Cooking the Books: Death of a currency (2025)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Local currency is retired to end a notable trend’ reported the Times (1 September) about the demise of the Lewes Pound, a local currency introduced 17 years ago in the Sussex town and copied in various other towns and cities in Britain.

We mentioned its launch at the time (Socialist Standard March 2009) and the extravagant claims made for the local currency by George Monbiot: ‘It by-passes greedy banks. It recharges local economies and gives local businesses an advantage over multinationals’ .

The aim was to encourage people to spend their money locally by using a currency that could only be spent and circulated in the town concerned. If people used the local currency to buy from a local shop, it was argued, it would stay in the town, but that if they used ordinary money to buy from a national supermarket the chances are that it would end up being spent elsewhere.

Local currencies didn’t replace ordinary money. In fact, they had to be backed pound for pound by an equivalent amount of ordinary money deposited in a bank. The Times refers to this in its report when it says that, now that the scheme is being wound up, ‘the backing money will be donated to four local charities’.

As we mentioned at the time:

‘The Lewes Pounds get into circulation by people buying them for ordinary pounds and are convertible back into pounds on demand. In answer to the question “What happens to the sterling pounds that are taken when people buy Lewes Pounds?” the organisers explain: “All Sterling pounds are held in a safe deposit box with a local bank, so that we can access them at any time should people wish to trade their Lewes Pounds back into Sterling”’.

So no by-passing of ‘greedy banks’. Nor any extra purchasing power introduced to boost the local economy. It was just one piece of paper being replaced by another of equal spending power. Since people wanting to use the local currency had to buy it, those doing this were likely to have been enthusiasts who would have bought things locally anyway using ordinary money; the same goes for those accepting it in change (which people couldn’t be obliged to do). It is unlikely, then, that local businesses benefited — except the scheme itself by selling Lewes Pounds to collectors. How multinationals lost out remains a mystery.

The scheme failed in the end due to the nationwide trend to pay by card rather than cash. In Brixton the organisers of the local currency there tried to get round this by introducing an electronic Brixton Pound  but this too was overtaken by smartphones with their electronic wallets, and the Brixton Pound too was wound up.

When the Brixton Pound was introduced in 2009 our South London branch commented in a leaflet distributed in the area:

‘What’s the point (apart from helping local shopkeepers)? What difference does it make what coloured pieces of paper we have to use to get the things we need to live? The real problem is that in present-day, capitalist society we have to use money at all to obtain these, and that the amount of money we have will always be rationed by what we get as wages or as benefits. That restricts and distorts our lives’ (Th£ Brixton Pound — What For?).

The sad fact is that all the enthusiasm, time and voluntary work that went into devising and running local currencies led nowhere. This particular ‘notable trend’ to do ‘something now’ to try make things better under capitalism made no difference whatsoever.

The Invisible Doctrine (2024)

Book Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came to Control Your Life). By George Monbiot & Peter Hutchison (Allen Lane)

This small book embraces some pretty big ideas, of interest to socialists. It’s a collaboration between US radical filmmaker Peter Hutchison (whose past work ranges from Iron Man to the Noam Chomsky documentary Requiem for the American Dream) and journalist George Monbiot. Monbiot’s trajectory is also of interest for socialists. From run-of-the-mill environmental reform campaigner in the 1990s his writings over the last 20 years detail a growing revolutionary political consciousness.

The objective of the book is to shed light on the significant political changes – ‘capitalism on steroids’ as the authors put it – that have occurred in the last 50 years and understand the extent to which these are predictable consequences of a concerted ideological offensive by the ruling class.

The book traces the intellectual origins of neoliberalism back to Hayek and von Mises. These ideas (privatization, cut taxes, deregulation etc) originally confined to academia were nurtured, funded and propagated by US business interests. (Monbiot has previously done much to shed light on the murky business origins of all the impressive-sounding institutes, thinktanks and lobbyists that actively try and manage political debate).

The authors make an attempt to argue that neoliberalism is distinct from classical laissez-faire liberalism, in that it emphasizes economic freedoms but pays less attention to the philosophical liberties of the individual that are usually bundled in. Adam Smith may have felt it necessary to expound on the benefits to society of the ‘invisible hand’; in contrast neoliberals don’t really care what the consequences are – the free market is the objective. For our part we have to be hopeful that workers increasingly see an invisible hand that gives them a very visible ‘two-fingers’. I’m not sure whether neoliberalism merits its own chapter in any political history of exploitation and oppression, but socialists would perhaps see it as a more honest philosophical rationale for capitalism. Either way the authors don’t get lost in the angels-on-pins philosophy, and are pretty explicit: ‘Neoliberalism is class war’.

The authors argue that neoliberalism’s disdain for anything beyond the market means that democracy is being degraded globally. We used to be told that capitalism and democracy were ideologically intertwined in a glorious revolutionary project. That was nonsense of course (the vote was just a necessary concession made by capitalists to keep workers on-side) but nevertheless democracy is a pretty heavyweight argument, one worth trying to have on your side. Harder to argue though in an era when free-market ideology appears to travel hand-in-hand with openly authoritarian demagogues; the recent Elon Musk/Donald Trump interview is a clear example (but perhaps not so much ‘hand-in-hand‘ as just two hours of mutual rimming – apologies to Socialist Standard readers for the mental image invoked).

World socialists are arguably unique as a political movement in how explicit we are in our confidence in the capacity of our species to understand the world we live in (given a chance) and act in our collective interests to create a democratic, participative and conscious revolution. We are therefore very interested in the spread of political ideas, including pro-capitalist ones. The ideas of von Mises and Hayek have clearly had impact. It helps to have a billionaires’ blank cheque of course, but the story of neoliberalism lends strength to the argument that ideas, particularly if they can be framed in a coherent narrative, actually matter. The unopposed march of neoliberal ideas has partly been because the left has been unable to adequately create its own narrative. World socialists would argue that this is because so much of the left are in denial; deep-down they are actually wedded to capitalism.

Many supposedly ‘anti-capitalist’ books end with a whimper as the author provides a list of reforms, a mild wish list. Monbiot and Hutchison end their book more substantially, suggesting the potential for some sort of alternative narrative, a ‘politics of belonging’. This involves acknowledging the remaining non-market commons around us that we share, and interesting concepts such as private sufficiency/public luxury are discussed that should be of interest to world socialists. There are glimpses of how this may be pre-figured and developed within the capitalist state (a contentious point for most world socialists) but don’t let this put you off. In the final chapter the authors make a strong and refreshing argument, that every world socialist will echo, against reformism:

‘Far from being a shortcut to the change we want to see, it is the morass into which ambition sinks. System change as the neoliberals and the new demagogues have proven is, and has always been, the only fast and effective means of transformation’.

Brian Gardner

Material World: The politics of envy (2024)

The Material World column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

In capitalism, the basic marker or criterion of status is material wealth. The more wealth you can accumulate and display, relative to your peers, the more status you attract. The same goes for them. We are talking, in other words, of a zero-sum game. Crudely speaking, if Jane’s accumulated material wealth increases and overtakes John’s, then her status in the eyes of society will rise while his will fall.

In principle, as long as there is somebody wealthier than you in our present-day society, the motivation to accumulate more wealth, and hence more status, remains. This is not quite as far-fetched as it might seem. Even among the super-rich who have absolutely no reason to want for anything, ‘making comparisons’ can become an all-consuming obsession.

