Voice From The Back: Happy days? (2005)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Happy days?

‘Schooldays are the happiest days of your life’, according to the old saw. Like most old saws it is a load of nonsense. Here are two reports from the same newspaper that paint a far from idyllic picture of the schoolroom. “The number of children prescribed antidepressant drugs is rising faster in the UK than anywhere else in the world. Prescriptions rose by almost 70 per cent between 1992 and 2001, according to studies published in Archives of Diseases in Childhood.” “Schools will be given the power to search pupils for knives and other weapons in plans to combat disruptive students announced by the Education Secretary, Charles Clarke. Head teachers could also invite police into schools unannounced” (Times, 23 November). Inside capitalism the nasty, aggressive nature of competition mars even the so-called golden days of youth.     

The wasteful society

“Companies around the world invested $334 billion in advertising last year – more than the gross domestic product of Switzerland. Advertisers in the UK spent £10.8 billion for the year ending 30 September” (Observer, 28 November). This $334 billion represents an immense amount of human labour and material. Just imagine what this could accomplish in the fields of human welfare such as medical research, food production  and sanitation inside a socialist society, where advertising no longer existed.     

Home alone

In Charles Dickens novels the old workers were condemned to eke out a miserable existence in a workhouse. Today things are much better, the old are allowed to freeze to death at home.” Pensioners in the UK are more likely to die from cold this winter than older people in any other Northern European country, campaigners warned today. Age Concern said that 22,000 pensioners were likely to die from cold-related illness this winter in the UK” (manchester online, manchester news, 2 December)

Infanticide

“Lack of food and education still afflict millions of children around the world, with nearly 10 million youngsters under the age of 5 dying each year from preventable diseases, the UN children’s agency said Sunday. UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy underlined the challenges of improving primary health care for children on a global basis as she opened an international conference in the Pakistani capital to encourage volunteers to help at aid agencies and in government programs. ‘Children under the age of 5 are still dying at a rate of nearly 10 million a year from preventable causes like diarrhoea, measles and acute respiratory infections,’ said Bellamy, who arrived in Islamabad on Sunday for a three day visit” (Yahoo News, 5 December)

All right for some

“The wealth of the super-rich has doubled since Tony Blair came to power, the Office of National Statistics said yesterday in a report on social inequality in Britain. Nearly 600,000 individuals in the top 1% of the UK wealth league owned assets worth £355 billion in 1996, the last full year of Conservative rule. By 2002 that increased to £797 billion, the ONS said” (Guardian, 8 December) We can safely assume that none of these super-rich will be among the 22,000 that freeze to death this winter.     

Contrasts

Two recent newspaper reports illustrate what a mad society capitalism has become. “The world’s most expensive weekend getaway is to be launched by an exclusive resort in Baja California, Mexico. The three-day package will cost $8.4 million (ú4.5 million) and promises a “bedside performance” by Sir Elton John and a private jet for whale watching” (Times, 1 December) “A record number of people are working in the global economy but half of them make $2 a day, or less, according to a report published yesterday. The International Labour Organisation’s World Employment report said that about 2.8 billion people were employed globally in 2003. But nearly 1.4 billion, the highest number ever, are living on less than $2 a day, while 550 million are living under the $1 poverty line” (Guardian, 8 December)

Cooking the Books: Who needs a financial structure? (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Building a land route – whether a tunnel or a bridge or a combination of both – between Britain and the Continent was long an obvious thing to do. Eventually a rail tunnel was constructed, and opened in 1994. But under capitalism things are never that simple.

In socialism, after an initial assessment of the need and impact of such a project and after democratic debate and approval, it would go ahead. The physical resources (digging machines, steel supports, etc.) and the skilled labour would be brought together and the bridge or tunnel built. After that, it would be used, the only additional resources needed being those to operate and maintain it.

Under capitalism it was quite different as it was not just a question of deciding to do something, then organising the physical and labour resources, and then doing it. Finance and profit came into the equation. The resources had to bought, and the money for this had to be borrowed, and the lenders had to be paid interest.

