Running Commentary: Clerics’ confusion (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clerics’ confusion

Are we all god 's children, or are some of us — women — rather more distant relations of his — nieces perhaps? Are we all made in his immaculate image or are those of us in the female sex less capable than those of the male gender?

The Church of England, which purports to instruct us in morality and keeping our place as docile wage slaves in the capitalist order of things, is having difficulty in deciding whether to allow women the same opportunity to be ordained as men. The recent vote of the Synod, to refer the issue to a panel of 53 bishops, was not so much a decision as a deferment, in the hope that the slickest religious brains in the church can use the next six months or so to cook up a face-saving compromise.

This is all rather curious. The church has been operating for centuries as a bunch of intellectual storm-troopers (although latterly rather more like a company in Dad's Army) for class society. Do they think they might perform better, on behalf of the ruling class, if women were allowed to dress up in those silly clothes, perform the same meaningless rituals and preach to us about the rewards waiting in heaven for all who do their duty for capitalism?

On the other hand, why should any of them oppose women priests? (Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, hinted broadly that he would leave the church if women are to be ordained. Not exactly a grievous loss to us if he did). Other churches have female priests, as does the Anglican church in some other countries. They don't seem to have any problems in doing the church's work of putting across the baseless, reactionary nonsense of religion.

This brings us to the most important question, of why women should want an equal right to become priests, especially if this means first being insulted by people like Graham Leonard. Of course, it's all part of the drive for sexual equality, for proving that women can do any job as efficiently as men. So far the jobs where this has been proved have included the armed forces (in some states there are female combat troops); the police (watch Hill Street Blues of a Saturday night to see how a girl can handle a truncheon); the prison service (there are now female governors of male prisons in Britain, making sure the prisoners are firmly locked away and punished appropriately); and of course there's the Prime Ministership . . .

Perhaps there are some women libbers who think it is a worthwhile result for their long campaign, that they can now do the same dirty work for capitalism as men. In fact, there are worthier aims to campaign for. Like a society free, not just of sexual inequality and repression but also of the religious hypocrisy which has helped to keep us all — and especially women — enslaved for too long.

Health service priorities

Another recent demonstration of the perverse priorities in capitalism is the statement by Norman Fowler, the Social Services secretary, that he has authorised health authorities to pay managers bonuses of up to £3.960 for making cuts in health service expenditure — cuts that are likely to entail the closure of hospitals.

Health service managers who don't mind acting as the government’s hatchet people can expect an extra £ 1.660 a year if they are general managers (five per cent on top of their annual salary of £33.200); for district managers £3,160 (ten per cent of their maximum of £31.600); and for unit managers. who run individual hospitals, an extra £3.960. or up to 15 per cent of the maximum salary of £26.400.

One of the ways in which the government seeks to justify its programme of hospital closures is through the cosy euphemism of "community care". This is the name given to the plan to remove many long-term sick, disabled and mentally ill from hospitals to be "cared for" in the community. Most people would accept that being looked after by loving friends, family or neighbours backed up by appropriate medical, nursing and social work support is preferable to incarceration in impersonal hospital wards. Unfortunately the reality of "community care" is often very different. Many long-stay hospital patients have remained in hospital precisely because they don't have family or friends willing or able to care for them; social services and community medical provision are already over-stretched and are unable to provide the support that would make "community care" a reality; there are insufficient resources being put into sheltered housing, group homes and day centres. The result is that the reality of "community care" for many people is a lonely, near-destitute existence in a depressing hostel; or homelessness or. for some, relapse into illness and a return to hospital.

Health service managers are being offered bribes to close hospitals, not because they are no longer needed but because meeting the needs of those who make up waiting list statistics is too expensive. Neither are hospitals being closed because "community care" is a more humane alternative. They are being closed because it is a cheaper alternative.

Policing pupils

Over the last few months the government has done its best to try to divert attention away from uncomfortable, but real, issues such as the continuing suffering caused by apartheid in South Africa, the failure of economic policies to stem the rise in unemployment, questions being asked about the nuclear power industry after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and so on. Instead we have had our attention focused on a series of pseudo-issues which can be "solved" easily. Litter in the streets: solution — call in capitalist entrepreneur Richard Branson to start a "Clean-Up Britain" campaign. Hippy peace convoys in the New Forest: mobilise an army of police at five in the morning to break up and disperse the camp. Sexual promiscuity among the young: introduce an amendment to the Education Bill to require teachers to stress moral values and family life in sex education classes.

This amendment to the Education Bill attracted considerable media attention and yet at the same time another two amendments were being tacked on to the Bill which, although they attracted less comment, are perhaps more insidious. They will require school governors to pay attention to the view of Chief Officers of the police when making decisions about school curricula and head teachers to take account of Chief Officers' views when organising lessons.

Are the police going to use their newly-acquired influence to ensure that children are taught about road safety, or the necessity of having lights on their bicycles, or what to do if they witness an accident7 So far the evidence suggests that this is not what the police have in mind. The 1983 report from the schools inspectors suggested that the value (to the police) of closer liaison between the police and schools would be that of "intelligence-gathering":

Police forces generally attach considerable importance to the advantages to be gained through unofficial contact with schools. Home-beat officers “drop in" at school during break for a chat with pupils or teachers . . . Most schools welcome and encourage this informal contact and may ask home-beat officers or juvenile bureau officers to have an unofficial "word" with pupils, or their parents, about whom they feel anxious in relation to criminal activity.

Of course there's an official term for this informal, unofficial contact between police and schools — "multi-agency policing". In practice this means that as many different people as possible are co-opted to do the dirty work of the police and inform on their neighbours and fellow workers through neighbourhood watch schemes and the involvement of social workers. Now it seems that the police, having got their foot in the door of school, are going to be allowed some input into the curriculum too.

Most teachers who attempt to talk about the morality of family life in sex education lessons will simply be laughed down by sophisticated teenagers who have their own moral code. But it's much harder to laugh down a police officer who enters the classroom to glean information through chats with pupils or teachers, or a Chief Constable who insists on his right to vet the curriculum.

Blogger's Note:

Though this Running Commentary column is unsigned, there's a strong chance it was written by Janie Percy-Smith. During this period, she was on the Standard editorial committee and was one of the journal's most prolific writers, and the 'Clerics' confusion' piece indicates that the author is female.

It's a rich man's world . . .

 From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

This cartoon was originally part of the Malcolm Prangell article but I believe it merits its own post.

Social reality and social revolution (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whenever workers endeavour to gain a few extra crumbs from the cake they themselves bake the capitalist class and its apologists remind them of the need to be realistic. By which they do not mean that workers should acquaint themselves with Marxian economics and the workings of the class struggle but rather that the employee class should accept less today in exchange for a promise of a share in Utopia tomorrow. In the meantime the working class have to endure the deprivation of their inferior social position, while the capitalist class can continue to enjoy their parasitic privileges derived from profit, interest and rent.

