New World disorder (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Worlders have pointed to
 developments in the Middle
 East and South Africa as
 examples of a more stable and
 democratic world, but 30
 nations remain in the throes of
 war, and many more conflicts 
are threatening to erupt, as
 John Bissett reports.

At present, 30 nations are in the throes of war and experts have pointed to a further 15 potential flashpoints, from Cuba to North Korea. Where, then, is the New World Order we were promised three years ago when the Berlin Wall crumbled and “Communism" was extinguished in eastern Europe?

President Bush believed the collapse of "Communism" (ie, the Russian state capitalist bloc) would make the world a safer place. Capitalism could step in and fill the political and economic vacuum and the world would look to the US as a mentor, for guidance towards democracy and stability. Money previously spent on arms would be used for social programmes such as health and education. Confidence and security would prevail. Or so some thought.

Such a notion of the New World Order is a fraud and only a new World Order in the sense of a change in power relationships among the mighty.

New Worlders have pointed to developments in the Middle East and South Africa as examples of a more stable and democratic world. Recent steps to create peace and democracy in the Middle East and South Africa, however, are hardly examples of a new international trend. The end of the Cold War simply meant that Israel could no longer bully its neighbours, safe in the knowledge that the US was watching from the sidelines like the proverbial big brother. Neither could the PLO and its allies count on Soviet support. A similar situation had existed in South Africa with Soviet satellites backing and ANC and South African Communist Party and sponsoring the "frontline states" in their war of attrition with the apartheid machine. The absence of superpower support, more than any other factor, has forced old enemies to the negotiating table.

The end of the Cold War, far from bringing the prospect of peace to the Middle East, has brought the continuing threat of catastrophe. For the end of the Cold War made possible the Gulf War. which in turn resulted in the regeneration of arms stockpiling.

The Independent on Sunday (14 November) reported that "current sales of weapons to the Middle East mainly the Arab Gulf Stales — are running at $415 million a day". When the Gulf War ended the US received S28 billions worth of arms contracts from Gulf States. This year alone Kuwait is buying 236 US MIA2 Abrams tanks, and the United Arab Emirates is buying $3.5 billions worth of Leclerc tanks. In January this year, John Major clinched the "A1 Yamanah 2" arms deal, providing the Saudis with 48 Tornado aircraft. This was followed by a deal with Oman for 48 Challenger tanks.

Unstable as ever

If anything, the Middle East is as volatile now as it ever was during the Cold War years, with no superpowers forcing a stalemate and with the globo-cops unsure what side to take should the "Warriors of Allah", the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, rekindle old hatreds.

Since the Cold War ended, 18 new countries, some with a nuclear capacity, have been added to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’s annual assessment The Military Balance. The New World Disorder is a global phenomenon that has left all but a few nations unscathed. In Russia, the rise of the autocrat Boris Yeltsin and the new privation and austerity facing the people of the former Soviet Union is as much the fault of the West as the "Communists” who bequeathed the political and economic void.

Much was promised the Russian people by Western capitalists. Investment would pour into the former Soviet Union and businesses would be falling over one another to establish new markets there - or so the projection ran. Sums of money have indeed been given or lent to the old Soviet Union, but in such tiny amounts (a mere fraction of what was originally promised) that their effectiveness has been greatly limited. And when one considers that they were given on condition the old state capitalist bureaucrats adhered to Western economic approaches — clearly failing in capitalist nations  — the reason for the Russian mess becomes more clear.

The "New World Order" promises little to fledgling nations striving to survive in today’s hostile capitalist climate, and even less for those nations that thought the new order would bring peace and financial stability. The Cold War at least offered something of a global insurance policy against catastrophe. It was a system that prevented regional wars from getting out of hand. And though most of us were scared silly at the idea of a nuclear exchange between the superpowers, the closest we ever really came to Armageddon was at the time of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

During the Cold War. the superpowers at least had a token respect for each others’ spheres of influences, but Western capitalism still harboured a desire to make the world its market.

Reagan stepped up the arms race in the 1980s in the full knowledge that this would cripple the Soviet economy. No sooner would Russian leaders attempt to redirect their state capitalist economy towards the manufacture of more consumer goods than the demands of the arms race rechannelled spending in the direction of military production.

The victory in the Cold War was what the US wanted and what they got. Now they have deprived themselves of their global role as standard bearers of capitalism. The end of "Communism" has meant the end of the US justification for global leadership. This was forecast by Georgy Arbatov in his office at Moscow’s old US and Canada Institute back in 1986:

"We are going to do the worst thing we can to America we are going to take away their enemy".

The collapse of “Communism" certainly has harmed the US arms industry, even if it can boast huge profits. In 1982 the Pentagon listed 118,000 US firms providing products to the Defence Department. Since the Berlin Wall came down this had dropped to 36,000.

New enemies please

Martin Walker writing in the Guardian (27 July 1992), described the New World Order as a "phrase looking around vaguely for a policy". Now the old enemies have left the international stage, the US is confused, unsure of its role, and of how to confront the problems of the current world malaise. There are new problems now, with new dimensions. New conflicts could escalate overnight with outside interference. In the old Yugoslavia and former Soviet Union, for instance, nationalism is taking a form few in the West could have prophesied in 1989.

Part of the US frustration regarding its role in the New World Order is a result of its relationship with the UN and commitment to UN peacekeeping forces. Washington is basically unwilling to place its forces under non-US UN command. Chapter VII of the UN Charter stipulates that the use of force should be controlled by a military committee made up from the five permanent members of the Security Council all with the right to veto decisions. One US diplomat summed up the US attitude succinctly: "Can you imagine our guys being told how to fight by a Chinese General" (New Internationalist, October 1992).

Neither is the US in a hurry to contribute its share of finances towards UN peacekeeping missions. At present the US is in debt to the UN for $1 billion an assessment based on a formula that reflects UN members’ wealth and size. If the end of the Cold War has given the US a headache, it is giving the UN a huge migraine. In 1987, peacekeeping missions cost the UN a mere S364 million. The figure for 1992/3 is estimated at $36,200 million. The UN is currently so short of funds that it can only foresee financing missions for several more months.

Rather than send US troops to Bosnia under some foreign UN general, which might increase the US UN contributions. President Clinton believes a lot of bother would be saved if the Bosnians were armed and the Serbs bombed. When the US led UN peacekeeping forces found themselves at loggerheads with Haiti’s upstarts, Clinton offered the 8,000 strong Haitian army a $50 million bribe to restore democracy and save the US further embarrassment on the international stage.

Intellectual laxatives

The US and the UN (the terms are interchangeable) seem to be going nowhere fast, having been frustrated in Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia and Haiti. Their peacekeepers kill, their financial advisers spread economic havoc and their think tanks are desperate for intellectual laxatives. We are left with an image of an organization lacking all credibility. Any pretensions the UN had of being an agent for world peace were shattered in the wake of the Gulf War when the Security Council ruled that food and medical supplies to Iraq be intercepted, in direct contravention of the Geneva convention and the UN Charter itself.

In today’s international climate, countries that can pay their way can expect US friendship and support. Those who are becoming a burden to the West are having to solve their own problems. The US is neither prepared to spend the money or sacrifice the lives that the direct confrontation of problems might demand — look, for instance, at Bosnia.

Just as the US and the UN are lapsing into global incompetence, so too is the World Bank that profit seeking organization that milks the "Third World” under the guise of humanitarian economic aid.

In 1991, Mexico went all out and serviced $16 billions worth of old international debt. The same year, the World Bank lent $16.4 billion to struggling nations, 37.5 percent of which went on projects deemed a failure by the World Bank’s own staff.