So, to build the tunnel under the channel, in the first instance money capital had to be mobilised, and was from private investors, banks and governments. The tunnel was built and trains began to run through it carrying passengers, cars and freight. A profit was made. So everything was alright? No, since not enough profit was made. Although operating costs were more than covered, not enough profit was made to pay the interest on the capital borrowed to construct the tunnel. As a result the company – Eurotunnel – has been in financial difficulties since the start. Its debt is now estimated at £6 billion and rising. A shareholders revolt last April threw out of the previous board of directors, but the new chief executive, Jean-Louis Raymond recently stated that “the financial structure of the group remains fragile and the high interest charges continue to impact on operating results“ (Guardian, 30 October).

But the tunnel would still be useful and could still operate without any “financial structure”. In fact, such a structure is just an unnecessary complication. Unnecessary, that is, from a rational social point of view but of course vitally necessary under capitalism where the general rule is that every productive activity has to aim to yield a financial profit and is in trouble if it doesn’t.

Letter: Wally Preston (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I have just come across on your website the (undated) obituary of Wally Preston [it was in the November 2000 issue – Eds]. I had not heard of Wally’s death, and was saddened to learn of it. I met him several times when he was a member of the International Socialists in the 1970s, and he once stayed the night at my home. He was a splendid speaker, a genuine working-class intellectual and a very likeable human being.

However, I must correct your obituarist on one point. He quotes my short history of the IS/SWP and deduces that the comrade who told an IS Conference that a document was so bad it must have been written by a sociologist was Wally. It was not. That speech was made by the late Terry Barrett, a London docker. Barrett was a man of great courage and principle (he publicly opposed the dockers’ march in support of Enoch Powell in 1968), but he was on occasion given to a certain demagogic anti-intellectualism of a sort that I think Wally would not have indulged in.

Ian Birchall, 

London, N9

Blogger's Note:

See the comment below for more background about Terry Barrett.

The Plot Thickens (2005)

TV Review from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Conspiracies – The Illuminati (Sky Mix, Fri, 9.00pm, Dec 10)

“They’re all enslaving you. They call us cattle, but they’re just scum”. So goes one of Alex Jones’ weekly Texas radio rants against that supersecret sect of the centuries, the Illuminati (Enlightened). Established in 1776 in Bavaria as a secular intellectual club but driven underground by the Church, this mysterious society has by now infiltrated into every government organisation including the media. Its aim is nothing less than the dumbing down of a helpless population and then global dictatorship. Apparently. 

We follow the narrator Danny Wallace on a wild-goose chase round industrial estates, hoping to meet a real-life Illuminatus, who evidently bottles out of the encounter (or didn’t exist in the first place), and sundry interviews with paranoid amateur journalists who say things like: “They are monitoring my every move. It’s a wonder I’m still alive” (a wonder you’re not locked up, more like).

Conspiracy theorists often gain plausibility by taking established fact and embellishing it, so that one can’t tell where truth ends and fiction begins. There are undoubtedly shadowy societies of the super-rich which are well-documented. The Skull and Bones in America includes many senators, three past presidents, and both George Bush and John Kerry, while in Britain we have the Masonic Lodge. The Bilderberg Group is also given lavish treatment in the programme. But of course, they can’t be very secret or we wouldn’t know about them. The point is, say the neurotic campaigners, they’re all just fronts for the Illuminati.

What’s really interesting – more than the unlikely tales of mock human sacrifices under a giant stone owl – is why some people need to believe the world is really controlled by a secret society, when it is fairly obviously controlled by the not-very-secret capitalist class. Perhaps that’s just too mundane an explanation, or too public, when what is required by conspiracy theorists is something akin to demonic global possession, something so unearthly and powerful that it is quite beyond our ability to exorcise it. Why do they need to believe in this absolute evil? Perhaps in order to cast themselves as holy crusaders.

