Pathfinders: Lost generations (2026)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Like a collective summer madness, the World Cup has passed into memory. While it’s tempting to see such events as a harmless flag-waving celebration of ethnic and cultural diversity, the raising of a Malvinas banner after the England-Argentina semi-final was for many a dump of cold water. Rather than being a source of communal pride, nationalism is a nasty and manipulative ideology used to set the poor against each other in defence of the rich.

As media pundits pointed out before the game, the Falkland Islands have been a source of simmering resentment in Argentina ever since the 1982 war. Possibly the thinking is that because the islands are next to Argentina, they should belong to Argentina and the Brits, being not even in the same hemisphere, should keep their grubby hands off it. Silly argument over a few sheep, perhaps, and on that logic much of the world’s land should not ‘belong’ to the non-contiguous states that claim it, for example Greenland, Hawaii, Gibraltar, Guam, Alaska, Guadeloupe, Kaliningrad and a host of other overseas territories. But silly arguments don’t stop Russia from pulverising Ukraine, Israel slaughtering the population of Gaza, the RSF slaughtering people in Sudan, China waging a grey-zone war against Taiwan, or any of the approximately 130 armed conflicts going on right now around the world.

But never mind sheep or patriotic fervour, the Malvinas thing is more about mineral rights, with possession of the Falkland, South Georgia and South Sandwich group giving the UK – which is to say the British owning class – formal rights over 745,000 square miles of ocean and oil and mineral-rich seabed, much of which overlaps with Argentine claims. And what’s keeping the issue hot is that Argentina’s president Javier Milei is enjoying a cosy ‘bromance’ with Trump, and may conceivably be tempted to ‘do a Galtieri’ on the assumption that a) the US would support him rather than the UK, b) it would reinflate his wilting popularity given his brutal austerity regime at home, c) the UK has virtually no navy left with which to defend such a far-flung territory, and d) the global rules-based order has been ripped up and gunboat (or chainsaw) diplomacy is back in vogue.

Why does nationalism work? Because humans like simple explanations, and we like to belong to a group. This combination makes us rather easy to manipulate. Scientists, who strive after objective truth, are not perceived as offering simple explanations. Instead we go for politicians who spin easy but self-serving us-and-them narratives. They make us feel superior while conveniently obscuring questions about who exactly owns all the power and wealth in ‘our’ country.

Science and rationality are not born human instincts, they’re skills we have to learn, and our education systems are paradoxically lukewarm about encouraging that. Capitalism needs workers to be smart enough to boost productivity, but also dumb enough to be consumers who don’t ask questions. It needs scientists, sure, but it doesn’t need a general population with basic science literacy, who can tell what’s plausibly true from what isn’t. That’s why people believe in cosmic woo-woo, and why some, in the recent heatwaves, forked out up to £120 on hoax air-con systems that supposedly cooled a room in 90 seconds.

On the plus side, scientists are getting media savvy these days. New Scientist is now doing YouTube, presumably for the same reason as the New Statesman, Private Eye and others, to boost paper sales in a shrinking market. Arvin Ash does quantum theory, Sabine Hossenfelder rants against physics and the standard model, and Kurzgesagt does it all as cartoons for kids. Cambridge maths professor Hannah Fry is all over YouTube ‘shorts’, explaining with engaging insouciance how to instantly cool your overheated car, and how we know when modern humans first migrated from Africa to Europe (approx 100-170,000 years ago) by tracing back the DNA of human body lice, which evolved to stick to clothes.

Harvard professor of genetics David Reich, author of the groundbreaking Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018), also has lectures on YouTube. These explain how the new discipline of palaeogenetics has since 2010 shone a new light on the lost generations of prehistory, including a revision of the ‘Kurgan hypothesis’ relocating Proto-Indo-European origins from Anatolia to Iran and Armenia, and the discovery of Sapiens, Neanderthal and Denisovan interbreeding. In ‘Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are‘, he runs through the huge amount of new genetic evidence which reveals that human populations have been in constant flux in time and space, migrating, merging and mixing, such that concepts like ancestry, ethnicity and nationality have no scientific meaning. In short, we are all from everywhere.

But politicians don’t care about any of that. It’s much easier, say in the UK, to blame immigrants for a crumbling infrastructure and falling quality of life than to cite the country’s long-term geopolitical, industrial and economic decline after two ruinous world wars and the loss of a global empire. In today’s miasma of misinformation, bottom-feeding grifters like Farage, Lowe and Robinson can whip up xenophobic paranoia and hope the populist swell carries them into the corridors of power. It’s the same story everywhere, a collective madness that won’t pass.

The price of flag-waving is ultimately blood. The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War and has in some ways recapitulated that ghastly conflict. The survivors at the front – many of them teenagers – now don’t even dare to sit in trenches, but hide in underground dugouts from loitering drones. The war has become ‘gamified’, with competitive points awarded for drone kills. Both states lie about the death rate, but it’s certainly enormous. And this keeps happening. Capitalism, like a crazed psychopath, kills its own children, pouring the flower of youth wholesale into nationalist wars that benefit only the rich. We owe it to these voiceless lost generations, and to our descendants, to abolish this capitalist madness forever.

Paddy Shannon

An ‘anarcho-capitalist’ explains (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last November voters in Argentina elected as President, Javier Milei, who must have styled himself at one time an ‘anarcho-capitalist’ since that’s what the media keep calling him. In January he was invited to the gathering of global elites in Davos in Switzerland and gave a speech in which he expounded his views. He had some harsh things to say about the state, seeing it, as individualist anarchists do, as the negation of ‘freedom’:

‘The state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. . . This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom’ (tinyurl.com/29vuvjwr).

Strict anarcho-capitalists want to abolish the state completely and transfer all its functions, including the judiciary and the armed forces, to profit-seeking private enterprises. Milei doesn’t go that far as he sees a very limited role for the state (to protect and enforce private property rights and commercial contracts) and so is technically what has been called a ‘minarchist’.

Defining his ‘libertarianism’ he said:

‘Its fundamental institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation, in which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price. In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero.’

Adding ‘and this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentina of the future’. So, it looks as if he is going to try to introduce ‘minarchy’ there. The result could well be some sort of ‘anarchy’.

Capitalist heroes?

It is a measure of the desperation of workers in Argentina that they were prepared to vote into the top office a person who calls capitalists heroes.

Are successful capitalists really heroes? To have a chance to be successful you first have to obtain money to invest in producing some good or providing some service. You can get this in various ways — inherit it, borrow it, even acquire it illegally — but you have to get it. Having identified what you think might be a profitable market you use the money to rent premises, buy machinery and materials, and hire workers. You put the workers to work at producing your product which you hope to sell at a price that covers these expenses plus a mark-up for profit. If your hope is realised you end up with more money than you started with. You have made a profit.

But what is the source of this profit? Since the only way that wealth can be produced is by applying human labour to materials that originally came from nature (usually after having been fashioned and refashioned many times) the source can only be the work of those who produced what capitalists sell. It’s the difference between the value of what workers add to the materials and what they are paid as wages. The source of profits is the unpaid labour of workers. Contrary to Milei’s assertion, capitalists do appropriate wealth produced by others. That’s not very heroic.

It is true that while some capitalists succeed others fail, and that how well you know your market or can identify a new market can affect how much profit you make and whether you succeed or fail. But this doesn’t increase the amount of wealth that has been produced. It is competition between capitalists to get a share of that part of new wealth produced by the working class over and above what it costs to maintain them. ‘Capitalist successful business people’ are those who do best in this competition at the expense of their capitalist rivals.

All on their own?

Milei argued that it is ‘free trade’, ‘free enterprise’ capitalism that has been responsible for the immense increase in both productive capacity and the amount produced since 1800.

It is a bold claim to say that this was achieved by private enterprises acting all on their own in pursuit of profits without any state intervention; in fact in spite of such intervention. We hold no brief for those pro-capitalists who favour state intervention, but we must point out that the state provides a range of key services that help private enterprises to operate and succeed. For instance, by arranging for a supply of literate and educated workers, or a health service to patch up workers so they can go back to work as quickly as possible, or payments to workers who are temporarily unemployed during a slump so that their ability to work doesn’t deteriorate for when they are needed in the next boom.

Milei denounced this state provision of services for capitalist enterprises as a whole as ‘collectivism’ (and also, as might be expected, as ‘socialism’):

‘The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn’t contribute to general well-being. Quite on the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively.’

In his view, taxing capitalist enterprises to pay for such collective services amounts to stealing some of their profits by force:

‘[T]he market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward. But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less.’

