Voice From The Back: Free (?) Trade (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Free (?) Trade 

The embattled head of the World Trade Organisation, Mike Moore, is pledging to use next week’s global trade talks in Seattle to open up the rich markets of the west to poor countries in an attempt to defuse the biggest demonstration in America since the Vietnam war. With the FBI fearful that the arrival of up to 150,000 protesters against the start of a new round of trade liberalisation talks may result in widespread disruption and violence, Mr Moore said in an interview with the Guardian that he was seeking to put right the “great injustices” of the world’s trading system . . . However, attempts by trade diplomats to produce an agreed text in advance have foundered and the WTO has come under attack from non-governmental organisations for being undemocratic, indifferent to the environment and dominated by multinational companies. Guardian, 25 November.

The death trade 

Britain last year continued to sell weapons to countries with poor human rights records despite the government’s pledge to bring an “ethical dimension” to foreign policy, the annual report on arms sales published yesterday shows. The government approved export licences for a wide range of military equipment to Indonesia, Turkey, China, Bahrain, and Algeria, as well as Saudi Arabia, Britain’s main arms customer. The report shows nearly £2bn worth of weapons were exported by Britain last year, including 38 armoured combat vehicles to Indonesia, 18 Tornado aircraft, 100 air-to-ground missiles to Saudi Arabia, and over 400 air-launched missiles to the United Arab Emirates. Guardian, 4 November.

Saving lives or profits 

The Boeing Corp. failed to disclose key findings from a 1980 report about fuel-tank problems in its jumbo jets that could have assisted federal safety investigators probing the crash off Long Island in 1996 . . . Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the subcommittee that oversees airline-disaster probes, told the Post that Flight 800’s crash could have been prevented had Boeing disclosed the report earlier. In 1990, a fuel-tank explosion on a different model jet, a Philippines Airline 737, killed eight people. New York Post, 29 October.

Couldn’t care less 

Old people are dying after operations because of hospital staff shortages and poor training, according to an independent investigation. Delays and dangerous negligence lay at the heart of a “poor” standard of care for the elderly after surgery, the enquiry concluded. Times, 18 November.

Define “professional”, please 

Headhunters are “unprofessional, unethical, money-mad, short-term chancers who would shaft anyone for a quick buck”. It’s official. A headhunter says so. The recruitment industry has been shaken by an e-mail sent by one of its oldest members to staff at a number of rivals in an attempt to poach them. Yes, really. Is there no honour among thieves? Claiming to be “the truth about recruitment agencies”, the message included the above description and suggested that, since they are treated so badly, staff owe their employers no loyalty and might as well switch sides. It came from a director of Lorien, a quoted company specialising in IT staff, and found its way to Computer Weekly.

Free market madness 

Free coal, the traditional perk for retired miners, may soon be shipped from China. The pensioners are being urged by the government to take the cheaper, subsidised Oriental fuel to cut the cost to the taxpayer. Financial Mail on Sunday, 28 November.

Not ethnic conflict—plunder 

The war in the Congo perpetuates a conflict that affects nearly every country in Africa; Congo, located in the centre of the continent, has borders with nine other countries . . . It is, in reality, one giant war against all of Africa, as a detailed analysis of any one of these wars readily shows. The real belligerents were not even at the peace talk in Lusaka: the British Commonwealth and allied French interests who, operating with complicity channels in the United States, are seeking to destroy the nation states of Africa in a domino chain of wars, and to ensure the full domination of Africa’s vast resources for themselves. The People Newspaper, Uganda, 4-18 August.

How helpful! 

“REMAIN WEALTHY. Money is fickle. And self-centred. It couldn’t care less about you and the people who depend on you. Protecting your wealth is up to you. For over 80 years we’ve helped manage the assets of some of America’s wealthiest families. Growing and protecting their money. Giving them the financial security to enjoy life to the fullest. Over the years our customers have come to expect the unprecedented level of attention and service we provide. We can do the same for you and your family. For more information, call or stop by our office at 520 Madison Avenue, 33rd floor. And find out how you can keep your money yours. WILMINGTON TRUST.” Stagebill, October.

Editorial: A Millennium To Win! (2000)

Editorial from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well, at least the Millennium is over. All we have gained is the world’s third largest hangar (the Dome) and possibly the world’s largest hangover. But, looking through bleary eyes onto yet another morning of wage slavery, do we have anything to look forward to?

We do. Bear in mind that the “Millennium celebrations” are an attempt to dislocate our genuine hopes for the future onto a Dome and a date. Our excitement for the marvels of our technology and self-understanding, and the changes in life that they would permit, is transmuted into an expensive symbolisation of these wishes, and a hangover. But the fact that the “powers that be” felt the urgent need to provide the Dome, to pander to our aspirations even as they are denied in reality, is a clear and present demonstration that THOSE ASPIRATIONS ARE THERE. It might be worth going to see the Dome, just to see how scared the ruling class has become of our imaginations.

The new century sees a dichotomy in needs between the West and the Third World. Whereas, in world historical terms, the Third World is at about the point we were in 1900 at best, needing socialism as an end to hunger and material deprivation of all kinds, the Western working class now suffers from a more general malaise. The irony of starvation on the one hand, and obesity on the other, merely demonstrates that the root cause of all our problems lies not just in the deprivation of material goods, but the deprivation of human life in general. “I am nothing, and should be everything!” is Marx’s revolutionary slogan. The Left merely insisted that we were nothing, and should be fed.

So, where to from here? The answer is already emerging. The demise of the Left is allowing genuine revolutionary sentiment for the OVERTHROW OF CAPITALISM AS A SYSTEM to re-emerge: demonstrations over the last year, however imperfect, are signs of this. Our problem, if any, is that the world is overripe for change! But we need always to remember that when Marx referred to socialism as a NEW MODE of production, he meant a new mode of social life, not some equalisation of the capitalist work process. We have to realise that socialism is not utopia, but better than utopia, a different way of life revealed by the poverty of this one; invest our hearts and minds in this our real future; and fight for it single-mindedly. We have nothing to lose but our chains: we have a world to win.

An Open Letter to ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Friends,

There has been a radical shift, in radical politics, from single issue campaigns within capitalism to attacks on capitalism as a system. As one focus for this shift “Reclaim the Streets” is to be commended. However, whilst J18 attacked capitalism as a whole, using the City as a focus, there was a worrying trend during N30 to make Seattle and the WTO—”fair trade not free trade”—the focus, thus leaving capitalism as a whole unscathed.

There are no nice capitalists. Capitalists in the Third World are just as ruthless and just as exploitative as their First World brethren. The debate over globalisation is a ruling class debate over how they divide the spoils from their collective exploitation of us. A peasant gets peanuts for growing peanuts because that is the going rate for peanuts in the world economy. If the price of peanuts is raised, the local exploiter will gain at the expense of the First World importer, and the peasant still gets peanuts. Anyone still unsure of the rapacity of Third World rulers should take a quick look at Burma/Myanmar, Indonesia, etc. As revolutionaries we should fight the collective war between us and the ruling class, not play the hostage game at their bargaining table.

We have nothing to say to our rulers on how to run capitalism, we should not be drawn into fighting their battles, and we should certainly not be drawn into rolling history back instead of forwards, as a global revolution must be made globally.

