Environmental disasters ahead (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

At election times it often suits politicians to make sympathetic noises about environmental issues, but after the elections are over the same politicians can usually find "practical considerations" that make them have "re-appraisals" of previous "policy statements". This cynical manipulation is rife throughout the capitalist world, but it is doubtful if any of the political con-men could beat President Bush for the rapidity of his volte-face on the environment.

"In a letter to Republican Senators, Bush reversed his election campaign promise to limit C02 emissions from coal-fired plants, saying a new study shows it would be too expensive. He also reiterated his opposition to the Kyoto protocol, a 1997 agreement which aims to reduce greenhouse gases in the industrialised countries by 5.2 per cent by 2012" (New Scientist, 15 March).

This is of course, the crux of the matter—cost. We live in a capitalist world based on commodity production with the aim of obtaining a profit. In competing with other capitalists, both nationally and globally, it is necessary to drive down costs in order to grab a bigger share of the market. In such a cut-throat society environment considerations count for little, except perhaps a little electioneering rhetoric. With the USA putting the interests of their capitalist class before the needs of the planet the future looks grim indeed.

"The reversal was a blow to Kyoto supporters, since limits on power plants are probably necessary for the US to reach the goals. Christopher Flavin, President of the WorldWatch Institute says: 'It is essential since those plants are one of the main reasons for the recent sharp increase in US C02 emissions. In the last two years, the US has passed China to be the world's number one coal burner'" (New Scientist, 15 March)

The General Election (2001)

Party News from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party will be contesting one seat in the general election, Jarrow, where our candidate will be John Bissett. Unfortunately, because of a recent change in the law making it a condition for a party's name to appear on the ballot paper that it refuse to accept "foreign" donations—which we have refused to accept because, stand ing for world socialism, we reject the concept of a "foreigner" and assert our right to accept financial help from socialists and workers in any part of the world—our name will not be appearing on the ballot paper alongside that of our candidate. Nevertheless, John Bissett will be standing as the official candidate of the Socialist Party and this will be made clear on all the election material we will be producing.

If you want to help out in the election campaign to get the socialist message across, contact North East at: 

Secretary, 10 Scarborough Parade, Hebburn, NE31 2AL.

Phone: (0191) 489 XXXX.

Email: johnbissett@cableinet.co.uk.

Website: www.communities.msn.com/RealWorldSocialismNorthEast

Offers of help from "foreigners" welcome

Voice From The Back: Good Will Hutton (2001)

The  Voice From The Back column from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good Will Hutton 

Surprise, surprise—the journalist Will Hutton, Keynesian economist and supporter of New Labour has actually written something interesting:

“The wealthy are doing well in America. Since 1976, the share of wealth owned by the wealthiest one per cent of Americans has doubled courtesy of the explosion of stock options, near halving of the top rate of income tax and the cuts in inheritance and capital gains tax. As a result the top one per cent of households own more than the bottom 95 percent of Americans combined” (Observer, 25 February).

Construction site carnage

  “Deaths of construction workers are ‘spiralling out of control’ as building companies slash staffing numbers in a bid to meet tight margins. There have been 100 fatal accidents on British sites over the last year in an industry booming thanks to increased orders and consolidations. Unions blame this ‘construction site carnage’ on firms that force workers to go self-employed. George Brumwell, general secretary of the builders’ union UCATT, said: ‘The increase in the number of employees forced to go self-employed leads to corner-cutting, risk-taking, people doing jobs they are not trained to do, and cash-saving at all costs'” (Observer, 25 February).

Supporters of capitalism delight in telling socialists that competition and the market are the most efficient way to run society. According to the above press report, capitalism is the best way to run society—if you happen to be an undertaker.

10,000 kids a day

Profit is the driving force of capitalism. The environment, the health and happiness of humanity is of no importance in relation to the profit motive. This has been again illustrated by the WHO report Water for Health; Taking Charge:

  “More than a billion people lack access to clean water, despite 10 years of intense efforts by aid agencies to avert drought and pollution. An investigation by the World Health Organisation has revealed that tens of thousands of children are dying every day of thirst or from diseases triggered by infected or poisoned water. The WHO report, to be published next month says global warming will exacerbate the situation. ‘The greenhouse effect is already bringing more extreme weather and that means more droughts and more outbreaks of serious flooding,’ said Dr James Bartram (co-ordinator of the WHO’s water, sanitation and health programme). With flooding, drinking supplies get contaminated with sewage and people can no longer consume unpolluted water. Epidemics of disease, such as cholera then break out” (Observer, 25 February).

Mysterious indeed

The Judeo-Christian God is a particularly blood-thirsty deity. According to his followers he is a dab hand at slaughter, famine and pestilence. Not to be outdone the Muslim deity (or is he the same one?) has been busy on the mayhem trail lately. The ways of God are indeed mysterious but those of his superstitious adherents are downright baffling.

  “Thirty-five Muslims were crushed to death in a stampede near the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia yesterday, as tragedy once again struck the annual hajj pilgrimage. The victims, 23 women and 12 men, mostly elderly and of various nationalities, were trampled and suffocated when a huge crowd in Mina valley rushed towards one of three giant pillars representing the Devil during a ritual known as ‘Stoning of Satan’. It was the first such tragedy at the hajj since 1998 when at least 118 pilgrims died, and more than 180 were injured in a stampede at the same spot in the third and last day of the stoning ritual. A year earlier, 343 pilgrims were killed and more than 1,500 injured when a fire destroyed 70,000 tents in Mina. The worst hajj disaster came in 1990 when 1,426 pilgrims were crushed to death in a stampede when a bottleneck developed at the entrance to a congested tunnel” (Times, 6 March).

It’s not cricket

The socialist view that capitalism distorts every human endeavour and makes it a mere commodity to be sold on the market place was recently illustrated by that arch-conservative the former Test Cricket umpire Harold Davis Bird (Dickie Bird):

  “I think it is very, very sad that the old umpire has gone, but it all boils down to money. Winning means everything—don’t get me wrong—we all like to win but, once we lose the enjoyment of playing the sport you’re gone and it’s all down to money” (c.CrickInfo.Ltd, 6 March).

The futility of reform 

  “The Government’s measures to help the most excluded people in society have had no significant effect, researchers have concluded The study, Low-income Families in Britain: Work, Welfare and Social Security in 1999, found that more than 80 per cent of children in households where neither parent worked were forced to go without basic necessities.” (Times, 15 March)

Why governments can’t just spend and spend (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour is hard at work preparing for election day. On billboards up and down the land, posters with “Tory Cuts” emblazoned upon them with the “Y” replaced by a pair of vicious looking scissors. The message is clear—vote Conservative and Hague the Ripper will come along and ruin your communities. Labour is attempting to use its incumbency advantage to tip the political debate in favour of discussing the benefits of public spending, instead of cutting taxes. As usual with politicians, though, the debate is entirely specious.

If Agatha Christie were writing the story of this election, it would be known as ‘The Case of the Hidden Record’. Everyone would think that Mrs. Thatcher did it, in the government, with the spending cuts but on closer inspection, we’d find we’d been duped by spectacular misdirection. Public spending rose under Thatcher from £256.6 billion in 1979, to £303.5 billion in 1991 (at 1998-99 prices). At no time under her régime did overall spending actually fall. Of course, though, that shifty Mr. Blair spent all that period promising to spend even more money, and so has no interest in exposing the myth.

Thatcher, of course, did not want to spend that sort of money, at least not in her ideal world. The legacy, however, of the post-war Keynesian settlement was one of massive state involvement in the economy. In 1974 state spending amounted to 48.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product. This massive level of state involvement was largely down to the policy of using state spending and credit expansion as a means of attempting to sustain economic growth and offset market induced problems in the economy. This meant that the state took control over more and more areas of the economy whenever growth looked like it was about to flag. It also meant that the state was in a position where it could not disinvest without causing massive social disruption. As a result, spending needs were locked in.

