Windows on Capitalism (1995)

Software Review from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Windows 95 by
 Microsoft

August 24 was "Windows Day", chosen by giant software company Microsoft to launch its new operating system, Windows 95. Accompanied by vast amounts of ballyhoo, an advertising budget of £100 million, acres of free newspaper publicity and a song from the Rolling Stones, Windows 95 is predicted to sell at least 20 million copies worldwide by the end of the year, further increasing the coffers of owner Bill Gates, richest man in America and one of the richest in the world (out-ranked only by a handful of kings and sultans). Computer stores opened all night so they could break open the champagne and sell the first copies at midnight. To judge from all the hype. Windows 95 represents a great leap forward for computer users. But is it, and (more important) does it reveal the efficiency of capitalism in developing new technology?

Windows 95 is an operating system, a program that allows the user to run word processors and other applications (from games to high-powered publishing tools). It certainly represents an advance over earlier versions of Windows and the previous operating system. MS-DOS. also marketed by (guess who?) Microsoft. As a simple example. Windows 95 means files can now be given any name at all. rather than being confined to a maximum of eight letters. You might wonder why Microsoft could get away for years with selling a product with such a daft restriction—especially when you learn that many other operating systems don't have such a limit. And indeed compared with what has long been available on some other computing systems, Windows 95 offers hardly anything that is new. Its likely success (as far as profit-making is concerned) is due far more to marketing skills and Microsoft's dominant position in the computing industry than to any technical excellence.

But the point of Windows 95 is not just for Microsoft to sell lots of copies. It is also intended to increase sales of some of Microsoft’s other products, such as spreadsheets and presentation software, to go with the new operating system. In addition. many buyers will find that they need a new computer with more memory and a faster processor in order to get the best out of it. And most insidious of all, Windows 95 comes together with the software for accessing Microsoft's own on-line mail and information system, Microsoft Network. If things go according to plan, this will almost immediately have more users than other such systems, not because it is in any way better but just because of Microsoft’s size and marketing muscle. No wonder some competitors have tried to take Microsoft to court in the US on grounds of constituting a monopoly.

The main thing all this shows is that so much of what passes for innovation and technical progress under capitalism has far more to do with hype and clever advertising than it does with real benefits to consumers. All the resources put into developing and marketing Windows 95 (and many other products) in no way represent useful work: much of it duplicates what has already been done.and is concerned with doing down competitors rather than creating a better product. Production for profit is wasteful and inefficient, and does not achieve what its apologists claim.

Paul Bennett

Economics Exposed: Do we need the market mechanism? (1987)

The Economics Exposed column from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Defenders of capitalism claim that the market mechanism is the only way of distributing goods across a modern global society. Without profit and loss, without buying and selling, they say. how could we organise production? If all goods and services were available free, as they would be in socialism, then how could we make decisions about what to produce and when, how and where to produce it?

At the moment these decisions are taken on the basis of reducing costs to a minimum, in order to maximise profit. The money system allocates values to every conceivable useful or useless item, allowing us to make comparisons between options, always on this basis of reducing cost. Cost, in turn, relates to labour time and hence the attempts of major companies to make "rational" capitalist decisions also show their results in the dole queues.

Socialism will do away with this whole system of relative values and with the price tags which express them. Instead, in a system of production for use. not profit, the focus will be on whether a given production process is geared to serving human needs. Does it result in meeting human requirements? In many cases, people may well prefer a form of production which is less intensive. cheap and "productive" in capitalist terms. In a socialist society, the democratic framework would be developed for such choices freely to be made.

And what about the question of consumption? Champions of the market system tell us that goods have to be supplied in response to how people are "choosing" to spend the paltry pocket money referred to as wages. In socialism, goods will still be supplied in response to people's expressed preferences, and these preferences will still be made ultimately clear by what people choose to take from the shelves of the stores. The difference would be, however, that in a sane society such choices would be made freely rather than under the artificial conditions of scarcity and effective rationing which cloud and distort the picture today.

Modern technology has been used already to develop stock control methods which could usefully be adapted for use in a socialist system of distribution. In a number of large chains, when an item is bought and passes through the cash desk, it is automatically recorded as sold and this information is relayed by computer to the department which deals with ordering further supplies. This can even be organised so that the level of output in a factory is informed by the same information. Once a certain amount of stability has been reached in the levels of "demand", a self-regulating system can develop in which all production levels are constantly monitored and are tied directly to the levels of consumption observed at local stores. This also, of course, encompasses the issue of personal choice, as a range of goods would be in those stores, and the popularity of each would be reflected in the computerised information received.

The existence of a buying and selling system. of money and of profit and loss, hinders and complicates the process outlined here. In contrast, a socialist system of free access would allow needs to be catered for freely in this way. Likewise, the existence of competition between productive units and between distribution outlets makes a mockery of any attempt to efficiently deliver, to humanity as a whole, the best that can be provided by modern production methods. Socialism will involve using co-operation on a world-wide scale to quantify human needs in real terms (not "money terms") and to provide for those needs swiftly.

Clifford Slapper

Democracy and the Silicon Chip (1978)

From the September 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx once said that the hand mill gives you feudalism and the steam mill gives you capitalism.  Had he lived for another hundred years, he might have added with a wry smile that the computer gives you Socialism.  The ways in which human society can be organised, is organised and ought to be organised depend on the techniques and resources which can be used in its running.  The idea of a society where no one goes hungry and all co-operate to control the conditions of their existence is no more than a pipe dream unless there is the wherewithal to translate idea into reality.

It is the case of the SPGB that the wherewithal is there.  The potential for providing for everyone’s needs has been created by capitalism.  Thanks to the development of machinery and automation, wealth can be produced in quantities which would have been unthinkable in earlier phases of human society.  However, one of our greatest difficulties in getting anyone to accept our view is to convince them on just this point.  For its truth is masked in capitalism.  The potential for plenty is there, but it cannot be made actual.  A profit system can only work with a labour force compelled to sell its energies.  If an abundance of the necessaries of life were freely available, the system would grind to a halt.  (Who would work at the kinds of jobs on offer in our society if they did not have to?)

We do not ask anyone to take our word for it that the problem of producing enough wealth has been solved.  Rather, we refer them whenever possible to the facts unearthed by non-Socialists who are particularly concerned with such issues. (See, for example, in our pamphlet Questions of the Day, the chapter on the myth of overpopulation, and our Canadian companion party’s pamphlet A World of Abundance).  In this way we hope to show that hackneyed prejudices about human greed are irrelevant and that, far from being a pipe-dream, a society based on common ownership is a practical necessity.

But this is only one aspect of our case.  Our aim is not just common ownership; it is democracy.  For us, democracy is not an optional extra or simply a means to an end.  It is part of our end, as anyone can discover by reading our Object on the inside back cover of this journal.  We define Socialism as “. . . common ownership and democratic control of the means and instruments for producing and distributing wealth . . .”

What do we mean by democracy? Amongst other things, a world in which people are not bossed around by a government or told what to do by their “superiors”.  More positively, a world where everyone takes an equal and responsible part in making decisions which affect society, without the strife which is inevitable in a class-divided society.  That is one reason why we say there will be no socialist society until a majority desire it.  As long as most people are content to be told what to do by elected representatives there will be no democracy in the sense defined.  (Not that an electoral system is completely worthless.  More of that later).

At first sight, this suggestion of literally everyone taking part in social decisions may seem as unrealistic as the earlier one of common ownership.  Surely, it might be said, these matters have to be left to the experts, and surely modern populations are far too large for active participation by everyone?

Objections like these are meat and drink to political theorists and political philosophers.  They think the point so obvious that they state them far more often than actually arguing for them.  Yet they are not obvious.  In view of the demonstrated failure of legions of experts and government advisers to solve any of the major problems of civilisation, the less said about expertise the better.  On the other hand, numbers may seem a genuine problem.  How can millions of people all have a say in running society?