George Monbiot refers to one of their ilk – a Saudi prince by the name of Alwaleed – who was the subject of an article published by Forbes magazine in March 2013. Let Monbiot’s words speak for themselves:

‘According to one of the prince’s former employees, the Forbes global rich list “is how he wants the world to judge his success or his stature.” The result is “a quarter-century of intermittent lobbying, cajoling and threatening when it comes to his net worth listing.” In 2006, the researcher responsible for calculating his wealth writes, “when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. What do you want?” he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. “Tell me what you need”’ (Guardian, 6 May 2013).

This is someone who, as Monbiot points out, owned (at that time) a 747 plane with its own specially installed throne to sit on, a palace with 420 rooms, a private amusement park and zoo and, according to Alwaleed himself, $700 million worth of jewellery and yet, still, he was apparently not satisfied!

It would seem, then, that the title of Monbiot’s article is entirely apt in this case: ‘Why the politics of envy are keenest among the very rich’. Indeed. Not that this is going to deter those who regard any criticism of the ‘very rich’ as a class as tantamount to the ‘politics of envy’. That’s rich, as one might say, coming from these staunch defenders of the very rich when it is precisely ‘envy’ that lubricates the very system of status acquisition under capitalism. They don’t mind endorsing capitalism but, seemingly, do mind when it is spelt out to them what exactly this entails.

In any case, perhaps those who accuse others of engaging in the ‘politics of envy’ regarding the super-rich are somewhat off base in their criticism. As the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume shrewdly noted in his Treatise on Human Nature, envy tends to be quite selective as an emotional response. It is one that is likely to become more intense, the more socially proximate the object of one’s envy:

‘It is not a great disproportion between ourselves and others which produces envy, but on the contrary, a proximity. A common soldier bears no envy for his general compared to what he will feel for his sergeant or corporal; nor does an eminent writer meet with as much jealousy in common hackney scribblers, as in authors that more nearly approach him. A great disproportion cuts off the relation, and either keeps us from comparing ourselves with what is remote from us or diminishes the effects of the comparison’.

Hume had a point. Envy is stimulated to the extent that we believe it realistically possible to match or surpass, in terms of our material possessions, the person with whom we compare ourselves. We tend not to feel particularly envious of the multi-millionaire because we do not seriously envisage ourselves ever enjoying the lifestyle of such an individual. So we evict the very thought of it from our minds or, at least, recognise it for the mere idle reverie it is. However, we may very well be envious of our neighbour with his gleaming new car provocatively parked outside our front door. It somehow contrives to makes us feel a little more inferior – a little devalued. The point is that we feel devalued only because we have bought into a value system that judges people in terms of their material wealth.

If envy is the spur to enhancing our social standing, it also an emotion that helps to reproduce the kind of society that typically makes such judgements. For that reason alone, envy is precisely not the sentiment of those who would want to fundamentally change the kind of society we live in. Obsessively aspiring to become a wealthy capitalist is probably not going to be very conducive to wanting to get rid of capitalism.

What envy does is to both reinforce, and reflect, the extremely unequal distribution of wealth and income that is to be found in society today – such inequalities being considered indispensable to the system of money incentives upon which this society depends.

Robin Cox

Life and Times: Trump v the Binman (2024)

The Life and Times column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently, at enormous risk to himself, a binman rescued a family and their dog from a burning house in the West Midlands. He had a cup of tea in Greggs and then carried on with his job.

How does this tie in with Donald Trump? Well, a recent Guardian article by George Monbiot pointed to the theory among psychologists that human beings can be broadly divided into two groups -‘extrinsics’ and ‘intrinsics’. What they mean by ‘extrinsics’ are Trump types – people attached to ‘prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth’. They are a group that tends to ‘objectify and exploit other people’, to be rude and aggressive, to ‘have little interest in cooperation or community’, to dismiss social needs and care of the environment, and at the same time to be likely to exhibit ‘frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour’.‘Intrinsics’ on the other hand are ‘inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance’, open to change and reasoned argument and ‘protective of other people and the living world’.

Winners and losers

If this theory is valid – and it does seem to correspond very much to the reality we see around us – how is it that different groups of human beings can be so different? How is it that Donald Trump can seem so manifestly uncaring about anyone other than himself while a binman can risk his life to save the lives of others who are complete strangers? Monbiot points out that, according to the theory, we are not born with either of these tendencies but rather pick them up from the environment – personal, social and political – in which we are nurtured. So ‘if people live under a cruel and grasping political system, they tend to normalise and internalise it, absorbing its dominant claims and translating them into extrinsic values’. In the same way, if they live in an environment ‘in which social norms are characterised by kindness, empathy, community and freedom from want and fear, their values are likely to shift towards the intrinsic end’.

This would seem to account for the widespread support enjoyed by an openly ‘bully’ politician like Trump, who divides humans into ‘winners and losers’, among not just some of the wealthy in the US but also among some of the poorest, most insecure and disadvantaged members of that society. Such people will blame their plight and vent their anger and frustration either on those they see as slightly better off than themselves or on those even worse off than themselves who they see as somehow spongeing off society by claiming ‘welfare’. And they will be particularly hostile towards the ‘intrinsics’, those behaving in a kind, cooperative way, labelling them as ‘woke’ or ‘snowflakes’ or the like. Monbiot suggests that, in the US in particular, this mentality has been engendered by ‘toxic myths about failure and success’ and the importance given to the idea that wealth needs to be acquired at any cost, solely by individual endeavour and without concern for other people or for social or environmental consequences (the so-called ‘American Dream’).

The same kind of mentality is of course widely found, if perhaps in a less overt and brutal way, in other countries too, subject as they are to the competitive ethic and the ‘sink or swim’ imperative of capitalism. In fact, everywhere we look, the system we live under pressures workers (ie, those who form the vast majority of all populations) to ‘get on’, to make money, to compete against others and, if necessary, to blame others if they fail to do that satisfactorily.

In trouble

Yet, as this column has often pointed out and is demonstrated by such acts as the rescue by the binman, people are on the whole powerfully inclined not to behave in selfish, self-seeking ways but to assist, support and be cooperative with their fellow humans where and when necessary. Such interactions are absolutely intrinsic to everyday life, be it in such everyday acts as giving others right of way in traffic, making contributions to and organising food banks, doing simple favours for others, but also in helping others who suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves ‘in trouble’. The fact is that we, as humans, will usually choose to help others in a worse situation than ourselves, if only because it makes us feel better about ourselves and, as has been shown by scientific research, gives us higher levels of well-being. Such examples of help and cooperation without the prospect of material gain or advantage abound but are taken for granted and are rarely reported or commented on precisely because they are so numerous, so common and such a perpetual feature of everyday life. Of course, human beings are also capable of the most horrendous antisocial acts, which may involve selfishness and brutality, but these are not the norm. This is so much the case that, when they happen, they stand out, leading to the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ scenario whereby we seem to be constantly bombarded by ‘bad news’.

