Voice From The Back: Business ethics (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard  

Business ethics 1 

Hundreds of Western firms are courting Saddam Hussein’s regime in the hope of contracts if the embargo imposed after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 is lifted soon. Scores of deals have been struck, aiming to take advantage of possible waivers of sanctions on certain goods . . . The courting of Baghdad, which has the second largest oil reserves in the world, surprises few experts. “Iraq is the big prize,” said Lowell Feld, of the US Department of Energy, who wrote a recent report on Iraq’s oil industry. “There are dozens of firms out there salivating, ready to move in as soon as the UN gives the go-ahead.” Observer, 26 December.

Business ethics 2 

A United Nations embargo on all diamond exports from Liberia, a high level commission of enquiry into the links between organised crime and the Belgian diamond industry, and a new International Diamond Standards Commission under the UN are urged in a new report on the disintegrating society of Sierra Leone. The report, released in Canada and launched by a former foreign minister, Flora MacDonald yesterday, is critical of De Beers, the dominant player in the world’s diamond industry. It set a challenge to the UN to take decisive action on one of the motors of war across a swath of west and central Africa. The diamond trade, most of it illegal, plays a major part in the wars or shaky peace in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Angola and Congo, but the actors reach far beyond west Africa. Guardian, 13 January.

For our safety 

The United States stored 12,000 nuclear weapons and components in at least 23 countries and five American territories during the cold war—including Morocco, Japan, Iceland, Puerto Rico and Cuba—according to an article based on a recently declassified document. The document, a secret study written by the Defense Department and titled “History of the Custody and Deployment of Nuclear Weapons: July 1945 through September 1977”, is described in the November/December issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. New York Times, 20 October.

Competition—great! 

The relentless factory-like drive to produce the perfect 40mph racing machine results in the mass slaughter of 20-30,000 greyhounds each year. These make way for the next 20-30,000 which are bred each year in the UK and Ireland. Only a small number of them make it to the betting tracks. The rest is “wastage”. Despite attempts by the industry to prevent the slaughter, some trainers and owners prefer the cheaper option of killing dogs to paying between £20-30 for them to be humanely put down by a vet. Unwanted greyhounds have been found starved, clubbed, electrocuted and injected with petrol. Some are flung from speeding cars, sold to vivisection labs or hung from trees. Corpses have been dragged up from the sea with rocks tied to their legs. Big Issue, 12-23 January.

Care in the community 

The government is to net a £4 million windfall after the West Midlands NHS Executive sold off a slice of the former Rubery Hill [mental] Hospital site for a new pub and lodge. Evening Mail, 13 January.

The rule of law 

“If there is indeed a ‘war on drugs’ it is not being won; drugs are demonstrably cheaper and more easily available than ever before. The same picture can be seen in the USA and elsewhere . . . If a significantly large, and apparently growing, part of the population chooses to ignore the law for whatever reason, then that law becomes unenforceable. A modern western democracy, based on policing by consent and the rule of law may find itself powerless to prevent illegal activity—in this case the importation and use of controlled drugs . . . The best example of this is cannabis—the UK has the highest rate of cannabis use in Europe, higher even than in the Netherlands which has a tolerance policy . . . If prohibition does not work, then either the consequences of this have to be accepted, or an alternative approach must be found. The most obvious alternative approach is the legalisation and subsequent regulation of some or all drugs.” Richard Brundstrom, former Assistant Chief Constable, from a report published by Cleveland Police.

The causes of war are . . . 

Three days after raising its flag in Grozny’s last rebel stronghold, Russia is claiming the richest prize of the war: Chechnya’s potential as a conduit for the vast oil reserves of the Caspian basin . . . As one export put it yesterday: “Access to the Caspian has historically been the reason for Chechnya’s importance. Why else did Hitler try so hard to conquer it?” Times, 10 February.

It all depends . . . 

Death in Britain is not an equitable business. Nor is health. People in Springburn, Glasgow, suffer a rate of chronic illness of 155 per 1,000. In Wokingham, Berkshire, the rate is 36. There are 67.9 deaths per 10,000 live births in Springburn but only 53.2 in Wokingham. Our environment can kill, in other words. But not at the same rate. Observer, 13 February.

Letters: Marx and communism (2000)

Letters to the Editors from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and communism

Dear Editors,

I have been reading some of Marx’s writings. I find him to be very good reading. I would like to hear your views on what he called “crude communism”. The passages I refer to are in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In the section “Private property and communism”, he mentions different types of communism which some have the ideal politically but are still under the influence of private property (democratic or despotic). How does this compare with, say, Russia’s state-run system of seventy years? I believe just like the SPGB that Russia’s communism was a form of state-run capitalism. I wonder if Marx would have agreed with this or just called it “crude communism” somewhere between, the first and second stages of development. What is the SPGB’s view on this?

Colin Robertson, 

Queenstown, New Zealand

Reply: 

Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were private notes written in 1844 soon after he became a Socialist; indeed, as he was in the process of working out his Socialist ideas. They make interesting, even fascinating, reading but too much emphasis should not be placed on them. But they at least show that Marx understood from the start that communism/socialism means the abolition of money, private property and the state.

By “crude communism” Marx seems to have been referring to the ideas of some workers he met in France (where he was then living) who, not taking into account the possibilities opened up by the industrial revolution, felt that full equality between humans could only be realised on the basis of common ownership and equal sharing of what little there was. It was a sort of “communism of scarcity”.

If we were to accept Lenin and Trotsky at their word, they too were trying to establish communism in conditions of scarcity after 1917. Naturally, they failed for a whole host of reasons (lack of majority socialist understanding, isolation, economic backwardness) and it soon became clear that (as Lenin himself openly admitted) what they were building was state-run capitalism not any form of socialism. The “crude communism” which Marx discussed was just a speculation which could never work in practice and which, given the development of industry and productive power in the 19th century, didn’t need to be tried either. From then on the only practicable form of communism/socialism is the form we in the World Socialist Movement advocate, where the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” can apply fully - Editors.

No mystery about banking

Dear Editors,

Recently someone lent me a copy of the Socialist Standard. In this issue (October 1999), I read something that brought me up rather sharply. On page 7 in “Poverty of the Greens”, Pik Smeet says, a little mockingly, “Pardon me, pray, please do excuse me . . . So the Greens believe that when a bank wants to make a loan it just creates money by magicking it out of thin air, etc” Now, I’m not an expert on money (not even at getting it!) but I’ve always understood this to be exactly the case.

Recently, being a bit interested in the subject, I bought The Ecology of Money by Richard Douthwaite (published by Green Books for the Schumacher Society, £5). I enclose a photocopy of the part of the book that deals with this magic of creating money out of thin air, with apologies to P. Daniels!

I would be interested to learn what Pik Smeet thinks of the views of these experts—Lord Stamp and J.K. Galbraith.

Frank Cooper, 

Redruth, Cornwall

Reply: 

The currency cranks did once try to argue that a bank’s “cash ratio” of 10 percent, i.e. the amount they must hold as cash (which is actually nearer one percent these days), meant that if someone deposited £100 in cash the bank could then immediately lend out £900. Actually, of course, what it means is that they can lend out £90. Modern currency cranks, such as the one you refer us to, are less crude. They argue that it is the banking system as a whole rather than an individual bank that can magically multiply an initial cash deposit nine times.

According to them, something like this happens. One person deposits £100 in cash in a bank. This bank keeps £10 as cash and lends the remaining £90. This £90 is spent and those who receive it deposit it with one or other of the banks which are assumed to exist. These can then lend out £81 which is again spent and then eventually redeposited and so on. According to the extract from Douthwaite you sent us, if this happens (“if each bank now lends out 90 percent of whatever it has received”) the end result is that “the original £100 cash deposit allows the ten banks to increase their loans to the public (and hence the money supply) to £1000”.