The answer, once again is that this would be a mere “good idea” unless the means were available to make it a reality.  And the means are available.  Here, too, it is a matter of pointing to existing resources and developments within capitalism.  It would be futile for us to offer a blueprint, of course.  The exact form the future democratic society takes will depend on the historical circumstances prevailing when it is established.  But there are aspects of the technology already available which show how large numbers of people could be drawn into the decision process.

Communication is the lifeblood of capitalism.  This is reflected in the facts that by 1975 over 95 per cent of households in Britain had TV sets, 53 per cent had telephones, and world traffic in telecommunications has continued to grow at a rate of 12-15 per cent per year (much higher than the rest of world trade).  If no vested interests were involved, and if there were a desire for it, imagine how much useful information could be disseminated and how far the ordinary citizen could participate in decisions, just by replacing one old American film every week with an information-and-decision programme.  People listen to proposals for some project (say, the building of a new playground or power station), discuss the issues by phone-in, and then ring in to some central point with their vote for or against.

But this is only the tip of the iceberg.  Developments are now taking place which will put phones and TVs in the museum along with the stone-age axe.  The device which will be responsible is the microelectronic silicon circuit.  It is about one centimetre square and is made, incredibly, of grains of sand.  In effect, this “silicon chip” is a tiny computer, enormously efficient and dirt-cheap to produce, which has been responsible for bringing together computer and telecommunications technology in one all-embracing “information technology”.

The first fruits of the marriage will be available next year when the Viewdata system goes into public service.  This will make available to its select customers 100,000 pages of information, any part of which can be called up on a screen literally at the touch of a button.  Not only that, but the system will be fully “interactive”—which  means that as well as it giving you information, you can give it information, which it will then store.  Even the feeblest imagination should be able to grasp the implication for democracy.  Such technology gives the opportunity for the population to keep themselves better informed and to take a more active role in decisions than at any time since the small city-states of ancient Greece.

But back to reality.  Viewdata is being developed in capitalism, which means it is first and foremost a commercial venture.  It will be used not for the sake of participatory democracy but to store information for its customers—advertising agencies, financial institutions, mail order firms and the like.  Moreover, systems of this kind have already begun to cause headaches in America, producing the telephone equivalent of junk mail and the hard sell.  The micro-computer works its way methodically through a list of victims, automatically ringing them up to relay its recorded message to buy someone’s goods.  You may not want to buy them, but it’s no use putting the receiver down because the computer will automatically continue to ring you back until you have heard it out.

And that is the least of it.  This potential boon to mankind is not just proving to be a nuisance:  it threatens to produce a crisis.  Microelectronic technology is so flexible it will be throwing people out of skilled jobs such as making precision watches and cash registers.  In the UK telephone equipment industry alone the number of jobs is expected to fall by 30 per cent between 1976 and 1979.  How far the capitalist system can cope with these far-reaching consequences is a problem for those who continue to support it.

Not to labour the point, here as elsewhere capitalism is double-edged.  The system has itself called forth instruments which could, in a different framework, be of untold benefit.  But under capitalism their use is perverted and only means further trouble.  Once again, therefore, the implication is clear that we must change the framework.

The development of information technology is double-edged in a further way.  At the turn of the century most political organisations depended largely on outdoor meetings for getting their message across.  With the widespread introduction of radio and TV this ceased to be true for the larger and richer parties.  But the gap which thus opened up has begun to close again.  The SPGB has managed to snatch the odd few minutes of broadcasting, and no doubt if capitalism lasts long enough we shall also, like our companion party in America, come to have our own programmes.  For the technology developed by capitalism for its own needs eventually becomes available for those who wish to replace capitalism.  The computer will make the dissemination of Socialist propaganda an easier and more efficient affair.

That it is something for the future.  For the present all we can do is make the best use of our limited resources in what is at least a relatively open political climate.  In Britain we can publish a journal and make tapes of our meetings without the threat of immediate persecution.  In a one‑party state like Russia we could not.  We do not exaggerate the extent of this freedom: it costs a lot of money to exercise it fully, and we know that such political freedoms as we have now can be withdrawn.  But equally we do not underestimate its importance. (Only a person who had never imagined living under a totalitarian regime would do that).  A climate of tolerance is useful to Socialists.  It is also fragile, and constantly endangered by our opponents of left and right.  Their policies of confrontation and smashing this, that and the other serve only to make it easier to place further curbs on political activity.  We received tangible proof of this recently, when one of our London branches lost the use of its meeting room in a pub as a result of threats between other organisations which use the room.  The SPGB will have no part in such tactics, and the only force we shall continue to use is the force of rational argument.

A number of points have been made in this article to show that out aim of a democratic society is a practical possibility.  There is also another kind of evidence—that of example.  The structure of the SPGB is democratic, foreshadowing the future society we advocate.  We have no leaders or ruling groups.  Though we cannot afford a computer or even to become a customer of Viewdata, our affairs are run according to the decisions of the entire membership through instructed delegates at Annual Conference, and all our officials are elected annually, again by the entire membership.  Any organisation can claim to be in favour of democracy.  We ask to be judged not on what we claim but on what we do.  Having nothing to fear from the presence of non‑members (welcoming them, in fact), we have never held a closed meeting in our entire history.  That is completely in keeping with our conviction that the revolution to establish the Socialist democracy will not be ours; it will be a revolution itself decided upon by a majority of humanity.

Bill Valinas

Sources

The General Household Survey 1975

The Times 1st March 1978

The Times (Supplement) 4th April 1978

Work and Employment (1967)

From the July 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fortunate indeed is the man who gains his livelihood by performing a task that he enjoys. Millions, born of working class parents, are condemned to earn their living by doing jobs that, at best, they can tolerate or, at worst, they hate.

Workers from birth, by teaching and training, are blinkered from sight of an alternative to a life of work for wages. High wages and security of employment become their life’s target. Boyhood dreams of a life devoted to some sensational, romantic or interesting occupation turn out to be—just boyhood dreams.

There is a tendency to confuse work with employment. The terms are used haphazardly, ‘Work’ being used when ‘Employment’ is meant, and vice versa. Work is the effort used to overcome a resistance, it is the expenditure of physical and mental energey. Employment is work performed in someone else’s service. All employment is work but all work is not employment. Work, in itself, can be enjoyable, employment seldom is. That is why millions go reluctantly to their employment and hasten away from it to seek pleasure in some form of work.

After five days in an office or factory, on a lorry or down a mine, workers will devote their week-end leisure to gardening, driving a car, some do-it-yourself occupation or a strenuous sport.

Why, then, does work, when it is employment, become distasteful? How does employment contaminate work and make it unpalatable?

The elements which make work enjoyable are, variety, the exercise of the worker’s initiative and intelligence, the satisfaction of creating something, and pride in the product. Remove one of these elements and the pleasure diminishes. Remove them all and it vanishes, the work becomes tedious.

A few centuries of capitalism have succeeded in eliminating those elements from the work men do for their livelihood by making employees of practically all workers.

Capitalism is a system where wealth is produced essentially for a market with a view to profit. The market is competitive and the competition exerts a continuous downward pressure on the cost of production, resulting in the introduction of ever more and more labour saving devices and more intense methods of production. Employees are coerced to produce more commodities in quicker time for the minimum possible total wage cost. Labour saving machinery ousts the craftsman. The division and sub-division of labour increases productivity but creates an army of semi and un-skilled workers doing repetitive jobs. The worker becomes proficient, not by the exercise of his initiative and intelligence, but by the continual repetition of a task.

Professor Charles Babbage, a nineteenth century mathematician, who devised a mechanical computing machine and who was a forthright apologist of capitalism, stated,

“. .. the most important principle on which the economy of a manufacture depends, is the division of labour amongst the persons who perform the work. 