Ultra-social

This says something about how human beings, though their behaviour is extremely flexible, are fundamentally ‘ultra-social’ creatures, who, given the opportunity, are only too ready to make common cause with their fellow creatures unless influenced into doing otherwise by circumstances or deeply embedded conditioning. This is the default, that, despite contrary ideas common in the past, is now widely accepted by those qualified in the subject of human behaviour. Of course, as exemplified by the Trump cult in the US, where the conditions of society push many people into behaving in unkind, uncooperative ways and in seeking to maximise their own self-interest, there is still a long way to go. Yet in a society organised in an entirely different way from the current capitalist one, it is clear that people will not have the slightest problem in behaving as ‘intrinsics’, ie, in operating in a harmonious and cooperative way most if not all of the time. In such a society, a socialist one of common ownership, free access to all goods and services and democratic organisation, the natural human tendency to share and cooperate will surely be its guiding principle.

Howard Moss

Tiny Tips (2023)

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

The owner of OnlyFans took home a hefty paycheck last year. Leonid Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American businessman, received more than $338 million in dividends in 2022, according to financial statements filed by the adult-content platform’s parent company, UK-based Fenix International Ltd, and obtained by PEOPLE. Radvinsky’s nine-figure bonus equates to roughly $1.3 million for each of the 260 working days in 2022 (tinyurl.com/7kax535y).

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It is no good targeting isolated faults within this society and attempting to fix them one by one. Many of its core structures, procedures, assumptions and values are mistaken and the focus must be on replacing the system with one that does not generate the present range of problems leading us to destruction. A satisfactory alternative must be some form of simpler way. We will get nowhere unless and until this is widely understood and willingly accepted (tinyurl.com/2tkr49fx).

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A harsh custom courses through rural China. If a woman marries a man from outside her village, she becomes a waijianü, or “married-out daughter”. Tradition deems married-out women can be stripped of their rights to land that legally belongs to them. The Communist Party came to power promising to emancipate women from feudalism. Today, the collective financial losses suffered by married-out women are growing (tinyurl.com/bdfkrjre).

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Almost thirty years after the end of formal apartheid ANC rule has come to a point of economic devastation with unemployment at over 40% and youth unemployment at over 70%. There has been no significant land reform. Hunger is endemic, there is pervasive violence, crises in schools and health care, collapsing electricity, water, rail and port systems, corruption on a staggering scale and ruthless political repression of struggles for urban land (tinyurl.com/4sz7kah7).

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Danish film-maker and provocateur Lars von Trier has defended himself from backlash after writing a social media post that criticised Denmark’s donation of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine. “Russian lives matter also!” he wrote on Instagram on Tuesday after Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Denmark, where he and Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, inspected the F-16s to be delivered to his country. Von Trier addressed his post to “Mr Zelensky and Mr Putin, and not least Mrs Frederiksen (who yesterday, like someone head over heels in love, posed in the cockpit of one of the scariest killing machines of our time, grinning from ear to ear)” (tinyurl.com/3fj7k4x5).

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More than 1,300 people died while homeless across the United Kingdom in 2022, marking an 85 percent increase since 2019 (tinyurl.com/3ftb3y66).

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Ryan Knight @ProudSocialist •The cruelty of disaster capitalism on full display in Maui: “We can’t get aid yet they are serving evictions” (tinyurl.com/nj5favbp).

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As Staughton Lynd’s speeches, writings, statements and interviews demonstrate, there were coherent and persuasive arguments against the war in Vietnam based on U.S. and international law, precedents from American history, and moral and ethical considerations based on conscientious objection to war and an internationalism embraced by American radicals which said: “My country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind” (tinyurl.com/bdtdr2t2).

Too much hot air (2007)

From the September 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

A week may be a long time in politics, but it seems that ten years is not enough for capitalism to take action against climate change. Since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol little substantial has been done to address the problem.

It is almost universally agreed that global warming is brought about by an increase in the amount of greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide) in the atmosphere. These gases trap heat and so lead to a rise in the planet’s temperature. The consequences are varied and not fully predictable, but might include water shortages, a fall in crop yields, rise in sea levels and the wiping out of many species.

It’s not yet too late to do something about it. Some degree of further global warming is already guaranteed by existing and near-future amounts of the greenhouse gases, but if a reduction in their emission is achieved then warming can be controlled and its worst effects avoided. George Monbiot’s book Heat is an extended attempt to show that carbon emissions in Britain could be cut by 90 percent. Various methods are described, such as the introduction of a micro-generation system, the use of gas-fired power stations, and an end to flying.

Monbiot argues that the climate change denial industry has managed to delay effective action. This industry is a mixed bag of lobby groups and websites, many of which receive funding from ExxonMobil, a giant corporation which makes most of its profits from oil and therefore stands to lose out if global warming is tackled seriously. Philip Morris, the tobacco company, was among the first to fund the denial industry.

Clearly companies whose business involves the production of greenhouse gases are going to fight tooth and nail against moves to constrain them. Capitalists in general will take a similar line if they feel attempts to combat global warming will reduce their profits. Governments, which — after all — represent capitalist interests will jump in on their side. All talk of global or governmental responses to climate change has to take these harsh realities into account.

In his book The Weather Makers Tim Flannery writes:

“The transition to a carbon-free economy is eminently achievable because we have all the technology we need to do so. It is only a lack of understanding and the pessimism and confusion generated by special interest groups that is stopping us from going forward.”

Flannery claims that international action to prevent damage to the atmosphere is possible and has indeed occurred in the past. In 1987 the Montreal Protocol successfully limited the emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). These destroy the ozone layer, which blocks lethal ultra-violet radiation reaching the earth. Once the dangers inherent in CFCs were realised, production of them was phased out, and now the ozone layer is recovering.

The problem is that the parallels between the Montreal Protocol and the Kyoto Protocol, which is intended to reduce carbon emissions, are not close enough. CFCs were used in spraycans, some cleaning agents, and so on, and consequently they were nowhere near as important or central to capitalist production as the generation of power and energy, which are basically where greenhouse gases are output. It’s not just a matter of the ‘special interest groups’ to which Flannery refers, but of the drastic disruption to capitalist industry — and hence to profits — that would be involved. Even though the Kyoto-envisaged reductions are nowhere near what is really needed, even these milk-and-water provisions are unlikely to be adopted.

So it isn’t primarily confusion and lack of understanding that militate against capitalism taking serious steps to limit global warming. It’s the central role of the profit motive. And that’s why it will take a socialist society before these and other environmental problems can be tackled — and humanity live in true harmony with our home planet.

Paul Bennett

Corporate takeover (2001)

Book Review from the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Captive State. The Corporate Takeover of Britain. By George Monbiot, Macmillan.

The British state was traditionally seen by liberal commentators as one of the most “well-established” parliamentary democracies, relatively free of corruption. But this perception is changing, with much talk of a “disconnection” between the interests of the people and the activities of government. George Monbiot’s book is an important contribution towards this shift of opinion.

The reluctance of many a Labour voter at the recent election can quickly turn into outright regret, after a few minutes of picking up this book. Monbiot takes the reader beyond the run-of-the-mill media illusion of politicians’ and their supposedly all-important press conferences and five-point plans. This is about the incorporation of corporate interests into the machinery of government.

Monbiot shows many cases where the business agenda determines the ground rules to which government is expected to adhere. Large retail firms and construction companies, for example, are shown to have acquired a strong grip over planning and development policy. Nick Raynsford’s 1998 withdrawal of Labour’s pledged right of appeal against town planning decisions is one of numerous examples of broken promises and contradictions in Labour policy exposed by Monbiot.