The only problem with the capitalist Utopia of tomorrow is that the closer it gets, the more it resembles the capitalist nightmare of the present. Just like the Christian fairy stories of life after death for those who accept hell on earth, so the economic gurus and assorted media hacks try to convince us that their masters’ fantasies have some basis in reality; prosperity is round the corner. Just be patient. King Capital has only reigned for three centuries. All we have to do is wait a little longer and as if by magic, all social evils will vanish. Magic is the appropriate word; it is probably the greatest con-trick in history.

Capitalism is not the only social system through which human evolution has passed. Before private property relationships evolved the hunter-gatherer groups practised a form of primitive communism. Society was organised on this basis for about 40.000 years. As people discovered new ways of living such as farming in settled communities so the communistic social relationships became a fetter to further development. Economic necessity produced the change to private ownership initially taking the form of chattel slavery, then feudalism and finally capitalism. Capitalism has not always been with us and there is no reason to assume it will be. Human society is constantly changing — at times slowly but at others open revolution occurs, as in the capitalist revolutions of 1789 in France and of 1917 in Russia.

But why do societies undergo changes? The realists might explain change by reference to the supernatural (God's will) or the superhuman (the Great Man theory). Socialists look at history in terms of cause and effect. In order to survive men and women must produce and distribute the necessities of life; food, clothing, shelter and so on. Consequently the most important aspect of social organisation is concerned with the ways in which the production and distribution of wealth is arranged.

As Marx wrote in The German Ideology:

We set out from real, active men. and on the basis of their real-life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily. sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality. religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence They have no history, no development; but men. developing their material production and material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness. but consciousness by life.

In other words history is concerned with the development of material production and its effects on other aspects of human society. As the methods of production change they come into conflict with the existing social relationships — a contradiction that can only be resolved by revolution.

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious. artistic or philosophic in short ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. 

(Karl Marx: Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Lawrence & Wishart. pp.20-21.)

The key to understanding any social system is that the economic foundation of society is the basis on which the intellectual superstructure is built; changes in the former lead inevitably to changes in the latter. This does not deny the influence of ideas on history. but analyses the source of these ideas.

Capitalism is a social system based on the private or state ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. The riches of society are monopolised by a parasitical minority; the capitalist class. In contrast the majority working class who produce all the wealth of society have no stake in capitalism. As the means of life are owned by the capitalists, the working class must sell theirmental and physical energies to the capitalists in exchange for a wage or salary. In return the capitalists employ the labour of the wealth producing class in the process of producing and distributing goods and services in the form of commodities. They do this not out of any philanthropic concern for the workers, but with the intention of selling the products on the market at a profit.

Surplus-value does not originate from any special or superior qualities on the part of the capitalists; since labour is the only source of wealth (other than nature) then it follows that it must be the source of the proportion of that wealth which is appropriated by the capitalist class as surplus-value. This is only possible because workers are capable of producing new values in the production process in excess of what is required for the reproduction of their ability to work. Like all other commodities the price that this ability to work (labour-power) can command in the market is determined by what is needed to produce and reproduce it. which means workers are paid as much as they need to go on living.

A class struggle is an inevitable result of the division between those who produce but do not own and those who own and do not produce. Each class tries to increase its share of the socially produced wealth at the expense of the other. The class conflict is institutionalised with the use of trade unions on one side and employers' federations such as the CBI on the other. Generally workers are more successful in periods of boom when the employers seek to avoid interruptions in production. Conversely, during trade depressions workers have to accept less or face the dole, as competition for employment tends to reduce wages and salaries. Necessary though this struggle is. it can never change the inherent nature of capitalism. The ruling class remains and through the state it controls the police, the armed forces and the judiciary; all of which can be deployed in the class struggle.

Production under capitalism is anarchic, as the profit requirement must be placed before the needs of the majority. Capitalism does not exist to serve human need; if the state of the market dictates that goods cannot be sold at a profit production is curtailed, workers sacked and stocks destroyed. That is why tens of millions of human beings starve to death every year, while farmers are subsidised not to produce food and food is accumulated in storage mountains. Alongside over-production for the market there is under-production for human need.

This basic contradiction has remained despite reformist attempts to eradicate working class social problems. They have failed as they address effects rather than the cause: commodity production. Capitalist parties of left, right and centre all claim they can control capitalism; history proves otherwise. Numerous governments have introduced legislation to solve problems such as inadequate housing, unemployment, pollution and racism. Yet all these problems stubbornly remain. Over the last one hundred years politicians, whether sincere or opportunist, have promised us the world; they have delivered today's horror story.

Socialists are not cynics, sneering at the efforts of reformists and offering no solutions of our own. Unlike the reformists, the SPGB and its companion parties abroad do not make promises of Utopia. Indeed we make no promises at all. The social relationships of capitalism must be replaced with those of socialism. Private and state ownership will give way to common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources. Access to wealth will be on the basis of self-determined need and individuals will contribute to society according to their ability. Commodity production with its absurd mechanisms of buying and selling will be confined to the history books.

Socialism will not create itself, nor can it be established by a vanguard. The inhabitants of a society of democratic participation will necessarily have reached a level of consciousness capable of administering it. Socialism presupposes socialist consciousness on the part of the majority, before the revolution. The socialist majority will be able to use bourgeois parliaments and congresses to capture political power and convert the private property relationships into those of common ownership and thereby abolish the state. The great task which confronts the working class is to organise consciously, politically, and democratically throughout the globe so that a speedy end may be wrought to the system which denies us access to the full benefits of modern technology and of the world s resources.

Malcolm Prangell

What price energy? (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The main problem facing humanity when it comes to satisfying its needs is not so much resources — either mineral resources or food resources — as energy. Resources are virtually infinite, the problem is to find the energy to get at them. For most of human existence on the planet Earth the main source of energy for production was the energy of human beings and domestic animals, supplemented by various mechanical devices and by limited amounts of wind and water power. Then, beginning in the 18th century, came the widespread use of steam power (based on burning wood and later coal to heat the water) and. at the beginning of the 20th century. the internal combustion engine (based on burning another fossil fuel. oil).

What will probably turn out to have been the greatest technological advance made by humans since the introduction of agriculture was the discovery of how to generate and use electricity in the second half of the 19th century. Electricity is a form of energy that can be generated by mechanical means (by turbines) and then later transformed back again into mechanical energy to be applied to production when and where required. It can be generated on a large scale (in power stations) or on a small scale (as by windmills and waterfalls) and so can be adapted to various different ways and combinations of ways of living.

Most of the electricity used in the world today is generated by huge steam-powered turbines in which the steam is still, overwhelmingly. raised by burning fossil fuels but also, increasingly, by the heat given off when atoms of uranium and now plutonium are split (nuclear fission). Electricity generated by using turbines turned by water, wind or tidal power is still relatively marginal. From an ideal point of view, burning fossil fuels is an irrational way of using these natural resources since this wastes a large part of their potential as useless and harmful gases.

