Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

While Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola was watching his team play Real Madrid in the first leg of the Champions League quarter-finals on Tuesday, his watch was making headlines around the world. Guardiola was wearing an extravagant Richard Mille watch worth £1 million ($1.26 million) on his wrist at Madrid’s Estadio Santiago Bernabéu.

 (CNN)

Conspiracy theorists have for years now insisted that COVID-19 vaccines were the real killers, especially among young men — but a new study shows that there’s no data to back that up. 

(Futurism)

Actual science is the great accomplishment of mankind. The antidote to ignorance, superstition, religious zealotry, and nonsensical beliefs in general. An eclipse exemplifies, to even the lay-est of laypeople, just how advanced modern science is. We were informed by astronomers, years in advance, exactly when and exactly where the eclipse would occur — down to the second, down to the meter — and everyone in the path of totality could literally see how exactly right those predictive calculations were. We should be celebrating and emphasizing this to laypeople, because these same scientists are the same people who’ve been telling us for decades that we’re destroying our climate with carbon emissions. So here’s my “by the way” retort to Montúfar’s aside: how many astronomers today — not in “ancient” times — are also astrologers? Spoiler: the answer is fucking zero. 

(Daring Fireball)

… I am aware of the dishonesty and stupidity of choosing any side in any war, and I am aware that all wars are immoral exercises in folly and absurdity. The only real beneficiaries are politicians and weapons makers. The great masses of regular people on both sides of any conflict always have to pay the price. The unlucky individuals who get killed or come home from the pointless war with mangled bodies and fucked-up minds pay the biggest price. Furthermore, whatever outcomes result from a war, no matter which side “wins,” serve mainly to lay the groundwork for future conflicts and more wars. 

(International Clearing House)

South Africa has undergone a nutritional transition over the past 30 years characterized by the triple burden of malnutrition: households are simultaneously experiencing undernutrition, hidden hunger, and overweight or obesity due to nutrient-poor diets. The results of the first in-depth, nationwide study into food and nutrition since 1994, the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey, found that almost half of South Africa’s adult population was overweight or obese. While there was sufficient food to feed everyone through domestic production and imports, many families and individuals went to bed on empty stomachs.

 (Alliance for Science)

Thirty years after the former liberation movement won the first democratic elections, South Africa remains the world’s most unequal nation, suffering from high unemployment, rampant crime, widespread corruption and a stagnant economy. 

(AFP)

Rough sleeping increased in all regions of England between 2022 and 2023 despite a Conservative 2019 manifesto promise to end rough sleeping before the next general election. An estimated 3,898 people slept rough in 2023, an annual increase of 27% – the largest annual rise since 2015. The numbers are more than double (up 120%) those in 2010. 

(Guardian)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Worldwide, 1.4 billion children aged under 16 lack any form of social protection, leaving them vulnerable to disease, poor nutrition and poverty.

(tinyurl.com/4s7uj2rz)

With church attendance falling, many Belgian churches are being given a new lease of life instead of being closed down. In one church in Mechelen, visitors now raise a glass instead of raising a prayer.

(tinyurl.com/5n6thwfp)

’It is important to understand aspects of human evolution so that you feel a part of humanity,’ Black says. ’So many people feel isolated, excluded or discarded because of the way they look or what culture they practice. By understanding human origins, people will see that we are all more united than divided in so many ways’.

(tinyurl.com/9rszmdau)

According to Mohammad Esmaeili Mahjoub, head of Tehran Municipality’s department for managing social issues, there has been a concerning rise in cases of abandoned elderly individuals. He revealed that since the start of the year, approximately 25 cases have been encountered by their organization in the capital alone. Fatemeh Abbasi, deputy responsible for rehabilitation affairs at the national welfare organization, has also voiced alarm over the surge in homelessness, particularly among the elderly and mentally ill. She stated that many of these vulnerable individuals are left on the streets by families who can no longer afford their care.

(tinyurl.com/2y2v8wnx)

Nick Hurley… said his firm had seen the number of businesses seeking advice on what to do about unexplained absences more than triple since the pandemic. Mr Hurley told The Telegraph: ’What we have noticed is in those sectors where perhaps wages and skills are a little lower, there is a definite increase in the number of employees who are just not showing up to work – and leaving the employer in the doo-doo, as it were.

(tinyurl.com/ycyjpsc5)

Prince of Wales to build homes for the homeless on his Cornish estate.

(tinyurl.com/msdepskj)

The Trump administration’s neglect and incompetence helped put half-a-million Americans in the ground, dead from COVID-19. Joe Biden was elected president in part on the promise of setting us on a science-driven course correction, but, a little more than a year later, another half-a-million Americans were killed by the virus. What happened?

(tinyurl.com/9j7az7k3)

According to Federal Reserve data, industrial production in the US defense and space sectors has surged by 17.5% since the war began, and administration officials say 64% of the $60.7 billion designated for Ukraine in a $95 billion supplemental military package will come back to the US defense industrial base.

(tinyurl.com/577azdhe)

The Houthis have recruited thousands of children since the start of the conflict in Yemen in 2014. The United Nations has verified at least 1,851 individual cases of child recruitment or use by the Houthis since 2010.

(tinyurl.com/4kpzxv6c)

…the criminal court in Dhamar in northern Yemen sentenced nine individuals to death – with seven sentenced to be executed by stoning, and two by crucifixion – while 23 others were handed prison sentences between six months and 10 years on charges including ’homosexuality’, ’spreading immorality’, and ’immoral acts’.

(tinyurl.com/yspz4k4f)

The Rear View: Everything’s for sale (2020)

The Rear View Column from the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everything’s for sale

This is the title of a ‘…shocking film on the privatization of American public lands. “We’ve arrived at a moment,” Herring says in the film, “where we are going to decide whether we’re going to keep the birthright and the legacy of our public lands [system] or whether we simply want to unleash the forces of industry and live in a world where everything is for sale.” In other words, the November elections could determine the fate of many of the most iconic and cherished ecosystems in the US, from national forests to wildlife refuges’ (theguardian.com, 25 September). This month’s election in the US has not changed anything: capitalism continues and everything remains for sale. The National Trust’s 2,480 km2 of land – with its 1,300 kilometres of coast, 500+ historic houses, castles, ancient and industrial monuments, gardens, parks and nature reserves — might be seen as inalienable, yet Parliament can override this. If capitalism really wants something then wildlife, natural beauty, peace and quiet, or anything else, will take second place.

50s-era landfill?

There is one for sale in Wilmington, North Carolina.’The Town paid $25 for the land, and used it to house hurricane debris and trash. The only thing that now stands between the Beach and a $1.05 million sale is a snafu involving an N.C. contractor and state regulators, who disagreed on how much it should cost to clean the former landfill’ (portcitydaily.com, 25 September). In fact, capitalism does put a value on a summer’s day. And on a work of art. On a mosque. A social system which works by profit, whose wheels are lubricated by money, must put a price on everything. It bruises many sensitivities in the process, but capitalism can work in only one way.

Recycled condoms?

‘Police in Vietnam have busted a factory that took recycling one step too far. Some 345,000 used condoms were seized from the factory near Ho Chi Minh city, where they had been boiled, reshaped with a wooden phallus, and packaged for resale, Reuters reports. According to state media, the 34-year-old woman who owned the factory said it had received a “monthly input of used condoms from an unknown person.” Health officials said the recycled rubbers posed an “extreme health risk” to users, reports the AP. The factory was raided after a tip from a local resident. Police said the factory owner told them she was paid 17 cents per kilogram of recycled condoms. She has been detained and authorities are seeking other people involved in the operation’ (newser.com, 25 September).

Escape from Covid-19?

