Pathfinders: Nobel efforts (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the November 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nobel Prize awards have been no stranger to controversy over the years, both for awards they should have given but didn’t, like most famous writers and virtually all women, and awards they shouldn’t have given but did. These included the 1949 Medicine prize for the prefrontal lobotomy, the 2019 Literature prize to a Bosnian genocide denialist and Slobodan Milošević fanboy, and most famously, the 1973 Peace prize to Kissinger, the carpet-bomber of Cambodia, which caused two Nobel Committee members to resign in disgust and prompted the equally famous retort from musician Tom Lehrer that satire had become obsolete.

Media pundits were quick to spot certain oddities about last month’s Nobel awards. Feathers had been ruffled earlier when the head of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute pointed out that ‘We have now over 50 armed conflicts around the world’ and suggested that perhaps nobody deserved the Peace prize this year (tinyurl.com/4c84a9zp). In the event they gave it to Hiroshima survivors, a clear stand-by choice.

The Physics prize went not to physicists but to two computer scientists for their early work in AI and neural networks. Reasonable enough, one might say, given that computer science didn’t exist in 1896 when Alfred Nobel established the prize topics. A mathematics Nobel might have been nearer the ballpark, but there isn’t one of those either, a fact emphatically not due to the popular gossip that it was revenge for Mrs Nobel having an affair with a mathematician (Alf was never married). In fact, Nobel also ignored dozens of other valid research disciplines, which reflects the deep capitalist truth that the rich always get to dictate to the rest of us what is important, just like today’s vainglorious and increasingly deluded ‘effective altruist’ billionaires.

As for the winning computer scientists, you may remember one of them, Geoffrey Hinton, as a well-known poacher-turned-gamekeeper who resigned from Google in 2023 to renounce AI and warn the world that it was about to kill us all. Given that the prize is awarded to those who, in Alf’s own words, ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humankind’, one might have expect a noble prizewinner to refuse to accept the medal and the money, however Geoff appears untroubled by such qualms.

Still, there must be a lot of physicists out there doing vital Nobel-worthy work, surely? Not according to the popular YouTube doyenne of theoretical physics and clunky jokes, Sabine Hossenfelder, who claims (no joke) that ‘physics is dying’ because it’s become an unfalsifiable pseudoscience whose only purpose is to chunter out meaningless papers in support of funding bids to prop up the physics community’s wage bill (tinyurl.com/5n93hdmb). It might be true that they have a vested interest in stringing us along with string theory, loop quantum gravity, multiverses and endless made-up particles, but perhaps Sabine would say that, as she thinks the idea of an elegant Theory of Everything is a romantic mirage, and besides, popular YouTubers also have a certain vested interest in being controversial, don’t they?

AI had a more direct role in clinching the Chemistry prize, through Google DeepMind and its groundbreaking work on protein folding. Proteins do everything that matters in your body, but there are 100,000 of them and nobody understands how they work. Their exact function depends on what shape they fold into, and working this out for just one protein used to be a 3-year PhD in itself. The DeepMind AlphaFold2 programme can now do it in seconds, triggering a revolution in potential new treatments.

The Medicine prize meanwhile was for work in newly discovered microRNA, which is how genes, when sending messenger-RNA ‘photocopies’ to cells with template instructions for building proteins, effectively Tippex out certain instructions and not others.

What’s called the Economics Nobel is really an ersatz 1968 add-on by a Swedish bank and denounced as a ‘false Nobel prize’ by modern relative Peter Nobel, on the grounds that he considers economics a pseudoscience, a conclusion which will not raise socialist eyebrows. This year’s ‘Economics’ prize was for interesting empirical research into the question why some countries are so much richer than others. ‘Culture’ and geography have been mooted, but these researchers, observing that many poor countries were formerly European colonies, opted to look at ‘settler mortality’ statistics. They concluded that where mortality was low, and Europeans were able to settle and farm (Australia, North America), they also imported their existing social, economic and political institutions, giving the colony a massive head-start. Where mortality was high due to malaria and yellow fever (West Africa, Haiti, etc), they instead kept their distance and imposed vicious, extractive regimes including the slave trade. In sum, liberal democratic institutions are enablers of prosperity, not the other way round. Hooray for liberal capitalism then, which has obviously not resulted in a billionaire elite, global poverty, war and climate change.

Honourable mention ought this year to go to an Ig Nobel prize winner who, instead of discovering something silly about mammals breathing through their anuses, actually found out something useful about centenarians living in so-called ‘blue zones’ of super-longevity, which is that the blue zones don’t exist, neither do most of the centenarians, and the ‘data’ is almost entirely the result of poor, faked or lost records, and pension fraud by relatives (tinyurl.com/4hzna4ka). Many rich capitalists are obsessed with cheating death and living forever. This finding pisses on their chips and allows hard-pressed workers to enjoy some schadenfreude for once.

Would there be Nobel prizes in socialism? Probably not ones named after someone who got rich by blowing things up, including his own brother. And certainly not cash prizes, of course (there wouldn’t be any money). The concept of ‘prize’ is so integral to the fabric of competitive capitalism (prize and price are the same word in several languages) that some will find it hard to imagine a culture that doesn’t need such incentives in order to do worthwhile research. But socialists, who understand the value of intrinsic motivation, won’t have a problem.

Paddy Shannon

What future for the Beautiful Island? (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

A look at the 'other China'

Start with Hong Kong. A bouquet of modern capitalism. Concrete, glass, steel. Banks, hotels, skyscrapers. Streets bedecked with anti-pollution face masks. And residents who advise visitors come to marvel not to drink the water. Then escape to a leaf-shaped island of some 24 million population which became known to untroubled, disinterested people outside only because it was the country of origin of much of the cheap electrical equipment they bought from their local branch of Currys or Comet. Once reliant on the export of cheap textiles or consumer goods the island rose to be among the world’s leading manufacturers of computer software and hardware. Not to overlook bicycle parts, some of which are used at a London East End branch of the not-for-profit Social Enterprise to help train locals who are homeless, isolated or unemployed (or perhaps all three) to make a kind of living as bicycle mechanics.

Within the island’s demographic stew there are some half a million descendants of about a dozen aboriginal tribes, settled with others who came over from mainland China. Together they can claim to be now one of the most peaceful societies in Asia. So – welcome to the island of Taiwan, to Ilha Formosa (beautiful island), to the Republic of China – a misleadingly splendid name for a state which is no longer a member of the United Nations and is recognised by only the likes of Belize, Malawi, the Vatican… Welcome to the beautiful scenery, the mountains, the golden beaches. To the flyovers whisking you above the factories and past the driven schools. To the nation state which exists by, through and in with, one tough work-ethic.