Nuclear fission, too. is not the long-term solution to humanity’s energy problem since it has been well described as "the dirtiest and most unpleasant method of releasing energy that man has ever discovered". It merits this description because, besides heat, the process of splitting the atom releases lethal radioactivity which can escape into the atmosphere (as at Chernobyl) and which, in any case, remains in the waste products. Nuclear fission reactors should be quickly phased out.if not stopped completely, in any rationally-organised human society, rather than being extended to meet the problem in the supply of fossil fuels. Certainly there can be no humane justification for embarking on the mad idea of building more and more "breeder" reactors (so called because they produce radioactive plutonium which can be re-used as a nuclear fuel).

So what, in a rational world of common ownership and production solely for use, could be the solution to the energy problem? In the light of present-day scientific knowledge. there are two main candidates for the not-too-distant future: solar power and nuclear fusion. Solar energy, in its natural form of heat and light, is the product of nuclear fusion, the sun being a sort of fusion reactor in which atoms of hydrogen are continually being fused into becoming helium, a process which generates huge amounts of heat and light energy. The sun is in fact the source of the energy that sustains all life on Earth (its rays being converted, in the first instance, by plants into chemical energy which serves as food for animals including humans); solar energy is thus nature’s source of energy. It is also the indirect source of some of the other forms of natural energy that humans have been able to harness such as wind and water power. If humans could find a way of harnessing solar energy, then our energy problem would be solved.

Solar batteries, which directly convert the sun’s light rays into electrical energy, already exist and are used in satellites and space vehicles. But an efficient method of doing this at Earth ground-level — where the sun’s rays are much less powerful — has yet to be devised, as the experimental batteries being developed use up more energy than they create. Further research into this is still necessary but a world socialist society would be able to direct resources, such as those that will be released by abandoning all military research, towards it. Another possibility would be to launch a satellite that would function as a power station, converting the sun’s light rays into energy and beaming this down to Earth. But once again until more research has been done, more energy would be needed to get such a power station into orbit than it would initially produce.

At the moment the only practical way of using solar energy, apart from small scale uses in particularly sunny parts of the world, is to use the heat from the sun to raise steam to drive electricity-generating turbines. Such power stations using mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays could be situated in sunny, desert areas and linked to a grid that would allow the electricity to be transported to whatever part of the world it was needed. Since, however, considerable amounts of electricity are lost in transport, such a change-over from fossil fuel and nuclear fission power stations to solar power stations. to be most effective, would demand a corresponding re-allocation of industry to the sunnier parts of the world.

In view of the geo-political considerations involved under capitalism in such a re-allocation of industry — and so also of economic and political power — a change to solar power on a massive scale is unlikely to occur while capitalism lasts. If capitalism is allowed to continue, it is much more likely that the states where industry is currently concentrated will choose to develop nuclear fission power stations, including breeder reactors, in these areas as a way of maintaining their economic and political power. This is one example of how capitalism prevents a rational solution to humanity’s energy problem and a reason why anti-nuclear protestors. justified as their protests are. are unlikely to succeed as long as capitalism lasts.

Nuclear fusion has nothing in common with nuclear fission beyond the fact that both are examples of nuclear engineering. Nuclear fusion is. as its name suggests, a process whereby atoms of the lightest chemical elements are fused together (as in the sun) as opposed to fission when atoms of the heaviest elements are split. Both processes release energy in the form of heat but fission also leaves a radioactive waste material, some of it extremely dangerous, fusion does not. and so to this extent is a clean source of energy.

It is true that, as the equipment used to contain the fusion process will become radioactive, fusion power will not be entirely clean, though the levels of radioactivity involved would be nowhere near those caused by the process of nuclear fission. It is also true that the technically-easiest process, now in the experimental stage, does involve the production of a radioactive gas. but other possible fusion processes could avoid this. If the technical problems involved in these latter can be solved, humanity will have at its disposal a relatively clean and virtually unlimited source of energy since the raw material — an isotope of hydrogen, deuterium — exists in abundance in the sea. to the extent of 1 gramme in every 30 litres.

Since neither solar batteries nor fusion power yet exist in a form that can be applied to production, it is clear that if socialism is established in the near future it is going to have to rely on existing ways of generating electricity, essentially burning oil and coal even if. ideally, this is not the best way of using these resources. Since socialist society will need all the energy it can muster to clean up the initial problem of world poverty and hunger it will inherit from capitalism, on present day knowledge it may well not be able to afford not to use any nuclear fission reactors in existence at the time, dirty and dangerous though they are — though, freed from the profit and cost considerations of capitalism they could be and would be made less dangerous than they are now. It will be a question of deciding to use them temporarily to help eliminate the more pressing evil of deaths from world hunger, disease and poverty. But the aim will have to be to take such reactors out of service as soon as these immediate problems have been cleared up. Nuclear fission reactors have no long-term or even a medium-term future in socialism.

As to whether the substitute that will sooner or later be necessary for power stations based on burning coal or oil will be solar power or nuclear fusion, only future socialist society can decide but since certain forms of power can be applied straight away this would seem to be the obvious choice at the moment.

Adam Buick

Nuclear power — making it clear (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been drawn to our attention that the statement in the June Socialist Standard that "nuclear power could be safe” needs qualifying.

Nuclear fission (splitting the atom) which is the process used in all existing nuclear power stations can never be made safe, not even in socialism, since this is a question of physics not economics It can only be made less dangerous.

What we had in mind was the possibility of being able, within a generation, to construct power stations based on the principle of nuclear fusion. This is a quite different nuclear process in which there would be no danger of a melt-down, nor of any accidental release of radioactivity into the atmosphere. nor any radioactive waste products, the only problem in this respect would be that the equipment used to contain the process would acquire a relatively short-lived radioactivity

Editors.

The teaching business (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

You may have seen adverts for those very exclusive sounding little "tutorial colleges", private cramming colleges, places which seek to guarantee urgently needed A-level or O-level results in a hurry, in return for a suitable fee. All very discreet and polite, very popular perhaps with young students whose parents have got a few quid to spare and who forgot, during their two years of working for A-levels, that that was what they were doing. No Arthur Daleys here, you might think. This is the world of education, and the people who run these colleges must be fine pillars of the educational establishment, devoted to enhancing the cultural tone of life in the 'eighties and getting those diligent pupils through such very noble examinations.

Well, don't you believe it. Having just been employed by a private tutorial college for the past year. 1 can assure you that such colleges measure their so-called educational achievements in pounds and pence from start to finish. Let us start by looking at the glossy prospectus which publicises the college. We are dealing here with a business, a company, an enterprise. The fact that it is supposed to be a question of learning means nothing. Education, like every other human activity, has to be debased by capitalism into a crude transaction, an exchange fraught with fraudulence. The prospectus is distributed mainly in Hong Kong, parts of Africa and the Middle East, as British universities are popular with students from those areas, and to be eligible to take A-levels in local authority colleges you need to have lived in Britain for some time. The prospectus displays an attractive photograph of the London University Senate Building (which, incidentally, was taken over by the government during the second world war for use by the BBC misinformation service. George Orwell worked there and used it as the model for the Ministry of Truth building which he describes in 1984). In very small print it is stated that the college which the prospectus is advertising is round the corner from this imposing building.