(i) for the gullible 99 percent. According to Dr. Vikas Mishra, ‘People are happily wearing these cards and moving around in crowded places which exposes them to the infection. Believing that any unverified and untested product would save one from the virus is foolishness and also exposes people to the danger of catching the infection…’ (news18.com, 21 September). Apparently, medical ‘. . . stores are earning a handsome amount and owners say these cards are selling like hot cakes.’

(ii) for the 1 percent. ‘Starting an overseas holiday with two weeks quarantine may not sound deeply appealing, but a tour operator says well-heeled clients are prepared to do it. Both National and Act party border control policies would allow foreign tourists to stay in privately managed isolation facilities that met strict rules… The package, including two weeks in an isolation facility, would cost $15,000 to $20,000 per person, and she said if up to 700 people were allowed in over the coming summer, they would generate $10m to $15m in tourism income…’ (stuff.co.nz, 22 September).

Eternal life?

‘The super-rich are already living the best lives. Now they’re trying to make those lives last forever with a wide array of weird and wonderful ideas from the fringes of science… Ambrosia is one of three outfits looking at experimental “vampire” blood transfusions that put the blood of young people into the veins of oldies. According to commercial finance experts ABC Finance, the cost of the trials currently ranges from £6,000 to about £215,000. The technique has worked well in mice, although as yet there are no positive results from human trials’ (dailystar.co.uk, 19 September). Such developments come as no surprise to socialists who have long understood capitalism’s voracious nature and how it seeks ever new ways to drain what it can out of the working class. Marx noted: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 10). Capitalism causes pollution, war and want, but for the system to continue it must avoid eradicating its source of unpaid surplus value. Indeed, the introduction of basic healthcare, welfare payments and even parks is primarily in the interest of the parasite, not the host.

Moneyless moonshine?

‘Work with us. Do not believe those who tell you any political party, or any “reformers” or any special legislation, can do away with crimes that are only the result of our whole system of society to-day. If you would do away with these crimes, you must do away with their cause. Help us. Help us to save not only yourselves, men and women; not only your little children. Help us also to save the very criminals, who now “drain your sweat and drink your blood.” Come to us. Join hands with us; and hand in hand, heart to heart with us, labour in this great cause. Never forget that when once the people will there is no gainsaying them. Once you rise “in unvanquishable number,” you are many, they — your enemies — “are few” ‘ (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, The Commonweal, August 1885).

Proper Gander: Gathering storm (2023)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Staying behind at work to get drunk and tunelessly sing karaoke with colleagues every few weeks isn’t in most people’s routine, and certainly wasn’t during the Covid pandemic. But that’s what happened then in 10 Downing Street, the place which issued the restrictions on gatherings for the rest of us. During the lockdowns which began in spring and winter 2020, at least 16 leaving dos, quiz nights and ‘Wine Time Fridays’ were held behind the shiny black door while the rest of the country was policed for illegal meet-ups. Channel 4’s docudrama Partygate was a sobering reminder of the Conservative Party’s not-so conservative parties. The programme’s dramatised scenes of government staff’s boozing, trips to the alcohol aisle in the supermarket and incriminating email exchanges were derived from findings in the inquiry headed by senior civil servant Sue Gray and the police’s investigation. Alongside these scenes were clips from past news broadcasts, often of Boris Johnson saying something crass.

The drama focuses on the party-animal team of ‘special advisers’ working in Number 10, particularly a newcomer to the Brexit Unit when the pandemic hit, Grace Greenwood, played by Georgie Henley. While she and many of the other characters aren’t specific real people, they plausibly represent a breed of young, posh graduates from the ‘right’ establishments who sycophantically support Boris Johnson. He’s only depicted in the dramatised sections from behind or at a distance. When he speaks, as voiced by Jon Culshaw, he comes out with embarrassing strings of half-formed quips which his fan club laps up. Other real people portrayed include Johnson’s special adviser and head of operations, Shelley Williams-Walker, who was made a Dame in his resignation honours list, perhaps for services to DJing during the parties. Another is Helen MacNamara who, as the government’s ethics chief at the time, presumably thought that providing a karaoke machine for a leaving bash was the morally right thing to do.

Cleaners and security guards are the only staff depicted as having any sense of responsibility, but too low down the pecking order for this to count, such as when a guard is given the brush-off after trying to object to one of the get-togethers. The police’s response to attending at least one Downing Street gathering hasn’t been revealed to the public, although details of some of the fines awarded have been. Boris Johnson and Helen MacNamara each paid £50 fixed penalty notices for attending parties, with MacNamara denying any partying. Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also issued with a £50 notice, along with 80 others, meaning that Downing Street was the address with the most Covid regulation penalties in the country. Between the dramatised scenes we hear from people fined larger amounts, like Xen Watts, the organiser of a snowball fight in Leeds who was issued with a £10,000 fine and Toriano Reed from London who was ordered to pay £14,300 for being held responsible for a gathering in his shed.

The programme also includes interviews with people who kept to the lockdown rules through their most difficult times. Alan Handley from Tamworth talks about his wife’s funeral, which only eight family members could attend, sitting two metres apart. Emma Jones from London speaks about how her daughter couldn’t meet with her friends or relatives before she died of cancer. While these, and others, aren’t likely to forget how Downing Street staff ignored the rules, after enough time passes, scandals like Partygate tend to get pushed away from most people’s attention, replaced by different criticisms of the government (such as debates around immigration or the HS2 railway line) and wider bad news. So, the programme was a useful reminder of how the Conservative Party has operated, with a smug assumption of superiority. The characters working in Number 10 featured in the programme consider themselves above the rest of us, and therefore not subject to the same rules, especially the lockdown laws they devised. They act like this not because they’re Tories as much as because of their distance from the populace created by the institution they work (and partied) in. The framework of government comes with a very limited type of democracy, but the special advisers are unelected. Instead, they’re selected from a small bubble of objectionable yuppies active in whichever political party is dominant. So, they’re even less accountable than voted-in politicians. The Partygate scandal drew attention to this aspect of government, behind the polished spin which it prefers to present.

Sue Gray’s report was published in May 2022, soon after the police completed their investigation, so Channel 4’s dramatisation of their findings has come late to the party, so to speak. Its broadcast was still timely, though, coinciding with October’s Conservative Party conference. This scheduling looks like a jibe by Channel 4 at a government which has wanted to review its broadcasting remit but probably won’t get the chance before the next general election. But the programme does more than reproach hypocritical Tories drunk on power as much as on red wine. It highlights how they acted as they did because the institution they are part of is so detached from the rest of us.

Mike Foster

Capitalist cake (2020)

Book Review from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pandemic Capitalism. From Broken Systems to Basic Incomes by Chris Oestereich (Wicked Problems Collaborative. 2020)

While this short book insists that the post coronavirus world can and must be one of radical change (‘a new paradigm’ as one of its chapter titles says) and one that provides a decent means of life for everyone, it nails its colours to the mast in the opening pages by quoting approvingly the World Economic Forum’s words: ‘We seriously need to consider implementing a well designed Universal Basic Income (UBI), so shocks may hit, but they won’t destroy.’ So the new world will, in the author’s view, still be one ensconced in the existing system of ‘incomes’ and not one involving the real paradigm shift of abolition of wages and salaries, of buying and selling and of money and wages. It will be, in the author’s own words and imagination, ‘a cake made of socialism with a layer of capitalism’.

