Deals and Lawyers (2025)

Book Review from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cuckooland: Where the Rich Own the Truth. By Tom Burgis. William Collins £10.99.

In December 2022 we reviewed Burgis’ Kleptopia, which examined the machinations of the super-rich to acquire and hide their wealth, with special attention to Kazakhstan. Here he looks at similar activities in a variety of countries. The idea behind the title is that a cuckoo has to get another bird to think that the cuckoo’s egg is its own, thus relying on an illusion, similar to the way in which some people present two versions of themselves.

Others are mentioned, but the focus is on Mohamed Amersi, who is a ‘dealmaker’ in the telecommunications industry. In an emerging market (which Burgis defines as a country where lots of poor people live) there are plenty of opportunities for selling mobile phones for the first time. In former USSR provinces, such as Uzbekistan, telecom licences can be obtained through contacts of various kinds, and Amersi charges a Swedish corporation a ‘success fee’ of half a million dollars. Never mind that the company later paid a massive fine because its partner in Uzbekistan was in fact the daughter of the country’s dictator (all hidden in a shell company in Gibraltar). Amersi did very well out of all this, as the company paid him $63m dollars over six years. As Burgis says, recessions do not happen to the rich.

The second part of the book deals with how the wealthy make and maintain links with politicians and other powerful people (‘access capitalism’). For instance, the Conservatives’ Leaders Group provides monthly lunches with ministers for a mere £50,000 a year. Or you could pay to attend a cheese-tasting session with Liz Truss (no longer available, perhaps). A company called Quintessentially satisfies the whims of the global elite, such as a football signed by Lionel Messi. But things do not always work out as planned. Amersi became involved in a dispute with Charlotte Leslie, a former Tory MP, over which organisation should be in charge of Conservative relations with the Middle East. He sued her for ‘disseminating false and misleading information’, but his suit was dismissed, the judge saying that his actions ‘give real cause for concern’.

This is an example of what is sometimes called ‘lawfare’: the rich and powerful intimidate those who write about them by means of lawsuits which may involve incredibly high legal fees. Even if the lawsuit fails, those who have been subject to it will have undergone a period of anxiety and stress, fearful of being bankrupted, and so may in future decide it is easier not to ruffle the feathers of the elite. Newspaper editors may prefer that their journalists not get involved in such cases. The term used is SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). So, as in the book’s subtitle, the truth is a matter of legal and financial power rather than actual facts on the ground. (Another example would be Trump’s recent attempt to sue US newspapers for billions of dollars.)

A well-argued insight into some of the ways in which some rich people acquire and protect their wealth.

Paul Bennett

Do We Move? (1906)

From the June 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

How it is possible for people to still hold, as so many do, that what is has always been and must be, is very difficult to understand. This difficulty is increased when the rapidity with which change follows change is realised, along with the size and importance of the changes themselves. The vast alterations that have taken place in our social life through the linking of place to place by networks of railways in a manner undreamt of less than two generations ago ; the ease and facility with which one is enabled to travel over great distances of land and sea and the equal ease with which, goods can be carried, have practically resulted in the annihilation of distance as any great barrier between the peoples of the world. So much so, indeed, that the most lengthy journeys that would, but a comparatively short time ago, have been attended with a host of uncertainties and dangers are now undertaken as pleasure trips. The development of the telephonic and telegraphic systems has still further removed the difficulties and disabilities of distance. To-day news reaches us in a few hours that would have necessitated but yesterday a long sea trip lasting perhaps many months. Our postal system and its facilities for communication are essentially of recent date. The days of stage coaches and horse travel are not so far distant as some are prone to imagine.

To mention a few such changes suggests a host of others of a similar nature that will amply illustrate the fact that we are constantly going through a process of development and improvement. Each fresh addition suggests some further one, and like the proverbial snowball, the rapidity of growth increases with the growth itself.

Such developments, as those of transit, etc. which have been instanced, are not without their effect in other directions. Everything that tends in the direction of rendering more accessible a place that previously was inaccessible makes that place more eligible as a market for exporting countries. The spur thus given to competition among capitalists for the new market would hasten economic development and render more efficient the means and methods of producing wealth.

The altering social conditions resulting from any change in economic relations have been too frequently stated to need repetition here. Suffice it to say, that with the growth of the market catered for, grows also the scale on which production is conducted. The larger the business the greater are the economies effected through the medium of the sub-division of labour and the introduction of more and more perfect machinery. Such economic developments result in increasing the co-operative and social nature of production. The way is paved for the trust and the combine, which render still more necessary and easy the collective ownership and control of such industries, in place of the private ownership of such essentially social concerns.

The rapidity of development in the last half century (so insignificant a period in the history of the world and society), and the recognition of the fact that the speed increases rather than decreases, points to yet more startling and far-reaching developments in the future, which, with the conscious co-operation of the working class in the direction dictated by the development itself, will culminate in the readjustment of the Social structure to its altered economic basis, while some people are still mumbling “things are as they were, and will so remain.”

D. K.

Electronic democracy (1998)

Pamphlet Review from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Autonarchy, the Ultimate Democracy. By Akiva Orr. Pamphlet can be downloaded from: http://www/autonarchy.org.il

Autonarchy, a word coined by Orr himself, means literally “self-rule” which in his view can be achieved by instituting what he calls “Magnetic Card Direct Democracy”. Every citizen would have a magnetic card and their own PIN number and all telephones, public as well as private, would be equipped with a device to read these cards. This would enable people to register their votes, which could be counted almost instanteously, on any policy issue put before them (Orr in fact argues that all policy decisions should be made in this way). Questions requiring a policy decision would be drawn up as a range of options by experts in the particular field concerned or proposed by a minimum number of citizens. A special TV channel would be devoted to discussing the pros and cons of the various proposals for policy decision which citizens could look at before deciding which way to vote.