… If, however, instead of learning all the different processes his (the worker’s) attention be confined to one operation, a very small portion of his time will be consumed unprofitably at the commencement, and the whole of the rest of it will be beneficial to his master.”

Sixty years later Henry Ford in his, My Life and Work, was able to show the application of the idea.

“With one workman doing a job he could turn out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine hour day, or about twenty minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into twenty-nine operations. That cut down assembly time to thirteen minutes, ten seconds. Then we raised the height of the line eight inches—this was in 1914—and cut the time to seven minutes. 

… we began to departmentalise so that each department would do only one thing … I did not know that such minute divisions would be possible; but as our production grew and departments multiplied we actually changed from making automobiles to making parts.”

The development of this process has varied in different trades and industries. For generations clerical workers considered themselves immune from its effects, but the typewriter, the adding machine, the electric Hollerith calculator, and the electronic computer have brought home to them with a vengeance the realisation that capitalism works on them in the same way that it works on their manual labouring colleagues.

Variety of task is almost extinct. Demands on most workers’ initiative and intelligence are low. The final product of his labour is so remote that interest in it has waned almost to vanishing point. During his hours of employment his attention is divided between his task and the clock and his interest is focussed on finishing time and pay day.

This is not a condemnation of machinery. Machines enable men to avoid many laborious tasks. Without machines society would not be able to enjoy many of the comforts and luxuries of modern living. The evil lies not in the machine itself, but in its ownership by an exploiting class who introduce it only when it serves their profit-making ends.

Employers introduce labour saving machinery, not to lighten the labour of their workers, but to cheapen it. The workers have had to fight every step of the way to achieve the shorter working hours which machines have made possible. Every gain by the workers of shorter hours is an incentive to their employers to instal more labour saving devices.

Modern automative machinery does not sub-divide labour processes into smaller units. It takes over batches of consecutive labour units and performs them mechanically with a minimum of human aid.

At the end of last February the British Computer Society held a symposium in London. The talks dealt with computer operations applied to grocery, brewery, tobacco, fashion goods, departmental stores and bakery trades. Automation introduced by the American bakery firm of Sara Lee was discussed and reported in the April issue of the Transport and General Workers’ Union journal, The Record.

This bakery produces fifteen different products which are frozen immediately after baking. On the bakery side the computer monitors raw materials, liquid and dry, including eggs, and weighs and mixes the ingredients.

“The cakes are baked in foil, packed in cartons and conveyed automatically to the warehouse.

Each carton surface has a “bar code” which decides the route that it shall follow. The cartons are tripped off the conveyor and pallet loading is automatically controlled by the computer, each tier is picked up by a suction head crane and stacked on the pallet. The warehouse contains eight of these suction head cranes. A loaded pallet consists of 80 cartons, which is then picked up by one of five stacker cranes and randomly stored in one of the ten racks in the warehouse. Each rack contains 5,310 individual cubicles. The computer memorises information concerning the whereabouts of each pallet load and when goods are being despatched it sends the stacker crane to pick up the appropriate quantities of each product. The computer sorts out the load and sends it to the despatching area where for the first time it makes contact with human beings who check the order and load on to the delivery vehicles. The computer records all products in and out and gives a rundown of stocks every quarter of an hour on tape.”

A reduced number of workers programme the computer and serve as a human check on mechanical accidents; they are adjuncts of the machinery. Their interest in the product is so remote as to be almost non-existent. They see and handle only the cases in which it is packed and the sheets of paper showing production data and marketing statistics.

Everything that gave the craftsman pleasure, satisfaction and pride in production is gone. Employment has made work a routine and often boring task. Physical effort is reduced, mental stress is increased.

The ideas of millions of workers are confined within limits set by the present social system. They conceive of no alternative to a wages system and, as discontent is a nagging sensation, they subdue it and become resigned to a life of employment. They look forward with pleasant anticipation to their daily leisure time relaxation, their week-end rejuvenation and their annual holiday recreation.

A word that has climbed the charts of the English languague is “Escapism”. Originally coined by psycho-analysts to define the attitude of mind of people who seek to avoid unpleasant realities by withdrawing into a world of fantasy, the term has assumed a wider application to include those who seek temporary escape from boring or harrassing life by concentrating on more pleasant activities or subjects for thought.

The workers’ week-ends and holidays are not so much times for rest as periods of “Escapism”, that offer the variety and interest denied them during their hours of employment.

Socialism, by ending the private ownership of the means of wealth production, will end work for wages and the division of society into an employing class and an employed class. Millions now employed in defending private property, calculating profits, seeking markets or in other socially unnecessary tasks, will be released for productive work. Machinery will be used to lighten or eliminate the more obnoxious or laborious tasks. When profit is no longer the motive for production all people will have the opportunity for a more varied experience and will be able to regain an interest in the productive process.

When men are no longer exploited by employers and can go to work with a light step and a smile in pleasant anticipation of an interesting day, leisure time and holidays will assume less importance in their lives.

W. E. Waters

So They Say: Economic Waste (1975)

The So They Say Column from the May 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Economic Waste

On 1st April. the new Health and Safety at Work Act came into force. It had previously received paid publicity in the press along the lines that it represented:

A great new chance to make work a lot safer and healthier in Britain.

(Daily Mirror, 24th March 75)

The announcements heralding its approach quoted the following passage from the Robens report of the Committee of Health and Safety at Work:

The toll of death, injury, suffering and economic waste from accidents at work and occupational diseases remains unacceptably high!

Although it would be impossible to measure suffering, the hard facts are measurable and give some insight into the reasons for the Act:

Every year nearly 1,000 people are killed by accidents at work—between 3 and 4 every working day. Well over 500,000 are injured badly enough to be off work for more than 3 days. Some 250,000 are presently getting disability benefit; some 30,000 wives have been made widows by accidents at work. This means much suffering for the individual and a heavy cost to the community.

The suffering of a particular individual who has been injured through working in unsafe conditions is of the least importance to the capitalists. Where it begins to hurt them is when this “heavy cost to the community” has to be borne: that is, through taxation from the capitalist class as a whole. It is they who ultimately pay disability benefit, or the costs of medical treatment through the Health Service, or allowances to widows whose husbands have been killed. It follows that it is directly to their benefit that such expenses be reduced to a minimum.

The Act has increased the responsibility on the employer by threatening all those who fail to maintain a safe plant, give adequate training and supervision, or ensure that his workers are aware of the safety policy, that the Government can levy heavy fines and penalties. This is only to be expected. Those capitalists who do increase conditions of safety will expect some guarantee that all of them have joined in the drive. It would naturally cause some pique if one private-property owner made his plant safe in order to obtain some eventual relief from taxation, only to find that his competitor was still cutting all the corners and still placing his workers in jeopardy. The consequent cost of any accidents would have to be met by both of them.

The announcement also describes how workers (including self-employed workers) can play a part. They

must take care to avoid injuring themselves or others at work.

It is clear that any sensible worker will take care to avoid injuring himself, but however careful he may be, when placed in a position where physical dangers exist as well as being under constant pressure to maintain or increase his output, accidents will occur. Nor will they disappear even if all capitalists comply with the code of practice set out in the Act. It is not possible to remove the occasional lapse of attention with legislation while men are unceasingly harried at work in which they have no interest.

No Deal — Yet

The Government adopted an interesting position on the request from the Libyan Government to supply up to £1,000m. worth of tanks, guns, fighter aircraft submarines etc. They considered the request and decided that they probably could not accede to the major part of the order. They took this decision after some consideration—armaments after all are commodities and capitalist production operates to produce and sell commodities. The Labour Party cannot be concerned with the fact that such commodities can only be used for destructive purposes. They are however interested in who is buying them, especially in view of the fact that arms previously sold to Libya have mysteriously "found their way” to the IRA. However they are not all united on the issue. Mr. William Wilson, Labour MP for Coventry South East, spoke of his Party’s decision thus:

It is a deplorable situation. The orders will almost certainly now go to France.