At present "Third World" debt is running at 1.3 trillion dollars. African nations are now taking out new loans just to service the interest off old debts, so health and education programmes are sliding down the list of government priorities. This year. World Bank projects have been responsible for the displacement of 2,153,000 people on three continents. This figure is nothing compared to those displaced as a direct result of the end of the Cold War. In 1972, the world had 2.5 million refugees. At December 1992 this figure stood at 19 million.

Most generous

Ironically, the most generous host countries are proving to be the most impoverished (ranked according to ratio of GNP per capita): Malawi. Pakistan, Ethiopia, Iran, Kenya, Algeria. Malawi, with a population of only eight million, is presently caring for one million refugees. Meanwhile, the US coastguard is intercepting flotillas of Haitian refugees off the Florida coast.

So much, then, for Bush’s "New World Order". But there again, few of us were fooled in the first place. There was, however, one person who swallowed the idea hook, line and sinker, who can remarkably still regurgitate it. The newly-inaugurated Clinton said at the beginning of 1993, that his job was to "develop an approach . . . to the post Cold War World that is a good place for freedom and democracy and market reforms." (Guardian, 15 January).

John Bissett

After Bulger (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

We live in unfriendly times. As neighbourhoods have made way for wretched anonymous tower blocks, so neighbourliness has become outdated. It is not that people have chosen to become careless and uncooperative; as social animals we are never happier than when we are able to behave in mutuality, empathy and compassion towards our fellow human beings. But the way that life has come to be organised conspires against our will to be human. “There is no such thing as society”, said Thatcher, and her words were met with howls of protest by those who did not want her words to be true, and by blushes of embarrassment by those who knew just how true her words were becoming. For the truth is that community is now little more than a quaint ideal, a sociologist’s buzzword. The depressing reality is that more than ever we live in a society which does not resemble anything very social.

This sense of crushing alienation, which was once a mere term of jargon employed by those who had read Marx (who wrote about how workers are alienated not only from the product of their labour, but from their very selves as creative beings who are transformed into robotic profit-producers) is now inescapable. The city streets are settings for fear and loneliness. Housing is designed according to the cheap measurements of profits for rapacious landlords whose concern for comfort, dignity or social fellowship in the place where we live simply does not exist. The transport system is unsafe and its weary users shuffle ritualistically to and from wage slavery in various conditions of unease, stress and anger. Services are running down—the basic needs of workers are too expensive to bother with, so let us dwell amongst the refuse of late twentieth century squalor. This is our environment. For most of us saving our environment is not about trees and forests and fish ponds; they are out of reach and survival within the urban wasteland is about dodging the dog mess and hoping that it will be someone else’s house that they break into.

An alienated world of non-community turns others into strangers and strangers into enemies. People turn in on themselves and draw lines like stone fortress walls around their lives, their emotions. And within the darkness of these enclosed lives horrible, unthinkable abuses occur. People like to speak about “the freedom of the individual”, as if being atomised, isolated and excluded from social cooperation were somehow a form of liberation. It is not; it feels horrible inside those fragile, impoverishing, lifelimited walls of the alienated human’s existence. And this is where awful nightmare’s come to life. Yesterday’s unthinkable becomes today’s headline and, perhaps, tomorrow’s routine.

Why did two ten-year old boys kill a two-year old boy? No simplistic answers are on offer here. If you want to blame someone or something there is no shortage of scapegoat hunters on the market. The boys had access to sick videos. One of these, in the home of one of their fathers, appears to depict a crime much like the one they committed. Who made this video? That “artist” of our age was not in the courtroom as the boys sobbed. Perhaps he is working right now on a new work of cinematic art which reproduces the killing in question. And if there is a market for it . . . an audience with cash to pay for thrills from screen violence . . . plenty of profit in that, so what can be wrong? And who are the government to condemn such an entrepreneur? How can a government which sells arms to dictatorships and torture equipment to the highest bidder state any but the most hypocritical objections to films which celebrate gratuitous slaughter? Were there no two-year old babies in Baghdad when British and American bomber planes went on their killing spree in defence of the profits and power of the unelected dictator of Kuwait? Let those who kill children, and celebrate it within their daily lie sheets, claim no moral high ground now that the murders are beyond the law.

The boys played video games for hours. These games now outstrip the music record industry in sales. When once (in “the bad old Sixties”, of course) kids sang that all you need is love and dopey parables about two little boys with their two little toys, now for hours on end they stare at video violence turned into a game. Press this button and Kill, Kill, Kill . . . and then put in another pound and your licence to kill begins all over again. Killing without consequence. Just as the victim of a shooting in a bad American film limps away and returns in the next scene ready to run the New York marathon, so the message of these “games” are that violence never really hurts. How about a game where you insert your pound and the machine boots you in the balls?

As life has become more of a miserable struggle to survive in the face of debt and the dole and a dreary environment, so entertainment has come to be about releasing anger. The racist louts who killed a teenage lad at a bus stop because they imagined that his skin pigmentation made him a threat were probably briefly entertained by their bullying victory. The kids in Manchester who captured and tortured a young girl might have had a brief high, and the list could go on. The truth is that the list is a very, very long one.

This capitalist system under which we all live—even if we many deny that they do, and most do not even know that they do—has committed against us the greatest of crimes. It has denied us our freedom to be innocent. Contrary to the medieval remains which lurk within Christian minds of professional pessimists like the Bishop of Liverpool, babies are not born evil. The whole notion of evil belongs in the museum of antiquated follies. Would Hitler have been a Nazi dictator if he was your brother?

We are born neither good nor bad. To imagine otherwise is as sensible as to imagine that we are born with a preference for Pepsi rather than Coke, a genetic inclination to rape rather than pass the parcel. We are born to be within the world as it is. And the world as it is right now is not a happy place in which to be born.

Millions and millions of children are born into conditions of such material constraint that it is amazing they grow up fit for anything. Some do not emerge fit for anything. The wounds suffered as a result of authoritarian parenting, of sexual and violent abuse (both misuses of power) and of squalid and ignorant upbringings are injuries which were once unthinkable—or at least, unthought about. Perhaps, if capitalism had been removed long ago, these effects would have been of a lesser magnitude and we could go in greater innocence towards creating our futures.

As this century comes to an end the hard, unpalatable fact (perhaps even for many socialists) is that the psychological pain caused by the artificial way of organising life under capitalism has led to a loss of innocence for most of us. Put plainly, we have all been much more hurt by this system than it is easy to admit. And that is why there will be more horror stories to fill the gutter press. More and worse, until we get rid of this system.

The reformists, who were always wrong, now stand mute before what is to them an inexplicable breakdown in civilised culture. After all, had they not set up a welfare state, with its ever-ready social workers and free schools for the poor? But the kids can’t stand the schools and see no point in going when all they must learn is to become unemployed—sorry, “Job Seekers”. The churches talk about the collapse of the family, with their eyes carefully averted from the disaster zone of the family which heads their religion. But when Norman Tebbit said to fathers that they must get on their bike and look for work (and families don’t fit on bikes, you know) and the smug bankers threw tens of thousands out of their repossessed homes into the insecurity of hostels, then what real chance did the children of those families have?

Now Tory ministers cry for moral education in the schools. But what reasonably sensible school student would for one minute accept moral instruction from that rabble of corrupt and callous rogues? And what moral depravity would characterise the child who received an A+ in the exam set by exploiters to test the sturdiness of the soon to be replaced exploited?