Orr adds some other refinements but the basic idea is clear. Modern communications technology has opened up the possibility for mass participation in decision-making:

“The revolutionary changes in communications technology make it possible, for the first time in history, to sum up millions of decisions taken far apart into a single total in seconds and to display this continuously on millions of TV screens. Political decision-making by millions of people is now possible”.

This is undoubtedly true and some socialists have suggested that it could be used extensively in socialism. Certainly, socialism would be the best framework for such an “electronic democracy” and no doubt this will be incorporated into the democratic decision-making procedures which will be a feature of socialism. Whether people will want to go as far as Orr appears to and have “magnetic card direct democracy” as the only such procedure appears more doubtful as “indirect” elected delegate democracy also has its advantages. Not all decisions can be reduced to a simple “yes-or-no” question, nor can people spend all their time voting.

Orr puts forward his proposal as a move “beyond capitalism, socialism, anarchism”. While he understands the drawbacks of capitalism and anarchism well enough, he misunderstands socialism as “state ownership and rule by a socialist party”. This is not what we would recognise as socialism but is rather state capitalism.

Adam Buick

Your Share in the Wonders of the Age (1956)

From the May 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard 

What Is and What Could Be

At school and in the books and papers that we read we are always being told of the wonderful technical developments of the age we live in. The politicians who oppose Socialism give the theme a propaganda twist by arguing that it is capitalism that gives us these things and we would be foolish to give up the social system that does so much for us. The worker of a century ago, they say, did not have the benefit of all the marvels that the worker in 1956 is free to enjoy. But this is the heart of the matter: is the worker of today free to enjoy them? Let us examine two of the fields in which invention has been most spectacular—transport and communications.

Certain facts are beyond dispute. A hundred years ago there were no motor cars, no high-speed luxury liners, no supersonic air-travel; no telegraphs, no telephones or wireless, no radio or television. Messages can now be flashed round the globe in a few seconds, you can travel far and fast in comfort, news and opinions can be radioed anywhere and picked up by all who have sets, though this means only a smallish minority of the world’s population.

What then is wrong with the argument of defenders of Capitalism? They leave two things out of account. One is that under Capitalism you can only have what you can afford to pay for. The other is that the savage class struggles and international conflicts that Capitalism incites prevent most of these freedoms from being used for the good of mankind. Under Socialism the use of all these technical developments would be freely available to all; under Capitalism they are used, for the most part, as appendages to profit-making industry and commerce, and subject all the time—even for the rich who could afford them—to the demands and restrictions imposed by the greatest of all industries, preparation for war.

Is this an overstatement? Let us see. Let us take first the postal, telegraph, telephone and cable networks. The great bulk of all their traffic is for business and State purposes not for the enjoyment of the private lives of the mass of the population; it is mostly business traffic and would disappear under Socialism. This is even true of the least expensive of them, the postal services. Apart from Pool entries and Xmas cards workers rarely use the posts, and more rarely still the telegraph and cable services. Most of the telephones are business lines or the residential lines of the well to do. A small minority of working class homes have unshared lines but for most workers, using the telephone for personal calls means using the “communal" telephone in apartment houses or the street kiosk, with of course a considerable volume of calls made on the firm’s lines in office hours. Even in U.S.A., where telephone development has gone farthest, large numbers of subscribers put up with the inconveniences of shared lines because they are cheaper. In Russia, telephonically most backward of the Powers, the number of workers who have their own lines is a tiny minority of the working class.

And the chief cause of this everywhere is that the workers' wages do not extend to meeting the cost of an unshared telephone except at the expense of some other comfort or convenience.

The Workers’ Choice

It is the same with motor cars, television sets and travel. Workers are free to choose from all the rich variety spread before them but only within the narrow limits of their wage packets. For many it is only by living in a slum or cramped and dilapidated houses that they can afford their television set, or their old crock of a car that endangers their own and other people's lives on the roads. Why are there 1,500,000 pre-war cars still in use except chiefly because of cheapness? Have a car and a T.V. set and cut down on holidays, clothes and other expenditure: that is the common choice. A News Chronicle reporter, inquiring of five London dealers about people buying new cars found the dealers surprised that money was forthcoming in spite of the raising of the deposit to 50 per cent. He asked some of the purchasers how they did it. “I spoke to four who had, between them, cut smoking, sold the T.V.. sold furniture and economised on food. Two of their wives had gone out to work.” (News Chronicle 2/4/56).

The brewers even complain of falling sales of beer that have accompanied the buying of T.V. sets and travel abroad. Go away on holiday and take the rest of the year to save the money by going to work on cheap early morning tickets packed like half-alive sardines.

You can travel by luxury air-liner all over the world if you have the money: but most workers have never travelled by air, and most of those who have do so only in the Armed Forces when Capitalism is at war. You can holiday abroad, if you have long enough holidays, and if, as a worker, you resign yourself for the rest of the year to going without other things in order to save up the money. The great majority of British workers have never been abroad except for war, and have no passports.

And what of the freedom of movement and communication as progressively narrowed by governments for military and other reasons? Freedom to settle in other countries is more restricted now than for many decades. Trains, cars, ships and planes can easily carry you across frontiers, subject, however, to the restrictions and immigration quotas and entry permits imposed by governments. Hence the widespread and often cosily activities to secure illegal entry, and the dangerous traffic of human beings fleeing across barbed and mined and guarded frontiers of the iron curtain and other countries.