The Tories, when in Government, struggled to make the necessary state payments without incurring political fallout from contradicting their declared aims about low taxation too much. In the aftermath of the 1990-2 recession, the Tories chose to raise gross public sector debt to the equivalent of 52 percent of money GDP in 1995, as compared with 33.3 percent in 1990, rather than take the politically embarrassing decision to raise taxes to fund their spending needs. Much of those spending needs, such as welfare and the dole, lay outside the immediate control of the Major government, and instead lay in the operation of the capitalist business cycle and in demographic shifts within the economy itself.

Labour, Tory, same old story
Labour came into power in May 1997 explicitly committed to adhering to the Tories’ projected spending plans for its first two years. According to an Institute for Fiscal Studies report, however, published in January, “Public spending in the first three years of the parliament was actually lower in real terms than the Conservatives’ plans.” (Dead Link). Although some of this fall in expenditure is due to factors such as a fall in unemployment caused by higher economic growth during the boom, discretionary expenditure actually fell too. Much of the money saved on borrowing, however, was spent on repaying the debt of previous governments, especially that of the Tories under Major.

The Blair administration also carried on the Tory position of nominally seeking to reduce and constrain public spending. The central tenet of their spending policies is the Golden Rule: “Over the economic cycle the government will borrow only to invest and not to fund current spending”—in other words, that any government borrowing will only be for tangible and saleable assets, rather than the pit of consumables such as stationary, staff wages and welfare benefits.

Whether this is achieved or not (and when it is, it is often done with the help of some “creative accounting”) the relationship between the state and private sectors is necessarily a tense one. Unlike the private sector, the state does not set out to valorise its capital—that is, it does not generally set out to add value to its capital by turning it into saleable commodities through the exploitation of wage labour. As a consequence the state cannot offset the depreciation through wear and tear of its capital by a fund taken from profits. The capital value of its infrastructure, then, can only be maintained via drawing capital away the rest of the economy. And government borrowing is only a form of deferred taxation.

As Ken Livingstone has asserted over the Tube privatisation, no public body in Britain has ever defaulted on its debts, so consequently the state has an excellent credit rating. Financiers can lend to the state with next to zero risk, which means that the state can get first preference on borrowing and thus (as their rivals see it) deprive other capitalists of much needed finance and heavily contribute to upwards pressure on interest rates. Having access to cash when others are going short means that the state also appears to have a competitive edge in acquiring other resources it needs. The size of state spending thus becomes a battle ground within capital as regards the distribution of the spoils of the exploitation of the working class—unpaid labour, or “surplus value”.

Prescott’s baby
Attempts to reduce the proportion of surplus value sucked away from productive capital by the state sector have come in a number of forms in recent years. For instance, spurred on by John Prescott the Labour government has pursued the Public Finance Initiative, or PFI (aka Public Private Partnership, PPP) first introduced by John Major. This has involved state bodies being handed over to the private sector for management, or the state agreeing to use private sector buildings for its hospitals, on fixed term contracts. Essentially, it has meant getting private firms to manage staff and infrastructure to provide state services. The provider firms are then competing over who can best exploit their workforce—a process Marx describes in a fragment from Capital as “sweating”, something which was going on even in the 1860s. Although still only providing a service of a certain value, the PFI firms can make their money through “efficiency savings” and applying greater workplace discipline to the staff to extract surplus value from them. And by the government detaching its involvement with some previous spheres of state activity, there are savings to be made for the state here too, though judging by the financial commitments of the government to PFI initiatives over the next few years, not as much as they might ideally have wanted.

This kind of approach has a predecessor in local government. The Tories—determined to bring local authority spending under control—at first imposed caps, i.e. spending limits upon councils so that effectively their spending was set centrally. On top of that, however, they imposed compulsory competitive tendering, so that council services could be sold off to private firms. At the time Labour loudly disputed such policies, but it has refused to remove spending caps from local authorities in the way it earlier had promised; it has though changed compulsory competitive tendering into a policy of “Best Value”, which subjects all spending proposals to the constraints of finding the cheapest source for providing them.

The other feature of initiatives like PFI is the old Pig in the Trough scenario. The state has a lot of desirable money, and it is in the interest of individual firms to compete to get their hands on it. Of course, the prospect of such filthy lucre leads to corruption and cronyism. Indeed, the whole tendering process for PFI contracts is corrupt in the sense that firms involved demand payment just to make a bid in the first place. The involvement of the private sector, however, does not change the fact that the state is essentially unproductive, and the PFI just represents intensified conflict for a share in already created surplus value.

This, then, explains not just the ongoing desire of capitalists for “cheap government” and the endless promises by the politicians—Labour and Tory—to find ways to cut public spending, but also their apparent prejudices against the state, reflected in common beliefs about state spending being inherently inefficient and inflationary and suchlike. Indeed, if anything goes wrong with the economy, the state, which looms large and threatening in the minds of many capitalists, is the first in line for blame, closely followed by the politicians employed to act as its managers and overseers.

Pik Smeet

Make A Difference (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Does anybody really still believe that either Labour or the Conservatives can make any difference? Is there any point in choosing between them?

Well he would say that—or something like that—wouldn’t he. His audience were not to know that what Blair meant was that his government would be so hostile to outdated dogma and ideology that they would simply carry on where the Tories had left off. For example soon after the election John Major buttonholed Jack Straw to ask why New Labour were sticking to the Tory spending plans which Kenneth Clarke, Major’s Chancellor, had described as “eye-wateringly tight”. Had the Tories been re-elected, said Major, they would never have stuck by them.

In fact Labour won that election on a minority vote—44 percent to the Conservatives 31 percent, the Liberal Democrats 17 percent and the others 7 percent. As the next election draws near, the Labour election experts are resisting any tendency to over-confidence. “This time,” said one of them recently, “we cannot afford a quiet campaign or for Hague to be ignored. The size of our majority will depend on a high turn out”. It is almost traditional among party agents and activists to assume that the lower the total vote the worse it is for Labour. So if the weather on polling day is bad, or if there has been a particularly stressful episode of Coronation Street, or if it’s football on the box—the Tories can be expected to do relatively better; they might even win some seats which they would otherwise have lost. It seems as if the very people who are supposed to benefit the most from Labour selflessly building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land can be put off from voting for it by a shower of rain or Deirdre Rashid’s latest emotional spasm or the spectacle of some millionaires kicking a football at a net.

It does not need a degree in psychology to work out that voters stay away from the poll through apathy but it does seem to need some political awareness to appreciate that a prime cause of apathy is the similarity between contesting parties which suggests that there is no point in choosing between them. This sometimes worries the parties themselves to such an extent that they feel obliged to try to highlight what they hope we will agree are fundamental differences between them. Before the last election Portillo tried to convince us that there is such a thing as a genuine Labour/Tory debate by talking about the “clear blue water” separating them. More recently Blair’s speechwriters thought he should speak out against the “forces of conservatism” (by which he did not mean just the Tory Party).

Thatcher

The Labour Party—or at least the few members who have bothered to find out about their party’s disreputable history—should be haunted by memories of 1931, when their leaders finally conceded that as their policies were so similar to those of Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives they might as well go the whole hog and form a government together. Apart from anything else this deprived Labour of some charismatic and well-known leaders like Macdonald and Thomas and replaced them with the lachrymose George Lansbury and later the reserved, colourless Clement Attlee—who, when he became Prime Minister in 1945, showed that he was anything but mousy and compliant. One effect of the events of 1931 was to sustain the idea that Labour was actually engaged in a fight with the Tories, who were basically different. That illusion kept a lot of party members going, through the worst defeat of their history. What is the situation now?

Blair came to power at a time when Thatcher had gained a reputation for being a kind of mad woman in the tower. Thatcherism was a new swearword for a supposed policy of deliberately creating unemployment through destroying swathes of a once powerful manufacturing industry, with the effect of grinding down the poorest in society while cracking down on anyone who tried to keep their head above water through offending against the system’s property laws. If all this got too much for the voters to stomach, their doubts could be diverted by a jingoist stimulant like the war in the Falklands. Capitalism is always ugly but that was a a time when it was grotesquely so.

