of exploitation by another in the hope that capitalism without South Africa and apartheid will be an improvement. The dilemma for capitalism is the extent to which South Africa can survive with limited markets. For western capitalism the question of sanctions is one in which vested interests must be weighed against the possibility of future interests. In these economic arguments morality has a very minor role to play As for the majority black community they are merely the pawns calling for a voice in a world of rival capitalist interests.

Philip Bentley

Oil out, guns in (2010)

Book Review from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chinese and African Perspectives on China in Africa. Eds Axel Harneit-Sievers, Stephen Marks and Sanusha Naidu,  Pambazuka Press £16.95. (Also available as an e-book from www.fahamubooks.org)

There may be a prevalent view of Africa as a continent immersed in poverty, but in fact it is rich in many things, minerals and energy for instance. Efforts by the wealthiest and most powerful countries to exploit these resources have carried on since the end of classical colonialism and the coming of ‘independence’, and these have helped ensure the continuation of poverty for the vast majority of Africans. As China joins the club of developed capitalist states, it also sees Africa as a source of raw materials and a market for exports. This volume gives a wide-ranging overview of China’s activities in Africa, with chapters by activists and academics from both China and Africa. Almost without exception, the most interesting essays are those by African authors, with those by Chinese contributors being largely bland and uncritical.

Bilateral trade between China and Africa has increased over the last decade to more than $US100 billion. As Chinese capitalism expands, it needs to import raw materials of various kinds, and nearly 80 percent of China’s imports from Africa are oil and petroleum products. For instance, 500,000 barrels of oil are exported to China from Angola each day, and it is only Chinese companies, with mainly Chinese employees, who carry out this work, so Chinese industry benefits from both the oil and the extraction work. Furthermore, China is a major producer of wood and paper products, but has relatively little by way of forestry resources, hence Chinese companies undertake logging in Mozambique and Tanzania. Minerals such as iron ore, copper and uranium are imported to China from Liberia, Zambia and Niger.

At the same time, China exports finished goods to Africa. In Nigeria, for example, cheap Chinese textiles have undercut domestically-produced goods, increasing local unemployment. Chinese companies export cheap, and sometimes dangerous, goods aimed specifically at the African market, where consumers have little money to spend.  Arms sales from China to Africa are also an important source of profits, with Sudan, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe among the purchasers.

The book contains a few pointless policy ideas, such as the African Union playing a larger role in supervising Sino-African relations. Its usefulness lies elsewhere, in showing the extent to which China is acting in essentially the same way as the other capitalist powers, and how the workers and peasants of Africa remain subject to the exploitation and oppression of both ‘home-grown’ and global rulers.

Paul Bennett

War and capitalism in Africa (1999)

From the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The president of Zambia, Frederick Chibula, recently declared the “dawn of a new era for Africa”. Such comments have become something of a regular occurrence amongst African and international “leaders”, including that messiah of the “new world order” Bill Clinton. The latest round of platitudes coincides with a period of instability and armament amongst the competing representatives of African capitalism.

Despite the signing of accords which appear to declare the desire of capitalist interests to accommodate each other’s interests in Sierra Leone and the Congo, Chibula made his comments at a time of simmering conflicts across Africa including a savage war between Ethiopia and Eritrea and a rampant civil war in Angola. Even in Sierra Leone and the Congo the accords thrashed out seem likely to fail, with international “peace-keeping” forces (the US and western Europe) not being committed as the interests of their ruling classes are not threatened.

Unlike the huge resources deployed to Kosovo where Western leaders wish to “protect” the Kosovo Albanian population from mass slaughter as a pretext for extending their influence in the Balkans at the expense of Serbia, the hypocritical face of capitalism is revealed once more. A blind eye and an arrogant shrug greeted and continues to greet the mass killing in Africa (in the case of the Sierra Leone conflict the British government was in fact implicated in the supply of arms to the conflict in contravention of its own “rules”, as if such things exist in capitalism’s wars).