The Marvels of Communication

You can communicate with people living all over the world, provided that, for many countries, you pass the censorship on foreign mails and telegraph calls. The air is free to broadcast—except that a very large port of the world’s radio equipment is now devoted solely to the jamming of foreign broadcasts.

After a century of technical development of communications the flow of information and propaganda over many frontiers is now limited to balloons! (It will probably rise to still higher efficiency and employ the pigeon post).

It may be objected that at least “free" Britain does not engage in these retrograde practices. This objection overlooks the restrictions of entry to this country and the censorship in some colonies; and the new development of British jamming of broadcasts in Cyprus and the Middle East

And here at home the S.P.G.B. has for 20 years been steadfastly refused any opportunity to put the Socialist case on the air by the B.B.C.

This is how Capitalism works in all fields. Under Capitalism the working class have invented, discovered, and produced, all the technical marvels, but Capitalism fetters and distorts them all for the profit-making and military needs of the Capitalist groups of the world.

Edgar Hardcastle

Pathfinders: What will Socialist society do with science? (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the July 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

What will Socialist society do with science?

Most people have no direct experience of science, only of the technology that is an almost incidental by-product of it, yet capitalism pours billions into pure scientific research despite the fact that virtually none of it will ever yield a profit. Why? Because the one per cent that does make a profit will pay for the 99 per cent that doesn’t.

And what will socialism do with pure research? Carry on the same way? Hardly. The problem with science in capitalism is that scientists have mortgages to pay, so they need to chase funding because they can’t afford to work for free.

Much of this funding is from military sources, and weapons systems drive so much research that some have even argued that in socialism we would never have invented the computer! Of course this implies that without military needs no other human needs would surface to take science forward, which is plain nonsense. Valve-state computing may have arisen because of a desire to calculate ballistics, but Babbage’s original ‘computer’ was developed to calculate navigation for ships, a distinctly unmilitary application. So what approach would socialist society take to the great scientific project?

Priorities would certainly be different. Drug research, for instance, will not occur in capitalism if the estimated $800m cost is not likely to be recouped, thus diseases rife in poor countries are overlooked while the top three drug groups by global sales are fat reducers ($26b), anti-ulcerants ($24b) and anti-depressants ($20b) (New Scientist, Jan 15, p.41). Similarly, science would no longer be prostrate at the feet of the military. Global military spending for 2004 was $1trillion. The US spends 40% of this, is home to 5 of the top 6 military corporations (the sixth,BAE Systems, is in the UK), and is the biggest investor in military R&D ($62.8b in 2004) while the UK is the second biggest (£2.6b in 2003-4). (New Scientist, Jan 22,p.19).

While some other lines of research would probably end, for example cosmetics and cosmetic surgery, including most animal testing which is for this purpose, there would be a clear need for continued work in climatology, energy, epidemiology and many others, but it is questionable whether a socialist community would have the same passion as George Bush to send humans to Mars, or to build space hotels.

In capitalism, science is a huge gamble that only occasionally results in a win, but bets are never placed on research that helps people who can’t pay. In socialism, science will still be a gamble, but with the difference that no knowledge thus gained can ever be money lost. It may be that the huge time, resource and work investment in such esoteric projects as Atlas and the Large Hadron Collider, the LIGO gravitational wave detector or the AMANDA neutrino telescope will continue in socialism, but if they do it will be because the population understands and respects scientific enquiry for its own sake, and not because they are expecting to get a new groovy gadget out of it.

What we can say for sure is that curiosity is not likely to be dimmed by some inexplicable post-capitalist apathy in a society that releases scientists as well as all other workers from the compulsion to direct their efforts towards only those endeavours that the capitalist class sees an interest in funding. The freedom from patent and copyright restrictions, which are forms of private ownership and will thus be abolished, will almost certainly unlock a tidal wave of new development which may revolutionise areas of science which are currently at a near-standstill, for instance drug research and computing. In addition, the justifiable fear of what corporations, governments and the military might do with horizon science will no longer hold back developments in gene research and nanotechnology. Lastly, the ending of male domination of science, in which men are four times more likely than women to be scientists (BBC Online Science, June 16) will produce a vast influx of new talent and new ideas that can only advance scientific effort for the acquisition of knowledge and ultimately the betterment of humanity.

Will Socialism be a Gadget Geek’s Paradise?

William Morris’s News From Nowhere (1890) famously describes a deliberately low-tech socialist society in which people have eschewed the benefits of technology and adopted simple ways of doing things, although arguably he cheats by powering his ‘force barges’ with some mysterious energy source he never explains, thus hiding his technology rather than really abolishing it. Nonetheless, this is unusual in that most portraits of the future, whether socialist or not, depict a society of advanced technological splendour in which all our needs are met by a range of technical apparatuses only a voice-command away. The amount of electronic appliances in the average household now massively outweighs that of fifty years ago, and half a century from now we may shudder at the poverty of gadgetry suffered in the early 21st century. Whilst it is true that all our digital delights are products of capitalism, it is not necessarily the case that a socialist society will produce an equal amount of high-tech gadgetry. Because socialist production will meet real rather than false needs, it could be that socialism might be a low-gadget society.

In 1995 few people were demanding a portable telecommunications device small enough to slip into the pocket. Fewer yet desired one that could take still and moving images and transmit them at light-speed around the world. Once the sine qua non of Yuppies and then the plaything of the young, mobile phones have achieved phenomenal penetration into our lives and our psychologies to the extent that people now look back to those pre-cellular days and wonder how on earth we managed without them. While the same could be said for many other products, mobile phones are unique due to the speed of their success and saturation of the telecommunications market, and the unparalleled innovativeness of their functions and features.

