Showing posts with label Caroline Lucas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Caroline Lucas. Show all posts

Thursday, May 13, 2021

The Green New Deal (2021)

From the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard
 
The Green New Deal is a general name for a set of supposedly radical reforms of capitalism, based on environmental considerations, aimed at generating jobs, combatting inequality and addressing ecological problems. It covers a number of different proposals, though they all have quite a lot in common. Here we examine various ideas falling under this heading.
Let’s start with the Green New Deal UK (www.greennewdealuk.org), which includes simple slogans such as creating secure jobs, transforming the economy and restoring habitats. It is intended to rely on the support of both the public and politicians, with local hubs working to develop awareness and support. There will be a transition from fossil fuels to renewables. It will cost billions of pounds, but then climate breakdown and inequality cost far more, they say. Government funding would come from things such as ending tax breaks for fossil fuel extraction and stamping out tax dodging. This organisation has general ‘defining principles’, rather than policy stances on single issues.

There’s also the Green New Deal Group (greennewdealgroup.org). The Green New Deal as they see it ‘will deliver an environmental transformation of our economy and society’. Climate and inequality problems will be addressed, with the economy decarbonised. Taxes will be reformed, but government investment will be the catalyst for the plan. Pensions and savings will be more secure, and the UK will show ‘real world leadership’. There will be investment in energy conservation and renewables. The Green New Deal Bill (tabled by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas) would introduce legally-binding targets, appoint a New Green Deal Commission, end the supposed fixation on growth, and transform energy supplies and the transport system.

The Labour Party’s 2019 election manifesto did refer to a Green New Deal, but spoke more of a Green Industrial Revolution (a term also used more recently by Boris Johnson) to rebuild towns, provide well-paid jobs, cut energy bills and so on, with the costs being borne by the wealthy. A Sustainable Investment Board would oversee investment; there would be 7,000 new offshore wind turbines, with fracking permanently banned but new nuclear power.

One even simpler ‘solution’ is a carbon tax (Henry Jacobi in the Guardian, 5 January), designed to raise the price of coal, oil and natural gas. This would be imposed at the wellhead or mine mouth, so increasing the cost of all carbon-intensive goods and making more environmentally friendly ones more competitive.

Beyond the UK, we can look at the Blueprint for Europe’s Just Transition, produced in 2019 by the Green New Deal for Europe, an organisation comprising politicians, journalists and academics (www.gndforeurope.com). Working at the level of the EU, it proposes eighty-five specific policies, including funding public taxis, phasing out plane journeys and democratising finance, and is thus rather more detailed than the UK equivalents. These and other policies are intended to address the ‘three overlapping crises’: economic (rising poverty and insecurity), climate and environmental, and democratic (with people being disconnected from decision-making).

Three new institutions would be established. Green Public Works (GPW) would be an investment programme, financed through green bonds backed by the European Central Bank. Its investments would be aimed at environmental sustainability, for instance by improved insulation in houses, and it would also invest in worker-owned co-operatives. The Environmental Union (EnU) would introduce regulations to ensure that Europe would be ‘a global leader on the green transition’. Fossil-fuel investments would be penalised and agriculture made more sustainable. Finally, the Environmental Justice Commission (EJC) would aim to ensure fairness at international, intersectional and intergenerational levels; the last would look to justice for future generations that will inherit the planet.

In the US in 2019 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez set out her version of the Green New Deal in the form of a House Resolution. The aim is to make the US carbon-neutral by 2030, with a view to this applying to the whole world by 2050. Almost all power would come from wind and solar energy, buildings would be made more energy-efficient, and steps would be taken to reduce emissions from agriculture. It offers a broad approach, rather than specific legislation on each goal. Among this is the intention ‘to create millions of good high-wage jobs and ensure prosperity and economic security for all people of the United States.’ The methods include ‘building resiliency against climate change-related disasters’, ‘removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere’, ‘ensuring that the Federal Government takes into account the complete environmental and social costs of emissions’ and ‘guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security’ for all Americans, who will moreover supposedly enjoy high-quality health care, adequate housing, economic security and so on.