Martial Law

Of the competing mercantile powers it was the Portugese who, about 1590, “discovered” Taiwan – and gave it the name Ilha Formosa. A long period of war, rebellion and murderous poverty while Taiwan was a “province” of China ended in 1895 when the Japanese occupied the island. This was supposedly “in perpetuity” but it came to an end in 1945, after a half century of martial law. Japanese rule was harsh – an estimated ten thousand people were killed – but not corrupt and it developed an educational system as well as roads, railways and industry. In 1943, as the Allied leaders were carving up the Far East in expectation of Japan’s defeat in World War Two, a “peace” conference in Cairo decided that, as a spoil of war, Taiwan would be “returned” to China under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT). United States Vice President Truman’s response described the island as “America’s unsinkable battleship”.

Towards the end of the war there was a subtle change in the vocabulary of the Allied powers’ intentions; Taiwan was to be “temporarily occupied” on their behalf by the KMT. But this was soon undermined when civil war broke out on mainland China between the KMT and Mao Tse Tung’s “communist” forces. Preoccupied by those more pressing events, Chiang left the running of Taiwan to his deputy Chen Yi, whose regime was barbaric enough to provoke many “liberated” Taiwanese to regret the end of Japanese rule. In 1947 a minor incident connected to the state monopoly of the tobacco trade inflamed a series of widespread protests which were crushed with mass arrests, torture and execution of up to 30,000 people. (The day when it started – 28 February – is now a national holiday in Taiwan and New Park in the capital city Taipei was re-named 2-28 Peace park). That horror was a foretaste of things to come

White Terror 

By 1949, as the KMT on the mainland were facing defeat Chiang Kai-shek took refuge in Taiwan, where he continued to insist that one day he would prevail. Meanwhile martial law returned under The White Terror, with mass arrests of those alleged to be “attempting to overthrow the government”. Over 90,000 were taken in this way and at least half of them were executed. The scene of much of this was Green Island Lodge – a prison on a volcanic island separated from Taiwan by a few miles of nausea-inducing Pacific Ocean. Here there is lush scenery, one of the world’s three seawater hot springs, golden beaches, pristine coral reefs and dazzling tropical fish. This is where many Taiwanese come to enjoy a short break – if they can ignore that close by are a museum and a human rights memorial in place of the notorious prison where so many victims of The White Terror suffered and perished.

Apart from his willingness to commit atrocities, the defeated Chiang Kai-shek became something of an embarrassment to the Americans. In 1971 President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger offered an “opening” – a carefully chosen word of flexible interpretation – to China and, as if that was not enough, Taiwan lost its membership of the United Nations to China. During the following year the US and China met and agreed on a “communiqué” which, while not actually saying that Mao had won the civil war, “acknowledged” (more of those careful words) that the new China was a unified country of which Taiwan was a part. This betrayal of what was supposed to have been an unshakeable commitment was settled after the negotiators had been pleasured by an especially sumptuous meal, encouraging Nixon’s odious chief arm-twister, replete, to assure his hosts “After a dinner of moatal and Peking Duck I’ll sign anything”. Well, he was Henry Kissinger wasn’t he…

Elections

Chiang Kai-shek died in 1978 and his son Chiang Ching-kuo took over with an easier, less repressive hand. While martial law was still in operation it was possible in 1986 for the first official opposition – the Democratic Progressive Party – to be formed and to win a significant number of seats in the next election. In process with these changes in 1987 martial law was brought to an end; free elections are now an established part of political life on the island and the election of 2000 brought an end to KMT rule. It should be said that it is not unknown for elected members to try to sort out their differences through a punch-up in the Chamber and for political business to be obstructed through allegations of corruption. In 1991 the KMT claim to link Taiwan and the Chinese mainland was formally abandoned. Symbolic of the clearing away of a lot of the obstructive anachronisms imposed on the Taiwan of the 1940s, many of the statues of Chiang Kai-shek were vengefully torn down. It was symbolic too of Taiwan feeling its way into place as an independent competitor in global capitalism.

Part of this process is Taiwan’s promotion of itself as a tourist attraction to rival the best offered by the likes of Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia. “Where else” bellows a full page ad in a Sunday newspaper colour supplement “would you find time-honoured traditions that thrive in perfect harmony with the chic and the avant-garde”’. Apart from its “breathtaking scenery” the island’s vibrant ambition is testified to by “the city’s skyscrapers” – among them Taipei 101, the world’s second highest building, with the fastest elevator to whisk you from ground level to the top viewing spot in a matter of seconds so smoothly that you are unaware of moving. All of which demands that the Taiwanese people live by a patriotism manufactured as surely as those computer parts. And it all soaks down to the children, who devotedly learn the officially sanctioned Mandarin language – often along with English and Japanese – during an average 12 hour day in the classroom with extra tuition in Maths and Science at private cram schools on a Saturday.

Unemployment 

But hard work, to whatever degree, has not been able to insulate Taiwan from capitalism’s chaos. The present world recession has cruelly broken the dream of ever-flowing Taiwanese prosperity. Unemployment is an encroaching problem no longer confined to the poorer, under-educated families but now also affecting graduates. A government subsidy intended to persuade companies to take on graduates has had the effect of worsening poverty at large by forcing applicants to accept lower starting wages – at about half the national average. Many employers – as in England – have pressed their workers to take temporary unpaid leave, or have stopped taking on new staff altogether. And there remains a serious problem of youth unemployment, with the rate for 15-24 year olds about twice that for the workforce as a whole and looming over it all is the real prospect of them being sucked into the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

After a history of savage repression, Taiwan is struggling now for a place among the trend-setters of Twenty-First Century global capitalism. For example they are trying for admission to bodies such as the United Nations and there are missions working for unity with China. As one guide (Robert Kelly and Joshua Brown, Lonely Planet ) put it: “So is Taiwan at a crossroads, or a precipice?” And it may also be asked – what will this do to a beautiful island which has already suffered so grievously? Will it turn out to be a modern capitalist power as frantic, as restless and as abrasive as Hong Kong?

Ivan

World View: We have been here before (2001)

From the September 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

A look at what lies behind the recent protest and police killings in Jamaica

Jamaica, with a population of just over 2.5 million, has witnessed 550 murders and 75 killings by the police between January and the end of June this year. At least 40 people have died in the last three months.

The recent spate of killings began on Saturday evening, 7 July, after police searched homes for guns in the Tivoli Gardens district of Kingston. The police said that their officers came under attack from snipers and people throwing homemade bombs. Initially, two policemen were said to have been killed. On Monday, the Prime Minister, PJ Patterson, the leader of the People’s National Party, announced that he was calling out the whole of the island’s army, adding that he might seek reinforcements from neighbouring countries.

Troops in trucks and armoured cars, backed by helicopter gunships overhead, patrolled the streets of mainly the Tivoli Gardens and Denham Town, impoverished areas of west Kingston, strongholds of the opposition Labour Party, led by Edward Seaga, the local MP for almost 40 years. Within three days at least 20 people had been killed and 30 injured. Protesters blocked the roads with burned-out cars, while gunmen strafed some streets with automatic weapons. The violence, however, also spread to other areas.