Ethiopia and Eritrea

It is in the little-mentioned conflict (the press coverage being remarkably little) between the Ethiopian and Eritrean governments that Bill Clinton’s “new leaders of Africa” have revealed the degree to which the politicians of capitalism will sacrifice the lives of working-class men and women in the interests of profits. Originally intended as the leaders of a regional alliance for the US against the “threat” of Islamic Sudan, Presidents Issaias of Eritrea and Meles of Ethiopia descended into a quarrel in May 1998 ostensibly over a small area of barren and mountainous terrain. In reality it was over Eritrea’s new status as a potential African Singapore threatening Ethiopia’s commercial interests (principally coffee) and aims for economic self-sufficiency and protectionism.

Taking advantage of its coastal status and Ethiopian cheap labour and launching its own currency, to counter what it saw as an overvalued Ethiopian currency which hindered it exports, Eritrea began to threaten the interests of Ethiopian capital. Becoming landlocked in 1993, following the overthrow of the dictator Mengistu and Eritrea obtaining independence, Ethiopia perceived a threat to its cheap labour market from the new-independently Eritrea’s processing export industries and cheap Eritrean imports, and thus began to impose tariffs. The territorial boundaries between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which had previously been a matter of little formal control and even convenient administration by local authorities on either side of the borders, began in such circumstances to be marked by claims of encroachment and eventually an act of aggression which sparked off a war which may have already claimed as many as 50,000 lives.

In a country racked by civil war and droughts where the majority of men and women exist in dire poverty, its leaders see their interests served by spending vast sums on armaments and mobilising hundreds of thousands to mass slaughter. The death toll in this conflict between capitalists using working class cannon fodder has been particularly high with a ratio of dead to wounded of one-to-one (the average for most modern wars being one dead to three wounded). According to the Economist (8-14 May) “the death toll is high because the combatants use the weapons of the Korean war, the tactics of the first world war and the medical treatments of the 19th century”.

With war of course comes the massive displacement of populations with, in this instance, many tens of thousands of Eritreans forcibly ejected from Ethiopia. As with all wars the Ethiopia-Eritrea war has competing capitalist interests at its root and the mass slaughter and suffering of its workers as its consequence.

Central and southern regions 

This conflict, however, is only part of a general increase in tension between African governments whose interests are perceived to lie in the increased militarisation of the continent. This was most particularly evident in the central and southern regions. Indeed the wars in the Congo and Angola appear to be threatening to draw these regions into full-scale sub-continental war. Angola has threatened Zambia with invasion over its ruling-class support for the UNITA rebel opposition in Angola, a position also supported by some members of the South African ruling class. The Mugabe regime on the other hand supports intervention on the side of the Angolan government. Tension still runs high over the war in the Congo, with Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia and Chad drawn into the conflict in support of President Kabila and Uganda and Rwanda on the side of the anti-Kabila forces. Conflict over the Caprivi Strip between Namibia and Botswana also poses a threat, with the Zimbabwean ruling class supporting the former and the South African ruling class supporting the latter.

The underlying cause of this increase in tension is in the economic crisis facing the two most powerful economies of the region, Zimbabwe and South Africa, in the face of the global economic downturn. The ensuing economic competition between the rival ruling classes has forced the two governments to attempt to form regional alliances. Such action is taking on an increasingly military character with the Zimbabwean government, backed by Namibia, justifying its intervention in the Congo on the grounds of securing markets at the expense of South African multinationals. In another example of capitalist robbers fighting over their ill-gotten gains South Africa, backed by Botswana, asserted its influence over Lesotho to protect the interests of its ruling class following attempts by the Lesothon population to overthrow the existing dictatorial regime.

In such circumstances an ominous regional arms race is beginning to take place, with South Africa announcing at the end of 1998 a re-armament programme worth 20 billion rands. Botswana, South Africa’s main regional ally, has also been conducting a re-armament programme including the construction of a US-assisted military airbase. Zimbabwe, under the pretext of the conflict in the Congo, has also been spending billions of dollars on re-arming with its most recent purchase being over $1 billion-worth of Russian military equipment. A similar massive re-armament has taken place in Angola as a consequence of the intensifying civil war. It seems that the increasing trade war taking place between the capitalists of southern Africa may result in yet another war in which the workers fights for the interests of capital.