All this argument proves is that money circulates and that the same coins and notes can be used for many different transactions including more than one bank deposit. So, in the example, while the total of bank loans will indeed increase from £90 to £900 but this will have come about because the banking system will have received an extra £900 in deposits. These will have been generated not by a “most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand” (Lord Stamp) or by a “stroke of the pen” (JK Galbraith, for once talking nonsense), but independently of the banking system, by the mainly productive activities in which the series of loans can be assumed, in the real world, to have been originally generated. When all this is taken into account the total amounts loaned throughout the process—at £900—is still only 90 percent of the total amount deposited, of £1,000.

A bank is no different from a building society: it can only lend out what people deposit with it, in fact a little less than this. This is clear for building societies. Nobody challenges the fact that they have to attract money from investors before they can lend anything to house buyers. A bank is no different, except that it gives out loans for a wider range of activities than buying a house.

Ironically, banks already are what Green Party currency cranks say they should be: financial intermediaries putting lenders and borrowers in touch and making a profit out of the difference between the rate of interest they pay to depositors and the rate they charge borrowers. It’s simple really. No magic is involved - Editors.

Bunker mentality? (1)

Dear Editors,

Andrew Northall’s letter (Socialist Standard, February) is indicative of the bunker mentality that has hampered the growth of the socialist movement. He claims that “identification of common ground with non-socialist organisations can only create confusion”. But common ground needn’t mean a common platform.

Andrew assumes that all members of non-socialist organisation (e.g. Reclaim the Streets) are non-socialists, simply because they are not members of the World Socialist Movement. In reality probably 99 percent of them are simply not aware of our existence. Many of them may be very attracted to the ideas of socialism but have rightly rejected what they think is only because of the undemocratic and unprincipled actions of the left wing.

We are not the keepers of some Marxian holy grail. Many of the ideas that are central to our “unique” position are in fact shared with others. Should we take heart from that, or begrudge it? The fact is, some people can be closer to our views than others. We tend to crudely view socialist consciousness as being one giant mental leap. Where you have to be on one side or another. I think human psychology is a bit more sophisticated than black and white. If we feel we cannot critically engage (even at the mildest level of publishing an open letter in our own journal) with those who share some of our ideas, without in some way feeling we are sullying our pristine hands, then maybe we lack confidence in our ideas.

Rightly, we address our case to the working class of the world, rather than any particular interest group or the left wing’s supposed “advanced sections”. But that surely doesn’t mean that we cannot tailor our propaganda to focus on those workers who are probably at least a little bit more sympathetic to our arguments. Wasn’t the maxim “if you aren’t for us, you’re against us . . .” one of Stalin’s favourites?

Some members conveniently lay the blame for our lack of growth last century with the working class: if we are not able to engage and encourage those who are close to our ideas, then failure to grow in the coming century will lie squarely with the Socialist Party.

Brian Gardner, 

Edinburgh (by e-mail)

 

Bunker mentality? (2)

Dear Editors,

Re. Andrew Northall’s letter (Socialist Standard, February). As an active and campaigning revolutionary socialist, I for one welcome the advances in consciousness which we see affecting widening layers of workers in the post-Seattle climate. It inevitable that many of these will be affected by anarchist, syndicalist, single-issue campaigns and many other ideas, and the responsibility of socialists is to engage with these workers in a battle of ideas, and build activity in areas of agreement.

Central to this is the concept of the united front, of agreeing common issues on which to act, while preserving the independence of thought and criticism needed to ensure that while action takes place, debate and argument accompanies it. Does the Socialist Party of Great Britain agree the need to undertake joint activity, or does the idea of hostility to all other parties and strands of thought take precedence?

If the answer is the former, the entry of the SPGB to the many public campaigns should be welcomed, although sharp arguments in both directions may lie ahead. If the answer is the latter, when the SPGB faces a long period of self-contemplation, unable to interact with wider layers of disaffected workers for fear of losing its political virginity.

Mike Greenhalf, 

(by e-mail)

Reply: 

No, to be quite frank, we are not in favour of the concept of the united front and reject the need for Socialists to undertake joint activity for anything less than socialism itself. What we welcomed about recent developments was the emergence of the view that “the global capitalists system, based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few, is at the very root of our social and ecological troubles” amongst those who have been involved in dead-end, reformist single-issue campaigns. We fully accept that it is the responsibility of Socialists to engage with these workers in a battle of ideas, by talking to, leafleting and debating with them, so as to encourage them to take the next step: if capitalism is the root cause of social and ecological troubles, then the intelligent course of action is to concentrate on removing the cause rather than trying to deal with a particular problem as a single issue since as long as the cause remains so, inevitably, will the particular problems.

That people who are concerned about these problems should concentrate their political activity exclusively on working to get rid of the capitalist system and replace it with a frontierless world community based on the common ownership and democratic control of the Earth’s resources is precisely our unique contribution to this debate - Editors.

World View: Death and destruction in Dili (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1996 (Socialist Standard, March) we reported, and commented upon, Indonesian repression in East Timor and Australian interest in, and control of, the vast oil deposits under the sea between Australia and East and West Timor. Much has happened since then.

East Timor is now “independent”. The Indonesians have gone. But not before they had killed thousands of Timorese and largely reduced the capital, Dili, to a burned-out ruin. Much of this has been levelled against Eurico Gutterres, a former Indonesian militia leader, now living under an assumed name in Jakarta. According to the West Australian (18 December), “the Indonesian military recruited and trained Guterres who commanded a paramilitary group called Aitarak, or Thorn, which was given the responsibility for security in Dili”. He ordered the destruction of East Timor, “carrying out his threat to turn East Timor into a wasteland if the Timorese voted to rejected Jakarta’s rule”. He now says that he does not feel guilty. He was only carrying out orders, he said.

In what the West Australian (15 January) calls “the razed capital” of Dili, “thousands of the deeply religious East Timorese Catholics turn out for Mass to thank god for delivering them from the horror of 24 years of Indonesian occupation”. But just outside Dili there are hundreds of children starving. Of the situation, reports the West Australian of the same date:

“Stagnant pools of sewage lay nearby, mixing with the regular afternoon rains, virtually ensuring that all open wounds would become infected. A girl, aged about five, stands half-naked except for a skin of massive, infected lesions which stretch from under her jaw to her waist.”

Yet,

“A blackmarket for food and goods has sprouted in Dili, with tonnes of rice and noodles being imported and held under guard in warehouses in the razed capital.”

Meanwhile, thousands of Timorese are starving in West Timor refugee camps. President Clinton is said to be concerned about a possible military coup, and the spread of religious violence in Indonesia; and Richard Holbrooke, the US Ambassador to the UN, “accused pro-Jakarta militias of blocking the return of about 125,000 East Timorese remaining in camps in West Timor. Responsibility for this lies primarily with the Indonesian military who continues to support the militia in the camps, he said” (West Australian, 17 January).

By last September, 75 percent of East Timor’s population had been displaced, and 70 percent of its houses, public buildings and essential utilities had been destroyed by the Indonesian-backed militias and military (West Australian, 8 January). However, Australian companies “have a chance to grab a slice of the $800 million which will be spent on rebuilding on East Timor over the next three years”. Indeed, more than £300 million will have been pumped into reconstruction by June this year.