Politics of violence

Patterson said that “the government cannot stand by and allow criminal elements to hold the country to ransom”. He denied that the confrontations were politically motivated. But Seaga, the leader of the Labour Party, said that the trouble had been deliberately instigated by Patterson and the People’s National Party in advance of next year’s planned elections. “This is a ploy to turn popular opinion against us,” he said. The Labour Party currently has a large lead in the opinion polls.

The police commissioner, Francis Forbes, denied any political motivation for the raids in west Kingston. And he hinted that the attacks on the police has been centrally organised. “There’s someone there who can turn it off,” he said. That there are criminal gangs, and that drugs are involved, no one denies. But, as Julian Borger observed in the Guardian (11 July), “Jamaica’s political parties have fought a proxy civil war through street gangs” over the past 30 years, adding that “gang violence is epidemic in Kingston, now one of the most violent cities in the world”. The Times (11 July) commented that “Jamaica’s two main political parties are blamed for helping to set up and arm rival gangs 30 years ago in poor neighbourhoods of Kingston”. Indeed, Patterson’s predecessor, Michael Manley, turned the Jamaican political system during the 1980 election into a low-level civil war, in which more than 700 people were killed. But the People’s National Party and the Jamaica Labour Party have not been the only villains of the piece.

American involvement

During the 1972 election campaign the United States ambassador, Vincent de Roulet, warned Manley not to make the US-owned bauxite industry a nationalisation issue, otherwise he would “oblige” the opposition Labour Party to take up the issue. Manley kept quiet. He had, however, upset the American government by supporting the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which the United States government was attempting to destroy, and had established diplomatic relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union.

In December 1975 US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, arrived in Jamaica to “suggest” that unless Manley change his policies Jamaica’s request for a $100 million trade credit “would be reviewed”. The Jamaican Prime Minister chose not to toe the Kissinger line, and continued to support the Cuban army presence in Angola. The Americans moved into action. By 1976, prior to the election in Jamaica, the CIA station chief in Kingston, Norman Descoteaux, drew up a destabilisation programme. Covert shipments of arms were sent to the Jamaica Labour Party. In one shipment alone, which was aborted by the Manley government, there were 500 submachine guns. Pro-Labour gangs began to use such tactics as arson, bombing and assassinations. And a wave of strikes in the transport, electrical and telephone industries hit the island, provoked largely by the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), the CIA’s principle labour “front” in Latin America and the Caribbean. The AIFLD also provided covert financial support the Labour Party, as well as infiltrating the Jamaican government’s security service.

Propagandists also arrived from the United States, including evangelists and faith healers, preaching against the “evils of communism”. Locally, the Daily Gleaner poured out a stream of anti-Manley propaganda, who, in the October 1980 elections, was defeated mainly due to the continuing deterioration in the standard of living of the workers, but, in no short measure, due to the intervention by the United States.

Problems for the Jamaican working class did not, however, begin in 1980 or 1975. Writing in 1969 (World Socialism 69), George Dolphy, a member of the then Kingston socialist group, stated that while 20,000 kids leave school every year, it was estimated that there were 150,000 unemployed on the island. Factories were closing, and the sugar industry, one of the chief users of labour, was in decline. Moreover, an emerging Black Power movement was preaching violence, particularly against “Chinese and people of a fair complexion”. He concluded: “The situation in undeveloped countries like Jamaica is tense, changing, and difficult to forecast. One thing is certain: their development need not be a transition period as often believed, but can be a permanent state. Looking around, the task that faces a socialist seems overwhelming. With communication so advanced, however, who can tell how people will react to events throughout the developed world? The restriction and waste of capitalism will become obvious to them. Spreading socialist knowledge may not be so difficult after this.”

In Jamaica, as elsewhere? We hope so.

Peter E. Newell

“Money na hand before the chop” (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many years we have read about hunger in Africa. Newspaper headlines and television news have been saturated with gruesome scenes of corpses; and pictures of emaciated women and children standing helplessly before NGO officials waiting for food to be doled out to them. Sudan, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia have all experienced famine unparalleled in the history of the continent for the past forty years. Again we have seen statistics that show more than 800 million of our fellow humans suffering from chronic malnutrition; that on any day 1.3 million will go without food.

While these statistics are extremely shocking we can still find governments that pursue policies that are nothing less than obscene – ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production in order that prices can be kept high. The June 1999 issue of the European Voice, for instance, reported that the EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler was expected to propose a doubling of the proportion of arable land to be left uncultivated. Experts predicted that he was going to put forward a proposal to set aside 10 percent of land in the 1999 season, because the 5 percent level in previous years had failed to prevent soaring cereal production, causing a sharp drop in European Union market prices. This, according to the experts, forced the institution to buy in large amounts of surplus wheat and barley at guaranteed prices. Surplus stocks stood at about 15 million tonnes. “We estimate that if this rate of 5 percent is carried over into the next year, they will rise to 25 million tonnes,” Franz Fischler said. If this is not abominable what else can it be?

The Roman Catholic Church, charity organisations and NGOs may do their bit to soothe the pangs of hunger, by distributing milk powder, yellow corn and beans here and there. This would not be bad. But their work would not be addressing the fundamental cause of hunger. They would only be treating the symptoms of a malignant tumour which has deeper roots. The problem is the capitalist system of production whose article of faith is “money na hand before chop” (pay before you eat). It is a system many governments believe can be made to run in the interest of all, i.e. of both rich and poor alike. Thus the New Patriotic Party in Ghana refers to building a prosperous nation by creating wealth and sharing on the basis of private capital. The question is, is it possible to abolish hunger when a tiny minority own the means of production? In other words, is it possible to abolish hunger under the global profit system? The answer for me is no.

Need to make a profit

The fundamental reason for capitalist production is to produce for the market with a view to making profit. This overriding interest in profit does not change, no matter in which economic sector production is carried out. In agriculture, production is not carried out because people need food. Of course needs are not completely ruled out in the process of capitalist production. They are met albeit inadequately for the producers and more than sufficiently for the owning class, otherwise human society would perish. The point, however, is that this is marginal to the main focus of the market economic system, which is the accumulation of capital. But capitalist enterprises can only accumulate capital if they stay competitive by adding value to their products. So the market is also important in the capitalist system of production because profits can only be realised from a commodity if it is sold in a market and converted to money. It is also the reason why enterprises would go full hog to hoodwink people through deceptive adverts in order to sell their products even if they are shoddy and injurious to the health of the consumer. Most of these profits are then reinvested in production so increasing the size of the capital the enterprise controls. This is an imperative that is imposed on all capitalist enterprises by their competitive struggle for profits. In this competition capitalists are not reluctant to use the most base methods of survival – forgery, swindles, bribery, lies and extortion. Capitalists become like a pack of wolves wrangling over the prey – anytime ready to tear each other by the throat. Emile Zola, a French writer, put this dog-eat-dog scenario in perspective when he said:

“In these battles for money, secret and vile, where the weak are disembowelled, there are no longer bonds, kinship or friendship. It is the cruel principle of the strong, who eat others or else they will be eaten themselves” (L’argent, Francois Bernaud, Paris 1928, pp.339-40).