In an interview in the Guardian (13 February), Bill Gates noted that 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases are emitted each year, and that reducing this to net zero even by 2050 is quite a challenging task. Transport accounts for one-sixth of this, and the slowdown resulting from the Covid pandemic has meant a reduction of just five percent in greenhouse gas emissions. Making a ton of cement (which is more or less essential for much building work) results in a ton of carbon dioxide; one possible solution is to take recycled carbon dioxide and inject it back into the cement. Gates dismisses the Green New Deal (in its US instantiation) as a ‘fairytale’, as carbon neutrality in a decade is just unachievable: short-term measures will simply be insufficient.

The Green New Deal UK’s FAQ notes that ‘Currently, the market focuses on short-term profits for shareholders, protecting the interests of large corporations and super-rich individuals.’ Which as a criticism is fine as far as it goes, but it fails to see that the problem is capitalism, not just ‘the market’ and how it works ‘currently’. In fact, this is what’s wrong with all these various Green New Deal proposals: they remain wedded to a system which, by its very nature, has to prioritise profits and short-term considerations, rather than ecological and human-based issues. It is all very well to speak of ‘building resiliency against climate change-related disasters’, for instance, but saying that contributes nothing to achieving such a desirable aim. And jobs for all is just impossible under a system based on profit, where the market’s need for workers can change according to alterations in consumer demand, price rises, technological changes and the consequences of competition. Most of the aims and policies of the various Green New Dealers are truly utopian, aiming at a goal which cannot be realised under a system of production that simply cannot put the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants in first place.

Of course, it is possible to fund public taxis and invest in renewable energy. But going against the grain of capitalism is simply not possible. The various versions of the Green New Deal are just different attempts to make a system based on profit into one built around ecological considerations, and that is just not doable.
Paul Bennett

Monday, September 16, 2019

The Guardian: Haven for Cranks (2012)

From the October 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

One way in which the notion that banks can create credit out of thin air has got into circulation has been through the Guardian.

“Money from thin air” was the heading of an article by James Robertson published in 20 March 2008 in which he claimed that
  “commercial banks are allowed to create almost all the money we use. They create it out of thin air and put it into circulation in the form of profit-making loans. They credit those to their customers’ accounts by a simple accounting procedure, and their customers spend the money into circulation.”
That banks give loans cannot be denied –that’s one of their functions –nor that those given a loan spend the money. That’s not the point at issue, which is: Do the banks create this money out of thin air by a simple accounting procedure? Or are they transferring previously existing purchasing power? In other words, are they creating purchasing power that did not exist before? In asserting that they do, Robertson has some other questions to answer. Why do banks compete with each other to attract people’s savings (i.e., money people don’t want to spend for the time being)? What is the difference between a bank and a moneylender? Do moneylenders, pawnbrokers and loan sharks also create money out of thin air when they make a loan? If not, why not?

In an article by Richard Werner and Green Party MP (and then Party Leader) Caroline Lucas on 12 February this year the two asserted that:
  “banks simply pretend that borrowers have deposited the money they lend them, and thus create it out of nothing, when they credit their deposit accounts, adding to the money supply.”
When they make a loan, banks generally do open an account for the borrower to which the amount of the loan is credited, but it does not follow that this has been created “out of nothing”. In fact, it has to come from what the bank has, either from outside depositors or from what they themselves borrow. Banks are essentially financial intermediaries which borrow money (depositing money in a bank is in effect lending it the money) from savers and lend it to investors (those who want money for some project). Their income comes from the rate of interest (if any) they pay those who lend them the money and the higher rate they charge those who borrow it from them. Bank profits are what is left after their expenses (buildings, computers, staff costs, etc) have been paid out of this income.

In the build-up to the present crisis, according to an article to an article by Deborah Orr (14 July):
  “The big international banks manufactured money, using very simple raw materials. All they needed were computers and borrowers. Every time they made a loan, the banks simply typed the amount they were lending into their computer system, transferred it to their victim’s account, and charged interest for the privilege.”
The fact that she herself described this as “the closest thing to alchemy that humanity ever contrived” ought to have alerted her that there was something wrong with this account.