So how did Blair signal that all that was at an end? Well as soon as he could spare time from organising a few necessities like Bernie Ecclestone’s £1 million donation to the party he forgot all he had ever said about Thatcher laying waste to British jobs and industry and popped round to get some advice from her on the best way to run British capitalism. In her turn Thatcher made it clear that she preferred Blair to her successor John Major, who had disappointed a lot of Tories as a flaccid nonentity. This opinion was not just a passing aberration by someone driven out of her mind by all those years of being the most powerful person in Britain, hobnobbing with—and bullying when she could get away with it—other heads of state. Before the election Blair had so impressed Viscount Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, with his intention to “reform” the welfare state that the Tory press baron swung his newspaper into support for New Labour on the grounds that they were the “new Conservatives”. And Alistair McAlpine, who was Thatcher’s Party Treasurer and remains one of her keenest admirers, praised Blair as “…a damn sight more Conservative than John Major…a Thatcherite… a man of principle…quite princely.” (McAlpine was accustomed to speak his mind. He once described Major as “hanging about like a pair of curtains”).

Single Parents

Blair’s government did not come to deserve such praise from such exalted quarters by planning to revolutionise society so that social relationships were adjusted through a re-distribution of wealth. In October 1997 Peter Mandelson, then in charge at the Department of Industry, assured a meeting of executives from computer firms that New Labour was “. . . intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”. What he did not say was that they were equally relaxed about other people getting stinking poor. One of their earliest ventures was to cut the benefit of single parents—a particularly depressed and pressurised group. As most of these are females some of the more odious Labour MPs felt justified in attacking the essential immorality of unmarried women who got pregnant to jump the council housing queue while they claimed benefit to pay for their cigarettes and Bacardis. One of these MPs—Frank Field, who had risen through the poverty lobby to become Member for Birkenhead and Minister for Welfare Reform—said that “There are no single mums in Birkenhead. They all have a boy friend somewhere”. The legislation for reducing the benefits of single parents was first introduced by the Tories, when it was denounced as a typical example of the cruelties of Thatcherism. Peter Lilley was the minister concerned; he was exultant at New Labour’s open support for the cause of punishing the poor and stood in the Commons directing Labour MPs into the correct lobby to vote for the cuts.

McAlpine does not admire all of Labour’s luminaries and one who escapes his embrace is Jack Straw, an exception to the tradition of Labour Home Secretaries such as Roy Jenkins, who liked to see themselves as “radical” and “liberal”. In the intensity of hatred he has aroused in the lobbies of penal reform and civil liberties Straw has exceded his immediate Tory predecessor, Michael Howard. “I couldn’t stand Michael Howard,” said McAlpine, “so imagine what I feel about Straw”. He was referring to the Home Secretary’s intention to abolish the law of double jeopardy, to allow people to be tried again for an offence for which they have already been tried and acquitted. As we go to press Straw has not revealed how many more times he wants a person to be tried or if it will go on and on until they are convicted but when he does decide it will no doubt be with an eye to the fact that while he has been at the Home Office the prison population has reached over 65,000. This trend will probably be accentuated by another of Straw’s plans, to erode the right to opt for trial by a jury at a Crown Court, where there is a better chance of acquittal than before magistrates.

Education

Straw is a former President of the National Union of Students, who may have learned at university that he should get his hair cut and smooth his image if he was to climb the greasy pole into Parliament and a top government job. On the way up he said a few things which might now embarrass a less sensitive and ambitious man. For example his denunciation of private prisons as immoral. In fact there was always more than an element of the bogus about the opposition to private prisons, which ignored the dreadful conditions existing in state prisons. The Chief Inspector of Prisons recently condemned Brixton and Wandsworth as appalling and inhumane, he said that Winson Green in Birmingham is even worse than Brixton and that Young Offender Institutions like Feltham in Middlesex and Brinsford in Wolverhampton are “corrosive”. Could private institutions, it is fair to ask, be any worse? But in those heady days in opposition Straw’s ambition was urgent enough to override facts.

Another New Labour front bencher stubbornly trying to put his past behind him is Minister of Education David Blunkett, who was once thought to be the teachers’ friend but turned out to be their scourge. There was a time when Blunkett could denounce Tory education plans for callously undermining the future of the children. Now he spends his days thinking up new ways of weeding out and punishing any teacher who fails to come up to standard in defiance of the kind of deprivation and alienation to be found in the slums of the inner city or rural deserts. His demands that teaching conforms to centrally conceived and imposed standards of achievement has damaging effects on teachers and sometimes disastrous results for the pupils. This kind of pressure was supposed to have been wiped out by the advent of the comprehensive school—once a cherished principle of the Labour Party but now due to be abolished, sneered at as “bog standard” by self-appointed education expert Alistair Campbell, who also happens to be Blair’s public relations man. Campbell is extremely adept at handling a few stroppy hacks but he might be a bit bog standard himself if he were faced with teaching a classroom of young toughies from the local estate. Blunkett plans to introduce an openly selective system—the same system that was eventually rejected as responsible for blighting so many young lives.

Ethics

Another Minister whose performance in opposition persuaded a lot of people that he would make a difference is Robin Cook, who reluctantly accepted the job of Foreign Secretary and quickly began to rave about an “ethical” foreign policy without telling us that the ethics would involve him cheerily shaking hands with the murderous dictator of Indonesia, President Suharto, or Blair hailing as a “fellow moderniser” a butcher like the Chinese premier Zhu Rongji and the ex-KGB operative who is now Russian President Vladimir Putin, carrying on the blood bath in Chechnya. These were examples of how capitalism fashions the “ethics” of foreign policy. The arms industry in Britain sells about £5 billion worth of its products each year to Indonesia. China and Russia are important trading partners. Beside that, of what concern are thousands of people imprisoned or murdered for their opinions or slaughtered in a war? In any case it took Cook only a few months to modify his ambitions over an “ethical” foreign policy. “Compromise, “ he announced on a BBC radio programme in January 1998, “is inevitable to foreign policy. That is real life”. That declaration can be understood properly only by someone who is alive to what “compromise” and “real life” mean in the context of capitalist society and the lowly place it gives to human lives and welfare compared to the profit-demanding priorities of the ruling class.

It is little wonder if the voting working class have difficulty in separating Labour from the Tories. The solution is to understand that the parties are united in their principles to maintain capitalism and all that that entails. In March 1972 Roy Jenkins, who had been Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer so should have known what he was talking about, observed life in this country:

   In spite of half a century of effort, our society—and still more our world—is still disfigured by gross unfairness . . . The poor are still poor. Property speculators—and others—are as relatively rich as were those with an accepted position at the top of the social structure.

Almost thirty years later, Jenkins’s successors in the Labour Party tell us that about a third of the children in this country live in what Blair has called “frightening” deprivation. And New Labour, with their big majority and their clutch of government ministers trying to forget the indiscretions of their left wing youth while they grow daily more and more like the Tories they once professed to despise, promise that in twenty years’ time they will have got around to abolishing child poverty. Does anyone really believe them? Does anyone really believe that it is worth choosing between Labour and the Tories? Does anyone really believe that to cast a vote for either of these parties will make a difference?

Ivan

In the News (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economic crisis

Tumbles across the world’s financial markets have sent shockwaves through the media and the owning class. The “dotcom” revolution is under threat as new technology corporations report stalled sales, faltering profits and now share prices in freefall. One of the greatest success stories of the 1990s was computer company Cisco which was the best-performing stock of the decade with its share price soaring 100,000 per cent at one point to make it the world’s most valuable company; Now it has announced that it is axing thousands of workers, just like its competitor Compaq and many other high-tech companies.