All that is left for capitalism is blame. Guilt is the final cudgel in their diminished ideological armoury. As the 1990s come more and more to resemble the 1930s, no lessons are learned by our masters’ mouthpieces who set the tone of the media. The best that they could do was whip up hysteria. Releasing the names of the two “guilty” boys and delighting in the waste of their lives places the British tabloid press several rungs further down the moral ladder than these little boys have ever had a chance to descend. These were the headlines of the tabloid press on Thursday 25 November, the day after the two boys’ conviction for murder:

Daily Mail: EVIL, BRUTAL AND CUNNING.
Daily Mirror: FREAKS OF NATURE—The faces of normal boys but they had hearts of unparalleled evil.
Daily Star: HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW YOU LITTLE BASTARDS?

All of the above appeared with pictures of the little boys—pictures that would ensure  the victimisation of them and their families for many years to come. The articles within these rags stooped to any claim in their eagerness to cast blame on these children. The editors and the journalists and the sort of vile readers who throw rotten eggs at prison vans were comforted by this orgy of attributing guilt to the feeble and infantile targets of popular wrath. What they did not report were the four suicides this year within the juvenile detention centre in west London where life for the guilty ended in the defeat of all hope. And while they screeched and yelled about the “unparalleled evil” of two confused and antisocial boys they did not report how killers of exactly the same age are employed by such armies as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or the government side in the civil war in Sierra Leone. (“Since the civil war began in 1991 children as young as eight years old have been used by government forces in Sierra Leone to execute suspected rebels, sometimes cutting their heads off with machetes”, readers were informed by the Independent on 2 December last year).

But why worry anyone’s narrow minds with such distant, legalised atrocities to which our rulers have uttered not a word of meaningful condemnation? How much easier it is to concentrate little minds on the guilty faces of little children (the freaks, the bastards, the murderers) and rest content that the origin is in the unequalled blackness of their hearts.

Sometimes, through the fog of confusion which is how life is viewed by many people, and despite the brutalised indifference which seems to be the price of keeping afloat within the relentless competition to afford any kind of a life, certain events make us especially sad. These events are very largely selected for us by unaccountable media chiefs whose employees orchestrate public grief on such occasions. That does not diminish the authenticity of our sadness. After all, we are human beings. We are social animals. And sometimes, after a Warrington bomb or an Ethiopian famine disaster, a collective nerve is touched. And then what?

Socialists do not indulge in piety. That can be left to those who prefer to respond on their knees with their eyes shut. We leave moral self-righteousness as their monopoly as well. No sugary sentiments of love for little children will be heard from us. It is only under a system where the material stimulus to love and care is lacking that “loving thy neighbour” is promoted as some great virtue. No proposals here for teaching children what is right and wrong; not under a system which would have willingly taken those sane children only five years further into their lives and taught them to kill strangers as paid members of the British army.

Occasional sadness is a sign that we have not been wholly brutalised. Just as the fact that the overwhelming majority of children do not adjust willingly to the competitive, vicious and violent norms of the capitalist ethos is proof that this system has not and will not desensitise us all. To punish the dehumanised for what an inhumane world has taught them to become is as wise as to lock a dog in a kennel and then beat it for barking. The fact is that the kennel door is unlocked. It does not have to be like this.

Steve Coleman

The Case for Socialism (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism — real socialism that is, not the state capitalism that collapsed in chaos in eastern Europe and Russia a few years ago — is just as relevant today as it always was. The case for socialism rested on the failure of capitalism to meet human needs properly. And capitalism fails to do this today as much as it ever did in the past.

The evidence is all around, especially on a world scale where hunger, death from preventable disease, and lack of education exist in massive proportions. But no one can claim that even in an industrialized part of the world like Britain all people’s basic material needs are met, let alone the needs that would allow' them to lead a reasonable and comfortable life.

This can be seen just by looking at the government’s own official statistics. The population of Britain is 57 million. Recent government figures show that there are nearly 10 million individuals dependent on Income Support, ie on means tested handouts from the State, to bring them up to the minimum poverty line (Guardian, 27 August). Nearly 700,000 other families are eligible to get (but not all claim) another means tested handout. Family Credit, because their wages are so low (Independent, 8 September). So we are talking about one in six people in Britain being on the poverty line. All of them certainly need more, and better, things to consume. Better food, better clothes and better housing.

Unfit dwellings
Another set of figures produced recently are those for the number of "unfit dwellings" in England. These show that nearly 1.5 million houses or flats have one or more basic defects such as damp and mold, inadequate heating, lighting and washing and cooking facilities (Independent, 10 September). Clearly the five million or so people affected by this need better housing. Which could easily be provided since other figures show that despite the so-called upturn in the housing market there is still a brick mountain of 1.4 billion (Daily Telegraph, 3 May), enough to build 175,000 new houses. At the same time the Building Employers Confederation says that there are about half a million unemployed building workers in the country (Independent, 5 October).

So why are needs not properly met today? The answer is simple and straightforward. It is because meeting needs is not the purpose of production today. The purpose of production today is to make profits. That is admitted even by supporters of the present economic system, only they see it as an incentive to produce things. Socialists see it as a brake on production.

What production for profit means in practice is that before anything is produced those in charge of its production must be convinced that it can be sold profitably. Before a firm opens a business somewhere, a survey is carried out. But this is not a survey of people’s needs. It’s a survey of the prospective market and that’s what it is called — a market survey. In other words, a survey of what people can afford and are willing to pay for. Which is not at all the same as their needs.

If the company was going to open, say, a furniture store somewhere, it would not carry out a survey of what were the needs of the people in the area for good quality, safe furniture. No, it would carry out a survey of the income levels of the people in the area — and would only stock up with good quality, safe furniture if it found it was an area where people had high average incomes. Otherwise it would stock up with the cheap utility furniture that the average consumer can afford. If it found it was in an area where most people were on income support and therefore most in need of new, safe furniture — it would probably decide not to open a store there at all. What would be the point? The people would need the furniture, but as they wouldn't be able to afford to buy it their needs don’t count.

This is a basic economic law of the capitalist economic system. "Can’t Pay, Won’t Produce". "No Profit, No Production".

So, under capitalism, how much and, in extreme cases, whether your needs are satisfied depends on the amount of money you have as your "purchasing power". There are various ways of getting money. You can beg for it. Today, in the centre of big cities, beggars are everywhere. This is something new and, except for winos, didn’t use to exist 20 yearn ago.

Then you can steal it. This too has been on the increase. It’s what they call the crime wave, since 94 percent of recorded crimes are "crimes of property" — that is, people trying to get money illegally or property that they can sell for money.

But if you rule out these options — which you have to be pretty desperate to take — then, for most people, all that remains is to work or try to work for a living. In other words, to go out to the labour market and sell yourself. Well, not exactly yourself but sell a part of you — your mental and physical energies — for a wage or a salary. The wages system is the basis of capitalism. What it reflects is the fact that most people don’t own productive resources and therefore have to work for those who do. It reflects the class division of present-day society: between the majority working class and the minority capitalist employing class. Anybody who has to go out and work for a living is a member of the working class. It doesn’t matter what job you do. Whether you are a doctor or a docker, a teacher or a turner, a lecturer or a labourer — if you have to sell you ability to work for a wage or salary, then you are a member of the working class. So most people — up to 95 percent of the population in fact — are members of the working class. This is wider than most definitions but is in our view the only scientific definition.

What can you sell
How much money you get paid depends on the quality of what you have to sell. Because under capitalism your ability to work is a commodity — something that is bought and sold — its price (which is what your wages or salary is) is fixed like that of all other commodities by what it costs to produce. A doctor gets paid more than a docker because it costs more money to train a doctor. An engineer gets paid more than a labourer for the same reason.