There is an element of truth in this in that, if the state goes too far in this direction — as reformist politicians want as a way of trying to improve conditions for workers under capitalism — this will have the consequence both of undermining the quest for profit that drives the capitalist economy and of rendering capitalist enterprises uncompetitive compared with their rivals from other states. It’s why all reformist governments fail and are doomed to fail. But if a state which did not provide these services for its capitalists and left their provision to profit-seeking private enterprises — as ‘anarcho-capitalists’ and ‘minarchists’ want — then this too would undermine the competitiveness of its capitalists.

It’s the job of governments, as the executive committee of their capitalist class, to get the balance right. In any event, no state has ever not provided such services, so it cannot be claimed that capitalist development since 1800 has been due to private capitalist enterprises alone. In fact, capitalism has never existed without the state. The state helped it to come into being and has helped maintain it ever since.

Can the market fail?

Milei also took a pot shot at neo-classical economic theory which, he said, ‘designs a set of instruments that, unwillingly or without meaning to, end up serving intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation’. He had in mind in particular its theory that the state should intervene to correct ‘market failures’.

According to him, market failures are impossible:

‘The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures. If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence.’

Notable ‘market failures’ that he rejected as such were the emission of too much CO2 into the atmosphere and the emergence of monopolies. He says they are not examples of the market failing. Okay, let’s accept this and see them as the result of ‘free market capitalism’ working normally. That rather weakens his case for ‘free market’ capitalism. These are indeed results of how the capitalist market economy does work and why its operation prevents states from dealing effectively with problems such as climate change. In any event, state intervention to try to correct what are perceived as market failures has nothing to do with socialism.

Milei began his address by saying that he was there to tell his audience, made up of the world’s leading capitalists and political rulers, that ‘the Western world is in danger’. This danger, he told them, came from continuing to practise ‘collectivism’. At the end he remarked: ‘I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism’. He was right. It does sound ridiculous but that’s because it is ridiculous.

Adam Buick

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard 

While the world has been devouring reality television shows, many Argentines have been opting this Christmas for reality board games, such as Eternal Debt, involving the International Monetary Fund.

[Paywalled Link.]

For seven years, Jennipher was forced to breastfeed the puppies of her husband’s hunting dogs. After drinking and smoking heavily, Nathan Alowoi would appear at the marital bed, bind his young wife’s legs and hands together and force the mewling animals to her nipple. He had handed over two cows to his father-in-law as part of the “bride price” for his new wife. So, he reasoned, if the cows were no longer around to provide milk then his new purchase would have to provide for the pups. “I had to feed them all through the night; then in the morning he would untie me,” his wife, now 26, explains matter-of-factly.

[Link.]

Israel will begin distributing its entire population with gas masks in two months, though no reason has officially been given by the Israeli government.

[Dead Link.]

Most Britons have little confidence in official statistics and believe that they are distorted by politicians, according to a survey for the Financial Times. Only about 10 per cent of adults believe that official figures are accurate, while a similar proportion think that figures are produced without political interference, according to the survey conducted by Harris.

[Paywalled Link.]

That isn’t stopping some restaurants from putting together the usual intricate New Year’s dinner — and in some cases, charging astronomical prices. At New York’s Aureole, for example, diners will be getting a five-course meal including big-eye tuna sashimi, chestnut ravioli, Canadian lobster, and N.Y. strip loin. The price: a mind-boggling $650.

[Link.]

Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories: What Next? (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

“cooperatives will never be able to outcompete ordinary capitalist enterprises”

In November anti-capitalists were urged, via email, to send a letter of protest to the President of Argentina about the threat to evict the workers cooperative, set up by former employees, that took over the bankrupt Bauen Hotel in the centre of Buenos Aires two years ago and has been running it ever since.  When in December 2001 the Argentine economy and currency began a melt-down many small and medium-sized enterprises went bankrupt or were simply abandoned by their owners. Faced with joining the already huge and growing army of unemployed, workers in some of these businesses took matters into their own hands. They occupied the workplace and resumed production on their own account.

At the time some saw this as the beginning of a social revolution in which the  workers take over the factories and organise production without the bosses. A more sober assessment was that this was workers, in a crisis situation, reacting in a pragmatic fashion to try to ensure that they had some source of income to maintain themselves and their families. But it did at least show, to any who might not have realised it, that workers can organise production without bosses.

This was not really a mass movement, but it currently involves some 200 enterprises employing in total a maximum of 10,000 people, i.e. the average “recuperated enterprise” as they call themselves (recuperated, that is, from bosses regarded as undeserving or even thieving) is one employing about 50 workers. And 10,000 less unemployed is a drop in the ocean compared with the total number of unemployed in Argentina which, even today, is still over 2 million.

The authorities, not wishing to aggravate an already disastrous economic and financial crisis, accepted this situation as a fait accompli and passed a law allowing workers cooperatives to play a part in rescuing failed businesses. Under this law, local and regional authorities were empowered to compulsorily acquire a failed business and authorise it to be run by a workers cooperative for up to two years pending a settlement with other creditors (the workers themselves were often also creditors in respect of unpaid wages) or the former owners. Some recuperated enterprises went down this road. Others negotiated a lease with the former owners, which of course involved paying them a share of any profits. Others continued to operate outside the law.

The two years are now coming up, and with the Argentine economy having recovered a little and the social and political situation stabilised, the authorities are beginning to enforce the law, which gives property rights over a business either to the former owners or their creditors. A number of businesses taken over by the workers in 2002 have already been recuperated back from them. Now, it appears, it is the turn of the Bauen Hotel. 

Evicting the bosses and organising production without them is one thing; escaping from the economic laws of the market is another – as, within capitalism, it is not just a question of organising production, but also of selling what is produced. Because of their precarious legal position, the workers cooperatives running a recuperated enterprise have been at a competitive disadvantage. They can’t get proper bank loans and, because ordinary capitalist businesses are not too keen to deal with them, often have to sell to them via a go-between (who naturally demands a share of the profits).

What the workers cooperatives, some of which  are organised in a Movimento Nacional de Empresas Recuperadas, are now demanding is a stable legal framework; basically, that the state or regional or local authorities compulsorily purchase the business they are running and legally hand it over to them. Thus, the petition to the President of Argentina on behalf of the Bauen Hotel cooperative calls upon “the Argentinian government and its legislators to act  immediately to . . . pass a law of definitive expropriation in favour of the Workplace cooperative B.A.U.E.N.”

Apart from wanting to secure their own position, the broader vision of those behind the Bauen cooperative seems to be an economy based on a network of worker-owned businesses. Even anarchists in Argentina, who might be expected to look favourably on this, have criticised it:

“Cooperativism does not provide a real solution to the workers’ situation. It is incapable of providing an answer in the interests of all workers. At no time does it question the capitalist production relationships – it questions only superficial features (monopolies, competition, etc.). Even less can a network of cooperatives create a parallel subsystem to capitalism” (www.zabalaza.net/phorum/read.php?f=2&i=156&t=156).

Yes, cooperatives can only ever involve a minority of workers, and the more they are integrated into the capitalist economy and its profit-seeking, the more their members will have to discipline and pressurise themselves in the way the old bosses did – what used to be known as “self-managed exploitation”.

The Trotskyists have another solution. According to an article in the October Le Monde Diplomatique:

“During 2002 there was a lively debate on whether revived businesses should get involved in capitalist markets. A Trotskyist minority called for nationalisation under worker control. It took over four businesses, including Brukman, a garment factory in Buenos Aires, and Zenon, a tile manufacturer in Neuquén. The workers involved saw the rescue as a first step towards a socialist system in which the state would control economic planning. The hard-left parties associated with them did not believe that cooperatives could survive in a capitalist market” (mondediplo.com/2005/10/13survey).

It is certainly true that cooperatives will never be able to outcompete ordinary capitalist enterprises, but the Trotskyists’ alternative of the state subsidising the recuperated enterprises, without requiring them to compete in the marketplace, just to provide jobs is even more unrealistic – and has nothing to do with socialism. (It is more than likely, however, that this is just another of the Trotskyists’ dishonest “transitional demands” which they know can’t be achieved under capitalism but offered as bait to obtain a following for their vanguard party.)

The fact is that there is no way out for workers within the capitalist system. Not cooperatives, not reforms, not trade unions. At most these can only make their situation a little less unbearable. As long as capitalism lasts workers will have to find a source of money one way or another and so will always be in a dependent and precarious position. 

But a number of lessons can be drawn from the recuperated enterprises movement in Argentina.