This has confirmed that even the largest firms are now being hit by the US slowdown, undermining confidence in the entire cconomy. The impact on the world stock-market bubble has already been considerable. Here in the UK the FTSE 100 is down 20 per per cent already on last year and it is likely there may be some way to go. In the US the Nasdaq index of technology stocks has plunged as depressing business results pour in. In Japan. the situation is worse still: the economy refuses to kick in to life despite the best efforts of successive governments and its financial system has lust been described by a government minister there as “on the verge of collapse”.

So much then for the perpetual boom capitalism had allegedly entered and the associated “paradigm shift” in the world economy that was supposed to have taken place. Day by day capitalism is again showing itself red in tooth and claw — and lust as prone as ever to the economic crises and slumps that have beset it throughout its history. Socialists have never been fooled into thinking the system can act in any other way, of course—which is rather more than can be said for Gordon Brown, Eddie George or Alan Greenspan who now seem to be on a learning curve as steep as the Nasdaqs plunge.

Xenophobia

“Patriotism is the last refuge ot a scoundrel”, wrote Dr. Johnson. “In a half-hour speech in which he used the words Britain or Britishness 25 times, Mr. Hague insisted that he, his party and Conservative voters were not racist, bigoted or little Englanders.” (The Times, 5 March)

We can expect a beleaguered politician like the Tory leader who is facing political extinction, to appeal to the worst elements of Xenophobia in a deperate attempt at survival. His depiction of the possibility of an other Labour government as a “journey to a foreign land” and his promise to toughen up restrictions on refugees is to be expected.

But what of the Labour Party? A chance to champion the plight of the refugees? No chance, because the same newspaper reports, “Labour refused last night to criticize Mr. Hague’s remarks on asylum and Europe—areas which party officials believe they are vulnerable— and attacked the Tory economic record.” The awful fate of some refugees being sent home to be imprisoned, tortured or killed can only be wondered at, but it is worth noting what one unknown visitor to the Hololocaust Exhibition at the Imperial War Museum has recently recorded in the visitor’s book.

  “It is 2.15pm. I came into this exhibition at 10.15 this morning I feel very overwhelmed. I am Jewish— on my mother’s side and some of her family perished in the Holocaust. Some survived because they escaped. It would have been interesting to reflect on the debates which must have gone on in thousands of families as the 30s unfolded. To escape? To what? To lose all and face a life of uncertainty and exile. Or to stay because “it’ll all blow over” or “we’ll manage” or some other reason. I have never seen this written about and I think it is especially relevant today when asylum-seekers are so reviled and suspected.”

Environmental disasters ahead

At election times it often suits politicians to make sympathetic noises about environmental issues, but after the elections are over the same politicians can usually find “practical considerations” that make them have “re-appraisals” of previous “policy statements”. This cynical manipulation is rife throughout the capitalist world, but it is doubtful if any of the political con-men could beat President Bush for the rapidity of his volte-face on the environment.

In a letter to Republican Senators, Bush reversed his election campaign promise to limit CO2 emissions from coal-fired plants, saying a new study shows it would be too expensive. He also reiterated his opposition to the Kyoto protocol, a 1997 agreement which aims to reduce greenhouse gases in the industalised countries by 5.2 per cent by 2012 (New Scientist, 15 March).

This is of course, the crux of the matter—cost. We live in a capitalist world based on commodity production with the aim of obtaining a profit. In competing with other capitalists, both nationally and globally, it is necessary to drive down costs in order to grab a bigger share of the market.In such a cut-throat society environment considerations count for little, except perhaps a little electioneering rhetoric. With the USA putting the interests of their capitalist class before the needs of the planet the future looks grim indeed.

The reversal was a blow to Kyoto supporters, since limits on power plants are probably necessary for the US to reach the goals. Christopher Flavin, President of the Worldwatch Institute says: ‘It is essential since those plants are one of the main reasons for the recent sharp increase in US CO2 emissions. In the last two years, the US has passed China to be the world’s number one coal burner'” (New Scientist, 15 March)

The Coming Balkan Conflict? (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two years after NATO and the UN moved into the former Yugoslavia to police a region beset by conflict since the Balkan break-up of the early 90s, a new conflagration threatens. Macedonian troops have clashed with Albanian rebels on the Kosovo border and, on the Serbian border, Albanian nationalists have launched attacks against Serb police positions.

Along the Kosovo/Macedonia and Kosovo/Serbia border, former members of the KLA have formed into guerrilla units intent on creating a “Greater Kosovo”. In the south of Kosovo the small and nascent Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) aims to annex north and eastern Macedonia, whilst on Kosovo’s eastern border, a sister organisation, the UCBMP (Liberation Army of Prosevo Medvedja and Bujanovo)—all towns in the southern part of Serbia with an Albanian ethnic majority—is demanding border changes so that 70,000 ethnic Albanians living in Serbia are included in Kosovo.

Whilst the nationalist insurgents would have it that a “Greater Kosovo” is at stake, that includes the ethnic Albanian populations of Serbia and Macedonia, others envisage a “greater” Albania, an Albania merged with Kosovo which would become the largest state in the Balkans, if not the most impoverished. Control of the borders is also allegedly a reason for the recent wave of unrest, for whoever controls these also controls the lucrative and illicit trade in drugs and arms and “illegal migration”.

The UCBMP have caused such much mayhem in the Presevo Valley that NATO has handed back part of the border buffer zone to Yugoslav military control, to special units of the 7th battalion of the Yugoslav army created by former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In other words, the West has sided with forces that battled for a Greater Serbia and only two years after NATO supposedly went to war with Serbia on behalf of Kosovo Albanians.

Once thing is certain—the West has clearly underestimated the threat of Albanian nationalism and indeed dissipated the once popular belief in Kosovo and Albania that NATO was an ally of Kosovo Albanians. There is also a lack of any consensus between NATO and the UN about the shape of any final Kosovo settlement, and US policy is still out of step with the other NATO allies.

Whilst UN officials see in KLA violence a game plan intended to provoke a swift retaliation from Macedonia (home to 600,000 ethnic Albanians) which will in turn incite Kosovos, Stratfor (the US Security consultants) sees the “primary motive for the [UCPMB] campaign in the Presevo valley [to be the desire] to provoke a harsh response and thus damage relations between the new Yugoslav government and K-For”. The UCPMB plan—if indeed it was a plan—has turned sour. The demilitarised Zone is now being policed by Serbian troops under the watchful eye of NATO and the US wishes to settle the Kosovo problem peacefully and to integrate Yugoslavia into a plan for long-term regional stability.

All the signs are that NATO’s Frankenstein is up and walking, fed on the same raw nationalism that has brought so much bloodshed to the Balkans this past decade, bent on carving out a greater Albania from Albania, Kosovo and the ethnic Albanian regions of Macedonia and Serbia. But they face repeated obstacles: not least is the desire by Western powers to cement relations with new President of Yugoslavia Vojislav Kostunica.

K-FOR (the Western peace-keeping force set up to police the region) failed to disarm the KLA, which went on the initiate a criminal network safe in the knowledge they had the backing of US Intelligence. And as the Observer reported on 11th March, that the CIA encouraged KLA fighters to mount a rebellion in southern Serbia to undermine support from President Milosevic. As one K-FOR battalion commander pointed out:

  The CIA have been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he’s gone, the US State Dept. seems incapable of reigning in its bastard army.

One Foreign Office analyst observes:

  We are not looking at a repeat of the circumstances when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 1990s. The people we are now dealing with are the fanatics who became wealthy out of national politics, crime and war. They feel that their power is being eroded and they will fight to survive (Guardian, 3 March).

Elsewhere, to the west of Kosovo, nationalists in Montenegro, lulled by the US into believing it would be permitted to split from Serbia once Milosevic was ousted, have been told to put aside these aspirations and re-forge ties with Serbia—news that is already inciting the nationalists of Montenegro. Meanwhile, Croat nationalists allied to Bosnian Croat leader Ante Jelavic are denouncing the government of the Muslim-Croat Federation, threatening to unravel the 1995 Dayton agreement which partitioned Bosnia along ethnic lines. Suddenly, Spring-time in the Balkans looks set to see war once again blossom.