(Financial Times, 12th April 1975)

The Government considered the Libyan request within the context of their policy for selling arms to the Middle East. This policy was outlined by Mr. David Ennals as Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office last year:

Our over-riding objective in the Middle East is a just and lasting settlement of the dispute between the Arabs and Israel. We are willing to consider requests from Middle East countries for arms, the supply of which in our view would not endanger the achievement of such a solution, in the light of our judgement of the long term policies of the State in question.

If that smacks a little of expediency, Sir Lester Suffield made it plainer:

We don’t do anything that can escalate fighting on one side or the other.

(Financial Times, 12th April 1975)

And he is in an authoritative position to speak. His post is that of Head of defence sales in the Ministry of Defence. We can only assume here that those sales of armaments which he does arrange are only to countries who give a most sincere promise never to use them.

Meaning Prestige

Some tantalizing prospects were held before us in an advertisement appearing in The Sun of 3rd April. In bold type it addressed itself to “MEN! GIRLS!” (perhaps ‘women’ is now considered unflattering).

You can earn £100 p.w. Plus an exciting life and a secure future.

The mind boggles — how?

How? Get into the fabulous Computer Industry now . . . Thanks to our method people from all walks of life have exchanged boring, underpaid, insecure jobs for careers that have meaning prestige and security.

Those reading the rest of the advertisement found that it was not actually offering the above delights, but was offering to train applicants in the techniques of such “exciting” work as programming, operating and key-punching cards for computers. The delights presumably would come later, after you had paid for the course. And how would you pay? Why, how else but with all those savings accrued from the under-paid job you were leaving? Nor is this a small sum, with courses often costing over £200.

Putting aside the Computer Digest verdict in March that such training schools were "a waste of time and money”, all those still interested in the "exciting life” might note the fact that Mr. Dick Brandon (a "computer wizard” according to The Sunday Times of 13th April) is running a business which assists companies in up-dating their computers—a process referred to as "system transformation”. It is no small affair:

When we realized US computer users spend $3000m a year on conversion, we began to lick our lips.

He has now set up shop in Britain where he hopes to establish a conversion centre for Europe "with work pouring in from far and wide”. The relevance of conversion to all those would-be programmers, operators and key punchers?

The task of converting all the programmes takes months, is tediously boring and is quite likely to drive all your carefully trained, expensively hired and scarce personnel off to more stimulating pastures.

The stimulating pastures of The Sun’s advertisement columns no doubt.

Alan D'Arcy

It may indeed! (1972)

From the March 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unhygienic, cumbersome, expensive to renew, money is rapidly going out of fashion. The credit card, that magic wand of purchasing power is taking over, bringing with it new problems. A Stanford Research Institute economist believes that thefts and other forms of misuse could drive the credit card companies into bankruptcy within 10 years unless they install equipment to stop the abuses. In New York a stolen card now sells for anything from $75 to $200 depending on its status. The typical loss on a card known to have been stolen is somewhere between $5000 and $7000. To foil the thieves will require devices that can link a document with its true owner by voice, fingerprint or some other physical characteristic. The economist sees nothing for it but to set up a nationwide computer system to check every purchase against the card-holder’s normal spending pattern—and. of course, how much he’s got in the bank. The bewildering assortment of hardware required (including new microwave or satellite networks to transmit the data over long distances) could produce a new industry to handle it. And it isn’t as if that will be the end of it. We shall have to guard against the crooks who invade the computerised hierarchy to funnel off private fortunes from so many credit sources at once that no one will know where the money has gone. How absurd the whole business has become. “To each according to his needs . . ." may yet be the only answer.

Ariadne, The New Scientist, 13 January, 1972.

Capitalism and computers (1994)

From the July 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you’re busily looking around at what political parties propose to do about the world we live in, you’ll notice that it’s very hard to get them to come clean and tell you their whole programme. They will say that is because you can’t explain a whole political programme in a sentence. I say that if you can’t explain your objective in a sentence it's because you haven’t got one. The Socialist Party objective is highly controversial, but it's very straightforward: the abolition of private property. It’s not that we oppose capitalism and would like to have some other arrangement of the property laws. It’s not that we hate money and prefer direct bartering of property. We oppose the concept of property ownership itself, and everything it entails.

Now why should property be such a problem, you might ask. Surely all our problems derive from not having enough of it in the first place? Don't we spend all our lives dreaming of the Pools? How does getting rid of all money and private property solve anything? We want more of these things, not less.

In answer allow me to refer you to interesting developments in the computer industry by way of analogy. In the world of computers, information can be privately owned, and therefore bought and sold, just like tins of spaghetti. Now I must point out that unlike other commodities such as spaghetti it is possible to steal information without its owner being aware of the theft — the shelf stocks don’t shrink from pilfering because you don’t actually physically take anything. You simply copy it. And if you’re copying it, you're not buying it. So the information tycoons get ripped off (shame) by invisible tealeaves who hardly ever get caught. Question: What can they do? Answer: Take you to the cleaners if they do catch you, otherwise not much.

Software piracy is now a criminal offence and is covered by the copyright laws. So if your boss at work asks you to copy an unlicensed program for the company, or use a program that you know has been copied without a license, you personally can also get prosecuted. So tell the boss to fuck off, unless he's going to make it worth your while to break the law. And incidentally, disgruntled ex-employees reading this will be interested in the potential for dropping their old employers in the shit. The fines can be ginormous. Not that I would encourage fellow workers to be spiteful, you understand . . .

But all that only applies to direct bit for bit mechanical copying. Alternatively, suppose you rewrote a program in your own code, in such a way that it did exactly the same thing as the original commercial program, and you then sold the finished item as your own program? In other words, you haven't copied it, but you have created an exactly similar replica. Maybe it sounds improbable to have to reinvent the wheel like that but it’s called reverse engineering and it goes on all the time. Only the twisted logic of a money-driven society could come up with anything quite as stupid as this, but there you go. Much of what passes for research in many different industries is simply company scientists being paid to reverse engineer other companies’ ideas. You wouldn't be breaching copyright, but you would still have pinched someone else’s idea and used it to make a profit. So how do you stop that? In theory, by holding a patent. However, you can’t rely on them.

In a recent patent dispute Intel the chipmakers tried to sue a rival company, AMD, for reverse engineering the 80386 and 80486 series of chips. AMD were of course guilty as hell. In fact they didn’t deny it. They won the case on the basis that reverse engineering didn’t breach Intel’s patent restrictions and that besides you can't copyright a number. So they effectively stole the whole thing, name and all, and got away with it. Intel retired sulking over their lost case, eventually emerging to retaliate with dash and brilliance by calling the new 80586 the 'Pentium'. On a different note, we can no doubt look forward to the Sextium, or maybe they’ll change its name to 'Esprit' or perhaps just 'Roger’. You think I jest? I make schoolboy joke? Let me tell you, an industry that calls a binary number an item of 'underwear' is capable of anything.

I digress. Now it happens that once upon a time the Patent Office didn't grant patents for computer algorithms at all, arguing amongst other things that it wasn't possible to call a string of numbers in a file (all that a program really is) an invention. In the 1950s through to the 1970s, unhampered by patent restrictions, research borrowed freely from research, and computer software developed very rapidly during this period as a result. It was an exciting period to be involved in computers, and all the real landmarks in computer technology were established at this time: spreadsheets, word-processing and DTP, computer aided design, networking, real-time simulation and virtual reality. The only thing that looked more exciting than the present was the near future.