Union organisation among the teachers in these colleges is (so far) virtually unheard of. although facilities and conditions for the teaching staff are in many ways particularly poor. The teachers' unions negotiate nationally with the association uniting local authority employers, whose agreements are not binding on this private sector. Pay is strictly by the hour. There is no pay at all during any holidays, bank holidays, absence (even through illness) and so on. Students pay approximately £600 for every O-level they are taking, and £800 for every A-level. Courses in English as a Foreign Language often cost well over £1.000. The college I have been working for has over 300 students registered. I had the opportunity on one occasion to see a note in which the owner has been totting up the accumulated income from these students, which ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Towards the end of the year, some students were complaining that they had not been warned against being over-ambitious in taking on too many subjects at A-level at the start. Standards of teaching are not properly monitored, with teachers being pressurised into teaching subjects which they may not be properly qualified for, rather than turn away potential fee-payers for a possible course. Some teachers, anxious to save some money for the holiday periods when their pay will abruptly cease, take on so many hours of teaching that they cannot possibly hope to prepare all their lessons properly. All of this, combined with the fact that a majority of students have been thrust too rapidly into writing exam papers in English even though it is not their first language, leads to a very poor level of results in many cases. The owner confided to me in an oddly candid moment that an appalling set of results has become the annual expectation. This situation is tolerated as long as it does not form into such a widespread bad reputation that there are no further queues of candidates.

Finally, the payment of teachers is carried out with a penny-pinching obsession which defies comprehension. I have personally kept (and framed) pay-slips which include deductions for "lateness" measured minute by minute, penny by penny. "Teaching" is regarded as a mechanical process, and if a moment passes when that process is not "happening" then the teacher must not be paid for that moment. The terms of the contract of employment are quite draconian: "a teacher who fails to attend any class . . . is liable to instant dismissal. Breach of College Regulations renders the teacher liable to instant dismissal" and so on.

No doubt Kenneth Baker would find all this very inspiring. After all. even the state education system is dominated by commercial considerations, ranging from the poor provision of facilities, understaffing and the present conflict over pay, to the underlying aim of turning out model wage-slaves (who should be expertly adaptable to the art of dealing with the DHSS for long periods). In either case, it is safe to assume that real education. the free process of social learning, has hardly begun.

Clifford Slapper

Poverty — fiddling the books (1986)

From the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Creative accountancy is something which, it is claimed (by accountants, of course) can rescue companies from bankruptcy. It has nothing to do with production (so no need to worry about strikes, shortage of components and the like) and nothing to do with sales (so no need to worry about Japanese competition). It is an imaginative, elegant restructuring of the books so that what were once shown as losses can now be shown as profits. This can sometimes be done through hiding real costs in the accounts, for example:

. . . the (first) nuclear programme was politically determined and exempted from CEGB rate of return tests. Without that exemption no nuclear power stations would have been ordered between 1958 and 1964. (Atomic Crossroads. John Valentine).

Another example came during the coal strike of 1984/5. when it was argued that a change in the accounting method would move many of the pits which the NCB wanted to close out of the red. The mind of the ordinary person in the street may well boggle at such esoteric, unproductive wizardry; it might also grasp how this exposes the central motivation for production under capitalism, how the very concept of profit is so obsessional that it has to be seen to be assuaged regardless of what actually goes on in the real, physical world where coal is physically dug out of the ground by real, living human beings.

We can see a similar unreality when we compare how election promises and party propaganda compare to what actually goes on in the world. This social system is characterised by some horrifying problems, many of them so outrageous that it is difficult to appreciate their full enormity How, for example, do we confront the fact that each year millions of people endure slow, tortured. degrading death through starvation while in EEC countries there is such a "surplus" of grain on the market that the British government are considering paying farmers up to £80 an acre to let their land lie fallow? How do we cope with the fact that the way capitalism uses nuclear power — Chernobyl was the most recent case in such a way that it threatens to blanket vast areas of the world under lethal radiation? How do we keep in proportion the fact that the nuclear powers have amassed enough destructive force to wipe us all out many times over and to leave the world in a condition which no sane person is likely to want to be alive in?

Such things can be accepted — they are accepted by tens of millions of workers — with a little help from the political equivalent of creative accountancy, in which reality becomes lost behind expediency. In some cases, the aim is to convince us that certain problems don’t exist. Unemployment, for example, is due to workers being unwilling to look for work. British nuclear power stations could not possibly blow up like Chernobyl, which everyone knows was made of substandard cardboard and elastic bands. The best medical care is freely available to even the poorest people in this country, which makes us all overflowing with health and vital energy. Of course there are a few matters which still trouble us but they will be dealt with — they are, in Thatcher's recent words, dragons yet to be slain. This style of argument looks good on the political balance sheets in election programmes, newspaper articles, speeches to the party faithful.

This technique has been applied with special vigour and skill to the issue of poverty. First, there is the attempt to convince us that poverty has been wiped out; it was a problem. it is conceded, in the days when the hunger marchers came down from the idle pits and shipyards and when miners were photographed scratching desolately on slag heaps. But things are different now. with millions of cars choking the roads, millions of homes wallowing in the luxury of TV sets, washing machines, microwave ovens . . . Children are better fed, better clothed, than ever. Pensioners, who were once in so desperate a plight that they formed their own pressure group, can now survive comfortably on their benefits, topped up with lunch clubs, charity outings and so on.

However, in the face of these complacent assurances, the poverty lobby persists in churning out facts about the suffering of people who exist on the barest minimum people who are malnourished, who dress in jumble sale cast-offs, who are under the extremities of stress. When the evidence to show that this is happening is too compelling to be denied, another technique is applied, which allows an admission that the problem exists but asserts that it can easily be solved with some adjustments in state benefits or by fiddling with tax thresholds and rates. This is what the Labour Party meant, when they claimed in their 1974 election manifesto that they would ". . .  eliminate poverty wherever it exists in Britain . . . achieve far greater equality of income, wealth and living standards..."

That was a very ambitious promise and since then both Labour and Tory governments have had their chance to bring it to reality. And what have they been able to do? In Britain today something like nine million people — about one sixth of the population live at or below the official poverty line, that is to say at or below the level of Supplementary Benefit. (It is not possible to be any more exact about the numbers because the last official count to be made public was taken in 1981, since when there has been a convenient official silence in the matter; however we do know that since 1981 more than a million people have been added to those on Supplementary Benefit). To put this into proportion, it should be stated what this poverty level is. A single person gets Supplementary Benefit of £29.50 a week; a couple £47.85; a family with two children £68.05, with housing costs paid separately. Not surprisingly. there is some feeling that a more realistic measure of poverty would be rather higher, say 40 per cent above Supplementary Benefit. This would increase the numbers in official poverty to about 15 million, or one in four of the population.