For those workers who can’t or don’t find an employer, existence is pretty bleak. They get made up to the poverty line — now £40 to £50 a week plus housing costs for a single person. Some 20 percent of the population of Britain, an advanced industrial country, are in this position. And this in a world which could provide plenty for all. Plenty of food, good housing, and good health care.

Beg or steal
The second alternative source of income to begging, stealing, or working for an employer is to get an unearned income from owning property. Non-work incomes such as dividends, interest and rents accrue to people purely because they have ownership rights over productive resources. They have property deeds and titles, stocks and shares, which entitle them to draw an income from the use of these resources by the working class, who actually operate them and produce all the wealth of society.

The unpaid labour of the working class — that is the source of all rent, interest and profit. Profit is a tribute levied by Property on Labour. And it is all perfectly legal, created, upheld and. if necessary, enforced by the law of the land.

Of course many workers have some unearned income, as interest on their savings in the bank or building society, for example, but this is never enough to enable them to stop working for an employer for any length of time. But in any event the ownership of assets that provide an unearned property income in the form of Rent. Interest or Profit is very unequal. To start with, two-thirds of the population have virtually no net assets of this sort. At the other end of the social scale the top six percent of the population — those who own capital worth £100,000 or more — own 60 percent of such assets. They own 85 percent of all privately owned shares and 80 percent of all privately owned land.

This inequality of property ownership is the basis of capitalism and these people, they are the capitalist class. Capitalism is the system and it works in their interest. Capitalism is the Profit System and they are the profit takers. The role of the government is to run this system in their interests, and it doesn’t matter whether it is made up of Tory or Labour politicians. Capitalism can only work by putting Profits before People. So what is to be done? This is where the original Socialist accusation against capitalism comes in — that if fails to meet people’s needs properly. But we can say more than this: capitalism can never be made to serve human needs. It can only work as a profit making system in the interest of those who live off profits. Which isn't us.

What must be done is clear. There’s no point in trying to reform capitalism or patch it up. It must be abolished altogether and replaced by socialism.

One good way to understand socialism is to see it as the opposite of capitalism. Capitalism is based on concentration of the ownership of the means of production into the hands of a tiny minority of the population, a small class of rich people who individually own enough wealth to be able to live without having to work for an employer. Socialism will be based on the opposite the common ownership and democratic control of the productive resources by the whole community. This means what it says: that no individual or group of individuals will be able to have property rights, entitling them to draw an unearned income such as rent, interest or profit, from owning land, farms, machinery, mines, warehouses, offices or any other means for producing and distributing wealth.

They will simply be there, to be used under the democratic control of those who work in them.

Naturally, this means they will be used to serve the common good by turning out the things people need. So. while capitalism means production of profit, socialism means production for use. Whereas the basic economic laws of capitalism is "No Profit, No Production", the basic rule of socialism will be "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs". In other words, on the basis of common ownership and democratic control, people will cooperate to produce the goods and services that are needed and everybody can then have free access to these goods and services to satisfy their needs.

Basic needs
We are talking about a society in which everyone can satisfy, not just their basic needs but all their reasonable needs, as a matter of right — just because they are human beings. Why not? Why should we have to pay for food, clothing, services and the other things we need? These should be available for us to take and use, free of charge, as and when we need them. This is what Socialism involves. It would mean no poverty, no bad housing, no collapsing health-service. How could social problems like these exist in a society that was geared to serving human interests? Enough food to feed everybody would be produced. Enough decent houses to house everybody would be built and kept in good repair. Enough hospitals, schools, libraries, museums, parks and other services would be provided.

This is possible but first the artificial scarcity and the organized waste of capitalism must be ended. And this is where you come in — because socialism cannot be established by the handful of socialists who exist today. It can only be established when the majority of workers understand and want it. That’s our purpose as an organized body of socialists holding meetings, contesting elections, bringing out this paper: to spread Socialist ideas and to get more and more workers to join in building up a Socialist movement to end capitalism and usher in Socialism.

Adam Buick

What Socialists want (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our aim is to see established a democratic world community without frontiers — in which the natural and industrial resources of the world have become the heritage of all humanity, and are used in co-operation to produce wealth directly for needs, with free access for all to the available goods and services, according to their own self defined needs.

A moneyless, stateless world commonwealth is the only framework within which current social problems can be permanently solved, since it is only on this basis that production can be oriented towards satisfying human needs. This social revolution can only be carried out when once a majority of wage and salary workers throughout the world want it, fully understand its implications, and organise democratically and politically to achieve it.

English Legal System (1994)

Book Review from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

English Legal System. By Gary Slapper and David Kelly. (Cavendish Publishing. £l3.95.)

This textbook is intended not just for law students but also for the increasing number of other people who in their work or their daily lives find they need to have some knowledge of the legal system in England. This readable and accessible book will meet that need.

As Socialists we know that the capitalist state has been in a financial crisis for the last twenty or so years and has had to cut back its spending in all departments. What has mainly struck us is how this has affected the various services national and local government provide for the population. This book shows (chapters 12 and 13) that the legal system has been affected too. Not only has legal aid been drastically cut back ("in some categories over 10 million people have been made ineligible by recent changes"), but since 1991 magistrates’ courts, which deal with 97 percent of criminal cases, have been forced to operate in accordance with market principles.

The amount of money they get from central government now depends on the number of cases and the speed they deal with them. As they can attract more funds by dealing with a larger number of minor offences (TV licences and motoring) than a smaller number of more serious ones, it is in their financial interest to pursue the former:

  "The clerk is thus under pressure to list more cases of this sort and fewer serious ones resulting from police charges as the latter only generate about £150 income from government funding per case hut take much longer to deal with if there is a not guilty plea and cost the court money.
  One justice's clerk in Hampshire who ’tots up' the points scored each week from the court's caseload said in an interview that he had come to speak of cases as 'earners' and some cases, like motoring matters, make much better profits than others"(p. 331)

So if you have ever wondered why the police pursue motorists rather than burglars, now you know why: it’s more cost effective. Increased recourse to fines (which bring in money) rather than jail sentences (which cost an awful lot of money) and the increased use of cautions by the police are other aspects of this cost-cutting exercise.

The irony is that all this weakening of "the fight against crime’ is happening under the Tories. But it is a measure of the seriousness of the financial crisis of the capitalist state that those in charge of it have been forced to skimp even on its primary role of maintaining Law and Order.

Adam Buick

Letter: National Health Service (1994)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Your recent articles on the NHS (November 1993) were particularly interesting. To correct one inaccuracy, district health authorities do not become self-governing Trusts. It is Acute and Community hospitals who used to be directly managed by DHAs who are now able to opt out of local health authority control. Health authorities are now required to purchase health care services from a range of hospital and other providers on behalf of their local populations. Providers of health care compete with each other to attract this business through the internal market.

I thought it may be useful to make one or two comments about the internal market and how a number of contradictory effects are now clearly discernible:

1. Competition in the classic sense is rarely a reality. With the exception of large conurbations, many hospital providers, particularly bog-standard district general hospitals, occupy almost a monopoly position. Similarly, the "host” district purchasers are often near monopoly buyers of services. Many of the alleged benefits from free competition like choice, cost efficiency are largely illusory.

2. Large specialist centres of medical excellence, many located in London, are now under threat. A district purchaser will tend to contract with local general hospitals and community units to obtain the basic expected standard services for its local population. To contract with a specialist centre almost on the off chance a very small number of cases may arise needing its services is seen as very risky and expensive, limiting the ability of the purchaser to maximise the benefit to the most number of people within limited resources. Although currently protected by various methods of national and regional funding, the constant push to devolve funds down to districts and to widen the scope of the market will exacerbate this threat.