An irrational and cruel system such as capitalism is not a productive and distributive system concerned to ensure that bellies are full. Food is not produced because people need it to survive, but because the owners of land other means of production need to make profit. Also, no account would also be taken of whatever method is used to produce such food, i.e. whether it is ruinous to the environment or not. Chemical fertilisers and pesticides are used in agriculture, animals injected with hormones, and fertile lands used to grow coffee and tobacco instead of millet or maize. One’s ability to access food is through ownership and money. Amartya Sen underscored this point in a study he undertook for the ILO when he pointed out that starvation is a function of entitlements and not of food availability.

In the developed capitalist countries of Western Europe people get money to pay for their food in two ways. They either milk other people or allow themselves to be milked, depending on the position they occupy in relation to the means of production. So one’s ability to eat and make a choice of what one wants to eat depends on money. This is a property claim in that the exchange of money for food is a property transaction involving the exchange of equivalent values.

In underdeveloped countries like Ghana, Ethiopia and Bangladesh, the situation is not exactly the same. There is a category of people that can have access to food without necessarily selling their labour output to others. Such people can have access to food without money because they directly own and work the land. But, here again, one realises some concurrence between what pertains in the sense that it is either ownership or non-ownership of the means of production that determines the ability of a person to have access to food. There are others according to Amartya Sen whose ownership arise from money obtained from petty trading. The loud noises made about the scarcity of food is not entirely justified. There is a lot of food in Ghana and most other developing countries; but the fundamental problem is whether the propertyless masses can afford to pay for it.

No solution within market system

With the opening of the Ghanaian economy to unbridled market forces, the market stalls are stocked with a variety of food items – burgers, cheese, honey, ham, frogs’ legs, etc; but the poor can only cast desirous looks at them and pass by. In spite of the glaring inequalities and obvious contradictions in the market system, the New Patriotic Party government and other governments in Africa, together with imperialists frontal organisations like the IMF and World Bank believe that it can work in the interest of all – poor and rich alike.

Whether this type of thinking is born out of a genuine lack of understanding of how the capitalist system works is not the main thrust of this article. What is of concern is whether the market system can solve the perennial food shortages that continue to affect hundreds of millions of people in Africa and other parts of the world, including those in the capitalist metropolis. The myth surrounding the capability of the capitalist system to feed the hungry and abolish hunger was demythologised many years ago when Henry Kissinger made a promise to the world food summit that this was indeed possible. At the time there were 400 million chronically malnourished, a 75-million increase over the previous ten years. Yet Kissinger had an almost sanguine expectation that this would happen. He swore world hunger would be eradicated without considering the eradication of the most fundamental cause of the problem – capitalism. Twenty years after Kissinger’s promise the situation has more than worsened. The number of poor and hungry people has since doubled; and experts believe that not even the best of efforts could improve the situation in the next thirty or so years.

Many more years to come we will continue to witness many more of such summits and conferences all purporting to examine the phenomenon of global hunger and find lasting solutions to it. A lot of bilge will be thrown up as solutions to the problems, but you can bet the last coin in your pocket that no remedy will be found. This would not be because there is no solution. It would be because there is one solution which is distasteful and horrifying to governments whose role is to facilitate the running of the capitalist state machine. It is socialism.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

World View: Famine or farce in Ethiopia? (2000)

From the May 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sixteen years after television cameras first brought the plight of Ethiopia’s starving millions into our living rooms, sparking the Live Aid rescue mission of 1985, history appears to be repeating itself on the Horn of Africa.

Just as it needed live images of children starving to death to shake Western governments out of their complacency all those years ago, having had prior warning that a famine was on the cards, so too now has the full threat of a famine had to become a reality before the world could sit up and take notice.

This time round, the Ethiopian famine was well predicted. In April of last year, the UN’s early warning system (GIEWS) reported that two years of drought were threatening two million people in Ethiopia with starvation. Nobody listened. Five months later, with further rain failures, the World Food Programme warned that 5.3 million Ethiopians faced starvation. Still, the cries fell on deaf ears. In January of this year, a UN mission in Ethiopia reported that 8 million faced starvation and that 800,000 tonnes of food were urgently needed to avert catastrophe.

At the beginning of April this year, the Ethiopian story finally hit the news headlines, but now with 16 million facing starvation in Ethiopia, as well as Eritrea, Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda, and with a further two million expected be added to this figure if the May rains fail to save the June harvest.

Perhaps many Ethiopians will recall the comments made by one key Ethiopian minister back in 1998 and recounted recently in the editorial of one Ethiopian daily.

In Kissingerian* fashion, the minister in question announced that “hunger in Ethiopia is already a thing of the past . . . has already been eliminated” and that Ethiopia would be food self-sufficient within five years and producing a food surplus ( Tamret Bekele in the Addis Tribune, 6 April).

Of course, we cannot criticise this individual for failing to foresee the present tragedy. He after all has no more control over the weather than the Ethiopian economy. But his remarks do point to the misplaced confidence people have in the present system and the inability of capitalist society to avert catastrophe because of its insistence in prioritising profit before need and in failing to implement long-term provisions.

Most of the aid given to Ethiopia in the 1980s was spent on emergency provisions, with little set aside for forward planning and for heading off the problems that made rescue missions so difficult back in ’85. Roads and bridges came low on the list of priorities, as did systems for storing what water did fall on the drought-prone regions. Vulnerable areas, like the Ogaden region were known to offer precarious living conditions but no plans were made for population relocation.

Again, much is hampering the current relief effort. Firstly, as in 1985, there is another war with Eritrea, sparked by an Eritrean invasion over a border dispute and which provides western governments with an excuse to cut aid – the logic being that aid is side-tracked into the military machine. Though not exonerating the likes of Clare Short, Britain’s overseas development minister whose idea it was to penalise Ethiopia for its border dispute nor the Ethiopian government who claim they did not start the conflict in the first place, as socialists we are upset that in an area desperate for concerted human co-operation and a willingness to work together in face of an overwhelming crisis, half a million men are dug into trenches preparing to kill one another over a piece of land none of them will profit from.

As in 1985, food distribution is also proving a logistical nightmare, with poor roads and the threat of inter-clan warfare and banditry halting the relief effort. Moreover, since the conflict with Eritrea, land-locked Ethiopia has since lost the use of two key Eritrean ports And, at present, mid-April, only 50 percent of the food needed has actually been pledged, with only a small percentage of this actually getting through.