Apart from the official line, there are many ideas about what constitutes poverty. Keith Joseph thought that it is not being able to afford to eat (perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Joseph once preferred to dine on a slice of wrapped British Rail fruit cake - the kind of eccentricity that only the rich can safely indulge). In fact, malnutrition is by no means unknown to people on Supplementary Benefit. Mrs L has five children between 11 years and nine months; her husband is disabled and unemployed and can't lose the drink habit he developed when he was a building worker. Their home reeks of material decay and of despair. Mrs L subsists on a diet of tea and apathy. Then there is Mr J who was a factory manager, many years ago, until the strain of his job pushed him into a mental breakdown and wrecked his marriage. He lives alone now with his anxieties and his bitter memories of the days when he could at least afford to pay the bills. He is, quite simply, starving to death. People like this are beset with advice, from Norman Tebbit's caustic goadings to social workers' desperate attempts to get Mr L to give up his drinking, Mr J to balance his meagre benefits against the costs of living. Against the inexorable effects of poverty, they are fighting a losing battle. In 1984 nearly a million council tenants were behind with their rent, to the tune of about £240 million; 1.5 million electricity users and over one million gas users are currently in serious difficulty over paying their fuel bills; nearly 11,000 people had homes which were described as "theirs" repossessed through mortgage arrears in 1985 — a fourfold increase since 1979. These symptoms are such as can be costed, recorded, put into statistical tables. Less calculable are the other, equally devastating effects of deep poverty — the inability to afford adequate clothes, or decent furniture, or a warm home in winter, or a holiday, or an outing . . .

In one degree or another these deficiencies, or the fear of them, exert a constant pressure on the entire working class — on everyone who depends on employment to live. There is however another group of people who can fall sick, or drink more than is good for them, without descending into unmanageable destitution. The present John Paul Getty suffers from a persistent disorder in his blood circulation; for the past 18 months he has been staying at the London Clinic, where it costs at least £200 a day to be a patient. This is no problem to Getty for his weekly income is in excess of £1 million. The Duke of Westminster recently suffered a reduction in his income, not because he was ill and off work but as a result of the 1967 Leasehold Reform Act which, the Duke complains. has cost his estate about £2½ million in income. There is no need to feel sorry for the Duke, or to offer him considerate advice for he is the richest man in England but we might speculate on the scale of ownership of the means of life which is required to produce an income of £2½ million and reflect that that is only a part of which the Duke owns and a fraction of his income.

Poverty is persistent because it springsfrom the existence of two classes in society — one which includes Getty and the Duke, who own the means of wealth production and distribution, and the other which includes Mrs L and Mr J who don’t own them. This second class needs to be in employment in order to live. When they are in work (although they often tell themselves that they are not impoverished) they receive wages which in general, overall terms amount to about enough to reproduce their working abilities. If for any reason they can't command a wage — if they are out of work or disabled or mentally ill or a single parent — they quickly slide down to the lower reaches of poverty where their very health is at immediate risk. Poverty can't be abolished unless something is done about the way society is organised at its basis. Reforms which promise an end to poverty at the most change its shape, or rearrange its emphasis, or shift its burden from one group of workers to another.

This is what has happened in recent years. The whole system of what is mis-called social security was based on the assumption that unemployment would never again amount to much and that workers who were in work would earn enough to fulfil the modest expectations about their standard of living without any state benefits. One consequence of this was that pensioners were relegated to the lower levels of poverty; in the early 1970s they made up a little over 50 per cent of Britain's worst-off people. There was much doleful debate, during the 1950s and 1960s, about the increase in the numbers of pensioners and about whether "the country" could "afford" to pay out more and more in benefits to them. And then the recession came to change the picture. In 1981 unemployment was said to be responsible for nearly three million people being at or below the official poverty line and was exerting a downward pressure on the wages of those in work. Nearly one million employed workers in Britain earn less than what the European Social Charter specifies as the "decency" wage and over a third of all adults off dally classified as being in poverty are families where the "head" is in full-time employment. Pensioners have now be superseded, as the worst sufferers from poverty, by couples, with or without children, who are in work.

Reformists and pressure groups, in which capitalism abounds, tell us that there is great merit in this shifting of the burden of poverty from one group of workers to another while the capitalist class enjoy their privileged riches. Some years ago, for example, there was a heated debate about whether allowance should be paid by voucher to the mother or to the father by means of an "income tax allowance". It was, as we say, a heated debate — so hot that it shrivelled the important issue of why workers should bother about so trivial an adjustment in their poverty. But the reformers had their way. As long as the working class allow this to continue their poverty, which cruelly represses them, degrades them and often kills them, will continue and the issue of creatively  ending it will not be confronted.

Ivan

Letter: Responding to Lynn (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the April Socialist Standard, under the heading Left Is Not Right, we published a letter from Lynn Stabler, with our reply. Another reader has sent us some comments on Lynn's letter; while we agree with Trevor Swistchew on many points — for example his view of society in Russia as state capitalist — on others we have reservations which are set out at the end of his letter.

Dear Editors,

In my view, one of the main reasons we suffer (and there are many forms of suffering) is because we live our lives selfishly. Capitalism epitomises selfishness in today's world. We are brainwashed to compete with each other, to subscribe to goals defined by figures in authority and to obey laws with little or no protest.

Suffering in terms of hunger or lack of medicine or poor conditions can definitely be linked with the doctrine of capitalism, which denies millions of human beings access to the necessary goods, services or opportunity to make life a more equitable proposition. I personally do not believe that violence can liberate the poor from poverty, yet can understand ongoing poverty and its debilitating effects on people and how this leads to desperation in some cases, and thoughts of revenge in others. It appears to be a mixture of exasperation, frustration and fear. Many people die from unnecessary causes like hunger (in a world where grain is destroyed or stockpiled to keep market prices high) illnesses, which medical science has cured in the Western world. The problem is lack of access to a fair share of all the goods, services and wealth created by labour, managed (and abused) in many cases by capitalists. It is not a matter of hate however, it is really a matter of how to ensure that people can get access to enough of the resources which their labour helps to produce, so that they too can survive. That is what true socialists aspire to. and not to bombing others, or advocating violence. I accept that some people who claim to be socialists do condone violence, in the same way that some Christians too are hypocrites who spout Jesus but live debased lives.

Lynn must not grab hold of bits of socialist theory that suit her arguments and use them to attack other views. Socialist theory and practice takes years to achieve — it actually is worthwhile, and is definitely the superior doctrine to capitalism because socialism, when properly understood, and lived, opens one's eyes to the deliberate injustices committed in the holy name of politics. May I conclude by saying loudly and clearly that Soviet Russia is not a socialist country What they actually practise in the USSR is state capitalism (i.e. the state is the Number One capitalist) as opposed to the land owning gentry in capitalist Britain, Not all who say they are socialists are socialists.

Yours in the hurly-burly,

Trevor Swistchew

Reply:

The ethos of every social system — its morals, laws and so on — is based on its mode of wealth production and exerts its pressure on the people to accept and conform. Capitalism's ethos springs from its nature as a society based on the class ownership of the means of life, the production of wealth as commodities and the drive to accumulate capital. The ideas of the working class — who are the productive. exploited class under capitalism — and the goals which they aspire to. are fashioned under this pressure. It is not possible for the workers as a class to operate selfishly, for their role under capitalism is to perform the enormously generous act of producing all society's wealth but allowing their exploiters to appropriate it while they themselves receive only enough to reproduce their working abilities. On the personal level, despite the pressures of capitalism, there are countless examples of workers behaving co-operatively, even self-sacrificially. A most recent case of this was the tragic bravery of the workers who struggled to control the fire in the reactor at Chernobyl.