Thankfully the Left-wing is dying. Good riddance! It was always the campaign for “real” i.e. manufacturing capitalism against finance and landed interests, and its demise is only a sign of capitalism’s maturity, not its triumph. We must return to the working class agenda, subverted by the Left, of calling for the abolition of capitalism rather than its “fair” administration. In a world where we are the slaves of many masters rather than one, and are told that the choice of masters is our freedom, the only action of any meaning to us is the abolition of the wages system, and thus of work as we understand it. A world which we own, and create, has no place in it for ruining men and women’s minds and bodies with employment, enslavement, or any other constraint on their mutual enjoyment of their creations. But be warned—the Left is trying to subvert your movement! The SWP, in particular, has been seen trying to recruit young and eager minds with their state capitalist poison, even at regular RTS co-ordination meetings when you and others are not represented.

The use of violence is counterproductive, as many in RTS realise. The state is strongest in its use of force, and weakest in its legitimisation of that force. Virtually all of the state’s hired thugs and hired killers are working class, from working class homes, and only function within mass organisations of repression because the state explains their actions to them as being in society’s interests. Ten years ago, Eastern Europe learned how impotent these forces are against a working class which has destroyed state legitimacy by peaceful action. As a class we run society from top to bottom, and revolutionary action lies in effectively communicating that message to each other: once legitimacy falls, the state falls. This is precisely why these forces provoke violence, with snatch squads, baton charges and horses, so that we will respond with violence and justify their repression. You don’t need to keep it fluffy—sullen resentment will do fine.

As members of the World Socialist Movement, we are glad to see the emergence of organisations attacking capitalism as a system rather than merely its particular evils. In Britain, we in the Socialist Party have stood since 1904 for the abolition of capitalism, and the establishment of socialism, i.e. the abolition of money, private property and the state. For most of that time the working class agenda has been dominated by those who said that socialism was about running capitalism better, be it Russia, China, Cuba, Labour, Sweden, etc. Now that this presence is lifting we find that many thousands have arrived at the same conclusions as ourselves, but have organised along the lines of the anarchist tradition. Whilst its diversity has allowed revolutionary ideas to flourish (as well as several reactionary ones!) it has the opposite problem to the Left. They are monolithic, but anarchism is fragmented.

We can only hope that RTS develops beyond its teething troubles, by shedding particular campaigns for the improvement of capitalism, into a general and radical attack on capitalism itself. You already have that programme in ideal, via the Situationists who seem to inspire much of your propaganda. We ourselves have spent nearly a century struggling for an authentic socialist movement, and understand the difficulties. We have a history, theory and organisation designed precisely for that revolutionary project towards which RTS is hopefully heading. We would urge all those in RTS who back the project for abolishing capitalism to meet and discuss with our organisation. We both have things to learn.

Contact us. Our branches are listed on a link from our home page, or email our Head Office, again from our home page. We look forward to hearing from you.

Yours for world socialism,

Simon Wigley

The ultra rich (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Careful readers of our August issue will have noticed that we gave two different figures for some statistics from the UN Development Report 1998. These were based on newspaper reports. To clarify the situation here is an extract from the original source:

“New estimates show that the world’s 225 richest people have combined wealth of over $1 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the world’s people (2.5 billion) . . .

The three richest people have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed countries . . .

Another striking contrast is the wealth of the 225 richest people compared with what is needed to achieve universal access to basic social services for all. It is estimated that the additional cost of achieving and maintaining universal access to basic education for all, basic health care for all, reproductive health care for all women, adequate food and safe water and sanitation for all is roughly $40 billion a year. This is less than 4% of the combined wealth of the 225 richest people in the world.”

These are the figures that should be quoted. But note that what is being compared is the wealth of the ultra-rich with the income of the poor, which might give rise to the impression that the solution is simply to transfer the wealth of the rich to the poor. In fact the solution is to make the wealth of the rich the common property of all.

Editorial Committee.

Letters: Selling Socialism? (2000)

Letters to the Editors from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Selling Socialism?

Dear Editors,

As a fellow socialist but also a practitioner in the evil discipline of marketing I have come to the conclusion that we are all missing something quite clear in terms of how we all seek to promote the aims of socialism.

We are entering a new millennium and the current tide of capitalism has to be—at least—challenged. The only way we’re going to do that is by beating it at its own game—and that does not mean distilling the message—it means working out how to communicate our message more effectively.

What we are offering is an attractive proposition for more people on this planet than any other ideal! I think that’s something to shout about!!

Marketing has been clever in cultivating capitalism, arguably its major tool. However we are now entering a darker phase where brand overtakes everything.

LET US have a global brand. Let us get our groups together and have a logo that reflects all the positives and ideals that socialism espouses. This is the only way we’ll ever challenge the NIKE, McDONALDS and COCA-COLA syndrome. We have to think brand but only after we’ve unified our message.

And how do we project our message more effectively? Through creative and sometimes illegal advertising—with images that break open the myth of capitalism, that allow people to consider their situation therein, that challenge the whiter than white brand identity. Let us tell people about the wage differential, the unethical practices, the exploitation that they are victim of. Let us get these images everywhere and see what kind of effect it has.

Don’t mistake me for seeing socialism as a product . . . oh no . . . it has infinitely more substance than a simple product and that is our strength and collective strength. Let us be taken seriously as a very workable solution—if not inevitable—to the greed, ethnic conflict and hate that fills this world.

We must break down the myths of what has been done in socialism’s name in the past and create a solid clear vision for the new millennium globally.

We must take heed of regionalised feelings—legalisation of cannabis etc.

As people with ideals we will all have an innate creativity in which we can tap into. We should take more notice of our ideas and realise that real creativity is not the preserve of top London agencies—where most copywriters will be/been socialists! We have the images, the icons that we can use to push ourselves and our message and be taken seriously.

Socialism has to evolve and move in a way that people can understand. Understanding has evolved and we’ve stayed still, it will only work if done globally and pushed globally. All the tools are there to do the job.

jimbob

Reply: 

The Socialist Party has always stood for a global system, and we have a global brand name—The World Socialist Movement.

The principles of Socialism are not an ideal, but rather the only real solution to the viciousness of capitalism. This journal has been exposing (unfortunately, too often, mainly to Socialists) this viciousness ever since its first issue. The problem, as you realise, is how to reach a mass of people with the Socialist solution. But our resources are—at the moment—minuscule. We could never compete with the likes of Coca Cola or McDonald’s. Perhaps the Internet is an easier (and cheaper!) way to reach the world—Editors.

Hollywood debases Oz

Dear Editors,

The Observer for 3 October carried a brief review of a newly-reissued book containing three novels in the Wizard of Oz series by Frank Baum (The Wonderful World of Oz, published by Penguin). This sparked off an interesting exchange of mails on the World Socialist Discussion Forum (well worth joining if you have Internet access: you can subscribe via the World Socialist Movement website, or by sending an empty email to WSM_Socialism_Forum-subscribe@onelist.com).

I had never realised before reading the Observer review that the Oz books are political allegories, an aspect that is completely lost in the film starring Judy Garland. The film depicted the land of Oz as a dream world, whereas for Baum it was a real place, an alternative to the alienating, exploitative and economically-depressed United States of the beginning of the century.

For instance, consider the following passage, from The Emerald City of Oz:

“There were no poor people in the land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced.”