Firstly, that built into capitalism is a class struggle between those who own the means of wealth production and those who don’t and who are therefore forced by economic necessity to sell their ability to work to those who do. This class struggle is not just over the price and conditions of sale of the commodity workers are selling.

Ultimately, it’s about control over the means of production.  If, as happened in Argentina after the economic melt-down of December 2001, capitalists abandon their factories or, as happened in Russia in 1917, Spain in 1936, and Hungary in 1956, the capitalist state is temporarily incapable of protecting capitalist property, then the workers more or less spontaneously take over their workplaces and keep production going.

Workers are not going to let themselves starve: if the means of production are there, and there’s no state to stop them using them, they’ll go ahead and use them, even if they have no revolutionary pretensions. However, as soon as the state has got its act together again, then it is in a position to confront the workers and re-impose access to the means of production only on its terms.

Which leads to the second lesson: the importance of who controls the state. At the moment, in Argentina as elsewhere, this is in the hands of people favourable to the continuation of capitalism, itself a reflection of the fact that most workers too don’t see any alternative to capitalism. The state, therefore, upholds legal private property rights. The importance of political power is in fact fully recognised by the recuperated enterprises movement.  This is why they are calling for the law on property rights to be changed so as to recognise the property rights of the workers cooperatives which are running recuperated enterprises; which will only happen if they can get the elected law-makers to do so, either by pressuring them from outside or by electing ones  favourable to a change in the law. This is why, too, they want people to petition the President of Argentina.

The end of capitalism can only come as a result of a consciously socialist political movement winning control of political power with a view to abolishing all capitalist property rights and ushering in the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. The preconditions for ending capitalism are a majority socialist consciousness and workers democratically self-organised in a large-scale socialist party. Neither of which, unfortunately, existed in Argentina.

Which is why the recuperated enterprises movement there has proved a dead-end and why the workers cooperatives it gave rise to are now forced to compromise and integrate themselves into capitalism to survive.

Adam Buick

Political Ideas and Class Interests: A Glance at Argentina (1944)

From the November 1944 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx wrote a century ago that all history, since the rise of class divided society, has been a history of class struggles. Constitutions have been made and unmade, kings dethroned and executed, treaties and alliances have been sworn (and broken), wars and civil wars have been fought, all involving the interests of rival classes; though the class interest at stake has always been half-hidden under the slogans phrased in terms of supposedly universal truths and philosophies.

Though modern capitalist writers are constantly having the real nature of the struggles forced on their attention, they usually abhor admitting it. When Liberals and Tories fight elections they are ready enough to accuse each other of having sinister designs against the workers, but neither—for obvious reasons—will admit that it fights to further the interest of its own section of the propertied class. So with wars, each of which has its appropriate collection of abstract aims and justifications—democracy, freedom of the seas, national independence, self-determination, rule of law, the just rights of superior races, etc., etc. On the Allied side in this war pride of place has been given to the idea of overthrowing dictatorship, and to suit this view politicians and the Press have studiously refrained from harping on the fact that a large number of the Allied countries are themselves dictatorships.

This expedient lack of candour has not, of course, been applied so rigorously to neutral countries. So when Russia made its treaty with Germany in August, 1939, it was permissible to refer to Russia as a dictatorship. “If war comes,” said the Daily Express (August 26th, 1939), “the issue will be clearer. The democracies will be ranged against totalitarian States.” Naturally that candour lapsed again when Russia became an Ally and is now customarily described as a democracy.

Later in the war most of the South American Republics, many of them dictatorships, gave support to the Allied side, with, however, the notable exception of Argentina, which has been much criticised for showing no enthusiasm. Criticism has been levelled against the near-Fascist dictatorship in that country, and the unilluminating explanation that has contented the capitalist press has been that the Argentine Government is anti-Ally because its own ideas are against democracy, and it therefore “sympathises” with Nazi Germany. Such an “explanation” is obviously inadequate. If sympathies and abstract ideals were a real guide to international alignments, half the history of all the Powers would be utterly incomprehensible, since they have all of them waged wars in the past in alliances which contained Christian Powers on opposite sides, Christian and non-Christian Powers on the same side, democratic powers and dictatorships, kingdoms and republics, white and yellow peoples all in seemingly inexplicable groupings. Let us, however, look further at Argentina.

The first curious fact to notice is that democratic U.S.A. and democratic Great Britain are at loggerheads over the attitude to be adopted towards Argentina. Roosevelt’s Government—in the name of democracy—wants stronger action against this South American Republic which is out of step, but the British Government holds aloof and wants to continue its existing trading relationships. The Economist (August 5th, 1944), putting the British capitalist point of view, admits that something else enters into the question besides abstract ideals, that something else being “British long-term trading interests.” “For decades,” says the Economist, “Argentina has been one of the main suppliers of cheap food for Britain’s industrial population. In return, it has been a valuable market for British goods, and a fertile ground for British capital—to the great benefit of both Countries.”

The article goes on to remark rather acidly that “In British eyes, American policy in Argentina is suspected of being moved less by the desire to defeat Hitler than by the desire to extend the influence of Washington from the northern half of South America to Cape Horn—in short, by a doubtless beneficent but none the less real imperialism.”

Then the writer quotes the President of the American Import-Export Bank, who admitted that when U.S.A. interests lend money to South American borrowers, the U.S.A. insists “that all machinery and materials not available in the country of the borrower shall be purchased or leased in the United States, and that such machinery and materials shall be transported in American ships.”

This is a usual procedure when capitalism lends abroad, and has its counterpart in a British-Argentine agreement of 1935, which forced Argentina “to discriminate against American goods.”

In short, Britain and U.S.A. are both moved by the capitalist necessity of finding markets and favourable areas for investment of capital.

Further light is thrown on the situation by a candid letter from an American correspondent, Isobel Fisk, in the Economist for September 23rd, 1944.

She largely admits the charge of imperialism against the U.S. Government, but urges that on a long view Britain and U.S.A. should act together because if they don’t it will be worse for both of them. Her case, in brief, is this : Argentina has been almost entirely an agrarian country producing wheat, meat, etc., for export, and importing machinery and other manufactured goods from Britain. This has suited both the British industrialists and investors and the Argentine landowning class, the latter having fought “tooth and nail” against efforts by rival Argentine interests to build up manufacturing industry in that country. (According to the Statesmen’s Year Book, 1940, there were in the whole country only 36 factories employing more than l,000 workers, in a population which totals 13,000,000.)

The rival Argentine interests are those behind the present dictatorship of President Farrell. They want to build up industry and end Argentina’s dependency on the British market. Their argument, in the words of Colonel Labarca, a member of the Argentine Government, is that “in the twentieth century all countries are trying to process their own raw materials; they know, that they can obtain very low prices by direct sale; they know that, on the other hand, when industrialised they will manufacture a wide variety of products and will utilise by-products, which will give work to their labourers. . . . Everybody now knows that a country has either the economy of a colony or of a world power, and that only the countries which are capable of elaborating what nature places within their reach are worthy of preserving their independence. . …”

The issue, then, in Argentina is not just one of democracy and dictatorship, but whether the landowners or the growing industrialists shall dominate, and the latter are prepared to use dictatorship and armed force to impose their will.

Miss Fisk, though the words she uses are that British and American interests should join together to try “to put down this American brand of Fascism which has sprung up in Buenos Aires,” makes no attempt to conceal the real issue. If Colonel Farrell and his fellow-Fascists succeed, “British investments,” she says, are “in mortal danger.” and “the system by which Britain bought Argentine meat and sold manufactures is doomed to go.”

The Economist, however, doubts whether an attempt to coerce Argentina now would be practicable, and is not prepared to support such a policy if the outcome is to be that of enabling American capital to get control there. Rather the Economist would prefer to wait till the end of the war in the evident hope that the changed situation then will put back the state of affairs that existed in 1939, with the landowners in power and British investments and exports safeguarded not only against Farrell’s group but also against U.S.A. interests. So much for the proclaimed concern of the British and American Governments with the establishment of democracy and overthrow of dictatorship.

There is another class interest that neither the Economist nor Miss Fisk takes into account, the world-wide interest of the working class. We are not concerned to prop up one or the other propertied class in Argentina, nor to try to safeguard British investments, or to make an open door for the products and investments of U.S.A. capitalists. The paramount interest of the working class inside and outside Argentina is to destroy the capitalist system and institute Socialism. Then there will be no problems of markets and investments to solve, and no country will have to face the choice between being a colony or a world power — all will be Socialist.