The problem of preventable, unnecessary illness afflicts the entire capitalist world. Illness in the "backward" countries may take a different form from that in the "advanced" Western world, where disease is very often associated with the stress of survival under industrial capitalism, but that does not indicate that it is any more of a problem.

Socialists are not aiming at a society of "fair" shares of wealth (which is in any case a dubious concept) but one where everyone has the same rights of access towards society's wealth that is. free access to satisfy self-determined needs. This is not in operation anywhere in the world: thus it is not possible to "live" socialism at present.

Capitalism is managed by members of the working class, who perform all the work, be it mental, manual or managerial, needed to keep the system going.

Socialism cannot be achieved through violence. It must be the act of a majority of workers throughout the world who understand socialism and who take the conscious, democratic step to abolish capitalism and replace it with the society of common ownership. The work of socialists is to change workers' ideas, through debate and persuasion: it cannot be done through violence and repression. The fact that some who advocate violence call themselves socialists illustrates the importance of judging people by what they stand for, not by the label they attach to themselves.

The issue of capitalism or socialism is not a moral one. It is not useful to think in terms of "deliberate injustices" ("justice" itself is a nebulous, variable concept) because even if capitalism were immaculately "just" it would still be a social system which cannot meet the needs of the majority of people. Whatever offences it commits against human interests are in response to its needs as a class divided society.

Capitalism has been a necessary stage in social evolution and now it has outlived its usefulness, making it a hamper on human progress. Its "doctrine" was once revolutionary and progressive but now it is reactionary and decadent. The idea of socialism promises to abolish the problems caused by capitalism but that does not make it "superior" in the strict sense of the term. It is truer to say that it is in line with modern conditions and needs and scientifically expresses the nature of the next stage in human society. Understanding socialism is not a difficult, protracted business: the members of the companion parties of the World Socialist Movement have come to understand socialism not through any special abilities or endurance but because capitalism has convinced them that there is no other way

Editors.

Letter: Sadists in Socialism? (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Friends.

In an otherwise excellent article in the June Socialist Standard titled "Criminal Convictions" it stated "If there was no property, no competition, no oppression, exploitation or deprivation, but instead freedom for all to pursue peaceful, uncorrupted and useful existences, then there would be no violence".

Do you not believe that there are certain individuals whose violence is not due to the symptoms of capitalism but because they actually enjoy inflicting pain on others?

If so. what will become of the anti-social element in a socialist society?

Fraternally.

G Ellis 

Halesworth

Reply:

There is very often a great deal more to be said about the motives of those who are described as enjoying inflicting pain on others; they are not simply sadists. In many cases they have themselves been subjected to rejection and violence. Sometimes they are unable to contain, as most workers are. their responses to the frustrations and repressions which capitalism imposes on us. day after day. Or perhaps a lifetime of alienation has taught them to fear and mistrust any kind of human relationship, or to be unable to admit to any dependence on others.

These examples of social neuroses — and there are many others — spring directly from the way property society operates. Another important example is the way in which capitalism positively encourages workers to enjoy inflicting pain, by rewarding those who are the most efficient and ruthless killers of the ""enemy"' in wartime (Remember the famous "Gotcha" headline in the Sun?)

The advent of socialism will remove the cause of all these problems and so abolish all but a few examples of violence. And those few will be the acts of individuals who are mentally sick, for although socialism will obviously eradicate most mental illness there will probably be isolated cases where it has physical and not social roots. If such people express their sickness in violence they will need to be restrained in the interests of society. But they will be treated as patients, not as criminals and while they are restrained they will also be helped to recover.

Editors.

SPGB Meetings (1986)

Party News from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

50 Years Ago: Socialists and War (1986)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The workers then should throw their weight against war. What does this mean in practice? As the working class have not yet placed themselves in control of the machinery of government, but continue at each election to place the capitalists in control, the latter are in a position to decide when, where and why the armed forces shall be set in motion, and also the amount and nature of the armed forces. The question the capitalists have to consider when deciding whether or not to wage war over any particular international conflict is the probable consequences to themselves. These include the military probabilities, personal danger (from air-raids, etc ), and also the effect war will have on the workers. If the working class, or any large body of them, are hostile to the war the capitalists have to consider how to overcome that hostility and what will be the result if they should fail to do so. To the extent that the workers in any country are alive to their interests and opposed to war the capitalists will be inclined to make some concession to the enemy government, rather than face war. A majority of workers will, however, never be in favour of peace against capitalist wishes while they (the workers) are prepared to support capitalist government, because they will always be ready to accept capitalist reasons for waging a particular war.

[From Socialists and War, Socialist Standard, August 1936. ]

"Human behaviour is plastic" (1986)

Quote from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Changes in social organisation involve drastic changes in human behaviour, and they in turn, depend on the fact that human behaviour is plastic and not genetically fixed. We see once again the absurdity of the notion that human nature cannot change. This commonly made assertion implies that human behaviour is essentially fixed; it is therefore the exact opposite of the truth.

(The Human Species Professor Anthony Barnett)

Observations: Special needs? (1986)

The Observations Column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Special needs?

In capitalism it is money that determines whether or not people's needs are met. This principle applies to the "welfare state" as much as it does to the market for goods. But in the case of the welfare state it is the government which has the power to decide whose needs are to be met (through the allocation of resources) and at what level.

Take, for instance, draft regulations recently drawn up by the DHSS which will restrict the availability of single, or "special", needs payments to supplementary benefit claimants. At present single payments are intended to cover the cost of such essential household items as beds, cookers, heaters, basic items of furniture, and bedding. It is already extremely difficult to obtain this assistance. But the government now intends to make it even more difficult, through the new regulations which will exclude payments for such things as hot water bottles for the elderly and infirm, curtains, cleaning implements. light fittings and other basic household equipment. Certain claimants, such as squatters, will not be eligible for any such payments at all.

The reason given for the new restrictions is contained in a DHSS memorandum (Guardian, 10 June 1986) which states that "there has been since 1981 a rapid and continuous growth in single payments" and "in these circumstances the Government now proposes to bring expenditure back to around the 1984 level . . . and to ensure an orderly administration of the single payment system in the two years before the Government reform proposals take place". (The "reform" referred to is the abolition of single payments and their replacement with a "Social Fund" which will apply even more restrictive criteria to applicants).

So more people are clearly in need and are seeking extra assistance from the DHSS. What is the government’s response? Those needs are first defined as "special needs” and met on a highly selective basis, and later redefined out of existence. And this is called "social security” — part of the "welfare state".


Diagnosis

There is a man in Broadmoor, sent there for killing his wife, who is a brilliant scientist. At the time he was working in the development of guidance systems for inter-continental missiles. An obsessive man, he was liable to bouts of morbid jealousy. One day his wife could stand no more and left him. After a while he gave up his job and walked, brooding, the hundred or so miles to where she was living and there he killed her. The missiles he had been working on are each capable of wiping out hundreds of thousands of people. At his trial the judge listened to social workers, police officers and psychiatrists and it was decided that killing his wife proved that the brilliant scientist was ill and must be locked away in a hospital until he is better.