For almost a century, this journal has been consistent in its opposition to nationalism, in the belief that nationalism is a killer epidemic, creating conflict from which those with the least to gain have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.

We maintain that, regardless of the supposed “century-old hatreds” the real problem is that the Balkans is a cockpit for the Great Powers and their local client states and their states-in-waiting. Despite their cultural, historical and religious differences, there is more that unites Muslims and Christians, Albanians and Serbs, than can ever divide them. Their real needs—needs people the world over identify with—can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers. We can only hope it is not too long before the long-suffering people of the Balkans come to realise this.

John Bissett

In A Real State (2001)

TV Review from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the last couple of years BBC2’s Newsnight has been compiling monthly features about life on a couple of tough estates in an inner-city area of Salford, Greater Manchester. Last month they followed this up with a four-part special documentary series examining the successes and failures of New Labour’s approach to the problems of social deprivation in the area. It made for compelling viewing.

The series—called Real Estates—took a hard look at life in the Langworthy and Ordsall areas of Salford to examine the progress made there since Blair came to office on education, health, employment and regeneration. Narrated by Jeremy Paxman, it highlighted local examples of the initiatives taken by the Blair government to tackle social deprivation and examined their effectiveness by focussing on how they affected individuals in the community. The answer to whether these initiatives had been successful was entirely predictable of course – as by and large, they clearly haven’t been. So much so that even when a particular problem has been contained in one area or school, it has only been at the cost of it emerging in another.

Running like a thread through the programmes were the major manifestations of the social problems that are rife and seemingly unstoppable amongst the most poverty-stricken elements of the working class in countries like Britain—most obviously unemployment, crime, truancy, drug abuse and ill health. The government agencies and their operatives dealing with these problems were often well-meaning enough (at least when there were cameras present). The social workers, truancy and probation officers, health workers and even the police officers were all attempting to bring some semblance of what passes for “normality” to the rows of terraced streets and partially boarded-up council estates that make up the area. But their struggle was necessarily an uphill one and the overall story one of minor and isolated successes amongst much wider despair and frustration.

Not all those watching Real Estates would have reacted in the same way to it. The typical knee-jerk reaction to the problems identified in the series would have been to say that the people at the centre of them all were just a bad lot, and that it was their “human nature” which made them rob, attack one another and take drugs despite the best efforts of the government and social services. Indeed, some would no doubt even argue that to invest money into tackling the social problems of areas like Salford is just to throw good money after bad. What Real Estates demonstrated to the more open-minded observer was something rather different.

It was that people living in communities such as those in Salford are battling against the elements even more than the agencies and government workers who are apparently trying to set things straight. In most instances they show a genuine care and warmth towards their families and friends but have to contend with a hostile social environment, just as their parents and parents’ parents did before them. Indeed, it was clear that there is nothing intrinsically evil about the dispossessed of the inner-cities like Salford. Unlike the little Coronation Street morality plays of the fictional Salford currently served up week after week by Granada TV in their desire to compete with the increasingly appalling EastEnders, the denizens of the real Salford have more tangible dramas and concerns. These are influenced and determined by the real evil that is all around them and which infects their every thought and move—poverty.

Philosophy of poverty

As each programme in the series demonstrated so visibly and movingly, the best intentions of those deprived of what society deems to be acceptable are just simply not enough. From the schoolboy who wants to avoid the older kids on the estate lest they get him into trouble and wreck his chances of a ‘decent job’ when he leaves school, to the young criminals who want to go straight and get off drugs, a life in poverty is never simple. For the truth is that in capitalism lack of money and the means to effectively get it is the deciding factor in people’s social existence. And even those without money who attempt to play by the official rules of the game will always be influenced or affected by all those around them who won’t or can’t.

In such a situation the Daily Mail and its ilk can bleat away forever about people’s lack of respect for authority and their lack of social responsibility. After all, why should people respect their supposed ‘betters’ when they have nothing and are never remotely likely to have anything unless a huge (and hugely unlikely) stroke of good fortune comes their way? To use the type of language the tabloids would understand, what incentive do they have?

New Labour—like many other governments before it – recognises the existence of this problem and is keen to do something about it, hence the much vaunted talk of “stakeholders”, “social partnership” and of the balance between “rights and responsibilities”. But recognising that a problem exists is not enough—you have to know what keeps causing it before you can seriously do anything constructive in response.

This is Labour’s own particular difficulty and it is the perennial one faced by reformist governments. This is because, as Real Estates showed clearly, poverty is not an individual choice or a curse bestowed from above as a punishment for evil but is instead a product of the way society is organised. Jeremy Paxman didn’t narrate this in quite those terms, but it is the obvious inference from a programme which movingly depicted the daily struggle of people against an economy and social structure which first casts them as victims and then as villains.

If it did anything, Real Estates showed how desperate situations—like in Salford—breed desperate people who think nothing of breaking the “norms” the rest of society may aspire to live by. But it also showed that Tony Blair and his Cabinet can in all probability set up all the task forces and social exclusion units they want. For when it is society itself that creates poverty amongst riches as a matter of course and then pits the poverty-stricken against one another in a desperate fight for survival, there is never going to be any solution in piecemeal reform and cosmetic initiatives.

Indeed, that way lies another century just like the last one. And that was a century where reformist schemes and promises persistently counted for little in the larger scheme of capitalist reality.

Dave Perrin

Inside the sports industry (2001)

Botile and Ingle

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the night of Saturday 16 December 2000 the crowd at the Sheffield Arena must have been stunned when Paul Ingle’s corner forced him back to the centre of the ring to be savagely crushed by his opponent Mbulelo Botile of South Africa. Even one of the commentators remarked that the decision of Ingle’s managers was shockingly unreasonable. Not unexpectedly, Ingle was carried unconscious to hospital with brain injuries. At the end of round 11 everybody, more especially Ingle’s corner, knew he had lost the bout.

The question on the lips of many was why the towel was not thrown in. But how could they do that when they were playing according to the rules of today’s international sports—the cash and fame first before the contender. In fact Ingle’s corner callously hoped that their man could miraculously pull a knock-out.

Gone are the days when games were organised with a view to merely entertaining the audience. In our day the motive behind any activity sports included, is profit. If, in the process of any sporting activity people get entertained, it is an unintended outcome of a purely business-oriented venture. In reality sport is now a multi-billion dollar industry masquerading as an entertainment agency. It has become an industry dominated and controlled by corporate bodies.

Sporting activities are organised mainly by IOC, FIFA, CAF, JBF, WBC, etc. The funds with which these bodies organise games are provided, in the main, by big business. Since business concerns will only spend money if they will make a profit, one can easily understand why they provide the funds—they are financially interesting.

Advertising is an essential ingredient in all profit-oriented activity. Getting people to become aware of one’s products is a vital competitive move. Corporate groups sponsor IOC and Co in exchange ttr the right to advertise their products on radio, TV jerseys, shinguards, gloves, and soon that is why you can never see World Socialist Movement or World Of Free Access or SPGB printed in bold characters and lined up around playing fields on stadiums. What you see is Coca Cola, Amstel, Visa, MasterCard, Western Union Money Transfer, Motorola, Ericsson, etc.

In the same vein other businesses deeply involved in the promotion of commercialised sports are the media houses. TV magnates are able to pay and have a stranglehold monopoly of coverage. They reap huge profits when they “sell” their “product” to other media groups.