Having said that, it cannot be denied that this book has a laudable aim, that of ‘finding a way to share the bounty of our planet, while working within its limits’. Its description of the kind of society we live in (‘a society rooted in cut-throat economic competition’ with ‘spiralling inequality’, where ‘necessities go unfulfilled while the privileged indulge in perversities’) is impossible not to recognise and agree with. The author is right to say that we live ‘on a planet where much of the food that is grown goes to waste, we destroy unsold garments, and homes sit empty’. The question he asks about what the world could look like if people were able ‘to choose a collaborative orientation, rather than being forced into a competitive one’ is also entirely pertinent to the endeavours of socialists to open up people’s imagination to the possibility of a different kind of world, one of cooperative work at all levels and free access to all goods and services, where, in the words of one of this book’s chapter titles, we would all be ‘sharing the bounty’.

With regard to UBI, the author is right to say that it is an idea that has very much come to the fore in recent times, the idea being that the state would pay each of its citizens an unconditional basic income. But could such a reform solve the endemic problems of capitalist society? Would it rather not be just capitalism with a few tweaks? As articles which have appeared recently in the Socialist Standard (May and July, 2020) have shown, the likely effect of UBI, even if it could be made to work, would be to redistribute poverty. The chronically poor would be slightly better off (better than nothing admittedly), but the gulf between the vast majority who own little other than their energies and the minority who monopolise most of the world’s wealth would remain. Above all it would leave the market and commodity relations, the bulwarks of capitalism, intact. So, far from the idea of UBI being, as the author puts it, ‘a stretch of the imagination’ for many people, it is actually relatively easy to imagine as reforms of capitalism go. The real stretch of the imagination is the socialist society of from each according to ability to each according to needs. So one thing we would entirely agree with the author on is his approving reference to the words of the anarcho-socialist author, Ursula Le Guin: ‘We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings.’

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

In the original review it was stated that the " . . . articles which have appeared recently in the Socialist Standard (May and June, 2020)." It was actually the May and July Socialist Standards.

The economic is impersonal (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Light is a monthly free newspaper aimed at winning people over to a particular point of view. It’s been going since 2020 and champions various conspiracy theories, in particular that the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis are hoaxes designed to get people to accept restrictions on their freedom imposed by a secretive, self-serving elite. It is also a place where various other eccentric theories, as against conventional medicine, 5G, ‘transgenderism’, MMR and other jabs, are aired as well as for ‘natural’ cures and currency reform. It doesn’t seem to be antisemitic, as has been alleged. According to Wikipedia it has 100,000 copies printed each month, and so will have some influence.

The front page article in March this year sets out its basic position. Headlined ‘Agenda of lies to control us. World is awash with disinformation’, it begins:

‘People often ascribe failures and disasters to incompetence, greed or corruption. And while these play a part, there is a plan in place to continue to degrade everybody’s standard of living to the point where we will be grateful for handouts — a universal basic income’.

The next page explains who it thinks is behind this plan:

‘It should now be clear that a cabal of corporations, bankers and non-governmental organisations, aided by progressive political leaders (the Davos set) is really running the world. They care not for the ordinary people, but for their own elevation to an elite-run technocracy. The contrived climate crisis is the means by which citizens are held in a tightening ratchet of supposedly ecological policies’.

Its language can be quite radical. Its aim, the editorial in June declared, is ‘to help raise awareness of the evil agenda to control the entire population, and all the world’s resources, by a tiny few.’ And from the same issue:

‘Wage/Debt Slavery. While we all need money if we want a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, spending our entire lives working for a government bureaucracy or corporate kleptocracy is as soul-destroying as it is a waste of a life. No-one was born to just drudge by and pay the bills. That’s why they give you cheap entertainment and let you get drunk and high — so you don’t explode with boredom and meaninglessness and start raging against the machine’.

And ‘The Owners do not have enough real power to control the 99% through overt force, which is why they must trick us with deception’ (March).

There is some truth in what they say. There is a privileged elite in whose interest governments act and the economy functions. And our standard of living has been under attack and has in fact been reduced over recent years. So their message could appeal to those who resent both of these. Those behind The Light are latching on to this discontent and resentment, offering an explanation and, less frequently, what they see as the way out.

But there is much more that is wrong in what they say. Indeed, the charge of ‘disinformation’ could be levelled at them. The threat from global over-warming may be exaggerated by some but it does exist. The Covid pandemic could not just have been left to run its course (it would have been irresponsible for any central administration, even a capitalist one, to let that happen). Their basic mistake is assuming that everything that happens in society and the economy has to be ‘planned’ by some group.

Unplanned

The capitalist economy is by its nature unplanned; its working gives rise to impersonal market forces that governments cannot control and which, on the contrary, exert pressure on them to give priority, over meeting people’s needs, to profit-making and capital accumulation by the minority class who own the means of production. Because governments do not have a free hand but have to act in line with the economic laws of capitalism, the impression can arise that the world is controlled by some ‘cabal’ that plans what happens and instructs governments what to do. But once it is understood that the economic laws of capitalism act as if they were a force of nature then the need to have recourse to a cabal with a plan disappears. There is no cabal. There is no plan. There is just the operation of capitalism’s impersonal economic laws.

Until the Covid pandemic and the lockdowns that were imposed those with such views were confined to theorising about the coming of a ‘new world order’ that was going to suppress the individual’s freedom to act as they chose. The lockdowns, and the demonstrations against them involving many thousands of people, gave them a chance to acquire an activist base. This still exists. The Light is distributed free by volunteers. Street stalls are held. Protests are organised to resist what they see as the cabal’s plan. Like the anarchists and Trotskyists their emphasis is on ‘resistance’; they even use the same slogans such as ‘the power of the people is stronger than the people in power’.

However, unless they are simply what someone once called ‘mindless militants’ who just ‘resist’ without having any idea of an alternative (which of course is entirely possible), presumably they want the ‘plan’ to be defeated and the ‘elite-run technocracy’ to be overthrown. So, what do they envisage should take its place, where we will all be ‘free’, our standard of living won’t be degraded and we won’t be a drudge ‘working for a government bureaucracy or corporate kleptocracy’? What will be its basis?

Individualists

Here they fall back on the philosophical views of intellectuals who are in the American tradition of individualism, ‘libertarians’ as they are called over there. There is also an overlap with individualist anarchism. The April issue had an article advocating the ideas of Henry Thoreau, including not taking part in elections (contradicted by an appeal a couple of pages later for candidates to stand as independents in local elections). In the same issue there was an interview with a freelance illustrator, Lee Simpson, who echoed the anarchist Proudhon:

‘My suggestion is an old idea called mutualism, where people freely organise into worker co-operatives, using a money backed by labour (the only thing we have a monopoly on) and take part in a legitimate free market’.

But mutualist anarchists are not the only ones who laud the ‘free market’. So do out-and-out defenders of capitalism in the tradition of a reactionary like Hayek and his polemic The Road to Serfdom. An article in May against paper money was subtitled ‘Free exchange of goods and services is bedrock of freedom’ and ends

‘ … those who value liberty know that personal ownership and the unfettered exchange of goods, services and ideas remains the bedrock of those free nations that refuse to be enslaved.’

Like, presumably, the United States.

An article in the previous issue on ‘How to build a resilient economy’ answered ‘Keep using cash and resist digital currencies’, arguing that:

‘Cash provides the opportunity to build a robust, resilient, and inclusive economy. An economy in which high streets prosper and in which towns aren’t some identikit version of each other. An economy in which goods and services are mostly produced locally. And most critically: an economy which doesn’t collapse every time there is a minor contraction in the money supply. The use and re-use of cash is the key to realising this sound economic foundation’.

The article went on to give as one of the advantages of cash that ‘it tends to be spent locally’ and that ‘it is more frequently spent in small independent businesses than large multinational chains’.

Exactly the same argument that Greens use to advocate local currencies. In fact, the author evidently shares the Green Party’s ideal of going back to a smaller-scale capitalist economy with no Big Business and no Big Banks.

