The Kurdish Question (1997)

From the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

 There is always a load of myth and romanticism surrounding so-called nationalist struggles and one of the most tortured and least understood is the case of the Kurdish people scattered amongst various states. The popular ‘solution’ is for the Kurds to have their own state, but, in time-honoured fashion, the Kurdish working class would soon find out that this was no solution at all.

The breakdown and imperialist carve-up of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s left Britain and France with a series of subordinate Arab kingdoms, several of which were enormously rich in potential oil resources. But the carving-up process was somewhat disrupted when a senior officer of the defeated Ottoman army refused to abide by the Sultan’s surrender to the victorious Allies, Mustafa Kemal (renamed Ataturk), regrouped like-minded officers and organised a popular resistance movement. This turn of events drew upon strong pressures for reform and modernisation that were already manifest in Turkey before the outbreak of the First World War and it skilfully harnessed the Turkish nationalism which the former theocratic state suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the many other nationalisms festering within the regime known as the “sick man of Europe”.

During the Great War Turkey was an ally of Germany. Berlin found the Pan-Turanian ideas of Enver Pasha fitted in well with their war objectives and gave positive encouragement to his dream of bringing the vast area of Russian Turkestan into the unified control of a new Turkish entity in close association with the Kaiser’s Empire. In marked contrast the rebel officer, Mustafa Kemal, took a less visionary and far more realistic stance. He opted for a Republic confined to the heart of the old Ottoman Empire consisting essentially of Anatolia (Asia Minor), the majority of whose inhabitants were Turkish-speaking Muslims. There were important exceptions nevertheless. Port communities all round the coast but especially on the Aegean had been largely populated by Greeks from classical times onwards. In central Anatolia there were considerable numbers of people who were Greek Orthodox by religion but Turkish-speaking. And there were, of course, the survivors of the Empire’s Armenian population which either had identified with “Holy Russia” during the war or was perceived to have done so. They were targeted as a scapegoat for popular wartime discontent and were subjected to a scale of massacre only surpassed by Hitler’s genocidal elimination of the Jews and Stalin’s mass liquidation of political opponents and recalcitrant ethnic populations.

Imperialist carve-up

The victorious Allies had decided to reward Italy and Greece with Ottoman territory. Italy was awarded the Dodecanese Islands (Rhodes) with their mixed Greek and Turkish population and the Aegean coast and Constantinople (Istanbul) which was the historic seat of the Orthodox Church, to Greece. Athens soon landed troops to enforce the new arrangement but they were rapidly repulsed by Ataturk’s forces. The outcome was a level of “ethnic cleansing” fully up to mid- and late-twentieth century standards. In the process most of Anatolia’s Greeks were expelled and re-settled in Greece. These League of Nations supervised population transfers included the transfer of Greek-speaking Muslims from Crete.

But of all the exceptions to the general truth of there being a Turkish majority in the area Ataturk designated as the territory of Turkey, the most important by far was the Kurdish in eastern Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Even in the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire there had been moves reflecting Kurdish aspirations towards autonomy and when the Kemalist struggle was still not assured of victory, noises were made in the direction of the Kurds suggesting that their assistance in consolidating the new republic would be rewarded with a degree of recognition of their cultural and democratic concerns.

Once the new Turkish state was firmly established any “understandings” arrived at with the Kurds rapidly evaporated and the new Turkish nationalism, confined to Asia Minor only, paradoxically meant that not only was Ataturk’s right-hand man, Ismet Inonu, a Kurd, so too was the ideologist of modern Turkish nationalism, Ziya Gokalp. This hocus-pocus of a theory classified the Kurds as a sort of “lost tribe” of Turks who had forgotten their mother tongue at some point (the Kurdish language is related to Persian and belongs to a quite different language group from Turkish) and who were to be described as “Mountain Turks”. The utterance of their language in public was made illegal.

Meanwhile, Kurds further down the Mesopotamian river basin of the Tigris and Euphrates had the good fortune (bad luck?) to be where the oil was (the Arab-speakers being where the dates were) Britain’s imperial scheme was to incorporate the Kurds into the Iraqi state they were creating. This served the dual purpose of including the oil-field and providing a mixed Arab/Kurdish population where the old divide-and-rule formula could be of imperial service. In the division of Arab-populated territory France got the Lebanon and Syria, the north-east of which included districts mainly inhabited by Kurds. Persia’s western border areas are also populated by several million Kurds and, a small but significant number of Kurdish speakers is to be found in what in the early days of the Soviet Empire was called Trans-Caucasia.

Turkish nationalism

Quantifying the Kurds in any of their home areas has been vitiated by their well-founded fears when it comes to identifying themselves as such to the census enumerators. It is also true that the great growth in Middle Eastern population generally means that the official numbers of Kurds tend to be both out-of-date and massaged by each regime. The usual pattern of migration from rural to urban areas has occurred to a large extent over the last fifty [years]. Ankara’s fourteen-year war to subdue the east. Here Turkey’s NATO weaponry and western-funded, modernised road network has been deployed against the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) guerrillas led by Abdulla Ocalan. Roughly speaking there are at least 15 million Kurds in Turkey, 6 million in Iran, 4 million in Iraq and perhaps 2 million in Syria. Germany’s “guest-workers” include something like a million Turkish Kurds and there are significant numbers of both economic migrants and formal refugees in all the Common Market countries.

During the twenties and thirties, Ataturk’s Republican Party was looked upon very favourably not only by colonial “liberation” movements within the European empires for their successful example of resisting imperialist designs but also by western feminist and reform groups for Turkey’s secularisation of the state, abolition of the caliphate, purdah and religious forms of dress and the establishment of a westernised educational and legal system, equal in its treatment of men and women.

Ataturk’s dictatorship claimed, like so many others, that it was paving the way for parliamentary democracy. Rather less usual was that less than ten years after his death from cirrhosis of the liver (a non-Islamic disorder) a significant level of electoral pluralism was introduced. No sooner was this in effect than the electorate plumped, to the extent that such an option was provided, for the rejection of a substantially state-capitalist economy and an essentially secular social system. This being the trend it was not long before the army which saw itself as the guardian of Kemalist reforms, stepped in to restore the unquestionable, statist, secularist and nationalist set-up whether the electorate wanted it or not.

Just as Lenin’s dictatorship radically altered many aspects of Tsarist Russian society but quickly re-established Moscow’s rule over most of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire so the Turkish Republic, whilst unable or unwilling to restore any of the former empire, was soon to subject its Kurdish “citizens” to an intense programme of assimilation. This could well have been much more effective were it not that eastern Turkey where they mostly lived, like Italy’s South is the poorest and least economically developed part of the country .So whilst there is no chance of the kids there being made literate in their mother-tongue, a very large proportion are provided with nil or solely primary tuition in the state language. It is often the case that eighteen-year-old army conscripts are screamed at by sergeant-majors in what is effectively a foreign language which they have to learn PDQ.