In the era of the “New World Order” capitalism once again proves itself to be an uncontrollable and destructive system of society. A system which accords the majority slave status and then expects them to die for their masters’ interests. The only solution to war and to the miseries of capitalism in Africa, as in the rest of the world, is for the working class to organise for common ownership and democratic control, a society where the root cause of war in the economic and strategic rivalry of a minority owning class is removed and the production and distribution of wealth is conducted in the interests of the whole community—Socialism. It is time the working class struggled for its own interests.

Colin Skelly

Not Revolution at All (2022)

Book Review from the March 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World. By Jeremy Friedman. Harvard University Press £28.95.

This book covers attempts to build so-called socialism in developing countries. Case studies deal with Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola and Iran, each supported by a great deal of detailed documentation. It is not about socialism at all, of course, but still contains a lot of useful information and interesting discussion, about such topics as rivalry between the rulers in Moscow and Beijing, and the use or not of parliament.

The examples are very different from each other. In Indonesia the ‘Communist’ Party (PKI) was not in power, but Russian aid was supposed to help build heavy industry and so increase the role of the working class. Sukarno’s dictatorship eventually resulted in the killing of perhaps half a million PKI members and supporters. In Chile Allende ‘saw himself as creating a completely new model of socialist revolution’, but he was not in full control of the Congress and was able to do little more than nationalise the copper industry. The end in 1973 was another coup and thousands of deaths. Nyerere in Tanzania claimed to want socialism without class struggle, but his agricultural reforms (‘forced villagization’) led to a drop in production and massive food imports. In Angola there were competing ‘liberation movements’ and from the mid-70s there was a combination of ‘political Leninism with a mixed economy’, resulting in a ‘Leninist oligarchy’ that skimmed profits and preserved its political power. Despite its vast oil resources, the country exemplified ‘Leninist capitalism’, where a kleptocracy justified itself on the grounds of national development. Iran shared with Indonesia the influence of Islam, but land reform was not implemented, and the idea that an Islamic state would mean a more just economic system proved baseless.

Friedman concludes that the Russian rulers’ idea of state-led industrialisation did not deliver what was promised, and so the market had to be re-introduced (not that it had ever gone away). He talks briefly about various definitions of socialism, but does not refer to the idea of a classless stateless global society. He sees the ‘Leninist model of politics’ as an enduring legacy, and a number of organisations built on such lines still hold power in southern Africa. The Cold War did not end so clearly in the less developed parts of the world, but the claim in the final paragraph that ‘the attempt to build a socialist future in the Global South was real’ is simply unsupported. Rather, there were attempts of various kinds to expand the role of capitalism (not necessarily state capitalism), with Russian and/or Chinese support. The book is a useful reminder that non-Bolshevik efforts to build ‘socialism’ also existed and failed.

Paul Bennett

A girl’s best friend? (2000)

From the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is a profound and tragic irony that diamonds, marketed in London, New York and Antwerp as the eternal symbol of love and beauty, are potent symbols of hate and disfigurement, misery and suffering to the millions of people in whose countries they are mined.

In Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Congo and Angola, the diamond trade has brought with it years of conflict and instability and the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Africans perceived as standing in the way of the lucrative profits the increasingly illicit trade brings.

The statistics speak for themselves. In Angola, between 1992 and 1997, Unita earned $3.7 billion from illegal diamond sales, helping them fuel a war in which 500,000 were killed. In under ten years of fighting, Jonas Savimbi built his rag-tag army up into one of the best armed irregular forces around, all thanks to diamonds he traded for state-of-the-art weaponry. In Sierra Leone, between 1991 and 1999, over 50,000 died and many more were maimed (their limbs hacked off with machetes) whilst government forces fought the rebel RUF over an illegal diamond industry worth over $200 million a year. And in nearby Liberia, between 1989 and 1997, 150,000 died as a result of a conflict fought over control of the diamond trade. Liberia, which incidentally has no significant diamond deposits of its own, nevertheless runs a $300 million plus diamond trade with the help of troops loyal to Sierra Leone’s RUF leader Foday Sankah. Such is the illicit global trade in diamonds that the US State Department believes it to be worth anything up to $7 billion a year.