Much of that innovativeness, however, is market-driven, and if your mobile has a built-in video camera it’s probably because profit, not patrons, clamoured for it. People’s belief that they need a mobile is a telling example of the phenomenon of an artificially created need, that is, the perceived need for a product stimulated not by genuine necessity but by the manipulation of our psychology by a producer battling for financial success in a competitive market.

Although mobile phones, i-Pods, palm-top PCs and so on can satisfy some actual needs, it is mainly sociologically — and psychologically — induced perceived needs they actually satisfy, such as the need for conforming to group norms, the desire for prestige, and the belief that a product brings contentment. And because these items are produced to satisfy manipulated needs, they can have little use value. So if socialism will be a society that relies far less on gadgets, it is only because it will be a more honest society than the present one, without artificial scarcity or artificial needs.

Paddy Shannon

The Influence of Television (1961)

Book Review from the May 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Television and the Political Image by Joseph Trenaman and Denis McQuail, Methuen, 30s.

During the last few years, a new word has crept into the English language. Psephology is the name given to the business of putting voters under the microscope and probing their innermost electoral reflexes. Where once people simply voted at election time, now every cross must be checked and analysed.

We might have expected that television would come into this. No self-respecting psephologist can ignore a communication medium which four-fifths of the population have access to. 1955 was the first television election, although at that time sound broadcasting was still dominant. 1959 was different; apart from the enormous increase in the number of T.V. sets, both channels broke with past practice by putting out such programmes as the B.B.C.s “Hustings" and Granada's “Election Marathon".

What were the effects of this? Did, for example, any votes change sides because of the parties' broadcasts on T.V? Did television affect attendance at political meetings, the number of party workers and so on? A Research Unit at Leeds University (working on a Granada grant) tried to find answers to these, and other, questions. They closely studied the campaign on television and at the same time sampled political opinion among the voters in the two Yorkshire constituencies of Pudsey and West Leeds. Television and the Political Image reports their findings.

The authors conclude that television had little effect on the outcome of the 1959 election. Partisan programmes were not as well received as those which hid their propaganda under an informative camouflage. The professional slickness of the Labour Party programmes, which so irked the newspaper reviewers, was not generally resented. Whatever knowledge the viewers had on the issues of the campaign tended to increase as a result of their watching television.

The specific validity of such conclusions may be open to argument. But the overall picture of the voter which emerges from them seems fairly accurate: somebody who is mostly bored with politics and who, when an election stirs him to vote, does so in accordance with his hitherto sleeping prejudices.

Television and the Political Image is not light reading, and it is loaded with statistical tables and graphs which demand close study. Doubtless, we shall see many more such works, for if the power-conscious parties can find out why the working class vote as they do, they are a long way towards winning an election. If Trenaman and McQuail are any guide, Labour's problem in 1959 was to convince everybody that their promises were not rash bribery. The Tories, it seems, must still work hard to persuade us that they really care about the aged and the needy.

This is a dirty game. And the psephologist, busily adding up his figures to discover the reasons for the working class preferring one type of capitalist subjection to another, does not make it any cleaner.

Ivan

The Communications Counter-Revolution (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We face a social crisis of communication. Not only do the means of mass communication not belong to us but they are being used against us.

As global media have developed, enabling words and images to be conveyed to millions of people in a matter of seconds, the words used have become increasingly more sloganised and contrived to delude, the imagery more tranquillising in its banality and stupefying in its detachment from historical context.

As the world becomes a global village, linked by newly accessible technologies from the mobile phone to the Internet, the most powerful use of these technologies has tended to promote the envelopment of mass consciousness by corporate ideology.

As the symbols of constitutional democracy come to dominate the globe, seemingly confirmed by newly-acquired voting powers from Moscow to Soweto to West Lothian, the empowerment of the ballot is insidiously undermined by the neo-feudal absolutism of the press barons and media moguls: the new stratum of the ruling class which controls the dogma of the news agenda. Rupert Murdoch’s News International, to exemplify the point by reference to the biggest and baddest, has global assets of $15 billion and now controls the major newspapers in Britain and Australia, the biggest news broadcast network in the USA and by far the most significant private media organisation in Asia.

As global literacy rates increase, and huge hopes are placed upon the potentiality of science as a method of liberation from disease and diminished opportunities, the lexicon of the communications industry has converged with the language of the manipulative advertising industry which has denuded language of depth or integrity and prostituted speakers and writers in the service of crude market targets.

The consequence of all this is a public which is increasingly bemused by and untrusting of the channels of mass communication; which finds itself the recipient of a monological, one-way conversation, presented as communication; which has come to regard truth as being either the monopoly of a mediating elite or else so relative that nothing can be really true; which has become so soundbitten by political messages delivered to fit the crass measurements of the tabloid headline that enthusiasm for such political babble has become as perverse as commitment to a brand of baked beans or loyalty to a fast-food chain.

For most people the world of politics (for, politics seems indeed to inhabit a separate, remote and misty planet) seems terribly drab and empty and meaningless and alienating and dishonest. Politicians are never useful, except as pawns who might drive away the even more useless. Political activity is seen as an obsession for the disturbed: the rule-bound, the myopic, the ones who get their kicks from power games. Politics is an irritation or a threat, but never a resource of strength or hope.

The language of politics, as it has become compressed to the point of sounding half like gibberish and half like fraud, is not taken very seriously except by those who deal in its currency and have come to realise that it is a code of impotence reflecting the timidity of statecraft before economic powers which operate only in the global language of numbers.

Soundbite culture

Why has the culture of the soundbite arisen? Firstly, because political leaders have come to realise, albeit gradually and with a conspicuous absence of humility, that they can lead nobody nowhere. The market leads; they follow. To dance to the tune of capital entails a minimum of choreographical creativity and to sing to the tune calls less for the oratory of Cicero than the verbal banality of Saatchi or Mandelson.