Language Rights

When I first encountered Kurds in London in the sixties they were mostly here on Iraqi government scholarships to acquire British professional qualifications but in those days the idea of a fully independent pan-Kurdish state was considered a wholly unrealistic objective. This view was normal in Turkey where the prevailing aspiration was the achievement of language rights within a democratised federal version of existing states which retained their existing external borders.

Subsequent events in Iraq were to result in a chronically authoritarian system conceding its Kurdish region in the north of the country a considerable degree of autonomy. This was wrested from Baghdad at the cost of a protracted civil war. The war leader, Mustafa Barzani, father of the present head of the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), owed his defeat largely to the weight of Russian-supplied arms. And the conduit within the Baghdad government through whom these munitions were routed was the long-standing Kurdish Moscow-liner, Jalal Talabani of the PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), now in receipt of Teheran’s help in his current rivalry with Masoud Barzani over control of the northern Iraq “safe haven”.

As stated, Persia too has a Kurdish population, of some 6 million. However, unlike the case of Turkey and Iraq there have not been large outward movements of Kurds from either pre- or post-Khomeini Iran. As a consequence there is less contact or interaction with them than with any of the other locations. Nevertheless it was a Persian Kurd who, although his Marxism was reflected through a Leninist distorting mirror has provided us with the most penetrating historical analysis of Kurdish society. Kurdistan and the Kurds by Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou was published in London in English in 1989 (by Collets). The author was assassinated by the Iranian secret police, in Vienna in 1989.

In recent months the war in eastern Turkey has proved so destructive that the demand for federal status within the Turkish republic has been revived in Kurdish circles. For a socialist who has no desire for yet more flags and frontiers and who anticipates that the setting-up of a Kurdish state will no more solve the problems of members of the Kurdish working class than has been the case with scores of other “successful” national struggles, the most promising line of action would seem to be for Kurds in each Middle-Eastern republic to join with other workers to maximise their trade-union and democratic rights so that these can be used as a spring-board for the early attainment of a classless and borderless society. Such a socialist or communist society (they mean the same) will not only enable us to have free access to our material requirements but we shall democratically control the pace and nature of work that we freely choose to undertake. It would also be a way of life in which the language in which we express ourselves and the clothes we wear will be freely determined by each one of us.

Edmund Grant

Letters: Roll Call of Defeats not Victories (1997)

Letters to the Editors from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Roll Call of Defeats not Victories

The Socialist Standard berates Greens for proposing that modified capitalism can be environmentally friendly in a manner which tars all Greens with the same brush. Although the Green Party conference recently voted to focus spending on lobbying rather than Direct Action (i.e. “asking” capitalists to be greener) this stance is not true across the board. I have met Socialists and Anarchists who are ’greens’ in that they make ecology their specialist subject and/or take part in direct action.

I must say in passing that I see the world through class spectacles and I have to grit my teeth when obliged to share my earth-mover with landed gentry.

James Nash 

Swansea

Reply:
We do not tar all those who are concerned about the environment with the same brush. After all, we come into this category too (have you read our pamphlet Ecology and Socialism?). The difference between us and most of the others is that we are concerned about other problems besides the environment and that we think capitalism can never be modified to work in an environmentally-friendly way. Under capitalism profits and profit-making must come first before all other considerations, including protecting the environment and maintaining a sustainable ecological balance.

Our criticism is aimed at those Greens who think capitalism can be modified in this way, in particular the reformist Green Party but also those in bodies like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace who act on the same assumption.

It is true that the Green Party does offer an alternative to existing corporate and state capitalism, but this turns out to be the impossible dream of a return to an idealised version of small-scale capitalism, with co-operatives and small businesses producing for local markets.

Lobbying groups like Friends of the Earth avoid proposing any alternative to existing capitalism: they assume in practice that this form of capitalism will continue eternally and see their role as merely to lobby within it for new laws and regulations to protect the environment.

Lobbying can, occasionally, achieve a concession but we are talking about very minor adjustments which make no difference whatsoever to the overall functioning of capitalism as a system that has to put profit-making before all other considerations including the environment.

You seem to be suggesting that, unlike the Green lobbyists, the Green Direct Actionists are not reformist, but don’t be so sure. Some do just see direct action, i. e. physical pressure, as a means of backing up reformist lobbying to get some law changed. The others, apparently. really do think that they can coerce the state, but there are no facts to back this up.

Direct action can sometimes work against soft targets (such as hunts or shops selling furs) but it has never worked against the state. It has never stopped a single nuclear power station being built, nor a single motorway or by-pass. Twyford Down. M1, Newbury, this is a roll call of defeats not victories. Under these circumstances continually banging your head against a police truncheon is not an intelligent course of action, even if this might give rise to the illusion that you are not a reformist who wants to modify capitalism.

The intelligent action for Greens is to work towards building up a majority to end capitalism, the root cause of pollution and environmental destruction.

Editors

A new way of thinking?

Dear Editors,

In his generally very positive review of We Can Change the World: The Real Meaning of Everyday Life (Socialist Standard, September, 1996), Stan Parker neglects to mention the central thesis of my book.

I argue that capitalism and Marxism are based upon the same paradigm of history and the same view of human beings. In this paradigm, economic forces drive history and economic development is the basis of human development Self-interest is seen as the primary human motivation. The great mass of people are viewed as either passive victims or beneficiaries of the actions of élites. It is not possible to build a democratic society based on this paradigm.

In my view, Marxism has failed. Communist regimes which, rightly or wrongly, claimed Marx as their progenitor have collapsed. Marxist parties in advanced capitalist countries, that is, operating in those societies which Marxism would lead one to believe would be best suited to the growth of Marxist movements, have become marginalized or reformist or both. The idea of global revolution against capitalism, to create a new society based on cooperation and sharing, is in retreat even while such a transformation is more and more necessary.

In his landmark book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argues that scientists do not abandon a paradigm or model for understanding the world, no matter how much that model may seem to have failed, unless there is a new paradigm to take its place. The purpose of We Can Change the World is to propose a new way of thinking about people and society, a new paradigm, which makes revolution possible.

I maintain that revolution is possible because most people are already engaged in a struggle against capitalism to create a better world. Most people in their everyday lives struggle against a culture based on inequality, competition, and exploitation to create relationships based on equality and solidarity. This effort is not pure or unmixed in people's lives, and people may not be aware of the meaning of their efforts. But whatever equal and committed relationships people have in their lives, they have created them by struggle against capitalist culture. The smallest acts of kindness and the most collective arts of class struggle are on a continuum of struggle to humanize the world.

The revolutionary transformation of society is the only possible fulfillment of the goals and struggles of the great majority of people. The first condition for success in their effort is that people be aware of the significance of their struggles.

I counterpose my views to Marxism, which accepts the capitalist idea that self-interest is the fundamental human motivation. As Marx put it. "every individual seeks only his particular interest.” Marx believed with the capitalists that history is driven by economic development, which in turn is driven by greed. Unlike the capitalists, however, Marx maintained that greed leads not to permanence but to revolution.