3. An opposite tendency is where two large general hospitals are forced into competition despite together covering a vast area. The effect of market forces if both survive, is to encourage rationalisation and specialisation. That is, each concentrates on a narrower range of services in which each feels it has an advantage over the other. In addition to the obvious waste of skills and experience associated with "rationalisation", the fundamental principle of local access to the full range of standard services is undermined. Patients and families will need to travel much greater distances to obtain diagnosis, treatment and follow-up. The choice of services available to the purchaser also narrows, reinforcing tendencies to monopoly.

4. The purpose of competition is of course to eliminate competition. This is seen in an increased number of mergers and takeovers on both purchaser and provider sides of the market table. The increased market and bargaining power associated with (say) the creation of a large district purchaser through merger is matched in double quick time by the merger of the local provider units to redress the balance and to prevent one being played off against another. Sooner or later, the internal market will seize up completely and all pretence of choice and competition will vanish. We will be left with a recreated national structure formed through takeover and closure, highly authoritarian, run by autocratic managers and non-elected business representatives, and totally unresponsive or sympathetic to the wishes and aspirations of health workers, patients, their families and the wider community as a whole. Being "successful" products of a market system and ravaged by the ideology of commercialism, the remaining Trusts (self-governing hospitals) will be ripe for privatisation. You can just see it: "support your local hospital — buy shares in the ’public flotation’". One way to raise needed money for cash starved hospitals. The ideological value of getting people to identify with particular methods of capitalist restructurings through privatisation is well known.

Enough of the pessimism. The only point of understanding how and why capitalist institutions change and adapt is to understand that this change whether left to the market or apparently influenced by politicians will never be to the benefit of working people. A world-wide health service (perhaps including a tremendous diversity of models of health care) can only happen when capitalism is replaced on a world-wide basis by socialism, The people’s health and wellbeing will only ever be safe in the hands of the people themselves.

Name and Address Supplied. 

Go for a million update (1994)

Party News from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

We would like to thank all those readers, members and sympathizers, both here and abroad, who have contributed to our Election Fund.

We are well on the way to achieving our target of at least £20,000. At the time of writing (mid-December) the amount paid into or pledged to our Election Fund stood at £17,094. So there is still another £3,000 to go.

If you want to help finance this biggest ever campaign to get Socialist ideas across and have not yet contributed you can do so by sending a cheque or postal order (made payable to the "Socialist Party of Great Britain") to Election Fund, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Obituary: Robert Smith (1994)

Obituary from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are saddened to hear of the death of last year of our comrade Robert Smith of Camden Branch.

Bob Smith was born in Hendon in 1915 where his family had lived for generations, back to the time when it was a village in Middlesex and not the north London suburb it is today. He became a socialist through listening to Socialist Party speakers in Hyde Park, joining the old Paddington Branch in 1938. His work as an accounts clerk meant that he was called upon at various times to do all the jobs at branch level involving finance (treasurer, auditor, literature secretary). For a short while he served as the Party’s Treasurer at national level. But he was also an occasional speaker and writer as well as his branch’s delegate to Conference.

He will remembered as a quiet pleasant man who was a dedicated socialist.

50 Years Ago: Working-Class Wives (1994)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent Court of Appeal decided that housekeeping savings belong to the husband. The decision aroused indignation amongst many women: but why? The judge was right. A worker’s wife is little better than a chattel-slave, though it is perhaps true that love enters into marriage more to-day than it did in the past. Yet the economic bondage of women remains fundamentally the same.

We live under a system of society known as Capitalism, which is made up of property relationships, one of which is marriage. In order to live, a working-class woman must either sell her labour-power to an employer, secure a husband or resort to prostitution. If she chooses marriage, as nearly all women do, she will receive in return for her services food, clothing and shelter according to her husband's means.

As the majority of men are propertyless. they are compelled to sell their labour-power to the capitalist class, who in return provide them with the means to keep themselves in a state of efficiency and also to maintain a wife and family. Most work is regarded as unskilled, therefore the means which the majority of men receive are simply for the necessities of life.

So women who marry these men are forced to live in poverty, and the very idea of saving any of their housekeeping money is ludicrous. In view of this we can conclude that for these women to enjoy equality in this state of poverty is impossible, for they are dependent on the goodwill of their husbands. The end of the exploitation of women will only come when they unite with men to abolish capitalism, which enslaves them both, and substitute it by socialism, under which no one will be economically dependent on another and all will enjoy complete freedom and equality.

[From an article by "D.M" in the Socialist Standard, January 1944.]

Between the Lines: Increasing Misery (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Increasing Misery

Marx once wrote that as capitalism develops the mass of misery of the working class grows progressively worse. This is all the more true if one bears BBC1's EastEnders in mind (Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7.30 pm). For never in the history of television has a TV programme been so dedicated to spreading misery among the working class.

Let there be no doubt about it — EastEnders is a truly horrendous soap opera and anti-working class to its core. At best, its portrayal of working class life is a caricature which bears little relationship to the way workers actually conduct themselves. At worst, its aim appears to be to convince you that life is one long emotional roller-coaster which we are entirely powerless to change. To this end, few characters in EastEnders have any interests other than conducting screaming matches with those they profess to hate, which at any given point in time is roughly half of the rest of the cast. When they are giving their lungs and their fists a break, they play a curious game of treading on eggshells with one another until an unsuspecting actor puts a foot wrong and another extended bout of ranting begins. Some characters, including the psychopathic Grant Mitchell, Pauline Fowler and her son Mark, exhibit mood swings the like of which are rarely seen outside of hospital psychiatric units. Their emotions are seemingly uncontrollable, ebbing and flowing wildly above treacherous depths like storm tides over a beach of quicksand.

Other characters are simply “write-offs" they were apparently born evil and will always stay that way. Their only pleasure in life lies in causing trouble for other people. Such is the lot of "Tricky Dicky", the market stall manager, and homeless Mandy, whom the other characters treat like Satan’s Daughter, only not as politely. “Tricky Dicky" and Mandy, indeed, are the only remotely stable characters in the series and their stability is one born of calculated malice and an effortless contempt for others which some characters in the series appear to secretly envy.

Happy Half-Hour

In the episode of Thursday 2 December one character — Frank Butcher — smiled, through only at the prospect of someone else's misfortune, but for this character it was still a definite advance. Ironically, the actor Mike Reid who plays Frank Butcher used to be a comedian of sorts, but really do any of the characters in EastEnders ever have the wit to say something funny. That would be to display signs of intelligence, and the scriptwriters can't be seen to be having any of that. The characters they create and manipulate have to be humourless and stupid if they are to appear to be convincingly powerless.

Neither can the characters been seen having stable long term relationships with one another. A quick fumble behind the Queen Vic is all that most of them are capable of until the inevitable bitching and recriminations commence. A case in point was Arthur Fowler's tawdry affair with Mrs Hewitt, so unsophisticated and furtive as to be reminiscent of Howard and Maria from Last of the Summer Wine, only without the humour. Though a bit of sex always spices up a dull script, other soap operas manage without the constant transfers of sexual allegiances that occur in EastEnders, and we can only suspect that it is again a deliberate policy to portray the working class as shallow, feeble and fundamentally untrustworthy.