There are, of course, problems for Australian capitalists, if not exactly the same as for Timorese workers and peasants. Land ownership was a problem, as records had been destroyed; and it was impossible to know who owned what. ” Conditions in Dili were tough, but foreign businesses were working there,” said Malcolm Murray, the international projects team leader with the Australian Department of Trade and Commerce. Nevertheless, Australian construction businesses have moved into Dili “with gusto”. There were many unemployed Timorese workers; but “the Australian Council for Overseas Aid also warned that pay rates for local workers could lead to gross inequality in wealth” (West Australian, 17 January).

Meanwhile, reported Agence France-Press (17 January), Australian, international and East Timorese officials held a conference to discuss a new Timor Gap oil treaty to replace the “illegal” treaty signed in December 1989, between Australia and Indonesia over the oil-rich waters between northern Australia and East Timor (see Socialist Standard, March 1996). However, Indonesia said that it would “accept a review or a cancellation of the treaty with Australia”, presumably as it now has little choice.

The UN made it clear in 1979 that the Indonesian invasion of the former Portuguese colony, and its subsequent occupation, was illegal and that therefore so was the so-called oil treaty. But “the Australian government has always maintained that the treaty is legal”, reports the West Australian of 18 December. As of December last year, Australian companies BHP, Santos and Petroz had already extracted 32,500 barrels of oil daily from three wells in the zone jointly controlled by Australia and Indonesia. BHP, however, have since sold its assets to the US company, Phillips Petroleum. There have been, it would seem, disputes over a number of as yet unstarted fields, including the Woodside’s Laminaria field and BHP’s Buffalo field which “would fall into an area which might be claimed by East Timor as well as Australia” (West Australian, 18 December).

East Timor has now replaced Indonesia as Australia’s partner in the Timor Gap oil treaty, according to the West Australian (12 February). The official ceremony was held in Dili at the beginning of the month, James Batley, Australia’s resident consul in East Timor, who signed the new treaty, said that “there are important investment prospects here, and this has smoothed the path for those to go ahead”. Of course! And the United Nations secretary-general, who recently visited Dili, said how pleased he was at Australia’s quick response to the UN’s call for troops to go to East Timor. Yes; of course, of course!

Meanwhile, the poverty-stricken, propertyless, often starving workers and peasants of East (and West) Timor watch, sometimes pray, and hope that things will get no worse.

Peter E. Newell

World View: The Mozambique floods (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

During four days at the end of January, the skies dumped a year’s rainfall on Mozambique. The consequent floods killed many and displaced over one million people. Within one week of the first rains, Mozambique’s economy and infrastructure had been set back 25 years, the floods causing more damage than the 16 years of civil war that devastated the country. More was to come as Cyclone Eline moved in from Madagascar.

In front of our TV sets in the relative safety of our living rooms, most of us watched with empathy the plight of the thousands left clinging to tree tops and bridges and with a shared feeling of human pride in the frantic and selfless efforts of the South African helicopter crews who flew countless missions to rescue those most in danger.

TVs are useful in this regard, allowing viewers to witness, almost live, the colossal tragedies endured by our fellow humans around the world, evoking in us all manner of emotions, whether it be the urge to send a cheque off to some charity, the despair at not being able to help out more, or a certain numbness born of an over-familiarity with such events, a kind of donor fatigue.

What TV sets don’t seem to get across is the behind-the-scenes stories, the kind of stories that hint at our powerlessness to help out at once, the futility of the controllers of capitalist society in putting the vast technological resources that are available in case of such emergencies into operation.

Weeks into the Mozambique disaster, arguments sprang up as to who was to pay for the continuing South African search and rescue missions. The US argued with the South African government over landing rights and, here in Britain, a battle raged between the Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development over who was going to pay the £2.2 million cost of sending five Puma helicopters. Never did it occur to the latter reprobates that in 24 hours the British public had chipped in £4m to help out or that the Blair government was throwing more money into the wastage of the £750 Millennium Dome.

So incompetent were the British government in getting their act together, in fact, that the Puma helicopters arrived after the search and rescue phase had been called off. Even then, they proved of little use because the limited range they could cover meant they could not offer assistance in the north of the country where they were needed. Moreover, the officer in charge of the British party had no experience at all in disaster relief.

We can well ask why there was no information on hand that could have suggested that Mozambique was about to face such devastating floods and a cyclone. While there are established international protocols for the sharing of meteorological information, there is no international obligation to do so. With advanced scientific equipment, and with satellite technology now widely used, the know-how exists to provide the world with data regarding soil absorption water run-off in rivers and anticipated rainfall. However, as one Guardian writer observed:

 “It costs money to amass, monitor and analyse data and pass it on to the people who need it most.” (6 March)

And this is the crux of the problem. Who will pay for this level of technology or, more importantly, how much immediate profit can be gleaned from investment in the same?

After each natural disaster and the rescue missions that slowly swing into action, the “experts” tell us we can learn lessons from it. As much was said after the December 1999 Venezuelan flood that left 20,000 dead, and after the Orissa, India, cyclone that left two million homeless and Central America’s Hurricane Mitch which created one million refugees.

Each time there are calls for an International rapid deployment force of rescue and first-aid teams. Each time there were questions as to how such devastation could not have been foreseen and for more co-operation and sharing of information.

Resources for war – too costly for aid

Few make an attempt to set the problem in a wider social and economic context, for instance making that crucial link to the perennial priority of profit before human need. Few point to the mountain of red tape that has to be cut through before rescue teams can be mobilised, red tape that the functioning of capitalism makes necessary (i.e. the observance of national boundaries and air-space, getting the okay from this and that government, working out who will foot the bill before operations are underway etc.)

While a case can be made that global warming is at least a contributory cause of recent floodings, hurricanes and cyclones (i.e. the greenhouse effect means more warmth, which means more evaporation, which means more wind and rain) there is no current planning for future disasters—and they will come. Foresight as ever proves an expensive luxury to those who at currently have the greatest say in our lives.

Right now, we not only have the technology to begin reversing the effects of global warming, and to predict the patterns and consequences of changing global weather conditions, but we have more than the capability to meet any natural disaster head on, thus preventing the loss of further life and the waste of valuable resources. At present, however, control over such technological resources is in the hands of a small elite, the capitalist class, and their executive, the world’s governments.

As we await further natural disasters we can only guess at how long it will take the “experts” to contemplate a system of society in which the earth’s scientific and technological resources are the common property of all and in which the death tolls from such disasters are greatly reduced.

John Bissett

Greasy Pole: Caning the teachers (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Blunkett is Secretary of State for Education and the author of a crushingly boring autobiography (On A Clear Day). Unless, of course, you like long, trivial stories about his dog upsetting the dignity of some eminent person (“We all enjoyed a good laugh . . .”). Or dollops of self-admiration garnished in mock modesty (“I believe that, at the time, Neil Kinnock thought I had let him down . . . whereas, as he later generously ackowledged . . .”). And the poetry—too embarrassing to repeat in a journal meant for a placid socialist readership. Any teacher who addressed their class as Blunkett does his readers would very soon lose control of the kids.

This is not to say that Blunkett does not sometimes let slip some arousing comment. A recent example was his statement that poverty is not an excuse for a school failing to meet the GCSE pass targets set by the government. “Cynics out there” was how he described anyone who accepts what seem to many people a self-evident fact, namely that “. . . school performance is all about socio-economics and the areas that these schools are located in”. That is another way of saying that only cynics would question whether a school in, say, a run-down part of Hackney should be expected to produce the same level of achievement as Eton or Harrow. It is another way of saying that if a school does fail to meet its targets that must be due to the teachers, who in Hackney are lazy and stodgy while at Eton and Harrow they are industrious and charismatic.