The diamond trail usually starts in the dusty towns of Angola, in the Sierra Leone wilderness or the jungle terrain surrounding Kisangani in the Congo, where half-naked workers labour with pick, spade and drill, guarded by miniature and well-equipped armies. Small mine owners pass on their stones they unearth to local dealers, though not before the guards’ commanders have had their share, and likewise the local dealers have to make payment to the local militia leaders, who similarly have to pass a share to their seniors

Immense armies can be spread over hundreds of thousands of miles of diamond rich land, providing safe passage to all prepared to pay the price, whilst governments and warlords sell concessions to mine, with concession purchasers selling them on to anyone keen on making a killing (no pun intended).

There are of course other key figures, albeit playing as low a profile as possible. They include Burkina Faso’s leader Blaise Compaore and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, who help speed smooth passage by circumventing the controls imposed by the UN and other regulatory bodies. Meanwhile, the governments of Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi and Zimbabwe provide military help to warlords in exchange for these little shiny stones and the right to mine them. In the case of the latter, critics of Robert Mugabe accuse him of donating 11,000 troops to the conflict in the Congo in return for diamond field concessions.

And of course there is the middle men who make the deals, find further safe passage for the diamonds to the western markets and supply the weapons that fuel the conflicts and ensure the diamonds keep coming.

Investigators working with the UN recognise a well organised international network of smuggling involving numerous west and southern African countries, with further links to freight companies supplying arms from the UAE to Bulgaria and the Ukraine. Whilst the RUF in Sierra Leone have been provided with former Soviet surface-to-air missiles, at the height of the Angolan war over twenty Ilyushin aircraft could be found landing on one airstrip each evening, each loaded with military hardware.

Whilst pressure groups, such as Global Witness, the UN and other diamond industry regulatory bodies try to introduce an “ethical dimension” into the trade, the dealers themselves fear their efforts will undermine consumer demand because of the diamond’s link with limbless children in West Africa. Provenance certificates, supposedly implying that this and that diamond has no blood on it have been suggested, but such a move would require the co-operation of bankers, brokers and buyers in Tel Aviv, Antwerp and Bombay—the three main diamond centres – and indeed the governments of several countries, including Liberia, who are only too happy to overlook the fact that a few hundred carats true cost is a child hobbling along on crutches and provide forged documents.

As Herbert Rowe, a political scientist specialising in African affairs at Georgetown University in Washington noted: “Even in the Cold War, superpowers did not allow the wholesale ripping up of the economy, the use of children as soldiers and attacks upon relief groups” (Guardian, 14 May). He is of course referring to countries like Sierra Leone, now the poorest country on earth and whose population has enjoyed no health or education system for 10 years, as a direct result of the mayhem that has been set loose because of the greed for the profits that diamonds bring.

Further anti-diamond trade measures have included a boycott of diamonds. But the truth is that— although the trade brings so much misery in its wake—the average piece of diamond-laden jewellery on display in the local high street has only a 4 percent chance of having an illicit source and that the diamond most likely originated in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa or the Russian Federation. Further, any such embargo would hit “innocent” diamond producing and cutting countries such as Botswana and India, the latter with a diamond industry employing 800,000.

The fact that only 4 percent of the diamonds that adorn our loved ones are bloodstained and that this 4 percent has caused so much chaos and upset throughout Africa suggests, more than anything, the intrinsic danger of the incentive to make a profit at any cost. All the controls it is possible to impose upon the diamond trade would not distract one iota from the fact that, at whatever human cost, if there are profits to be made from the trade then profits will be made. This is the essential nature of capitalism, even in its more overt and legal forms. If profits can be made, no matter how small, they will be made and to hell with anyone who stands in the way.