Nay, Nay and Thrice Nay

The really bad news for the future is that the BBC apparently have plans to increase the dose of this anti-working class nonsense from twice to three times a week. There are reports of unrest among the cast at this prospect, and some prominent cast members like June Brown and Peter Dean have already left the series in disgust at the way things are going. Their view is that the “golden age" of EastEnders is over, but in truth, there was no such cultural nirvana in Albert Square to start with. Even at its peak EastEnders always glorified in portraying the grosser aspects of working class life and unlike other soaps largely shunned humour and pathos. Its leading characters have inevitably been thoroughly unpleasant creatures and its message a hopelessly bleak one. Twice a week has been bad enough, three times a week would be to extend the cycle of misery to breaking point.

Dave Perrin

Who Wrote The Bible? (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Bible dates from 700 BC but many Genesis stories are based on ancient Mesopotamian myths. The Garden of Eden was Mesopotamia’s fertile flood plain, the "Edhen". This dried up when the Persian Gulf withdrew 200 miles southwest causing the people to believe that they had offended the gods. Hence the "Fall of Man” myth.

John G. Jackson in his work the Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth comments:

  "There are liberal Christian apologists who no longer subscribe to the literal belief in the Fall of Man. But if there is no Fall, there is no need of an atonement, and no Redeemer is required"

Amorite people from Mesopotamia — known as the Habiru or Hebrews — entered Northern Canaan about 1500 BC and some were possibly taken as hostages when the Egyptians reconquered Canaan in 1468 BC. In about 1400 BC. the monotheistic Cult of Aten first appeared in Egypt only to be destroyed soon after Tutankhamun’s death c. 1300 BC. Pears Cyclopedia states: "From the historical point of view an important influence on Judaism may have been the monotheism of Akhen-aten".

The Exodus refugees may have been expelled Aten cultists. Professor Richard Friedman, states in Who Wrote the Bible?:

    "Some have concluded that only a small proportion of the ancient Israelites were in Egypt. The names, Moses, Hopni and Phineas are all Egyptian, not Hebrew. The group that was in Egypt and then in Sinai worshipped with god Yahweh. In Israel they met Israelite tribes who worshipped the god El. The two groups accepted the belief that Yahweh and El were same god."

The people of south Canaan eventually became known as the "Yahudi" and the land "Yahuda" or Judah. The name is possibly derived from "Yahweh” or its variant "Yah" (as in "Halleluyah”). The people of north Canaan — including the Hebrews — worshipped the Canaanite god "El", which may explain the name "Ysrael" - Israel.

Some historians now believe that the kingdom of "all Israel” never existed and that Israel and Judah emerged separately. In 722 BC Israel was destroyed by the Assyrians and its sacred writings to El were subsequently combined with similar Judean scriptures to Yahweh. These were further combined in about 622 BC with Deuteronomy when this long lost Book of Moses was supposedly "rediscovered" in the Temple. The German scholar, De Wette, described the "rediscovery" as a "pious fraud".

In 586 BC Judah was conquered by the Babylonians who in turn fifty years later were conquered by the Persians who made Palestine a province in 458 BC. This, therefore, marks the real beginnings of Judaism a combination of the declining Yahweh cult and Persia’s official religion. Zoroastrianism.

Zoroastrianism introduced to the Jews the concept of a god of love whose good would triumph over the Devil’s evil. Heaven was for the righteous and Hell for the wicked. Zoroastrianism also introduced the concepts of angelology, the soul, a Messiah, Resurrection and a Judgement Day. "Paradise" is derived from the Persian for an "idyllic afterlife” - “Pairidaeza".

The archaeologist, John Romer, in his work Testament, writes:

    "The influence of ideas that once filled the mysterious faith of ancient Persia runs through the Old Testament and continues well into the pages of the New Testament; an influence that leaves a trace even in the words of Jesus. "

In 332 BC, Palestine was conquered by Alexander the Great and a Greek influenced Jewish priesthood eventually emerged, the Sadducees. In 152 BC the Jewish Maccabean uprising occurred, out of which emerged the Pharisees whose apocalyptic ideas stemmed from the Book of Daniel. E.E. Kellett in his History of Religion states that "it was, as is now fully acknowledged, from the Pharisees that Christianity drew much of its inspiration.”

Perverted temple

A third group also emerged — the Essenes — who introduced the concept of a holy community temporarily replacing the "perverted" Temple worship of the Sadducees.

Kellett describes the apocalyptic philosophy’s development:

  "The idea of a 'new heaven and a new Earth' had hitherto been materialistic. A gradual transformation of this view look place in the last century before Christ, and prepared the way for his ideas. Apocalyptic ideas asserted a catastrophic end of the world. It is needless to prove that this conception, also, was taken over by early Christianity."

The first Christians were probably Essenes living in Jerusalem called Naasenes or Nazarenes. The Essene Dead Sea Scrolls describe a schism between the followers of the Essene leader, the "Righteous One", who strictly adhered to the Law of Moses and a breakaway group led by the "Wicked Priest" who wanted faith to replace Jewish Law.

This parallels the New Testament schism between the Jewish Christians of James the Just and the Greek Gentile Christians of Paul. The New Testament refers to Jesus as the "Righteous One” and is the only non-Essenian literature to use their term for the Devil "Belial". Jesus, James the Just's brother, clearly says: "Do not suppose that I have come to abolish the Law. I did not come to abolish but to complete." (Matt. 5:17 20). But Paul claims: "Christ bought us freedom from the curse of the law"! (Gal. 3:8-18)!

Similarly, the conflicting genealogies of Jesus attempt to show that Jesus was virgin born and descended from the Jewish "House of David". Jesus confirmed his Judaistic cause in Matthew (15:24 26): "I was sent to the lost sheep of Israel and to them alone".

Christians claim that Jesus's so-called "Doctrine of Love" is unique, but Zoroastrianism's god was a god of love and the Old Testament Book of Leviticus says "Love they neighbour as thyself". (Levi. 19:18). Rabbi Hillel, the Liberal Pharisee who died in AD 9 preached "Love thine enemies". Jesus later hijacked the phrase, falsely claiming the Old Testament said "Love your neighbour, hate your enemy". This is curious given Jesus’s own statements: "If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother, he cannot be a disciple of mine" (Matt. 5:43-44). In fact, some disciples of Jesus were Zealot insurrectionists. At Gethsemane, some disciples were armed with swords and one attacked the High Priest's servant.

The accounts of Jesus’s life are all riddled with numerous contradictions. For example, Matthew claims that Jesus was born before Herod’s death in 4 BC but Luke says the birth occurred when Cyrenius governed from AD 6.

Given the many contradictions it's no surprise that there is not one genuine contemporary account of Jesus's life. As Gibbon says in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

    "During the age of Christ the lame walked, the blind saw, the sick were healed, the dead were raised, demons were expelled but the sages of Greece and Rome appeared unconscious of any alteration in the moral or physical government of the world."

Christianity’s real founder was Paul. His writings which make up 44 percent of New Testament were written many years before the Gospels.

In AD70. the Romans destroyed Jerusalem, its Temple and dispersed the Jews. Four years later they overran the Fortress of Masada and 960 Zealots committed suicide.

This final destruction of the Jewish Messianic movement meant that their doctrines were totally reversed. The Gentile Christians made their Holy Community, as symbolized by Jesus, a permanent Temple replacement. Jesus promised salvation in the next world and Mosaic Law was replaced by faith in Jesus as the central doctrine.

Christianity survived by accommodating Rome’s influence on its teachings. Hence the whitewashing of Pilate’s role in Jesus’s death. In AD 325 the Council of Nicae fixed the Canon of the New Testament. The Emperor Constantine arbitrarily decided the location of Jesus’s birth, death and ascension, and built a church on each site.