There are conspiracies all the time, little ones. Big ones tend to spring leaks however, and few are likely to believe in one that has lasted 250 years without being ‘outed’. The capitalist class is not a conspiracy, not because it is open and, more or less, above board, but because it is not united, as the Illuminati presumably are. The disunity of the capitalist class is their Achilles heel, a weakness workers could use. If you believe your enslavers have no weaknesses, you won’t struggle against them. The crusaders against the Illuminati could do with some illumination on that point.

Paddy Shannon

The need for socialism (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is true that material deprivation – at least in this part of the world – is less than it was when the Socialist Party was formed in 1904. But it is also true that since then there has been a tremendous development of the forces of production – the technical means of producing enough for all – so that, despite the increase in world population in the meantime, no man, woman or child in any part of the world need today go without decent food, clothing, shelter or any of the other amenities of life. The fact that most of the world’s population do is a damning indictment of the present social order, capitalism.

Basic contradiction

The case against capitalism and for socialism has always been simple. With the division of labour resulting from the use of more and more sophisticated machines and techniques, humans already cooperate to produce what is needed to sustain life and social activity, but what is produced does not belong to those who produced it – the working class, those who are obliged to sell their mental and physical energies for a living and who make up the overwhelming majority of society – but to a tiny minority of privileged people who, through historical circumstances, happen to own and control the means of wealth production.

As a result what is produced belongs to this minority and so is not available to the members of society to take and use to satisfy their needs. It is only made available to them against payment but what we of the working class can afford is limited by the size of our wage packet or salary cheque, which is always less than the new value incorporated in what we produce. The difference is profit – the source of the privileged income of the owning minority and the over-riding aim of production. So, not only is free access to what is produced denied to those who, collectively, produced it, but what gets to be produced is dictated not by what people want and need but by what is most profitable.

This contradiction between cooperative, collective production and the private appropriation of the product, arising from the means of production being monopolised by a minority, is the root-cause of the problems faced by the working class majority in all fields of life.

Promises to solve these problems, as over housing, transport, the environment, food safety, are the stuff of politics but the parties and politicians people vote for never solve them. Not because they are dishonest or not determined enough or mere self-seekers but because they cannot. The problems they promise to solve are caused by capitalism and so can never be solved as long as capitalism is allowed to continue.

Capitalism cannot work for all

Capitalism, as a profit system based on the class ownership of the means of production, can never be made to work in the interests of all. It always puts profits first. That’s its nature, which cannot be changed by any government or any other form of activity within the context of class ownership and production for profit.

This is why reformism, as the attempt to make capitalism work in the interest of all, is ultimately futile. At most it can only smooth off some of the rougher edges a little, at least for some people and for a while, but it can never solve the problems facing wage and salary workers.

This being the case, what the working class, as the class that suffers most from the problems caused by capitalism, should be aiming at is bringing an end to the contradiction between cooperation in production and private appropriation of the products. This can only be done by bringing ownership into line with productive reality, by bringing about a situation where what is produced collectively is also owned collectively; which is only possible when the means for producing wealth have become the common property of all the members of society.

The socialist solution

This – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production by and in the interest of society as a whole – is socialism and it is the only political goal worth striving for. Only it can provide the framework within which production can be re-oriented away from making profits for an owning class to providing what people want and need. On the basis of common ownership and democratic control, enough food, clothing, housing, transport, energy and the other necessaries and amenities of life could, should and would be produced to ensure that nobody, in any part of the world, went without what they needed. Material deprivation, and worries about satisfying material needs – around which most people’s lives revolve today – will no longer exist.

But socialism is not just about satisfying people’s material needs. That will just be routine in socialism, something taken for granted. It is also about allowing human beings to behave as the social animals that, biologically, we are. We are not just dependent on each other materially – on cooperating to produce what we need – but psychologically and culturally too. We evolved through cooperation and we need to cooperate and to feel part of a community with other human beings, but capitalism denies us this. Built-in to it is competition not cooperation. Competition not only between the owning class and the excluded majority – the class struggle – but also between members of the owning class to make profits – which, on a world scale, leads to wars and preparation for war, as over sources of raw materials, trade routes, markets and investment outlets – and between members of the excluded majority for jobs and housing, fuelling nationalism, racism and xenophobia.