Leaving aside the reference to the ruler, this is clearly a description of a Socialist community, based on production for use rather than exchange of commodities. No wonder Hollywood didn’t show this in the film!

Paul Bennett, 

Manchester

World View: Sent to Siberia (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

It has been called the Frozen Hell. There are no trees. Nothing but rock and tundra. In the winter, which lasts from mid-September until the beginning of May, when the snow begins to melt, the temperature goes as low as –75oC, with blizzards drifting the snow eight-storeys high. The spring and summer last a brief three months; and for two months, in mid-winter, the sun never rises above the horizon. Sixty five miles to the west, the estuary of the Yenisey-Angara river (3,445 miles long) flows, during the short spring and summer months, into the Kara Sea and then the Arctic Ocean. For nine months of the year, it can only be reached by air or by a nuclear-powered icebreaker from Murmansk, docking at the estuary port of Dudinka.

Such is the location of Norilsk, the world’s most northern industrial city, with a population of 200,000 inhabitants.

In 1930, there was nothing there, except a few reindeers and reindeer-hunters. Nevertheless, in that year, Stalin proposed the Angara-Yenisey Combine for central Siberia, similar to the Kuznetz Combine planned for western Siberia. Shortly after, nickel and other metal deposits were discovered. And in 1935¸ construction of what was to be the city of Norilsk and the Norilsk Metallurgical Combine began. The problem, however, was, as elsewhere in Siberia: where would the Soviet state find the hundreds of thousands of workers it needed in such an inhospitable place? Few would volunteer to go there.

The solution was the collectivisation of agriculture and the dispossession of the kulaks, and other peasants, in Ukraine and south-western Russia. Together with “Trotskyists” and other “enemies of the people”, they were rounded-up and shipped off to eastern Russia and Siberia the Soviet Union’s era of what Marx called the “primitive accumulation of capital” had begun.

Responsibility for the administration of the Norilsk Combine was the Glavnoye Upravlniye Lagerei, or Gulag, the Chief Directorate of Labour Camps, a department of the Narodny Kommissariat Gosudarvetvernoy Bezopasnosti, or NKVD, the People’s Commissariat of State Security. After the Second World War, when the Soviet Union occupied the Baltic states, eastern Poland, hundreds of thousands of Balts, and thousands of Banderisti¸ Ukrainian Nationalists, were arrested and sent to such places as Vorkuta and Norilsk. Just how many prisoners passed through the Norilsk Combine is not known, as even the present Russian authorities in Krasnoyarsk, where the records are still kept, refuse to permit anyone to see them. Between 1935 and 1955, it has been unofficially estimated that 500,000 prisoners passed through Norilsk. Most died there, buried in unmarked graves or in holes in the ice.

Stalin died on 2 March 1953. Following his death, there was general unrest in many of the Soviet labour camps, including those in the Norilsk Combine. The strike began in zone 5 on 25 May. It soon spread throughout the camps and mines. Thousands of prisoners refused to work. The strike, which lasted about two months, was finally suppressed with many killed by the NKVD guards. After the strike, conditions for the prisoners were, for some time, considerably worse. But 1956 saw the beginning of the end of the vast Gulag system. The rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union required a more sophisticated workforce of “free” wage-slaves. Not that that made a lot of difference to the surviving ex-prisoners in Norilsk! Nevertheless, some returned to western Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere.

But for many, after ten or fifteen years imprisonment, and five years “administrative exile”, there was nowhere to go. Some of the women married former guards and NKVD (later KGB) officials. All became state employees, or were pensioned off. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever-increasing inflation ate up their modest savings. Today, the Combine is no longer a state-run enterprise. No longer are the workers exploited by the state. It has been privatised; and according to James Meek (Observer Magazine, 4 July), “it was bought for fraction of its commercial value in 1995 by Vladimir Potanin, one of Russia’s richest industrialists, a man made very wealthy now by the old slavery and the new freedoms, and a business partner of George Soros”. Private capitalism had replaced state capitalism.

Yenseisk lies on the banks of the Yenisey river, 800 miles to the south of Norilsk. Trees grow here, and it is less cold. Indeed, global warming has been noticeable in Yenseisk. It has become milder, with the minimum winter temperature rising from –52oC to –40oC. Even vegetables can be grown under glass. Nevertheless, the ice only melts on the Yenisey in May, when boats from Dudinka arrive, or pass south to Krasnoyarsk. And over the last couple of years, a few thousand workers have managed to escape the frozen hell, and the smog and pollution, of Norilsk, downstream to Krasnoyarsk.

There is a road between Yenseisk and Krasnoyarsk, but no railway; and, furthermore, the local airline, which links such towns and cities as Norilsk, Yenseisk and Krasnoyarsk, is in deep trouble as it has lost most of its pilots. In fact, according to a local priest, Father Grigory, interviewed by the Guardian (3 December 1997), Yenseisk is “a dying town that lived in the past, by subsidies. There’s no industry. Now, it’s thrown back on its resources. The teachers and doctors haven’t been paid for months”.

Krasnoyarsk, a city of 900,000 inhabitants 200 miles south of Yenseisk, is the administrative centre of the area, and is situated on the Yenisey where it is crossed by the Trans-Siberian Railway. It has factories manufacturing equipment for Siberia’s mining industries, a timber combine and a food processing industry. But like Norilsk and Yenseisk, it too is depressed and probably in terminal decay.

One hundred miles to the west of Krasnoyarsk, also on the Trans-Siberian Railway, is the huge Achinsk Company, recently privatised, which produces alumna, most of which it sends to the Krasnoyarsk Aluminium (KrAZ) Company. It does not make a profit, yet it is the source of massive profits. It pays no taxes to the state. For it does not sell its produce direct to Krasnoyarsk aluminium, but through a series of intermediate companies, owned by the managers of Achinsk Company and KrAZ, all of which make “a killing”, and pay very little tax. Much of this money ultimately finds its way, in dollars, to the Bank of New York. Like Potanin, the owner of the Norilsk Combine, Georgi Lokk, the Chief Executive of the loss-making Achinsk ore combine, is a very rich man; from wealth created by the exploited, poverty-stricken workers of Siberia.

Peter E. Newell

World View: Should there be a state religion? (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The other day a comrade who had just completed a short visit to Nigeria sent me an e-mail. The content was about one of the states in Nigeria being bent on declaring an Islamic state, come January 2000. For those familiar with Nigeria’s turbulent political past, the repercussions and implications will be obvious. Apart from the dozens of Islamic states around the world, only one declared Christian state in Africa currently comes to mind, Zambia.

In answering the question “should there be a state religion?” most people here will readily reply “yes”, indicating thereby their ability to defend their faith.

The question of state religion is frequently before the public mind, and it seems that the majority who have any view on the subject incline to one of two camps.

In camp one are the secularists who feel that, as the harm done by religion throughout history outweighs the good, the best thing will be for the state to wash its hands of it completely and by leaving its citizens entirely without religious dictates leave them free either to live untouched by religion or to evolve a faith for themselves.

In the other camp are those who believe that their primary duty in life is to proselytise for the faith to which they happen to belong, and who consequently make the most of every opportunity to convert non-believers. They believe that the absence of a state religion is one of the root causes of the materialism, selfishness, and restlessness which prevail throughout the world.