Jack Straw 

We have heard this kind of criticism of workers before. We hear it when companies go broke, or when governments are swamped by an economic crisis. Then we are told that all the problems are due to greedy, short-sighted workers. When the crime statistics are published we are informed that offending is not the blindly despairing act of people who are trapped in the dirt and decay of inner cities or rural slumdom but the behaviour of people who are intrinsically anti-social. When pensioners die of hypothermia they are chided because they have not learned how to keep warm in an unheated home.

Blunkett should have a word with his fellow minister Jack Straw, who was once Labour’s Shadow for Education. In those days Straw did not seem to have any doubts about the cause of struggling schools. At the 1987 Labour conference he told the delegates that ” . . . there is only one culprit responsible for falling standards (in education)—the government which has been in power since 1979″. Two years later he returned to the theme, denouncing “a government that blames teachers for the ills of Thatcherite society” and promising that, far from harrassing them, Labour would “…train teachers better, support them better and, yes, reward teachers better”.

Of course in those days it was safe to make that kind of a speech. Like Straw’s 1987 complaint that “. . . the weakness of the Cabinet’s commitment to public education is shown by the fact that all its ministers have sent their children to private schools” and that as a result of the Tory government’s cuts in spending on education “the morale of the teaching profession has been destroyed”. Well this government’s persistent attacks on teachers have not exactly resuscitated their morale and one reason is that so many Labour leaders, like the Tories before them, have placed their children in private schools.

Results Culture 

For his part, Blunkett has never been been among the wilder animals in the swamps of left-wingery. In July 1987, for example, in an article in the Independent, he claimed that the Thatcher government were stealing Labour policies when they declared war on the “dependency culture”—which did not mean the system which allows the ruling class to live off the exploitation of the workers but the few people whose means were so reduced they relied on state hand outs to survive. The repressive attitudes implied in that article have been all too evident in Blunkett since he was put in charge of the schools, for he has been pre-occupied with the results culture, the obsession with exam results which has millions of neurotic parents scanning the league tables to see how their childrens’ school has done—knowing that head master Blunkett will wreak a terrible revenge if the results are not good enough. There have been other Blunkett policies which have given offence—for example his sturdy championing of the odious Chris Woodhead, the boss of the dreaded OFSTED, when it was revealed that Woodhead’s, er, private life did not live up to the standards his inspectors demand of teachers and pupils.

So it is hardly surprising that Blunkett should feel the need to attack the notion that bad social conditions have an effect on schools just as they do on health, crime, families . . . His evidence for saying that poverty is not an excuse for a failing school is, not surprisingly, supplied by his own Department, who say that schools with low exam results exist in areas other than run down inner cities. So what? The results may be due to a number of factors which are conveniently left unilluminated but Blunkett, in an exercise in logic which would be unacceptable coming from a ten year old pupil, chooses to draw the conclusion which suits his already formed opinion—that teachers are to blame and must be punished, sacked, driven out in revenge.

Watch My Lips . . . 

In any case nobody, least of all the teachers, would argue that the skill and sensitivity with which a subject is taught does not make a difference. The skills of teachers vary, just like the skills of people in other jobs—for example politicians, who can be very clever in the lies they tell and the manner in which they cover up their failures. And then again they can be embarrassingly clumsy. As was Blunkett, when he was on the spot about his policy on schools selection, which is now in such sharp contrast to the statement he made to the Labour Party conference in 1995: “Watch my lips, no selection, either by examination or interview, under a Labour government”. When he was faced with this, Blunkett chose to defend himself with the feeble protest that his 1995 statement was a joke. This may have been more convincing if, as he was receiving the delegates’ rapturous applause, he had said something like “Well wait a second. You know me, always ready for a laugh. That was a joke. When I get into office there will be selection because we’ll be a government which is too scared of the Daily Mail to do otherwise”. This shabby episode brings up the question of what sort of a role model Blunkett is to the teachers he so persistently harasses about their professional standards.

The evidence that conditions outside the schools have a more powerful, eventually decisive, influence is overwhelming. The Guardian of 6 March described a school in Brighton where 45 percent of the pupils conform to the generally accepted measurement of poverty—they have free school meals. Many of them come from families struggling to survive under the stress of long term unemployment, on an estate where life has always been that bit harder. What kind of material do the teachers there have to work with? Unsurprisingly, some of the pupils are on drugs—the police suspect they are working for a drugs syndicate from Scotland. One boy was a male prostitute on the sea-front. A former pupil, 17 years old, was murdered on a rubbish tip next to the school. A pupil was accused of helping in the murder of another pupil’s brother.

The Real World

Of course exceptionally brave, talented teachers might hope to have some effect in that kind of situation. What actually happened , as is to be expected in the real world away from Blunkett’s cruel fantasies, was that the teachers simply collapsed under the strain—like politicians often do, when their failure to control capitalism becomes too obvious. One teacher died, it was thought through a stress related illness; another disappeared. Several developed serious illnesses including two cancers. Others had nervous breakdowns. Because that is how poverty deals with people who are trying to make sense of this society—in their homes, their jobs, their schools. Peter Mortimore, director of London University Institute of Education, put it that “All the work of school improvement professionals shows that schools can make a difference, but they cannot completely overcome the effects of disadvantage.”

And what if we applied the standards which Blunkett imposes on the teachers to people like him—to the political leaders? What if they were to be judged on their failures, their impotence and the deceptions they use to conceal this reality? Should we punish them? Or wouldn’t it be better to close down their organs of power and make them redundant?

Ivan

The internet and capitalism (4) (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 3

In this concluding article in our series on the impact of the Internet we examine its possible effect on community.

Anyone who comes from a small village knows that one can get too much community. The close and frequently closed communities of feudalism were suffocating, parochial worlds with narrow horizons and narrow minds, a sink of intellectual inertia and ritual. Yet though the club wasn’t inspiring, one’s membership at least was not in doubt. Alienation from other humans was unknown.

One hundred years ago in Britain, urban workers lived together, worked together, went to school, got drunk, went on holiday or strike together, and were buried together. In such a milieu, an idea could take hold, and then spread. People were influenced by each other, they had common ground, they thought as a group, and they were not afraid to talk.

Today, after fifty years of the Welfare State and worker mobility, nobody seems to know or care who lives next-door. Friends are scattered and remote. Isolation is normal, experience and consciousness are private, discrete and discreet. Life is a claustrophobic micro-universe containing a TV and a closed front door. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt as our greatest desire is for the drunks and the drug addicts, the bores and the Christians to leave us alone. We don’t have community because we don’t want community.

Contrary to the claims of the Internet fraternity who see something new and exciting about “virtual communities”, we in the West have already been living in virtual communities for years. Virtual, because we have been remote workers, remote from our community, remote, one might say, from ourselves, stuck in motorway madness chasing remote jobs, going on ever more remote holidays, or slumped exhausted on the sofa with—you guessed it—the remote control. And when we’re at work, in spare moments, we gossip with people we barely know about people who don’t even exist.

Soft soap and schadenfreude 

Nowhere is the virtual community more realised than in the TV soap, the ultimate cry for help from an alienated society. Now the pundits talk sickeningly about “virtual e-soaps” where the viewer—you— can give these “people” advice. The soap characters are one-dimensional caricatures whose only purpose is to provide a cathartic release for workers after a hard day’s slog. It is simply an exercise in schadenfreude, that delight in other people’s problems so essential to those whose own problems could scarcely get any worse.