Secondly, because ideas have become detached from political life. What George Bush called ‘The Vision Thing’ was a recognition of what he lacked, not what he had. The words needed to convey the contemporary political visions of the future, fantasies of myopia as they are, are few and uninspiring. “Gahd Bless America !” “New Labour; New Britain” “One Europe; one people” “The Lady’s Not for Turning” “Things Go Better With Coke”? It is a world led by second-rate advertising copywriters.

When you have nothing to say there is much to be said for saying nothing. But in order for the political mime-show to become audible, for the sake of putting background noise, however disjointed, to the increasingly dominating imagery of the photo-opportunity, something, however brief and pointless, must be uttered.

Thirdly, there is a belief amongst those who produce the media and design the news, that the public is incorrigibly stupid, happy only when offered infantile distractions from reality and capable of taking in only the most simplistic and compressed smidgeon of sound before rubbing our eyes and demanding an appointment with the Page Three girls. The public are regarded as half-baked cretins. The workers are witless and best offered football reports and Royal fairy stories: the tabloid valium for the dispossessed.

And because the news producers worry that our attention spans will collapse under the strain of more than a few minutes of political discussion, they ensure that such unmanageable bites of sustained argument never reach us. In the 1964 General Election — the first in which the major political parties prepared themselves for a TV campaign — the average excerpt from a political speech on the television news was eighty-seven seconds. These days an eighty-seven second excerpt is unheard of. By the 1979 election the median length of speech extracts on the BBC News was 45 seconds and on ITN 25 seconds. In the 1992 election the average length was heard was down to 18 seconds. In the last US presidential campaign no contender was quoted for more than 7 seconds, except during the deadly boring presidential debates in which they recited their pre-rehearsed soundbites with the conviction of a waitress in an American restaurant telling you the day’s specials on the menu.

The problem is not, of course, simply people wants to hear politicians for more than twenty seconds. Fifteen seconds of John Major felt like a lifetime in a cell with him. The media producers are quite right: too much of this makes our heads ache and we run out into the street committing road rage. Faced with such intellectual vacuity and emptiness of vision there is much to be said for the most extreme brevity. The problem is quite simply that the most extreme brevity is fine when you are contrasting Coke with Pepsi or advertising baked beans which don’t make you fart or asking if you prefer Oasis or Blur, but it is inimical to and destructive of the kind of reasoned, scientific judgement required from people who are called upon to make serious democratic choices.

No time for reason

Reason — the capacity to exercise our unique human capacity to organise our thoughts — to remember — to envisage and plan — to think and speak conceptually — to share thought through words — to use words to differentiate the self from the outer world and experience from fantasy —these hugely potent, definingly human, boundlessly creative forces which comprise reason will only wither and die if they are constrained by the inane language and crass imagery which sells jelly babies and New Labour.

To exercise reason takes time. This need for time has always been a problem for the vast majority because, under capitalism it is precisely the theft of our time which leaves us exploited and unfree and weary. So, there is a paradox: to understand why we are weary, unfree and exploited we need the time to contemplate the cause of exploitation and the hope for freedom. For the Leninists and the social-democratic reformists the problem was easily addressed: the nature of life for the majority would never permit the luxury of such reasoned contemplation, so mass socialist consciousness could never occur. The wearied workers must be led or left to rot.

For socialists, who refused to accept that authoritarian logic, the only basis for our claim that workers could and would understand the case for a new way of organising society, was that given the time to think and make sense of experience, understanding would combine with desire to create an enlightened embrace of the socialist alternative. Give people time to think and to speak and to argue and they cannot but see it as we have seen it.

But if time itself is to be sapped away by a culture of hurried messages and commercial jingles, the fascistic anthems of the marketplace, then what hope is there for reason? If language itself, in an Orwellian rape of meaning and sequential logic, becomes not a means to know more but a weapon in the armoury of those who would prefer us to know less, then reason itself falls victim to a vandalising culture which dehumanises those left to dwell in the Brave New World of the Sun and the organisation of mass stupidity. We would be abandoned to a cultural wilderness of endless Happy Hours but no happiness, punch-drunk street parties and feudal funeral processions as repositories for the deeply repressed miseries of the bewildered; elections and referendums with no issues and no discussion. This is the dystopian future of a society bereft of reason.

The threat of a slide to such an historical catastrophe is a menace to the reason which makes us human and to the socialist vision which could enable us to live humanely. And we do face such a threat. That is why we are unmistakably in the midst of a profound crisis of communication. Not only is it the case that the means of communication do not belong to us — in a world where very little that is worth much belongs to most of us that is hardly a revelation. But these channels of communication are being used against us. They are The Enemy Within, which can brand strikers as The Enemy Within and socialists as loonies, utopians and the merely irrelevant. It is as well to know our enemy, for struggle for the tools and language of communication has become in the course of the twentieth century the predominant battle-ground within which the shape of our social future will be contested.

The war waged by the ruling class to silence the majority is not a new one, even though it has too often been neglected by liberal historians who prefer to bathe in the still waters of liberal ideology. The battle to stifle the voices of the working class is a long and bloody one, and in many parts of the world it still goes on leaving the silenced, the maimed, tortured and the butchered corpses in its wake. But in Britain and the so-called capitalist democracies the war against the right of workers to speak has changed. The strategy now is to tolerate ‘free speech’ and then drown it out with the megaphones of distraction and deceit. What we are offered is a democracy in which everyone has a right to be ignored, but only the rich and powerful can insist upon being heard.