Against ‘communism’

There is a tension, even a contradiction, between the different supporters of the free market, between those who appear near to the anarchists and Greens and those who think that the US is a ‘free nation’. The former won’t normally be attracted either to views expressed by other contributors against ‘transgenderism’ and refugees. All that unites them is a belief that a ‘free market’ will make things better and opposition to state capitalism that they misidentify as ‘communism’ and ‘authoritarian socialism’.

But, properly understood, communism (or socialism, the same thing) is not state capitalism. It is the negation of capitalism in all forms, and means the end of the whole market economy, whether ‘free’ or regulated by the state. A return to the smaller-scale capitalism of yesteryear, even if it were possible, would not solve the problems faced by ‘wage slaves’; the whole process which has led to the corporate capitalism we know today would start all over again and we would eventually end up where we are now.

The only way to stop people being subjected to economic forces that dominate them is to end capitalism with its class ownership of resources and its production for sale with a view to profit. To replace it with a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, so allowing them to be used to directly turn out what people require to satisfy their needs. That, not an idealised free market, would put an end to the impersonal market forces that The Light mistakenly takes for the machinations of some imaginary cabal.

Adam Buick

Tiny Tips (2023)

The Tiny Tips column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

A video has captured the dramatic moment a £300,000 Roll-Royce was hoisted up to a penthouse on request of a billionaire in China. The luxurious Rolls-Royce Ghost was sent up to the 44th floor of a high-rise building after the wealthy businessman decided he wanted his car parked on his balcony (tinyurl.com/3ytvh63e).

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Eswatini heads to the polls soon, with elections scheduled for September. But there’s nothing remotely democratic in prospect. The country remains ruled by King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, who presides over Eswatini with an iron fist. Mswati dissolved parliament on 11 July, confident there’s little chance of people who disagree with him winning (tinyurl.com/msbaae72).

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‘Legislative protections remain weak across the continent,’ the researchers who collated the results of the survey said in a response to questions. In ‘Somalia, Somaliland, Mauritania and Northern Nigeria homosexuality can be punishable by death,’ they said (tinyurl.com/4buzjv55).

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Disadvantaged Britons are dying 10 years sooner than their wealthier compatriots – victims of what’s become known as the ‘shit life syndrome’ – a life marked by poor living conditions, disease and addiction. The documentary profiles people who have a job but can still afford nothing – from Blackpool in the west, to Ashton-under-Lyne and Cumbria, on the border with Scotland (tinyurl.com/3scyx5a6).

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A Labour government in the UK under Starmer will bring no significant changes in economic or foreign policy and will make no difference whatsoever to the lives of working class people (tinyurl.com/4hw9pey3).

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When I spoke to Cohen [co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream], the group’s primary donor, according to Fritz, he echoed the ad’s key points, saying U.S. arms manufacturers saw NATO’s expansion as a ‘financial bonanza.’ ‘In the end, money won,’ he said with a resigned tone. ’And today, not only are they providing weapons to all the new NATO countries, but they’re providing weapons to Ukraine.’ I told Cohen I could understand his opposition to the war and follow his critique of U.S. foreign policy, but I couldn’t grasp how he could take a position that put him in the same corner as a government that is bombing civilians. He refused to be drawn in. ‘I’m not supporting Russia, I’m not supporting Ukraine,’ he said. ‘I’m supporting negotiations to end the war instead of providing more weapons to continue the war’ (tinyurl.com/2p827284).

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The federal minimum wage in the United States would be $42 an hour today if it rose at the same pace as Wall Street bonuses in recent decades. But it hasn’t. Monday marks 14 years since the last federal minimum wage increase—the longest stretch without a boost since the late 1930s, when the national wage floor was first established. Since 2009, the federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 an hour, pay that’s currently not liveable in any state in the US (tinyurl.com/35jebfkm).

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The implication of Kennedy’s statement is that the [Covid-19] disease is a biological weapon created by Chinese researchers and Jewish American scientists to kill Christians (bit.ly/44PAouB).

The Rear View: Iran – a capitalist, theocratic dictatorship (2020)

The Rear View Column from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Iran – a capitalist, theocratic dictatorship

Apparently, ‘The Islamic Republic of Iran’s blending of religion and Marxist negation of private property means that beneath its veneer of turbans, veils, mosques and prayers, it is a totalitarianism that shares much with Communist and Socialist states like the Soviet Union or current day Venezuela: Orwellian exploitation of workers in the name of the worker, repression of all basic rights, severe loss of livelihood, a kleptocratic class that maintains regime survival, and all manner of lies to sustain the myth of a just, egalitarian society battling the evil, capitalist West. Like in other anti-capitalist states, workers in Iran are prohibited from organizing. The assumption is that a Godly, Marxist state has elevated the “mostazafin,” or the downtrodden in whose name the revolution was waged, and is always and already providing for all. The regime pummels propaganda to maintain the myth of economic liberation but the truth is that Iranian workers are routinely denied wages, lack benefits, are forced into exploitative contracts and suffer from dangerous work conditions’ (nationalinterest.org, 27 June). This, save for the undoubted class division and mass suffering, is the kind of arrant nonsense which socialists encounter all too frequently in a propaganda version of Wack-A-Mole, and have challenged relentlessly for over one hundred years. Going back in time, ‘A Joker’s Conception of Socialism’ (Socialist Standard, December 1918) concerned drivel spouted on the subject by Winston Churchill.

 We in the World Socialist Movement are not dogmatic masochists: we stick to our principles and the original meaning of socialism – common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use – because our socialist theory consistently provides an insightful analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, because of the repeated failure of the alternatives put into practice, and because the prospect of socialism as the meeting of our real needs provides the motivation. Occasionally, however, we find articles written by non-socialists which directly or otherwise support our case, such as those below.

One human race

‘Medical science has long been used for the consolidation of power rather than for solidarity with the oppressed. We see how Black mothers are blamed for their own mortality in childbirth and how starkly high rates of COVID death in Black communities are preposterously misattributed to differences in hormone receptors or clotting factors; all the while letting racism off the hook. We wish to remind fellow physicians that medical science has never been objective. It has never existed in a vacuum; there have and will always be social, political and legal ramifications of our work. Our assessments may be employed in criminal justice cases; our toxicology screens may have profound effects on the livelihood of patients; our diagnoses may perpetuate sexist and racist stereotypes. Our lack of ill intent cannot be our alibi—we must be accountable for not just our work but also how it is used, lest our medicine becomes the very weapon that harms. Medicine requires inclusion of the social context of disease in order to uphold its sacred oath of doing no harm. If we focus only on molecular pathways and neglect to articulate the role of structural inequities—of racism—in our country, our reports on the causes of death and injury in our patients will erase the roles of their oppressors’ (blogs.scientificamerican.com, 6 June). Here we can only quibble with Dr Ann Crawford-Roberts’ use of the phrase ‘our country’. Workers have no country: ‘Study Shows Richest 0.00025% Owns More Wealth Than Bottom 150 Million Americans’ (Common Dreams, 10 February, 2019).

Capitalism is THE pandemic

‘Once again, the U.S. is undergoing a media-driven COVID-19 scare after a “spike” in infections. But as we noted earlier this week, the number of cases depends on the amount of testing. The key gauge to watch is deaths. They’ve been falling since April, and there’s strong reason to believe they’re lower than the official count suggests. The dreaded Wuhan virus is no doubt a nasty bug, worthy of our vigilance and ongoing concern. That said, its virulence, as measured by the daily number of deaths, appears to be waning, as the chart with this piece, courtesy of the COVID-19 Tracking Project of the Atlantic, clearly shows. The average number of daily COVID-19 deaths on a weekly basis has fallen from a peak of just over 2,000 to 700 or so. That’s a roughly 65% decline’ (issuesinsights.com 25 June). The phrase lies, damned lies and statistics springs to mind here, but perhaps Dr Marx’s favourite – doubt everything – is more apposite, particularly where mainstream media is concerned.