Let us look a little more closely at both of these camps. The secularist argument is plausible and cogent. It is difficult to deny that religion has been either the cause or the pretext of many black chapters in human history and will continue to be a very dangerous rallying-cry so long as the masses remain ignorant and superstitious or bigoted and fanatical. Therefore, say the secularists, let us be rid of it once and for all. Such a theory rests on the assumption that religion is in a class by itself and differs radically from all other activities of the human mind and should be singled out for special opposition.

The people in the other camp, on the contrary, believing that religion is the most important thing in life, leave no stone unturned in their endeavour to persuade or compel everyone to join their particular organisation and unquestioningly profess their creed. In religion what matters is the acceptance of truths miraculously revealed in a book which under no circumstances is to be subjected to rational criticism but is to be venerated blindly as revealing the whole truth.

In approaching the question of state religion, certain basic principles should therefore be kept in mind.

Firstly, that the capacity for clear, honest thinking is one of our greatest and rarest capacities and that, no matter what the subject of their study, people should be encouraged to develop this capacity to the utmost and to be as honest in their doubts and questionings as in their beliefs and acceptances. Such honesty will not lead them astray but will help them sift the gold from the dross, and to distinguish between superstition and facts. Since religion whether state or otherwise, is a drug derived from mythology it should not be too difficult to discredit it, with such clear thinking.

Secondly, when a state upholds a particular faith, it not only makes a mockery of free thought, but also exposes the weakness of its leaders who have to cower behind the veil of religion to perpetuate their tenure.

What, then, is the answer to our question, “should there be a state religion?”

Religions, like a tree, must be judged by their fruits—how else could they be judged? Since not one of the world’s faiths can truly claim to have produced good fruits, our efforts should be used more wisely in pondering pertinent scientific questions. By so doing, humanity can redeem itself from the burden of the superstitious complex that webs its mind. So long as what is taught remains in the hands of leaders whose chief concern is to proselytise religious faith, just so long will their subjects continue to grow up with narrow exclusive notions about the world.

Daniel Wah

Greasy Pole: Poverty – Blair Speaks (2000)

Moore is less.

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Does anyone now remember John Moore, the cabinet minister who was once encouraged to see himself as the next Conservative Prime Minister? He started out as one of those people who enriched themselves by doing things like selling pounds for deutchsmarks for dollars back to pounds again. Having made his pile it seemed the natural thing to do, to find a nice safe Tory seat so that he could participate in arranging the system to ensure that people like him could get even richer.

It worked like a dream and after he got into Parliament his rise was meteoric (an appropriate word because he later burnt out and fell like a meteorite). With some cunningly obsequious interventions he locked himself into position as Thatcher’s favourite. He got to be a minister and then, when the two departments of Health and Social Security became merged into the huge, hugely spending, dreaded DHSS he was put in charge. There he introduced the Social Fund, a method of drastically reducing the money available for Special Needs grants. To emphasise how fit and dynamic he was we were regularly treated to repulsive photographs of him on his exercise bicycle or at work in his shirt sleeves. But this rich, energetic, ambitious man was really not tough enough. The stress of running the DHSS while scheming to take over the top job cracked him up so that at one cabinet meeting, to the open contempt of Thatcher and the discreet glee of his rivals, Moore practically collapsed. It was not long before he returned to the back benches. No one was sorry to see him go.

Speeches 

He would have been wise to leave it at that, to accept the cruel reality of politics and devote the rest of his life to his roses or his currency note collection. But he decided to have one last effort at climbing the greasy pole. He would make a controversial speech which, on the basis a bit of pre-determined research, would claim to challenge some accepted ideas about a social problem. It was natural that the problem should be poverty, about which he should have learned a little when he gave up playing the markets and took over the DHSS. He might have spoken about alleviating poverty but that would not have been controversial enough to attract attention. Instead he set out to prove that poverty virtually did not exist, that it was really not much more than the angle from which you viewed the statistics about slums, malnutrition, poverty-related diseases or whatever.

It was not a very clever speech and the attention it attracted was not the kind Moore had reckoned on. It was savaged by the poverty lobby and by his erstwhile rivals in the Tory Party. Deservedly, it sank into a swamp of contempt—like Moore himself, who was packed off to the House of Lords.

That nasty piece of history came to mind when Tony Blair, on a trip up north, used a recent government “analysis” of levels of poverty to cast doubt on the generally accepted notion that the problem is wider, sharper and more punishing in the north than in the south:

“I am determined to make all parts of Britain share in rising prosperity and that in all parts of Britain we tackle poverty.”

Of course we are accustomed to that phrase “rising prosperity”; we hear it a lot when ministers are doing their best to lower working-class living standards. It is intended to disguise the fact that millions of people are unfamiliar with any kind of prosperity and spend their lives trying to survive through various degrees of deprivation. The burden of Blair’s speech was that while there may be deep poverty in the north it also exists in the south; in both parts of the country there are patches where workers are relatively better off. The object, apart from asking us to accept an index which is self-evidently nonsense, was to persuade us that this government is, by some miracle, successfully grappling with the effects of the long term decline in heavy industries such as steel manufacture, mining, shipbuilding . . .

Objectors 

Blair’s speech was no better received than that made by Moore, all those years ago—which says something about the persistence of the problems of poverty whichever party is in power. Apart from the usual clutch of disappointed Labour MPs, whose concepts and principles are flexible enough to keep them in the party whatever their reservations about it, there were also other objectors who may be called more detached. Bill Midgley was one of them: this president of the North East Chamber of Commerce and one-time building society boss described the analysis used by Blair as a “whitewash” and accused ministers of being “highly selective . . . Anybody can play the selectivity game”.

Less selective is the material coming from places like Bristol University, where research undertaken before the last election showed that twice as many babies die before their first birthday in Glasgow and Manchester than in less impoverished areas. These are places where there are some four percent more children living below the official poverty line. One effect of this is that there are 1.5 percent more GCSE failures. A survey carried out jointly by the Office of National Statistics and the Institute of Psychiatry found that children from poorer families are three times more likely to suffer from some kind of mental disorder. And a little piece of what is sometimes dismissed as anecdotal evidence is that staff at a school in Sheffield have to keep a sharp watch on the weather because the building where they try to teach is so rotten that the roof could be ripped off by a strong breeze or collapsed by a heavy fall of snow.

These are symptoms of the poverty inseparable from the lives of all those who have to sell their working ability in order to live. In the scale of that social reality it does not matter whether poverty is more intense, more desolate, more degrading, in one part of the country than another. When Blair argues to the contrary he is simply trying to obscure a persistent fact of capitalist life. Wherever it exists, and to whatever degree, poverty is brutal and nasty; it wrecks peoples’ lives, it makes them ill, it drives them mad and it kills them. It was doing massive damage to working-class lives when John Moore was hoping to rebuild his career by concealing reality and it is the same now when Tony Blair is trying to strengthen his hold on power by the same cynical method.

Ivan

Nationalisation (2000)

Book Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Realism, New Barbarism. By Boris Kagarlitsky, Pluto Press, 1999.

Socialism has never existed, anywhere. However, Boris believes that socialism did exist in Eastern Europe but has now been replaced by capitalism, so we now have global capitalism. He is a senior research fellow in the Institute for Comparative Political Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Boris is no government stooge, however. He was a political prisoner under Brezhnev and is currently an adviser to the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia.