However, things changed. During the 1980s patents started to be granted, sometimes for ridiculous things which were not original at all. The Patent Office arguably couldn’t keep abreast of fast-moving changes in this sunrise industry and tended to believe what it was told. And then the problems began.

If you can gull the Patent Office into granting a patent for your code, then whenever anyone writes any program that uses the same idea, they have to pay you royalties. So what big software houses are doing now is buying up buckets of patents and using them to sue the arses off all their competitors as a way of slowing them down — because it ends up being impossible to write any code at all without being in breach of somebody’s patent. As one observer puts it, in today’s information superhighway the Patent is what gets you pulled over for speeding (New Scientist, April 23).

The problem is, ownership of ideas slows down development of new ideas across the board, and in every field of computer science, and by extension in every field of human endeavour. Research is now hag-ridden with lawsuits. Nobody dares do anything innovative for fear of being stomped on by the big bullyboy patent owners. The result is that progress grinds to a halt, or shifts phase into that monumental waste of effort known as "lateral" or "sideways development", which is a process of designing the same thing over and over again in different fashion shades. You see what I'm getting at here? Private ownership has avalanched into the vale of ideas and dammed up the river. So the computer world is fiercely divided now between the rich software houses with their libraries of patents and their conservative views, and the rest who are clamouring to abolish the patent system. In other words, abolish the right to "own" an idea by patent, and you can at one stroke emancipate computer research and people can once again start to do really interesting things with the technology.

Anyone familiar with the Socialist case will see the similarity between the two arguments immediately. They are saying that ownership of ideas halts the progress of ideas. We are saying that ownership itself halts human progress of almost any sort. The scientists complain that they can’t have free access to ideas. We complain that humans can’t have free access to even basic necessities like food and shelter. The upshot of both arguments is the same — how are we supposed to progress as a civilisation under such restrictions?

In actuality the progressive scientists are not being as revolutionary as all that. Even if the state agreed to abolish the patent system — perhaps in order to stimulate the sagging computer economy — that doesn’t mean that suddenly information would become free. Those scientists would still be happy to make us pay for their ideas — they just wouldn't have to pay themselves. But the probability is that they won’t get their way. The reason that you can "own" an idea is that capitalism is a system of "ownership". It tends to commodify whatever can be made into a commodity, however unlikely. If you can figure out some way to stop everybody getting at it, then you can force them to buy it from you as a commodity, on a market established for that purpose, and at a massive rate of profit.

Example: why isn’t air a commodity while water is? Because they haven’t figured out how to restrict our access to air yet, but god help us all when they do. You see, the money system depends on stopping you from getting what you want. Now you see we are having to pay for metered water, even though it rains for eleven months of the bloody year, because they "own" the purification plants. A thing doesn’t have to be rare or scarce to be a commodity. It just has to be rendered unavailable by careful containment.

So all that’s happened in the computer industry is that information has been commodified. There should be no surprise about that, and no real expectation of being able to return to earlier times. You can’t seriously expect owners of a commodity like information to allow you to decommodify it from under them. Not unless you were actually challenging the concept of property ownership itself, the whole basis of capitalism, in which case we’d be talking world socialist revolution.

So hard cheese to the computer scientists. And anyway, what makes them think progress is on the agenda in the first place, or that "pure" research is or ought to be somehow exempt from the property system? They really do become insufferably pious and moral at times. There’s only one item on the agenda of anyone who owns anything in this world, and it begins with 'M'and rhymes with funny. Ingenious though I think computer researchers frequently are, I just can’t figure out where they get this idea from. Too much staring at the screen makes you go blind, perhaps.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Game On (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Game On

A man from Sydney, Australia, buys an island populated by wild animals for $26,500, and charges tax for hunting rights, as well as renting beach front property. This is perfectly normal behaviour in capitalism. The money he earns from it is real enough. The island, however, does not exist. It is a virtual island, with virtual animals. (New Scientist, May 20)

Elsewhere, in Shanghai, a man lends his prized sword to a friend, who then secretly sells it for 7200 yuan (£500), back-pocketing the proceeds. Furious, the man complains to the police, who do nothing. Enraged, he breaks into his friend’s house, and stabs him to death. The knife he uses is real enough, and the man gets life imprisonment for murder. No action is ever taken over the original theft, because the sword does not exist according to any known law. Real blood spilled by a virtual sword.

From Carolina, one man has made a fortune selling rare virtual furniture and other items, which, he discovered through a bug in the program, he could duplicate, and sell over and over again. Nobody knows if he has broken a law. The game company closed the bug hurriedly, but not before the man had cleared $100,000.

Online gaming is moving beyond the purview of geeky kids. Virtual items and goods, though theoretically worthless, acquire value in the real world as players seek to shortcut the time-consuming process of acquiring them in the game, and serious money is being made in the ‘grey market’ of virtual trading. Now game currencies have been indexed to real currencies, and one game developer, MindArk, has launched an ATM cashcard that players can use to withdraw real cash, calculated according to MindArk’s exchange rate of their ‘game’ wealth. The global trade in virtual goods is currently estimated at $880 million and rising, with 30 million, mostly western and mostly affluent gamers, playing games for up to 18 hours a day. In one popular online game, Second Life, a third of the players spend more time in the game than in the real world.

It’s not hard for socialists to see why people would want to escape the rigid fetters of real-time capitalism. People have been escaping the real conditions of life ever since the Greeks invented the outdoor theatre. What is slightly depressing but perhaps not very surprising is that people work so hard at their escapist fantasies only to create societies of lawlessness, savagery and insane self-destructive cruelty that make capitalism look like a pussycat by comparison. In one game, players are dedicated to the task of setting off virtual semtex bombs and blowing themselves and their online world up. In others, there are virtual assassinations, or random slayings, where players find their character has been murdered for no particular reason, apart from somebody’s idle amusement. A player can take a long time, sometimes years, to build a character up, provide it with its special faculties and powers, as well as its virtual property. To be robbed and murdered after all this work is no small thing and can be deeply upsetting to the player. But this is the virtual wild west, and there is a nihilistic appeal. Law doesn’t appear to work in people’s interest in the real world (true, in many ways), so the idea is to get rid of all law and have an orgy of violence and blood in the games.

The problem is, as with the Shanghai murder, the violence is starting to spill over into the real world, prompting some observers to suggest that law and punishment should be introduced into the games. The game developers are opposed. What is the point of playing a game that lets you do nothing? That’s just like real life, the very thing people want to run away from.

The other problem, from a socialist view, is the constant reinforcement these bloodthirsty games give to the perceived need for law and policing. For these are, in a way, highly moral games, in that they strongly emphasize what dread chaos results from ‘amoral’ or lawless behaviour. Socialism proposes to abolish all coercive law which serves class interests (which is to say, all property law, at the very least). What laws or rules socialism would retain is a moot but interesting question. What is evident however is that no rational debate on the socialist need for laws, or rules, or their nature or means of enforcement, is possible among workers while they are bamboozled into believing that a society without repressive legal structures is always going to look like a scene from Conan the Barbarian. Play one of these online games for a week and you will either become a nightmare axe-murderer from the Dark Ages or you will be screaming for the return of capital punishment and school floggings.

Why normal bank clerks and home heating engineers should want to lead double-lives as marauding rapists and genocidal maniacs is a topic too large to enter into here. But it would be interesting to speculate what a socialist society would make of it. Would they look back at capitalism and trace a pattern from the Boy’s Own stories of Empire days with their strongly moral content, through the poignant emptiness of punk culture and on into the cybernight of shoot-em-ups and global conquest games and say: there, that was a society in decline? By giving reality to the horrors of the repressed mind is capitalism liberating or enslaving us even more deeply? Will there come a point, perhaps with the total abolition of hard cash, when capitalism will itself become a virtual game, with a human population of players who try to amass arbitrary ‘units’ of currency in order to buy arbitrary artifacts? The difference between real life and a game is that you always have to return to real life eventually, but it is just possible that this difference may one day disappear, and our grip on reality may disappear with it.