If not now, then when? (2020)

From the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The days pass by now in a strangely routine way — I rise early, turn on the radio and whilst having breakfast listen to the news; now, as each and every day, entirely filled with Covid-19. I then set about my work. I am a sculptor, so what little work I did have has now evaporated, along with any income (the arts are not really that important in a society where beauty has little value). Life has become a little like the one experienced by the character played by Bill Murray in the 1993 film Groundhog Day.

In the early days of the pandemic, I, like many people in that peculiar British way, drew humour from the awful truth of the virus, and jokes about the lack of toilet paper did the rounds on social media. The actual reality had not, perhaps, hit home. Also, (and this was widely discussed, particularly in those early days) there was the universal awareness by people of which jobs really were important and necessary to allow society to function in a meaningful and efficient way — refuse collectors, shop workers, delivery drivers, bus drivers, farm labourers and, of course, care workers and nurses. Ironically, all were notably workers with the lowest pay scales (and also jobs that were looked down on by many people). People even came out of their houses to ‘clap for our carers’ — a gesture heartily supported by the government, who seemed to experience an odd case of amnesia when it came to remembering how, a few years previously, they had treated the nurses who could not afford to live near the hospitals where they worked and were forced to resort to food banks, or Jeremy Hunt’s jack-booted handling of the junior doctors’ requests. As the conversations between people developed during April, it was not unusual for them to reflect on the possibility and likelihood of a ‘new form of society’ that would rise, phoenix-like, from the smouldering pile of post-pandemic ashes. Lots of people were finding life less stressful (although, it should be said, not those who were confined in flats with an abusive partner or whose lives meant that the lockdown just exacerbated an already dire existence), with no need for urgency or frantic meeting of deadlines, and were beginning to question whether the media’s often-used ‘return to normal’ phrase was appropriate. Was where we were and how we were living before ‘normal’ at all?

Slowly and inexorably, society was, due to the pressure and dictates of the virus, moving towards a new way of living; people were organising themselves, very rapidly, into caring communities, displaying selfless generosity and acting locally. Hours were spent by individuals making PPE items for health workers, or providing meals for delivery drivers. Freed from the constraints of daily toil and exploitation, the real human traits began to emerge. Far from lazing around, work and contribution towards a happy and functioning society was becoming the ‘new normal’. So surely, one would think, if not now, then when would humanity reflect on the manner in which capitalism functions, and realise that nothing we do requires the physical existence of money, let alone a system predicated on profit and ever-growing destruction of resources, the environment and people. I must admit that I felt the time was perfect; all the indicators were there — it only needed people to reflect and think for a moment. It did not need a revolution, just a simple change of perception — an epiphany moment when people realise that ‘this cannot and need not go on’ and, more importantly, understand what to put in its place.

So, why then are we where we are now — nearly four months on? The initial talk has, it seems, settled into a state of ennui. The media has relentlessly bombarded us with promises of ‘relaxing lockdown rules’ and ‘returning to normal’. Of course we all know (and it doesn’t take an economist to figure this out) serious economic malaise will follow very soon if workers are not working and businesses are not trading and ‘growing’. Therefore, and despite the fact that there is no cure or vaccine, the governments worldwide are desperate, largely regardless of the risk to workers’ lives, to get people back to work. The economy has, once again, triumphed over the needs of the people.

So, with no fundamental change in the dangers imposed by the virus, queues stretch for miles outside Primark, KFC, Homebase, Starbucks, Sports Direct and dozens of other faceless commodity outlets as lockdown is relaxed and the public are being encouraged to spend their cash on ‘non-essential’ items, is there any chance of change? Sadly, things aren’t looking hopeful; the power of a capitalist society to engineer the way the majority of people think is so powerful — the belief that buying the latest item of shoddily made tat will somehow make you a better, happier or more fulfilled person seems now to be ‘hard-wired’ into the masses.

‘Socialism? That’s just utopia!’, to which we reply — have you actually checked out the meaning of utopia?

Glenn Morris

Right Direction (2020)

Pamphlet Review from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Food, Health and Capitalism. Covid-19 and Beyond. Published by the Anarchist Communist Group, June 2020. 45 pages.

The Anarchist Communist Group (ACG), formed in 2018 by former members of the Anarchist Federation in Great Britain, states its aim as ‘a complete transformation of society’, explained as ‘the working class overthrowing capitalism, abolishing the State, getting rid of exploitation, hierarchies and oppressions, and halting the destruction of the environment’. Among the group’s activities is the production of pamphlets arguing their case, the latest of which looks at the way capitalism produces food and the part this has played in the Covid-19 virus.

Despite its limited length, this is a well-researched and highly informative publication which outlines very effectively how the profit system, the driving force of today’s world capitalist economy, dictates an increasingly intensive exploitation of land and animals, leading to a ‘perfect storm environment’ for diseases which are likely to be infectious. It outlines the conditions of industrial farming that, after causing previous virus epidemics such as MERS, Ebola and SARS, have now led to the current Covid-19 pandemic which in its indiscriminate worldwide spread is causing panic and threatening social and economic breakdown. It explains how these viruses stem from a form of intensive agriculture, in which ‘the more you can produce with fewer inputs, the greater the profit’, with the effect on human health (not to speak of the welfare of animals) always a secondary consideration.

So, for example, both intensive factory farming of domestic animals and the slaughter, preparation and sale of an increasing range of wildlife in the Far East in crowded and insanitary conditions provide an ideal breeding ground for deadly viruses to ‘jump’ from animals to humans and then spread indiscriminately. In addition, the quadrupling of global meat production in the last half century has resulted in most land resources being used to feed animals destined for slaughter rather than to grow food directly for human consumption. This has led to an epidemic of obesity among some populations, but at the same time, as the pamphlet points out, in many parts of the world people die of starvation and, even for example in the UK, it quotes estimates that, even before the present virus hit, at least 3 million were going hungry, while 14.6 million were suffering from food insecurity. The entirely irrefutable reason given for all this is that, while some people get obese because of the cheap, unhealthy food that they eat, others go hungry because they do not have the money to buy enough food of any description. This, the pamphlet insists – again irrefutably – is quite simply the outcome of a system that puts profit before need. As it says, ‘capitalism has penetrated everywhere on earth in its search for profits’.

What remedy then does the ACG propose to resolve deadly industrial farming practices, food produced for cheapness rather than quality, and, even in the more economically advanced parts of the world, poverty amid plenty? It advocates ‘the need to create an agriculture system which is not based on the need to compete in the market economy and in which human need and health is the main priority’ and goes on to say that ‘instead of tinkering with the system… we need to get rid of it altogether and replace it with a food system that can truly meet the needs of everyone… the aim is for food to be free’. So far so good. This seems to mirror the aim of the Socialist Party, ie a society of free access with production for need not for profit. But then, this pamphlet, in its final section entitled ‘Basic Principles of a Revolutionary New Food and Agriculture’, seems to water down this objective advocating not a free access society as such but rather single initiatives such as ‘land reform’ ‘collectivising agriculture’ and ‘developing co-operatives for distribution and consumption’. All it seems within the framework of the current overall capitalist system, this being implicit in the characteristically reformist call to ‘begin to transform our society now’. A pity, because the way to truly transform society is not for individuals or groups to fight capitalism’s imperatives within the current system but to band together to persuade the majority of wage and salary earners to take democratic revolutionary action to usher out the whole framework of capitalism (profit society) and bring in socialism (a free access society based on the satisfaction of human needs).