Following the collapse of the state capitalist dictatorships in Eastern Europe in 1989 and after, neo-liberal (Thatcherite) “New Realism” became global. The current global system, according to Boris, is a “New Barbarism” wherein the relatively few wealthy countries of the centre exploit the poorer countries of the periphery. Eastern Europe has now become part of the periphery, with debt dependency and declining living standards for many. In Russia the old nomenklatura (ruling class) has become the new capitalist class by converting its political power into money and property. However, the process of change has not been identical throughout Eastern Europe, ranging from civil war in Romania to a change of power witnessed by a largely passive population in Hungary. But the end result was more or less the same: an acceptance (even by the reformed Communist Parties) of market capitalism.

The technological revolution of the late twentieth century is developing according to the same logic as the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, so Boris argues. The Internet in particular has important social consequences. The Internet is intrinsically socialist in that its success depends on the free flow of information and data within a non-hierarchical network. But its full development is fettered within global capitalist relations of production. The Internet can only really flourish when free and equal access is established.

Boris claims that unless a socialist alternative “challenges the system of global capital and its local political representatives, it has no chance to change anything.” But his “socialist” alternative turns out to be the failed and discredited policies of “nationalisation and redistribution.” This conclusion is just as mistaken as his belief that globalisation is a new phenomenon. Globalisation is just another word for capitalism.

Lew Higgins

Workers’ Solidarity (2000)

Book Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Unfinished Revolution: South Tyneside 1969-1976. Jack Grassby. TUPS Books, pp. 343, 1999.

The period around the mid-60s to mid-70s was seen by many then as a time of radical change. These were the days of “People Power”, of world-wide grassroots political action involving students, trade unionists, claimant groups and all manner of single-issue fanatics. The era was typified by such events as the student protests in the France of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movement in the USA and the UK miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974.

Set against this backdrop, Jack Grassby’s book is an account of the intensity of grassroots political action from 1969 to 1976 on South Tyneside and in which the author played a key part. A cornucopia of reproduced pamphlets, documents and press reports from the region and period, the book is more a primary source for the political and social historian than any guessed-at academic account of a revolution that failed.

Chapter by chapter, the documents are carefully accompanied by a running commentary which gives a vivid detail of events and feel of the period.

Grassby makes no bold claim for his work and no remarkable political statement. As he states in the preface, the book has an “objective manner” in which the “political/social significance is left largely to the reader”.

Socialists have no objection to grassroots action—i.e. the struggles of claimant groups, students and trade unionists—so long as the struggle for socialism is not side-tracked by the campaigns for individual reforms, the futility of which this journal has been exposing for the best part of a century. And Grassby takes time out in an epilogue to remind us of the pitfall of reformism:

“Few of those involved in those events . . . would claim that their long-term objectives had been realised. Although some local campaigners can claim to have had a limited success—heating allowances for pensioners, social security benefits for students and strikers etc—their success was often transient and was overturned by subsequent government legislation. Even the miners’ success was to prove ephemeral.”

Grassby’s book presents as a fascinating testament of what workers are capable of achieving if enough are prepared to join together in common cause, whilst at the same time standing as a stark reminder of the philosophy of settling for crumbs in a world of abundance. As the title suggests, the revolution is very much “unfinished”.

The book is now on website: http://www.unfinishedrevolution.co.uk 

John Bissett

Time well spent (2000)

Theatre Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three Days of Rain. Donmar Warehouse, London.

What lessons can we draw from the past? At a time when some academics, shamefully unaware of their unwitting attachment to the ideological apparatus of capitalism, claim that history is dead, contemporary playwrights are much concerned with the conclusions we draw from events long ago. In the last year or so I have seen plays by Tom Stoppard (Arcadia), Michael Frayn (Copenhagen—see Socialist Standard, September 1998), Peter Barnes (Dreaming—Socialist Standard, August 1999) and Stephen Poliakoff (Remember This—Socialist Standard, December 1999), all of which conclude that the past very much determines what takes place in the present. And now Richard Greenberg, a young American whose work has not previously been seen in Britain, offers us a splendid new play in which the past is ever present.

Three Days of Rain involves only three actors. In the first act we meet brother and sister, Walker and Nan, together with Pip, the son of their father’s business partner in an architects’ consultancy. In the second act the same actors play Walker and Nan’s father and mother, and Theo, their father’s business partner. And as the second act unfolds it becomes apparent why Walker, Nan and Pip are as they are. Not, I hasten to add, in any crude deterministic fashion, Greenberg’s imagination is far too subtle for that. Rather we are aware of the impact that one generation makes on the next: of the way in which behaviour is affected by the complex chemistry of both nature and nurture. Act 1 offers us a view of the past in which Walker, Ned and Pip strive to understand the behaviours of their parents trying to make sense of diaries and remembered anecdotes. And Act 2 shows, us with both drama and poignancy, that if you don’t have enough evidence and you don’t understand the context, you will reach the wrong conclusions.

The play is a warm, intelligent one, by turns touching, sensitive and funny, which is marvellously played in the small, 250-seater, Donmar Warehouse Theatre in Covent Garden. It is a play which points to the dangers of judging a person’s contribution on the basis of their family life, their relations with their children, and so on. If we are to understand people’s lives we need to have access to all the relevant evidence. The personal behaviour of the architect fathers of Walker, Nan and Pip cannot be inferred from their buildings, even though the latter command universal praise. Francis Wheen’s recent biography of Karl Marx makes much the same point. Marx’s contribution to the history of western though cannot be judged by his rather fey attempts to live a bourgeois life in mid-Victorian London.

Postscript

The following three plays—all of which have been reviewed in this journal—are still playing in London. All can be seen for less than half the cost of a ticket to a Premier League football match. All have something to say to socialists. All are highly recommended at the turn of the century.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (Duchess Theatre) “Michael Frayn has written one of the best plays about science and society that it has been my pleasure to see.”

Summerfolk by Maxim Gorki (National Theatre. Reviewed October 1999). “Summerfolk is as relevant today as it has ever been. I hope to find an early opportunity to see the play again and to marvel at the skill of the actors and the wonder of its staging.”

The Weir by Conor McPherson (Royal Court Theatre. Reviewed April 1998). “Valerie’s revelation serves both to underscore the emptiness at the heart of their lives and to offer an alternative which might be reached through honest, open discourse, about matters of real concern, managed in an empathetic manner . . . This is theatre at its most sublime.”

Michael Gill

Twenty-twenty Vision (2000)

TV Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The turn of the millennium is a time for thinking of the future and starting anew, but it is also an opportunity to reflect on the past and to learn from it. With the male propensity for compiling lists so prevalent among reviewers of late, why shouldn’t the Socialist Standard get in on the act? If any group of people have clear ideas why the past was unsatisfactory and how the future could be a whole load better it is socialists. So here we go with twenty TV nightmares of the past balanced by twenty TV wishes for the future:

We should have pulled the plug on . . .

