Election Results (1970)

Party News from the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The result of the election of the two seats contested by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in the general election on 18 June was :

CLAPHAM

Skelton (C)       16,593

Pitt (Lab)         13,473

Thwaites(L)       2.982

Simkins (Soc)       220

Boaks(Ind)             80

HORNSEY

Rossi (C)           21,434

Pestell (Lab)      17,645

Brass (L)              3,755

Morris (Comm)      624

Grant (Soc)             156

The Socialist Party also contested a local by-election in the Town Hall ward of Haringey Borough Council on 4 June. The result was: Carnell (Lab) 1.234. Painter (C) 1,146, Buick (Soc) 11.

Food Production: The World Can Feed Us All (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main function of food is to provide the human body with energy. This it does in chemical form. This chemical energy is converted into mechanical work and into heat (to maintain body temperature). What a human being needs can be worked out in energy terms and the unit generally used to measure this is the “calorie” (or, more correctly, the kilocalorie). Many people don’t realise that this is a unit of energy, equally applicable in physics as in biology.

Depending on his age, sex, work and climate a person’s calorie needs can be worked out. If he is not getting these calories then he is underfed and can properly be regarded as “starving”.

But calories are not all that a person’s food must give him. It must also provide the various substances the body needs to develop and function properly especially proteins, vitamins and various minerals (like iron, calcium, iodine).

The bulk of people’s food is taken in the form of carbohydrates (starches, sugars) and fats. The carbohydrates, which come from corn, rice, potatoes, are cheap. Which is one reason why they are the staple diet of most people. The fats provide more calories and come from eating meats and some vegetables.

They say that you could in theory live without carbohydrates and fats; the same does not go for proteins, however. Protein-foods also provide calories (which is why they could replace carbohydrates and fats) but their main role is in supplying certain essential ingredients to the body to grow and to renew itself. The trouble is that proteins are found in the more expensive foods. Thus malnutrition arising from protein deficiency is fairly widespread. Malnutrition can also be caused by a deficiency of vitamins and minerals.

You often hear it said that “two-thirds of the world are starving”. That all depends on what you mean by starving. The Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates “that up to half of the population of the world continues to suffer from under-nutrition and malnutrition in varying decrees” (1963). But is malnutrition, as opposed to under-nutrition, properly called “starvation”? To most people starvation means not getting enough food, being almost at death’s door. If two-thirds of the world were starving in this sense then the world’s population ought to be going down as they die off. It is safer to say that up to half the world’s population is either underfed and/or badly fed. Estimates of those actually underfed put the figure at about 10 to 15 per cent; the half being made up by cases of malnutrition mainly from protein deficiency.

Faced with these terrible figures people say its the result of ignorance or of too many people or of not enough land to grow food on. In fact this problem is caused by none of these. All this human suffering is unnecessary and could be rapidly ended given the necessary changes in the structure of society.

That the natural resources of the earth and the knowledge and machines of its people are sufficient to provide an abundance of foodstuffs is a well-established fact. Listen to Professor Clark, formerly of the Agricultural Economics Research Institute of Oxford University:

  The purpose of this article is to consider whether the earth’s resources, if properly developed, would yield material goods sufficient to provide, a satisfactory livelihood for the whole human race. Although it is not usual to state one’s conclusion at the beginning, in this case it can be stated without qualification. The material resources of the world would easily suffice to make such provision, not only for the whole human race as it now is, but also for any conceivable expansion of our numbers which is likely to occur for a very long time. Whatever was the case in the past, we can certainly say now that, with modern scientific and technical knowledge, the fact that so many people fall short of satisfactory livelihood must be blamed entirely upon human shortcomings, not upon the inadequacies of nature (“The Earth Can Feed its People”, Christian Responsibility and World Poverty. A Catholic Viewpoint).

Prof. Clark is a Catholic and an opponent of birth control, but even supporters of birth control as one way to solve capitalism’s current food problems agree on this. N. W. Pirie, of the Rothamsted Experimental Station, writes in his recent book Resources: Conventional and Novel (reviewed, Socialist Standard, September, 1969) of the possibilities of increasing food production by the further application of conventional agriculture:

  At many points there is great scope for further research, but the vigorous application of existing knowledge on a worldwide scale could increase immensely the amount of food produced. The extent of the possible increase is a matter of opinion. But only a very cautious prophet would predict less than a doubling.

In 1963 the F.A.O. published Possibilities of Increasing World Food Production, a region-by-region survey of food producing potential, and declared that “it is clear that world potentials for increasing food production are very substantial indeed”. This conclusion is all the more impressive since the FAO openly assumes that food will continue to be produced for sale and traded on the world market (a great restriction on production).

It is perhaps worth running through what are these conventional methods that could be vigorously applied: (1) Cultivating more land; (2) Irrigation; (3) Better varieties of crops; (4) Use of fertilizers; (5) Use of weed killers and pesticides.

All these techniques could be further applied as soon as Socialism were established in order to increase food production immediately by a substantial amount.

Developments in agriculture are not the only ones that can allow food production to be increased. It is often said that although the food can be produced in America, Europe, Australia, the facilities for transporting it to the people who need it either don’t exist or are quite inadequate. The ports of India are said to be so overcrowded that it would be physically impossible to transport more food there. There are said to be no roads to the places where people are starving so that the food would have to be carried by porters over long distances. This may well be true but there are transportation techniques which are also not vigorously applied. When there is a war on, the logistics sections of the armed forces overcome such problems and the Indo-China war has shown that the USAF can build temporary air fields in the middle of the jungle in a very short time.

Besides the more vigorous application of conventional methods of agriculture, further research could lead to the discovery of new methods by which food production could be increased.

Food, as we saw, is energy in chemical form and, if really necessary, essential foodstuffs could be produced synthetically toy industrial processes. In the last world war, Germany had a factory producing artificial fats. Vitamins and minerals are already produced industrially. Research into ways of manufacturing proteins is also going on, as newspaper stories about food from oil and coal show.

Then there is the sea, a vast source of untapped food potential, especially of protein-rich foods. As far as obtaining food from the sea is concerned mankind is still largely in the hunting and gathering stage from which on land we developed millions of years ago. Very little farming of the sea is done as yet. Two scientists, writing in the April 1969 issue of World Health (WHO), estimate:

  If the sea’s resources were used rationally, an acre of its surface could produce twice as much protein-rich food as an acre of high-class pasture. . . . According to estimates made by the oceanographer Professor L. Zenkevitch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the productive capacity of the sea is more than a thousand times that of the arable land area.