This reviewer had a recent, first-hand experience of the absence of democracy in local government – at a council planning meeting to consider a proposed “development” behind the garden where I live (actually the removal of some old woodland to make way for a car park). All Labour party councillors voted in favour without any of them even bothering to speak in defence. Local residents had found out about the meeting in spite of it having not been officially publicised and scheduled during a holiday period. They expressed the many arguments against the plan: pollution, noise, environmental quality etc but the shameful-looking Labour councillors did not reply, knowing that they had a majority over the Conservative Party minority who opposed the plan. “And this is supposed to be a democracy,” said one resident afterwards. “It was all a stitch-up – planned weeks ago,” said another.

Monbiot shows that commercial interests are paramount at all levels of state decision-making. He shows how they influence government regulatory bodies and the research agendas of British universities (everything from the Environment Agency to the Biotechnology and Biology Research Council). The “Fat Cats Directory” lists many business people who have served industries such as biotechnology and petroleum, whilst also having a role in the government-run institutions that supposedly regulate these industries.

Socialists have consistently said that the State never did exist to represent the interests of the majority of us (even if a majority of voters did elect the governing party that resides within it). The picture from Monbiot of corporation-dominated government is really the logical outcome of a class-divided society where the state must serve the owning minority. So what do we do about it? Monbiot calls for

“the peaceful mobilization of millions of people in nations all over the world. Globalization, in other words must be matched with internationalism: campaigning, worldwide, for better means of government” (p.357).

“Better” government, for Monbiot, means government that is held “accountable” and actively regulates corporations. Monbiot envisages this democratisation of government as occuring on an international scale through multilateral agreements. This book still points to the willingness of transnational corporations to relocate to more favourable climates for profit-making, as well as their capacity to change government policies to suit their interests. Yet Monbiot does not reach the conclusion of socialists that the profit motive will undermine reformist attempts to restrain it.

Monbiot’s vision of a political culture of “permanent agitation” is, at least, an implicit recognition of this built-in tension within capitalism. It is outlined in the final chapter entitled “A Troublemaker’s Charter”. The international campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment is offered as an example of a successful international campaign. (This was a World Trade Organisation proposal for reducing the scope for national regulation of investment decisions; it was eventually withdrawn.) Yet, just a few pages on, the more recent Transatlantic Economic Partnership (involving the US and the EU) is introduced; a more gradualist move towards the same kind of goal, says Monbiot. So, the trouble-making should not ease up. More of it is needed as the problems of capitalism continually spill forth.

Monbiot does not consider the possibility that, when peacefully mobilised, the people of this world might seek to permanently end the cause of the social divisions he describes.

Dan Greenwood

The peril of moralism (2007)

From the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Guardian (5 June) ran a story by George Monbiot about pharmaceutical companies’ promotion of baby formula in the Philippines. The article, together with readers’ responses, is online at http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2095325,00.html.

As in other underdeveloped countries, the majority of the population in the Philippines has access only to polluted water. As formula has to be mixed with water, its widespread use instead of breastfeeding kills thousands of children every year. Nevertheless, the corporations promote it in the most ruthless fashion. For instance, they encourage their saleswomen to dress as nurses to gain the confidence of young mothers. The Philippines government has tried to restrict the promotion of baby formula, but the Pharmaceutical & Healthcare Association of the Philippines (PHAP), representing the manufacturers and backed by the US government and Chamber of Commerce, has led a campaign to thwart the attempt, using lobbying, diplomatic pressure, legal action and (apparently) targeted assassinations.

All this is, indeed, horrifying, and indignation is a natural and healthy reaction. But against who or what should we direct our indignation?

Irrelevance of nationality

Often enough, indignation expresses itself as national hatred, typically as anti-Americanism. America Puts Profit Above Babies’ Lives – runs the headline over the print version of the article. Of course, the American government and American business do put profit above babies’ lives (and above everything else). But the same is true of other countries. Ordinary Americans tend to feel that accusations against “America” are aimed at them too and respond in like manner: “You British are just as bad!”

Nothing could be more irrelevant to the issue than nationality. The first target of activists opposing the promotion of baby formula in underdeveloped countries was Nestlé – a Swiss company. The members that PHAP represents include European, Australian, and Japanese as well as American companies. They are equally ruthless.

Bad guy approach

But blaming “America” – or the Jews or the Japanese, perhaps, or some other nation or ethnic group — is a form of the broader phenomenon called moralism. Alternatively, we might call it “the bad guy approach.” Track down the “baby killers,” the evil people responsible for the evil deeds and do something about them. Do what exactly? Here things generally get fuzzy, but one Guardian reader has an answer: “The world right now needs another Revolution like the Bastille when all these greedy, unprincipled, corrupt and criminal politicians/industrialists are rounded up and are summarily executed.”

That should do the trick! Or would it? The “revolutionary” remedy has already been tried – in France, Russia, China and other countries. And yet there are still plenty of “bad guys” around, in those countries as elsewhere. Why should more shootings help? The more adaptable “bad guys” survive the “revolutions” by switching to the winning side in good time, and any who do get shot are readily replaced. What we have here is obviously an expression of extreme feeling, a fantasy of revenge, rather than a carefully thought-out solution. The moralistic approach stirs up emotions so powerful that thinking is paralysed.

Evil deeds without evil people

Really evil people are few and far between. They are not the crux of the matter. Most of the people involved in making and selling harmful products are not truly or intrinsically evil. The saleswoman dressed as a nurse to sell more baby formula and earn her commission, the Chinese tobacco farmer, the Afghan poppy grower, the armaments worker making land mines that will maim and kill children as they play – they are all doing evil things. Their deeds are evil, but they themselves are not, for they have to make a living somehow. They have to feed and clothe their own children.

Even the corporation executives who organize the evil deeds are not doing evil as a free and deliberate choice. They are required by law to do whatever is necessary to maximize profits for their shareholders. They could, of course, give up their positions and join the working class, but you can understand why so few of them would want to do that! The shareholders, in turn, do not feel obliged to concern themselves with the morality of the businesses that provide their dividends. Everywhere we look we find moral ambiguity. Evil is certainly being done, but no one is clearly to blame – only the social arrangement that we refer to as a system.

Some of us are lucky enough to come by a livelihood that allows us the luxury of a clean conscience (more or less). Some are not so lucky. The appropriate target of our indignation is the system that places people in such excruciating dilemmas, penalises altruistic impulses, rewards ruthless egoism, and inexorably turns “good guys” (or potential “good guys”) into “bad guys.” It is only by understanding the system that we can devise a way of freeing people to heed the voice of their conscience and freely contribute their talents to society, without thereby jeopardising their families’ survival and wellbeing.

Stefan

Toothache? Pay private fees or do it yourself (2023)

From the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many will know that, while most people have to pay something for NHS dental treatment, it is still free to a certain section of the community: children and pregnant women and new mothers. But, as George Monbiot pointed out in his column in the Guardian on 2 March:

‘Every child in the UK is entitled to free treatment by a non-existent dentist. Some people on benefits, pregnant women and those who have recently given birth also have free and full access to an imaginary service. Your rights are guaranteed, up to the point at which you seek to exercise them’ (tinyurl.com/s7epuzad).