Game Off

On a more positive note, a friend who is a computer repairman reports a recent case where a young man came in to have his computer repaired. The graphics card, an expensive one, had blown, and the cost would be over £300. The man appeared, and was given the bad news. He went away to think about it. A week later he returned.

“£300 is a lot of money when you don’t have a job. I can’t get a job because I’m too busy playing online for 16 hours every day. I haven’t been to a pub in two years, all my friends have disowned me, and I never see anybody. On top of that, I’m bored with the games because I am Grandmaster in all of them and can’t be beaten. In the past week I’ve gone to the pub, gone to a party, found all my friends and even met some new ones. In fact, I’ve had the time of my life. Tell you what. You can keep the bloody thing.”

And with that, he walked out into the real world.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Avatar, avachange (2006)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Avatar, avachange

Anti-socialists who peddle the old saw about human nature being unchangeable ought to hang out more with the kids and play online computer games, because if they did they would soon realize just how malleable human behaviour actually is. A recent study by researchers in Palo Alto, California, took two groups of virtual reality gamers and assigned them online cartoon representations, or avatars, which were deliberately given distinct physical characteristics, shorter or taller in the first group, and uglier or prettier in the second. Then they studied the behaviour of the gamers. (New Scientist, Feb 25, p.30). Those whose avatars were taller displayed consistently more assertive and aggressive behaviour while the shorter players were more acquiescent, and in the second group, the uglier players stood farther apart than the prettier ones. A quick and informal interrogation by Pathfinders of known local players reveals that this sort of behavioural change is common knowledge among gamers and in fact accounts for much of the appeal of virtual reality gaming. If our behaviour is so easily influenced by our perception of ourselves and our virtual surroundings, it is not hard to imagine a sea-change in human behaviour occurring almost overnight if our actual material surroundings were changed, say by the abolition of private ownership. The researchers plan to run the experiment next using age as the defining characteristic. We look forward to gamers, confronted by themselves with wrinkled skin and grey hair, suddenly becoming gurus of wisdom and maturity.

RFID, RDFI, DRIF, FRIED…

News that researchers have managed to infect state of the art RFID tags with a virus (BBC Online, March 15) raises a number of disturbing issues for the security of this new technology, as well as a highly interesting question for socialist revolutionaries in the wired world of the 21st century. These electronic Radio Frequency ID tags, which give every inanimate object the ability to identify itself electronically, can now be printed on cans of beans, and even sprayed on advertising posters, so that in the supermarkets of the near future the checkout till, barcode reader and human operator will disappear and your goods will be automatically identified in the trolley, and your bank account debited, as you push your wonky-wheeled chariot through the doors and into the carpark. Such ‘smart-tagging’ of products, posters, pets and even people carries huge benefits from a capitalist point of view, and not a few benefits from a future socialist society’s point of view too (see Socialist Standard, Jan 2005), but none of this takes into account what happens when a virus introduces Factor X – the RF Identity Crisis. When all forms of hard cash have disappeared, and the circulation of money in the economy is replaced by the circulation of binary digits round a computer network, the money economy will have reached its zenith of efficiency, and its nadir of vulnerability. One smart hacker could in theory do by stealth what all the revolutionaries of history have failed to do by force – abolish price tags, wipe out bank accounts, mortgages, debts, profits, rents and fees, thus effectively ‘rebooting’ society and resetting all values at zero. The question, for socialists, is whether they could ever condone, or advocate, such a draconian step, given the chaos which would quite likely ensue. Given the organized chaos of a society which at present lets most of its members suffer appalling deprivation within a sea of riches, the answer is surely not straightforward.

More on viruses

AOL, the American internet giant, have recently been hit by a double whammy. First, according to informed sources close to Pathfinders, their endorsed anti-virus partner Macafee turned out a March upgrade to their anti-virus software which, oh dear, oops, deletes certain vital Windows DLL overlay files, which is the equivalent of removing the spark plugs from your car engine. Then, within days, the Norton group produced their anti-virus upgrade which accidentally removes, yes, you guessed it, your AOL internet software. If anti-virus companies are going to carry on doing more damage to your computer than the viruses they are supposed to catch, surely the obvious question is: why don’t they test these upgrades on virtual animals first? Remember, you saw this idea here first.

Lastly, on viruses

In case you missed this: the animals in the jungle are discussing who is the scariest of them all. ‘Me’, says the lion, and gives out a big roar. The animals shake their heads, unimpressed. ‘Me’, says the gorilla, and thumps his chest. The animals tap their paws, underwhelmed. Then the parrot lets out a sneeze, and everybody runs for miles…. You know it’s serious when the jokes start appearing.

Drugs trial + Pro-Test

The controversy over animal testing has always generated more heat than light, and the temperature has now been turned up several notches on the regulo dial by two unrelated but curious events. One is the unprecedented ‘coming out’ of pro-test students in Oxford under the name ‘Pro-Test’, instigated by a young student disgusted with anti-testers’ increasingly terrorist tactics against individuals as well as the alleged poor quality of the debate. The other is the catastrophic clinical trial of the drug TGN1412, developed by the German TeGenero biotechnology company, that left six UK volunteers in intensive care, with two of them in critical condition as this goes to press (FT.com, March 16). Early reports are suggesting that the paperwork for the trial was entirely in order and that the drug had already been extensively tested on rabbits and monkeys with no discernible adverse effects, so that it was deemed entirely safe to proceed with clinical trials in humans. What is especially interesting about this calamity is that both sides of the animal testing debate will immediately seize on it as proof of their position: the anti-testers will parade this disaster as evidence that animal testing is unable to prevent harmful drugs like Thalidomide and Seroxat, now TGN1412, from reaching humans, while pro-testers will be entirely justified in asking how many more potentially lethal drugs would have been tried on humans if animal testing had been banned outright. As with many things in science, both sides have a point, and there are no simple answers. Even in socialism, where there would be little likelihood of animal testing for non-medical purposes, eg. cosmetics (such research today account for around three quarters of testing), this debate would most probably run and run.

Paddy Shannon

The socialist breakfast (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The King asked the Queen, and the Queen asked the Dairymaid: "Could we have some butter for the Royal slice of bread?” The Dairymaid she curtsied and went and told the Alderney: ”Don’t forget the butter for the Royal slice of bread." The Alderney said sleepily: ”You’d better tell his Majesty that many people nowadays like marmalade instead. ” The King said "Bother!” and then he said, "Oh, deary me!” The King sobbed “Oh deary me!” and went back to bed.

A. A. Milne’s king was not a typical royal. The present Queen is hardly likely to go back to bed in a sulk because there was no butter on her breakfast table, since she is one of the few people with a free choice of food and all the other material things of life. Many people in the world get no breakfast — 90 thousand die every day of starvation. The majority have a limited diet to survive on — a few mouthfuls of bread, cereal or rice. On the other hand, we in the more industrialised West are very much dependent on the availability of commodities like sliced bread or breakfast cereal and are brain-washed by advertising into wanting, say, Sugar Popsicles, regardless of their nutritional value or effect on our teeth. In a socialist society life would be very different and breakfast well illustrates how a free access society might be organised.

The key to a satisfying breakfast — as in any other area of consumption — will be communication. The consumer needs first to find out what would constitute a nutritionally satisfying meal for her or his normal daily activity and the choice of foods that could provide that balanced diet. Those caring for babies and young children will be concerned about their special dietary needs. The results of research into new foods — maybe plankton and seaweed porridge, rich in protein and minerals and with a delicious taste — will be of interest even if no one chooses to try it. Information and communication go hand in hand and the two can be achieved simultaneously.