Yet nobody ever stops to consider that, quite apart from the characters, there is an even greater peculiarity about the soaps which is manifestly out of touch with reality. In Marxian terms, it is their economic base. None of the characters works away from the area. In fact, most if not all of them are sole traders, in other words, artisans. You get the publican, the tea-shop owner, the local entrepreneur, the corner-shop owner, the market-stall owner, the garage owner, and so on and so forth. Each works for himself or herself. Each owns his or her own means of production. Comfortingly, each has an income which we can guess is in rough parity with the other characters’ incomes. One or two of them employ people as staff, or more correctly as apprentices, but these are always locals too, with ambitions one day to start their own local business or to inherit the present one.

It is obvious that this improbable scenario is devised purely in order to allow the creation of a local community. Clearly it would not be possible for an Eastenders character to work in Brighton or Oxford but still appear regularly in the show. And community is very important in the soaps, because it provides the dynamic for drama but also because it provides vicarious relationships for real people to “relate to”.

Back in the 19th century a very popular reformist programme was that of Proudhon, a programme which in essence involved a society of artisans. Proudhon was very concerned at the tendency of employers to exploit employees, and thought that if society was made up of artisans then no such exploitation would take place, each worker would own their own means of production, and would sell their products at the market rate, since the market is an unbiased process of checks and counters, this would tend to balance incomes and prices and provide an equitable system of commodity production and sale, but without the massive problems of class division and exploitation.

There are people today who still believe this, Marx’s efforts to debunk it notwithstanding. The soaps encourage this belief. They provide an apparently working and stable model of an artisan economy, upon which is mounted a community-based superstructure which, despite being populated largely by cartoon characters, is fiercely attractive to the community-starved worker. The fact that this economy is fiction is overlooked. The focus of the plots is always kept away from the underlying economy, and while protagonists frequently experience exaggerated personal problems the artisan economy their community relies on remains perpetually in the background, innocuous and unchallenged. Markets do not change. Economic conflicts do not arise. Nobody goes bust. The plot-writers do not wish to present themselves with insoluble dilemmas – if they allow a character to lose their livelihood, they must either drop them from the soap or find them some other plausible occupation within the narrow confines of the community. It is in general easier for the writers not to let this situation arise. One insidious consequence is that people are always the focus of problems, while their economic circumstances are never seen to be the source of any conflict or difficulty.

Artisan production did exist in the late feudal era, when commodity production was in its infancy, but it was very rapidly overtaken by modern capitalism. As a model of commodity production, the artisan society becomes very quickly unstable in reality. To believe in a form of capitalism based on sole traders is to believe a fairy tale or, indeed, a soap opera. It is essentially a step backwards in time, a reversion to an earlier form. People want to believe in an artisan society (many idealistic left-wingers call this “socialism”, and it is intrinsic in much of the thinking of Greens) because in reality they want their communities back, and see this as a way to get it.

Doing your homework 

And yet, bizarrely, it is just possible, despite this, that history might repeat itself. The real revolution of the Internet isn’t online, it’s offline, in the world of the “homeworker”. If global destruction does not intervene beforehand, a new form of hi-tech artisanal society might indeed appear in the West. As production becomes computerised and the Internet pervades the workplace, more and more people are going to find it feasible to work from home, or from “hot-desks”, or from their portable “teledesk”. Due to the difficulty of defining “homeworking”, estimates for home-workers vary in the US from 10 to 15 million workers, or about 14% of the labour force, up from 4 million in 1990 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted in American Demographics, July 1999: www.demographics.com). In Britain there are about 1 million home or teleworkers, and an estimated “52 percent of the working population will be homeworking by the year 2010” (Teleworking Survey: Link). That this has not happened faster or sooner can be ascribed simply to traditional business structures: “The barriers to teleworking tend to be managerial rather than technological. Traditional attitudes need to be chipped away at to make it happen.”

Community?

In addition, the casualisation of work contracts means that the main working pattern of the future may be freelance. Operating from home, many workers may find themselves doing not one but several different jobs for different companies, not as employees but as sub-contractors. They will in effect become sole traders, online artisans plying their wares and skills in a virtual marketplace. Although surveys show that homeworking is the most desired option by hi-tech workers (Washington Post, February 11, 1999) it is the capitalist class who stand to gain most, by saving on wages, costs and overheads, and by eroding worker’s rights:

  Behind the technological part of the information highway is the business community’s attempt to use the new information and communications technology to shift power from governments and the nation state to multinational corporations, from the public to the private sector, from small business to big business, from a unionized to non-unionized environment, from citizens to consumers, and from group rights to individual rights (Unions and the Information Highway: http://www.ofl-fto.on.ca/ftp/ppaper5.txt).

Even though homeworking would save a Londoner on average 10 working weeks per year in travel time (Home Office Partnership: http://www.hop.co.uk/) the chances are the worker won’t gain the full benefit:

the current wisdom is that up to half the commuting hours saved by telecommuting employees may be given directly back to the company as additional work hours. The Gartner Group estimates that telecommuting improves employee productivity by 10 percent to 40 percent (American Demographics).

Yet the home-working revolution is likely to bring some fundamental advantages which no amount of capitalist exploitation can outweigh:

 The community will benefit in the longer term as larger numbers of home workers abandon the peak-hour rush. There will be fewer cars on the road, less air pollution and traffic congestion, fewer health and work-induced stress problems and more community participation (International Journal of Career Management Conference, August 1995: http://www.mcb.co.uk/liblink/ijcm)

From the Tudors to telecentres 

But then there arises a new social dilemma for which people will have to devise a new solution. The isolation and domestic interruptions which working from home imply and which are cited by many workers as problematic may result in the development of a new kind of working environment, the work or telecentre. Just as the artisans of the Tudor age began to find it convenient and cheaper, as well as more sociable, to band together under one roof in order to share tools, materials and heating, so online workers of the future may find it desirable to band together under one local roof.

The result may be that local people will once again be able to work together locally. That they will all be working for different companies in different parts of the world hardly matters. The implications for the rebirth of local communities are obvious. The car culture evaporates and motorways empty of commuters as workers walk the five minutes to their local telecentre, greet their friends and neighbours, sign on to their individual company, and discuss politics and local affairs in their lunch and tea-breaks. In addition, the non-gender specific nature of teleworking means a sea-change in the realm of sexual politics and childcare, as homelife and working life converge in the local community matrix and gender becomes less significant than at any time since the agricultural revolution.

The social, cultural, political and environmental consequences of such a change in western working patterns are hard to overstate. But the class war won’t go away, indeed it may intensify. If unions presently fear the atomisation of an isolated homeworking labour force, the communalisation of working may change for the better the means by which workers organise in defence of their pay and conditions. Unions, previously based first on individual trades and latterly on individual companies, may in the future find individual telecentres the locus of organisation. This would cut across the traditional corporate divisions as workers from various sectors of industry, commerce, finance and other services band together to defend themselves. As capitalism becomes global, workers will need to globalise their strategies of defence, and one way to do this would be to network between these local centres.

Déja vu

But in yet another twist, as capital becomes ever less dependant on geographical considerations, companies may find it expedient to invade these local telecentres and take them over, lock stock and barrel. The way to do this would be to buy into the management of these centres, the capitalist bodies which administer everything from catering to arbitration, and then gradually take over the role of central employer, accountant and contractor.

Nevertheless, even in this worst case scenario, workers would have achieved, or rather re-achieved, the community which they lost in the period after the Second World War. The significance of this should not be underestimated. Community is essential to socialism, indeed community and communism are really the same word. A society with a strong sense of community is a society which can communicate the idea of a socialist revolution, and can bring it about. Far from representing some terminal retreat into virtual reality, the Internet may finally precipitate a wholesale flight out of one. If the future online world leads, not to a society of isolated electronic cave-dwellers, but to a new flowering of community working and activity, and to an explosion of communication, the prospects for social revolution cease to look unlikely, and begin to look possible, and even probable.