• News reports that refer to any given dictatorship across the globe as “Marxist”.
• Programmes intent on uniting Tony Blair with a comfy chair and a pair of sycophantic interviewers before mealtime.
• Channel Five’s sickeningly nationalistic coverage of England matches.
• The Price is Right.
• The aliens with overly-large foreheads constantly on Sky One.
• Brookside, about three years ago, Neighbours at least ten years ago and EastEnders after the very first filming session.
• Every US kids cartoon since the Hair Bear Bunch.
• The exponential growth (in both width and coverage) of overly matey TV chefs.
• Bellicose, belligerent and biased war reporting (all channels, every year).
• Judith Chalmers.
• Solemn and revered historians on BBC2 (solemnly received by us and greatly revered by themselves).
• Kids TV presenters who invite us to “check it out” with our “posse” if we are “in the area”, the area in question being the King’s Road or Camden Lock, not Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side or Harlem.
• Royal correspondents.
• Gordon Brown’s sinister attempts at smiling to camera.
• The incisive, penetrating and totally unscripted interviewing of Des O’Connor.
• Anything involving Jeremy Clarkson and subliminal erotic fantasies about fast cars and motorbikes.
• Songs of Praise.
• The ‘devil-may-care’ and ever-so-wacky participants of Extreme Sports.
• Interviews with Barbara Cartland (the contrast button on my TV set is worn down).
• The Money Programme (natch).

The above choice is a personal one so please remember that any offence caused is purely intentional.

We should plug into . . .

• The abolition of the TV license, “pay-per-view” and all monetary payments for TV subscriptions. Free access to the airwaves!
• The Royal Family, the moving tale of a dysfunctional extended family getting to grips with life in a classless society without butlers, palaces or command performances.
• Community-controlled television rather than multinational pap and brainwashing.
• The Antiques Roadshow, without the blue-rinse money grabbers feigning interest in everything but the long-awaited valuation.
• The disappearance of all Party Political Broadcasts in a society where there are no longer any political parties.
• Men Behaving Badly, to remind ourselves of how desperate we were in capitalism to laugh at something – indeed, anything.
• Direct democracy via television and the internet.
• The accurate dissemination of information rather than the sustained idiocies of modern advertising.
• Blue Peter without charitable endeavours and coke-head presenters.
• Television for children which isn’t dominated by violence and gang warfare.
• News broadcasting shorn of its class content, political bias and servitude to the market.
• Re-runs of The Prisoner, so we can remember what life became like in capitalism.
• Re-runs of the Queen’s Speech during Comedy Hour.
• People playing sport for fun and entertainment, not money.
• The Bill, without being able to comprehend any of it anymore.
• The concluding episode of EastEnders.
• What the Papers Say without the Daily Mail.
• Casualty without a crisis (admittedly, this might be stretching it a bit).
• The final edition of the Jerry Springer Show, where Jerry is outed as a transsexual bigamist who has been cheating on his sister’s pet Alsatian.
• Wish You Were Here, and really think that for once we might be.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: They all go the same way home (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

After 14 years of Labour government in New Zealand and eight years in Australia, the general elections in November and December saw those Labour governments rejected by the voters who had earlier put them into power. Some of the political commentators in this country have been speculating about the effect those results may have on the forthcoming General Election.

They suggest that the British workers may be influenced to vote against the Labour Party because of what has happened in New Zealand and Australia. It is a fallacious view. If the Labour Government here had been able to make a success of its efforts to run capitalism in a manner pleasing to the workers they would not be influenced at all by what has happened on the other side of the globe. It may be that the British Labour Government will next year be returned to power for another five years, though the Labour Ministers are clearly resigned to suffering some loss of votes and seats. What we can say with complete confidence is that sometime or other, either at the 1950 elections or later on, the workers in Britain will turn out the Labour Government. The now lengthening history of Labour governments in many parts of the world shows that they are merely the alternative that the electors choose when they have become tired, sick or resentful of Liberal or Tory government. Just as 19th century Britain witnessed the game of political ins and outs, with never any fundamental change in the position of the working-class, so the 20th century gives us the same game but with the Labour Party in place of one of the older Parties.

(From front page article by ‘H’, Socialist Standard, January 1950)

Education System, or Wages System? (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

• We live in a society dominated by the labour market, by the wages system. We go to school, to college, to university, in order to prepare ourselves for entering that market; to gain skills and knowledge we can sell in order to live.
• Students are workers in waiting.
• The education system is a production line, vending skills for the jobs market; and like any production line, it must produce to follow demand.
• If the labour market needs cheap unskilled workers, the education system provides. Academic achievement is not the main goal of the education system, providing for the jobs market is.
• Low academic achievement is factored in, to supply the masses of jobs that don’t need brain work.
• Only a few workers are needed to really think, thus the university system is set up to produce a small élite, to fill that niche market.
• Their skills are valuable because they are rare: but, as in any other market, if the number of graduates available becomes too large—as it does as university education spreads—they are over-produced, and then their value drops.
• Sending more people to university does not guarantee more people with higher wages and does not guarantee more skilled jobs.
• Today people gain skills, and knowledge, only to be never able to use than when they find their McJob. There’s little chance of enjoying the intellectual fruits of society when you’re slaving for a living.
• Fighting for a just education system under an unjust social system is liking trying to roll a boulder up hill, only to see it roll back down again.
• Even if you win, future generations of students will have to fight all over again as soon as the education system comes into conflict with the wages system.
• Justice can only be found through a just society, through social change: only a society where human needs and desires take over from the market, can an equitable enjoyment of the fruits of society’s learning be gained.
• There is only one way to ensure free access to knowledge for all: the Abolition of the Wages System!

The internet and capitalism (1) (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just over 30 years ago in October 1969 the first email was sent, and the world took no notice. Even in 1990, in Megatrends 2000, the authors Naisbitt and Aburdene failed to mention the Internet. After ten more years, the world is still largely unprepared for the scale of the communications revolution overtaking it. According to Andy Grove of Intel: “The Internet is like a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are in kayaks.”

The Global Internet Project (GIP) (http://www.gip.org), a collective including AT&T, Sun, Visa, Fujitsu, BT, IBM and Deutsche Bank, believes that the Internet explosion will be good for capitalism, a “cause for unambiguous celebration” as they put it in a recent report. The figures they have supplied illustrate the explosive colonisation of cyberspace.

In 1980 there were just 100 Internet host computers. The World Wide Web did not exist in 1991. In 1992 there were just 100 web sites. In 1996 there were 10 million host computers. Today there are 120 million hosts, 250 million users in hundreds of countries, there are uncountable millions of web sites, and the Web is growing by 300,000 new pages every seven days. The amount of information on the Internet has reached a level almost beyond human comprehension, and it doubles every year.

Gold fever has been evident at the stock exchange, with Internet company values being grotesquely over-inflated and largely responsible for the share price bubble. Start-up companies with no assets and no profits have been valued at millions. Oddly, there exists an uncanny parallel with the overvaluation of RCA shares in the, then, new technology of radio prior to the Wall Street Crash in 1929 (Money Programme, BBC2, 24 October). As then, Internet company valuations are also likely to be wiped out, but this won’t stop them in the long run. The speed of growth is breathtaking, and contributes to the speculative hysteria. The accountants just can’t keep up. Mobile phone sales were not even included in GDP figures until 1998, while there is still no reliable estimate for Internet sales, although GIP puts it at about $6.6 billion for this year.