The task is not to try to regulate the diamond trade more efficiently, but to end the system that makes the diamond the commodity it is; to banish forever the system that conditions us into thinking that wearing a shiny stone brings status and respect. Since this journal’s inception 95 years ago, we have consistently reported the wars and conflicts, the misery and sufferings our class has endured in the name of the profits derived from mineral wealth and its possession by an elite. We expect, for the foreseeable future, to carry on in this tradition until our class truly wakes up.

John Bissett

Rear View: The Mosquito Knows (2017)

The Rear View Column from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Mosquito Knows

‘Ambrosia: This Startup Will Give You Blood Transfusions From Young People to Reverse the Aging Process. It Only Costs $8,000’ [£6275] (newsweek.com, 9 June). Only rich over 35s seeking the elixir of youth need apply. But such developments come as no surprise to socialists who have long understood capitalism’s voracious nature and how it seeks ever new ways to drain what it can out of the working class. Marx noted in Capital volume 1, chapter 10, section 1: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. Production for profit rather than need has resulted in the untimely deaths of millions through war and want, but for the system to continue it must avoid eradicating its source of unpaid surplus value. Indeed, the introduction of welfare payments and improvements in healthcare etc. are primarily in the interest of the parasite, not the host.

A rich reformist

Joining the parasitical 1 percent is difficult for those not belonging to families who have had our blood in the bank for generations. But one who has managed to climb the greasy pole recently is none other than Bernie Sanders. cnbc.com (6 June) reveals that he ‘had a surprisingly good financial year in 2016’ as he supplemented his annual income of $200,000 [£157,000] – a paltry sum, ‘making him one of the least wealthy senators’ – with $858,750 [£674,000] from book royalties . We reviewed Our Revolution in the April edition of this journal, and  berniesanders.com where he states ‘the issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time, and it is the great political issue of our time’. Our objection to him is not that he is rich, but that he is a reformist not a socialist.. The World Socialist Movement does not exclude capitalists from membership. Had Frederick Engels and William Morris lived long enough and demonstrated agreement with our Declaration of Principles, they would have been welcomed into our newly formed Party.

Here, there, everywhere

Capitalism exists throughout the world. We recently tweeted: Socialism has NOTHING to do with Venezuela, the Soviet Union, North Korea, China etc. That is a LIE capitalists and politicians want you to believe as it keeps them rich and powerful. Wherever there is a privileged elite in control of waged workers there is a capitalist economy. Socialism means a society with NO ruling class. Elites are found everywhere, including Angola. There the majority of our class exist on less than $2 (£1.60) a day and 90 percent of Luanda’s population must do so in slums. Yet the Angolan President’s son just spent £440,000 on a set of photographs. Daddy’s fortune ‘has been estimated at US $20 billion, which would put him among the world’s 50 richest people….José Eduardo dos Santos has not spared any effort in ensuring that his legacy continues through his family. The most famous of his children is businesswoman Isabel Dos Santos, 44, the only female billionaire in Africa. As well as being president of the Administrative Council of the state oil company Sonangol, she has investments in various multinationals, from banks to telecommunications, totalling a fortune of US $3 billion’ (globalvoices.org, 4 June).

Another old elitist

Socialists know that Simon Sebag Montefiore is a lousy historian (we reviewed his Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar in March 2006), so imagine the surprise when Catherine Merridale’s Lenin on the Train (2016), described by him as ‘the superb, funny, fascinating story of Lenin’s trans-European rail journey to power and how it shook the world ‘ (standard.co.uk, 17 November 2016), provides this gem. ‘But it was Lenin himself who made it clear that the Bolsheviks would reject democratic values.’ He ‘had not traveled back to join a coalition,’ Merridale writes according to the review of her book in the New York Times, but ‘to undermine the provisional government and establish a dictatorship in the name of the proletariat. It was Lenin who instituted severe censorship, established one-party rule and resorted to terror against his political enemies. Stalin took these measures to further extremes for his own sinister purposes.’  (nytimes.com, 9 June).