Half the world is inadequately fed despite the existence of the resources to provide the food they need in abundance, not because of overpopulation nor because of nature but because of the capitalist system of production for profit on the basis of the class ownership of the means of production.

Adam Buick

World Mineral Resources: Enough to Last (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Until the rise of capitalism as a source of energy mankind was mainly dependent upon wood which was also a major raw material. Today wood has been replaced by minerals as the major source of energy and for many of its uses as a raw material.

The development of industrial societies in the capitalist era is directly related to the expansion in the exploitation of the world’s mineral resources and there has emerged a significant correlation between the consumption of energy per head per annum and the Gross National Product per head per annum in any country. Countries with the highest energy consumption per head turn out higher values of product per head, and they tend to be large consumers of the non-energy minerals.

Capitalism’s need to form more capital, its drive for profit and a lower cost of production of minerals has often led to an irrational exploitation of mineral resources, and a constant search for alternatives. Flooded mines, collapsed workings, underground explosions and fires has made the future of some deposits difficult. Thousands of workers have lost their lives or had their bodies maimed just to meet the need of capital.

In the past coal, and more recently oil, has been the base for economic growth in the industrial countries. Since 1880 there has been an almost thirtyfold increase in the world’s production of commercial sources of energy. Although oil is now more important than coal the world output of the latter continues to rise because under-developed countries find its exploitation technically more feasible. As industrial development becomes more widespread throughout the world, and as population increases, the demand for energy will become greater.

One estimate of demand is that by the year 2000, compared with 1960, the population will have doubled and energy consumption will have risen five times.(1) Population forecasts can be said to be well informed guesses, and as consumption under capitalism depends upon the vagaries of the market and the extent to which such competition results in physical conflict, such an estimate can only be very tentative.

Nevertheless increases in consumption are historically obvious and present trends have at times caused concern about the ability to meet future energy needs.

The reserves of coal deposits are easier to prove than those of oil. The reserves of both change because of technical developments and new discoveries, which are both likely to be more significant in the future. For example although undoubtedly the most likely areas to contain minerals have been surveyed, only 20 per cent of the U.S.A. has been mapped geologically. (2)

One estimate of coal reserves maintains that even if coal supplied all energy needs up to the year 2000 there would still be enough coal for another 100 years at the level of consumption expected to be prevailing at the end of this century. (3)

Because oil reserves are never really proved until commercial exploitation takes place estimates vary widely. (4) Undoubtedly new techniques will increase the percentage of oil taken from existing fields, and although recently the extent of proven reserves has not kept pace with output this may be a reflection of the opposite situation in the twenty years after the war when there was not a fuel “glut” as there is at present.

It would appear that fossil fuels are likely to supply the world’s energy for many years to come for hydro-electrical power is of small importance outside a few countries and as yet solar radiation, an almost inexhaustible supply of energy, is technically limited to minor uses. Nuclear power with the development of the Advanced Gas-cooled reactor and the Fast Breeder reactor will be of more importance in the future despite the vast projects necessary and the doubts about the supply of high quality ores.

A similar situation exists for the non-fuel minerals. Some advanced countries have exhausted their better deposits of iron, copper, lead, zinc and other ores. Fears of shortage of the non-fuel minerals are largely a reflection of the fact that more ores have been extracted from ‘the earth since 1900 than in the entire period of man’s history before that date.

The total demand for minerals of all kinds is increasing as new uses are constantly being found for minerals already important to man as well as for those of little importance in the past. For example although steel output is constantly rising it is being replaced for many uses by aluminium and pre-stressed concrete.

The two world wars have played a significant part in depleting the non-fuel mineral reserves of Western Europe and America. Nevertheless discoveries elsewhere in the world are being exploited. The post war fears of shortages are being overcome by modern survey methods, i.e. electromagnetic surveying from the air and geochemistry aiding the discovery of vast new deposits in isolated backward areas of the world.

Despite increasing exploitation of the world’s mineral resources it is now becoming recognised that they never will be exhausted. Advances in technology permits exploitation of leaner ores and also creates new resources.

The fears of shortage of supply of all minerals is in reality a reflection of capitalism in which production for sale causes periodic gluts and shortages which are accentuated by political division. The needs of the market may dictate that mineral resources be exploited in a manner that is not technically the best. The British coal industry in the last century and the American oil industry in the early years of this century provide good examples.

Capitalist society accentuates the demand for minerals in a manner that a sane society would think ludicrous. The production of battleships, locks, cash registers, bombs and thousands of other articles designed to protect or secure property, or if only of commercial use, are wasteful of mineral resources.

If there were fears of world shortages of minerals it would be doubly criminal to use them in the production of articles to kill, to restrict the freedom of, and to assist the exploitation of man by man. But capitalism cannot be doubly indicted for its technology has amply demonstrated that man need not fear a shortage of mineral resources for hundreds of years to come.

Ken Knight

1. SEARL, M. F. Report to the. U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

2. FEISS, J. W. Technology & Economic Development. Ch. Minerals.

3. AVERETT, P. U.S. Geological Survey.

4. SCHURR, S. H. Technology & Economic Development. Ch. Energy.

World Administration: A Framework for Socialism? (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

World government is an idea most people understand. Indeed, if science fiction books and comics are anything to go by, most people expect it to come sooner or later. Even though people expect world organisation to take the form either of a world dictatorship or of a federation of national governments they are still treating the world as one unit. This is a way of thinking we Socialists want to encourage. We do not stand for world government (we are opposed to governments everywhere) but for, to adapt a phrase, a world administration of things — the planned production and distribution of wealth on a world scale to meet human needs.

We have always understood the change-over from capitalist government to socialist administration to involve the capture ‘by a socialist-minded working class of the various national governments of the world to be followed by the dismantling of the coercive features of the old government machines but the retention, in adapted form, of some of the non-coercive technical functions now exercised by governments. In Britain, for instance, some of the functions of the Ministry of Transport or the Post Office might be retained insofar as they concern the technical side of communications.

Equally this could be done on the international scene. There is not as yet (if ever there is, which is unlikely) a world government but there is the United Nations Organisation a body which has in primitive form some of the features of this and which the advocates of world government want to see developed further. Just as on the national scale some of the institutions of the capitalist government machine could be adapted and used as part of the new socialist administration, so on the world scale could some of the institutions of the UN.