Marx’s model of history does not see working people as conscious agents of change who act on the basis of anti-capitalist values. Instead Marxism sees working people primarily as dehumanized and passive victims of economic forces who. when they are moved to action, are moved by these same forces. Lenin’s concept of the revolutionary party was his attempt to supply Marx’s idea of revolution with a human subject with disastrous results.

There is one other point on which I would like to comment. I was taken aback by the picture of Mao accompanying the review of my book, and can’t imagine what are the "worryingly approving comments about the Cultural Revolution" to which the review refers. In fact I show that the Cultural Revolution was a"pseudo-revolution which triggered a real revolution" against the Communist Party, and that this real revolution was defeated by its ambivalence about Mao and its failure to attack him until he drowned the revolution in blood. The Mao portrait and caption are very misleading, and marred an otherwise positive review.

Dave Stratman

Reply:

We can agree with much of what you say about the form the revolution against capitalism must take. Our problem is that we don’t recognise the picture you paint of Marx.

1. It is true that in his early philosophical writings dating from the time he was becoming a socialist. Marx did tend to see the working class as a completely alienated and downtrodden mass that needed to be liberated with the help of others—philosophers.like himself and his fellow students of Hegel. But he soon abandoned this naive position in favour of the principle that “the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself', a position he held and applied for the rest of his life. So, contrary to your claim, Marx did see "working people as conscious agents of change”.

In any event, one of the meanings he attached to the term "alienation” in his early philosophical writings was, besides workers’ alienation (separation) from the product of their labour, their alienation from their nature as humans, their alienation from their humanity. This implies a position close to yours: that humans are not just the passive product of their circumstances, but also have an essential nature which can be suppressed but which will keep coming to the surface.

In fact, like you, Marx thought that the essential nature of humans was that they were social, co-operative beings seeking to co-operate to satisfy their needs and that this social need was frustrated by capitalism which sought to reduce them to isolated social atoms competing against each other. The passage you quote from Marx (taken from a footnote in the German Ideology) that "every individual seeks only his particular interest” is not. as you suggest, a statement of Marx’s view of what motivates humans under all circumstances. It is a reference to what is thought of as happening under conditions of bourgeois political democracy, i. e. under capitalism. Marx's point was that this was what happens under capitalism because under it there is no common, social interest.

This—the theory that humans act on the basis of “possessive individualism"—is of course the capitalist “paradigm" of human behaviour. But it wasn't Marx’s and is certainly not ours.

2. Marx's materialist conception of history (which we agree with) does have some of the features you attribute to it, in particular the primacy of economic factors. Marx held that it was the way humans were organised to meet their (material) needs that was the basis of human society; and that the form of human society changed as the way humans changed, in response to technological developments. the way they were organised to meet their needs. However, this was not an automatic process independent of human will and action. Since the break-up of the earliest, hunter-gatherer societies that had been based on common ownership, production for use and distribution according to need, human societies had been divided into classes, with one class benefiting from the economic arrangements on which society was based. Technological developments changed these arrangements and brought into being a new class with an interest in struggling for the spread of the new arrangements which benefited them. This was a political and ideological as well as an economic struggle.

The ideological struggle, although a reflection of an underlying conflict of economic interest. was not necessarily perceived to be this by those engaged in it. In other words, they were not necessarily hypocrites claiming to be pursuing some high ideal as a smokescreen for pursuing their less noble economic interest. In most cases they really did believe in the ideals they pursued. This was why Marx remarked that you can’t judge a historical epoch by what those engaged in it said they were struggling about (religion, honour, or whatever). His materialist conception of history accepted that humans were motivated by ideals. His point was that the ideals for which people struggled and died had, ultimately, an origin in society's economic arrangements, not that everybody always acted out of conscious economic self-interest.

3. In a sense in history up to now "the great mass of people" hove been "either passive victims or beneficiaries of the actions of élites”. But to claim that Marx held that the change from capitalism to socialism would take place on this basis too is a complete travesty of the real position. Consider, for instance, the following well-known passage from The Communist Manifesto: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities; the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority”.

Marx drew a distinction between the socialist revolution (which would end class society, and emancipate all humanity) and all previous revolutionary changes in society (which replaced one élite by another). In philosophical terms, Marx saw the socialist revolution as a great act of human liberation, one that would precisely free humanity from the sway of economic and historical forces which had a social origin in the way they were organised to meet their needs but which they could not control and had to submit to.

In freeing humans from the sway of these forces, socialism would allow them to control their own collective destiny, to act as rational beings consciously creating the life they freely chose (which was the ideal of 18th and 19th century philosophy). This was why Marx, who was steeped in this philosophical tradition, sometimes talked of real history—as the acts of free, rational beings— as only beginning with the end of class society. Similarly. what is generally called history—the period of class societies—became for him "prehistory", because during it humans were the passive victims of forces beyond their control.

This is all rather philosophical but it does show that Marx did not adhere to the "paradigm" of the change from capitalism to socialism you attribute to him. Lenin did and, in fact, if everywhere where you wrote "Marx" and "Marxism" you had written “Lenin" and "Leninism" your letter would have been spot on.

4. This does not mean that the working class majority that alone can establish socialism will be motivated exclusively by the ideal of liberating humanity. Since the socialist revolution will be a conscious revolution they will of course be aware of this and this will be an inspiring motive. At the same time, as human beings with material needs to be met. they will be motivated by the desire to establish a society in which these material needs will be met as a matter of course.

This is nothing to be ashamed of, as your approach tends to suggest, but is a quite reasonable and rational course of action. The same can be said about the economic struggles workers engage in under capitalism; these generally do have the aspects of solidarity, cooperation and simple humanity that you mention but they are also, even mainly, about those involved trying to satisfy their material needs better. To say this, and even that this is the primary motivation in most strikes, is not to demean them. It is not being greedy to want to satisfy your material needs; it is being natural since unless they are met you can’t enjoy life in other ways. Humans don't live by bread alone, but we can't live without it.

5. We are sorry if the photo of Mao accompanying our review of your book was inappropriate. The “worryingly approving comments” on the Cultural Revolution we had in mind was not that you showed any sympathy for Mao (which you didn't) but precisely the passage you quote about it being a "pseudo-revolution which triggered a real revolution". It was a pseudo-revolution. but it didn't trigger any “real revolution". As far as we are concerned, the whole episode was a struggle between various rival élites which had nothing to do with the working class.

Editors

These Foolish Things . . . Harvest (1997)

The Scavenger column from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Harvest 1

A recent US study has found that for every dollar spent on foreign aid for rice research, the US got back $17 in better varieties for its own crop. Aid dollars for wheat research realised 190-fold returns, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute. Guardian, 24 October.