Mercenaries (1976)

From the March 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

If fourteen of them had not been shot for unwillingness to fight, the presence of a small number of British mercenaries in the war in Angola might well have been ignored. Their presence being made known through that episode, the result was disclaimers and threats by the government—and a study in capitalist interests being pursued.

Mercenaries are soldiers who fight for money alone, without pretending they are for good against bad. They are the “universal soldier” practically as old as war itself. In the period when feudalism was giving way to capitalism they were the nucleus of every army in Europe. The German Landsknecht and the Italian Condottieri were troops which plied for hire. With the development of the capitalist state, national armies took their place.

However, mercenaries have never disappeared. To a large extent they are produced by national armies. Speaking in the House of Commons about those who went to Angola, the Prime Minister said many of them were contacted through “lists of names of former soldiers”. Of one modern force of mercenaries, the Black and Tans recruited by the British government to serve in Ireland in 1920, a historian says:

[They were] for the most part young men who found it hard to settle down after the war, who had become used to a career of adventure and bloodshed, and who were prepared to try their luck in a new sphere for ten shillings a day and all found. They were the same type, and produced by much the same circumstances, as the Congo mercenaries of our own day.

(F. S. L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, 1971)

In the 1939-45 war there were mercenaries on both sides. According to H. W. Koch in History of the Second World War (Vol. 7) there were 130,000 West Europeans, mostly Dutch, Flemings and French, in the German Waffen-SS as well as Russians and East Europeans. In The Big Lie (1955), a jingoistic account of Allied propaganda organization in the war, J B. White mentions Circassian mercenaries serving under the French in North Africa. Previously, in the Spanish Civil War, men were recruited for Franco from Morocco on the promise of pieces of land afterwards. Mercenaries have taken part in other more recent wars. Besides the Congo, they were employed in the Biafran war of 1967 and included air-pilots on both sides.

The distinction between mercenaries and soldiers in standing armies is a scanty one. Men do not enlist from patriotic or moral sentiments, but for pay and security spiced with physical excitement; in the past the Regular Army was recruited chiefly from the able-bodied unemployed. Discussing the legal position of the British mercenaries in Angola, a Times leader on 10th February said the existing law (the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870) “makes no distinction between fighting for money and fighting for a cause”. It would make no difference if it did. The British government’s alarm was not because these adventurers were deficient in lofty motives, but because they might imply a general British partisanship. The French government disowned mercenaries in the Congo for the same reason, and threatened to withdraw citizenship from them. What is “a cause”? In this context, a capitalist interest agreeable to Our Side.

In a speech in the House of Commons the Minister for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, David Ennals, said: “The mercenaries by their irresponsible action, are not only acting against Britain’s interests, they are bringing more suffering to the people of Angola.” (The Times, 11th February). The mercenaries deserve contempt, but not in those terms. It is Britain’s interests, and those of capitalism all over the world, that are responsible for the suffering. In the Biafran war, while similar pious sentiments were expressed, about one-fifth of the Nigerian side’s military purchases came from Britain. The officers and advisers in the Nigerian army were largely British-trained.

The position over the sale of arms to developing states is summed up in a chapter “The Merchants of Death” by Philip Windsor in The History of the Twentieth Century, Vol. 8 (1968).

At present, practically everyone sells in the Middle East; the major European arms producers—Great Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland and Belgium—are chipping away at the virtual American monopoly in Latin America. Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union have very large markets in South-East Asia. France and Great Britain sell what they can in Africa, and France is taking over the British role in South Africa.

Nor is this a nefarious conspiracy. It is normal capitalism : the production of commodities sold at a profit because of the certainty that normal capitalism generates wars inexorably.

“Mercenary” is a disapproving word, and mercenary soldiers characteristically are turned out and despised when their job is done. In this case it was sooner instead of later. There is another lesson here. People are often convinced by the idea of a “just” war; for instance, that the Second World War had to be, because of the Germans’ totalitarianism and their persecution of the Jews. In fact anyone who set out to fight on those accounts before his government found it expedient would have been dealt with as a trouble-maker. Governments carry out the compulsions of each one’s national capitalism. The workers kill and are killed, by order—until they see the reason, and decide they will have no more of it.