Edgar Hardcastle

Cooking the Books: An anarcho-capitalist president? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August the media reported the success in Argentina’s presidential primary elections of Javier Milei, ‘a self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist’’ (Financial Times, 31 August), ‘the ultra-right libertarian and ‘anarcho-capitalist’ who represents angry Argentina’ (El País, 14 August).

If they now have a chance of one of theirs being elected as president, the anarcho-capitalists have come a long way since we debated them in the 1980s and 1990s, challenging their argument that socialism (as a society based on common ownership without production for sale) was impossible and refuting their spurious ‘economic calculation argument’.

The theory, the Financial Times noted, was the brain-child of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) who ‘developed a radical version of libertarianism that he called ‘anarcho-capitalism’. In this worldview, states are ‘organised banditry’ and taxation is nothing but ‘theft on a gigantic, and unchecked, scale’. As Quinn Slobodian points out in his recent book Crack-up Capitalism, in Rothbard’s ideal polity, ‘contracts would replace constitutions’ and people would not be citizens but ‘clients of a range of service providers’’ (tinyurl.com/484hr8b8).

We can confirm this from the many debates we had with them. They did argue that capitalism can, and should, exist without the state; in fact that as long as the state existed there was not real capitalism but ‘statism’ or ‘corporatism’. Capitalism, they said, had never been tried. In their view, the functions of the state, including the courts, the police and the armed forces, should be exercised by competing private enterprises whose services individuals could buy according to choice. In fact, everything should be dealt with by buying and selling contracts between individuals and groups of individuals.

This includes the sale of body parts. They are divided over whether parents can sell their children. Milei, who is evidently a loud-mouth who speaks before he thinks, confirms both. According to El País,

‘In June of last year, he referred to the sale of organs as ‘just another market’ during a radio debate. ‘Who are you to determine what [a person] does with his life?’ Milei questioned. (…) Days later, a journalist asked him if he subscribed to another theory that suggested ‘the sale of children.’ Milei replied, ‘It depends,’ and further got himself tangled up. ‘Shouldn’t the answer be no?’ the journalist pressed. ‘If I had a child, I would not sell it,’ Milei said. ‘The answer depends on the terms in which you are thinking; maybe 200 years from now it could be debated’ (tinyurl.com/ykvn5baj).

Capitalism in Argentina must have reduced workers there to the depths of desperation if so many are prepared to vote, even as a protest, for a person with such crazy ideas.

Anarcho-capitalism is a dystopian nightmare that, if it could be implemented, would make capitalism even worse than it is now by subjecting everything, literally everything, to being bought and sold. It would reduce us all to isolated atoms only interacting in the market place.

Capitalism has never existed without the state and never could have. It was helped into being by the exercise of coercive state power both to accumulate the first money invested as industrial capital (colonial plunder, slave trade) and to create a propertyless proletariat by driving peasants off the land (enclosures, clearances). As Marx put it, capitalism came into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Capital, vol 1, ch. 31). Once established, capitalism still needed a social organ of coercion to maintain the monopoly over the means of production by a few and to exclude the working class from them except to work for wages and produce profits.

In any event, if Milei is elected president, there is no chance that he will abolish the state in Argentina. ‘Anarcho-capitalism’— capitalism without a coercive state — is a contradiction in terms.

Just a few more contradictions (1949)

From the July 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists are always pointing to the stupidities and contradictions of capitalism, and capitalism certainly provides us with plenty to point to. Take, as a recent example, the agreement signed last month between Britain and Argentina, over which there has been so much fuss and bother. Under the terms of this agreement, which is scheduled to last for five years, both countries have undertaken to exchange goods to the value of £160 million. In line with her usual policy in these days of dollar shortage, Britain has stood out against using dollars for any part of her purchases and at the same time has insisted that the exchange shall be at parity, i.e. that Britain will sell to the value of £80 million in return for Argentine goods to the same amount. In order to get the meat she particularly requires, Britain has also promised Argentina priority treatment in supplies of oil, coal, machinery, chemicals, and other manufactured products, and will export them in sufficient quantities to satisfy most of Argentina’s needs.

So far, so good. On the face of it a useful trade agreement for the British capitalist class, and a triumph for their negotiators, acting, by the way, under the instructions of a Labour government.

But evidently everything has not turned out quite so rosily as expected, for now the United States has come along and objected in quite strong terms that the agreement is actually a very bad one, is going to have the effect of cutting out the United States from the Argentine market, and for quite a long time to come. American exporters, it seems, are most annoyed at all these developments and want their government to do something about them.

Now for the other side of the story. It is common knowledge that the United States has been pouring millions of Marshall Aid dollars into Western Europe as part of her foreign policy. Of these dollars Britain, as the most important Marshall Aid country, has received the largest share. The prime purpose of this aid has been to help the Western European countries to get back on to their feet economically, to assist them to increase production, and to step up their exports. Thus encouraged, the British capitalist class, aided by the Labour government, have energetically set to work (with the co-operation of the British workers), and made great strides in their trade, receiving numerous pats on the back from Hoffman, the Marshall Aid Administrator, for doing so. It seems, however, that Mr. Hoffman has been a little too generous with the back-slappings, for the British capitalist class are apparently carrying out the export policy too well. Having encouraged British capitalists to increase their exports, the Americans are now complaining that they are being cut out of the export market, and with the help of their own money!

There is another twist in the story. Even if Britain did not supply her with the goods she requires, Argentina would not be able to buy from the United States, because she has not got the dollars to pay for them. As it is, she owes America millions and millions of dollars for goods she bought years ago, and the Americans have been trying to get paid ever since. In spite of this, however, the American capitalist class are still prepared to have a row with Britain over the right to send even more goods to Argentina, still presumably without Argentina having the slightest chance of being able to pay for them!

Finally, we cannot resist making a side-reference to oil, one of the commodities involved in the agreement, and the one that is evidently causing the Americans the biggest headache. Only a few months ago, the Americans were still obsessed with the worry they get from time to time that their internal oil supplies were running low, and that they would need to draw to an increasing extent upon supplies from abroad. Thus one of the top priorities in the Marshall Aid programme was for the Western European nations to increase their refining capacity and sell oil to the United States for dollars, so killing two birds with one stone. Again British capitalists set to work with a will, to such an extent that “American companies have already lost part of their Swedish market to British competitors.” (Daily Telegraph, 11/6/49), and look like losing the Argentine market as well. No wonder they are getting upset! What has happened, of course, is that American home demand has been falling off, prices have been dropping, and American companies that thought they would be hard put to supply their home market are now finding it to be in danger of saturation, and that they had better look after their overseas markets while the going is good.

So here are three more problems for would-be solvers of capitalism’s problems to get their teeth into. Solutions should not be sent to us. Send them to the American State Department or Sir Stafford Cripps' or even to President Peron. They will be very glad to receive them, we feel sure.

Stan Hampson

The Mixed Blessing of Big Canadian Wheat Harvests (1941)

From the January 1941 issue of the Socialist Standard

On November 19th two newspapers, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle, both published some observations on the bumper harvest in Canada. The Guardian had a letter from Mr. Robert Tasker, M.P., who asked that “in the midst of our thanksgiving for the home harvest let us hold in grateful remembrance this year the bounty of the Empire crop. . . . All told, Canada will have about 730,000,000 bushels of wheat this season, as against 591,000,000 a year ago.”

In the News Chronicle Mr. Reuben Hogg was not quite so certain as Mr. Tasker. He wrote at length on the necessity of prompt and drastic steps to deal with this bounty. It will mean, he wrote, “that Canada has an exportable surplus equal to the entire world’s peace-time needs for about 14 months. But actually only about a quarter of Canada’s surplus is likely to be exported before her next harvest. A very large quantity will have to be carried forward . . . .”

Here enters problem number one, for the Canadian banks “are naturally hesitant to advance money for wheat that may never be marketed.” So the Canadian farmer will be the first to curse the superabundance of wheat.

Then there will be repercussions on British agriculture—”Farmers at home cannot see these surpluses accumulating with equanimity. Remembering the collapse in British agriculture that followed the last war, they are wondering more and more if things are not beginning to point to a repetition of that sad event.” Then there is the Argentine : —

 “The Argentine faces a similar problem with maize, for which a surplus of 25,500,000 quarters is anticipated next April. Unsold feeding stuffs are also piling up elsewhere, particularly in parts of the French Empire. It is said that Indo-China alone has a million tons of feeding stuffs held up and unsold.”

So although the bumper Canadian harvest may make it easier to supply the demand in Britain during the war, it looks as if Mr. Tasker’s thanksgiving for Nature’s bounty will not be shared by quite a number of people.