Howard Moss

Rear View: Capitalism is the disease (2021)

The Rear View Column from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is the disease

Socialists have long argued that war, poverty and much pestilence are caused by capitalism. ‘It has led to the deaths of millions of people, sickened hundreds of millions and dramatically changed the lives of almost every person on the planet’ (dailymail.co.uk, 30 October). Indeed, but Matt Ridley’s article concerns the origin of Covid-19 rather than the urgent need to establish a post-capitalist world. More than a year after the latest pandemic began, PETA Asia investigators visited live-animal markets in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos, and Sri Lanka. Everything is for sale, dead or alive: bats, monkeys, civet cats, and other animals are sold as food or to be used in traditional medicine, in entertainment, or in other ways. ‘Carcasses were displayed on blood-streaked countertops, and both live animals and raw flesh were handled without gloves. These markets are cesspools of filth… Most scientists are convinced that the coronavirus originated in a live-animal market in China, where animals of a wide range of species are sold alongside dead animals and produce’ (PETAUK, 13 April). Ridley provides a note of caution: ‘…despite testing markets, farms and no fewer than 80,000 animal samples spanning dozens of species across China, no evidence has emerged for a similar chain of early ‘zoonotic’ infections — transmitted from animals to humans — in SARS-CoV-2. Hundreds of samples taken from animal carcasses at the market have all tested negative for any trace of the virus’, and he concludes ‘we can but hope the truth will — one day — come out.’ Nearly 5 million deaths due to Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide. Given that the knowledge and resources exist to reduce the number of epidemics and minimise the possibility of them becoming pandemics, the vast majority of these deaths can be considered premature. The author of Animal Farm, George Orwell, commenting on the genesis of this work, stated: ‘I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.’ This is the truth workers across the world should focus on.

Charity begins at work

The dreadful scenes at Kabul airport in early August would not have looked out of place in the horror film World War Z. Now, months after then-President Ashraf Ghani fled, there is a war between the zombies of the Taliban and the zombies of Islamic State. Whoever wins, we lose. ‘Afghanistan’s Taliban government is pressing for the release of billions of dollars of central bank reserves as the drought-stricken nation faces a cash crunch, mass starvation and a new migration crisis’ (reuters.com, 29 October). Every 17 hours a billionaire is created, and every 17 hours 17,000 people die from hunger. World Food Programme executive director David Beasley is calling upon US billionaires to give just 0.36 percent of the increase in their collective wealth since the start of the pandemic to help prevent 42 million people from starving to death. The capitalist class is ‘…charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, and makes a deal with the poor saying: “If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary! ”’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844). Such chutzpah – the capitalists exploit us and then place themselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when they give back a mere fraction of the wealth generated by our class.

Only zombies need leaders

‘Mr Lobanov says the KPRF [Communist Party of the Russian Federation] has been trapped by Kremlin design into a predetermined place within the existing system and, unless it moves more decisively into the streets to stage more convincing forms of peaceful resistance – as happened when millions of Russians protested against election fraud a decade ago – it will lose relevance with Russian voters. In fact, within the KPRF some members have lamented a too-passive reaction by leader Gennady Zyuganov to the results, and are pushing against their leaders’ “business as usual” relations with authorities’ (ca.news.yahoo.com, 26 October). Zyuganov, KPRF leader since 1993, said in a radio interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid, that ‘the main slogan of communism – “He who does not work shall not eat” – is written in the Apostle Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians found in the New Testament. “We need to study the Bible,” Zyuganov concluded’ (Moscow Times, 2 September). ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ Compare this biblically-inspired Leninist distortion with the real thing: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha programme, 1875). Also, the vanguardist Lenin again: ‘If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years’ (from a speech in November 1918 quoted by John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World), compared with early socialist Flora Tristan: ‘the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself’.

Tang Ping, the new China virus? (2021)

From the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Usually it’s only Christmas, and maybe a week or two in summer, when more fortunate workers get to stay home for a while and put their feet up, though the break from the rat race is always too short to ever get used to.

But then we got the pandemic. Richer capitalist states collectively took a huge hit – the cost equivalent of a world war – by paying their workers to stay at home with furlough schemes. This might look like paternalistic generosity but in reality they didn’t have much of a choice. Capitalism has to have an available workforce, even when there’s no work, because workers producing wealth is how profits recover after a downturn. That’s why there’s a welfare system and why, historically, the British capitalist class tried to prevent the emigration of workers even during famines. So it was either a question of continuing to pay wages for nothing and probably bankrupting themselves in the process, or get the state – the executive committee of the capitalist class – to borrow the money and do it for them. From the government’s perspective, the enormous furlough bill was certainly more politically survivable than presiding over the wholesale economic and social destruction that would otherwise have occurred, even though it will very likely take generations to pay off the debt.

For workers this has been a true black-swan event, an unprecedented opportunity to stay at home and, basically, find out what it feels like not to be a worker, ie, not be forced to slave away in some dull and shitty job for 40 hours a week just to earn the price of their rent, food and bills.

What was the result? Well of course workers loved it, and now a lot of them don’t want to go back to work, or at least not the same work. When hotels, pubs and restaurants opened up after the lockdowns they found they couldn’t get staff, which may be because the hospitality sector is traditionally the least unionised and so generally has the worst pay and conditions. But it’s not just hospitality that’s suffering. The UK is seeing a record shortage of workers which economists are struggling to explain with a mixed bag of reasons including a spate of early retirements, Brexit, and people living on savings or starting their own micro-businesses. It’s not just the UK either, there’s a global labour shortage, estimated by the US government to be around 40 million, which is causing massive supply chain disruptions just as food and energy prices are hitting the roof. Capitalism has rarely looked so close to coming apart at the seams, though there’s no doubt it will recover in the fullness of time if workers stand by and let it.

What might not recover though is workers’ attitudes to employment after their recent prolonged holiday. For months the western media has been talking in gleeful tones about the phenomenon in China of tang ping, or ‘lying flat’. Just as the Chinese economy is set to overtake the US to become the most dominant global force, Chinese youth is apparently staging a quiet revolt against the ‘996’ turbo-capitalist culture of working non-stop, from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, to get ahead at any price. Instead, young people are proposing the less stressful and more humane option of taking it easy and doing the least amount of work possible to get by, aka ‘lying flat’ or, as we would call it, being a slacker. Naturally this has alarmed the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party and is one reason why it is currently cracking down on everything from karaoke to computer games to combat what it sees as a dangerously westernising trend (bloom.bg/3HyhGNd).

What would wipe the schadenfreude off the faces of western employers is if tang ping inspires workers to start spreading a new global ‘lazy virus’. And many post-pandemic workers are just in the mood to do so. Elle Hunt argues in a recent Guardian article that people should quit their job and join something called the ‘anti-work movement’, which questions ‘careerist values and the erosion of workers’ rights, while celebrating idleness’. Naturally Bertrand Russell’s well-known essay In praise of idleness gets a mention, although Hunt seems strangely unaware of the even-better-known The Right to be Lazy, by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue. At any rate, the argument is one that’s familiar to any socialist: what’s the point of flogging your life away solely for the benefit of the rich, when we should all be free to enjoy life and do whatever we want, just as the rich are? Now there is an ‘anti-work forum’ devoted to discussing the viability or otherwise of such a lifestyle choice in capitalism, as well as the reactions of employers to it (reddit.com/r/antiwork/). The forum has ‘gone vertical’ in the past year, with subscribers growing by 400 percent to around 900,000. Here you can find a big reading list from the likes of Bob Black, Fredi Perlman and David Graeber, plus little gems like ‘The idea of having to earn a living implies that, by default, you don’t actually deserve to be alive’. But it also includes opportunistic PC game adverts as well as dubious comments like: ‘you shouldn’t worry about your career. The world will be completely unliveable within 20 years. Just try and have a good time while you can.’ Such millennial fatalism is partly fuelled by climate change anxiety, but is also seen among today’s UK students, many of whom are spending their student loans with gay abandon on the assumption that they’ll probably never get a job earning more than the minimum £27,295 threshold which triggers loan repayments – which is undoubtedly why the government is proposing to lower the threshold to £23,000. That’s right, Rishi, kick the kids when they’re down!