Paddy Shannon

Ken Livingstone/Paul Foot – Dream Ticket? (2000)

Editorial from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ken Livingstone has taken on the Labour machine. He wants to be mayor instead of Blair’s poodle, Dobson. Journalist and SWPer Paul Foot is heading a list of candidates for the assembly calling itself the “London Socialist Alliance” which is supporting Livingstone. “Vote Livingstone, Vote LSA” is their slogan.

Well, should we? That depends on what you want. If you want to elect an old-fashioned Labourite politician to run the administrative side of capitalism in London—or if you want the mayor of London to speak with a London accent—or if you want to protest at Blair’s control-freakery—go ahead. But if you want Socialism, stop and think it through. Livingstone as mayor with Foot as leader of the assembly is an intriguing prospect, but how would this advance the cause of Socialism?

Livingstone has been a lifelong member of the Labour Party and still regards himself as a Labour man temporarily separated from the fold. He is not a socialist unless you think that nationalisation under a Labour government is an example of Socialism (in fact, it’s state capitalism).

In any event, he is not standing as a “Socialist”, but as a politician promising to make things better for London people under capitalism—”Vote London” is his campaign slogan. But anyone who knows how the profit system works knows this can’t be done. It doesn’t matter how sincere or competent or determined a politician is they can’t make capitalism work other than as a system that gives priority to profit-making. All governments that have spoken about putting needs before profits have failed. So will Livingstone. This is not a reflection on him personally but on capitalism as a system.

Paul Foot and his “London Socialist Alliance” aren’t standing on a socialist programme either. They are not standing for the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production for use not profit. All they are doing is offering a collection of attractive-sounding reforms to be achieved within capitalism: “a £7 billion increase in NHS spending”, “a 35 hour week without loss of pay”, “a minimum wage of at least £7 an hour”.

Nice if you could get them, but you can’t. They’re just empty promises. Vote-catching bait. These days capitalism can’t deliver reforms. Nor can Foot and his friends any more than Livingstone or Blair or anyone else.

So what to do? Leave Livingstone to fight it out with the other professional politicians. And if you want to vote for Socialism, do this by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across your ballot paper.

The poverty of education in Ghana (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a close affinity in Ghana between post-independence politics and the pre-independence era when the political and intellectual African elite were mobilising support from the African masses to overthrow the colonial establishment. Both have been full of promises and rosy dreams of what the future ought to be like.

Elections in Ghana these days, for example, remind one of the politics of agitation by the Nkrumah’s, J. B. Danquah’s and the Houphuet-Boigny’s in the colonial days. Equality, freedom and freedom from poverty and oppression are sonorously proclaimed these days too; and every available propaganda tool is used by parties to discredit other political parties in the bid to win the support of the voting public. But the results of these bitter campaigns have always ended in the same way. As soon as any political party assumes the mantle of office, the ideas that it used to politicise the masses to propel it to power becomes a fetter on the purpose of the leadership of the party. The demands for equality and freedom from poverty, and the vitriolic criticisms launched against the oppressive economic policies of previous governments, are inevitably forgotten and equally inevitably people come to direct them at the party that has taken over the reins of power. The difficulty of the political leadership is that it wants to inherit the privileged positions of previous governments, that it has unseated either in an election or a coup d’état, without implementing the progressive and radical sounding ideas which had helped it to come into power. It knows too well that its interest as the representative of the ruling class and international capital are diametrically opposed to the interest of the majority. And it cannot fundamentally transform the existing relations of production in the interest of the masses, without limiting its own access to economic surplus. The interests of the Ghanaian ruling class since independence is just the same as those of the old colonial regime; and it works with the forces of neo-colonialism and international capital to negate the consciousness of the masses, using its unlimited access to the economic surplus to attain this objective.

Ruling class and ruling ideas 

The national bourgeoisie and international capital have succeeded in foisting their ideas on the majority of the people largely because of their control over material production. Marx and Engels’s claim that “the class which has the material means of production at its disposal has control at the same time over the mental means of production, so that generally speaking those who lack the mental means of production are subject to it” seems to describe the Ghanaian situation aptly. In no other field have the techniques of mental control been employed with such efficiency as in the educational system. Apart from being inaccessible to a majority of Ghanaians it seeks to create the myth that the current neo-colonial and capitalist direction of development are sacrosanct and inviolable. The school curriculum, especially in the social sciences, is replete with all kinds of bogus assertions seeking to justify the unjustifiable. The educational system has thus evolved essentially into a positive instrument serving neo-colonialism and the ruling class in Ghana; whilst at the same time making it difficult for the propertyless classes to understand the true nature and causes of their wretched conditions.

This is evident in the economics syllabus in educational institutions and the thinking of prominent intellectuals on the subject. They all reflect the ideas of bourgeois academicians in America and Britain. Consequently the ideas they propagate manifest the interest of capital. Books written by Harvey, Adam Smith, Caincross and Hansen are not only important textbooks for students but reference books for teachers. The ability to regurgitate the ideas in these books in examinations qualifies one to be a graduate of economics and enhances the chances of an individual to aspire to lucrative jobs. These books are devoid of class analysis in their presentation of current economic problems, ignore imperialistic influences as factors in the underdevelopment of a country, and propagate the myth that without foreign investment economic growth and development would be hampered. The exploitative aspects of foreign and Ghanaian enterprises are either completely ignored or little discussed. The worship and devotion to free enterprise is therefore total. The impression that private investment of capital is essential for economic growth relegates labour to a secondary position in industry and prepares the minds of the people to accept the dominance of capital over labour in the process both of production and distribution. It also seeks to imprint in the minds of the recipients of education the idea that the profit motive is both essential and intrinsic to increased productivity; and the belief that free-for-all competition at the market place is the only way to realise the overall interest of society.

The alternative to the free market policy is normally presented as the state ownership of the means of production. What is not discussed or is not known is that the state ownership of the means of production prescribed and fixed in law does not preclude the exploitation of labour by capital. Capitalism is not only characterised by the legal form that class possession of the means of production takes. That is the superficial aspect of it. The essential aspect is the social fact that those who “possess” the means of production exploit wage labour and accumulate surplus value thus obtained as capital. The immediate post-independent West African economics would suffice to illustrate this point. Workers sold their labour power to various state enterprises; and the products of their labour were sold in the market place with a view to profit. The difference between the wages of the producers and the value of what they produced was used for capital accumulation and the consumption of the privileged classes. Under the guise of socialism that state was employed by the ruling classes to appropriate economic surpluses from the masses. State ownership sought to hide the monstrosity of capitalist exploitation by confusing socialism with state property and presenting it to the producers of wealth as the best.

With the failure of the economic recovery programme staring them in the face, the ruling class has become louder in their call for “indigenisation” in recent times. Suddenly the ghost of economic nationalism is being resurrected after it had been banished from economic planning. Conspicuously absent are those aspects and activities of enterprises that have made their operations inimical to the interest of a majority of Ghanaians, irrespective of their origin.

Imprinting minds

The ethos, symbols, values, lifestyles, relations of production and modes of operations are not of primary concern to the new converts of indigenisation. What matters is the encouragement of Ghanaian manufacturers to produce more to capture the local market from “foreigners”. But such factors as mentioned constitute strong inbuilt pressures on local entrepreneurs to cave in to the wishes of foreign capital. Instead of enterprises becoming more and more national in the use of local resources and in satisfying of the needs of the vast majority of Ghanaians it is in fact the Ghanaian entrepreneurs who are going to become less and less national. The ultimate beneficiaries will be the privileged classes whose share of the surplus in the exploitation of Ghanaian labour would increase. Indigenisation would therefore essentially become a weapon of the haves in the country to realise their dreams of increasing their wealth which was somewhat crushed during the heydays of liberalisation.