Harvest 2

“I do it because I would prefer to die than see the rest of my family starve,” said Sabir Saleh, a middle-aged man who used to be a farmer but is now too poor to hire a tractor to plough his land. Every morning he goes out into the minefields laid around Penjwin, a village in northern Iraq shattered by fighting in the Iran-Iraq war. Mr Saleh looks for one mine in particular, the Italian made Valmara, one of the most lethal anti-personnel mines in existence. It is not easy to spot, because its five khaki-coloured prongs look like dried grass. Pressure on any one of them causes the Valmara to jump to waist height and explode, spraying 1.200 ball bearings over a range of 100 yards. “I defuse the mine with a piece of wire.” said Mr Saleh. “Then I unscrew the top of it and take out the aluminium around the explosives. When I have taken apart six mines I have enough aluminium to sell for 30 dinar (about 75 pence) to a shop in Penjwin.” Independent on Sunday, 20 October.


Our friendly bobby

Two policemen have been accused of abducting a homeless old woman who had been sheltering in a terminal at Heathrow airport . They are said to have bundled her into a van and dumped her 25 miles away on a golf course at midnight. In December last year an officer was reported for attacking a down-and-out with his American-style baton. A pilot spotted the officer hitting the man five times, causing head injuries which required hospital treatment. Mail on Sunday, 20 October.


Trust the market!

There are 40,000 programmers working as temps in the UK alone—a figure that has doubled in the last two years. Basic pay is £200 a day, a total wage bill for British industry of at least £2 billion a year and. because there’s still a shortage, rates are climbing . . . Contract programmers might seem risky and expensive, but they’re better and cheaper than the alternative . . . Sharing the available bodies helps meet the demand for their skills. But this is only half the solution—the skills gap in the industry is getting worse, according to a depressing report from the Institute of Data Processing Management called “The End is Nigh”. The report says that too few programmers are being trained—partly as a result of companies relying on contractors . . . “New programmers are not coming through and there’s still a shortage for the older languages. Training for contractors is pretty rare, so they can't develop new skills.” Guardian, 7 November.


Poor outlook

Nearly one household in six in Britain is living below the poverty line, putting the country on a par with some of the poorest states in the European Union, according to the The Cohesion Report, published by the European Commission, 6 November.

'Scavenger'

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

Clueless and Classless (1997)

TV Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

In examining the concept of class and whether John Major has succeeded in creating a classless Britain, ITV’s World In Action last month maintained its usual high standard of visual entertainment while simultaneously slipping badly in its standards of reporting. Like an insipid pint of beer there was plenty of froth but little body.

A number of celebs were paraded in front of the cameras to air their views on what they perceived the word "class” to mean. Style guru Peter York, footballer and PR merchant Max Clifford were among those who joined Tony Benn and Tory MP Steve Norris to declare an interest in the subject. This was the froth, but it was far more nourishing and tasty than anything that was to follow. While gung-ho. patriotic Tory-loving Vinnie Jones set out to convince anyone yet to make their mind up about him that he is indeed a total muttonhead. many of the others expressed views that bordered on the sensible—even Tony Benn.

Benn declared that the only meaningful conception of class is that which defines it in terms of how people get what they need to live, and that no political or economic problems will be solved unless the fundamental division in modern society between the owning class and the workers is addressed rather than avoided. This sound analysis was only spoilt by the fact that Benn is a man who has been a willing participant in anti-working class Labour governments which have attacked the living standards of the majority in the interests of capital, and who will be standing under Blair's banner at the next election—Blair himself being a politician who reiterates almost every time he speaks the importance of putting the "old class divisions” behind us to build a "united Britain”.

Quite amazingly. Peter York, a well-heeled ex-public schoolboy who has made a small fortune out of rather superficial social commentary about Sloane Rangers. Essex Man and the like, came out as a putative Marxist on the issue. While many could be forgiven for thinking that York would be one of the last-ditch defenders of the idea that class is all about etiquette, clothes, style, dialect and other fripperies, he instead rejected this view, stating that Marx's conception of what constitutes a social class is right after all! Only slightly less straightforward was the viewpoint of Max Clifford, who demonstrated that he, too, was not taken in by the camouflage draped over the issue by politicians and the newspapers.

Downhill all the way
But once this appetising froth was out of the way. the dregs were not far behind. The World In Action reporting team continually peppered their commentary with the assertion—never substantiated once—that the changing social structure of Britain was exemplified by the statistic that there are now as many "middle class" people as there are "working class". Though no evidence was given for it and no argumentation deployed to justify it either. this was presented time and again.

What constitutes "middle class"? They didn’t say. Why was the analysis of Tony Benn and Peter York dismissed in such a way? We weren't told. What seems likely is that this was either a deliberate attempt to confuse people or simply make the subject more “complicated" than it actually is, or alternatively simply slopping reporting.

Either way, it served as a springboard for a hopelessly irrelevant segment centred around the chairman of the MORI polling organisation. Bob Worcester, who took it as his cue to bombard anyone still watching with meaningless statistics about Essex Man and Worcester Woman, and how important the lie machines at Tory Central Office and Walworth Road consider them to be. While the commentary made the valid point that those at the bottom of the pile are being left out in the bigger political game, why give this type of analysis house space in the first instance? Its only real validity would be if the political ideologies of the main political parties were determined by what Worcester Woman thinks. But this is sheer fantasy, and is at least in part what the parties themselves would like their target voters to think about them, i.e. listening to the voters and shaping their policies accordingly. The reality is that the politics of the Labour and Tory parties is determined by their support for capitalism, and by the needs of requirements of the owning class at any given point in history. Essex Man and Worcester Woman can go and whistle if anything they do or think comes into conflict with that, and this journal for one is full of relevant examples.

This is why John Major’s hope of creating a classless society was just so much hot air. To create a really classless society would require the abolition of the political and economic power of the capitalist class. Neither Major nor Blair want this, only a removal of the perceived social barriers which make it more difficult to move from what is really the working class to the class of capital owners (they are presumably well aware that this is difficult enough without any additional impediments). Style, etiquette, dialect and background should not matter they say—only profits, markets and stocks and shares. Capitalists and workers would then truly be of one social class, only distinguishable by a few million pounds, as if such a triviality as that should matter among friends! And all this in the finer defence of a parasites' world of inaction where to be truly classless—Vinnie Jones— is to be totally clueless with it

Dave Perrin

Socialist Party to stand five candidates (1997)

Party News from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the coming General Election the Socialist Party will be putting up five candidates, the highest number yet in a parliamentary election. Two will be standing in Scotland, two in the North East and one in London.

The seats and candidates are:

Glasgow Kelvin: Vic Vanni
Livingston: Matt Culbert
Jarrow: John Bissett
Easington: Steve Colborn
London Vauxhall: Richard Headicar

Around 40,000 election addresses will be distributed by the Post Office in each of the five constituencies, but this will only be during the election which must take place sometime before May next year.

In the meantime preparatory work has started, with meetings, literature stalls and leaflet distribution in the constituencies. If you want to help with this, or want further information about the socialist campaign, the contact persons for the constituencies are:

Glasgow: Vic Vanni, Flat A, 26 Baker Street, Glasgow G41 3YE. Phone: 0141-649 9338.
Livingston: Matt Culbert, 53 Falcon Brae, Ladywell, West Lothian, EH54 6UW. Phone: 01506-162 359.
Jarrow: John Bissett, 10 Scarborough Parade, Hebburn.Tync & Wear NE31 2AL. Phone: 0191-189 0253.
Easington: Harland Wear, Phone 0191 5170470
London: Gareth Thomas, 185c Northcote Road, London SW11 6QF. Phone:0171-585 1856.