Capitalism is indeed a curious system of society.

Edgar Hardcastle

Development to what? (2021)

From the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We resume our refutation of the view that workers in the advanced capitalist countries share in the exploitation of the people in the so-called ‘Third World’ by examining contemporary theories of this.

In the early post-war years large swathes of the world’s poor countries were decolonised. Seeking to complement their new-found political independence with a semblance of autonomous economic development, they soon found this was not so easily achieved.

The concept of ‘development’ has roots in nineteenth century thinking on the supposed civilising mission of the imperialist powers succinctly captured by Kipling’s patronising phrase: ‘white man’s burden’. Cynically, imperialism was justified as a means of uplifting native peoples everywhere — economically, spiritually and culturally — though, in reality, its impact was often the opposite.

The modern understanding of ‘development’ as a coordinated macro-economic strategy was first clearly associated with a ‘structuralist’ school of thought that emerged in Latin America in the 1930s centred on the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). The structuralists argued against the Ricardian concept of ‘comparative advantage’ promoted by liberals who extolled the virtues of free trade and urged countries like Argentina to specialise in the export of agricultural products, capitalising on that country’s natural advantages.

The structuralists countered that there was a long term tendency for the price of agricultural products, to fall against imported manufactures because of the latter’s greater ‘elasticity of demand’. Meaning Argentina would be shortchanged in the long run due to a declining terms of trade if it focused only on producing beef and wheat for the European market. Therefore it made sense to adopt protective policies of ‘import substitution’ to stimulate the growth of local manufacturing.

Development economics

After the Second World War, however, such economic nationalist thinking found itself increasingly swimming against the tide. While import substitution continued to be implemented in many developing countries, by the late 1970s it was largely abandoned. Ironically, it was instrumental in encouraging transnational corporations (TNCs) to set up — in Trojan-horse fashion – production facilities within the countries concerned precisely as a way of getting round import controls — leaving such countries still essentially at the mercy of external economic players in the guise of these corporations.

Moreover, commencing with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1948) there was an increasingly concerted, international push to bring about a ‘substantial reduction of tariffs and other trade barriers and the elimination of preferences, on a reciprocal and mutually advantageous basis’. The belief was that free trade would not only mitigate the prospect of war but also promote economic growth. This tendency culminated in the emergence of neo-liberalism (rubber-stamped by the so called ‘Washington Consensus’ which replaced the post-war Bretton Woods framework) in the wake of the collapse of Keynesianism in the recession-hit 1970s.

Dependency Theory

In the early post-war years, ‘development economics’ had fallen under the spell of the ‘modernisation paradigm’. A leading protagonist, Walt Rostow, argued that development was a process driven by capital investment and that the developing countries, being short of capital, needed to open themselves up to investment from abroad. The Modernists were Keynesian interventionists and, unlike the liberals, accepted the need for developing countries to industrialise and diversify their economies. For them, ‘development’ basically meant passing through a linear sequence of economic stages, mirroring the economic history of the already developed countries (The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, 1960)

In the 1960s and 70s, however, the modernisation paradigm was increasingly challenged. What had appeared so seductively simple at the outset no longer seemed to fit the facts. In those early post-war years, growth among the developing countries had been comparatively vigorous — though, for the vast majority of citizens, the benefits failed to ‘trickle down’. Then, in the seventies, the oil crisis came along — and the mushrooming problem of Third World debt as many countries desperately resorted to IMF (and other) loans to plug the gap between export earnings and the rising costs of imports. With the onset of global recession, growth began to falter. In Africa alone at least 15 countries saw their economies shrink in real terms. The situation deteriorated further in the 1980s, dubbed the ‘Lost Decade’.

In this period a new development paradigm emerged — Dependency Theory. This built upon earlier structuralist thinking but also marked a new departure. As Dudley Seers notes: ‘The realization that import substitution created new, and possibly more dangerous forms of dependence converted the ECLA structuralists into dependency theorists’ Dependency Theory: A Critical Reassessment,  1981).

According to the ‘Dependistas’, drawing on Lenin’s ‘law of uneven development’, the problems faced by poor countries was not the result of their incomplete integration into the global capitalist economy as modernisation theory suggested. They were already fully integrated into this economy and those problems sprang, instead, from the form of integration to which they were subjected. They were not ‘undeveloped’ but systematically ‘underdeveloped’. This manifested itself in a net outflow of capital from them via such mechanisms as ‘unequal exchange’ — proof that it was not for any lack of capital that their development was impeded.

The ‘world trading system’ was conceptualised as a hierarchical order in which the dominant core countries were able to impose their own needs on the dominated countries. Such needs dictated that the latter should remain suppliers of low-value raw materials for processing into high value finished goods within the industrialised core countries themselves, rather than rival producers of such goods, given the latter’s complete dominance over global value chains. In short, industrial development and economic diversification was effectively blocked in the capitalist periphery.

Thus, the linear ‘stages of growth’ model of modernisation was misconceived. It overlooked that the predicament developing countries found themselves was quite unlike the pristine state of affairs already developed countries encountered when they first began to develop since, back then, there were no already-developed economies around to obstruct and distort the development process.

For developing countries, trade liberalisation (which tended to be heavily biased in favour of developed countries) was not the only problem. There was also the growing dominance of the TNCs that not only controlled the great bulk of global trade but, as stated, were becoming increasingly active as producers inside these countries. Their immense economic clout and footloose nature in a world where capital could freely relocate to wherever costs where lowest, gave them considerable leverage in their dealings with poor countries. Finally, there was the ability of lending agencies like the IMF to impose ‘structural adjustment’ programmes on these countries — like privatisation and phasing out food subsidies — as a condition for receiving the loans they increasingly depended upon.

For some ‘Dependistas’ the solution lay in ‘delinking’ from the global economy and pursing a policy of national self-reliance. But in a world in which the global division of labour was becoming ever more diversified and complex, this was not really feasible.

Moreover, though it became fashionable for a while, Dependency theory seemed increasingly out of touch with changing realities. In particular, its core claim that industrial development of the poor countries would be ‘blocked’ was decisively refuted by the emergence of the ‘newly industrialising countries’ — particularly, the Asian Tiger economies (like South Korea and Taiwan) and, above all, China which has since become a major imperialist power to rival the US, with business interests right across the globe.

Additionally, there has been a massive shift in manufacturing away from the advanced countries to the Global South which now accounts for 83 percent of the world’s manufacturing workforce. Indeed, amongst many large western-based corporations there has been a significant movement towards ‘offshoring’ production and outsourcing it to local contractors based in the Global South — meaning such corporations are no longer involved in producing commodities as such, solely in marketing and ‘branding’ them.

Guilt-ridden liberals

Around the time the Dependency paradigm was gaining adherents — the 1970s — an alternative worldview centred on the concept of a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) began to be promoted. The impetus came from the non-aligned movement of developing countries. The basic idea was to bring about a more equitable global economy.

Hardly any of the proposals embodied in this concept were taken up as neo-liberalism strengthened its hold on practical policy-making everywhere. However, in ideological terms, the concept gained traction by implanting far greater awareness of the substantial inequalities in economic circumstances and living standards between rich and poor countries.

Along with this has arisen the idea that ordinary people in the ‘rich countries’ enjoy a standard of living so much higher than ordinary people in ‘poor’ countries precisely because they live in one part of the world that profits handsomely from the exploitation of the other. They are said, in effect, to share in the fruits of such exploitation and it is this that affords them a lifestyle incomparably more affluent and comfortable than their counterparts in the exploited poor countries.

Sadly, this frankly pernicious and tendentious idea is one that seems to seep into popular discourse with all the ease of a toxin into a watercourse. It is the meat and drink of hand-wringing liberals everywhere who fret guiltily about how appalling it is that ‘we in the West’ should enjoy the comforts of life produced by the sweatshop labour of the Global South.

Consider this comment by Jonathan Glennie and Nora Hassanaien in the Guardian newspaper, that most formidable bastion of liberal thinking, on the subject of ‘Dependency Theory’:

‘As with most Marxist-inspired tirades, it is not a complete analysis of Latin America’s history — it probably exaggerates the villainy of capital and heroism of peasants. But it presents a perspective on the truth that any serious development worker or academic should have intellectual access to. This is as relevant today as ever. It is critical that voters in the rich world learn that their wealth is related to a historic exploitation of other parts of the world, especially when they are eventually asked to readjust their living habits and conditions in order to better accommodate the just requirements of poorer countries’

(1 March, 2012).