Since today’s sports is a matter of business due to its profit-oriented nature, it is always spiced with the not uncommon shady deals. Business is nothing but legalised stealing. Its main rule is “grab-as-much-as-you-can”. International sports is therefore plagued with such inevitable phenomena as bribery, corruption, match-fixing, gambling, betting, pools, etc. In fact most many sports ministers, members of IOC, FIFA (the chief organisers of international sporting activities) siphon away huge sums of money in the process of organising games. A typical example can be seen in the famous Salt Lake City scandal which not only exposed but also shattered the credibility of the IOC and blew apart its five interlocking rings. Again, quite recently some German sportswriters have alleged that the German government and some corporate groups bribed Thailand, South Korea and Saudi Arabia to vote for Germany to host the 2006 World Cup. The multinational corporations mentioned were Daimler Chrysler, Bayer, BASF and Siemens (Gambia Daily Observer 21 November 2000).

Wealth (goods and services) is created by labour. In the sports industry the creators of service (entertainment) are the sportsmen and women. These (mostly) youth are by no means different from workers in the factory; clerks in the bank; teachers in the classroom, etc. Sportsmen and women sell their labour power (i.e. their ability to run, jump, kick, swim, etc) to the owners of the means of production and distribution of the services produced. In sports the means of producing and distributing entertainment include the stadiums, the factories the assorted sporting gear, the media houses, etc. These are owned by corporate bodies, states, local councils and the like. The youth use these facilities to entertain society, who pay money that goes to the owners of these means. The sportsmen and women arc then paid wages by the owners (the employers).

It is a common business practice to fire workers who are considered to be not too productive. In the same way sportsmen and women who do not move mountains to prove, maintain and improve upon their competitiveness risk being booted out of employment. Even the language used by employers, especially owners of football clubs, clearly smacks of the business element in sports. Football clubs who hire the services of footballers are often heard talking of “buying”, “selling”, or “giving out on loan” such-and-such a player. Indeed one sometimes gets the impression that the players are not just wage-earners but real commodities! In one report by Reuters carried in the 6 November Daily Observer (Gambia), entitled “Pele attacks ‘slave trade’ in young players”, the Brazilian Sports Minister decries the almost slave-like ownership of young footballers from Africa, Brazil and Argentina in particular. A very recent example is the case of Kanu Nwanko whose masters, Arsenal, refused to release him (from their bondage) to go to play for his “national” team during the just-ended Sydney Olympics.

Consequences

Having been considered as “commodities” whose price is influenced by market forces, sportsmen and women are constantly engaged in fierce competition with each other. Competition is an unhealthy phenomenon but in sports it is even worse. The use of drugs to enhance performance is a direct result of the unwholesome profit-oriented practices. In the final analysis these people who use the drugs suffer and get disgraced when they test positive. By contrast the organisers and drug dealers, sitting behind their dark sunglasses at the VIP stands get away with their dirty profits.

But perhaps the most serious effect of this dubious U-turn in sports from entertainment-oriented to profit-oriented can be seen in the growing number of serious and in some cases fatal incidents involving sportsmen and women. The story of the British boxer Paul Ingle has already been mentioned. No-one is unaware of the world-famous pugilist, Mohammed Ali. There is also the tragic fate of Michael Watson, another British boxer. A Colombian defender, Escobar, was gunned down in Bogota when he inadvertently scored an own goal during the 1994 World Cup. He met this unfortunate death not because Colombia could not go ahead to win the cup but because, as it was generally believed, some big business people had lost huge sums which they staked in a betting game.

Sports and politics

Another interesting aspect of sports is that it is very much encouraged by governments especially in poor countries. The main reason for this support is the mind-numbing power of sports. A lot of money is spent to get people hooked to and addicted to sports. In fact sports plays the same role as religion, alcohol and the like. Commentators, sportswriters and the like are trained to be able to present the dullest of events or matches to appear to be the most interesting ones to listeners and readers. Sporting activities, as such, are organised constantly and at short intervals—from community through national to international levels. As people’s interest in games soars so is their attention diverted from the mismanagement of social wealth that goes on in the corridors of power. In fact the revolutionary consciousness of people addicted to sports is usually completely blunted.

On this same political front, one notes the narrow-mindedness of so-called sports analysts when they opine that sports encourages togetherness and even has the magic of bringing peace to rival nations. This view dates back to the days of the “Cold War”. These analysts considered the participation in international games by the “West” and the “East” as a positive step towards defusing tension in their world. But a deeper insight into the role of sports in the relations between nations or countries reveals the exact opposite of the claims of these sports experts. Modern capitalist sports is organised with a view to realising profit. Profit-making thrives best when people are kept divided. There is no way then that sports as it is organised today can bring peoples of the world together as one. In reality sports entrenches petty, myopic nationalism and chauvinism. Witness for instance the violence of the famous “English hooligans” during football matches in Europe. There are always running battIe in the streets of towns and cities all over the world during games especially football. Each country sees the other as an enemy. People competing under national flags only helps in keeping them disunited. But we need a single world without boundaries.

Yet sports, at all levels, can be made to achieve its original objective—to entertain both participants and spectators. This however can only materialize when it is freely organised by all persons interested in it—and not only by those who have money. But this possibility is itself dependent on the level of consciousness of humanity When the majority of people come to understand that a society that undertakes every venture with a view to making profit is bound to he plagued with shortcomings. “Money is the root of evil”, as the saying goes. So it is only when the stadia and the factories producing sports-ware are commonly owned by all people, and when the present artificial boundaries dividing them and nations are dismantled that the present violence-prone, drug-infested activity called sport coupled with the slave status of most sportsmen and women can be eliminated. Then sports and games in general can play their unalloyed role of entertaining humankind free of charge.

Suhuyini

Message for Napster free music users (2001)

From the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, Napster lost its court battle with the five biggest record labels who had brought a legal action against the online music-swapping service because their profits were increasingly being eaten into. Big business got its way. No surprise there, then. Millions of people had all come to the same decision: that obtaining something you need for free was a very good idea. And so it is! We would like to inform the estimated 61 million Napster users, and millions of others using similar “peer-to-peer” services, that we in the World Socialist Movement in the various countries also believe in having completely free access to music. But not only music. We advocate that people should also have free access to all other entertainment, computers, phones, electricity, food, clothes, motor vehicles, housing, public transport, water . . . in fact, absolutely any goods and services that are needed.

Now this might strike even music-swapping fans of Napster as wanting and expecting far too much. Not at all! Such a free-access society is by no means unacceptable or impossible to achieve. Who says that we must pay? Capitalists! But if a popular majority chose to collectively own the means of producing goods and services (industries, power stations, raw materials etc), and chose to work for the benefit of one another (as with Napster) rather than for any privileged asset-owning elite, then everything that people produced and provided would collectively belong to us all. It is then possible to have whatever you need without ever handing over any money (in fact, money would then be obsolete). There wouldn’t be any grabbing of everything in sight, quickly resulting in shortages, since the whole point of working would have then changed from making profits, as happens now (resulting in deliberately restricted production to keep up prices and exclusion for the less well-off), to working simply to meet human needs.

And don’t think that people in this new genuine socialist world would have to work harder. Because there’d then be no more capital-owning employers or employment, there’d also no longer be any unemployment. That means many millions more people, currently unwanted because market conditions mean they can’t be exploited for a profit, or are considered too old or inefficient by bosses, then being able to contribute. And since money would then be useless and non-existent, that means yet millions more people also being able to do something of real benefit rather than just tinker with cash and financial documents in banks, shops, tax offices, solicitors, estate agents etc as happens today. Furthermore, a united world would also have no further need for armies and manufacturing workforces turning out all manner of weaponry, resulting in further millions of people being able to do socially useful work. This revolutionary change in the way we work, with far more people being available, and no financial restrictions on introducing sophisticated automation to take over dirty or unpleasant tasks, would in fact result in a far shorter working week, and far greater freedom to choose jobs we like, instead of being forced into them by a need for an income or by government threats to withdraw welfare benefits.