Ethnic chauvinism 

In sociology and anthropology one encounters the bogus assertion that Ghana has ethnic and not class relations. This argument is nurtured by bourgeois politicians and their mentors in sociology departments who want power based on communal hegemony. Normally the place occupied by individuals in a historically determined system of social production is not made the basis of analysis. While it is not denied that ethnic consciousness exists in Ghana, the phenomenon has to be recognised as part of the ideological rationalisation that reinforces and in turn reflects the existing relations of production. Classes in Ghana may be embryonic but they exist. Thus while ambitious petty bourgeois politicians preach and fan the deadly parochialism of ethnic chauvinism they actively form alliances with petty bourgeois elements in the various other ethnic groups to consolidate their repressive domination of the masses. Ethno-centrism as presented by bourgeois sociology is essentially a weapon of the dominating classes to dissipate the energies of the working class, divide them, and strangle potentially progressive organisations.

Another fraudulent intellectual claim obviously calculated to instil false consciousness in the recipients of education is that Ghana’s present underdevelopment is a direct inheritance from the pre-colonial times. The history departments and historians of repute in universities have made no attempt to prove or disprove this assertion. They just reproduce it for students to swallow and regurgitate during examinations. The impression this propaganda pap seeks to create is implicit: that pre-colonial conditions continue to be reproduced. But three questions immediately come to mind when issues of this nature are discussed. Is this claim correct? If it is correct why is it that these conditions have persisted in spite of years of colonialism and neo-colonialism? What forces are reproducing them and why?

It should be understood that societies are not static and Ghanaian societies were not an exception to this law of development. They also went through the processes of change that characterised societies elsewhere. These changes were to be found in the revolutionary transformation of the social structures, relations of production and techniques of production of social groups. What impacted negatively on these processes of change were two things—the slave trade and the subsequent integration of Ghanaian societies into the world capitalist system in a subordinate position. One cannot deny the infrastructural changes that contact with Europe brought in its wake; but the subsequent material benefits benefited the metropolitan bourgeoisie and the sham bourgeoisie in the colonial country. It condemned the majority to perpetual poverty.

Some contemporary African writings used as literature books in universities and secondary schools in Ghana also do not adequately address the phenomenon of exploitation. Mongo Betis’s Poor Christ of Bomba; Rene Maran’s Batouala; Oyono’s The House Boy; Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God; and Camera Laye’s African Child tend to emphasise the superstructural aspects of colonialism. The imposition of colonialism through brute military force and the subsequent destruction of African socio-cultural and political institutions are given prominence in these writings. What is not normally clearly established or is often ignored is the link between the superstructural aspects of colonial rule and its economic base—production relations. The colonial production relations were the foundation upon which the political, juridical, ethical and religious aspects of colonialism were founded. But in these works the cultural and political aspects of colonialism are artificially severed from the production relations which provided it with its life-force and dynamism.

However, available evidence proves that the real reason for colonialism was to ensure the haemorrhage of capital from the fringes of the capitalist system to its core. The cultural and political domination which were made very much part of the colonial system were therefore a means to an end.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Losers’ World (2000)

Book Review from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Turbo-Capitalism: Winners and Losers in the Global Economy’, by Edward Luttwak, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998)

Most American textbooks on capitalism either present it as the best possible system that will last well into the future if not for ever, or admit that it has a few faults which are a small price to pay for its benefits. Luttwak is closer to the second position than the first. In his opening sentence he expresses his belief “both in the virtues of capitalism and in the need to impose some measure of control over its workings”. In a matter-of-fact tone the author discusses the many and dreadful consequences of capitalism for the losers, of which there are many more than winners. By turbo-capitalism he means a form of capitalism that is much different from the controlled form that mostly prevailed from 1945 to the 1980s. He admits that “turbo” is his term—others simply call it the free market. It means very much more than the freedom to buy and sell:

  “What they celebrate, preach and demand is private enterprise liberated from government regulation, unchecked by effective trade unions, unfettered by sentimental concerns over the future of employees or communities, unrestrained by customs barriers or investment restrictions, and molested as little as possible by taxation.”

Luttwak likes the increase in economic growth that turbo-capitalism brings but is aware of the consequences which he deplores:

  a breakdown of familial capitalism (especially in Asia): “Cold-blooded, truly arm’s length and therefore purely contractual relations” 

  increasing job insecurity: “employees at all but the highest levels must go to work each day not knowing if they sill still have their job on the morrow” 

   the global increase in unemployment: “it is a protracted tragedy at the personal level, and destabilising at the social level” 

the insecure majority are persuaded to accept the sovereignty of the market: “losers blame themselves rather than the system”

In mitigation of the harsh discipline and sharp inequalities which Luttwak admits turbo-capitalism has brought, he believes that there are “two great forces that serve to balance its over-powering strength”: the American legal system (poor people can get “damage awards”) and the pervasive influence of Calvinist values (earned wealth is no impediment to virtue).

In Luttwak’s favour is his assessment of Blair and the left wing in politics: ” . . . both Clinton in the United States and Blair in the United Kingdom have continued to use some liberal prose to wrap their conservative remedies . . . even a left-wing electoral victory can yield only right-wing polices”.

Compared to what he calls “defunct communist economies” and “bureaucratic socialism”, the author believes that turbo-capitalism is “materially altogether superior, and morally at least not inferior . . . Yet to accept its empire over every aspect of life, from art to sport in addition to all forms of business, cannot be the culminating achievement of human existence. Turbo-capitalism too, shall pass”.

Yes, Luttwak, but what are you doing to help make it pass?

Stan Parker

50 Years Ago: Circumstances alter attitudes (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Before it became the Government the Labour Party built up a reputation on the frail ground that it was in favour of applying the principle of democracy everywhere, with particular reference to the depressed native populations who suffered so much from the profit-hungry greed of the privileged class. Now that the Labour Party has become the Government, administering Capitalism, lofty ideals that gained them support have had to take a back seat and the interests of the British Capitalist class become, and must become, the ruling idea. A recent example is the instance of the native ruler Seretse.

The circumstances are fairly well known owing to the publicity given by opponents of the Labour Party: opponents, it may be added, who would in all probability have acted more or less in the same way had they been the Government. Seretse is chief of a native population in Bechuanaland. He came to England to study and married a white girl. The Regent who had been acting as chief during Seretse’s minority objected to the marriage. After considerable internal discussion the Regent was exiled and the majority of the population accepted Seretse and his wife. In the meantime the Government’s representatives had been taking part in the dispute. Finally Seretse was invited to England for discussions on the express condition, he claims, that he would be allowed to return. When he was here the Government refused to let him return and banned him and his wife from the territory for five years . . .

Thus, in spite of the high-flown style of the propaganda against Fascism and Nazism in the past, where capitalist interests are, or seem to be, involved all capitalist governments, including Labour ones, are prepared to engage in racial discrimination.

(From editorial, Socialist Standard, April 1950)

Life of Marx (2000)

Book Review from the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx by Francis Wheen. Fourth Estate, London.

Journalist Wheen has performed a staggering feat. In just over 400 pages, he has traced the action-packed life of Karl Marx from childhood in Triers in the Moselle valley to university life in Bonn and Berlin and political exile in France, Belgium and finally London.