On the other hand, the current labour shortages are driving up pay rates, as employers are faced with a seller’s market and forced to be a little less Scrooge-like, along with the UK government also raising the minimum wage again, this time by a comparatively whopping 60p to £9.50 an hour. All this ought to be great news for workers but unfortunately in many cases the gain on the swings is being offset by the losses on the roundabouts through the highest rate of inflation in the UK for a decade and in the US for thirty years, leading to a US net decline in wages of 1.2 percent (cnb.cx/3clYFiK).

Even so, employers are currently on the back foot as they try to increase profits with a workforce that stubbornly won’t play ball, so we should expect an epidemic of strikes in the next year or so as workers organise to press their collective advantage.

Elle Hunt does not tell us whether she’s planning to ditch her job as a journalist, however she does end with ‘The key, at this crucial juncture, is for all workers to align as a class of people’. Unfortunately she envisages this emerging class consciousness as serving only to ‘keep up the pressure on employers to make work work for us’. This is neither ambitious nor even realistic given that all profit derives from the exploitation of workers’ unpaid labour, so capitalist employment can never be made to ‘work for us’ but only for the bosses. While capitalism exists, workers are always going to be hamsters on a wheel, turning over profits as fast as they can.

So what are we to make of tang ping, anti-work and the mutterings of workers who sense they are in a strong position for once? Well, it’s a long way from revolutionary class consciousness. They’re not generally talking about getting off the hamster wheels for good, just about turning them a tad more slowly, or insisting on nicer-looking wheels and maybe better quality hamster food. And it may only be temporary. Once capitalism swings back into full operation, employers will return to grinding down workers’ pay, undermining class solidarity and stepping up their state and media propaganda against unions and opposition to capitalism. Meanwhile in China, anyone ‘lying flat’ may well find a tank rolling over them at some point.

But it’s all a step in the right direction. Workers need to be doing this, questioning their miserable existence in capitalism and asking what is the point of it all. And the fact that young people are doing just that is evidence for what socialists have always said, which is that, despite what you might think from the propaganda-wash of the movies and the media and the ‘official discourse’, capitalism never really wins the argument for capitalism because the everyday experience of it is viscerally hated by workers, even if they don’t always recognise or acknowledge the fact and they often have a tendency to blame the wrong things.

Something else we always say, which any aspiring slackers should note, is that work is not the same thing as employment. Employment in capitalism is, largely speaking, a useless waste of our lives in which, if we have any sense, we do as much slacking as we can. Bosses want as much work out of you for as little money as they can get away with paying. It’s only logical that you should aim to do the opposite. The class war exists whether you like it or not, and if you’re not actively fighting it, you’re passively losing it.

But work that you like and choose to do is a very different matter. Humans are not made to be idle. We’d get bored far too quickly. Idleness would be like a prison sentence. Anyone so jaded as to believe that humans hate work should see how eager young children are to help adults by doing whatever little jobs they can. In socialism there would be no lazy attitudes because ‘laziness’ is a construct of property societies that rely on forced labour and pour judgmental scorn on anyone who resists. And there would be no tang ping either, except at the end of the day when you’re lying down for a relaxing snooze after a nice day doing exactly what you wanted.

Paddy Shannon

Why do some Christians oppose vaccination? (2021)

From the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some pastors call the Covid vaccination the ‘mark of the beast’, a biblical reference to the apocalypse. A Tennessee pastor who threatens to expel anyone who wears a mask to his church also discourages people from getting the vaccination, which he falsely claims contains aborted foetal tissue.

No wonder that white evangelicals are among the least vaccinated people. And no wonder that many in the vaccinated majority, increasingly angry with their unprotected fellow citizens, conclude that anti-vaccination evangelicals are just tools in the right-wing war on common sense and basic decency.

Yet the roots of vaccination hesitancy are much older and more interesting than that. Indeed, American scepticism of expert knowledge reaches back nearly three centuries, to a rebellion against religious authority.

During the first century of English settlement in North America, most colonists listened to university-educated pastors. Whether Congregationalist in Massachusetts or Anglican in Virginia, those pastors based their authority on their knowledge of Latin and Greek as well as of theology. Many dabbled in medicine. They were the experts.

But in the mid-1730s, charismatic preachers without college degrees suddenly drew huge crowds with harrowing tales of a furious God and wayward flocks. Embracing these revivals, the Rev. Jonathan Edwards of Massachusetts delivered one of the most famous sermons in American history, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (the title pretty much sums it up.)

The revivalists also denounced educated ministers as ‘unconverted’ impostors whose book learning led people away from real piety. One likened the regular clergy’s sermons to ‘rat poison’. Distressed by such attacks, Edwards pulled back from the fires he had stoked, calling for ‘humility and modesty’ in the face of conflicting views.

But the wounds of this religious revolution never healed. Unlike in crowded European countries, where congregants had to coexist, Americans kept spreading apart, moving west after 1800 and forming new churches that reproduced rather than resolved the bitter divisions that had begun back East.

As moderate Protestants began to stress the human capacity for progress with or without God’s help, wave after wave of revivals cast fresh doubt on anyone who claimed expert knowledge without divine inspiration.

New forms of fundamentalism emerged in the 1920s in response to Darwinian science and again in the 1970s in reaction to the women’s liberation and civil rights movements. While many Americans and Europeans drifted away from religion, except as a guide to moral conduct or a source of community, religious conservatives sustained the belief in God as an immanent presence in daily life — a power vastly superior to any kind of research or learning.

Some faith communities have embraced vaccinations and other medical breakthroughs, citing God’s benevolence and the golden rule. Yet modern evangelicals often see God as more stern than kind, encouraging a sense of epic conflict between the pious and the profane. And over the past few decades, evangelicals’ deep-seated distrust of society’s experts has merged with the increasingly nihilistic themes of the far right, creating a toxic disdain for science in general and public health in particular.

Covid and anti-vaxxers

Which brings us back to our troubled present. COVID-19 surges again due to vaccination hesitancy and growing hostility to basic safety precautions, while the experts throw up their hands. How can understanding the long history of anti-expertise help us overcome this deadly impasse?

To start, those of us who are vaccinated must accept that the non-vaccinated aren’t just political pawns for religiomaniacs like Brian Tamaki and Billy TK. Rather, they are bearers of a long and complicated history, one that has often enlivened our culture.

After all, the mid-18th century revivals that tore apart so many communities also helped prepare the colonists to defy the Church of England, and thus the British Empire during the American Revolution. The revivalism of the 19th century often inspired anti-slavery activism.

In non-pandemic times, a healthy scepticism of expertise has made the western hemisphere a place of free-thinkers and rule-breakers.

On that note, public health officials should more directly address faith communities, making clear that each church has a right to worship God according to its traditions and to question science when people’s lives are not in immediate danger. By taking that vital step across the great cultural divide, the experts can more effectively dispel the wild conspiracy theories swirling around the vaccines. They might even make the case that getting vaccinated is the moral choice, the kind, caring and Christian thing to do.