If the banks she referred to only needed computers and borrowers, how come some of them got into serious difficulty when the rate of interest at which they had been borrowing money on a short-term basis rose, squeezing their income since they were unable to raise the rate they charged borrowers? Clearly, they did need the money to lend as well as their computers.

Orr went on to give her support to a bank reform under which banks would be “lending from their capital, not ‘lending’ money they had conjured up from thin air of cyberspace.” She didn’t seem to realise that this is what banks already do today.

Only a woolly-minded reader of the Guardian would believe the tosh that banks can conjure up the money they lend from “the thin air of cyberspace."
Adam Buick

Monday, December 7, 2015

Pathfinders: Fracking – A Bridge Too Far? (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard
Earthquakes in Blackpool, flaming faucets in New York State. The hot new single issue of this year is surely fracking. Barely anyone even understands what it is yet but already the Greens are against it, and after the Chancellor gave the provisional thumbs-up including tax breaks to the new ‘unconventional gas’ industry in his December budget speech, right-thinking citizens everywhere will know in their hearts that fracking is definitely a ‘very bad thing’.
Fracking, or methane gas extraction through shale rock fracturing, is a text-book example of how capitalism periodically gets itself out of a fix by finding new commodities or techniques to replace old or unprofitable ones. The technique of fracturing rock with explosives and high-pressure water is being billed as new, but it isn’t. Nor is horizontal drilling, which is necessary because shale deposits are spread wide but thinly. The thing that is new is that getting gas this way is now economically and politically viable. Economical because ‘conventional’ gas is unevenly distributed and getting harder to extract, while it looks like everyone apart from Poland has got oodles of this unconventional shale stuff. And politically? Well, we all remember what happened when Russia spitefully turned off Ukraine’s taps in the middle of winter, and we don’t want to go down that unlit alleyway.
Fracking seems almost to have come out of nowhere. As is common in capitalism, and especially the USA, the smart money was straight down the well-heads before anybody thought to ask any awkward questions about regulation. And of course, first thing you know, cows are dropping dead after drinking poisoned water, flames are coming out of kitchen taps, and earthquakes are spilling cups of tea in northern England. Panic duly set in. The UK imposed a moratorium. Sarkozy banned fracking in France. Quebec and Poland followed suit. The main performance may yet turn out to be a success but the overture was certainly a disaster.
There can’t be many people who don’t know that the world is hitting an energy crisis. Oil is peaking, and tar sand oil extraction is a filthy, polluting alternative. Gas reserves are limited, and coal though plentiful is the dirtiest carbon culprit of the lot. Now after Fukushima nobody wants nuclear. Along comes shale gas, like a rabbit out of a hat, and hey presto, the opposition lobby is immediately in business. Protesters in Balcombe, one UK fracking site, insist that it is ‘a very, very short term choice. We really should be putting money into renewables’. Caroline Lucas of the Greens complains of the government’s ‘irrational obsession with hard-to-reach shale and with keeping the UK addicted to fossil fuels’ (BBC Online, 6 December).
These people don’t know what they’re talking about. If the Greens think that this or any government is going to be able to turn renewables, currently just 3.8 percent of the national grid, into a major energy source right in the middle of a depression, they are up a tree. What’s needed is a practical solution to an existing energy problem, and fracking looks like being it.
It’s not clean, but it’s 50 percent less carbon-belching than coal. It’s not easy to get but it’s getting easier. The much publicised fire faucets and poisoned water were almost certainly preventable accidents and cowboy carelessness at the well-head, rather than leaks from the kilometres-deep seams.
Although it’s still early days and nobody’s really sure how big the deposits are, the current global estimate is of around 250 years worth of shale gas at current usage, with the likelihood of revision upward not downward. This changes the whole energy debate at a stroke. Now the talk is of a bridging fuel to a low-carbon future, ie renewables, that could be a more realistic century away. The Greens are aghast. Their whole strategy relied on states having no get-out clause, and this doable solution is the last thing they want. They believe, not without justification, that ‘realistic’ is politician-code for ‘never’, and that fracking will allow governments to ignore any investment in renewables for the foreseeable future. They are no doubt entirely correct in this appraisal, but that’s an argument against capitalist politicians, not an argument against fracking.
This being capitalism, one would hardly expect the development of fracking to be straightforward and problem-free. One must remember that it is not a matter of answering the call of global need, which is fairly steady and predictable, but rather the call of profit, which certainly is not. Thus the US fracking bonanza has already depressed local gas prices, causing a minor energy slump and shareholder panic, but worse, investment has also slumped in conventional drilling and liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology. Since there is a decade-long lead time in the energy business between investment and return, we get the ludicrous situation, which only capitalism could create, that 10 years from now there could be a global shortage of gas due to its very abundance deterring current investors. If you want an example of capitalist absurdity you could do worse than this one.
Beyond this, it’s not really for socialists to take a position on fracking, either pro or con. It’s not a class issue, after all. If regulated properly, which is a big ‘if’ in some countries, there doesn’t at present seem to be much of a case against it. It’s true that methane produces 25 times more global heating than carbon, and there is some early and tentative evidence that it might leak up through the soil (New Scientist, 24 November), but it’s not a long-stay gas so its effect is not likely to be as severe. If every new technology was abandoned directly there was a small accident, we would not have cars, planes, electricity or even steam power. Fracking is new, and the idea of blowing up the ground under our feet may seem intuitively alarming, but geologically speaking it’s fairly insignificant unless some fool drills into an existing fault, and besides, what other immediate alternative is there? If the world miraculously mined its invaluable seam of common sense and abolished the real disaster  of private capital accumulation through the market system, we’d still have an energy problem and fracking would still look like a good bridging solution. Only in that case the world’s people might take the question of renewables with rather more seriousness than short-term capitalist politicians will. If the Greens ever want their arguments to carry any force, they should get real and support workers to abolish capitalism first.
PJS