In the hands of Wheen the story is one of almost cinematic action. The heady student days of feverish philosophical debate fuelled by too much wine and beer are vividly portrayed. His foray into political journalism, his jousts with state censors and his eventual political banishment, leading to the life of a stateless person trekking through the capitals of Europe in poverty and constant harassment by state authorities and police spies are dealt with in a lively and readable fashion.

The real strength of this book, however, does not rest on the colourful biographical detail, but on its depiction of Marx as a human being, rather than (as has been too often the case in the past) as a god or a devil. Interestingly enough Wheen mentions in his introduction a book, written by an American evangelical preacher, entitled "Was Karl Marx a Satanist?" The other side of the coin, of course, are the books that are nothing less than hagiographies. As the jacket cover says, "Karl Marx emerges as a flamboyantly unmistakable individual, not the stony head of a monolithic, faceless organisation."

Socialists might have wished for more emphasis on Marx's ideas, but when Wheen does this he does an excellent job. Considering that his intention was to deal with Marx more as an individual rather than as an economist, historian, philosopher or revolutionary, the author's discussion of the works of Marx is generally speaking difficult to quarrel with and easy to admire. He distances the writings and actions of Marx from his so-called supporters like Lenin, Stalin and Mao. He has a pop at Karl Popper's criticism and absolutely devastates the attacks on Marx by the likes of Paul Samuelson. The role of Marx in the International Working Men's Association is particularly well documented and his jousts with Michael Bakunin and the anarchists are vividly drawn.

A lot of people are going to hate this book. Left-wingers who see every industrial dispute or petty social unrest as the harbinger of a transformation of society will be reminded (if they ever knew) that Marx's view was that a long period of education and organisation was necessary before the working class could establish socialism. Anarchists with their 19th-century romanticism about conspiracy and direct action will be less than pleased at the reporting of the antics of their anarchist heroes in the International. The academics who have dismissed Marx's views as outdated are not going to like Wheen's view that Marx's criticisms of capitalism are still valid today.

Even if a lot of people are going to hate this book, this socialist loved it and advises readers to get down to their local library immediately. If you are going to buy only one book this year, then this is it.

Richard Donnelly

Education serving capitalism (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

At every level of formal learning we are taught to conform—without mass indoctrination the profit system could not exist.

Tony Blair knows the value of education—it was the only word he used when listing his three priorities for running the profit system. Education is an integral part of any social system. In one that is dominated by commodity relationships and values, education both reflects and contributes to those relationships and values. Those who wish and work to replace capitalism with socialism need first to understand how education sustains the one and how it can help to bring about the other.

There is a conventional mythology surrounding the noble ideals of education. Schools are said to be places where young minds are nurtured, where boys and girls are prepared to become responsible citizens. Sir Sydney Caine writes that universities at their best are "the 'soul' of the country and when they have been independent of government and inspired by some vital and independent philosophy." The reality is, of course, much different. Schools, colleges and universities are not independent of society—they are an essential feature of it.

Feudal society required little of the peasants by way of education. The Industrial Revolution demanded more—workers who could make, tend and repair machines, and some who could keep records and books. The schools taught the virtue of attendance, the children were to know their place and sit still in it—a suitable preparation for working life in the factory or office. In the 20th century the process was continued—mass education was fashioned into an increasingly refined training and selection mechanism for the labour force.

For the employer class the education of workers is a cost that must be borne as economically as possible. In a book called The Education Dilemma, edited by a member of the World Bank, we are treated to the following remarkably frank admission (boast?):

"It is true that schools have 'inputs' and 'outputs' and that one of their nominal purposes is to take human 'raw material' (i.e. children) and convert it into something more valuable (i.e. employable adults)."

The cost of education is a particular problem for governments of Third World countries, most of whom are saddled with huge debt repayments to international banks and with the costs of choosing to put domestic guns before butter. One answer they have come up with is to use what is called non-formal basic education as an inexpensive alternative to universal primary education. This is a rural-based, vocationally oriented form of education relying heavily on instructional technology (useful if you can't afford to pay teachers). One contributor to The Education Dilemma offers the advice that, since television seems to work no better than radio and is much more expensive, it should almost never be used for instruction in low income countries.

This leads us to the question of whether the increasing use of more costly forms of instructional technology in the economically advanced countries is a good thing or not. From the point of view of school and university administrators and the governments and corporations who are their paymasters, instructional technology is a good investment. The recent worldwide growth in distance education is an example. Apparently, national and multinational corporations like distance education because it can link employees via electronic means for training, and they can save on the costs of transporting employees across the country.

The rhetoric about the university is that it is a community of scholars. While some of the medieval universities were no doubt founded on this ideal, today the label "academic capitalism" seems more apposite. Academic capitalism denotes market behaviour on the part of universities and faculties. There has been a shift from state block grants to grants and contracts targeted on commercially useable results. Centres within universities that form government-industry-university partnerships are encouraged. Faculties are obliged to look for commercial research funding—projects that are applied rather than basic, that are tied to the needs of national or multinational corporations.

A few years ago George Ritzer wrote a thought-provoking book on The McDonaldization of Society. The basic principles of the ubiquitous McDonald chain of fast-food restaurants are efficiency, quantified and calculated product, predictability, and the substitution (as far as possible) of non-human for human technology. Ritzer shows how these principles are exemplified in education. Schools and universities are required to be cost-effective; league tables give evidence of which institutions get the best exam results. Exams themselves are increasingly boiled down to multiple-choice questions, the answers to which are machine graded. The best-selling textbooks are "customised" and contain easily-digested McNuggets of information.

The subjects taught are prone to the same commercial pressures. Economics—aptly named the dismal science—focuses its theories, concepts and examples on the world of buying, selling and exchanging property, including intellectual property. If alternatives to the status quo are considered (which they rarely are) they equate socialism with nationalisation and communism with state capitalism. In a University of the Third Age economics group the speaker expounded on multinational corporations: their names, the industries and countries involved, the technologies they used, and so on. In view of their failure to meet basic human needs, I raised the question of whether they should be replaced by a system of common ownership and free access. My question was ruled out of order.

Other subjects are also heavily influenced by monetary calculation and property relationships. The comparatively new field of conflict resolution is monopolised by texts and teaching on "deterrence" to war, leadership policies, business strategies—not a word on the conflict between capitalism and what could be its practical alternative if enough people were given the opportunity to know and understand it. Leisure studies gives undue weight to the provision of leisure by commercial companies and government bodies—the idea that we can make our own leisure, individually or collectively, is largely discounted.

The inherent inequality between teacher and pupil has led some critics of capitalism—and indeed some socialists—to question the value of "schooling". In New from Nowhere William Morris expresses his objection to the way children are taught in capitalism by predicting that in socialism there will be no schools offering "a niggardly dole of not very accurate information; something to be swallowed by the beginner in the art of living whether he liked it or not, and was hungry for it or not". No blanket rejection of education was implied, but the critique of authoritarian schooling as simply preparation for employment led to a movement for "deschooling". The concern has been that hierarchical and autocratic teacher-pupil relationships concentrate power in the hands of teachers and lead children to acquire attitudes of docility and submission to authority.

What can we say about education in socialist society? It is easier to foresee what will no longer take place than what will positively develop. With no employment, schooling will lose its function as preparation for employment. No more McDonaldisation of education, no more economics (though economy history, as part of history, may well survive). The knowledge and skills needed to run a society which inherits the best from the past and rejects the worst will be circulated and developed among adults, and the ability to think creatively and critically transmitted from generation to generation. There will surely be different approaches to—even controversies about—what task.

Stan Parker