Professors Eisenman and Wise in their work The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered state that some Essenes were known as "The Children of Salvation". The Hebrew for "salvation" is "yesha" - and the noun "yeshuato" means "his salvation" ("his" = “Righteous One") — and "Yeshua" is Hebrew for Jesus. Eisenman and Wise further state: "The personification of this concept in the Gospel can be considered a most revolutionary development and one that has not ceased exercising its influence on mankind even now."

The Dead Sea Scrolls referred to were suppressed for 40 years because, as Eisenman and Wise state, it is impossible to distinguish them from the doctrines of the Jewish Christians. Christianity’s origins in the violent xenophobic Jewish Messianic movement contrast vividly with the demure picture painted by today’s Christians. Today’s Christians may equate "Loving your neighbour" with the so-called socialism of the Labour Party, but as has been shown such sentiments did not even originate with Christianity. As Socialist and Materialists we reject the notion that our destiny is ultimately determined by something outside the material world. The ideas that the existence of a complex universe presupposes the existence of an even more complex creator/designer/god — whose own existence does not — answers nothing.

Richard Layton

Planning - a cautionary tale (1994)

A Short Story from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

His mind mulled the words tangibly, "Frank is wrong! He is wrong and I can prove it from my own experience!" He said: "I’m not wrong, Nigel: I said capitalism is a system of economic anarchy and that it could not be planned. Obviously, I did not mean that all the plans made within capitalism were doomed to failure".

He felt silly carrying on a conversation with himself and, yet, as his mind flicked over the arguments that had passed between himself and his brother he was surprised at how fluent he had become in Frank’s arguments. As he tossed the papers into his briefcase he said audibly to an absent judge: "He's shifting the goal posts, now that I have proven him wrong!"

"Goodnight, Mr Wynn", said Grogan, rattling his keys pointedly. It was nearly eight; he wasn’t particularly late tonight but he knew Grogan secretly cursed him for always being the last out. Sometimes, if Nigel arrived before eight in the morning, he had to wait in his car for the man to arrive, despite the fact that he had four hours off in the middle of each day. Only last week, Nigel had mentioned to Personnel that he thought Grogan wasn’t worth the seventy pounds a week he was paid.

The BMW purred its way gently through the traffic. He drove more slowly than usual, enjoying his thoughts - his supreme triumph! The letter of confirmation had arrived from Sir James that morning. His mind had rioted and it was all he could do to suppress his excitement in front of his secretary. Later, Mr Deasy had phoned him to see if there was any news and, as he thought now about it, he marvelled at the adroit, matter of fact tone he had managed to maintain as he told his managing director that Harrington’s had accepted their tender for building the plant.

Deasy could not restrain his excitement: "Which tender? Did we get more than one?" He seemed close on the phone. Nigel could hear his breathing. "Oh, all three tenders, the entire plant and the auxiliary service area!" He was enjoying this; it was his prize. “Jesus! Bloody great! You did a cracking job, Nigel. Look . . .  I have to say this . . ."  "Sorry, Mr Deasy, what was that?" Let the bastard repeat it; he had resisted Nigel’s plans every step of the way!

"Nigel", there was real contrition in the voice and Nigel waited expectantly, ”I know I gave you a hard time. You worked so hard on this bloody thing. It was your baby, your scheme; it was all your planning. And you've won through! I can tell you, Nigel, I was terrified . . .  all the new plant, the premises - Jesus, the work on the drawings, even, cost a fortune! We were in away over our head - you know, of course that, had it gone the other way. we were down the tube. I can tell you that I have not been sleeping too well lately! But congratulations. You’ve pulled it off. Fantastic!”

He smiled quietly to himself in the comfort of the BMW. He knew they were all terrified but he was supremely confident because he had planned cautiously and carefully. He had compiled information on every aspect of the scheme and, though he was excited with the outcome, it had not really come as a surprise. He thought absently about Sir James. It was pretty obvious that he had made a personal hit with the chairman of Harrington’s. Maybe ...?

As he turned into Oulton Road he turned on the radio. He might get Alice to go with him over to Frank’s tonight. He thought of all the lost arguments with his brother -  sometimes he thought bloody schoolmasters had nothing to do all day but read books that contributed nothing to real knowledge. It was easy for Frank, he had a retentive memory and could rime off facts and figures that supported his arguments in favour of Socialism. But this time I have him, thought Nigel. What the hell did Frank know about real capitalist planning?

"City new's . . .", his hand reached out in the dark to increase the volume of the radio. "In the City this afternoon, dealings in Harrington’s shares were suspended when, following the collapse of its European subsidiary, twenty two million pounds were knocked off the value of the company. Our financial correspondent says that the European subsidiary, Girard and Brock, had run into cash flow problems arising from the failure of the Mexican government to meet payments on the giant Arana project. A spokesperson for the Company said . . . "

Richard Montague

Sting in the Tail: Empty talk (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Empty talk

The myth that fascism/racism can be defeated by violence is persistent. This is demonstrated by Fighting Talk, the juvenilish paper published by Edinburgh Anti-Fascist Action (AFA).

The Autumn/Winter issue is certainly full of fighting talk: one bunch of would-be nazis are mocked because an intended victim "was unscathed and alarmed only by the gentleness of the attack. Have [they] been washing their hands in Fairy Washing Liquid?".

Various skirmishes are reported - "the BNP got kicked to fuck"- while the Anti- Nazi League and Anti-Racist Alliance are jeered at for being too timid.

There is also a report that Ibrox Stadium, home of Glasgow Rangers FC, is "held by the BNP". True enough, Ibrox is a notorious recruiting ground for the BNP and similar groups, so how does this square with the boast that:

"AFA has keen attacking fascists wherever they raise their ugly heads for the last seven years . . . "

The truth is that AFA has been conspicuous at Ibrox by their absence, and in this at least they have shown that they are not altogether daft.

Idiot’s delight

While MPs were over at the House of Lords for the State Opening of Parliament in November, left-wing firebrand Dennis Skinner and a few chums enjoyed a jolly jape in the empty House of Commons.

Skinner sat in the Speaker’s chair and presided over a charade in which the Monarchy and the House of Lords were "abolished".

Alas, some cad sneaked on Skinner and he was pompously ticked-off by Speaker, Betty Boothroyd for this "travesty of the proceedings of this House".

Abolishing those two hoary institutions has been the left-wing’s favourite dream for over a century without it ever dawning on them that this would in no way alter the exploitation of wage by labour by capital.

Wake Up, Greens

Those who believe that the threat to the environment can be dealt with within the capitalist system are hopelessly wrong.

These dreamers imagine that politicians whose task it is to run the production for profit system can be persuaded to recognize and act on the danger which pollution brings to the planet.

Sometimes they are encouraged in this belief by the utterances of politicians. In 1991 a "green" Michael Heseltine said countries that:

"regulate for high environmental standards create opportunities for their own industrial base. Governments will increasingly use their regulatory powers to insist on and, where necessary, impose such standards."

(Independent on Sunday, 14 November)

Now Heseltine is leading the drive to de-regulate industry and the government has:

"forced the National Rivers Authority to relax standards at many sewage works. It is also relaxing air pollution controls on some industries."

The government’s aim is to remove regulations "that may be a burden to business", or, put another way, to put first the maximization of profits and to hell with the environment and anything else which gets in the way of that.

Name dropping

The government’s decision to allow ITV companies to merge had the pundits speculating on who was likely to swallow-up who. So far Carlton has bid for Central and there is no doubt that there will be some familiar ITV company names missing from our screens.