At a time when many ‘voters in the rich world’ are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet, when governments are slashing social welfare programmes with the grim determination of a state-sponsored executioner with a quota of severed heads to fulfil, when more and more people seem to have been reduced to ignominious penury of food banks, charitable handouts and even a life on the streets, it must be comforting to learn that they can always depend upon that ‘historic exploitation of other parts of the world’ to sustain and materially uplift them.

Unfortunately, being ‘asked to readjust their living habits and conditions’, by which one assumes is meant having to accept a downward adjustment in their real income is no guarantee whatsoever that the ‘just requirements of poorer countries’ will be suitably accommodated.

On the contrary, the only beneficiaries of this sacrifice will likely be those who substantially own the means of production and profit from the employment of others who constitute the overwhelming majority of those ‘voters in the rich world’ to whom Glennie and Hassanaien appeal. There is no getting round this most fundamental antagonism in our existing capitalist society which mediates and conditions everything else that we find so obnoxious and objectionable about it.

In fact, grotesque inequalities are to be found in both the rich world and the poor world alike. Spatial-cum-national inequalities in this respect pale by comparison with class inequalities, something our liberal handwringers seem constantly prone to overlooking. In this, they are joined by Maoist-style ‘Third Worldists’ who cynically exploit the idiom of Marxist rhetoric to justify their abandonment of a class-based analysis of capitalism in favour of a nationalistic-based ‘anti-imperialism’.

In the final two parts of this series we will consider the claims of these Third Worldists and subject them to empirical and theoretical scrutiny.

Robin Cox

The cost of lives (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The relentless pursuit of profit under capitalism produces a wealth of contradictions: coal mines are closed while old people die of cold, food production is curtailed despite widespread starvation, hospitals are closed and ill health in the general population increases in spite of advances in high technology medicine. The provision of health care is distorted by the competing forces within capitalism as social needs are, if catered for at all, secondary and coincidental to the overriding requirement of profitability.

The interests within the health care system are: the workers trying to obtain improved medical services "free at the point of use"; the government trying to "privatise" medicine and reduce state provision of health care, the insurance companies who are gaining increasing numbers of subscribers to private insurance schemes as the National Health Service deteriorates; the companies who supply drugs, equipment, provisions. construction and services and are parasitical on the health service; private medicine with fees for consultation and surgery.

Although bringing health care under state provision with the development of the National Health Service appeared to represent a gain for the working class it is, in fact, a victory for ruling class expediency and has developed, and continues to be shaped, according to the needs of capital. There is no doubt that new discoveries, technological improvements and modern drugs have eased the misery of many serious diseases. However, it would be wrong to assume that the use of sophisticated techniques automatically confers benefits on patients. Illich (Limits to Medicine, 1976) claims that coronary care units are no more effective than normal medical wards but require three times as much equipment and five times the number of staff to run them. Garner (The NHS: Your Money or Your Life, 1979) cites research which supports this claim and points out that patients nursed in coronary care units have a higher mortality rate than those nursed at home.

Ineffective or even harmful treatments may continue to be used because they are profitable or allow control, prestige and power by vested professional interests. The misleading publicity (or advertising) which accompanies technological medicine and discouragement of information and knowledge outside professional circles may lead to a "demand" for dubious medical treatments by the general public who mistakenly believe that miracle cures have been found without being aware of potentially dangerous complications or side-effects. The damage that commercialised medicine can cause has been pointed out by Eyer:

  . . . when doctors went on strike in Los Angeles County in 1976. limiting elective surgery for the most part, the death rate fell by about 15 per cent and rose well above its previous level when the doctors resumed practice. before returning to normal. This means at least one out of every six deaths in Los Angeles is due to the overdevelopment of medicine.

(J. B. McKinlay (Ed.): Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care, 1984.) 

Although excessive medical and surgical intervention is a feature of private health care, under-provision of facilities is common when its supply is less profitable. Professor Stewart Cameron of Guy's Hospital. London claims that 2,000 sufferers from renal failure may be dying unnecessarily each year in Britain because of insufficient renal dialysis machines (Medicine in Society, 1984).

The considerable variation in the provision of health care facilities has been summed up by Julian Tudor Hart (Lancet, 1, 405. 1971) as the Inverse Care Law. in which he states: ". . . the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served. This operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces and less so where it is reduced." Wales typifies the Inverse Care Law with some 10.000 deaths from coronary artery disease each year and 25,000 men of working age suffering from angina, but with a dearth of cardiologists compared with regions in England (Medicine in Society, 1982). This contrasts markedly with private medicine as the fashionable London clinics accepted patients from the continent for coronary by-pass surgery until it was realised that patients receiving drug treatments made similar progress. It is true that a minority of people with coronary heart disease benefit from by-pass surgery providing they are properly assessed and identified. Also the much simpler and safer procedure of supplying cardiac pacemakers could save lives in Wales if they had the resources.

Heart transplants make dramatic news but there is little evidence that, on average, they prolong life expectancy. The deaths of heart transplant patients get very little reporting by the media, distorting the benefits, or lack of them, of technological changes. Nevertheless, in spite of all the evidence that technological advances need to be approached much more cautiously and with considerably more evaluation, there seems to be more specialisation and technological expansion than ever before. Garner has pointed out that doctors in the United States carried out twice as many operations on a group of Federal employees when paid a fee-for-service than doctors paid a flat salary by another insurance scheme. Similarly, the number of hysterectomies performed in Saskatchewan increased by 72 per cent after the introduction of national health insurance which reimbursed the doctor. Apart from the obvious profit motive, the restriction of skills to a professional elite concentrates power, prestige and more money into fewer hands. Mitchell (What is to be Done About Illness and Health?, 1984) claims: "We tend to assume that historically paid physicians opposed the herbalists and lay healers because their methods were ineffective or dangerous. Yet there is considerable evidence that it was because these methods did work that they were threatened".

Widgery (Health in Danger, 1979) has questioned the "medical prestige mongering" of advanced medicine: "In Buenos Aires doctors are playing about with cardiac surgical units costing tens of thousands of dollars while new-born babies die in the precincts of the hospital for lack of decent milk". He also questioned some of the cardiac resuscitation procedures:

 . . . while every effort can and should be devoted to monitoring and reviving patients in units equipped for intensive care, the kind of indiscriminate, ineffective invasion we carried out, which we wholeheartedly conceived as solely for the patient's good, was in fact depriving the dying of the last shred of dignity in order to give us a little practice and a little false prestige. None of this is to argue that we should abandon or relent our development of medical science, but we need to sharpen its focus, take more seriously its implications and applications. We need to ask honestly, every time whether its net result enhances the doctor's prestige or the patient's well-being, for these are by no means the same thing.

Under capitalism medical care assumes its most profitable form and there is usually more money to be made from curing a complaint than preventing it. In under-developed countries the resources consumed by curative medicine in the prestige hospitals of the major cities have been at the expense of preventive services in the rural areas. ("The Politics of Health in Tanzania", Development and Change 4 (1) 39. 1972) has put the contradiction of high technology medicine co-existing with poor primary services in Tanzania in perspective:

  . . . a man has hookworm anaemia (common in Tanzania). He has been ill for years; eventually he has to stop work altogether. He is admitted to hospital. He needs laboratory tests, skilled medical and nursing attention, drug treatment and a blood transfusion. After a time he improves, and he eventually goes back to work. At home, he catches hookworm again; the whole process is repeated. If his village had used pit latrines none of this would have happened.

Poverty remains the main cause of a considerable amount of ill health. Millions of children die each year from malnutrition and infection in the Third World. Even in the more affluent countries workers have higher mortality rates than the rich as a result of working in stressful, polluted, alienating environments and living in poor housing conditions. And within countries such as Britain relative poverty is still quite widespread. Thus a socially deprived area such as Rochdale has an infant mortality rate 2½ times greater than the national average.

In advanced, industrialised countries preventive services also have a low priority because they are less profitable. Yet governments are anxious to shift the burden of costs away from the state and back to the consumer. As Crawford states:

  The emphasis on individual responsibility for health mystifies the social production of disease and undermines demands for rights and entitlements to medical care. Beneath the rhetoric about the costs of medical care and the obligation of the individual to remain healthy lies a political programme to shift the burden of costs back to labour and consumers and to paralyse regulatory efforts undertaken to control environmental and occupational hazards. (J. B. McKinlay. op. cit.)

As it is uneconomical to safeguard workers' health during unemployment because a reserve army of labour is available, drastic cuts have been made in the health and social services. But substantial increases in military expenditure, aid to private industry, the police force, and tax advantages for the wealthy reflect capitalism's priorities.