If you are not living in any of these areas you can make a contribution to the Election Fund. The amount in the fund at the moment is £6,292, not much compared to what the pro-capitalist parties will have to spend. The more money we have the more effectively can we make the voice of socialism heard. Cheques (made payable to‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain*) should be sent to: Election Fund. 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Research Dept (1997)

Party News from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World Socialist Movement site on the World Wide Web is soon to be "re-launched". For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a web site is a series of pages published by an organisation on the Internet. The Research Dept are organising a new section for the site, to be called Worldview (after the section in the Standard) which will aim to cover a range of global issues. We will be planning a publicity campaign to accompany this "re-launch". Please do not hesitate to contact us c/o Head Office if you would like to help e.g. by wiring an article, finding useful information on a particular issue, editing material, organising publicity.

We will be making the research available to those not on the Internet.

Greasy Pole: The Year of the Idea? (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nineteen Ninety Seven is European Year Against Racism, a year of "tolerance and goodwill", according to the grandly titled European Parliamentary Intercultural Committee, who want us to drop them a line to tell them what we are doing about it. This will be good news to what is sometimes called the Anti-Racism Industry, but it should not be quite so welcome to other groups—like refugees, children, the homeless—who may remember years in the past given over to focusing on their suffering. There is no evidence that having a year all to themselves so much as dented their problems, let alone abolished them.

For example, if anything did come out of the year for refugees it will have been completely swamped by the effects of a series of wars which have spawned their own flood of pitiful, terrified, starving people trying to flee from the fighting. Most recently this has been the case in the Gulf. Bosnia. Africa. . . . Whatever may have been done for children there is still the gruesome evidence of the neglect, abuse and violence which is meted out to them—which according to organisations like the NSPCC and the National Children’s Homes, has been worsened by the deeper poverty associated with unemployment. And when those grosser symptoms of poverty are absent there remain the diseases which are avoidable but which flourish when children are neglected or stressed or malnourished.

Health visitors
In a survey in 1995 the Health Visitors’ Association found that almost a third of their members came across cases of tuberculosis. Rickets was found in 25 cases and more than 80 percent of the Health Visitors knew of children who were failing to thrive—a phrase which can cover appalling physical and emotional deficiencies—because of undernourishment or neglect. The health visitors who are at the sharp end of working-class life have no illusions about tackling problems with special years. Their director tells us that ". . .  the many improvements in health and welfare are being undermined by the effects of desperate poverty on a national scale".

Those "many improvements in health and welfare” were based on the plans laid down in the Beveridge Report. A recent issue of the Guardian republished part of a leader written on Beveridge on 2 December 1942. It was. said the leader ". . .  a big and fine thing. It will go towards securing for the British people 'freedom from want' . . .  it will strengthen our democracy by raising the happiness and wellbeing of 'the common man”'. It is almost ghoulish to remember that now, after all the promises, the dreams and the effort. They were all killed off by the central reality that we live under a social system in which the priorities are the exploitation of its workers, the production of wealth for sale and the amassing of capital. Human interests count only in so far as they serve those priorities.

Homeless
Our final example is the homeless. They too have had a year apparently given over to eradicating their plight. Not that there was nothing being done about it already. Shelter, for example, was formed over 30 years ago; at the time it was assumed to be a short-lived organisation because the problem was accessible to reform. But that is not how it is now according to Shelter’s occasional reviews, which show that homelessness of one sort or another grows and grows regardless. It has grown in spite of the rise of the Housing Association, with its promise of cheap, good standard, available accommodation but which has been gobbled up by local councils and is now similarly strapped for cash. In some cases homelessness is not a simple problem. Its roots go rather deeper, for many young people prefer to live on the streets because they find there the sense of welcome and security which they desperately need after fleeing from a brutal, abusive or neglectful family. So they too are a part of the wider problem of a society whose very structure, from its basis upwards and outwards, cannot meet the needs of the majority of its people. And what do our political leaders have to say about this? For them 1997 will also be a special year because there must be a general election. John Major is in desperate trouble as his government is revealed, more and more, day by day, in all its impotence and venality—and in the fractiousness which springs from its impotence. If things had gone better for him Major would obviously have opted for an election before this but he has been forced to hang on, increasingly wretched, in the hope that something would turn up.

How is the Labour Party dealing with this situation? If we are to go by the actions and utterances of Tony Blair we would conclude that he has been carefully studying the Conservative Party and decided that, as they have been so successful at achieving and holding onto power, Labour's best chance of winning an election is to be as much like the Tories as possible. Some of his supporters—like the awful Jack Straw— have adopted this policy so enthusiastically that they have became more Tory, as it were, than the Tories. Straw, after all, has managed the difficult task of making Michael Howard look like a liberal, soft-on-crime Home Secretary.

Along with this ruthless reshaping of the Labour Party so that it more closely appears in its true colours as an aspiring alternative government for British capitalism, Blair has spewed out a copious stream of the most appalling guff. For example his book New Britain is a rich (if that is the word) source of the kind of meaningless ravings which politicians use to convince the voters that they are people with an inspired vision of the future. Just look at a few of his phrases: "It is about giving power to you. the individual . . . the bringing of a country together, a sharing of the possibility of power, wealth and opportunity . . .  the problems of low pay and unemployment must be tackled at source . . . "

By now our more sensitive readers will have had enough. The point is that that is nothing new in all this. There is nothing new in Major’s difficulties, nothing new in Blair’s evasive verbiage. We have to measure the value, the effectiveness of these things in the reality we experience all around us. In the homeless, in the refugees, in the sick and hungry children. The politicians’ impotence to affect these problems docs not deter them; they continue to mouth the same promises, wrapped up in the same empty claptrap.

So here, for the New Year, is an idea. We need a year when we focus, not on the separate plight of a particular group suffering under capitalism’s demands, not on the deceptions of political leaders, but on the real, basic causes of society’s problems and what we ourselves can do to change society from the basis and all that follows.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: The Nationalisation of the Railways (1997)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naturally the shareholders clamour for higher compensation. Their special grievance is that, unlike the Bank of England shareholders, they are not being guaranteed the same income as they were getting during or before the war. In effect, they are to receive a State-guaranteed income of about £22,500,000 a year in place of a larger but uncertain sum they received as shareholders in concerns the profitability of which had been rendered precarious by road competition. How the shareholders must regret not having jumped at Nationalisation on the much better terms they would have got in 1919, when profits and share values were higher!

So much for the shareholders. What of the workers? The workers merely change one employer for another; little else is changed, for the State undertaking, as the Daily Herald specially emphasises (November 19th, 1946), has got to pay its way. The Evening Standard remarks that nationalisation cannot bring any possible benefit to the railway worker— "for him it can mean neither higher wages nor shorter hours" (November 19th, 1946). And the Observer, in like vein, says. "It . . . leaves the transport workers and the consumers to wonder what difference it can make to them except for the worse" (December 30th. 1946).