Many won’t listen. But some will, and fewer people will die.

In the end, we can all learn something from the Rev Edwards, who had the wisdom to step back from his longing for spiritual revival and speak instead to the simpler, humbler virtues of coming together in dark times.

Bruce Greville (New Zealand)

They Caused It (2021)

Book Review from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Know Who Caused COVID-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia. By Zhou Xun and Sander L. Gilman (Reaktion Books £16.)

Many pandemics have been blamed on minority groups. Jews, for instance, were widely held responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Here Zhou and Gilman look at a number of examples of ‘outgroups’ (or just ‘them’) being blamed for Covid or its spread, with xenophobia a common response to public health problems.

China was the source of the coronavirus, and recent responses have been similar to nineteenth-century views of Chinese immigrants bringing plague and other diseases to North America from the ‘sick man of Asia’. The source appears to have been a market in Wuhan, a mega-city where many rural migrants have congregated, where the health system has struggled to keep up, and which is located in an area where previous diseases have been transmitted from animals to humans. The Chinese government’s reaction has included attaching blame to Africans and Muslims, who supposedly previously brought swine flu and AIDS to China.

In the US and Israel, the ultra-orthodox Jews, the Haredim, were accused of spreading coronavirus. They often objected to vaccination, the wearing of face masks and the forced closing of synagogues. Their communities in Israel had very high levels of infection and even accused the government, when it tried to enforce measures, of being Nazis. On 6 January, there were Haredim among those who stormed the Capitol, and also anti-semites who wore T-shirts stating 6MWE (for ‘Six Million Wasn’t Enough’)! In the UK, vaccination was sometimes compared to the medical experiments carried out by the Nazis.

Black people in both the US and UK have suffered high levels of infection and morbidity, but the reasons for this are complex. They have poorer health in general than the population as a whole, understandably lack trust in government pronouncements, and were initially reluctant to be vaccinated, though this resistance lessened over time. In the US black people were often unable to get jabbed because vaccination sites were pretty inaccessible, requiring a car to travel to them.

Black Trump supporters were anti-vaxxers, and more generally Trump fans saw themselves as victims of the medical and governmental establishment. Masks were viewed as a sign of weakness, and became for many on the extreme right and other populists a symbol of what was supposedly wrong in the US, with people no longer being able to choose for themselves.

Unlike wars, pandemics do not leave tangible physical reminders behind, but they can result in many different kinds of loss. Setting people against each other is one unfortunate effect.

Paul Bennett

Bird’s Eye View: Neither God nor state (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the April 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Neither God nor state

The 1st of this month is Iranian Islamic Republic Day. According to Ramin Mazaheri (greanvillepost.com, 6 February), ‘…after 43 years Iran’s revolution has become entrenched in global political history as the most successful political revolution of our contemporary era’ (bit.ly/356Z1Ka). Apparently the vast majority of the 99 percent (98.2 percent) of the electorate) voted for the establishment of an Islamic republic. Those who realise they were taken for April Fools include imprisoned trade unionists. Tragically, over 43 years many thousands of our class have been executed, including minors, under a theocratic dictatorship where those convicted of adultery, alcohol consumption, blasphemy, burglary, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution, along with, of course, political dissidence, as well as many other ‘crimes’, can pay the ultimate price. We must not forget the state-sanctioned use of juveniles as troops during the mass slaughter that was the Iran-Iraq war, or the oppression of women. Add chronic corruption, obvious class division and we can say that only assorted fundamentalists see the revolution as successful. And the suffering grows:

‘Iran has returned 820,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines donated by Poland because they were manufactured in the United States… TV quoted Mohammad Hashemi, an official in the country’s Health Ministry, as saying that Poland donated about a million doses of the British-Swedish AstraZeneca vaccine to Iran. ‘But when the vaccines arrived in Iran, we found out that 820,000 doses of them which were imported from Poland were from the United States,” he said. Hashemi said “after coordination with the Polish ambassador to Iran, it was decided that the vaccines would be returned.” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters, in 2020 rejected any possibility of American or British vaccines entering the country, calling them “forbidden”‘ (whdh.com, 21 February).

Toll: more than 270,000 coronavirus-related deaths since the pandemic began.

Strange bedfellows

Fundamentalists are not limited to book-burning fakirs issuing fatuous yet often fatal fatwas. ‘…Republicans aren’t going to stop with abortion bans…’ (Cue ‘Handmaid’s Tale’: Michigan Republicans say 1965 Supreme Court decision legalizing birth control was wrong, alternet.org, 21 February). According to Planned Parenthood,

‘In 2006, Nicaragua enacted a complete abortion ban, including in cases of rape, incest, and when the life of the woman is at risk. Access to sexual and reproductive health information and services is seriously lacking, and the country now has the highest rate of teen pregnancy in Latin America.’

Recall, Ortega was returned to power in 2007 as the Catholic president of Nicaragua. He named his wife as Vice President and stated: ’This revolution – in which women have participated shoulder to shoulder – has opened the doors to the full participation of women in all spheres: political, social and economic (theweek.co.uk, 4 August, 2016) – nonsense only matched by that of another President Ronald Reagan, calling Nicaragua a beachhead of communism. Nicaragua is one of 24 countries in the world where abortion is totally illegal under any circumstances, including when the woman’s life or health is at risk. Maternal mortality is 98 per 100,000, 118th in the world. And leftist/nationalist fundamentalists claim that the empowerment of women in Nicaragua has been achieved.

Cannot see the wood for the trees

‘Conflict, climate change, and COVID-19 are having a clear impact on the global poor, in many cases having joint incidence upon those living in poverty, the World Bank’s report concludes’ (‘Inequality Kills One Person Every Four Seconds,’ipsnews.net, 14 February). The article’s conclusion echoes that of Dr. King, who focused famously on the ‘Triple Evils’ of poverty, racism and militarism, ie, symptoms rather than the underlying disease and one reason why Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer winning historian, could say of MLK that ‘all the issues that he raised toward the end of his life are as contemporary now as they were then’ (nytimes.com, 4 April 2018). Fundamentally idealistic, reformists eschew revolution in favour of another spin on the misery-go-round. Consider, capitalism causes the rivalries that lead to war in the modern world. Conflicts between states and within states can result from competition over markets, sources of raw materials, energy supplies, trade routes, exploitable populations and areas of strategic importance. ‘Russia’s president knows exactly what he wants, and it’s not eastern Ukraine. His interests are all about oil and gas and supply routes. The rest is smoke and mirrors’ (thedailybeast.com, 1 March 2015).

With regard to climate change, all enterprises and states seek to minimise costs and releasing greenhouse gases into the environment is a way of reducing monetary costs. Human and environmental needs always come second, if at all, in the profit system. Capitalism’s primary imperative is always to produce more and accumulate capital or otherwise lurch into economic crisis. ‘…companies are continuing to invest vast sums in exploration and new fields, which the IEA said last year could not be brought to fruition if the world was to limit global heating to 1.5C’ (theguardian.com, 11 February). Nearly six million deaths, twelve times that of the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, due to Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide. Given that the knowledge and resources exist to reduce the number of epidemics and minimise the possibility of them becoming pandemics, the vast majority of these deaths can be considered premature. Capitalism has eradicated rinderpest and smallpox, yet the driving force of capitalism is the pursuit of profit not health. According to March’s Scientific American, ‘Global billionaire wealth grew by $4.4 trillion between 2020 and 2021, and at the same time more than 100 million people fell below the poverty line’ (bit.ly/3BTn7nk). And ‘The poor, no matter where they live, will suffer the greatest lasting toll’ – until, that is, we organise as a class for the conquest of the earth and all its resources.