Robert Barltrop

At the crossroads (1997)

From the February 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all the Arabic countries, Morocco is the nearest to Europe. It is just 16 kilometres south of the southernmost tip of Spain, across the Straight of Gibraltar. But immediately you step off the ferry from Algeciras, at Tangier you know that you are no longer in Europe, but in North Africa.

After 44 years of "protectorate”— that is colonial rule—Morocco became independent of France and Spain on 2 March 1956. The Hizb el-Istiqlal (Independence Party) and a number of other pro-nationalist groups, but excluding the Parti Communiste Marocain which was also pro-nationalist, had achieved their aim. The PCM. being good patriots, supported a constitutional monarchy and the reunification of Morocco with Mauritania; but this did not stop the Moroccan government from dissolving the PCM in September 1959. Morocco has been ruled by King Hassan II since 1961.

About the only kind thing that can be said about Morocco is that it is a "guided" bourgeois democracy, where opposition parties (but not "subversive" parties) are generally tolerated —and where Islamic fundamentalists have not, as yet, resorted to the kind of violence witnessed in adjacent Algeria. In Morocco the king rules with a Parliament, in which two-thirds of the deputies are elected by universal suffrage. and the remaining third are chosen by an electoral college of local councils, professional groups, employers' organisations and a few "tame" trade unionists. The iron fist of the state is generally covered by a velvet glove, although when I was there in 1981, I witnessed students who were demonstrating against the deposed Shah of Iran, who was in the country at the time, mown down by machine-gun fire from Moroccan troops.

French influence is still strong, although less than in the past. Nevertheless French companies have been responsible for much of Morocco's industrial development. Politically, however, Morocco has. and has had, other less transparent allies and friends.

In 1948, there were about 200,000 Jews living in Morocco: and up to Moroccan independence in 1956, 100,000 of them had left for Israel. But following independence, the new Moroccan government gave in to pressure from other Arab states, and forbade emigration to Israel. However, MOSSAD organised secret escape routes bribing Moroccan officials. In 1961, Israel asked France and the United States to intervene with the recently crowned King Hassan II. The king needed Western support, and so quietly co-operated with Israel, thus allowing more than 80,000 Jews, who wanted to go to Israel, to leave the country. Although Morocco was a member of the Arab League, and officially a supporter of the Palestinian cause, it nevertheless established close ties with Israel. MOSSAD helped Morocco organise its secret service; and in 1965, did Morocco a favour by assisting the Moroccan secret police assassinate their dissident, Mehdi Ben-Barka. Morocco and Israel, sometimes with Egypt, have quietly co-operated ever since.

In 1977 Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan UNITA nationalist leader, backed by South Africa and the United States, travelled to Morocco, where he met King Hassan. From Morocco. UNITA obtained a secure external headquarters in Rabat. Morocco offered Savimbi military training facilities, near Marrakech, for up to 500 men at a time; and Morocco provided UNITA with arms, and other military equipment, most of which came from the United States, over a period of many years. In 1981, Savimbi and other UNIT A rebels met senior State Department officials in Morocco to discuss United States plans for Angola. Morocco has, since independence, been a loyal but subordinate ally of the United States; and the CIA has always had a strong presence in the country.

Economic problems

The Moroccan economy has suffered severe drought in recent years, which has badly affected the predominant agricultural sector. Indeed, agriculture is still dominant. It is the principal source of employment, accounting for half the working population. Most of the farms are not economically viable, with only one percent of the farms having more than 125 acres. Most of the rest are under eight acres.

Since 1993, the government has been involved in a massive privatisation programme of what was largely a state-run, dirigiste, capitalist economy. Banking and foreign currency regulations have been lifted. From the capitalist viewpoint, the Moroccan government claims that it is a success story:

"International fluctuations in commodity prices have led the government to build up a more diversified economy by reducing reliance on agriculture and mining. It has been largely successful since the mining sector's share of GDP had declined steadily from 5.3 percent in the 1970s to 1.8 percent in 1994. Manufacturing has increased its share from an average 16 percent in the 1970s to almost 18 percent in 1990-94 period. The sector's share of total exports has jumped from 20 percent in 1986 to about one-third since 1992" ("Images”, Observer, 22 December 1996).