In October of last year, Tony Blair announced to a startled population that 100,000 computers would be made available to poor families, at just £5 a month. The significance of a move to put even the poorest online should not be underestimated. Meanwhile, huge pressure is being brought to bear on BT to make Internet calls free, as they are in the USA. If they don’t, somebody else will. Callnet UK announced the first such, free and no strings, service in late October. A rash of similar services is expected to follow. The expense of being online is rapidly heading downwards, to almost zero, as capitalism anticipates a cyber-bonanza of sales that will make free calls, even free computers, more than worthwhile.

Falling costs

Capitalism is rushing with orgiastic zeal headlong into cyberspace. The prospect of global reach for free is the Holy Grail of any business, and the “technology of the ether” can make transaction costs so small as to amount to their elimination. “What market can ignore transaction costs, when there is one that has none?” says Michael Vlahos of the Progress and Freedom Foundation. The potential savings are enormous in other areas too. The cyber-based company of the future may need far fewer staff, no premises, little capital expenditure, tiny running costs, no stock or warehousing, and have no distribution overheads. Yet they will be more efficient than any business has ever been before.

“By putting everyone on the Web accessing information in both directions internally and externally,” says Barry Demak of Cadence, “we suddenly had a cohesive view of our markets, customers, and technologies—it all started coming into focus for us. And if you compare the cost and time to train the sales force, and factor in the difference in time to market, the returns are awesome” (Quoted in GIP).

There is a revolution in advertising and marketing theory too, as technology makes possible the placement of tailored advertising on the screens of specific customers. XTV, the new wave smart video, not only records the TV programmes it knows you’ll like, it gives you bespoke personalised commercial breaks too (Observer Business, 7 November). Every user’s every movement on the Internet is a piece of valuable marketing information. Now the talk is of “infinite stratification” of demand and “micro-niches”, of industrial mass-based society being remoulded by an individualistic assortment of micro-demands and micro-viewpoints, with customised low-volume production replacing the conveyor belt. Already the biggest engine of growth in the US, so-called Mom and Pop stores, will proliferate in cyberspace, the one place they can really compete with the big players. Here they can use “knowledge robots” or “knowbots” to roam the Web, create customised reports and newspapers, find specific products at the best prices, and even negotiate on behalf of the trader and customer.

As the expense of being online plummets to near zero, the speed of connection is soaring. The slow modem is obsolete as fibre-optic lines no thicker than a human hair with a trillion bit per second transfer rate are being installed in the US at the rate of 4000 miles per day, while in Britain BT is promising nationwide permanent ADSL links (50 times faster than modems) within two years. Project Oxygen plans to lay ocean-floor optical cables across the Atlantic, while satellite data broadcasting offers wireless Internet connection. Bandwidth (the bottleneck of the data exchange process) doubles every year. Bill Gates in 1994 predicted “we’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time”. Information will before long be able to travel at almost literally the speed of light.

In consequence of all this, there is an orgy of buyouts and alliances as capitalism races to reconfigure its entire business system, including everything from Hollywood to hard drives:

The business of computing (hardware, software, and services), communications (telephony, cable, satellite), and content (publishing, entertainment, advertising) are . . . collapsing to create a new industry sector. This new media industry is the engine of the new economy and will be critical to leading a successful transition. The rise of this new sector and the transformation of corresponding markets is forcing every company to rethink its very existence . . . (Don Tapscott, author and chair of Alliance for Converging Technologies).

One can easily envisage the telecommunications companies becoming the new giants, eclipsing all others as one box does everything and all bills are paid through one tele-account. Yet talk of “boxes” is itself an obsolescent concept, as Xerox have perfected “e-paper” (Observer, 22 August) and research continues towards wristwatch computers and even brain implants, giving rise to talk of “synthetic telepathy” in the more distant future. And as science revolutionises the Internet, so the Internet is revolutionising science. With the spatial decoupling of the scientist from the task, the so-called “collaboratory” is born, enabling multiple users to share a single physical resource, enhanced productivity with no travel time, and participation by experimenters in multiple, geographically-distributed projects. Remote science not only levels the playing field for researchers, it also offers more rigorous standards of specification, note-taking and reproducibility of results. Capitalism’s R&D department is as excited as the Accounts department and the Board of Directors.

Yet despite all this breathless enthusiasm there may be serious problems for capitalism inherent in this revolution. That the marriage of the state and the capitalists is fraught with mutual suspicion is evident from their attempts to reach a solution to the problem of devising a code to keep details secret (see GIP report on House of Lords Encryption Summit, 1997). The capitalists want a system which is unbreakable, for customers will not expose their bank details in an unsafe medium, and corporate secrecy remains essential in a competitive market. However, the state cannot afford to allow it, citing terrorism as its pretext, and demands a master key for every code. The capitalists respond that they don’t trust governments not to use these keys for their own unsavoury purposes, such as interfering in business, and back and forth it goes. At present it seems unlikely that the state will get its way. It could probably happily do without the Internet altogether, but conversely, capitalism needs the Internet, possibly as much as it needs the state, given that local lawmakers are anyway creating a global maze of parochial laws and regulations that offer nothing but obstructions and impediments to the progress of capital. The cry of “free the market” is heard everywhere from boardroom to newsgroup to government office, and legislators do not seem to be winning.

Price-less information 

There is a worse problem. Information, as a buy and sell commodity, carries a curse unknown to any other type of commodity. In the words of an old computer hacker slogan, “information wants to be free”. When one disgruntled ex-employee of a software firm recently posted the company’s products on a free website, the site was closed down in two hours. Yet twenty minutes would have been enough to start mirror sites containing the free software, at a stroke wiping out the firm’s profits. It is worth recalling what really makes a commodity—it is restriction of access. Air is just about the only use-value in existence which is not yet a commodity, in other words it has no exchange value. If access cannot be restricted to a good, money cannot be charged for it. The unique property of information is that you can make infinite exact copies, you can “steal” it without removing the original, or leaving any trace of the “theft”. Just as the music industry had to learn to live with music piracy (which of us does not have pirate tapes on our shelves?) so the information industry must live, not only with piracy, but an extremely short shelf-life. The price of any information commodity will tend towards zero more rapidly than any other commodity. The traditional product-cycle will contract to a single, sharp peak and steep descent. Whereas capitalists now salivate over a presumed bonanza this short-term pay-out will give way to a cut-throat and dog-eat-dog business world characterised by a falling rate of profit and a desperate race to stand still.

Impossible though it seems, it gets worse for capitalism. The goose could be laying a golden bomb. Unlike any other sector of production, the knowledge-producing sector which produced the Internet has always incorporated a strong ethical tendency towards free distribution—the gift economy. In a far-sighted study of Internet sociology, Richard Barbrook’s essay on Cyber-communism (Link) argues powerfully that a knowledge-rich society will increasingly tend to share rather than sell, just as socialist common ownership is a logical adaptation to material abundance. In an ethical reversal, it is selling, not piracy, which will be seen as anti-social. All in all, capitalism would appear to be staking its future on a commodity it can never control:

  The scarcity of copyright cannot compete against the abundance of gifts . . . At the cutting edge of modernity, the exchange of commodities now plays a secondary role to the circulation of gifts. The enclosure of intellectual labour is challenged by a more efficient method of working: disclosure.