The Labour Government has kept its pledge to nationalise transport but for the workers it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nationalisation is State capitalism and leaves untouched the real problem of the working class of emancipating themselves from capitalist exploitation.

(From front page article by ‘H’ in Socialist Standard, January 1947)

It Could Be You! (1997)

From the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

So, you think the idea of a socialist society in which everyone cooperates to provide the things which we all require to live decent lives free from poverty, unemployment, homelessness, war and want is a utopian dream; you think abolishing the wages system and along with it the slavery of employment is too far fetched to bother with, well keep doing the Lottery — who knows, you might win!

Were it not for the poverty and misery of capitalism two institutions would not exist: the National Lottery and the Socialist Party. Both are responses to real problems and genuine discontent.

The lottery exists as an illusive escape from working-class life for millions of people who have been conned into believing that becoming a multi-millionaire by gambling is more likely than being struck by lightning. The same mugs do the football pools and keep the bookies in business. They speculate upon the worst bet in the world and then pour more money into Camelot’s profits to ensure that they will be in with a chance of losing again the following week.

The Socialist Party exists because some people—very few of us at present— have asked ourselves why it is that there is poverty and misery in the world. We have concluded that it is a consequence of the way society is organised. Production for sale with a view to profit means that needs will always come a poor second to profit-making. As profits arc accumulated by the small minority of the earth’s population who own the productive resources but produce no wealth, and as unmet needs are largely those of the working-class majority who do produce all of society’s wealth, we have concluded that the profit system works against the interest of the majority of us. Capitalism is a bad bet for the working class and a safe bet for the capitalist class. The capitalists win the lottery every week. How? They pay us less than the value of what we have produced for them to sell on the market.

So, unlike the main parties which canvass working-class support, the Socialist Party says that the profit system— capitalism—the market economy—(these all mean roughly the same thing) —should not be maintained or reformed but abolished. We are an anti-capitalism party. No promises from socialists that if you vote for us you will have more chance of winning the lottery or even getting an extra tenner in your pay packet. We say unequivocally that it is the system which pays workers to produce profits for the few which is the cause of the problems facing the majority.

The right choice
Our remedy for capitalism’s problems is not better capitalism but no capitalism. We stand for unadulterated socialism. Not state capitalism like they had in Russia or China or Cuba, but a new system of society in which production is solely for use.

We contend that producing for use is both more practically efficient and democratically desirable than continuing with capitalism and all of its inevitable problems stemming from profit before need. Get rid of capitalism and replace it by common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

In a socialist society productive resources will be owned by all, without discrimination of race or sex, and will be democratically controlled by the whole community. Because production will be simply for use there will be no need for the market. There will be no buying and selling. There will be no money. There will be free access to all goods and services.

Most people would prefer to live in a socialist society, as we have described it, than the present capitalist one. Few people like the poverty and misery caused by capitalism: we know that because so many are trying desperate measures, such as giving money to the lottery, as a way out. People go in for all kinds of hopeless gambles to escape from capitalism. They borrow large amounts of money from banks to set up small businesses, most of which fail because they can’t compete with the big capitalists. They emigrate to other countries in the false hope that poverty will not be found in distant lands They steal and end up behind bars for long stretches. They prostitute their dignity doing horrible jobs which no self-respecting person would choose to do. They cheat on their friends and neighbours. They pray. All of these are more-or-less useless. There is no escape for workers from the effects of capitalism within the confines of the system.

So, what about the socialist gamble? For most people, appealing as socialism sounds in contrast with the present system, the prospect of achieving socialism is too small to be worth the risk of dedicating time to working for its establishment. It’s a tempting argument. After all, being a socialist involves hours—which can turn into years—of trying to persuade others of the logic of the case for changing the system. Trying to win a majority to socialist consciousness can meet with derision and ridicule. It involves the time-consuming effort of organising democratically and co-operating with fellow socialists. It can leave you angry at times that people who could benefit so much from socialism are wasting their efforts on useless pursuits like trying to reform capitalism or hoping that they will win the lottery.

Those who consider the gamble and decide against joining the socialists will often attempt to justify their inaction by resorting to common, but utterly false, arguments. They will say that socialism is against human nature. Even though private property, the market and money have only actually existed for a small fraction of the time that humans have lived on the earth. (Were the majority of humans who ever lived not “naturally human”?) They will say that the workers are too stupid to understand the need for socialism. In that case, how did they come to understand it—and how did we who are socialists? They will say that the media will always keep the people mentally enslaved. Now, that’s a strong argument, but history abounds in examples of people who have overcome the propaganda of religion, education and the mass media and overthrown regimes they have not liked. 

Picking a winner

The most honest argument of the person who sympathises with socialism but refuses to join the socialists is to admit to being lazy about changing society. “I'll be with you on the day,” they say, as if socialism could ever come about if a majority of people decided to sit back and wait for it. The truth is that there will be no socialism without conscious socialists, just as there could be no Socialist Party without democratically organised socialist activists. We are not active because we like being in a minority, but because we have good historical reason to believe that in time and with effort we can be in a majority.

If we are wasting our time as active socialists, the present writer’s view is that it’s better to waste time and be right than to devote energy to a growing movement which is based upon a wrong analysis of how society works and how it needs to be changed. There is some satisfaction in knowing that your political position is invincible. (And if it’s not, let our critics show us where we are wrong—enough have tried and failed.) But even so, the satisfaction of being correct is not enough.

The problem is far greater for the people who nod their heads and smile in passive agreement with socialism and then conclude that the gamble will be a waste of their time. You see, the choice is not between socialism as it could be and life under capitalism as it is. One of the special features of capitalism is its tendency to take people who are just about surviving, perhaps even in a bit of comfort, and kicking them into the ditch of dire poverty. The problem for the workers who bet on capitalism is that it could be them—not winning the lottery, but losing everything.

Think about the risks of supporting this system. What would happen if tomorrow morning you lost your job? And how many couples need both partners in employment for them to survive? What about if you or a close family member falls ill and the only way of helping them properly is to pay for private medical attention? What about if your child becomes a victim of the next Chernobyl or the next Bhopal? What if the big powers decide to fight over the spoils once again and powerful fingers start getting itchy near to nuclear buttons? What control will you have over any of those situations? It will be too late then to decide that it would have been better to have done something earlier to bring about a new system of society in which none of these problems could occur.

Just as the lottery gambler is a pathetic figure standing in a sea of filth with an empty perfume spray, so the worker who agrees with socialism but will do nothing about it is a fool to him or herself. The continuation of the profit system relies upon the inertia resulting from such folly. The future of society, as we move from a system which fails the majority to one which is sane, co-operative and practical, depends upon overcoming that folly and ignorance of the majority. And overcoming it is not up to someone else. We need more active socialists now—and it could be you.

Steve Coleman

Intoxicating spirit (1997)

Book Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Price of a Cigar by Peter Wood,  Anchor Books, £9.95.