Although Warner, Sony, EMI, BMG and Universal may have won one battle over obtaining music without paying (and it’s inevitable that other swap sites will soon be legally targeted or deterred from starting up), they certainly haven’t won the war. By our numbers, we possess not simply the power to avoid having to purchase CD albums, and pay through the nose in the process. We can also get rid of all exploitative companies for ever, simply by supporting us in the WSM and the goal of replacing capitalism with money-less free-access socialism, and voting for this rather than business-biased market-supporting politicians.

We can understand that you probably think that all political organisations are the same: a waste of time because nothing really changes no matter who’s in power, and all in it for what they can get out of it for themselves. Politicians from all sorts of parties have been exposed as corrupt, incompetent, deceitful, irrelevant, two-faced and thoroughly abhorrent. But the reason why you’ll never find any WSM government politicians behaving like that is very simple—there never will be any WSM governments! For when there’s majority popular support for socialism, not only will there be collective ownership of productive capital, there will also be collective decision-making in how those assets should be used. In other words, once socialism is established, there’d be no more governments or electorally empowered politicians — ever! The people would run their own lives from then on, perhaps making use of the internet to register occasional votes on local, regional and global matters that need deciding and acting upon. Hence, the WSM itself would no longer be needed as a political entity, and would therefore cease to exist.

Dot.socialism

As for Napster, what has happened since its emergence is of immense importance to us all, and could result in no less than a commercial and psychological battle for the way we live in the future. Whether MP3 computer file enthusiasts know it or not, this is a critical struggle between two great economic principles. On one side there is the old market-based capitalist economy, made up of sellers and buyers, with exploitation of exclusive property for profit, and laws to punish transgressors. And on the other side, a true socialist society, made up people living according to the principle of “to each according to need; from each according to ability”, with common property, production simply for use, and no monetary or other restrictions.

The WSM objective of the socialisation of society and the “Napsterisation” of music in cyberspace therefore have much in common. This breaking down of the idea of private property and a passion for free access on the net has been called “dot.communism”, though “dot.socialism” could just as easily be used since both mean the same thing. But however it’s known, because it has the potential to grow rapidly and encourage unselfish co-operation all over the globe, it seen as a threat to the super-rich minority who presently determine how everyone else lives and works in accordance with capitalist requirements. Napster embodies the sharing, community-based ethos of both the internet pioneers and true socialists seeking an end to capitalism—both the private version espoused by free marketeers, and the state-run type, sought by various fake “socialist” parties who merely want to run capitalism themselves.

The fact that increasingly large numbers of internet users are, through free music, free video, free ISPs, free email etc acquiring immunity against diseased businesses, who want us to pay, means there is an increasing desire by global capital and their political puppets to kill off these digital free lunches before such revolutionary web thinking and behaviour expands into political thinking and behaviour (i.e., widespread support for genuine socialism).

“MP3” (the file compression method Napster uses for music sharing) has become the word most often typed into search engines, and millions upon millions of people, most without enough money to meet a frequent need to obtain new music, have had a tiny taster of what life would be like in a socialist free access society. As for the recording artists and writers, while some like heavy metal band Metallica, Madonna, Elton John, The Corrs and Eminem are unhappy about Napster, and have even taken legal action over copyright material being available for free. Other million-selling bands like The Smashing Pumpkins, Hole, The Offspring, Cypress Hill and Limp Bizkit together with lesser-known groups who just want to share their music, have expressed support for the freedom that Napster offers. Performers and writers can of course claim that they need money to get by within capitalism, as does everyone else, but the fact is they themselves (like us) could also get by without money in a socialist society. How do they feel about that? If many millions of people are making it absolutely clear by their actions that they want music gratis, and perhaps thereby indicating a growing hankering for much more for free in the not too distant future, is this extensive socialistic desire shared by the artists? Or do certain singers actually prefer to live in luxury, and have no moral problem whatsoever in enjoying superior living standards while those buying their music have to struggle through life on far smaller incomes (an inevitability with capitalism, since by the very nature of this system, there will always be a few on top, with a pyramidal expansion downwards incorporating everyone else at increasing levels of poverty)? If that is the situation, then maybe downloading their particular songs, even for nought, isn’t worth it in the first place.

Max Hess

Editorial: The politicians’ festival (2001)

Editorial from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

So a general election has come round again.

In theory, this should be an important event since it is a time when we have a chance to decide who is to control political power: the rich and the super-rich and their political servants or the rest of us who produce all the wealth of society but who are not in charge of things?

In practice, elections have become a Festival of Politicians.

Rival groups of professional politicians spend millions of pounds competing for votes. If only we vote for them—they tell us–they’ll do wonderful things for us. Improve education. End the health care crisis. Solve the transport problem. Stop pollution. Avoid wars. We’ve heard it all before, but nothing much changes. The same old problems continue. The reason they continue is because the capitalist economic system of production for profit, which causes them, continues. As long as this happens it does not matter which party is in office.

The fact is that, at election times, we are not offered a real choice. The candidates all stand for the same thing—keeping the capitalist economic system in being in one form or another. The three main parties only offer themselves as better managers of this system than the others. In Scotland, Wales and Ireland the Nationalist parties there merely propose to change the seat of government, from London to Edinburgh, Cardiff or Dublin, while leaving production for profit intact. As if that would make any difference.

The profit system—which all of them want to keep and try to manage—can never be made to work in the interest of the majority class of us who run production from top to bottom. It can only work as a profit system in the interests of those who live off profits.

If we are going to improve things—and the resources have long existed on a world scale to provide a decent life for all—we are going to have to get rid of the profit system and replace it by a new and different system based on the world’s natural and industrial resources becoming the common heritage of all humanity.

On this basis, production can be carried out, not to make a profit, but to satisfy people’s needs. The ravages of the profit system—the world-wide pollution, the waste of resources on armaments and on buying and selling, the artificial scarcity resulting from only producing to meet paying demand—can be ended and a world of peace and plenty brought into being.

But this is not something we can leave to professional politicians. It is something that we can only do ourselves. That means organising ourselves democratically without leaders and, at a later stage, mandating socialist delegates to stand against the professional politicians. In the meantime (except in the one constituency where there will be a candidate standing for a world of free access, in Jarrow) those of us who want a socialist world can indicate this and our rejection of the profit system and its politicians by writing the words “WORLD SOCIALISM” across our ballot paper.

50 Years Ago: To Members and Sympathisers (2001)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

An Appeal 

At a Party Meeting held in Central London on the 19th January, it was decided that the Executive Committee proceed with the purchase of premises in Clapham for use as the Head Office of the Party. The need for new premises arose a year ago when the lease on Rugby Chambers expired. An extension of one year was obtained, and that year is now at an end. The lease could be renewed, the landlords informed the E.C. at a rental of £357 p.a., payment of rates at approximately £60 p.a. and provided that the premises were redecorated, the cost of which would have been in the region of £400/450. In addition, the display of bills, posters and advertising matter generally on the outside of the premises was prohibited.

Faced with this alternative, the E.C. decided to purchase suitable premises and those at Clapham High Street were chosen. Much more space will be available there for the routine task of the Party—tasks which increase in size and number as the Party grows. The room for E.C. meetings is much larger and there will be ample space for those members who attend Head Office on E.C. meeting nights. In addition, there are eight other rooms which can be used for storage and despatch of literature, meeting rooms for the various committees, a room for the library, and so on. The possession of suitable premises can materially assist the Party in its growth, and the main object of our organisation—Socialist propaganda—can go ahead unhampered by cramped quarters.

Those are the facts: now for some figures. The new premises were bought at a cost of £4,000.

(From front page article, Socialist Standard, April 1951)

Marx in Soho (2001)

Book Review from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx in Soho. By Howard Zinn. South End Press, distributed by Pluto Press.

Granted his request to return to earth for just one hour, to clear his name and refute the rumour that his ideas are dead, a bureaucratic mix-up finds Karl Marx in Soho, New York, instead of Soho, London where he once lived.

This short, one-man play sees Marx alone on stage, with only a table, a chair, books, newspapers and a glass of beer as props, reminiscing about his family life, enthusing about the Paris Commune and reliving an imaginary confrontation with the “shaggy anarchist” Bakunin.