Linguistic nihilism

What kind of intellectual climate is it that is allowing the communication of hope and the vivacity of human creativity to become so neglected? The answer lies in the current mood of counter-enlightenment which has come to dominate Western thought. The arid atmosphere of what has come to be known as postmodernism is precisely the environment within which the banalities of the soundbite and the soft-focus lens can triumph over the long-learned lessons of the Age of Reason. With their disdain for rational explanations the postmodernists argue that no cause is more important in producing an effect than any other. There is no rational analysis of history; there are no social systems; there can be nothing which is reducible to the clarity of scientific transparency.

So, within this hopelessly nihilistic chain of postmodernist discourse, everything is as meaningful as it is meaningless; rationality stands on a par with irrationality; no judgement must be prioritised over any other — genocide, death camps, avoidable mass starvation, the torture of political prisoners. These, according to the postmodernists, are all merely fragmented and inexplicable phenomena which operate each in their own separate world of autonomous values. So, if nothing general can be said, language becomes diminished as a civilising force. Words can mean anything or nothing or both. The postmodernists have celebrated the so-called Death of History: the death, in short, of that fundamentally liberating Age of Reason project, to which Marx contributed so greatly, to transform history from a passive force, in which humans are mere puppets, to a creative force in which our comprehension of the process allows us to actively direct the process of social movement. For the postmodernists all of this was ultra-optimism and must now be substituted by an inert, sullen, complacent pact with the present.

This veritable revolt against the Enlightenment derides scientific logic and the quest for the dialectical interrogation of complexity and surrenders abjectly to the lunatic’s logic of the marketplace and its attendant disorders. It gives rise to a notion of politics as being essentially about slogans rather than substance. For, if you really believe that there can be no substantial intervention in the making of history, what else is there to do but stand on the sidelines and pretend that your mandate is to carry out whatever happens to be taking place already?

At its worst, this is the climate in which the dark clouds of fascism can form. But not necessarily fascism in jackboots with Nuremberg rallies. It was hard to ignore a fascistic element within the mass hysteria which followed upon the recent death of a Princess. Such mass manipulation of human feeling and well-organised collective agonising of the repressed is precisely the kind of perverse waste of human emotion and energy made permissible in a society which has come to disdain popular reason.

The politics of reasoned thought requires the capacity to distinguish between the trivial inconsequences of our enemies and the historically vital events out of which history makes us and we can make history. It requires a rejection of the linguistic nihilism of contemporary journalism which asserts like Humpty Dumpty that words can mean whatever a headline-writer wants them to mean. It requires a respect for scientific logic which considers causes and effects rather than diminishing everything to the random agenda of ‘News Just In’.

Capitalism, because it would perish by the force of mass intelligence if enough people thought about it, cannot create an environment conducive to intelligent reflection. Indeed, the more it goes on, the more it will create more elaborate and sophisticated diversions from reasoned thought. And the more socialists will need to warn against those diversions and remind their fellow human beings: Your brain is the greatest weapon you possess; your ability to communicate is your tool of liberation; thinking, speaking and organising democratically and intelligently you are a force that cannot be defeated by the babble of a worn-out social system.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: The Nationalisation of Cables and Wireless (1946)

Editorial from the January 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Within a few years of the opening of the first inland telegraph service in Great Britain (in 1846) attempts were being made, not at first with success, to carry the lines across the Channel by undersea cable. The next development was the long-distance cable across the Atlantic which, after early failure, was opened in 1866. By this time, however, business and commercial interests as a whole had found that their need for a nation-wide telegraph service was not being met by the private companies, which concentrated on the most populous—and therefore most profitable—centres. Disraeli’s Conservative Government decided in 1868 to nationalise the telegraphs and in 1870 the Post Office acquired, along with the inland service, the cross-Channel cables. The latter were at first leased to private companies, but in 1889 the Post Office took over and operated them itself.

Millions of pounds were now being invested in long distance undersea cables, and a period was opening up of big profits for the cable companies which had not yet been threatened by the rival system of wireless telegraphy. At this stage, however, the imperial and war-time needs of the capitalist Powers made their influence felt. The Governments of the Empire were concerned about having cables laid on routes that would serve Empire needs and be safe during war, and they paid huge subsidies to the Cable companies to secure the laying of cables on the desired routes. One of these subsidies was the payment of £28,000 a year for 20 years, from 1893, to the Eastern and South African Telegraph Co., for a cable from Zanzibar to Mauritius. While precise figures are not known, some estimates place the total subsidies at £4,000,000 or more.

In the meantime wireless, first used in an elementary form in the nineties and developed in a different and greatly improved form by Marconi with the help of the British Post Office, entered the field.

The position after the world-war 1914-1918 was that the cable companies, owing to greater reliability and lower over-all costs of cables, were more than able to hold their own in competition until the invention of the "beam" short-wave wireless system. "Beam" stations built by Marconi's for the Post Office opened up in 1926 and 1927, and were immediately able to operate profitably at charges far below those of the cable companies, and the latter saw their profits disappearing.