Dental practices, being profit-seeking businesses, consider that what they are paid for treating NHS patients is not enough – they claim that in some cases it doesn’t even cover their costs – and so are increasingly reluctant to offer it and have not been using up all their NHS funding. In February it was reported that ‘Around £400million allocated for dental care went unspent this year because of a shortage of dentists willing to do NHS work’ (tinyurl.com/yrrpakv2).

What this ultimately means is that any patient requiring urgent treatment is forced to make a choice between suffering or paying privately for the treatment there and then.

With private dental treatment running into the hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds, it is obvious that those on lower incomes are really faced with no choice at all.

The system does appear to offer an alternative. Since 2006 the necessity to ‘register’ with a particular dentist has been abolished. What this means is that a patient whose regular dentist is unable or unwilling to provide NHS-funded treatment can shop around for another dentist prepared to treat them under the NHS.

The reason this only ‘appears’ to be an alternative is because it is another of Monbiot’s rights to a non-existent service. You won’t find another dentist prepared to treat you as they won’t find it profitable. So, when you look at those same low-income families and elderly people who can’t afford to ‘go private’, you see that really this is not much of an alternative at all.

In any event, going to another dentist obviously can involve increased travel costs if the dentist is out of the area. While merely inconvenient for some it could mean the difference between having the treatment and not for others such as the very low-waged who do not have access to personal transport or the rurally housed elderly who rely on poor public transport coverage. When you add the psychological factor of forcing people to see a dentist they are unfamiliar with which, as we know, can have a particular impact on older members of our community, you can see why so many people elect to wait for their own dentist to be able to do the work or forgo the treatment altogether.

There is another option – DIY dentistry – which, apparently, some have been taking. As Monbiot noted:

‘The result, in one of the richest nations on Earth, is that people are extracting their own teeth, making their own fillings, improvising dentures and sticking them to their gums with superglue, and overdosing on painkillers’.

We continue to be forced into a situation where, when we need treatment which is vital to our health and well-being, we either pay extortionate private fees, are forced to seek out another dentist at our own cost or, if none of the above are possible for us because of our financial situation, simply wait, with our condition worsening.

In socialism dental treatment would be provided freely to anyone who needed it. Unshackled from the financial pressures of the capitalist system, freed from the necessity of eking out an inadequate funding budget, the health services would be able to treat all those in a timely fashion to the best possible standard.

The fact is that no-one should be forced to make such dire choices when it comes to this or any other area of their health. The NHS was originally intended to implement the admirable principle: ‘Treatment free at the point of need’. Where our dental treatment is concerned, this principle has long had a thread tied between it and the door handle, and the door slammed shut.

Cooking the Books: Who will verify the verifiers? (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his book on the dangers of global warming, Heat, George Monbiot endorses a scheme, thought-up by Mayer Hillman and called “contract and convergence”. The basic idea is that a target should be fixed for reducing average world CO2 emissions per person to a level much lower than at present. Countries above this average should commit themselves to reducing their emissions while countries below it should be allowed to increase theirs up to the average. The countries above this average will of course be the developed capitalist countries while those below will be developing capitalist countries such as China and India.

So, it’s a proposal that the developed capitalist countries should voluntarily shackle themselves in the competitive struggle with their developing rivals to produce and make a profit from selling goods on the world market. Which is why it will never be adopted. There is simply no way that the capitalist corporations of the West and the states that protect their interests are going to agree to this. Given capitalism – as Monbiot and Hillman assume – each capitalist state will defend its own in the battle to realise profits on the world market. No capitalist state is going to undermine the competitiveness of its capitalist firms by imposing more expensive energy on them while its competitors in the developing world are not subject to this. It’s just not going to happen.

A front-page article in the Guardian (2 June) gave another reason why it wouldn’t work even in the unlikely event of its being adopted. Headed “Abuse and incompetence in fight against global warming” and subtitled “Up to 20% of carbon savings in doubt as monitoring firms criticised by UN body”, the article concerned the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the 1997 Kyoto treaty.

The CDM is a “carbon trading” scheme, which supporters of capitalism are lauding as the way to solve the problem within the profit system. Under this particular scheme, projects are started in the developing countries which are certified as reducing CO2 emissions; the firms carrying out these projects can then sell these “carbon credits” to firms in the developed countries for them to emit (a lesser amount of) CO2 instead.

But it hasn’t worked as planned:

“Within the world of carbon trading there are numerous cases of projects which are widely regarded as breaking CDM rules. Some existed long before the CDM project was launched: if they do happen to be producing fewer greenhouse gases that is the natural state and not a reduction which can be claimed and sold. Yet, such schemes have been validated by specialist companies and accepted by the CDM board; and the companies running them have been allowed to earn large amounts of money by selling unjustified Certified Emissions Reductions”.

These specialist companies are hired by firms who stand to earn big profits if their project is accepted. The Guardian quoted one carbon analyst: “The verifiers are being paid by the people they are verifying. If it turns out the verified is a bad guy, he is paying the policeman to sign him off as a good guy”.

Monbiot’s scheme would demand a far wider verification of carbon saving since accurate statistics would have to be collected and verified for every country (and every individual in every country). So, the problem uncovered by the Guardian would be multiplied many times, with every country trying to cook the books by understating the amount of its emissions.

Compared to “contract and convergence”, it would be much simpler to introduce socialism, the common ownership of the world’s resources with production to satisfy people’s needs not for profit, where vested capitalist interests and market forces would no longer conspire to prevent what needs to be done being done.

The socialist position on Kosovo vindicated (2001)

From the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Very occasionally, the bourgeois media serve socialists tasy snacks which cut to the reality of how capitalism operates. Hidden away on the comment pages of the Guardian, arch greeny liberal George Monbiot provides a compelling case for how Caspian Sea oil was a major factor in the Kosovan war after all. With one eye on an article by fellow liberal Jonathon Freedland (written at the time of the bombing), which mocked the idea that oil had anything to do with the war effort, Monbiot quotes from various prominent sources to demonstrate the opposite.

The Trans-Balkan oil pipeline (which is coming up for approval) will transport Caspian Sea oil from the Black Sea port of Burgas to the Adriatic, passing through Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania. According to a paper by the US Trade and Development agency, the pipeline will “provide American companies with a key role in developing the vital east-west corridor” and “facilitate rapid integration” of the “Balkans with western Europe”. Monbiot says that there is “no question” that this featured prominently in Balkan war politics. The then US energy secretary said: “This is about America’s energy security . . . We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out right.” The pipeline does not pass through the former Yugoslavia, but as the Albanian president said: “no solution confined within Serbian borders will bring lasting peace”. Monbiot adds that “the message could scarcely have been blunter: if you want Albanian consent for the Trans-Balkan pipeline, you had better wrest Kosovo out of the hands of the Serbs”. Subsequently, we can now fully understand the strategic need for “stability” in the Balkans.

The May 1999 Socialist Standard said that “wars are fought over markets, investment outlets, raw material sources and trade routes and strategic points to control them”. Liberals mocked us at the time. Now, after their support for the slaughter of our class in Kosovo, they will have to concede that we were right all along. Thanks George!