Carl Pinel

The War in the South Atlantic (1982)

From the July 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers’ blood has been spilt in a squalid war over which group of exploiters shall own and control the resources on and around the Falkland Islands. The perverse propaganda in favour of legalised murder oozes from rags like The Sun, while the genteel voices of BBC “defence experts” discuss details of human sacrifice with all the cynicism of ancient rulers plotting a battle between expendable slaves. In a society where the loss of a fighter plane is infinitely more costly than the waste of a replaceable uniformed wage slave, profit is the god and human needs must be tossed aside to satisfy its voracious appetite. “Our lads”, who hitherto could not afford a weekend trip round the harbour on the luxurious QE2, are now being treated to a mystery tour on their bosses’ floating mansion—the mystery being not where they are going, but whether they will return alive. At the bottom of the bitterly cold South Atlantic, corpses from both sides mingle with each other—death highlights the fact that a British worker is indistinguishable from an Argentine worker: they are not natural enemies, but paid dogs of war set on to each other to do their masters’ dirty work.

Workers have no country. Britain is not “ours”: the richest ten per cent of the British population own more of the accumulated wealth than the other ninety per cent added together. Britain, like Argentina, belongs to a minority class which owes its affluence and privilege to a system of institutionalised parasitism. The Falklands do not belong to the workers of Britain or Argentina or the Islanders themselves. If British capitalists maintain their ownership and control of the Falklands, or if they lose control to their rival exploiters in Argentina, it will not make a scrap of difference to workers anywhere. It is a war fought by workers for the interests of capitalists.

What are they fighting about?
Much fallacious drivel has come forth from politicians and media hacks alike about “the interests of the Islanders” and “principles of international law”. It is suggested that Thatcher and her Tory, Labour, SDP and Liberal allies have sent the Task Force to the South Atlantic at a huge cost to the British capitalist class because they are eager to defend the Islanders’ rights to be British and to save the world from fascism. Such nonsense would be laughable were it not so commonly believed. If the government was so eager to “keep the Islanders British”, why did it exclude them from British citizenship in its recent Nationality Act? If the government was so disgusted by the Argentine Junta’s record of repressively anti-working class dictatorship, why was it a major arms supplier to the Junta up until the invasion of the Falklands? The hard fact is that wars are not fought for moral reasons — the only justice of significance to the capitalists as a class is that which ensures their own economic power. If British capital could succeed by selling out the nationalistic wishes of the Islanders and by working in alliance with the Argentine fascists they will certainly do so. Unlike in the Great War, however, the ruling class is no longer able to urge gullible wage slaves to die for the sake of Imperial Glory. These days the imperialist interests of the ruling class need to be dressed up as battles over principle — modern wars are disguised as “fights for democracy” or for “international law” or “for the right to be British”. Just as Churchill and his political allies would readily have made a deal with Hitler in the 1930s (in fact, Chamberlain tried to and Stalin did), so Thatcher would willingly conspire with the Junta today.

Workers should not be deceived: wars are simply a continuation of the rivalries over markets, raw materials and trade routes which are inherent in the profit system. The economic interests at stake in and around the Falkland Islands can be summed up as follows:

1. Agriculture and fisheries.
2. Oil.
3. The mineral resources of the Antarctic.
4. Strategic routes.

Agriculture and fisheries
The main industries of the Falkland Islands are sheep farming and fisheries. On 6 June 1982 The Mail on Sunday posed the question: “Who owns the Falklands Islands”. The answer was revealing:

  For the most part, not the islanders. More than seventy per cent of the land is owned by companies registered in the UK. The best-known landlord is the Falkland Islands Company . . . now owned by the Coalite Group, the Derby-based manufacturers of smokeless fuel. The Company employs half of the island’s population and owns half the sheep. It also owns some forty per cent of the land. Another thirty per cent is in the hands of seven small private companies in Britain and Germany.

The article refers to some of the holdings on the Islands which are usually referred to as being “ours”:

  Port Howard on West Falkland is a spread of 170,000 acres – bigger than Hampshire — stocked with 38,000 sheep. The farm is run by a manager for a company called James Lovegrove Waldron Ltd., whose thirty-seven shareholders live in England . . . The first territory to be recaptured by the Task Force was Port San Carlos where the Cameron Family have 97,000 acres and 31,000 sheep. Mr. William Cameron settled in the Falklands and bought the farm in the 1870s. He left it to his four children who later moved to Britain. Mrs. Anne Cameron, managing director of Port San Carlos Ltd., now lives in Ireland.

Reading this one might ask, how many workers own farms covering thousands of acres of land? The repossession of the Islands is entirely a capitalist concern, of no interest at all to the majority of people who are lucky if they own or rent a back garden. Landowning parasites like Charrington Coalite and the Camerons must be laughing all the way to the bank as they observe propertyless wage slaves worrying about the possession of territories which will never belong to workers. We can be sure that the capitalists will not die fighting for our interests; why should workers sacrifice their lives for the sake of capital?

Oil
For some time there has been speculation about the potential oil reserves which lie beneath the South Atlantic in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands. Oil is currently a very valuable commodity and capitalists are particularly interested in new areas of exploration. According to the Observer (23 May 1982), two major oil consortia have made bids within the last year to explore the Magallanes Este, a stretch of water which is equidistant between the Falkland Islands and the Argentine coast. The Argentine government sold the bidding rights to explore for oil and gas in the Magallanes Este to the American oil company, Atlantic Richfield (ARCO). The British government threatened to take legal action against ARCO, as it claimed that the exploration was going to take place in its waters and that Argentina had no right to sell the exploration rights. In objecting to foreign exploration of the Magallanes field the British government was undoubtedly thinking of the objectives of the section of the capitalist class which it represents. The Argentine military conquest of the area will have been seen as a denial of the British capitalists’ ambitions in relation to oil.

The oil factor has been played down by the British media. British capitalists are straining to give the impression that the potential oil is quite incidental to their high moral motives in sending the Task Force. The truth is rather different: in 1974 a team from Birmingham University investigated the oil potentiality in the Malvinas basin and compiled an economically optimistic report. According to the Observer,

 Industry forecasts of the potential oil in the Malvinas basin have been mixed, ranging from 20 million barrels from the Falklands side of the basin to between 40 and 200 billion barrels from the Argentine side.

North Sea oil reserves produce about 50 billion barrels. In 1981 the Royal Dutch Shell Group, acting as a contractor for the Argentine State Oil Company (YPS) drilled a well in Argentine waters which yielded 5,000 barrels a day.

Quite possibly the oil prospects around the Falkland Islands will come to little or nothing; but they have yet to be seriously tested and the British capitalist class is determined to be around if and when the oil profits start pouring in.

The mineral resources of the Antarctic
Not long after the main discoveries of the Antarctic by Cook, Bouvez de Lozier and Kergeulen-Tremarec in the eighteenth century, commercial exploitation of the area began. It has always been assumed that the mineral potential would be vast; but only in recent years have techniques been developed for obtaining the resources of the Antarctic. (Similarly, the Russian ruling class has recently discovered the vast riches in Siberia and it is becoming one of the key industrial areas of the USSR.)

Competition between sections of the capitalist class for the right to own and control the Antarctic was so intense that research in the area has often been stifled and “poisoned by endless arguments over sovereignty” (The Antarctic, H. G. R. King, p. 250). In the mid-1950s the US government proposed that the Antarctic should be internationalised and placed under the control of the United Nations, but this idea came to nothing. In October 1959 a conference of sixteen nations met in Washington and devised the Antarctic treaty, which was ratified in 1961. The treaty determined a thirty-year period of multilateral control of the Antarctic by Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Russia, Britain and the USA. During this time geological research was to be carried out in the area in order to determine its potential riches. The treaty will expire in 1991 and there is every prospect that conflict over future ownership and control of the vast area will be very fierce. While British capital has a foothold on the Falklands it is close to the scene and cannot easily be excluded from a share-out of the Antarctic territory.

Cartoon by George Meddemmen

Strategic routes
Capitalism not only needs to produce commodities, but to distribute them to the markets of the world. To do so it needs access to the convenient trade routes. In an interview on NBC (a US television network) on 9 June. Margaret Thatcher was candid about the fact that economic considerations were on her mind:

  Mrs. Thatcher argued strongly that there was more to the Falklands crisis than ideological issues like democracy. Quite a number of big oil tankers now had to go round Cape Horn to get to Alaska, she said, and they (i.e. the Falklands) had very enormous strategic value” (Guardian, 10 June 1982).