Books written from film scripts and from the texts of plays are comparatively rare, but here is one. Based on the play The Strike of 1889, which ran for 26 sell-out performances in 1994, The Price of a Cigar, tells the story of the London dockers' strike of 1889.

I didn’t see the play but the book makes easy, often compelling. reading. The author claims that the events took place much as they are described and this seems credible.

The story traces the life of one docker and his family, describing in touching detail the squalid, crushing poverty of life in the East End of London. We follow the beginnings of the strike, and its subsequent development, through the actions of the strike committee, the rapacious behaviour of the London Dock Employers, and an American reporter employed by the Times. If the dialogue is sometimes less than convincing, with common language of the late twentieth century occasionally intruding into nineteenth century speech patterns, this seems not to matter very much. Wood tells the story with drive and gusto, and manages to capture something of the intoxicating spirit which drove the strikers on.and which finally led the employers to climb down and accept the strike committee’s demands.

But it was a pyrrhic victory. Nothing really had been changed. Over a hundred years later, in 1994, the remnants of the once vast army of Liverpool dockers were sacked as they protested against the return of precisely the conditions which had led the London dockers to strike in 1889. Their union seemingly powerless to intervene— hamstrung by the anti-trade union legislation of the 1980s.

Writing about the book John Monks, the present chairman of the Trades Union Congress. describes it as "A moving and truly memorable account of ordinary lives that changed history.’’Moving and memorable"? Well yes. But "an account of ordinary lives that changed the course of history"? Not really. The capitalist class remains in power; workers continue to be exploited; the essential social relations which obtained before the 1889 strike remain in place.

Workers understandably fight to improve their conditions under capitalism, but the burden of their efforts, strategically, must be to change history by replacing capitalism, not by reforming it or concentrating on defensive struggles alone. Nothing less will do.

Michael Gill

Author’s note: 

As he has no wish to needlessly swell the coffers of W.H. Smith, Dillons, etc., the author intends to forward the profit from all books sold as a result of this review to the fund for the families of the Liverpool Dockers The price of the book is £9.95. Any reader requiring a copy should send two cheques, one for £5.55 payable to Anchor Books to cover the cost of the book plus packing and delivery, and one for £4.40 payable to the Merseyside Dockers Family Hardship Fund. Post both cheques with order to: Anchor Books, Anchor House, 54 Whiteadder Way, London El4 9UR. Copies will be signed by the author if requested.

Editorial: The same difference (1997)

Editorial from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a popular misconception that the reason for the deprivation and misery in Britain is because we have had 17 years of Tory rule. This is a misconception which Tony Blair and his gang of professional liars and spin doctors are keen to perpetuate. They would have us believe that they will bring back the ‘'feel-good" factor, deliver the poor from their misery and provide security for us all.

What they cynically forget to tell us is how they will achieve something that no government has ever achieved—that of running capitalism in a way that satisfies the needs of the majority. And Tony Blair has been honest about one thing: he wants to run capitalism.

In that respect he is the same as the Tories. He wants to manage a system which only really works in the interests of that small minority who live very well off the wealth which the vast majority of us produce but receive only a portion in return.

Within capitalism we can only at best hope for meagre survival. Workers don’t enjoy the security and wealth which comes from owning the means of production. Only about 2 percent of the population—the capitalist class—are in this privileged position. The rest of us have to survive on leaner pickings. This class division has changed little over the past 200 years and in many respects the gap has widened.

Is it any surprise that those who want to continue running such a system would be keen to sweep such inequality under the carpet? Be they Tory or Labour, of course they would have us believe there is no such thing as class or that we are not being screwed for the benefit of a capitalist minority and their highly paid lackeys.

No politician can help us: if we are going to improve things we will not do so by following professional politicians or leaders of any kind. We are going to have to act for ourselves to organise ourselves democratically to bring about a society geared to serving human needs, not profits.

From 'Third World' to One World (1997)

From the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a long time, economists' expectations about what would happen to the "developing” or "third world” were shaped by an influential theory first put forward by the economist and MP David Ricardo in the last century. According to his theory of "diminishing returns”, national economies, as they grew, could be expected to slow down and eventually to come to a halt. The corollary of this was that the poorer nations could be expected to catch up because their rates of growth would be faster.

Ricardo, however, exaggerated any “diminishing returns" problem and did not take account of a number of important factors. Foremost among these was the influence which states can exert on trade patterns through protectionism, dumping and all the other long-used tactics of developed states, and the economic blocs which they form to protect their interests. Also, huge initial amounts of capital are required before a company can even begin to compete in many world markets, and the emergence of such companies is near impossible in small, poor nations.

History has forced economists to question the Ricardian theory. Average growth for 16 rich countries surveyed by the Economist (25-31 May) has slowed since the early 1970s in particular, but it is still above the average. As for the supposed faster growth among the developing world, "if there is any discernible pattern . . .  it is the opposite: poorer countries have tended to grow more slowly".

Interestingly, the UN Development Programme administrator, James Speth. believes "the world has become more economically polarised" and that “if present trends continue, economic disparities between industrial and developing nations will move from inequitable to inhuman" (Observer, 21 July). 

As a result, many of the world's poorest countries have seen average incomes decline and increased polarisation. The wealth of many nations has actually declined in recent years. Eighty-nine countries are reporting lower per-capita incomes than they were 10 years ago.

During the 1980s average real incomes were reported to have fallen by 10 percent in most of Latin America and 20 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. In many urban areas wages have fallen by as much at 50 percent.

The 1980s' decline in average incomes in many developing countries has continued in the 90s: in 1990, average per capita income fell by over 2.5 percent in Latin America and by over 2 percent in Africa.

The UN Human Development Report states that the poorest 20 percent of the world's population have seen their share of world income fall from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent over the past 30 years (Guardian, 29 July). In sub-Saharan Africa, the number of families who are unable to meet their most basic needs has doubled in a decade (Fairer World Statistics). Furthermore. according to OXFAM projections, the future looks little brighter for the rest of Africa, the Middle East, South and Central America.

A World Bank report only tells half the story when stating that "flows of private capital to poor countries have quadrupled to $170 billion a year in the past five years. Over a third of the world's foreign direct investment now goes to them”. This investment was actually targeted at eight countries who receive two-thirds of this investment, while most others have been left by the wayside.

In stark contrast to the hopes of charity organisations such as UNICEF, overseas dcvelopment aid (ODA) can be relied upon even less as a substantial source of help for poorer states. In 1993, ODA fell 8 percent from 1992 levels to US$56 billion (20-20 Plan, UNICEF pamphlet).

The significance of all this is that it dispels the illusion of there being an inevitable and ongoing sense of progress within global capitalism. And any "progress" that does occur is sure to bypass the world's poorest. Ricardo got it wrong—inequality and uneven development are fundamental features of the capitalist system. Nearly 200 years after he wrote, this is more apparent than ever.