Life and Times: Two Eco-Reformists (2022)

The Life and Times column from the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A friend of mine who’s a keen vegan recently sent me an email with a Channel 4 podcast link to an interview with someone she greatly admires. That person was Dale Vince, a vegan himself who has become a wealthy entrepreneur through his setting up of the ‘green’ energy company Ecotricity, even if he’s probably best known for his ownership of Forest Green Rovers, a small football club recently promoted from non-league football to the Football League. The other thing about FGR, as they’re known, is that, in Vince’s image, the club itself is entirely vegan, so that everything sold, eaten and drunk in the ground is plant and not animal based. My friend described Vince as ‘an amazing person’ and ‘a genius’ for his espousal of environmental causes and efforts to bring about change in that area. Her view was that ‘his involvement in the business world has nothing at all to do with making money’.

The ‘Green New Deal’

As all this piqued my curiosity, I couldn’t not give the 40-minute podcast a go. It was definitely worthwhile. I found Vince quite a fascinating character, with a ‘rebel’ past (from the age of 15 he became a traveller for 10 years living from hand to mouth) who hated being constrained and was resistant to living the kind of life dictated by money-based society. He came across as likeable too, not deterred by adverse reactions and of course very clever for the way in which he had personally conceived and set up a highly successful energy business.

So far so good, but, as the interview progressed, what became clear was that Vince, despite his obvious good intentions, was , like so many others, falling into the trap of thinking you could solve the problems thrown up by the system we live in by making certain adjustments to certain aspects of it. The proposed innovation he was especially enthusiastic about was the use of biofuel, in the form of grass, as a way of creating abundant cheap energy. The lines along which he was talking were clearly compatible with what has come to be known as the ‘Green New Deal’. This involves, among other things, boosting renewable energy sources and lowering reliance on fossil fuels, using energy-saving appliances, constructing buildings with lower negative environmental impact and, in Vince’s case, campaigning against over-fishing (he funded the Seaspiracy documentary) and encouraging veganism.

All this is in a sense to be applauded, yet it is hard to see how this ‘greening’ of economic activity will not simply be integrated into the global system (capitalism) whose bottom line is always profit rather than human need. Even veganism, on which Vince is so keen and which is definitely on the rise, can only be – and is in the process of being – sucked into the system of profit-making with the problems it produces – and cannot solve – of poverty, inequality and environmental degradation. What was traditionally seen as a subversive and anti-establishment form of resistance to the global food industry and its horrific abuse of animals has itself increasingly become a ‘cash cow’.

Decadence?

The friend who expressed admiration for Vince also drew my attention to a pair of articles from the Guardian written by another environmental campaigner, George Monbiot. One of these lamented the government’s policy of continuing to subsidise farmers despite their anti-environmental practices, while the other, entitled ‘Why are we feeding crops to our cars when people are starving?’ attacks the widespread and increasing use of crops, grasses, marshes and trees for fuel purposes, so-called ‘biofuels’, the very thing that Dale Vince advocates and claims to be a form of cheap, sustainable and non-destructive green energy. Monbiot takes aim at Vince by calling Ecotricity’s plan to turn huge land areas into feedstock for biogas plant as ‘the worst land proposal I’ve ever seen in the UK’. He goes on ‘But we can’t use such fixes to solve our climate crisis. To leave fossil fuels in the ground, we should change our energy system: our need to travel, our modes of transport, the fuel economy of our homes and the means by which we heat them. Modern biofuels, used at scale, are no more sustainable than an older variety: whale oil. And burning food is the definition of decadence’ (bit.ly/3IAaqRG).

Is there a side to be taken here? As socialists we wouldn’t want to do that, since it would involve supporting one plan or another for managing capitalism, even if both campaigners refer to it as ‘ecosocialism’. And what we explicitly want is for capitalism to be replaced by a completely different kind of society organised on the basis of human need not profit. So, though during his interview Vince calls himself a ‘socialist’, his arguments, well-meaning as they may be, show his ideas about social change to be a million miles away from what we mean by ‘socialism’. And he confirms this by ending with the admission that he would like to have a future role in the Labour Party. It’s doubtful that Monbiot would want that for himself, but he too shows he is still thoroughly into policies to reform capitalism when, in his article on government policy on farming, he states: ‘I want to see Defra diversified and clear lines drawn between private and public interests. I want to see the lobbying power of the NFU curtailed’ (bit.ly/3uCZE7J).

Global socialism

In her message to me, my friend, in support of Vince and his plan for producing energy from potential food sources, drew attention to the fact that more food than needed is already produced on a world scale. The only problem, she stated, was distribution ‘due to economic and political factors’. And that’s exactly right, but the trouble is that those ‘economic and political factors’ will always exist as long as we have a society with such things as money, banks, governments and states.

So we need more than a vegan football club à la Vince and more than changed government policies à la Monbiot. We need something quite different – a world of planned cooperation which takes advantage of technology in a sustainable way and in which everyone can develop their interests and abilities with full social support and live without the ever-present threat of pervasive material insecurity. That, and not just the tinkering at the edges of capitalism that both campaigners advocate, would be the true ‘ecosocialism’.

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

The Seaspiracy documentary was reviewed in the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Danger: capitalism at work (2000)

Book Review from the June 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The profit system’s in-built culture of risk-taking inevitably leads to danger for those who are the real wealth producers.

In his introduction to Blood in the Bank: Social and legal aspects of death at work by Gary Slapper (268pp Ashgate) American academic, anarchist-superstar Noam Chomsky execrates the unaccountable and deadly rule of corporations with powerful well-practised and passionate arguments. Chomsky’s preface contrasts with Slapper’s own text, which, with care, deliberateness and precision explores the complexities and the structures of the legal process of dealing with corporate manslaughter. The two styles, however, far from clashing, are complementary; as Slapper’s meticulous explication of the subject of death at work, and its relationship to the capitalist system, resolutely builds up to an impressive substantiation and justification for Chomsky’s resounding fusillade.

Slapper begins by going back to what a crime is and how criminal law came into being. This enables him to examine the practice of law as a whole, and to proceed on the basis that “it is reasonable to judge the system’s functioning: (i) by the extent it meets its aims . . . (ii) whether its policies have been formulated in accordance with its . . . accepted purposes”. He exposes the circularity of those stated aims and purposes, which summed up merely say “a crime is anything the state has chosen to criminalise” and then back it up with metaphysical flim-flam about social order and human nature. In place of this, Slapper deploys the materialist critique developed by Marx and Engels which sees law as “a code which generally sought to maintain the social and economic system” of its day.

Corporate culpability

Highlighting the divergence between ideals and reality is the way in which the law of manslaughter applies to death at work, and corporate culpability. In 1989 576 deaths were recorded as personal homicides, “the number of people killed at work during the same period was 517”, along with some 28,900 non-fatal injuries. Using Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reports and his own research and analysis of coroner’s court hearings, Slapper estimates that around 70 percent of deaths at work could have been prevented by due management care.

The modern test for manslaughter is that of “objective culpability”. If the accused can be shown to have taken an unnecessary risk, or have been indifferent to risk, resulting in a death then they could be culpable of manslaughter. Since for this to apply it is necessary to consider how far “conduct must depart from accepted standards to be characterised as criminal [it must be] supremely a jury question”. This means that manslaughter is a highly complex and nebulous crime, depending on the cultural expectations of juries. However, Slapper proposes that we can discern “an essence of criminal culpability” which can be applied to show whether death at work is manslaughter. He proposes three tests which could be applied to deaths at work to determine corporate liability: if an employer creates a situation of deadly risk; where the risk is serious and obvious; and where they decide to run that risk either choosing to ignore it, or attempt to avoid it in a negligent and incompetent manner.