Again, the current crisis and the famine of 1984-5 were sparked off by rain failure. But there are major differences now. The Ethiopian population is now 60 million, twice its size in 1985, which means an increasing rural population has had to work, and overwork, smaller parcels of land, which could only ever produce weaker and weaker yields. Added to this has been the shrinking availability of fertilisers. Ethiopia’s use of fertiliser, at 7kg of nutrients per hectare is half the sub-Saharan average and about seven percent the world average (statistics from Addis Tribune, 6 April).

After the 1985 famine the Ethiopian government sought to hold 350,000 tonnes of food in reserve to help avert further crises, but with 50,000 tonnes remaining at the beginning of April, it is evident a massive overseas contribution is needed to help provide the basic 7.2 million tonnes needed to feed the Ethiopian population in the year ahead.

What percentage of pledged food actually gets through remains to be seen, but it’s a fair guess it will fall far short of the 1.2 million tonnes the Ethiopian government estimates is needed urgently. Again, it is too early to predict whether or not the May rains will come and provide a desperately needed source of water to a country in which only 27 percent of the population have access to clean water even in the wet seasons, as well as saving the June harvest.

Only a month ago this journal reported on the natural disaster Mozambique encountered when the skies dumped a year’s rain on the country in a few short weeks, flooding tens of thousands of square miles. It seems something of a sick irony that we now comment on a country a few thousand miles up the same east coast of Africa that has awaited rain for three years.

In the years ahead we can well predict to comment on further natural disasters as the effects of global warming kick in and, more, to continually point to the failure of capitalism to effectively mobilise its vast technological resources to the benefit of those in direst need. As in Ethiopia 15 years ago, so too now will history continue to repeat itself, as tragedy, then as farce.

*At a world food summit in 1973, Henry Kissinger announced that global hunger would be eradicated within 10 years. There were then 400 million chronically malnourished people on the planet (a 75 million increase over the previous ten years). That figure now stands at 800 million.

John Bissett

Socialism would solve global hunger (1998)

From the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent weeks newspaper headlines have highlighted the plight of starving millions in the Sudan and Burundi. Again we have seen published statistics that show 800 million of our fellow humans suffering from chronic malnutrition, with 1.3 billion, on any one day, going without food.

While these statistics are shocking, we can search and find others, far more obscene, that show governments still ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production in order that prices can be kept high.

Charities and NGOs may do their bit, alleviate a little suffering here and there, but their work in is in reality only addressing the symptoms, not the disease.

The disease is the global profit-drive market system whose golden maxim is “can’t pay–can’t have”. It is a system governments believe they can run in the interests of us all.

The futility of trying to make the present system work is best revealed in the present instance by remembering Henry Kissinger’s promise to the World Food Summit some 25 years ago. There were then 400 million chronically malnourished, a 75 million increase over the previous ten years, and Kissinger vowed world hunger would be eradicated within the next decade. That number has since doubled, and with the best efforts the experts believe the statistics will not improve in the next 25 years.

In the years to come we will see many conferences and summits looking at the problem of global hunger. A lot of rubbish will no doubt be uttered at the same and you can bet no remedy will emerge.

This is because there is only one remedy and governments cannot contemplate it because, as the executive of capitalism, it runs counter to the real interests they serve.

The remedy involves abolishing the money system, freeing production from the artificial constraints of profit and establishing a world of free access to the benefits of civilisation.

A utopian dream you may say, but is it not more utopian to believe the present system can be made to work in all our interests?

John Bissett

Hungry for Change (1998)

From the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Aid agencies warn of famine in Sudan” (Guardian, 7 April). “Starving North Koreans on the border of despair” (Guardian, 14 April). “Famine in Burundi. Why are 600,000 people starving to death?” (Observer, 15 April).

These are indeed harrowing headlines, evoking images of stick-limbed children with oversized heads, of adults, cadaverous and saucer-eyed, scrounging, scavenging and bartering for food. The stories these headlines introduce tell of a combined total of six million facing death from starvation. On a much wider scale, 800 million are chronically malnourished and 1.3 billion inhabitants of the world will today go without food.

The latter are well used figures, and taken with the former echo the absurdity of those obese and confused government officials who gathered together several years ago to label the 1990s the “UN Decade for the Eradication of Poverty”. At that time there was only 400 million malnourished, when Henry Kissinger rose to his feet at the 1972 UN Food Summit and vowed to eradicate world hunger within 20 years.

The immediate causes of famine–drought, floods and civil war–often mask the fact that most suffering countries are capable of feeding themselves. Sudan’s arable land, for instance, could feed its population, but is instead used for cash crops such as cotton and sugar, and Burundi, as Peter Beaumont recently reported (Observer, 15 April) “is so fecund it cries out to be abundant”. Elsewhere, we find that 50 percent of arable land in Afghanistan can’t be cultivated because it is land-mined.

The UN Food and Agricultural Organisaion readily admits that the world produces more than enough to ensure “adequate food for all” (2,700 calories per person per day). In the 1970s, the World Health Organisation announced that we could feed a world population seven times its then size, and as late as 1995 admitted that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there.

Faced with these facts and while the people of North Korea are having grain rations reduced to 100 grams per day, while the poor of Sudan forage for wild nuts and grasses and while the Burundese bury their dead from starvation at a rate too quick to count, there is no shortage of organisations willing to try to remedy the situation. In North Korea, the World Food Programme appealed in January for 650,000 tons of food and the United Nations Development Programme has drawn up plans to make North Korea self-sufficient by the year 2000. UNICEF and the WHO hold conferences, apportion blame and send representatives to investigate the plight of the starving.

Interestingly, the bulk of these organisations come under the watchful eye of the US-controlled UN, and wasn’t it the US which twice in the past–and alone–voted against UN resolutions that sought to recognise “proper nourishment” as a “human right” (14 December 1981–Resolution 36/133 and 18 December–Resolution 37/199)?

The food the aid agencies succeed in sending usually ends up in cities rather than in rural areas where it is most needed. Some 60 percent of EC and 30 percent of US food aid is given to governments to sell on, mostly in cities, and which often provides money that is squandered–i.e. tanks invariably seem a better investment than seeds. And food aid tends to cut food prices, diminishing the incentive for farmers to grow crops, and fosters long-term dependency. Moreover, food aid is often provided minus the transport to deliver it where it is needed and ends up rotting on the quayside. When it can be delivered, it is often the case that camps have to be set up to dispense the aid, resulting in “food drones”, maelstroms of hunger and disease.

Charities launch campaigns, telling us what a donation of 20p, £1 and £100 will buy, holding back the more damning statistic that 95 percent of the money donated is eaten up in administration and infrastructure.

Though the relief organisations and charities are undoubtedly well meaning, they address problems for which the solution already exists. Though they have the insight to see the profit-driven market system as a cause of hunger, they err in trying to reform it in the interests of the hungry. While they wave off shipments of food top faraway lands, their own governments are ordering the destruction of food and paying farmers to take land out of production.