The UN was set up by the victorious powers in the second world war at a conference in San Francisco in 1945. Socialists have no illusions about the UN; we know full well that the expressive phrase that used to be used of the League of Nations — “the League of Bandits” — applies equally to the UN. It is a league of the various governments of the world at which most ruling classes are represented (the most notable exceptions being those of West Germany, Japan and state capitalist China). It is a body which serves the interests of the big powers, and especially America. It is only with their support, not to say their manoeuvring, that its meagre coercive powers, its so-called peace-keeping force, are used.

However the UN is more than the Security Council, its talking-shop General Assembly and its troops in blue helmets. It also has an Economic and Social Committee to which are responsible a number of bodies known as the “specialized agencies of the UN”. Most people are familiar with some of these without perhaps knowing they had anything to do with the UN — the FAO, WHO, ILO, IMF and World Bank, to name a few. These agencies are concerned with gathering information and giving advice in their respective fields, though some of them play a vital regulatory role as well.

Nine of these agencies could perhaps be adapted to play a part in the socialist administration of the world. They fall into two categories: those needed even in a capitalist world to regulate international communications (a further proof that we do have one world now under capitalism) and those which are essentially world advisory and statistical services in various fields.

Into the first category come:

1. The International Telecommunications Union, originally set up in 1865 to ensure an orderly telecommunications network.
2. The Universal Postal Union (1874), set up to ensure the orderly distribution throughout the world of letters and parcels.
3. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) regulates international air traffic allowing regular scheduled flights; it also promotes standardised technical equipment.
4. The Inter-governmental Maritime Consultative Organisation (IMCO) plays a similar role with regard to ocean shipping.
5. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) gathers and disseminates information on the world’s weather.

These organisations could play a basically similar role in world socialist society. Their significance for Socialist propaganda today is that they show that capitalism itself is already a world system and that it has to set up certain world organisations to deal with matters that can only be dealt with on a world scale.

The other bodies, besides collecting and disseminating information, are also involved in the economic development (albeit under capitalist conditions) of the so-called backward parts of the world:

6. The International Labour Organisation (1LO) deals with working conditions and training.
7. The United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) deals mainly with education and eradicating illiteracy.
8. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
9. The World Health Organisation (WHO) deals mainly with health hazards.

In addition there is one other relevant UN body, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). This is concerned with the peaceful uses of atomic energy, but also has a political role insofar as it aims to preserve the monopoly of nuclear weapons of the big three powers (sometimes called preventing the spread of nuclear weapons).

In the UN, then, there are ten bodies concerned with postal services, communications, air transport, ocean shipping, the weather, labour, education, agriculture and health which could form the basis of institutions for controlling these matters on a world scale in socialist society.

It is true that none of these bodies is involved in the actual production of wealth and that the more directly economic UN bodies — the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs — are more concerned with finance and commerce (which would have no place in Socialism). But some of the information which even these have gathered could be useful for planning production on a world scale to meet human needs. Planning in a socialist society, remember, will be essentially a statistical exercise, correlating estimated human needs with known world resources.

In the specialized agencies of the UN (and in the administrative networks of the growing number of trans-national corporations) the basic framework for a world administration already exists. It only remains for the workers of the world to realise this and to organise to take it over for the benefit of all mankind.

Adam Buick

World Poverty and Birth Control: Malthus Was Wrong (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

A majority of those who comment on the future prospects for mankind stress the problems associated with rapid population growth. With unrelieved gloom book follows book upon the prospects of a starving world as a consequence of the rising birth rate and the only solution usually offered is birth control.

The theory that the restriction of population is the only cure to present-day hunger and future outright starvation goes back to a book by Thomas Malthus first published in 1789. His theory can be stated fairly simply; there are too many people on the earth and they are increasing too fast. Enough is not provided by nature for them all, therefore, poverty, vices, misery, the splitting of society into haves and have-nots leading to violence and wars. Most of these calamities could be avoided by stopping the growth of population. Malthus recommended the workers to practise birth control in order to remedy the social evils which they faced.

What was new in his theories was that he explained social problems like unemployment and poverty not from economics as was the case with Ricardo, Adam Smith and many of their followers, but from biology — from sexual life. The basic idea convinced many when it was first put before the public and it seems to be convincing to a substantial number of people today.

Malthus claimed that population grows faster than the production of food (not to mention clothing and shelter). According to him population grows in geometric progression (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 . . .), while the production of food increases only in arithmetic series (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 . . .). He was convinced that the only way to restore the balance between population growth and the production of food was through moral restraint (sexual abstinence i.e. copulation control through postponement or cancellation of marriage), limitation of births, pestilence and war. Because the world is always overpopulated there is inevitable poverty and misery. From this Malthus drew the conclusion that practical steps have to be taken to decrease the surplus population.

During the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century Malthus’s theories were not widely accepted but what is seen as the menace of overpopulation in the so-called underdeveloped parts of the world has given birth to a whole new generation of neo-Malthusians who are determined to save the world through producing infertility in bedrooms rather than fertility in fields.

In most of the books and articles produced by the modern neo-Malthusians the basic ideas of Malthus remain unchanged. Biological solutions are suggested for social problems, biological laws explain social facts and biological causes replace economic, social and political ones. People starve because they breed too rapidly not because the world’s wealth is monopolised and used by a minority to increase this wealth still further in response to uncontrolled economic forces. People will stop starving when they stop breeding and not when they reorganise the world’s resources in the interest of the world’s population.

The fact is that Malthus and his followers are not concerned with explaining poverty and misery, they are concerned with justifying it. They see scarcity as something natural and eternal to which we must adjust. In the face of their critique technology must retreat from the fields and the factories and into the bedroom.

But the point they seem to miss is that surplus population is not something natural and absolute. It is at all times relative to production, distribution and social organisation. There are definite socio-economic reasons why there was a “surplus” population in the Rhondda in 1931 and in Delhi in 1961. They were only relatively surplus and superfluous because they have been made so by the way the world’s population is organised (or disorganised) in relation to the means of production and world markets. Workers do not suffer the pangs of hunger and destitution because there are too many of them but because they cannot gain access to the things which would enable them to produce what they need. Poverty is not the result of overpopulation, on the contrary, overpopulation is the result of poverty. This is true in two senses: (i) poverty in the sense of propertylessness which afflicts all workers generally and which can lead to relative overpopulation when this propertylessness leads to workers being cut off from the means of production during periods of unemployment and (ii) poverty in the sense of destitution which can lead to apathy over questions of family limitation, which, in turn, can lead to an increasing birth-rate. This is partly the reason for the lack of success of birth control in areas like India. Modern methods of birth control require a degree of self discipline which is often absent in populations with predominantly pre-industrial ideas and values, especially when they are thrown together in squalid primitive shanty towns with little hope for the future. Contraception is difficult enough on an individual level in such conditions but when it is attempted on a mass scale, as in some areas of India, it becomes ludicrous.