Fair cops

There is enough for the people of Greater Manchester to worry about in the colourful menace of their Chief Constable, James Anderton, without all this shock-horror-probe stuff about his deputy John Stalker.

Like most of these sordid affairs, the Stalker scandal becomes more outrageous and ruthless with the dragging out of one piece of evidence after another, which hint at corruption and intrigue at what is called A Very High Level.

It all began when Stalker was given the job of looking into the shoot-to-kill policy of the Ulster police, under which some embarrassingly innocent victims had been mown down. If Stalker took this seriously he is at variance with most of the people who have any experience of these matters, who expect as a matter of course that such enquiries are really designed to sweep a scandal under the carpet.

Whatever the truth of this, there is evidence of a campaign to undermine Stalker's standing as a high ranking policeman by showing him up as an associate of criminals and of other people with a reputation for sailing rather too close to the legal winds.

There are many people who have been arrested and harassed by Anderton's and Stalker's police who coknow what it means to be subjected to a sustained persecution. They will probably appreciate the irony in the fact that the same sinister techniques are said to be now applied to Stalker.

How outrageous a scandal is it? A social system based on the interests of a small but powerful minority cannot be open about much of what goes on in the cause of protecting the standing of that minority. Secretiveness (and the British government is noted for its obsessive concern with secrecy and an elegantly worded suppression of the truth) is endemic to capitalism. When it is demanded, the welfare — even the life — of an individual is of no account; even the most devoted servants of capitalism are expendable.

There was, to put it another way, never the slightest chance that Stalker would be allowed to lift the lid off the RUC.

Meanwhile, the workers of Manchester and of the rest of capitalist society should concern themselves with such events only to take what lessons they can from them. The police are employed as a part of capitalism's coercive, privilege protecting machinery. Their role is repression, of people and of the truth when they need to. They do this to sustain a social system which, even were it morally immaculate, without a taint of evasion or corruption, would still be unsupportable for its impoverishment, degradation and murder of millions of human beings.

We must get on with working towards the abolition of this sordid mess, leaving that odious bunch of thugs and twisters to grass each other up.

Open heart surgery (1986)

Theatre Review from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

What would it be like to be black, in the British army, accused of shooting your commanding officer while serving in Northern Ireland and left at the mercy of a sadistic bigot of a sergeant for a gaoler, an upper-class twit of a defence lawyer, and a guilt ridden psychiatrist, as you await the prospect of the court martial?

A new play by Les Smith — Some Kind of Hero — will tell you. This is not satire. I would not demean it by calling it that. No glib leftish parodies here or amusing latex puppets to render the subject matter palatable to a bourgeois audience. The play is witty and amusing yes. but not at the expense of an intimate, head-on treatment of the subject. It is open heart surgery on institutionalised racism and it had the audience on a scalpel edge. If you think theatre should be about more than just entertainment, this play is for you.

Harvey Harwood

New Pamphlet: Women and Socialism (1986)

Party News from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

For thousands of years and in most societies in the world, women have had a worse deal than men. Even today, in the "advanced industrial nations", where physical strength has ceased to have any real value on the labour market, men still get the jobs with more pay. more prestige and more power. Feminists have pressed for, and won, the vote and various pieces of legislation designed to give women equality in education, property rights and employment, but the basic inequalities remain.

Why has feminism failed to bring about women's liberation? A condition which affects half of the working class like this is of major importance to socialists. The new pamphlet produced by The Socialist Party and issued this month re-examines the whole question, looking afresh at the origins of sexual inequality, and then at all the disappointing attempts to rectify it The Russian revolution, which was supposed to be ushering in sexual equality with socialism, did neither; and the pamphlet draws out the inescapable conclusions about Russian society which follow from the present condition of women there.

Particularly valuable to socialist speakers and writers is Chapter Two. which analyses the three main strands of feminist theory and endeavour. Full credit is given to those elements of social analysis which are accurate and unique to feminist thinking And one cannot help but admire the dedication and self-sacrifice of so many of the campaigners for "women s rights" But the fact that so little real advantage has been gained after all this time and effort is, in the end, clearly the result of a fundamental fault in the feminist theory of sexual inequality and discrimination.

Socialists, male and female, are striving for the real emancipation of women. Our analysis shows, however, that this is not an aspect of society that exists in isolation and can be dealt with separately. The last chapter of this new pamphlet demonstrates in detail that the oppression of women can only be effectively ended by eradicating the underlying conditions which cause and perpetuate it. It is a pamphlet which fills a long-standing gap in socialist exposition.

RC

Editorial: Socialism and Ecology (1986)

Editorial from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Only when the Earth has become the common heritage of all will humanity be able to face up to the ecological problems posed by its existence as the only animal species that changes nature to satisfy its needs.

All other animal species merely take (the rest of) nature as they find it, feeding off the plants and/or other animals that nature spontaneously supplies and are in fact, both during and after their lives, part of what nature supplies for other animal species. All forms of plant and animal life are linked together in a network of relationships known as an "ecosystem". This system is normally self-sustaining and self-correcting in the sense that if an imbalance develops it is spontaneously eliminated, either by the old balance being restored or by the establishment of a new balance. This latter course is how change, including evolution, occurs.

The animal species known as homo sapiens is also part of nature and must have evolved out of a related species that at one time also merely lived off the spontaneous fruits of nature, gathering plants and insects. Pre-humans came to be distinguished from the other animals — became "human" — when they began to change nature to satisfy their needs, as for instance by systematically using sticks and stones as weapons to capture and kill other animals which they would otherwise have been unable to do. This introduced a new. potentially disturbing element into the ecosystem that had not existed before. Previous disturbing elements which upset the balance had resulted from changes in the non-living part of nature, from climatic and geological changes. Now the activities of a living species also introduced changes. This human activity — changing nature to supply their needs — is what we call today production and is an activity engaged in by no other animal species.

Production inevitably upsets the previously existing balance of nature. This is not necessarily a problem in itself since, as we saw, a new, different balance will sooner or later come into being and there is no reason to suppose that one particular balance is any better than any other. This new balance, like the old one, will tend to be self-sustaining as long as new changes — such as a change in productive methods — do not happen. Humans are in fact quite capable, despite the production (changing nature to satisfy their needs) they engage in, of being a fully integrated part of a self-sustaining ecology system. This was the case of many early human societies which lived in full harmony with the rest of nature and there is no inherent reason arising from the nature of production why this should not be possible today on the basis of modern technology and productive methods.

It is not production itself that is incompatible with a sustainable balance of nature - though all the great productive innovations, from hunting, fire and metal-working to agriculture and the domestication of animals, will have initially been upsetting factors — but the application of certain productive methods as if there was no balance of nature to be upset or which introduce changes too quickly to allow a new sustainable balance to develop. This, basically, is what capitalism's use. or rather abuse, of industrial methods of production has done over the past two hundred or so years and is still doing today. As a system of society rent by property and class divisions in which economic units compete to achieve relatively short-term economic gains (monetary profits), it is inherently incapable of taking into consideration the longer-term and overall factors which ecological science teaches are of vital importance.