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Green-lite reformism (2009)

Book Review from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fuelling a Food Crisis – The impact of peak oil on food security. By Caroline Lucas, Andy Jones and Colin Hines. (See here for more details).

Current methods of food production and distribution are having a negative effect on the environment. The facts of the case are set out in this report by Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas and the two others, on behalf of the Green Group in the European Parliament, even though the measures they offer are no more than “green-lite” reforms.

They show that the increased industrialisation of farming, particularly following the end of WW2, means that current methods now consume 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture and in the most extreme cases “100 fold or more.” “Including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, processing and feedstocks for agricultural chemicals – the modern food system consumes roughly 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.”

The UK has developed an increasing dependence on imported food. Figures from the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) show that between 1988 and 2002 imports in tonnes increased by 38 percent and that 50 percent of all vegetables and 95 percent of all fruit consumed in the UK now come from overseas.

How necessary are these imports for the consumers? The 'New Economics Foundation', in its UK Interdependence Report for 2006, published a list of food imports and exports, showing a two-way process of similar products travelling in opposite directions being both imports and exports simultaneously: in 2004, UK imported 10.2 million kilos of milk and cream from France – and exported 9.9 million kilos of milk and cream to France. The figures traded between UK and Germany for milk and cream were 15.5 million kilos to and 17.2 million kilos from the UK. UK imported 1.5 million kilos of potatoes from Germany and exported 1.5 million kilos of potatoes to Germany. UK imported 44,000 tonnes of frozen boneless chicken and exported 51,000 tonnes of fresh boneless chicken (countries not specified).

These examples are a tiny fraction of the crazy methods of the globalised food trade which have scant regard for either environmental protection or actual consumers.

A report for DEFRA in 2005 on “The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development” concluded:
“Transport of food by air has the highest CO2 emissions per tonne and is the fastest growing mode. Although air freight of food accounts for only 1 percent of food tonne kilometres and 0.1 percent of vehicle kilometres it produces 11/ percent /of the food transport CO2 equivalent emissions.” (https://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles/final.pdf)
Whilst the UK imports almost twice as much food as it exports vegetable and fruit imports account for over 60 percent of its food air freight. This is the upside-down world where there are, on the one hand, international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while, on the other, trade agreements to exchange foods internationally involving unnecessarily flying foodstuffs around the globe, so increasing the emissions.