When we look at the problem on a world scale it becomes apparent that it is not merely a question of people failing to gain access to what is produced but also what is produced cannot find its way to those that need them. Because the world is organised along national and class lines the means of subsistence are sometimes withheld from those who most urgently need them.

The cornerstone of the Malthusian argument is that the produce of the soil can never keep up with the increase in population. It is based on an extremely simple model of soil and population. It disregards entirely a third factor—the human ability to use rational means to attain certain ends i.e. science and technology. The history of Western Europe and America over the last 150 years has contradicted Malthus on every point. Despite the fact that wealth was and is owned by a minority the standard of living of Europeans has improved even though the population increased from around 180,000,000 in 1800 to around 676,000,000 in 1965. It could be argued, of course, that this was achieved at the expense of the rest of the world. But this cannot be the case since the per/capita income of the entire world has been growing over this period and not only that of the advanced industrial countries. At the present time the indications are that, viewing the world as a whole, food production is more than keeping pace with population. [1]

The trouble with Malthus and especially neo-Malthusians is that they take the social system as something given and unalterable. The only thing that can be changed to solve problems of poverty is individual sexual behaviour. We must regard the fact that the world spends more on armaments than the entire national incomes of Southeast Asia (including India and Pakistan), the Middle East and Latin America [2] as something given and somehow ‘natural’. But we must regard an Indian couple with six or seven children as something unnatural and horrible. Heavily armed with sheaths, coils and pills they set out to change the latter condition but the former condition must be left well alone.

Lewis Hopkin

[1] Our Developing World by Dudley Stamp, page 80. See also Population and Land Use by Colin Clark.

[2] The Cost of World Armaments Scientific American, October 1969, p. 21.

Not Too Many People (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The overpopulation myth threatens to overtake the human nature myth as the chief explanation for the evils of the modern world. A recent Observer feature confidently attributed the following problems to an excess of human beings: hunger, disease, the retarded development of backward countries, social unrest, political instability, urban sprawl, radio-active waste, destruction of wildlife, city squalor, crowded mental hospitals, violence, all kinds of pollution and ecological upset, the shortage of housing in London and the desecration of the English countryside. The writer of this piece did not think it necessary to supply any evidence for his assertions. They are, after all, common gossip.

People’s readiness to accept the “overpopulation” argument arises from their lack of understanding of the way capitalism works. If millions are hungry, it is felt that this can only be because there isn’t enough food in the world. If millions live in overcrowded squalor, this must be because there is a shortage of living space. If people are homeless, there is a “housing shortage” and that is that.

Occasionally we hear a few snippets of information which might be expected to disturb those who take this fashionable view. The growing problem of huge surplus food stocks in many parts of the world, for example. Or the recent recommendation to the French government to take measures to increase the French birth-rate, in the interest of France’s long-term economic and political strength.

It has become a cliché in Britain to speak of “this overcrowded island”. In fact, although the British Isles are far from being among the world’s more lightly-populated regions

  The whole population of the United Kingdom could be rehoused in the single county of Devon with a density of ten houses per acre (quite a generous piece of land for each family) and there would still be land to spare.” (J. P. Cole Geography of World Affairs, p 319)

Indeed, the fear of overpopulation does sometimes appear in its most naive form: the fantasy of human beings so thick on the ground that there wild be “standing room only”. Such a state of affairs would certainly be frightening, but even if the world’s population continued to grow at its present rate, it would be a long way off. If, for example, the entire world’s population were now placed in the United States, the population density in that country would still be no more than that of Holland today. Overcrowding is not due to overpopulation, but exists principally because of the private property system which ensures that the majority of people, being poor, cannot afford to buy or rent sufficient accommodation, of sufficient quality, for their own health, privacy and peace of mind. It hardly needs pointing out that for the rich minority, there is no housing shortage and no problem of overcrowding.

Also, though capitalism does increasingly necessitate attempts at planning the layout of communities, this takes place within a context, and with a scale of priorities, fixed by the market and by the warring of mighty vested interests. Small wonder that, under capitalism, the anarchic arrangement of our physical environment adds its weight to the other forces which oppress and depress us. It therefore plays a part in generating the frustration and disharmony which lead to mental illness and some forms of violence. It is a total evasion of these problems to put them down to “too many people.” In fact the readiness to “solve” human problems by wishing away the human beings who are suffering from them, is itself a horrible symptom of something profoundly wrong.

It is true that the human population cannot grow without affecting the natural environment, sometimes with the risk of dangerous ecological chain-reactions. But the vast majority of pollution, from pesticides, herbicides, industrial waste and so forth, is quite unnecessary, and could easily be avoided upon the abolition of capitalism with its reckless race for profits. “If large parts of our country are polluted, it is not because we are too numerous, but because we pollute. The way to stop that disgrace is not to stop having children, but to start cleaning up.” (Henry Wallich, in an otherwise abysmal column, Newsweek, 29 June 1970.)

Recently even the crackpot notion that overpopulation is the cause of war has been creeping back into circulation. When the spotlight was on the danger of war between Russia and America, two very sparsely populated countries, this theory could hardly be paraded with any seriousness. But now, though the main danger of world war remains in that region, the press and other media are paying more attention to China, which is depicted as being both over-populated and especially bellicose — both falsities. Mention is rarely made of China without the magic phrase “teeming millions”, and often there is an attempt to conjure up the picture of a country bursting at the seams with hordes of people wishing to pour over its borders in search of room. This is ludicrous. If there were anything in it, China would be the one to fear invasion from its much more densely populated neighbours, India and Japan. (But as we have seen, it can more realistically expect attacks from “underpopulated” Russia.) Of course, it would be in the interest of China’s capitalist class to expand its economic and political domination over other nations — not, however, to unload surplus people, but for the classic purposes of capitalist international squabbling: to control trade routes, markets, sources of raw materials and strategic positions.

Increasingly too, there is fashionable chatter about an impending war between the “haves” and the “have nots”. Every so often we are ominously warned that the “have nots” are out-breeding the “haves”, and casting jealous eyes on their possessions. By the “have-nots” we are to understand the poorer nations (including the millionaire maharajah, the African state bureaucrat with his Mercedes, the Brazilian capitalist), whilst the “haves” include ourselves, the wage-workers of the advanced countries.