Under a system in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit, a system that has expunged the causes of war, a system that can locate people to areas less prone to flooding and drought, famine can then be a thing of the past. And this–socialism–could perhaps be brought about with less effort than goes into organising a world food summit and running the myriad of existing aid agencies. It is not some pipe dream anathema to human nature, for what can be more natural than producing for need?

John Bissett

The War in Cyprus (1974)

From the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Futile bloody slaughter” said a man on a bus in the nineteen-thirties; and the point of the recollection is not the succinctness of his phrase but the fact that one can’t remember, now, which war he meant – Abyssinia, China, Spain, another outbreak in Arabia or India, or what. The capitalist world as it was, is now, and as long as it remains shall be. Eleven months ago, the Middle East; now, Cyprus. It was the scene of violent struggles in the ‘fifties, and last month war broke out again there with the major nations circling round.

Before the 1914-18 war Cyprus was Turkish territory, as it had been for 340 years, but occupied and administered by Britain; and Britain was, by treaty, to support Turkey against Russia. The war made Russia an ally and Turkey an enemy. The British government annexed Cyprus and offered to give it to Greece on condition of the latter’s helping in the war. It was declined and in 1925 Cyprus formally became what it had been in effect since 1878, a British colony.

The Greek nationalist agitation for enosis (i.e. union) broke out in 1931. It was suspended during the war, when Cypriot troops were part of the Allied armies, and resumed not long after it. The Atlantic Charter of 1941, a set of wartime humbug-platitudes, laid down the principle of self-determination for “all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live”, but in 1947 the British government ruled out any change of status for Cyprus. In a plebiscite in 1950 the Cypriots – of whom Greeks form four-fifths – voted overwhelmingly for union with Greece.

From 1954, with Archbishop Makarios as leader of the Greek population, the guerrilla organization EOKA waged war on British rule. A military governor was appointed by the British government, and in 1956 Makarios was deported. Besides the EOKA campaign, Turkish Cypriot nationalists pressed claims for a partition of the island and fought the Greeks. The “solution” of 1960 was a constitution in which Greeks and Turks shared in government – no enosis, no partition; Greece and Turkey stationed token forces there; and Britain retained sovereign rights in certain areas for military purposes. Near-war again in 1963, and shells and bloodshed in 1974.

Why is Cyprus important to Britain and other world powers? Its economy, apart from some minerals and a lot of cheap wine, is insignificant. But in the Middle Ages Cyprus was a vital entrepôt for commerce with the east, and every trading state established stations and bought trading rights there. In the 19th and 20th centuries it has remained a vital strategic point. Disraeli in 1878 wanted it as a link in a scheme to defend British interests in India; Eden in 1956 declared that the possession of a British base in Cyprus was necessary to protect British and West European oil supplies.

Changes in sovereignty and political alignment in the Middle East have made the need still more pressing. Part of the Greek argument after Greece joined NATO in 1951 was that if Cyprus were joined to Greece, Britain and her allies could still have bases there. The instability of Greek government has made that an unreliable prospect (indeed, the case for enosis once collapsed in the face of a threatened Communist takeover in Greece). Instead, the British government in the ‘fifties made it a policy to involve Turkey and, according to The Guardian of 15th August, is said by Greece to have assisted the Turks again now.

The policies of the other powers are likewise equivocal. While the usual pious sentiments about morality and peace are uttered, the American representative Dr. Kissinger’s reported line is that “the ‘geo-strategic’ position of Turkey makes it an inevitable political first choice”; the Russian government was said to be tacitly siding with Turkey but likely to transfer support to Greece. Not much about anyone’s “national honour” in that.

Nor can such an absurd consideration figure in the politics of capitalism. All wars are economic ones. Ultimately they are over markets, the life-blood of each nation’s capitalism. They are rarely directly so, today – the last major war fought openly for world markets was the 1914-18 one; their common sources are the trade-routes and strategic points which are keys to the nations’ economic interests. And the treaties and balances are never maintained because the pursuit of those interests must disturb them continually. Capitalism makes war hang over us all, all the time.

While Turkey and Greece fight for advantages and pickings from the others’ need for Cyprus, their peasants and workers remain poverty-stricken. Futile bloody slaughter, indeed: capitalism lives, and the workers die. Stop it. Stop your nationalism, and your support for this wretched system – quickly!

Robert Barltrop

Food for thought in Rome (1997)

From the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty-three years ago, the then US Secretary of State. Henry Kissinger, vowed to a World Food conference that world hunger would be eradicated within the next decade. There were then 435 million chronically malnourished people on earth—a 75 million increase over the previous five years.

In spite of the "green revolution" in agriculture, the introduction of high yield crops, genetic engineering and advances in farming technology since the 1984 deadline set by an optimistic Kissinger, there are now as many chronically malnourished people on earth than ever— over 800 million. And although some expect conditions to improve, the United Nations Food Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reckons there will still be 680 million malnourished people in the year 2010.

Faced with this alarming scenario, delegates representing 194 nations attended the November 1996 UN World Food Summit in Rome, ostensibly to tackle the problem.

The gathering had been blasted by many as a farce before it had begun, in fact even before a 31 October meeting at which delegates had negotiated the bulk of the Summit agreement in advance which, incidentally, was to strive for food security "through a fair and market-oriented world trade system".

In spite of the October meeting, at which possible disputes were supposedly resolved in advance, the FAO remained confident it could focus attention, in Kissengerian fashion on what it sees as its central purpose, which it defines as a renewal of a "high level commitment around the world to the eradication of hunger and malnutrition and to the achievement of lasting food security for all" (Guardian, 1 November). If this did not smack of a complete misunderstanding of the rules of capitalism, the FAO went on to state that it did not seek pledges of food aid from rich to poor countries, even though this had halved in the past three years.

As could only be expected, the November Summit attracted only a few "leaders" from the industrialised world— no doubt only too aware of what to expect and similarly all too familiar with the fact that such global dilemmas cannot be solved within the context of capitalism. Furthermore, although the UN is supposedly committed to the idea that each person has a right to food and to be free from hunger, it can well be imagined how such "leaders" feared the legislation they might one day run into should they turn up at the Summit and consent to the right of their citizens to food.

Needless to say, a lot of crap came out of the Food Summit—and not the kind that fertilises barren land. There was a lot of finger-pointing at wars and the western arms industries and ethnic and civil strife as being the cause of much hunger. Overpopulation cropped up, with Vatican anti-abortionists objecting to the promotion of “reproductive health care" (as they had at the recent Cairo and Beijing summits) and the issue of free trade in agricultural goods for third world countries was also raised. Nowhere was the problem located in a wider context—the capitalist system itself.

Little wonder, then, that instead of agreeing to abolish world hunger, the 200 or so fat-arsed delegates could only consent to the idea of world hunger being reduced by 50 percent within 20 years—in other words, in the year 2015 world hunger would still be as high as when Henry Kissinger vowed to eradicate it 43 years earlier.