This is why it is only when the original communist condition of humanity is restored, but at a global level with modern technological knowledge, that the ecological problems involved in industrial production and in supplying the needs of over 4.000 million people will be properly faced. Of course capitalism has ultimately to face up to the ecological problems its pursuit of profit creates, but only after the event, after the damage has been done. Capitalism in fact goes on from energy crisis to energy crisis adopting new sources when the old ones have become exhausted or too expensive; it exploits one source after another according to their relative cheapness without any concern for the future.

Humans occupy a unique place in nature. Not only are we the only species that engages in production and the only species whose activities are a potentially disrupting element, but we are also the only conscious part of nature, the only part which can, at least in principle, choose its patterns of behaviour. We are what the ecologist philosopher Murray Bookchin has described as the "self-conscious spokesmen of nature" and as such we have a special responsibility to the rest of nature in the sense of our being the only animal species capable of taking steps to ensure that a sustainable ecological balance is maintained.

Bookchin has attempted to derive from this an "ethic" in the sense of a code of behaviour governing what human societies should and should not do: we should abstain from using productive methods which are incompatible with a sustainable balance of nature or, expressed positively, we should only employ productive methods which are compatible with such a balance. Of course this is not a question of choosing particular productive methods in isolation from the structure of society but of the objectives and so of the structure of society itself.

Clearly, a class-divided society geared to production for profit is incompatible with humans fulfilling their responsibility to the rest of nature since, being governed by economic laws operating as external constraints on human productive activities, such a society allows no free choice as to what productive methods to adopt. In fact it is obliged to adopt those methods which serve profit rather than ecological considerations — with the consequences in terms of pollution, plunder of non-renewable resources and waste that are well-known.

We can only meet our responsibility as "the self-conscious spokesmen of nature" in, and by establishing, a society without property rights and the profit motive, a society in which humans would be free to choose which productive methods to adopt because it would be a society freed from the uncontrollable economic laws of profit-seeking and capital accumulation. Only a world socialist society, based on the common ownership and democratic control of the world's resources, is compatible with human responsibility to the rest of nature.

Capitalism in the Peak District (1986)

From 'The Place Where I Live' series from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Peak District in Derbyshire is an area of great scenic beauty, extending from the 2.000ft high bleak, gritstone plateau of Kinder Scout in the north to the softer, mellow limestone hills of the south. The combination of wooded countryside, meandering rivers winding through beautiful dales, and picturesque stone-built cottages in the scattered villages makes the National Park a ramblers paradise.

The accessibility of the area (it is within 50 miles of Leeds. Manchester. Stoke-on-Trent and Nottingham, and less than 20 miles from Sheffield), the attraction of the "spa-towns" of Buxton and Matlock, and the quaint custom of well-dressing draw large numbers of tourists in the summer months and it may be possible to forget, momentarily, the impoverishment of our lives that capitalism causes. But capitalism is never far away: huge quarries scar the landscape in the search of fluospar and other minerals which are used for making products as diverse as cement and jewellery.

Bakewell, often considered the capital of the Peak District, contains a high proportion of retired people. This is a reminder that the commercial interests of the surrounding industrial areas have overridden environmental and social needs, causing migration from these areas when the 40-50 years stint of wage slavery which workers have to endure is finished.

The wealthiest man in the area is the Duke of Devonshire, who owns Chatsworth House, probably the most elegant property in Britain, which is regularly invaded by tourists who pay for the privilege of seeing the luxury enjoyed by those who profit from the workers’ labour. The present Duke of Devonshire has been in the news in the last two years for selling a small part of his art collection for £6 million and for giving money to prostitutes - a slight set-back for the "pillars of society" who "safeguard the nation's morals". But the power such people have over the lives of workers, because of their wealth and the protection the state gives to them under capitalism, was demonstrated by the moving of Edensor village in 1839 by the 6th Duke of Devonshire because it spoilt his view across the east ridge of Chatsworth Park.

The Peak District and neighbouring towns feature quite prominently in classical literature: Hathersage is the Morton of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. Bakewell is mentioned briefly as Lambton in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Hayfield became Clough End in Mrs. Humphrey Ward's novel David Grieve; George Eliot had local connections, her father came from Roston. near Ashbourne, and the quaint town of Wirksworth, defaced by leadmining, is the Snowfield of Adam Bede while Ashbourne is Oakbourne in the same novel.

Edward Carpenter, social reformer, writer and poet lived in Millthorpe for many years, where he wrote Towards Democracy and My Days and Dreams. His love of the simple life profoundly influenced William Morris who modelled his utopian romance News from Nowhere on Carpenter's cottage and the hospitality he received on his visits there.

The need to make a profit under capitalism has led to the cancellation of a number of bus services in the area. A number of villages have no bus services at all and others are threatened with the same fate. Some of the schools are also under threat of closure because they are too small to be run economically; the priorities of capitalism involve running an education service as cheaply as possible, particularly as trained workers are not needed in such large numbers during a recession.

The village shop is also under threat from the concentration of capital in the hands of the big chains of supermarkets and the attempts to extend trading hours, if successful, would probably be the final straw for small shopkeepers who would not be able to offer an out of hours service free from competition. Without schools, buses and shops the villages would be in danger of dying or become commuter villages, lived in by people whose work, and roots, remained in the industrial towns. The tourist trade manages to make substantial profits from the popularity of the area; Bakewell puddings, Ashbourne ginger bread, bottled spa water, postcards, books dealing with local walks, history, flora, wildlife, well-dressing and mining have all managed to separate the holiday makers from their money.

However much the Peak District manages (relatively) to be an oasis from the ugliness of industry it is never far away; Bolsover, a few miles outside of Chesterfield, has the largest smokeless fuel works in the world; Cromford had the earliest English cotton mill, established by Richard Arkwright in 1771; South Normanton, near Alfreton, was the birthplace in 1726 of Jedediah Strutt, inventor of the ribbed stocking machine.

The area has historical interest too; 1,500 Scottish soldiers were imprisoned in 1648 in St. Thomas’ church at Chapel-En-Le-Frith and many of them died from suffocation. The barbarity of the Black Hole of Calcutta incident perpetrated by Indians on British soldiers is well known but English barbarity has led to a more discreet spread of information. In 1817 the Pentrich Revolution (often incorrectly referred to as the Pentridge Revolution) was brutally put down by the state. Both incidents remind us of the cruelty that the state will resort to when protecting its interests.

Recently the area has had Liberal hearts fluttering because they were only 100 votes behind the Conservative candidate in West Derbyshire's by-election. But when I get a day off from work and walk through the dales in my walking boots bought from a chain store, eat my sandwiches bought from a profitable bakery, or stop at a pub owned by a giant brewery, I realise that whichever capitalist party wins an election it is business as usual.

Carl Pinel