This is highly misleading because, apart from subordinating class divisions to national ones, it gives the impression that the so-called “have-not” countries or “Third World” have identical problems and prospects for development. What interests us here however, is that birth control is frequently advocated as a solution to the problem of uneven capitalist development (the problem of “backwardness”) and it is sometimes claimed that these countries could industrialise faster but for their rapid rate of population growth. This may be so in some cases, but many of the arguments used to support it are weak, for example the use of statistics to show that a certain increase in production has been “eaten up” by an increase in population. Obviously, from some points of view it might be more important for a new capitalist nation to increase its total production than to increase its production per head. In some conditions a rapid rise in population is favourable to rapid capitalist development.

Essentially, the Socialist case against the population scare is that what manifests itself as an “overpopulation problem” is really a misuse of resources problem. Capitalism, as a system of rationing via the market, is justified in people’s minds by a belief in scarcity. “There isn’t enough to go round”, so we must be restricted in what we are allowed to consume, by the amount of money we can get. “Overpopulation” is used to make those of us who possess a few elementary comforts, feel that we are on the brink of a vast pit of scarcity, and we ought to be thankful for what we have. Yet if we examine the potential for satisfying human needs which has been released by modern technology, we see that the opposite is the case. In order to survive, the capitalist system must continue to develop its potential for plenty, even plethora, but in order to preserve the poverty and scarcity which are its life-blood, capitalism must restrict, waste and destroy on a colossal scale.

Socialists are not, of course, opposed to birth control. On the contrary, we say that everyone should have free access to the most effective contraceptives which science can devise. The modern Malthusians have profited greatly from the fact that their best-known opposition has come from the superstitious teachings of the Catholic Church. What we do say is that talk of overpopulation misdirects attention from the real cause of the problems in question, and that birth control will not solve them.

Yet there is a positive outcome of the overpopulation scare, in that it has prompted many individuals and institutions to begin making an accurate inventory of the world’s resources, and to chart out the possibilities for their use. The knowledge thus provided will cause many to query the efficiency of the capitalist system from the standpoint of human needs — and is also laying a possible basis for the world production plan to be instituted by the Socialist revolution.

Steele

Progress Perverted: The Technology of Abundance (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The technological revolution which has taken place in the last twenty years has great significance for the human race. And yet, because of the way our social and economic system works, most people are not really aware of what has happened.

The basis of all technology, all work, is energy. One pound of uranium will produce as much energy as 3,000,000 lbs of coal; and in breeder reactors an isotope of plutonium is a by-product which is itself a nuclear fuel. The supply is therefore unlimited, and transport to areas of the world without natural fuel supplies is a simple matter since a plane-load could carry a year’s supply of fuel for a moderate-sized country. (The Russian ice-breaker Lenin uses up two ounces of fuel a month). Nuclear reactors will operate for several years without refuelling, making it feasible to set up isolated unattended power units if necessary, even at the bottom of the sea.

In spite of these immense advantages, the installation of nuclear power stations has been slow — and in the wrong places. The richer nations, who can afford to build them, are rich partly because they already have natural deposits of coal, gas and, in some cases, oil, and it is still slightly cheaper to build power stations for these fuels. Add to this the fact that the vested interests in coal, gas and oil add all their weight against nuclear power and it becomes clear why this revolution proceeds at a snail’s pace. Meanwhile, the underdeveloped parts of the world are critically short of fuel while the advanced nations carry on polluting the atmosphere and burning up the world’s irreplaceable wealth of fossil fuels which could be the raw materials of synthetic products for centuries to come. Limitless energy, for taking the hard work out of life for everybody, is possible now, technically — but not within the economics of capitalism. What we have got instead is the most sophisticated range of nuclear weapons that our scientists can devise.

Nuclear fission was not begun in industry. It was a scientists’ laboratory triumph. But one of the most striking trends since the war has been the way in which science and scientists (more and more of them) have been drawn into industry. Research itself has become an organised factory process on mass production lines in a wide range of fields. Although this has meant that certain lines of inquiry have been ignored, it has enormously speeded up the discovery and exploitation of new drugs, chemicals, metals, production processes, and so on. Many of the chemical products are substances not found freely in nature at all — totally new materials created by altering the structure of molecules to achieve specific qualities. Control is now virtually complete. We can synthesise almost anything we can describe. One of the best known fields is that of plastics. We use them in paints, adhesives, clothes, furniture, building materials, bottles, toys, almost everything. Except where we need the electrical properties of metal, everything in a house or a car (including the engine) can be made of one sort of plastic or another. The problem of the availability of raw materials has been solved permanently. The fact that plastics are in danger of becoming a curse rather than a blessing in our capitalist society because they turn up in a spate of shoddy gew-gaws and create a vast disposal problem is no condemnation of the materials, only of the social system. The fact that places like Hong Kong can flood the British market with millions of small plastic objects demonstrates one of the main superiorities of plastics over the materials they have replaced: they are ideally suited for automated mass production. The drudgery of working with wood, stone, fur, hide and a great deal of metal is no longer necessary.

Plastics are only one corner of the huge advance in chemical engineering. We can make anything from detergents to artificial hormones. And this is just the trouble — in capitalism. The mechanism of profit-making knows no morals or aesthetics, and it opposes all interference. So, with no sense of proportion, these quite valuable products are used in the wrong places at the wrong times for the wrong motives and in enormous quantities. The result is that we have an enormous pollution problem, as well as frighteningly large stocks of chemical and biological weapons.

Together, transistors, printed circuits, and magnetic tape have completely altered the scale and scope of electronics. This is only partly apparent in the pocket tape-recorder. The real impact of these developments is to be found in the fields of computers and communications. Compared with valves, transistors and diodes are tiny, cool in working, long-lasting and consume very little current. Similarly, magnetic tape is infinitely more compact and efficient at recording and storing information than film, punched paper, record discs, and so on. And printed circuits, apart from this same ability to be very tiny indeed, can be mass-produced by machine with complete reliability. The equivalent of a complete radio circuit can be put on to a sliver of mica one eighth of an inch square. This phenomenal decrease in size is not particularly valuable for its own sake. Its significance lies in the fact that it allows thousands of such circuits to be put together in a manageable space. The first computers, with valves, were as big as a house and almost as heavy. The latest, far faster, more versatile and more reliable, are as big as a desk. With computers, quantity (of circuits) becomes quality (of ‘brainpower’). Modern computers can be programmed to control and operate complete production systems, transport systems, communication systems.