Now, according to the theories propounded by the capitalist text-books on economics, the cable companies should have set about discovering ways and means of improving cable transmission so that they could compete. Instead, suddenly forgetting how they had argued that the cables must be retained in British and Empire control for reasons of patriotism and Imperial defence, they threatened to go into liquidation and distribute to their shareholders the enormous reserves accumulated out of past profits (with the help of Government subsidies); with, of course, the possibility of selling the cables to foreign companies known to be willing to buy them. The cable companies were then able, in 1928, along with Marconi's, to get consent to a merger of cable and wireless companies and to the transfer to them from the British Post Office of the "beam" wireless telegraphs and Atlantic cables, and from the Empire Governments as a whole, of the State-owned Pacific cable system. Cables and Wireless, Ltd., and their associated Dominion companies, thus came to a position of dominance throughout the British Empire, though in Britain wireless telephony and certain subsidiary cable and wireless services remained with the Post Office. For a time the property and profits of the investors in cable companies were saved, but the war 1939-45 introduced or accentuated factors which have led the Labour Government to adopt its recently announced policy of nationalising the Cable and Wireless telegraph services operating from this country. This move is not the result of the application of Labour Party theory on the question of nationalisation but is dictated by events outside their control, including growing American competition. The inquiry into nationalisation of communications was going on long before the Labour Government came to power and, as the Times says, "their Coalition and Conservative predecessors, though reluctant to decide on acceptance, were almost bound to accept the same conclusion. Pressure from the Dominions, especially from Australia and New Zealand, in favour of this solution has for a long time been strong. Its motives are mixed. In part it has proceeded from the simple desire of the Dominions to have full sovereignty over communications in their own country. In part it has been due to concrete disagreements with Cable and Wireless over rates, service and policy; and these disagreements were, perhaps, accentuated by one or two specific instances in which the American companies which installed and operated new services in Australasia during the war were able to suggest rates and terms with which Cable and Wireless felt itself unable to compete." (Times, November 2nd, 1945.)

The precise terms of nationalisation are yet to be announced, but the Labour Government will follow their settled policy of compensating the investors either with a lump sum payment or Government Bonds, and intends to set up a public utility organisation to run the services.

One development of Labour Party theory is of interest. When the Capitalists had only to consider internal services such as telegraphs and telephones, and when capitalist opposition to private monopoly was strong, the solution applied by Liberals and Tories alike was to institute State ownership and State operation. The Labour Party took over this policy of State capitalism, called it Socialism, and made it the main plank in the Labour programme. Later on the capitalists developed the so-called public utility form of monopoly organisation in the Port of London Authority, the Central Electricity Board, etc., in which the State exercises control, but less directly, and in which operation is not by a State Department but by a Public Board working under restrictions imposed by law. Bereft of any basic principle of their own to guide them and able only to tag along at the heels of capitalist development, the Labour Party promptly discovered that its former favourite, the Post Office, was no longer the apple of its eye. An important additional motive influencing the trade union and Labour Party leaders, with their eyes on the problems of Labour Party administration of capitalism, was that public utilities would, they thought, free them from direct Governmental responsibility for wage disputes with the workers. They wanted the workers' votes, but did not want to appear directly responsible for their wages as employees of a Labour Government.

Of course none of these problems of capitalism have any bearing on the issue of Socialism, which is the issue of dispossessing the capitalist class the world over, and making the means of production and distribution, including communications, for the first time the common property of the whole community, operated not for profit and the needs of capitalism's wars, but for the good of all.

Between the Lines: Only Joking (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Only Joking

More mature TV viewers must be at a loss what to do with their Monday nights this month. April 9th saw the last in the series of Stand Up Jim Davidson (ITV), which was billed as "adult humour". What this meant in practice was peak-time permission for the chirpy cockney to entertain the troops by setting the clock back thirty years. Remember those good old days before we were taught to worry about the feelings of racial and other minorities? When a good joke had to have a good defenceless target? Well, Jim takes the Sun newspaper and simplifies it into small-screen sniggers for the simple-minded. Asians in Bradford, people in wheelchairs. the blind, women in council flats. Jews. Irish and gays: all these and many more were featured in his gallery of mugs. Only one group was missing from his league table of comical victims: white, male. English boneheads, with a microphone in one hand, half a pint of lager in the other, and not very much in between.

Democracy Versus Marketing

There was a great deal of promise in the early parts of "Remote Control: Television and Democracy" (Channel 4, April 7, 8-9pm). First, there was an excellent survey of the ways in which each period of history has seen a struggle over control of the key means of communication. In the Middle Ages, for example, the translation of the Bible into English was part of a shifting of power from Rome to Canterbury. In the nineteenth century, punitive taxation on publications was used to prevent the free distribution of radical ideas within the working class. And in the twentieth century, the early lessons learnt by the ruling class regarding the political uses of cinema were later applied to radio and television.

A further useful point was made by this documentary, regarding the current debate about the likely effects of the impending "deregulation" of broadcasting, and the arrival of cable and satellite. The debate has been almost exclusively based on arguments about "quality" and choice. Will deregulation lead to a widening of choice, a degeneration of quality, or both? But this is to regard television as purely another product for mass consumption like any other in the capitalist world market. The stress being placed on the concepts of quality and choice place the millions of viewers in a passive role, their only function being to pay their money and flick their remote control switches. But television, as a means of expression and communication, has always had the potential to be more than simply a product for mass consumption. The technology, particularly since the advent in the 70s of small, hand-held video cameras, could allow large numbers of people to be making programmes as well as watching them. Present government plans for the future of broadcasting fail even to pay lip service to such possibilities.

It was at this point that the programme began to flag somewhat. Lacking any really pertinent political analysis, it was not able to touch on the reasons for this, or to approach any real solutions. This inability of present-day society to allow proper participation in the broadcasting process is in fact symptomatic of a much wider problem. Real, full democracy in society is simply not compatible with a class-divided, property and profit-based social system. With regard to possible solutions, the programme focused on access slots like the BBC's "Open Door", the problems they have encountered, and on Channel Four, with its special remit to cater for minority views. Radical commentators trotted out tired modern cliches about their wish that TV would become more "empowering", "enabling" and "facilitating" for people, but had little idea how this might happen.

The conclusion reached, however, was refreshingly realistic: that the direction in which TV is heading shows less and less concern with the exciting ways in which it could be used as a democratic means of expression, and more and more preoccupation with being a profitable investment within the market system.