Neither did the Summit extract one single cash commitment, trading reform or agriculture policy shift from any major donor nation. After much prevarication, procrastination and pontification, the world's hungry were quite simply left to fend for themselves, the Summit declaration stating that primary responsibility for food security rests with individual governments operating with a "market- oriented world system".

Such news will not doubt be as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool for the likes of the 15 sub-Saharan countries who produce less food per person then they did 30 years ago—thanks largely to IMF structural adjustments programmes and the subverting of arable land to the production of cash crops to meet debt repayments. Meanwhile, the fat cats of the 6 multinationals who control the grain trade (Cargill, for example, has an income larger than that of the 9 largest sub-Saharan countries) can relax—their profits are safe.

The only sense to come out of the Summit came in form of criticism levelled by the major charities.

Save the Children lambasted the Summit as "a forum for legitimising a new international code of practice which . . .  subordinates basic rights to the market philosophy". Actionaid blamed the free trade system itself for global hunger and Oxfam pointed out that the "enhanced competition between the surplus agricultural systems of the industrialised world and the deficit system of the developing world" could only "exacerbate problems" (quotations from the Guardian, 13 November).

Although the FAO admitted that the world produces enough to ensure "adequate" food for all (2,700 calories per person per day), they nevertheless maintained that a 75 percent increase in food production was needed.

It may well be the case that the world is already producing more than enough food to feed the present world population, bearing in mind, for instance, that in one season in 1995 French peasant cooperatives were paid to destroy 972.000 tons of food, and that in 1993 the European community destroyed 3 millions tons of food at a cost of £439 million.

Add to this facts such as the US taking 8 million acres of arable land out of production to reduce their surplus in recent years, the 651 British farmers paid £ 100,000 each in 1994 for not growing food, the Indian army guarding food mountains, and you begin to realise what a waste of time such summits are.

The problem is not a shortage of food, or even a deficiency of “common- sense" among world leaders—it is the system they believe can be run in our interests, a system that says "can't buy, can't have". A system which allows the ruling élite in almost every country to destroy food and pay farmers for not growing food in order to guarantee profits.

Neither is the problem one of overpopulation. Twice the present world population could stand up in Cornwall. Africa is supposedly overpopulated, yet it is now acknowledged that Africa could feed a population six times its present size were western farming techniques to be introduced there.

Capitalism is solely responsible for world hunger, just as it is the root cause of war, diseases that are returning to haunt humanity, homelessness, unemployment and a thousand other social ills. And we call them "social ills" because all of these problems are rooted in the way society is at present organised for production—production for profit, not social need.

John Bissett

Running Commentary: No Tragedy, Cambodia (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the February 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

NO TRAGEDY, CAMBODIA

For years, Cambodia has been mauled over by the competing powers in South East Asia. Devastated by war, since 1975 four million people have died out of a population which was then eight million. Now tens of thousands make their desperate way along the refugee trail into Thailand.

Like ghosts they travel, limbs as thin as bamboo, ravaged by diseases of malnutrition - dysentery, tuberculosis, cholera. Skeleton-like mothers cradle children with swollen bellies, heads like skulls.

This is a situation beyond despair; it is estimated that, unless they get vast amounts of help, 2¼ million more Cambodians could die of starvation during the next few months.

There are many bitter ironies in this human hell. Cambodia was once a peaceful, fertile place. Infiltrated by the Victcong, it became the target of pitiless raids by the American bombers.

Then came the Khmer Rouge, with their policy of genocide. Now it agonises under invasion from Vietnam and an unrelenting guerilla war with what remains of the Khmer Rouge.

And this, for Cambodia is the grisly climax to the International Year of the Child, when capitalism vowed to pay special care to the wellbeing of children. And it came some time after Henry Kissinger had smugly accepted the Nobel Prize for supposedly bringing peace to the area.

Cambodia has been ravaged because it is in the middle of a typical power struggle of capitalism, involving some of the world’s great armed blocs. Capitalism habitually defiles, destroys, terrorises. Human beings are never of urgent account to capitalism and when the stakes in terms of material advantage are high enough they become worth little more than the mud they die in, among the refugee camps.

So Cambodia is not, as the media are so fond of calling it, a tragedy. A more correct description for it would be a symptom. In this case the disease is curable; only abolish capitalism and places like Cambodia will again be green and tranquil lands.

HOT AND COLD

Blood pressure in the best gentlemen’s clubs and the most refined drawing rooms must have been forced several notches upward by the recent debates on issues of poverty in, of all places, the letter columns of the Daily Telegraph.

There was a discussion about whether there actually was any suffering from hunger and other deprivation during the slumps of the Twenties and the Thirties. This is not, one might think, a matter over which anyone could dispute for long, unless history is rewritten to wipe out all those records of unemployment, ill fed and ragged children, mouldering slums.

Then there was a rather more refined debate, over the rights and wrongs—or rather the existence or non-existence—of hypothermia among the elderly. This was started by a letter from an orthopaedic surgeon in Glamorgan, calling workers who want to live in a warm home in the winter “softies” and advocating “ . . . more physical activity in the elderly . . .  a good breakfast of porridge . . . several layers of lightweight loose clothing . . ."

There are, of course, plenty of countries with a climate which normally provides living temperatures as comfortable as a properly heated English house. No surgeon suggests that people in those countries have gone soft or have lost the use of vital, heat generating organs.

In truth, the debate was about the living conditions, and the alleged extravagance, of only one social set. It is the working class, whose life depends upon their earning a wage, who suffer conditions like hypothermia. When a worker is too old to work there is only reliance on a pension, or on charity, which often means cutting back on essentials like heating.

It is old workers who die, in silent misery, from the cold of an English winter. After a lifetime of exploitation the indignity of that death is all that capitalism has to offer them. For an expensively trained surgeon to debate whether they need a warm home where they can stay alive is to add cold insult to sick injury.

PEP PILLS

As the proprietor of any Health Food Store will tell you, ginseng is the greatest thing since natural, hundred per cent stone ground, wholemeal, unsliced bread.

This product from the root of the ginseng plant is reputed to be both a tranquiliser and a stimulant (an aphrodisiac no less) which sounds rather like having your cake (or whatever) and eating (or whatever) it.

It is perhaps a measure of the desperation of what is left of the British car industry, that one of its firms is turning to the ancient Chinese medicament as a way of casing its problems.

This firm is about to launch a controlled medical experiment on the effects of ginseng upon production, feeding genuine doses of the stuff to one lot of workers and dummy tablets to another. Success or failure will be measured, need we add, not just by whether the subjects of the experiment are happier, healthier, have a more satisfactory sex life—but on whether production goes up or down.

This trial is not without precedent. Two Japanese car firms supply free ginseng to their workers, as does the great new Lada plant in Russia. This meeting of the minds, of the avowedly capitalist and the allegedly socialist, on the issue of the more profitable exploitation of workers, is instructive as to the common, capitalist, nature of society in both those countries.