Linked by communication satellites across the world, they could keep constant check on consumer wants, regulate production to keep pace with them, and dispatch the goods in computerised transport to where they were needed. But not in capitalism. Here and now they are employed in trying to keep pace with the mounting complexities of the money system: wages and deductions, income tax returns, bank statements, mail order accounts, files of bad debtors, and the finger prints of criminals. They have also been employed in working out the prodigious mathematics of flights to the moon and the ballistics of intercontinental missiles. Up to now it is in modern weaponry that computers have risen to their most sophisticated heights.

Fundamentally, automation is no more than an engineering principle. It is when it is used in conjunction with machine tools, mass production techniques, sensing and measuring devices and servo-mechanism that its potentialities are so great. The principle is now called negative feedback (from electronics) and involves using the error in a machine or system to alter whatever is causing the error so that it is corrected. In this way, feeds and speeds of machines can be adjusted, worn cutting tools replaced, faulty pieces rejected, and so on, all automatically. When this is combined with the resources of the computer there is really no job which has to be done by human beings, if we want it otherwise. Simple automation is most suitable for repetitious jobs. The more boredom and drudgery there is in a job, the more suitable it is for immediate automation. And yet the introduction of automated systems has been slow and patchy. This is due to the peculiar economics of capitalism: to be profitable in a highly competitive market, production has to be large in scale; but automated plants of this size are very expensive — and they cannot be sacked like workers. So an assured market for many years ahead is the only justification for a capital outlay of tens or hundreds of millions of pounds. Such assurance is rarely possible in the market anarchy of capitalism.

Automation does not have to be applied to large complexes. Its basic units (relays, solenoids, photo-electric cells, etc.) are small, and it could remove all the danger and drudgery from human work. Capitalism, however, cannot use it to decrease toil and increase freedom. The economics of the profit motive insist that it is used to increase production, decrease unit cost, and increase the mass of profit to compensate for the falling rate. As with computers, the most successful application of automative systems in capitalism is to be found in the development of guided missiles and space shots. The real use of automation awaits the next leap forward in social evolution.

This very brief survey has attempted to show that the power, the materials and the techniques, as well as much of the industry, for producing an abundance of all the things that are needed by the people of the world are now a reality, but that their development is being held back by the economic and social restrictions of our present system of society. The fact is that capitalism is now badly out of date, obsolete. It cannot digest abundance. It cannot work on the basis of plenty for all. Its economy relies upon scarcity, and its social structure relies upon class privilege. These are now in direct conflict with the forces of production. For a while, this vast potential can be throttled, or perverted into the production of weapons of destruction, but not for long. What is already overdue is the scrapping of capitalism and the installation of a society based upon abundance. Only a massive awareness of this necessity by everybody can achieve it. Nothing else in this modern world is big enough to make the change. But the means of communication are ready. Six hundred million people can now watch the same television programme, and the whole complex system is run by workers. As soon as all workers can be made aware of the necessity and the urgency, then it can be done.

Ron Cook

Capitalism – Waste – Want (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Misusing world resources

One speech for which Enoch Powell is not quite so famous is the one in which he gives vent to his fervent faith in the basic virtue and inexorable efficiency of the capitalist system. It seems, when Powell is talking in this vein, that he has a dream about what he thinks of as pure capitalism, in which the profit motive and the whole business of buying and selling are left to work their ways undisturbed by such things as state intervention, union bargaining power and so on. He thinks that the system of commodity production has such eternal sanity that, left to itself, it will solve all problems — housing, health, economic crises and the like.

Powell is an extreme case but he uses a logic which, although it seems macabre, is consistent enough to anyone who accepts the basis of capitalism. What of these, the less extreme? Every supporter of capitalism must to some degree argue that the system is basically efficient. Even the problems they admit to must have a solution which is never more ambitious than a juggling with, or a deflection of, the profit motive; they can never actually question that motive. Hence the policies, typical of such as the Labour Party, of subsidies for houses, food, transport and so on. These subsidies are of course supposed to stimulate the production of goods; there are others, also inspired by the profit motive, aimed at promoting the non-production of goods. Both, apparently, are examples of the efficiency of capitalism.

What we are concerned with here is the notion that capitalism works, in terms of the efficient production and distribution of wealth and of the satisfaction and happiness of its people. There are two ways of approaching this. The first is to look at examples of inefficiency so blatant that even supporters of capitalism consider them fit subjects for protest. By examining the background reasons for these we can broaden our view, taking in examples of inefficiency and wastefulness which probably only socialists would regard as scandalous.

Every so often the communication media become fascinated by some spectacular revelations of especially obvious waste. It is about ten years since Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers burst upon us, crammed with details of what was succinctly called planned obsolescence. Packard showed how firms make inferior goods, goods designed to wear out relatively quickly so that there might be a market for new ones. He told of portable radios, car silencers, television sets which their designers knew could easily be made to last a lot longer. He also gave evidence of manufacturers regularly changing styles, once more to stimulate the market by persuading buyers that their present model was no good because it was out of fashion. Who wanted to be seen driving last year’s car? Looking at an old-look telly? Better buy a new one, keep up with the times.

Perhaps many of the readers of The Waste Makers hoped that it would have the effect of raising production standards. They were wrong. As anyone who buys a car or a TV set or something similar knows, waste is still being busily made in the factories. Any reader of the consumer reports can testify to the fact that obsolescence is still on the factories’ planning schedules. One small example of this came to light last September. It concerned a skilled joiner, an old man who had been sacked—not because he was a bad worker or a poor time keeper or anything like that. He was sacked because his work was too good to be profitable. A director of the firm concerned said:

  There were no complaints about Mr. Welch’s work. He was a first class joiner, but he was not prepared to use modern methods of work. His unnecessarily high standard meant that the company could not make his work pay. (Daily Telegraph, 16 September 1969)

It is easy to imagine the frustration of a skilled worker in this situation. Then what about the similar feelings of, say, farm workers who watch fertile land being taken out of production in the knowledge that starvation, even famine, is one of the world’s serious problems? It will surprise some of those who are starving, to learn that there is a “glut” of wheat in the world, that leading wheat exporting countries are trying to reduce their “surpluses”, that in America the government has just imposed the third successive cut back in production and has once more increased the financial inducement to take wheat acreage out of cultivation. All the cloudy jargon used to justify this policy can be reduced to one single sentence. Capitalism is here deliberately wasting human and natural resources.