Food has to be transported but all transportation is at cost to the environment. How it is transported and how far are not decisions about which the consumer is consulted. Individuals could make a difference by the choices they make using their own moral code – providing they are equipped with all the available information – but, like travel, unrestricted flying, expansion of airports etc., individual actions make little impact. Action groups can and do make differences by boycotting certain food outlets or companies to affect their stance on political, humanitarian or moral issues (apartheid South Africa, Nestlé's infant food formula sold in countries where customers had no access to clean water for mixing it, Fair Trade products) but these successes, whether small or substantial, don't address the root problem and there's always the need for yet another campaign.

Also topsy-turvy are the various goals set for using crops as alternative fuels. The authors quote George Monbiot that “It has been calculated that meeting the EU's target for 20 percent of transport fuel to come from biodiesel by 2020 would consume almost all of Britain's croplands.” Presumably, attempting to achieve this target would imply relying even more heavily on imported food with all the associated extra environmental damage, plus the damage to domestic farmland and the environment from growing a monocrop.

Then there is the environmental impact of modern industrial agriculture's use of fertilisers:
“The manufacture of synthetic fertilisers is particularly energy intensive and accounts for around one third of the UK's agricultural energy consumption. It has been estimated that 40 percent of world food protein now relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.” “The fourth most traded bulk commodity in world shipping trade after iron ore, coal and cereals is fertilisers and their raw materials.”
Peak oil and natural gas are not seen as a problem for future manufacturing in the fertiliser industry as there are sufficient coal reserves for 200 or so years at current production levels. “The consequences in terms of climate change, however, would be catastrophic. Additionally, production of ammonia from coal is 70 percent more energy intensive than production from natural gas.” Fertilisers are both big business and big polluters. Damage is caused during production, during distribution and to soil and water post-use, upsetting natural soil balance and leaching into water sources.

The authors conclude:
“The mandatory rules of trade that promote the interests of agribusiness, industrial production and long distance transport, and that force countries to compete to produce each other's food at the expense of domestic production . . . are a disaster for food security, particularly in poorer countries, as subsistence farmers are increasingly put out of business or forced into export production instead.”
As alternatives to this environmentally destructive madness what do they recommend?
“Relocating our food systems will require a complete change of direction, away from the policies of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and the rules of the World Trade Organisation . . . Instead, the central aim of trade and food policy should be a just and environmentally sound food security programme, for all nations."
They go on to list some measures (i.e. reforms) that "would be instrumental in helping to meet the challenge." For instance,. "Production methods would have to meet key environmental and animal welfare standards, as well as provide healthy food . . . the reduction of fossil fuel use would need to be prioritised across the framework." Other proposed measures include fair wages and adequate income, national import controls as a prerogative of all countries, reduced profit margins for food processors and supermarkets, restricting the market share of individual supermarkets, promoting self-reliance and ending subsidised dumping, and rewriting the EU Treaty and the rules of the WTO.

The trouble is that each one of these reforms, or something similar, has been promoted, implemented, tried, reworked and discarded in favour of whatever is the latest fad. They are offering palliative treatment when only invasive surgery will do. As for agriculture and the environment, there is plenty of evidence pointing to how to get well and truly onto a sustainable path worldwide. Studies and statistics abound from universities, national and international farming networks, coalitions on food sovereignty, and organic farming which demonstrate that traditional intensive farming methods can out-perform industrial agricultural methods and are more beneficial to the health of both people and the environment. People may desire this change but the economic framework of capitalism won’t allow it.

"At a time when water tables are falling, temperatures are rising as a result of climate change and oil supplies will soon be shrinking the need for decisive action could not be more urgent." Without a doubt. But, whilst the authors set out a wealth of solid information, and display a desire both to improve the lot of worldwide farmers and to ensure enough healthy food for all, their focus throughout their report on the monetary costs of everything – inevitable in a capitalist world – is their downfall for it is this very element that is fuelling both the food and the environmental crises.
Janet Surman

Friday, September 19, 2008

The end of capitalism - or just of "neo-liberalism"?

From the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

In the 1980s, with Reagan in America and Thatcher in Britain, it became acceptable amongst the system’s supporters to use the word "capitalism" again. Before that if you used it you risked being called a "communist". But by capitalism they meant the ideology of free-market, private-enterprise capitalism, a capitalism with much less state intervention and regulation than up till then.