Dan Greenwood

Spiv Culture (1997)

The A Word In Your Ear column from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain has become a nation of spivs and the new national hero is Arthur Daley. Only fools, horses and used-car salesman would find reason to celebrate this victory of commerce over common decency as something to be amused by. There is a foul smell of dirty money in the air and the polluters are more often than not would-be entrepreneurs with one foot in the capitalist class and the other on a banana skin. Wanna buy a fake Rolex, gov? Anyone for shares in a company that doesn’t exist? Or timesharcs? Or a chance to rob old ladies without doing time?

I happened to find myself seated in yet another Indian restaurant (“Does this man do anything else with his life?” readers may ask) and at the next table were two oafish drunks who slurred their way through several brandies and some nosh talking about how they were going to get stinking rich. One of them was involved in selling in-flight confectionery to a well-known airline. They both looked like men who had suddenly discovered that there are legal ways to get rich. “As long as we stick together... [belch]... yeah, stick together, see, and keep the product quality high ... [fart]... we’ll be able to corner the market. Trust me . . . [glug] . . . there's money in these chocolates, mate.” They ended up by shouting abuse at the waiter who had apparently been too slow with their last brandy and by handing round complimentary' chocolates to people at other tables. So, these were the crooks responsible for making money out of what loosely passes as airline food. These were the cutting edge of the enterprise culture.

These spivs were the boys who loved Maggie because she understood and delighted in the power of money. They liked Major better than Kinnock (who looked like the kind of bloke who would make a loss running a jumble sale), but they prefer Blair to Major because he talks their language. Just as the mud is the natural home of the slug, so the market is the social home of the spiv. Mind you, not the deep end. That is reserved for the multinationals. The 1990s loadasmoncy market-louts are happy to be poking around in the swamp for enough room to make a few grand and buy themselves a villa on the Costa Brava.

There is even a whole area of academia now reserved for training people to become spivs. They call it Business Studies. In fact, the study involved is how to make yourself appear as a respectable spiv. It is the most disreputable area of contemporary education. usually taught by failed bank managers and salary' slaves with earnest commitment to their slavery. It is probably one of the most useful degrees or diplomas to get in the 1990s. “History? English literature? Theoretical physics? Who needs 'em when there’s a world out there waiting to buy damaged goods?”

The myth that spivs went out of fashion after rationing was abolished and there was no black market for wide-boys to exploit is to miss the point: the true spiv never was the guy with dirty fingernails flogging rationed goods to people with money; the true spiv wears the best of second-class suits and flogs rubbish to people who can’t really afford them. The great business skill of modern capitalism is the sale of useless items by fast-talking crap merchants.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg

There is an indignity, not to mention an invidious inequality, about living in a society which rewards worshippers of the fast buck. A society which treats nurses like dirt and which allows some people to buy houses in the country, with money made from jerry-building and the sale of the cheap and shoddy, is rotten at its roots. Actually, Arthur Daley was at best pathetic and at worst a rather nasty trickster whose trickery was protected by his ability to buy a minder to keep the innocent away from him. What kind of a society acclaims such entrepreneurs? And yet look around the benches of the House of Lords and you will see more than a few of them sitting there, honoured as thieves of repute. (Remember Harold Wilson's Honours List?)

Wandering around the streets of Minsk a few' months ago it was impossible to avoid the constant pull by fast-talking street traders who were determined to flog you a souvenir tablecloth or a pair of old shoes. Their sales talk was incessant, made all the more irritating by the broken American accents and phrases they had picked up from ads on MTV. They will be tomorrow's graduates of the new business schools being set up to train a new generation of spivs in a country where the ruling crooks used to call themselves communists. No, of course it’s not just Britain which has become a nation of spivs. World capitalism is a system of international spivvery. To hell with it! 

Steve Coleman

Spanish Anarchism & Libertarianism (1997)

Book Review from the January 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

To Remember Spain: The Anarchist and Syndicalist Revolution of 1936. Essays by Murray Bookchin (AK Press £4.50.)

This pamphlet consists of two essays: "An Overview of the Spanish Libertarian Movement" and "After Fifty Years: the Spanish Civil War".

Bookchin’s view of the Spanish Civil War is made clear from the outset. In the preface he describes it as "the greatest proletarian and peasant revolution to occur over the past two centuries". Compared with similar struggles in Italy, Germany and Austria, he writes that the Spanish working class and peasantry put up a massive, brave and organised resistance to the forces of fascism in the guise of Franco's military uprising. Bookchin views the Spanish Civil War not as a struggle to defend a discredited and treacherous republican regime but to create a social revolution in Spanish society. Much literature on Spain has tended to play down the more radical forms the conflict took, with the so-called Communist movement at the forefront of this camouflage.

As its title would suggest, much of the first essay deals with the development of the Spanish Anarchist movement, its structure, attempts at democratic control and how these varied from the countryside to the more urban areas.

The remainder discusses the problems of building a mass libertarian movement in the circumstances which have changed since the time of the Spanish Civil War. Bookchin highlights those changes and the limitation of unions, syndicalist as well as reformist. He outlines the capacity of the capitalist system to condition the working class through institutions like the family, school, religious organisations, the factory and trade unions. The system teaches workers obedience, hierarchy, the work ethic and authoritarian discipline and these also have their effects on organisations formed to try to emancipate workers from capitalism. Employment, (although Bookchin uses the term "factory"), and the class organisations that spring from it, are seen as most important in instilling docility in workers, manifesting itself in a commitment to hierarchical organisations and authoritarian leaders with the result that most militant groups and situations can be bought off to serve the interests of a reformist labour bureaucracy.

Bookchin does not provide clear-cut answers to these problems, nor would we expect him to do so, but while socialists may not always agree with the attempts to formulate a solution he does make, this sort of discussion should be of concern to all of us attempting to build libertarian forms of organisation that can begin to challenge capitalism.

In the second essay Bookchin argues against the view of the so-called Communists that Spain was too economically backward for a socialist/anarchist revolution. He sees this as just an excuse for the reactionary role they played in destroying the more radical elements in the civil war in the interest of the dictatorship of the state capitalist Soviet Union, adding that if Spain in 1936-9 was too economically backward then so was Russia in 1917. The more radical initiatives which the "Communists" helped to destroy is well documented as is the reactionary role of popular frontism. What is not considered is the implications of their isolation in one country. The causes of the Civil War are considered by Bookchin to be cultural as well as economic.

The second essay also gives an interesting account of the depth of what has been called the Spanish revolution. In the Catalonia region it is estimated that three-quarters of the economy was under "workers’ control" and in what are described as "the more thoroughly anarchist areas” especially among the agrarian collectives, money was eliminated and the material means of life were allocated according to need rather than work, but it is clear that the circumstances varied from region to region.

Whilst sometimes Bookchin uses the terms socialist and Marxist in, to say the least, irritating ways this pamphlet is still well worth reading. It is certainly an encouragement to find out more about the “Spanish revolution" if your knowledge of it is limited. Some may feel Bookchin overstates the significance of the Spanish Civil War or the depth of support for the more radical movements within it What cannot be denied, even sixty years on, is that it was an event of enough significance to analyse and learn from.

Ray Carr