However, the economy is estimated to have contracted by five percent in 1995.

And how has this affected the majority of the people of Morocco, the workers and the peasant farmers? The Times (26 December) reports that unemployment is 20 percent, with those under 30 years of age suffering unemployment of more than 40 percent. Fifty-one percent of the population are still illiterate; and the per capita income in Morocco, North Africa's poorest country, is just £800 a year.

All this has resulted in thousands of poverty-stricken Moroccan would-be workers "illegally” going to Spain. Scores of them are detained every week, reports the Times. Last summer, 50 Moroccans were apprehended each day in Spain; and 1,300 were detained in June alone. Just how long it will take them, and many others, to realise that escaping the miseries of one country, Morocco, for the miseries of another, Spain, will not solve their problems, we cannot say. All we can say is that they will not solve them, in Morocco or elsewhere, within the framework of world capitalism.

Peter E. Newell

A booming industry . . . even in a recession (2009)

From the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent issue of the magazine Time (14 October) highlighted the immense profits to be made in capitalism even in a trade recession. "Need to start a war? No problem. While stock markets grate and financial institutions (and even whole countries, like Iceland) teeter on bankruptcy, one global industry is still drawing plenty of high-end trades and profits: weapons."

The article reported the case in a Paris courtroom where 42 officials went on trial for taking millions in kickbacks and organising huge arms commissions from the Angolan government during the mid-1990s. This group, which included a former French Interior minister and the son of the late French President Mitterrand, were charged with having supplied almost $800 million worth of arms to Angola, including 12 helicopters, 6 naval vessels, 150,000 shells and 170,000 mines.

The Angolan President Jose Eduardo Dos Santos used this huge stockpile to crush the US-backed Unita rebels during Angola's devastating civil war. It is worth noting that Dos Santos is reckoned to have made millions of dollars from the transaction and that he is still in power with no prospect of a fraud trial for him.

The source of this arms hardware was the huge stockpiles of Soviet weapons left behind when the Soviet Union collapsed.The French businessman Pierre Falcone allegedly plied Angolan officials with tens of millions of dollars – some of it stuffed in in suitcases – and deposited other sums in offshore accounts.

You might imagine that these shady dealings having been brought to light could no longer occur, but you would be dreadfully wrong. "Researchers say arms trading has boomed in the decade since the Angolagate scandal was uncovered. That's partly due to heightened supply. As ex-Soviet republics emerged as economic actors in their own right, several countries developed national arms industries, refitting weapons from their stocks and manufacturing new weapons of their own. These industries have taken off in in recent years. Ukraine has about 6 million light weapons from Soviet stockpiles, and has modernised tanks, anti-aircraft missiles and other weaponry, says Hugh Griffiths, an expert on illicit weapons at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute."

"It is very difficult to stop arms trafficking, because there is no control," says Griffiths, who has researched Ukraine's arsenal for the US government. Although NATO funds Ukraine to destroy its stockpiles, "the Ukrainians realize how much money they can make by selling surplus weapons," he says. In an action that broke no laws, the Ukrainians shipped about 40,000 Kalashnikov rifles to Kenya last year during the tense standoff following the country's disputed presidential election."

As the struggle for oil and minerals intensifies inside capitalism we have rebel conflict in Chad, Sudan, Congo and elsewhere. This conflict needs weapons and so the arms trade legitimate or otherwise flourishes. In Africa and all over the world capitalism reigns supreme. The basis of capitalism is production for profit, so in its remorseless drive for profit it leads to conflict, and eventually armed conflict. It is the nature of the beast to maim and kill and all attempts to civilise it by such grandiose titled groups like the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute are doomed to failure. As the expert Hugh Griffiths himself admits – "there are plenty of arms out there - so long as you have the money to pay for it."

Richard Donnelly