Zinn's Marx can be humorous one page, and deadly serious the next in vitriolic condemnation of a system he spent his life trying to overthrow. One moment Marx is recounting his countless journeys home from the British Museum, past open sewers telling how it was “only fitting that the author of Das Kapital should slog through shit while writing the condemnation of the capitalist system”. The next he is grappling on the floor with a drunken Bakunin. Then, just as suddenly, we can hear the bearded man launch a vehement attack upon the notion that the Soviet Union was socialist: “Do they think that a system run by a thug who murdered his fellow revolutionaries is communism? Scheisskopfen . . . can that be the communism I gave my life for? . . . Angry. . . Socialism is not supposed to reproduce the stupidities of capitalism!”

For anyone coming into contact with Marx's ideas for the first time, dreading the thought of long, studious hours in front of volumes of insipid texts on political economy, having only ever heard second-hand, distorted accounts of Marx's theories, fear not; this is a welcome first point of reference in which Zinn makes his ideas accessible and the man himself, less the spectre that haunted Europe, than some 19th century alternative comedian who just happens to know what capitalism is really all about.

The Labour Theory of Value, the Materialist Conception of History and the Class Struggle are all Marxian ideas that get aired in this short work, as well as concepts such as nationalism and alienation.

And one thing is certain; Marx in Soho is not just Marx speaking. Zinn is very much in agreement with Marx. When Marx, despairing at the consumer culture that has evolved says; “Doesn't anyone read history? . . . what kind of shit do they teach in the schools these days?” this is the real Zinn speaking, the Zinn whose books such as A People's History of the Unites States, are proscribed in US schools.

His hour up, Marx is about to leave the stage but stops and turns. “Do you resent my coming back and irritating you?” he asks. “Look at it this way. Christ couldn't make it, so Marx came.”

It's been an hour well spent. Marx is vindicated. His theories are still relevant. Socialism is not dead—it was never tried. The philosophers are still interpreting the world, whilst the point is still to change it.

John Bissett

Blair's Place in the Sun (2001)

The Greasy Pole Column from the April 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just in case he was in any doubt about whether he should have the election soon or wait for a bit, Tony Blair has had some help in making his mind up from the Sun. “It's in the bag Tony. You might as well call the Election now” he was recently urged by that newspaper, apparently on the basis of its less than penetrative analysis of Gordon Brown's budget. Furthermore the Sun, after some dithering, has at last decided about where its readers should put their cross on the fateful day: “Blair gets our support for a second term. Blair has done enough to get our backing” was the message, in appropriately heavy typeface. It was enough to have them punching the air in relief at Number Ten.

Well it would not be the Sun without some crafted, instant impact front page. Remember the word GOTCHA, which exulted over the killing of hundreds of Argentinean sailors on the Belgrano? Remember the crushing request on polling day in 1992, that “If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights”? And the triumphant, if perhaps overblown, claim, after Major's dramatic win at that election, that “It was the Sun wot done it”? By 1997 when John Major, whose victory the Sun claimed to be responsible for, went to the polls amid the near ruin of his government, things were a bit different. For one thing there had been a lot of work from New Labour's leaders, sucking up to Rupert Murdoch and other press barons. “The Sun Backs Blair” was their reward, screamed the front page on 1 May 1997; a few days before that an editorial had encouraged Sun readers with the advice that they needed “a leader with vision, purpose and courage who can inspire them and fire their imagination. The Sun believes that man is Tony Blair”.

Pandering

Well, as it happened Blair also thought he was that man and since then he has put a lot of effort into keeping Labour locked onto support from the tabloids, using a technique appropriate to the assumed prejudices of their readers. This has entailed the government pushing policies and attitudes which have outraged many of its supporters, who cling stubbornly to the quaint notion that the Labour Party has some connection with protection of the poorest and most vulnerable in society and an historical obligation to stand up for the international unity of all human beings. Ideas like that exist in defiance of the fact that the support of people in the position of Rupert Murdoch has to be bought. There may be some who, apart from needing urgent psychiatric care, believe that Murdoch would allow his newspapers to support a party because its policies would significantly benefit the majority of people in this country. The reality is that he wants to back the winner as the most effective way of protecting and expanding his interests. In 1997 the Sun thought the Tories were “tired, divided and rudderless”—in other words not the kind of government a global capitalist would want to do profitable business with.

Now that he has the Sun on his side Blair has only the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph to persuade. These are rather tougher nuts for him to crack but doubtless he will try; in fact that is what his government have been doing since they came into power. For some years now, carefully watching the circulation figures, New Labour have been busily pandering to the crass prejudices and political neuroses which are regularly stimulated in the Daily Mail, with the result that that paper has steadily climbed the sales ladder. Now the Mail is a leader among the papers for those who are frightened, not of what capitalism actually does to them but of what a newspaper tells them could happen unless they are protected by the more primitive of government policies. Some Labour supporters might have expected their government to stand up against this; in fact Blair and his ministers have pursued issues like asylum seekers, benefit fraudsters and public order offenders with a zeal which has given comfort to people who are suckled on the Daily Mail.

Disillusioned

It is unlikely that the Mail will change sides (although after what happened with the Sun nothing, it is clear, is impossible) but it is certain that if this were to happen Blair and his minions would not be put off by the content of that paper. For example on the day it came out for Blair the Sun devoted almost a page to such tedium as : “Randy Owl Savages Dad On Way To Pub”, “Major Can't Stand To Attention: Bungled Army Op Ruined My Sex Life, Claims Dick . . .” If that kind of rubbish did not persuade Blair to renounce the support of the Sun there is no reason to assume that if the Mail also supported Labour he would object to the kind stuff it publishes regularly:

On Crime: “The untouchable. This boy of nine is a thief, arsonist and vandal...Yet he is beyond the law”.On Asylum Seekers: “We didn't need the extraordinary pictures in yesterday's Mail of the luxury that certain Romanian 'refugees' leave behind to come to this country to know that there is no repression in Romania. When will the government stop being so naive about these people, who travel here to wolf down our precious resources?”On Foreigners in General: “William Hague's speech about Britain becoming a 'foreign land' was precisely the sort he should be making close to a General Election”.

The question, however, is what happens when Blair has won the election with the help of Murdoch's Sun and perhaps other papers? Well we have seen the answer to this, in what has happened since 1997. This has had its effect—a perceptible disillusionment among Labour supporters, who regularly complain that they have missed the thrill of Blair's “vision, purpose and courage” and feel definitely uninspired with their imagination anything but fired. Here. for example, is one grumble in the Guardian of 10 March:

“I have been a member of the Labour Party for 37 years and I first wrote to Tony Blair in 1999 expressing concern at the way my party was developing and gave the arrogance of Peter Mandelson as just one example. This letter was not, and never has been, acknowledged . . .”

Traumas

Perhaps they were wondering, in Millbank, how they could possibly reply to a man who has been in the party since 1963 and is so stubbornly unresponsive to experience as to maintain his membership through the traumas of those previous Labour governments. For example Wilson and his battles with the unions . . . Callaghan and the Winter of Discontent . . . support for the war in Vietnam . . . genocide in Biafra . . . Faced with that kind of discontent, what is Blair supposed to do? Well, he carries on trying to do whatever is necessary to run British capitalism in the interests of its ruling class, which means him ignoring irate letter writers while grovelling to the likes of Murdoch. On Breakfast With Frost on 7 January he spelled it out: “it is a good thing”, he said, for Labour to accept donations from their rich supporters, he was “absolutely proud of the fact that we have got successful entrepreneurs and disaffected Conservatives . . . who support the Labour Party”. What he did not say was whether he was proud of the fact that the people who give that kind of money—or, in the case of Murdoch, give an expensive endorsement in their papers— must expect some return on their investment. It may be the Sun wot will do it but there will then be pay-off time.

Ivan