Steve Coleman

Free the airwaves! (1984)

From the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The rapid development of the technology of communications makes present social relations more and more outdated with every day. The obstacle to a more free use of these exciting new channels is the same as that which has held back the spreading of knowledge for hundreds of years: the fact that a minority class possess and control the means of communication just as they do the means of production in general.

In 1637, under a decree of the Star Chamber, whipping, the pillory and imprisonment were to be the penalties for publishing without the consent of the licensers, who were headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In later years, an invidious “tax on knowledge" known as the Stamp Duty was the slightly more subtle method used to prevent the majority of the population making "subversive" use of their growing literacy. In 1831, however, and in defiance of the Stamp Duty laws. Henry Hetherington brought out the Poor Man's Guardian, a "weekly newspaper for the people, established contrary to law, to try the power of ‘Might’ against ‘Right', price Id”. On the front page, in place of the official government red stamp was a black one inscribed “Knowledge is Power", with a drawing of a printing press and the words "Liberty of the Press”. The first paragraph of this journal is worth quoting from, if only to demonstrate the difference between this early working-class paper, and its latter-day name-sake, the Liberal Man’s Guardian:

No more evasion; we will rot trespass, but deny the authority of our "lords" to enclose the common against us; we will demand our right, nor treat but with contempt the despotic "law" which would deprive us of it.

The Stamp Duty was finally abolished in 1855, but not before Hetherington had served a prison sentence for his pains.

The capitalist state is a coercive machine and overcomes the sporadic resistance of individuals and groups by resorting to force or the threat of it. But it could not survive for long if it had constantly to use such brutal (and costly) methods. In the course of the nineteenth century in Europe there gradually evolved an ideology of reformism, the intention of which was to replace repression with placatory gestures to accommodate the working class into the administration of their own exploitation. This presented the ruling class with a dilemma on the question of working-class literacy. As a Justice of the Peace was quoted as saying in 1807:

It is doubtless desirable that the poor should be instructed in reading, if it were only for the best of purposes — that they may read the scriptures. As to writing and arithmetic, it may be apprehended that such a degree of knowledge would produce in them a derelish for the laborious occupations of life.

 In 1870, this dilemma was solved through the enactment of the Education Act. which provided for a standard system of state-controlled schooling, capable of manufacturing the raw material for modern industry: literate, numerate and disciplined wage-slaves. The tradition of independent working-class self-education continued to flourish, however, in Mechanics Institutes, in bodies such as the Workers Educational Association, and through the carefully preserved bookshelves of knowledge passed down from one generation of workers to another, cherished for the relevance of their contents to the problems which confront workers: the works of Marx and Engels, of William Morris and Robert Tressell.

The early twentieth century witnessed an explosion of large-scale communication technologies, once again under the strict and stifling control of the state or of private business interests. In 1984, more than one hundred and fifty years after the publication of the Poor Man's Guardian, it is still illegal for anyone to broadcast publicly over the airwaves to others, without the (unlikely) approval of the BBC or IBA. The 1949 Wireless Telegraphy Act allows the Home Office almost total power to control and regulate the use of the frequency spectrum. The capitalist class monopolise the land and factories across the world (including the state capitalist Russian empire); the air itself, however, is no more immune from this tragic abdication of responsibility for our world and lives which we make by allowing a minority to possess that world.

The 1930s saw the evolution of the new culture industry, with an increasingly uniform state-regulated leisure entering the sway of the world market. In marketing communications as a commodity in itself, huge profits were accumulated. The big telecommunications multinationals such as IBM. ITT, Western Electric and AT & T are usually to be found on the list of top ten US companies today.

Of course, there have continually been attempts at various levels to evade this monopoly. In 1962 a young Irish businessman. Ronan O’Rahilly, tried to promote a recording of Georgie Fame and came up against the power of EMI, Decca, Pye and Philips, who between them cornered 99 per cent of the market. All the radio stations, including Radio Luxembourg, were working hand in glove with these companies, so O’Rahilly founded Radio Caroline. In 1967, however, the Labour government’s Marine Broadcasting Offences Bill outlawed all the pirate stations and later that year the BBC’s new 4-channel radio service came into operation with Radio One as a pop channel, all safely under the control of the (Labour administered) capitalist state.

Communications technology in the twentieth century has been developed according to the needs of profit and, as a corollary to this, according to military needs. By the mid-seventies there were, according to NASA, about 3,700 satellites in space. Of these, only a handful were communications satellites; the vast majority served the military establishments of the superpowers, in command and message systems, logistics, interception and surveillance.

Under capitalism, the latest advances in communication technology will be used to improve the efficiency of profit accumulation while dividing people more and more from one another and from their own self- determined needs. For example an advertisement for one of the home microcomputers on the market speaks of the delights of "balancing the family budget" (working out what you can no longer afford after splashing out on the computer) and of "the fascination of controlling your own private little world" as being "addictive".

With the advent of socialist democracy, there could be a great proliferation of multilateral communications systems. We must forget the false division between the passive entertainment of the media and the active process of education. In the words of Brecht, “Radio must be changed from a means of distribution to a means of communication". But for the devices at the disposal of humanity to be used to enhance, rather than obstruct, the democratic control of society, we must replace the social relationship of employers and employed which permeates the world today with social relationships of equality and co-operation:

A microphone is not an car, a camera is not an eye and a computer is not a brain . . . as we design technological systems, we are in fact designing sets of social relationships. (Mike Cooley, Architect or Bee?)

The forms which communication takes will be directly related, in other words, to the form which society takes. If we are to start communicating with one another globally on the sophisticated level which modern technology has made possible it is a social revolution, rather than a technological revolution, which is urgently needed.

Clifford Slapper