The supporters of the old form of mixed private/state capitalism were appalled. They denounced the new form taken by capitalism as "neo-liberalism", using the term "liberal" in its 19th century sense when the Manchester cotton lords who wanted free trade were supporters of the old Liberal Party.

Both supporters and opponents of free-market capitalism now seem agreed that the current financial and economic crisis represents a turning point. Even the free-marketeers recognise this, though they don't like it. "An historic turning point has been reached", wrote Anatole Kaletsky in the London Times (12 September) following the State take-over of the US mortgage companies, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, "the West is ditching its faith in free markets and private enterprise".

The decision of the US State to let Lehman's go bankrupt revived their spirits a little. "What critics are too hasty to see as capitalism in crisis is, in fact, capitalism in action", the London Times editorialised on 17 September, explaining: "It might be brutal and unforgiving but this is how capitalism works. The market ensures that those who make mistakes are accountable for them". But that was before the US State intervened to try to save AIG, the insurance giant that sponsors Manchester United. Collapse of the stout party.

On the same day the Guardian asked a number of well-known, self-proclaimed "anti-capitalists" -- among them Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Ken Livingstone, Tony Benn, George Galloway, George Monbiot and the leaders of the SWP -- for their views on the current crisis . None of them saw this as a final crisis of capitalism (as of course it isn't). Most of them called for an end to "neo-liberalism" and a return to the more state-regulated capitalism of previous decades. As if this hadn't proved a failure too from the point of view of meeting the needs of wage and salary workers and their families.

Ken Livingstone put it this way: "Sadly, I don't think this will be the end of capitalism. But there is going to have to be a return to a much, much more interventionist state". 1968 students' leader and now a Green MEP Daniel Cohn Bendit followed suit: "It's not the end of capitalism because capitalism has always had the intelligence to reform itself. It will be the end of capitalism when it's incapable of reforming. However, the belief that the market is god is over. It must now be regulated". Fellow Green MEP Caroline Lucas, from the UK, agreed: "This is a defining moment; the end of the kind of unbridled, deregulated capitalism of the past few decades. We are going to have to return finance to its role as servant rather than master of the global economy".

George Monbiot wanted to revive Keynes, the discredited 1930s economist: "A Keynesian solution along the lines of Roosevelt's New Deal could deliver many of the things the left is calling for -- more public spending, more training and education". Respect Party councillor, Salma Yaqoob, and Lindsey German of the SWP were more moderate. They called for just one reform measure. "Why not do something literally concrete on the ground and start building cheaper social housing?" said the one. "The left needs to put forward answers. People have the right to work; we have a housing crisis, so why not employ people to build more houses?" echoed the other. It's true that by concentrating on one reform such as housing these would-be vanguardists have a better chance of fooling people into following them than if they raised a demand for a "Keynesian solution". That wouldn’t "mobilise the masses" and would also expose them for the reformers of capitalism they are in practice.

Chris Harman, Tony Cliff's successor as the SWP's theoretical guru replied, curiously: "This is a very, very serious crisis of capitalism: it has been the build-up of private borrowing that has kept the system going, and it's coming unstuck". Since when has capitalism been kept going by consumer spending, whether financed by borrowing or not? This is a new version of the SWP's old mistake of thinking that what kept capitalism going was arms spending (exposed as wrong when arms spending was cut and capitalism kept going).

What keeps capitalism going as an economic system is the pursuit and attainment of profits. It falters when profits are not attained, though it can also be temporarily upset by a financial crisis. What also keeps capitalism going is of course, politically, the support or acquiescence of the vast majority of the population who see no alternative to the money-wages-profit system that is capitalism. Livingstone, Galloway, Benn, the SWP and the Greens, in only criticising "neo-liberalism" and advocating instead what might be called a "neo-statism", are not helping to dissipate this acceptance of some form of capitalism as the only possible way of organising the production and distribution of wealth.

The only real alternative to capitalism, whether private enterprise or state capitalist or a mixture of the two, is a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, with production to meet people's needs not to make profits and distribution on the principle of "from each according to ability, to each according to needs". A view the Guardian too omitted to mention.
Adam Buick