If famine is a touchy, well-publicised problem, so is housing. We are all familiar with the apparently insurmountable obstacles which are in the way of providing decent homes for everyone; we have all heard the politicians and the businessmen telling us about the chronic shortage of materials and resources. This might sound more convincing were it not for the fact that, when there is money to be made by doing so, building materials and labour — even completed buildings — are left unused.

Consider the case of Harry Hyams, one of London’s great property “developers” who, according to the Daily Telegraph (27 June) “controls enough empty offices to house 10,000 workers—11 million sq. ft.” Among the empty Hyams properties are: Centre Point (32 stories, 300,000 sq. ft., empty since 1964); Space House (237,000 sq. ft.); London Bridge House (155,000 sq. ft.). It is no accident, that these buildings are unused. In the past year Central London rents have more than doubled — and as long as rents keep rising faster than interests rates it is actually profitable in the long run to let such buildings stand without tenants. Three years ago Hyams’ fortune was assessed at £27 million; since then, says the Telegraph, it has “inflated like a gas balloon”. Let us be clear that this vast fortune has been amassed partly as the result of a deliberate, planned, organised waste of resources and materials and of human abilities—at the same time as there are millions of people whose housing conditions give them a desperate need for those resources and abilities.

It would be possible, as Vance Packard and others have done, to write a book about such waste. The vital point here is that it is all caused by the simple fact that capitalism produces its wealth not for use but for profit. If Harry Hyams could make another £27 million by building houses and giving them away he would do so. But he, like the wheat farmers of America, like the car and TV makers, like the joinery firm, can actually make more profit by waste. And after all making profit is all that capitalism demands.

This is the thread connecting us to the second part of our case—the part where no breath of popular indignation is ever felt. It is not enough to say that capitalism makes money from waste. The fact is that, unless it wastes a tremendous amount of energy and material, the system simply would not function.

Let us take a look at the way capitalism has to organise its manpower. In this country there is a working population of about 25 million. Some of these are engaged in productive work, some of which is even essential and non-wasteful. But others are doing wasteful unproductive work which is necessary only to capitalism, only needed in a society where goods are made to be bought and sold, in a society with money, with a privileged class and laws to protect those privileges. Here are some figures for those engaged in certain occupations, all of which come under the above descriptions:

• Insurance, banking, finance and business services: 892,700
• Armed Forces                                                           377,000
• Police                                                                          99,135
• Wholesale Distribution                                             545,000
• Retail Distribution                                                  2,008,000
• Clergy, Ministers, Members of Religious Orders        39,520
• Judges, Barristers, Advocates, Solicitors                     35,490

Most of Capitalism’s supporters (which means most people) although they may kick against the waste built into a shoddy car, or into an empty building, think that bank clerks, soldiers, clergymen are necessary. The same way of thinking leads them to approve of the way capitalism tries to solve some of its economic problems. We have already seen how governments will stop wealth being produced, in the interests of profit. They also sometimes try to stop it being distributed.

Currently the American government is raising a storm by its intention of imposing a series of import restrictions, designed to keep some foreign produce out of the country. At present this is confined to some textile goods but other commodities—the rest of textiles and shoes, for example—may be included later. It is not especially relevant to this article that this policy is a direct reversal of the American advocacy of freer trade of not so long ago. The point at the moment is that the goods America is trying to keep out might well be better and cheaper than her home produce. But capitalism cannot apply such standards of judgement; the idea of protectionism, like all the measures which governments take, is to protect—protect profits. In that quest capitalism will actually bolster and protect inefficiency; at one time it will stimulate the movement of wealth, at another stifle that movement.

The patent laws are another way in which the profit motive stifles production. Patents are themselves restrictive, confining the production rights of something which might be better and more efficiently produced elsewhere. In some cases patent rights actually work to stop production. The original patent for stereo recording was taken out in 1931. It was soon acquired by some American companies who, seeing stereo as a threat to their established products, use the rights to prevent production. By the late fifties a glut of hi-fi was threatening the market with stagnation. It was then that stereo was released—almost thirty years after its invention—in an effort to stimulate the market anew and so revive some ailing balance sheets. Needless to say, when it was released the event was heralded as a great step forward in human progress. What other ingenuities, one wonders, are mouldering in pigeon holes, market “Not to be Opened until More Profitable.”?

Socialists are hardened by now to meeting the opinion that the system of production for profit is essentially sane and efficient. The opposite is true; in this article we have looked at only the tiniest fraction of the evidence which says that capitalism wastes its wealth and its abilities. The profit motive cannot work efficiently. Capitalism cannot cater for the needs of its people. It produces waste and it produces want and both are profitable only to the minority who hold positions of privilege.

Ivan

The Social Nature of Modern Production (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is torn by one major contradiction: that the socialisation of wealth-production has developed to an extent undreamt of in former epochs, whilst ownership of the means of production is concentrated in the hands of a minority. World-wide interdependence in production has made a material abundance possible for all mankind, yet the fetters of private property keep the overwhelming majority in poverty. The socialist answer to the poverty problem is to remove the contradiction by making the means of production the common property of society as a whole.

Most workers who support the social system that keeps them poor think in terms of greater productivity, more technology or other nostrums of capitalism. They fail to grasp that the problem of production has been solved. Nor do they realise that the abolition of private property will end all forms of exchange including barter and will result in free access according to need. Consequently such questions are asked as “say I made bicycles and wanted other things made by other people who don’t want bicycles, how do I get them without money?” These questions show a lack of knowledge of how production is carried out under any form of society. It suggests that individuals carry out the production of objects from start to finish and by virtue of this have rights of ownership. This has never been so and under capitalism, the producers do not even own the places they work in, nor the tools, materials and finished product. These belong to the non-producing capitalist class.

No single person could produce a bicycle right through. Nor in fact does any single industrial combine, huge and diversified as some are. The ores for the metals and their alloys have to be found, mined and processed. The metals have to be shaped and treated to make the tubes for the frame, sprockets, chains, ball bearings, wheels and other component parts. These processes need machinery of many specialised kinds. Transport of all types to move the materials through the various stages and processes, sometimes over great distances; electricity to power the machines, and the fuels to supply the power to generators are also essential. Then there is the paint and chrome-plating to be seen to. No bike can do without tyres, needing rubber from the plantations of South East Asia, cotton for the carcass and steel wire for the beading. The bicycle like other articles is not only the product of co-operative labour, but of a certain form of society. The techniques involved are of a highly sophisticated kind. They are not made in ones and two’s but in millions. The world is involved in producing them and they are available for the markets of the world.