In socialism each person will be free to choose not only what she or he consumes but how she or he registers that and gets delivery. Some may prefer to order by telephone or post and have delivery to the door. Others may like to help themselves from “shops” or “markets”. Whatever way is used, each person’s choice is detected or registered as it is made and then combined with everybody else’s. Thus the total requirement for bread, butter, marmalade, and so on is available to the food industry, so that fluctuations in demand are detected and accommodated day by day.

Having measured the demand for a particular foodstuff — and the same principles apply to other types of basic need — we encounter a further need for communication. Just as we have needs which in socialism we shall communicate directly, so each part of the productive system has its needs. The marmalade factory needs oranges and sugar, peeling and chopping machinery, glass jars, metal tops, and its share of power, water and transport. The marmalade factory’s demand for oranges, say, is added to the soft drink factory’s demand and to our demand for fresh oranges, and so on until a total demand for oranges is registered which has to be communicated to the orange growers. The same sort of merging of requirements throughout all industry forms a very complex network of information, extending world-wide. The network also extends through time since it has to accommodate planting as well as harvesting, replacement of machinery as well as its use and all the various stages of mining and processing of raw materials.

The network of requirement information is an ideal application for a computer system. The data and relationships are basically very simple while the volumes arc enormous. The network will hold a four-dimensional electronic mapping of the entire productive system with linkages established between associated data using a worldwide digitised telephone system. It will record and respond to the capacities and requirements of every unit of production factory, depot, dock, mine, farm — linking all consumption and demand through to raw materials, land and labour through every intermediate stage of distribution and processing.

The network consists physically of millions of small computers sited locally to information sources, all linked by telephone lines to form a “distributed” computer system. It is worth emphasising that this would not have a hierarchical structure with levels of control, nor would it require giant databases at administrative centres. Indeed, the function of the network would be communication and not control. It would enable people involved in production to know what needs to be done. It would not and could not instruct them to do it. So, for example, if the people at an orange plantation decided to have a week off instead of doing their estimate quota of picking and packing, the information system would register this fact and arrange for supplies to be got from some reserve stores set up for such contingencies.

The communication network would replace the money system as a means of regulating production levels. From “how many can we sell in competition with our trade rivals?” to “how many are needed?” means stability and an end to the expansion, boom, crisis, recession cycle. The saving of time and resources now wasted on administration, the law, marketing and in duplication of effort will free us all for more useful and stimulating activities. Associated with the network, and using the same hardware, would be an information system allowing anybody who was interested to see what was happening in the world. With helpful indexing and routing facilities and linked to television news and documentaries and to film archives and reference libraries, the system would provide a window on the world and unity and security for all its people.

There is nothing in this method of organising production that resembles management or government as we know it now. Having automated the routine decision-making, what remains of the planning process — the decision, for example, of where to establish a new orange plantation should it be needed — cannot be made automatically by a computer system. The information system can however make available to the people affected by the decision, or interested in it for some reason, all the relevant facts about alternative sites with suitable climate and soil, and the state of those sites at present. Then the decision would be made democratically by the people.

The ability to automate administration answers the reservations some people have about the reality of socialism. Fears that in socialism we would all be perpetually sitting on committees are groundless. Some people have argued that managers and foremen always be needed and that those people with organising ability — with analytical minds and loud voices — would have a useful contribution to but if we have reliable information about what needs to be done, everything can be organised on the basis of co-operative teamwork. Oscar Wilde in Soul of Man Under Socialism called democracy “the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”, but in fact no bludgeoning is necessary. Democracy means freedom for the individual — freedom of choice, a say in all significant decision-making, and a secure and happy life.

  The Queen said, “There, there!” and went to the Dairymaid. The Dairymaid said, “There, there!” and went to the shed. The cow said, “There, there!” I didn’t really mean it : Here’s milk for his porringe and butter for his bread. ” 

Chris Marsh

Blue chip (1989)

Book Review from the January 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Big Blue by Richard Thomas DeLamarter (Pan £4.99.)

Big Blue is IBM, the American computer company which is the world's most powerful and profitable corporation. For thirteen years it was the subject of an anti-trust case brought by the US government, which was eventually withdrawn by one of Reagan's puppets in 1982. DeLamarter spent eight years working as a government economist on the case, and this book is his interpretation of the evidence provided, based largely on material from IBM's internal files.

Different readers will no doubt draw different conclusions from the book: some may even see it as a recipe for how to run a successful company. What strikes a socialist reader is the amount of effort devoted by IBM simply to defeating competitors or would-be competitors, and their methods of maintaining and extending their power.

Contrary to the popular image (which the company has worked very hard to build), IBM's products are not particularly reliable or technically advanced. Prior to the development of computers, IBM had a big share of the punch card accounting machine market, which gave them a larger sales and repair network than any other rival. Even though Remington had the computer market to itself for a couple of years, it was IBM that captured the lion's share of sales by installing the new machines alongside the existing ones (on which they were at first partially dependent). The first IBM computers were deliberately priced to lose money and so undersell their competitors, who lacked the financial resources to reduce their own prices.

Having beaten off most of their rivals, IBM were able to keep their, dominant market share by exploiting software lock-in and price discrimination. Software lock-in refers to the fact that once programmes have been written for a particular type of computer system, and staff trained to operate it, a company will find it prohibitively expensive to switch to another system, and so will tend to stay with its original choice and simply add on updates, however inefficient they are. Price discrimination meant setting prices relatively low where there was competition (for example, for small-scale systems which would be a customer's typical initial purchase) but relatively high where there was no effective competition (extra peripherals or computer memory). IBM was quite prepared to be flexible in this respect, drastically cutting the price of memory when independent producers began to challenge its position, and to be threatening, dropping unsubtle hints about likely maintenance problems to customers who considered buying non-IBM equipment to add to an IBM system. The company's executives were also willing to use their influence with banks and finance companies to starve competitors of funds.

In the early sixties, General Electric began to win large orders for a computer specifically designed for time sharing (whereby different operations are performed concurrently). To boost its own sales, IBM announced a new machine, model 67, intended for time sharing, and at a low price. Model 67 never attained its proposed technical performance, but it did achieve the more important (for IBM) goal of killing off the competition. General Electric saw its sales drop off, and in 1970 ceased to make mainframe computers. The model 90 was another IBM machine that was designed and launched not as a technological advance, but purely to damage a rival company, in this case Control Data Corporation

In spite of the sometimes tedious amount of detail, DeLamarter's book provides an interesting look behind the scenes of capitalist business practice. It shows very clearly that profitability and "success" in capitalist terms have nothing at all to do with meeting people's needs.

Paul Bennett

From Handicraft to the Cloud: Part 1 of 2 (2012)

From the March 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

As in the industrial revolution, progress in the computer revolution comes at a price.

Despite all the technological innovation, computing is all too often a frustrating and limiting experience. Is this because Google, Apple, Facebook or Microsoft are evil and lock down hardware, platforms, software and content? NO! Is this because we should all avoid proprietary software, even freeware in favour of mutual co-operative open-source projects such as Linux? Well this is barely half the story as can be seen when free open-source software is not immune to industry trends such as cloud computing, bloat, eye-candy, new version fetishisation and app stores. The elephant in the room is the broad historical trends in the industry which affect free software somewhat less than proprietary software and mirror the industrial revolution and tend to disempower, limit and alienate (in the Marxist sense) the end user. Software and personal computing suffers from class divisions.

2011 was another year of hype for cloud computing. In June 2011 Google launched the Chromebook and Apple announced iCloud. The Google Chromebook is no ordinary laptop, it relies on storing software and your data on Google servers. This is called cloud computing and has been considered the next big thing in IT by market experts for some years. The term ‘cloud’ is appropriate since its benefits are nebulous and it may also represent dark clouds on the horizon for personal computing.