But what happens, if all the car manufacturers throughout the world are feeding ginseng to their workers? Who then will be the unprofitable ones? Will British Leyland magically revive? Will capitalism suddenly stop being a society where wealth is turned out for sale and profit?

In fact, profitability does not in the last analysis depend on the state of mind of a workforce. Capitalism’s goods have to be sold in order to realise a profit, which means that its prosperity relies upon the market. Nobody has yet discovered a way to eliminate the anarchic nature of the market, which is why capitalism's booms and slumps are not susceptible to control or to forecast.

Workers in the productive process can have no effect on the market; under capitalism production takes place blind, in the hope that the goods can be sold profitably. If they can’t, then production shuts down. And for an unemployed worker, there is not likely to be even the consolation of tranquilising, stimulating ginseng; like most stuff sold in the Health Food stores, it is pretty expensive.

For Carter and Ford—Read Capitalism (continued) (1976)

From the November 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Arch-reactionary Barry Goldwater, who was for all-out war in Vietnam in 1964 when Johnson was still regarded as a “dove”, is supporting Ford. This is taken as an indication of how far to the “right” Republican sentiments have moved. The lines of demarcation between so-called “liberal” and “conservative” are entirely imaginary. Those who fondly regard themselves as liberal regard Carter as a liberal, and the conservatives think he is one of them. The balancing trick of appearing to be all things to all men is the essence of the capitalist politician.

All the polls indicate that people vote on the candidate’s personality rather than his policies. They want to know how steady his finger would be on the button. . . .
(Sunday Times 22nd August 1976)

Since differences in their policies need to be searched for with a large magnifying glass, “personality” becomes the only means of telling t’other from the which. There is no conception as yet in the minds of the American working class, of a world without “the button”. This lack of any penetration beyond the reformist spectrum is something they share with their fellow sufferers throughout the world.

Running Walter

Carter’s running mate, Senator Walter Mondale, is reported as saying:

in the whole range of human problems I’ve dealt with in my 12 years in the Senate — hunger, housing, labour, Indian education, migrant workers, children, ageing — I keep getting back to one thing; the strength of the family.

A nice piece of side-stepping, but what about the problems? The choice of running mate is a shabby bit of expediency aimed at “balancing the ticket” (vote-catching). Mondale is rated a liberal, and this has focussed attention on spending. Are people opposed to spending as such or only to wasteful government spending? Do people want less government or better government? “The opinion polls show total ideological confusion”. (Guardian, 17th July 1976.) The opinion pollsters ask only a limited range of questions, designed to sound out what is popularly expected of capitalism. Workers are not asked to consider and discuss the nature and extent of waste under capitalism, or the desirability of a world run democratically, without government.

In 1967 Mondale made a speech supporting Johnson’s Vietnam policy. Four years later, he told an interviewer that it was

a painful speech . . .  I think the worst mistake I’ve made in public life is to be a slow learner on Vietnam. This has been the most tragic mistake this country has ever made . . .  and I share part of that blame, and the record is there, I’m not proud of it.

(Guardian, 17th July 1976)

Mondale supports capitalism but pukes at its most brutal outcome. Here is no condemnation of war, but a slow learner realizing a tragic mistake. Any capitalist politician in power, who refused to endorse a war involving “national interests” would be forced out. The Labour Party in Britain has spawned many “slow learners” about war, who have rallied to the flag when the time came.

The Black vote

Carter is wooing the votes of America’s black workers with promises to put “more than one” black in the cabinet. There are the traditional “black jobs” in the echelons of administration, and black Congressmen, but there has yet to be a black man in the government. The Democratic convention of 1964 in Atlantic City, which nominated Johnson, had an all-white segregationist delegation from Mississippi. This year a new image is being put over. Andrew Young, an influential black Congressman, is working to get Carter the black vote. If it were a solution of problems for people to be the same colour as those in power, then white workers would have had all their problems solved long ago. So would the black workers living under black dictatorships in Africa. Incidentally, it is fear of Russian “infiltration” in Africa that prompts Ford to send Kissinger to put pressure on the South African government to help bring about majority rule in Rhodesia. Kissinger is obviously thick-skinned enough to ignore America’s own brutal record of racism. America has its own style of apartheid and ghetto living. Though not backed by legislation, the effect is the same.

Issue

Senator Moss of Utah, who is chairman of the Senate Committee investigating alleged fraud and abuse in the Medicaid programme for the poor, sent out a team of snoopers who made more than two hundred visits during four months in eight cities. (Investigating fraud is a form of waste peculiar to capitalism.) They found that patients usually get substandard care whether they need attention or not. Cases were reported of patients in need of care going untreated and X-rays being taken without film in the machines. In Los Angeles a woman who handed in a mixture of a soapy water was told her “urine sample” was normal.

Medicaid was started in 1965 to provide medical facilities for 20,000,000 poor Americans. Eligibility varies from place to place. In New York, you need a family of four and an income of less than $5,000 a year. Some doctors are making more than $100,000 out of fiddles. More than half the delegates at the Republican convention were in the $30,000 income bracket.

Ford and Carter and (if capitalism remains) those who succeed them, will be promoting more reforms to sort out the mess produced by past reforms in the vain attempt to reduce the running expenses of capitalism. The poor and their problems will still be here.

Issue — What Issue?

The governor of California, Edmund (Jerry) Brown Junior, who was a rival candidate to Carter for the nomination, is to give Carter all the help he can. Governor Brown, a former Jesuit Seminarian, says that Catholic misgivings about Carter are “overblown and inaccurate”. Asked if he would run again in 1980 Brown said:

I’m not even sure I’ll run for Governor again. I may even retire to the monastery to figure out what this is all about.

As both Carter and Ford are bible-belters, God is put in a difficult position rather like that of wartime, with both sides praying for victory. In his “infinite wisdom”, he has the consolation of knowing it will make no difference either way. Farcical though the whole thing is, it is too tragic to be funny.

As Socialists, we often observe when an election takes place in the UK that the “manifestos” of all parties other than the SPGB are so closely similar that if the names were blanked out they would be virtually indistinguishable. Although we have been dealing with the American Presidential election, capitalism and its absurdities are so similar all over the world, we could change the names and be dealing with almost any other country.

How much longer we will have to live in the suffocating atmosphere produced by a politically ignorant working class is the real question of our times. Socialists, however, have good grounds for optimism. Nothing demonstrates the bankruptcy of our opponents better than an election, and we have the only workable answer to their system of chaos and misery.

Socialism will be a classless world community, democratically administered without leaders, Presidents, or governments. Production will be geared to meeting human need, on the basis of free access. The privileged private or state property institutions of capitalism will make way for communal interest and cooperation. Money, wages and profits will be no more. Thus, every “issue” being bandied about during the Presidential election campaign will disappear, never to be seen again.

Harry Baldwin