The problem, though, lies in applying criminal law, which has traditionally dealt with individuals, to corporate entities. Initially, employers were utterly immune from prosecution, because it was deemed that their employees had willingly volunteered to undergo the work for their employer. However, the evolution of a duty of care both towards employees and the wider society has meant an end to that line of defence. Prosecution is still hampered, though, by the need to identify a criminal “mind”, a person to be held to account. In cases of failures by entire companies, proving one individual director to be guilty within the terms of the “controlling officer test” can be immensely difficult, especially as police would not usually exhaustively search through company records after an “accident”. In 1996 the Law Commission recommended that a change ought to be made, making it possible to prosecute companies for management failure, but the requirement for a controlling officer is still current. Thus, most legal action resulting from death at work comes under the aegis of Health and Safety regulative legislation rather than the more serious criminal law.

The Health and Safety Executive, however, “has severely restricted resources”, reflecting the lack of political priority given to its existence. Further, the HSE’s own policies mute its effectiveness, as it prefers to promote “negotiated compliance” with safety law rather than work as an outright enforcement agency, casting itself as the good angel sitting on the shoulders of corporations, whispering words of conscience. Even then, such negotiation is ranked sixth in the league of the HSE’s own priorities, with enforcement coming seventh.

Culture of capitalism

Beyond simple policy matters is the cultural view of death at work as an “accident”, which is the automatic presupposition of investigating authorities, a presupposition that downgrades the severity of the occurrence. Both police and juries are likely to react lightly towards the respectable management, who do not fit with their pre-conceptions of criminals, and so are less inclined to use their powers of discretion to pursue those cases, unless-as in one gruesome case with a cutting machine that is cited-the details are so gross as to fit with the traditional horrific and violent concepts of murder. Slapper attributes the ultimate causation of this cultural influence to the social conditions of capitalism. The result of the practice over corporate killing is to avoid “too serious a deterrent to the risk-taking that is part of competitive industry”. Capitalists must remain flexible enough to take risks that may brings greater rewards in the interest of profit.

This competitive aspect of capitalism also nullifies any real prospect of solving the problem through the law. As Slapper notes, the Indian authorities failed to prosecute the directors of Union Carbide for the Bhopal disaster (see Socialist Standard, December 1999), yet did manage to prosecute an elephant for trampling someone to death. “Attempts to deal effectively with cavalier attitudes to safety within one jurisdiction can only have a limited effect because, . . . then the problem is exported by capital . . . Like water running down a hill, capital follows the path of least resistance”. Global competition between regulators undermines effective control over working conditions.

Capital views safety as simply another cost to business, as is illustrated via the Ford Pinto case of 1977, where the firm decided the cost of paying law suits was cheaper than actually correcting a fault in their product. That this calculation was repeated in 1997 by Chrysler, and again in 1999 by General Motors, shows how this sort of problem is endemic to the market system. The problems do not end there as there are those who argue “that the burden of fines is inappropriately borne by shareholders”. Despite the fact that it is exactly the constant baying of the shareholders for profit that is the root cause in the system, they are not, and never can be, in any way personally responsible under the law.

Slapper’s book has been picked up on by the usual rag-tag band of reformists. George Monbiot referred to the book in his Guardian column, in which he concluded by calling for a change in the law. Monbiot neglects to mention, though, Slapper’s conclusion that it is the profit system that must go, to be replaced by non-market socialism, and that this can be the only solution to the problem. Likewise, Channel Four News asked for a soundbite on an item about death at work. Again, they failed to explore his radical, and entirely deductive conclusion. Gary Slapper’s book is a rewarding and informative read, that deserves to be known as more than simply a useful source of horrifying stories and statistics to back up calls for milk and water reforms.

Pik Smeet

Blogger's Note:

Full disclosure: Gary Slapper was a member of the SPGB. He wrote for the Socialist Standard under the pen-name of 'Gary Jay'.

Snippets (2021)

From the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Abolish the Rich?

A photo of the disgraced Labour MP Claudia Webbe, with the caption ‘Claudia Webbe’s plan to beat climate change is as worrying as her conviction,’ accompanied Claire Foges column in the Times (8 November). According to Foges, ‘this year she tweeted a novel idea to solve the climate crisis: ‘the rich must be abolished.’” We are prepared to believe that Webbe might have had in mind abolishing them because they consumed too much or some other such silly idea. But what’s wrong with abolishing the rich or, rather, of abolishing the division of society into the rich and the rest? As a matter of fact, as this can only be done by making productive resources the common property of all the people, it would also create the only framework within which the climate crisis can be tackled with any chance of success. It is more worrying that some people want to keep the rich, and so the society which has led to the climate crisis.

Or just tax them?

Commenting in the Guardian (15 November) on the outcome of COP26, George Monbiot wrote:

‘Our survival depends on raising the scale of civil disobedience until we build the greatest mass movement in history, mobilising the 25% who can flip the system.”

As he has previously identified capitalism, not just one particular kind of capitalism, as the cause of the climate crisis, we can assume that this is the system he wants to ‘flip’. We can agree that this requires ‘the greatest mass movement in history’ and that if 25 percent want this then we would be more than half way there as most of the rest of the population would soon follow. However, they would need to be clear on what is to replace capitalism (and they’d be better advised to aim to win political control rather than trying to confront the state head on).

Unfortunately Monbiot is very vague on this, having talked merely about a ‘wealth tax’ and the government spending more money on public amenities. But that wouldn’t be an alternative to capitalism, if only because to be taxed the rich would still have to exist and their wealth derives from their ownership and control, in one way or another, of the productive resources on which society depends, the basis of capitalism. To flip capitalism means establishing a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of these resources. Will Monbiot eventually come round to this view or would that be too much of a shock for Guardian readers?

Whose government?

Before going in to be sent to prison for contempt of court, the 9 Insulate Britain protestors, who had been alienating people by blocking roads, had a family photo taken with one of them holding a placard saying “Betrayed by My Government” (Guardian,17 November). How naïve can you get? Evidently they think that the government exists to protect the people and that, in failing to do this over climate change, it has betrayed them. But the government exists to protect the interests of the rich owning class, and insulating people’s homes is not one of their priorities as it would cost too much. It’s their government. To call the government ‘my government’ is to reinforce the myth that governments are there to serve the people. They are not.

A hundred more years of wars?

This year is the centenary of the Royal British Legion. Its press statement on this began:

‘For the past 100 years, and for the next, the RBL will always ensure our Veterans get the support they deserve ….’

A hundred more years of wars, no thanks.

Cooking the Books: Greed or Necessity? (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Wake up XR, you’re not going to kill capitalism’, was the headline in Hugo Rifkind’s column in the Times (31 August). According to him, XR ‘wants to save the world by ending capitalism’. That’s not what they say. Their position is that talk of ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’ is ‘politics’ and that the urgent need is to go ‘beyond politics’. As they put it on their website, ‘we have a moral duty to act – whatever our politics.’ This makes them a political pressure group, employing direct action and civil disobedience tactics, to try to get capitalist governments to do more to combat climate change. At most, they are proposing a purely constitutional change – decision-making citizens’ assemblies – which, given that most ‘citizens’ today still vote for capitalism in conventional elections, would come up with measures to be implemented in capitalism.