The history of personal computing is almost as old as the first manned moon landing in 1969, and in technological terms, the personal computers of today are certainly more advanced. Why on earth is personal computing then, a frustrating and limiting experience? By 1965, Gordon E. Moore had predicted the rate of advancement in computer hardware (doubling every 18 months), which has proved largely accurate. By 1973, the first mouse-driven graphical user interface had been produced.  Niklaus Wirth observed that ‘software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster’. This parallels Stanley Jevon’s observation over a century earlier that ‘advances in efficiency tend to increase resource consumption’. To find out why this is the case we have to look at the history of personal computing and its potential downfall.

‘A computer in every home’
The first million selling computer book was the Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth in 1968. Although it was an incredibly technical book, Knuth liked to stress the art aspect of the title, and it was certainly in stark contrast to the industry that it is today. In other respects, sentiments among computing enthusiasts would be familiar (especially to socialists) throughout history. In particular, The Hacker Ethic (Steven Levy, 1984, Hackers) which included such noble statements as ‘all information should be free’ and ‘access to computers should be unlimited and total’. This was not unusual for the time. Popular computing literature including magazines and books such as 101 Basic Computer Games (David H. Ahl, 1973) printed lines of code and encouraged users (especially children) to input the code to produce games. Most personal computers offered a command-line interface (even those with an additional graphical user interface) and were bundled with some form of the BASIC programming language, so named because of its ease of use and suitability for learning. The learning curve for using home computers was steep when compared with today but popular computing literature at the time helped make the curve somewhat more graduated. Despite its significance, very few writers have lamented the disappearance of BASIC, perhaps the most well-known article is titled ‘Why Johnny Can’t Code’ (David Brin, 2006).

As Neal Stephenson put it, in the beginning there was the command-line and Microsoft had the odd idea of selling operating systems. It was Apple Macintosh however, who introduced the first commercially successful graphical user interface with drag and drop capabilities and WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) interface in 1984. Just a year later, the Commodore Amiga 1000 made colour, animation, sound and multi-tasking affordable to home users. Although the desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was used by rivals, the Amiga offered an indicator of the ethos of the time. It used the metaphor of a deeply-customisable workbench for its operating system. The desktop metaphor prevailed partly because home computers in the West evolved out of the office at a time when industrial capital was on the decline.  But also, the desktop prevailed over the workbench metaphor, because empowering users to control the means of production was gradually becoming an alien notion.

No single business seemed to be able to establish a hardware monopoly, let alone a software monopoly, that was unchallenged by rivals. In January 1986 PC Magazine reviewed fifty-seven different programs for word-processing. Even the most popular application software such as WordStar, AmiPro and WordPerfect was largely produced by small teams and in some cases individuals. The spirit of the age was described as the era of the bedroom programmer, although this is possibly a little exaggerated. Sharing software was widespread, computing magazines distributed cover disks with public domain and shareware software and users exchanged software in classifieds advertisements. Software developers might not have liked it, but magazines were an important channel for distribution. Acceptable software costs to users were generally regarded as the cost of the disk and this was the attitude in businesses as well as at home. The limitations of the hardware of the time meant also that developers were expected to optimize code to be as fast as possible.

Windows 95
The personal computer industry grew rapidly over subsequent years. By 1992, Amigas had fallen by the wayside. Ataris were cheaper and in 1993 could boast multi-tasking but by then it was too late. A monopoly position had already been established by IBM-PC compatible hardware and Microsoft consolidated their monopoly in software with a $300m launch of Windows 95. Although users may have been reluctant to embrace planned obsolescence, this was a time when the vision of ‘a computer in every home’ still involved selling hardware to first-time buyers.

The truth behind the hype was a little different, RoughlyDrafted.com (5 February 2007) comments:

 ‘From the mid 80s to the mid 90s, Microsoft amassed fortunes as an application developer for the Mac. Even in 1996, Microsoft reported making more money from Office–$4.56bn–than it did from all of its Windows sales combined–$4.11bn. Tying sales of Windows 95 to Office helped to boost sales of both. Microsoft pushed the new version of Office as a reason to buy Windows 95, and Windows 95 helped kill sales of rival applications, including the then standard WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, neither of which were available or optimized for Windows 95 at its launch. By the release of Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft had swallowed up 98 percent of the OS market’

Innovation, but not for the masses

Although Windows 95 firmly established the desktop metaphor over rivals, this was the limit of its innovation and other enhancements were criticised as merely cosmetic. The successful introduction of encyclopedia software called Encarta on CD-Rom was regarded as cutting edge use of technology for encyclopedic content. That encyclopedias might not be traditionally editorially controlled and might instead be participatory by the next major Windows release was not anticipated by Bill Gates in his published book The Road Ahead in 1995 or its heavily revised 1996 reprint.

Many innovations after the achievement of software monopoly never reached the masses or if they did, many years later than when they first appeared. IBM OS/2 never replaced Windows 95, though some considered it more advanced. By 1997, an operating system called BeOS had been introduced with instant-on boot, 64-bit, journaling, indexing and metadata tags, but this too never reached the masses. The first 32-bit internet web browser, with FTP client, usenet group reader and internet relay chat (IRC) client was not from Microsoft but from Cyberjack in 1995. But by embedding Internet Explorer into Windows just as the internet was taking off, Microsoft was able to delay tabbed web browsing as standard (until 2006) which already existed in the relatively popular Netscape Navigator. Internet Explorer became so popular for about 5 years after 2001 that it felt no need to introduce a new version. By then it could no longer ignore the threat of Mozilla Firefox (loosely descended from Netscape) which was rapidly gaining market share.

At least, the marketing for new versions of Windows did claim to offer usability improvements and fix the many problems identified in previous versions rather than just eye-candy. What became clear beyond any doubt was that software was getting inflated at a rate roughly in proportion to each passing year (faster than Moore’s Law). Benchmarking tests are one way to test this, and are sometimes used in the independent computing press.

Bill Gates commented: ‘I’m saying we don’t do a new version to fix bugs […] We’d never be able to sell a release on that basis’ (Focus Magazine 23 October 1995).

The vision of ‘a computer in every home’ began to look dated. Instead, focus shifted to encouraging existing computer users to upgrade software. It suited hardware manufacturers that software updates should make older computers slower. Whereas the earlier trend was for first-time hardware sales to come packaged with software, now software sales (with artificial barriers)  would drive the need to buy new hardware.

Games also played a big part in driving early hardware sales of the first personal computers in the home. Games revenue eventually overtook the movie and music industry and games were even described as the leading artform of the era. The latest ‘Call of Duty’ game was the biggest entertainment launch ever in revenue terms. Games helped drive the industry upgrades but many users’ reluctance to upgrade persisted, and Windows sales through retail channels continued to decline. Planned obsolescence needed introducing more forcefully, and subscriber-computing and the internet was about to offer the opportunity to do it.

The emergence of viruses and malware on the burgeoning internet helped the software update industry. The idea of software spying on the user or otherwise compromising privacy, was something malware and viruses did, not legitimate software. Users owned their software and anything else was an alien concept. As one user on MSFN.org put it:

  ‘I will never understand why users tolerate or accept this. If an individual or company demanded that you prove that you did not steal your home or car, you’d eventually file some kind of complaint or harassment charges against them. If the same standards that are used for applications were applied to operating systems, XP and newer systems would be classified as spyware. Windows has been going in the opposite direction for some time, with each new version giving the user less control over what it does and less access to the data it stores.’

This comfortable position of around 90 percent market share could not be threatened by any rivals. Journalists of the computing press might have been tempted to describe the hardware and software monopolies as the end of home personal computing history. But to do so, would have been as foolish as Francis Fukuyama’s claim to have reached ‘The End of History’ a decade earlier.

DJW

Link to Part 2