In addition to the principal economic causes of the Falklands war there are political factors which come into play. In Argentina, the Junta was probably prompted to take military action when it did by the then growing political opposition. Faced with a crisis of world capitalism, the Junta has been unable to prevent intensifying economic contradictions from fuelling the discontent of large sections of the working class. Shortly before the ”reconquest of the Malvinas” the Junta was confronted by mass demonstrations on the street; its show of nationalist militarism has converted dissidence into jingoism, thus temporarily stabilising the position of the Argentine ruling class. The use of national chauvinism as a political diversion has aided Thatcher no less than Galtieri. In the long run, however, it is a mistake to assume that the leaders of capitalism are directing its affairs; they are the victims of the system and no amount of peaceful intentions on their part will avoid the occasional need of capitalism to destroy lives and wealth for the sake of profit.

The war, Marxists and the left wing
The role of revolutionary socialists is not simply to declare abstract principles. There are plenty of piously motivated people who are deeply committed to abstract aims, such as “world peace”. Such aims are utopian unless they are related to the historical possibility of establishing a classless, stateless society. Understanding that capitalism causes wars, socialists urge the need for conscious political action to end capitalism and thus eradicate war. Socialists do not simply oppose violence or war or destruction; we oppose the class interests which give rise to these anti-social forms of behaviour.

Socialist principles are put to the test when they are applied to the real experiences of the class struggle. In 1914, when every political party in Britain was either swallowed up by the jingoistic war hysteria or else left muttering inane pacifist sentiments, the Socialist Party stood alone in condemning the war from a class angle:

  Whereas the capitalists of Europe have quarrelled over the questions of the control of trade routes and the world markets, and are endeavouring to exploit the political divisions and blind passions of the working class of their respective countries in order to induce the said workers to take up arms in what is solely their masters’ quarrel. THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN, having no quarrel with the working class of any country, extends to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.

In 1939 the Socialist Party refused to be tricked into support for legalised killing, firmly rejecting the fallacy that the British ruling class — in its alliance with the dictator, Stalin — was fighting for democracy. Alone among all parties in Britain, the Socialist Party has never supported one capitalist interest against another in a war. Consistently we have argued that workers have a material interest in opposing all wars. In maintaining this principle the Socialist Party adheres to the classic declaration of Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto:

  The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the fore the common interests of the entire proletariat independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

In the light of these revolutionary guidelines of Marx and Engels we may examine the attitude taken to the war by the parties, groups and sects of the British Left. In the moment of truth, have they sided with the workers’ interest — have they pointed out “the common interests of the entire proletariat” — or have they supported the military ambitions of one section of capital against another? Predictably enough, the latter is the case.

Instead of pointing out that workers have no interest in the territorial squabbles of their rulers, virtually all the Leftists opted to make legalistic judgements about which band of exploiters ought to possess the Falklands. The New Communist Party’s leaflet on the war begins by stating: “Let no one be deceived, Britain has no right to the Falklands.”

It seems that the Central Committee of the New Communist Party has set itself up as an international arbiter of capitalist rights. Perhaps they will be good enough to tell us which capitalists do have the “right” to own. control and plunder the earth? The Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) states that Galtieri’s fascist junta is “manipulating the just sentiments of the people for the decolonisation of the Islands . . .”

Socialist Newsletter seems to be divided between supporting the claims of both groups of capitalists; its leaflet begins by stating that: “The 1,800 or so British people who live there are British. They have a right to stay there as British people.”

Having granted the Islanders the right to stay allied to the British ruling class, Socialist Newsletter is anxious not to seem unfair to the Argentine capitalists and so states that “The Malvinas are part of Argentina”.

The Socialist Workers’ Party is never far behind when there are class issues to be confused. “Stop this mad war now!” its leaflet instructs; but instead of going on to say that only socialism can put an end to war, the SWP declares that what is needed is an Argentine victory. “Every socialist and trade unionist . . . has a direct interest in the defeat of the British forces.” Now, if socialists have a direct interest in an Argentine victory (because that is what “defeat of the British forces” means) — if success for the junta equals success for socialists, as the SWP says, should workers not be encouraged to sign up and help the Argentine army defeat the British forces? Presumably the SWP is in favour of what they call the direct interest of socialists and trade unionists, and so are therefore logically committed to taking any action which will enhance such interests. Perhaps we will soon be seeing SWP paper sellers collecting coins to provide arms for the Argentine army — instead of their old slogan, “Fight the fascists on the streets” they will be able to shout out, “Fight with the fascists in the Malvinas" — for by doing so these political half-wits think that they are defending the interests of socialists and trade unionists everywhere.

The SWP leaflet states that:

 . . . the Argentine trade unions and Left rightly believe that the Falklands should belong to Argentina as they were stolen by British gunboats 150 years ago.

So, according to the petty nationalists of the SWP, workers in Argentina are quite right to believe that the national aspirations of their ruling class have anything to do with them—they are right to engage in the very anti-working class nationalism which Marxists totally oppose.

The other trad Trots, such as the IMG and the WRP, have taken attitudes to the war which are indistinguishable from the SWP. They have taken to referring to “the Malvinas” and to regarding Galtieri as a fighter against imperialism. While the Trotskyists dream of a future People’s Malvinas, the Communist Party engages in sterile, meaningless talk about the need for a peaceful United Nations settlement. Such is the revolutionary status of the party which was once going to smash capitalism!

If the trad Trots are strong on pro-nationalist implications, the Revolutionary Communist Party is in the running to become the British wing of the Argentine junta. The RCP is quite clear about which capitalists have its support: “In this war it is the duty of British socialists to back Argentina.” On the assumption that the enemy of an enemy must be a friend, the RCP states that “No socialist can remain neutral when the British ruling class goes to war”.

In 1939 the RCP would no doubt have been sending fraternal telegrams to the Nazis. The front cover of the RCP’s disgustingly anti-working class paper, The Next Step, has banner headlines declaring:

WHEN BRITAIN GOES TO WAR WORKERS MUST TAKE SIDES!
THE MALVINAS ARE ARGENTINA’S!
DEFEND THE RIGHTS OF 27 MILLION ARGENTINES!

If the RCP intends to defend the entire population of Argentina we must assume that they are just as concerned about looking after the interest of the capitalists’ as the workers. The Next Step for any clear-headed member of the RCP would be resignation.

None of the leftist groups has attempted to analyse the real economic causes of the war. The SWP advance the facile explanation that “the war is really about, saving face – Thatcher and her government’s face”.

Not only is this a classical example of. the conspiracy theory — the absurd belief that the capitalists are in any kind of conscious control over capitalism — but misses any serious Marxist analysis why wars occur. To blame wars on Thatcher is to ignore the class forces which personalities like Thatcher, Reagan, Brezhnev and Galtieri are simply the symbols.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has traditionally ignored the vital question of the cause of war, preferring to campaign against certain weapons of war. The Falklands war has put CND in a difficult position: here we have a decent, old-fashioned conventional war of the kind that CND finds rather more humane than the unpleasant nuclear variety. The horrific conventional weapons which have been used in the South Atlantic may have forced some those CNDers who do not object to war as long as they are non-nuclear to have a re-think. Just as in the late 1960s thousands of CNDers lapsed from the faith in order to take sides in the Vietnam slaughter, so today there are many CNDers fully support the Task Force in its mission. CND boasts that its defence policy has been proved correct and had there been a run-down in conventional armaments the British ruling class would have been militarily unsuccessful in the South Atlantic. In short, just like all reformist bodies, the role of the CND is to advise the capitalists on how to run their competitive and murderous system.

One member of CND who must not be forgotten is Michael Foot — the man who likes to be known as an “inveterate peacemonger”. His speech in the House of Commons at the beginning of the Falklands crisis should be remembered by workers for years to come. It was Foot who urged the government to use force — it was he who threatened to expose the government for weakness if it did not respond to aggression with the might of the British military machine. Foot has workers’ blood on his hands no less than Thatcher. But Foot was elected to administer capitalism and who could expect his party or the Leftist sects which hang on to his party to do anything but bow to the needs of British capitalism? Peace for them is something to be talked about when there is not a capitalist war to be fought. The Left wing of capital is as much an enemy of the working class as are the overt defenders of capitalism on the Right.

The tragedy is that the dangerous policies outlined above lead inevitably to the waste of war and the continuation of class privilege. For Marxists there is but one way ahead and that will not be in the company of capitalists of any nation.

“The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” (The Communist Manifesto)

Steve Coleman