Joe Carter

Editorial: Human Needs and World Resources (1970)

Editorial from the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

No comprehensive and detailed survey world’s resources in relation to needs of its people has ever been made. Those able to do this, the scientists and statisticians working for governments and inter-governmental organisations, have never been asked to collect this information. The politicians to whom they are responsible and whose task it is to preserve the capitalist system are not interested in whether the world could produce enough to meet human needs. They are more concerned with seeing that no more is produced than can be sold profitably. Nor would welcome a survey that would expose the wasteful and restrictive nature of the system they uphold,

Nevertheless scientists have examined separately the various aspects of this question and their findings do establish one fact: the world has, and has had for some time now, the natural, industrial and human resources to provide for the needs of all its people.

In stating this we are merely saying what any well-informed person should already know. But in our attempts to convince people that Socialism (a world based on common ownership with production solely for use) would be a workable alternative to capitalism we come across a well-entrenched popular prejudice. We are told that the resources to abolish hunger and slums and ill-health and ignorance just do not exist. This is a prejudice that is encouraged by the economics that is today taught in the schools and universities with its loose talk of “scarce resources”. Of course the supplies of what mankind needs are not limitless, but they are still enough to more than meet what is likely to to be needed in the foreseeable future. The problem is not allocating scarce resources but arranging for abundance to be produced.

We are devoting most of this issue of the Socialist Standard to combating this prejudice by presenting the evidence on which we base our claim that a world of abundance is technically possible. We shall also argue that it will not be socially possible until a social revolution has made the world’s resources the common property of all mankind so that there will no longer be any vested interests to prevent their being used to satisfy human needs.

Robens admits it again (1970)

From the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Robens, the chairman of the National Coal Board, has again stated that the nationalised coal industry is run on state capitalist lines. He told the annual conference of the National Union of Mineworkers in Douglas on 9 July:

  In 1961 the Tory Government produced the White Paper called "Financial and Economic Obligations of Nationalised Industries". With this, the old Morrisonian concept of the socialist philosophy of public ownership gave way to State Capitalism; which even the return of a Socialist Government did not change.

The last Labour government (which Lord Robens as a member of the Labour Party supported) was not socialist. Nor were the nationalised industries run on socialist lines up until 1961. Herbert Morrison’s philosophy was merely that these industries should subsidise the private sector rather than try to make profits themselves. Oddly enough Morrison once himself denounced one public corporation, the Port of London Authority as a form of capitalism (Daily Herald, 30 July, 1923)

One World (1970)

Book Review from the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Buckminster Fuller Reader. Edited by James Meller. (Jonathan Cape. 48s.)

Socialists devised the slogan 'One World" as a concise description of the society we are striving for. Socialism means that the whole world will operate as a single productive system where goods and services will be produced so that people can use them freely without resorting to buying and selling. It also means that the people of the world will be united on the only solid basis for achieving this end—by the resources of the world (the means of producing wealth) being owned in common and democratically controlled by mankind as a whole. "One World”, then, represents an entirely different vision of the future to such schemes as the “United Nations" or "Internationalism” which, as their names imply, are attempts to improvise a patchwork from the fragments which capitalism makes of the world.

The American scientist Buckminster Fuller, whose work over more than forty years has brought him recognition as an architect and industrial designer, is not a socialist. But his understanding of what industrialisation has done to the world, and the potential abundance it gives rise to, has led him to a number of conclusions which are similar to ours. Since the problems which face mankind are "whole- world problems", since culturally and scientifically we are all enrolled in a "One World University”, given the "world-girdling air transport and communication services”, what we are rapidly being confronted by is a “constantly shrinking ‘one-town world’."

   Any who have looked at the jet plane schedules know that they can fly to the furthermost points around the earth from where they start in less than twenty hours, so that within the day they can reach the furthermost point of the earth. Projecting for only five years, you find the speed is such that you will be able to leave your home any morning, go to any part of the earth to do your day’s work, and come home for dinner. And if our definition of a town is a place where you work and sleep, then in five years from today we can have a one-town world. What has been a theoretical and idealistic concept will be stark reality.

Because of industrialisation, “wealth is now without practical limit.” Traditional ways of thinking of consumption (‘you can’t have your cake and eat it’) are completely outdated. "You can now have your cake and eat it. The more you eat. the more and the better the quality of the cakes to be had by further production.” “It is complexly clear that ail men now may be successful in living in a progressively satisfactory enjoyment of total earth”. At last we have the ability to "make man a success on earth” and the sequelae of a step like this do not escape Professor Fuller. “If this is successfully done, the Malthusian and Darwinian frustrations will be completely irrelevant. There will be enough to go around, and the politicians will have no mandate to build weapons.” “There is a dawning awareness that I am saying something realistic when I say ‘Reform the environment, don’t try to reform man’.”

The trouble with Buckminster Fuller and other brilliant men like him is that while their scientific training and technological expertise make it clear to them that “we will soon have to design the overall industrial network for making the world work for all humanity”, politically they have never climbed out of their cradles. True. Professor Fuller dismisses what he calls "gold capitalism” (“as obsolete as the stone hammer") and even his rejection of socialism is fair enough (“Socialism was one of yesterday’s ways of dealing with inadequate wealth”)—because by 'socialism’ he simply means either a state capitalist system or government intervention in the American economy. What he doesn’t call into question, however, is capitalism’s motive force—the production of goods for sale on the world markets in order to realise a profit. As long as this is the priority which production is he is dedicated to proving to be technically feasible is bound to remain a dead letter.

The Buckminster Fuller Reader is a useful anthology of his speeches and writings over the last forty-odd years and is only marred by the fact that it is unreadable Professor Fuller’s prose has to be seen to be believed. Sample sentence — "Environment embraces a complex of non-simultaneously occurring but omni-integrating, or inter-stimulating and therefore inter-regenerating mutations of man’s integral, internal, metabolic regeneration organisms on the one hand, and on the other of his external, invention realised metabolic regeneration organism which we think and speak of as industrialisation.” If that whets your appetite there is a copy in the Socialist Party’s library.

John Crump

Obituary: A. S. Wilson (1970)

Obituary from the August 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to announce the death of Comrade Wilson of North Wales. Comrade Wilson had been a members for many years, having been active in Cardiff and Newport areas. Latterly, he has been living in Caernarvon and served as a contact for the Party in that area.

We extend our sympathy to his wife and family.