Maybe some in XR blame ‘human greed’ for the present situation and see the solution as people consuming less or there being fewer people. This seems to be Rifkind’s assumption. In any event, he equates capitalism with greed and argues that you can’t abolish capitalism because you can’t abolish greed as that’s against human nature. ‘Extinction Rebellion protestors need to get real about human nature,’ he says:

‘Abandon capitalism? Come off it. Do humans really care about the planet enough to give up on the fundamental human desire for more, and more and more? Have you ever met any?’

Actually, it is quite common to meet people who might want more but not ‘more, and more and more’. But why, at present, do people want more money? It’s because they need it as capitalism is a system where you must have money to survive; for most people it’s also a system where you can’t be sure that you will get a regular supply; if you lose your job it dries up. In these circumstances getting as much as you can is a reasonable precaution for you and your family against this economic insecurity. In short, such behaviour is a product of capitalist society, not an expression of human nature.

In his article Rifkind reveals that he had recently interviewed George Monbiot, who he describes as ‘an unabashed proponent of the whole environmentalism-entails-anti-capitalism worldview’. Monbiot has indeed come out and stated that capitalism is the cause of environmental damage.

He does not blame human greed as such for damaging the environment. He blames the way in which capitalism allows the rich to do what they want with their money, on the greed and irresponsibility of the rich in ‘the pursuit of private luxury’.

Capitalism does, as explained, encourage, in fact obliges, people to seek to acquire money. The rich have to as well, not so that they can wallow in luxury but because this is what capitalism dictates. As Marx wrote of the capitalist:

‘So far as he is personified capital, it is not values in use and the enjoyment of them, but exchange-value and its augmentation, that spur him into action. Fanatically bent on making value expand itself, he ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake… As such, he shares with the miser the passion for wealth as wealth. But that which in the miser is a mere idiosyncrasy, is, in the capitalist, the effect of the social mechanism, of which he is but one of the wheels’ (Capital, Vol. 1, ch. 24, s. 3).

In other words, what we are dealing with here is not the personal greed of the rich but a ‘social mechanism’ which obliges those in charge of capitalist corporations to accumulate more profits as more capital to make more profits, to make more capital, and so on. This, not human greed, is why capitalism as an economic system is geared to infinite growth in a finite world.

Pathfinders: Say It Loud (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Say It Loud

If you want to take a pessimistic view of humanity’s future, there’s no shortage of evidence. And because the news cycle feeds primarily off bad news, it’s the easiest evidence to find. You have to look a bit harder for the positive news stories to back an optimistic view, but they do exist.

Like the story about the massive expansion of sharing app Olio, where people go out of their way to provide free stuff for people who are in need. Volunteers collect unsold produce from Tesco supermarkets, list it all in an app, and then superintend the hand-out process as local people come in to collect whatever is available.

What’s in it for Tesco? Cynically, one might say it’s good optics, as they are being seen to care, plus it saves them the costs of disposal. Less cynically, they are to some extent undermining their own profits by giving stuff away, so this is at least a concrete act that is a world away from the empty rhetoric and vapid virtue signalling of most capitalist companies.

What’s in it for the volunteers? A nice feeling, presumably, of doing some good in the world, to counteract all the loudly advertised bad stuff. ‘If everybody did something small but meaningful, we’d live in a much, much better society,” says one volunteer, who gets up at 7am every Saturday to collect Tesco cast-offs. And he’s right, of course. But any sentence that starts with the phrase ‘If everybody did…’ is really a political statement about how the world ought to be, and as we know, politics is about more than people just being nice to each other. It’s about thinking big.

Socialism is about thinking on the largest, global scale. And we know that’s a problem because a lot of people don’t seem able or willing to think at that scale. Not even when it comes to an existential threat like climate change. Even though the capitalist money-machine has blindly bulldozed its way across the planet destroying lives, cultures, landscapes and wildlife, people still have a dogged faith in the market system and its governments and politicians to find solutions to the very problems they’re causing.

And here’s a little anecdote about Glasgow and the run-up to COP26 in November which is nothing if not ironic.

Property owners in Glasgow are exploiting the shit out of COP26 by hiking their rents to astronomical levels during the conference period, in a bid to make big bucks out of a climate emergency. Greedy, grasping bastards indeed, but this is capitalist logic at work. If you’ve got a commodity that’s in high demand, you charge the maximum price you can get for it, and never mind scruples.

So it turns out that many climate activists from around the world who want to go to Glasgow to demonstrate their belief in the market system’s supposed magical ability to clean up its own mess, now can’t afford it because of the normal operations of the market system.

Fortunately, not everyone is a greedy, grasping bastard, even when capitalist logic tells them they ought to be. A network of Glasgow house owners has come together to express solidarity with climate activists by offering them very cheap accommodation over the course of the November climate summit (bbc.in/3mnSIbc). There aren’t enough of them, and they’re already oversubscribed, but still it’s some comfort to know that, destroy whatever else it may, capitalism never quite manages to destroy the capacity of humans to treat each other with decency.

Given this, the failure of people including climate activists to engage with the concept of a decent society at a global scale is astonishing and alarming. All kinds of cognitive biases are at play here, as people perform mental contortions to rationalise the irrational world around them, when it would be so much easier to say ‘you know what, capitalism is turning into a catastrophe, let’s get rid of it.’

The problem is the alternative. Influential environmental campaigner George Monbiot has publicly acknowledged the fact that capitalism is the problem, ‘a weapon pointed at the living world’, a conclusion he freely admits he came to slowly and reluctantly, after he had run out of ways to excuse it. Unfortunately he is under the impression that the only alternative is state (ie. soviet-style) ‘communism’, a prospect he is understandably not attracted to and which he recognises had ‘more in common with capitalism than the advocates of either system would care to admit’ (bit.ly/381QB4p).

In fact, soviet ‘communism’ is no alternative at all, it’s a travesty. We said so in 1918, mere months into Lenin’s coup d’état, but it seems our voice is not loud enough to reach Monbiot’s mighty ear. Meanwhile he’s wrestling with a mishmash of trendy behavioural and economic models that stand little chance of being put into practice and in any case don’t address the core problem, the existence of private property and markets, which results in a tiny class who own all the world’s resources and enrich themselves by impoverishing the rest of us and the planet.

People just can’t say the unsayable, which is that we have to abolish private property and markets, and dispossess the capitalist class. Why can’t they say that? In Monbiot’s case, as a regular writer for the Guardian newspaper, he must be aware that the Guardian is known for dumping writers who say anything too radical, as it dumped comedian Jeremy Hardy and even award-winning journalist John Pilger (bit.ly/37ZYFme). Science journalists are in a similar position, depending on employers for their wages. Ditto academics. Ditto social media influencers. No one can speak their mind who relies on the ‘king’s shilling’. Ever wondered why we don’t take commercial ads in the Standard? That’s why.

So there is a lacuna of silence surrounding the biggest question of humanity’s future on Earth. It’s not some deep-state conspiracy. It’s just the normal workings of capitalism. It creates an artificial dependence on money, and then pays everyone money not to question the money system.

As Black Panther activist Assata Shakur famously remarked, no one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. People are starting to question capitalism like never before. Well, it’s about time. But capitalism is not going to encourage that conversation. That’s why socialists need to be vocal, and not just vocal but loud, as in Glasgow this November. The world’s people need an alternative to the market system that plays to human strengths of cooperation and mutual support. It’s up to people like us to show them there is one.

Paddy Shannon