So capitalism’s drive towards bigger and fewer economic units continues, with the big ITV companies arguing that they must become bigger if they are to meet the competition from other industry giants.

This process is happening in every industry - electronics, brewing, airlines and package holidays are examples, and this whether or not the bought-out company’s name survives. A full-page ad in the Herald (1 December) revealed that 59 stores with such prominent names as Binns, Arnotts, Barkers, David Evans, Army and Navy, Hammonds, Jollys, Dingles, Schofields, Cavendish House, Howells, Rackhanis, Dickins and Jones, Kendalls and Frasers are all owned by The House of Fraser.

As the ad in the Herald put it, "What’s in a name?”

Peace Breaks Out

Today it’s peace talks over Ulster and Bosnia, yesterday it was peace talks over Palestine, Angola, etc. All this talk about peace and yet

"There were a record 29 big wars last year, bringing to more than 23 million the death toll in conflicts since the end of the second world war, according to the annual report released yesterday by the independent Washington-based research group, World Priorities. It said 11 substantial new wars broke out in 1991 and 1992." (Guardian, 10 November)

The capacity of politicians and others for talking about ending wars is surpassed only by capitalism’s capacity for providing them.

More Peace News

In March 1991 George Bush, then President of the US, told Congress a week after the Gulf War ended, "It would be tragic if the nations of the Middle East and the Persian Gulf were now, in the wake of the war, to embark on a new arms race".

Tragic or not, that is exactly what is happening. In November 1993 six Gulf defence ministers watched all the aircraft manufacturing nations (including the US) put their fighters and bombers through their paces at the Dubai air show.

"Despite low oil prices and unaccustomed budgetary pressures, the Gulf States, which never stop worrying about big bad neighbours like Iran and Iraq, give no hint that they are about to curb their appetite for new hardware: estimates of potential sales over the next decade range as high as $65 billion. The United Arab Emirates' reported desire to purchase 80 fighter aircraft, worth up to $10 billion, has set the aerospace industry in the West and in Russia salivating. ’

( Time International, 22 November)

Like Bob Dylan once wrote, "Money doesn’t talk, it swears".

Remove the barrier of profit (1994)

From the January 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Year in and year out we release millions of tonnes of carbon gases into the atmosphere. Every year 200,000 square kilometres of tropical forests are destroyed or seriously degraded. So, at the same time we are destroying the plant life that uses carbon dioxide and converts it into oxygen. The result is a slow but steady build-up of carbon dioxide which may be leading to a gradual global warming.

We are reducing the ozone layer with the result that we now get big holes in it. For the first lime, last year the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica extended over populated areas in the Falkland Islands and the tip of South America. The increase in the amount of ultra-violet is known to be very damaging.

Then again we are seeing a steady and unremitting build-up of radioactivity in the environment; which is also damaging.

These are global changes which involve incredible risks. Some of the dangers are understood but nobody knows and nobody can predict the critical point when any combination of such changes might produce a sequence of further rapid changes which would be catastrophic from a human point of view.

Capitalism to blame

The first thing we’ve got to do is identify the cause of the problem and here socialists begin to part company with most environmental groups. Obviously we share their concern about the problem, and we too want a world where we do not damage the environment. But read the material put out by people like Friends of the Earth and you’ll notice that they never get down to the cause of the problem.

They say, for example, that acid rain and the resulting destruction of the lakes and forests in the Northern hemisphere is caused by the release of sulphur gases. That is only part of the explanation as it tells us nothing about why we keep doing it.

Acid rain is not a technical problem. The means of stopping the release of eases like sulphur dioxide are known and available and with the millions of unemployed there is a super-abundance of unused labour to apply these means.

Acid rain continues for the same reasons why we can’t provide decent hospitals, why we can’t house the homeless, why we can’t stop people living in insecurity and poverty, why we can’t stop people dying of hunger . . . These all result from the economic limitations of a system that puts privileged class interests before the needs of the community. The cause is capitalism which puts profit before needs and which therefore puts profit before the protection of the environment.

The cost of fitting de-sulphurisation equipment in all the power stations that burn fossil fuels would come to billions of pounds and would not be profitable. That is why we continue to create acid rain.

It must be obvious that a set of problems which are global in scale, affecting populations across the entire planet, can only be effectively tackled by cooperation between all peoples.

You can’t have the world divided up between rival capitalist states — all riven by economic competition both within their boundaries and between each other and all driven by the economic pressures of profit and class interests, with a good many of them at actual war with each other — and expect to be in a position to solve the problems of the global environment.

Effective action has got to be based on world cooperation.

Secondly, we have to be in a position of control. In other words, we must be in a position of being able to make democratic decisions about what must be done and must be free to take the necessary action, using the available means without any economic constraints.

It is surely self-evident that unless we have cooperation and control we are never going to begin to solve the problem and that we cannot get cooperation within capitalism.

World cooperation

To get cooperation we first have to get rid of the present system which is based on economic competition. We need to establish a system based instead on common ownership, a world where all means of producing and distributing goods and all productive resources are held in common by the whole community. This means the end of the wages system through which workers are exploited for profit and the end of producing goods for sale so as to get that profit. It means people living and working in the community in a relationship of direct cooperation with each other, producing the goods and running the services that we need. This is a way of organizing the community where the use of money will be entirely redundant.

If we establish common ownership, if we set up a society which is run solely for human needs as a result of people cooperating together, we are at fast in a position where we can control our actions. Under capitalism we are at the mercy of economic forces that nobody can control. Get rid of these economic forces and we are at last in a position to make democratic decisions about how best to use production for the benefit of the community.

At last we would be able to build houses for the homeless without the barriers of cost and money. We would be able to provide a good health service without worrying about how much kidney machines cost. We'd be able to provide everyone with good quality food, to stop the dying from lunger, and to end the malnutrition that exists even in this country. And we would be able to begin the work of restoring the environment.

Socialism is not the instant solution to problems but the means by which we can solve problems. In socialism we get the release of all productive resources — machinery, transport, raw materials, energy and labour — for the benefit of the community, but as, to start with, there will be a great deal to do we would have to make choices. We would have to make decisions in line with agreed priorities of action.

We’ve got to supply a lot more food, so that has to be increased. We’ve got to supply decent housing for everyone and that is an enormous world project. The mention of just these two priorities of action means that we would need a lot more energy and, as we know, the supply of energy is one of the worst villains in this problem of environmental damage.

Produce for use

As things are at present it is clear that socialism will have to do two things at the same time: increase the supply of energy and to do it in ways which protect the environment.

Do we keep on using nuclear generators knowing that inevitably this leads to increases in radioactivity?

Do we keep on burning oil, knowing that oil is an immensely useful material which can supply thousands of very durable products? The burning of oil in power stations is in fact the kind of profligate waste that only capitalism could go in for.

What about coal, do we keep on burning it? There is no doubt that the burning of coal can be made less damaging by the installation of pollution-abatement equipment but it is expensive. In socialism money would not be a factor. So we could go on burning coal in a less damaging way and of course there are immense world reserves of this.

However, most people would agree that the most desirable way of producing energy is with the various renewable, benign methods such as solar, wind and wave power etc. This is clearly where the future lies.

Under capitalism it is uneconomic to use these methods. It costs too much money. It is not competitive. But, again, this would not be a factor in socialism where we would be free to go in for a rapid development of these ecologically-benign methods.

With the establishment of socialism we will throw off the economic shackles of the profit system and break through into the freedom to use all our talents, skills and energies to solve problems through co-operation.

Pieter Lawrence