Barbrook foresees the collapse of production and market relations in the same way as other business observers have been worrying for years about the “technology paradox” of “zero cost production” in industry (Business Week, 6 March 1995). As the computer world gapes at the meteoric rise of a new operating system called Linux, designed by a student as an antidote to the “bloatware” of Microsoft and, more to the point, given away free as “Open Source”, there does indeed seem to be some basis for the optimism of the gift economists. The implications for the future of capitalist market relations are huge and contentious. There are no guarantees that capitalism will drown in its own Third Wave, but equally there are no guarantees that it won’t. But as if this wasn’t enough, there arises a new problem which has no precedent and for which no avoidance strategies have yet been devised. In the knowledge explosion, what happens when we know too much?

Paddy Shannon

(In Part Two of this three-part series, Paddy Shannon explores the consequences of the information revolution for the ideological foundations of capitalism.)

Link to Part 2

Socialism or Zombyism? (2000)

Front cover for the 2001 revised edition.

Book Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Two Hundred Pharaohs, Five Billion Slaves . . . Manifesto. Available from Box 100, 178 Whitechapel Road, London. E1 1BJ.

“In short the conditions already exist for us to build a world better than utopia.” This is an inspiring statement for any contribution to revolutionary thought to kick off with, and this manifesto continues in similar style; analysing capitalism’s current trends and the prospects for working class revolution and the achievement of the classless society we call world socialism. This is a thought-provoking publication, and one of scope and detail that a review of this length can’t deal with satisfactorily.

The title refers to the situation we are now faced with: that of the subjection of humanity’s billions to the class interests of a couple of hundred billionaires: the real bourgeoisie. The vast wealth and power of such a numerically tiny class has been accumulated through the process of turning the world population into an exploitable working class, eradicating the peasantry and locking us into the global factory of world capitalism. This class, as this manifesto points out, has waged war to proletarianise the world, making capitalist relations universal. In doing so though it has created its own gravediggers. That’s us: the five billion plus, united by class position and interest, capable of abolishing class society and beginning the beautiful adventure that will be the future human society.

Though we in the Socialist Party would wish some debate on the means by which the working class majority can achieve a transformation of society, there is much here we can agree with. The need, for instance, for revolutionaries to organise openly and democratically, and in complete opposition to the “vanguards” of the Left, who are always on hand to protect and serve the capitalist system. Also, socialists will disagree with the view of “socialism” as some sort of utopian capitalist business strategy rather than a description of a classless society. Nevertheless this is a publication that socialists will find very interesting.

Of great insight, for example, is the analysis of capitalism’s efforts to colonise every second of our lives, fully subsuming our “leisure” time as it has our working time:

  “A situation in which every waking moment of a worker’s life is an uninterrupted experience of either factory labour (the regimented labour of the office, factory, retail unit or commercial hotel etc.) or intensified shopping.”

Epitomising this process is the march of the Mega-Malls, which began with Canada’s West Edmonton Mall in 1984, and now includes developments such as the MetroCentre, Bluewater etc. in Britain. The Mega-Mall, an “awesome neon cathedral” of retail and “leisure” is the environment in which we are meant to wander, controlled and spellbound. This it seems is capitalism’s vision of the future in its “advanced” nations: a docile, profit producing working class who will revert to being Consumer Zombies when we are let out to play.

Which is all very reminiscent of George Romero’s film Day of the Dead, where the Living Dead converge on The Mall, as it is the only thing they remember from their human existence. But we are not zombies; we are human beings and we need better than this. We can choose life. We can choose revolution.

Ben Malcolm

The coming century (2000)

From the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well, this is it! This is what? The brand new century—a row of virginal 0s waiting to be filled in. So what? So . . . so, it's time to take stock. Of what? Of where we are . . . who we are. History. Bollocks!

The first thing to realise is that history does not arrive at midnight, like a rabbit out of a magician's hat. History makes nothing, brings nothing, stands for nothing. History is social motion and the speed and texture of that motion is made by men and women. We make it out of the material environment that exists and in making it transform the material environment and our own existence. We make our own future; it does not arrive as hero or demon, but is the product of our own energy.

Secondly, there is a harsh truth to recognise. The battle to make the future better than the past is about power, not ideals. We all want to be happy, but happiness for Rupert Murdoch is achievable in a different way than for a single mother in Brixton. Murdoch needs to hold on to his power and expand it. The single mother needs to gain power. Murdoch has a class interest based upon the ownership and control of property. The working-class interest is based upon its non-ownership and control of property. Consciousness of these interests and organisation to promote them is the key to changing history. So, the question is not about what the future will bring, but about what we have the intelligence and the political force to take for ourselves.

Thirdly, the future is not a moment and is not Out There, like a Star Trek story. It is a process in which the present second is always a part. The beginning of the future starts with an understanding of where one is. There are no solutions until the problem is recognised. The complexities of our future are inextricably connected to the contradictions of the present. That is why stargazers and prophets are always faintly ridiculous, obsessed as they are by imagined destinies.

We owe them a future

What's rotten

By 2100 it would be rather nice if the world could have seen the last of

• Nation states—homely prison enclosures in which the inmates sing the prison song and coloured rags fly overhead to remind you of which wing you're in.
• Banks—repositories of paper and metal tokens that people need in order to buy existence.
• Sir Cliff Richard—the singing ayatollah of creepy Christendom who has managed against all odds to put a tune to the act of fraud.
• Wages and salaries—the price on our heads, always less than the value of what we produce, which are the stale air provided for the semi-suffocated majority in a world where they produce much and possess little.
• Telephone muzak—designed to drive us slowly mad while we wait to speak to people we probably don't want to speak to about matters we'd rather not be discussing.
• Charities—which redistribute poverty, enabling the abjectly poor to benefit from the guilt of the moderately poor.
• America—the ultimate trash-empire, based on the principle that no-one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the inhabitants.
• Markets—which are presented as channels of economic access, but are obstacle courses which ration access in accordance with the callous priority of profit accumulation.
• Lenin-worshippers—those insufferable lefties who see their role in this world to lead the witless masses into a state dictatorship where the Lenin-worshipers will become commissars.
• Hymns—see Cliff Richard.
• Government—the means whereby we are coerced into class regimentation by the force of law.
• Socialists—a redundant label once the job is done.

New millennium—new social order?

The biggest failure of the twentieth century was the failure of humanity to grasp the need for a new social order based on need rather than profit. The consequences have been devastating. The thought of sustaining those consequences, embedded as they are in ever-increasing contradictions of anarchic global capitalism, is not only uninspiring, but deeply depressing. Although there is a prevailing political illusion that Capitalism Has Won, there is a remarkable absence of confidence, even among its supporters, in the capacity for humanising the global market.

The most pressing challenge this century will be to remove capitalism and establish a new social order based upon

• Common ownership
• Democratic control
• Production solely for use
• Free access to all goods and services

Such a system has never been tried. It conforms to the highest needs of humanity to create a world where order is based upon equality, friendship and freedom. It is humanity's objective in humanising its social environment.

Capitalism reduces us to conformity and obedience

There will be those who raise objections. They should. The most important next step is that at least there should be debate. Others will raise no objections, but continue to uphold the present system in a state of inert, apathetic and cynical resignation. They are the bulwarks of global capitalism which relies not upon enthusiastic support but hopeless acquiescence. Shaking such hopelessness, and offering what Raymond Williams called "resources of hope", may well be the most important political task of our age.

Steve Coleman