Socialism, by ending the division of society into antagonistic classes, and by ensuring that every human being has their material needs met as a matter of course, will stop the rat-race we are forced to participate in under capitalism and create a real community and a real sense of community. People will no longer be alienated from their social nature and from other human beings.

Which way to socialism?

Those who set up the Socialist Party had a clear idea of how they thought socialism should come about: through the majority working class coming to understand that they were an exploited class to whom capitalism had nothing to offer and organising on the political field, to pursue uncompromisingly the single aim of  wresting control of political power from the capitalist class and using it to end the monopoly exercised by the capitalist minority over the means of wealth production. This political and then economic expropriation was seen as being a conscious, democratic, political act.

It was also seen as being a revolutionary act, not in the sense of street-fighting and bloodshed – even if some violent incidents might not to be able to be entirely avoided – but in the sense of a decisive break, a rupture, involving the rapid conversion of the means of production from the class monopoly of a minority into the common property of all the people. In other words, a social revolution as a rapid and abrupt change in the basis of society carried out by political means.

At the time there were others who called themselves socialists who put forward a different approach: the gradual transformation of capitalism into socialism through a series of social reforms which would improve conditions for the working class by supplementing their wages with state benefits and which would convert individual industries, one after the other, into public services producing what people needed not for profit. This went under various names: gradualism, Fabianism, revisionism (when put forward by former Marxian revolutionaries), reformism. In Britain, at the time the Socialist Party was formed, it was represented by the now defunct Independent Labour Party, which was one of the constituent parts of the Labour Party and then, after the adoption of a new constitution in 1918, by the Labour Party itself, at least by those of its members and leaders who had any long-term perspective.

Gradualism fails

This strategy denied the need for a consciously socialist majority as a preliminary condition for establishing socialism. According to its proponents, all that was required was a parliamentary majority acquired on the basis of votes for a programme of reforms to be achieved within capitalism. It was a strategy that was put to the test, in Britain, in 1945 when the Labour Party won a landslide election victory giving them a huge parliamentary majority.

But it didn’t work. Labour, having taken on responsibility for governing capitalism found, as it had as a minority government in 1924 and 1929-1931, that capitalism had to be governed on its terms: priority had to be given to profit-making not social improvements for workers; in fact, even wages had to be restrained. The Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s fared no better at reforming capitalism in the interest of wage and salary workers. They, too, ended up administering capitalism on its terms, i.e., in the interest of profit-making and against the interests of the wage and salary earning majority. As did all similar government in other parts of the world.

The experience of the 20th century proved the gradualists wrong. Instead of such parties gradually changing capitalism, it was capitalism that gradually changed them. Nowadays, they don’t even claim to be aiming at socialism, only to be able to manage capitalism in a more efficient way.

The Socialist Party in Britain were not the only critics of gradualist reformism. Indeed, the early members initially saw themselves as part of the wing of the international Social Democratic movement that was opposed to the revisionism and opportunism that was spreading within the movement. However, most of the other pre-WWI opponents of gradualism, including Rosa Luxemburg, author of a pamphlet with the title of Reform or Revolution?, did not see the danger, in terms of attracting non-socialist support and becoming its prisoner, of a socialist party advocating reforms. After the ignominious collapse of the international Social Democratic movement when the war broke out, many of the other anti-gradualists turned to Lenin’s Bolshevism for an alternative strategy.

Minority action fails too

Whereas the gradualists had still been committed to democratic methods and majority action even though only by non-socialists, Lenin argued that under capitalism only a minority would ever be able to reach socialist understanding and that it was therefore up to this minority to organise itself as a vanguard party to seize power on behalf of the majority.

In other words, the Leninists’ alternative strategy to gradualist reformism was not the consciously socialist, majority political action advocated by the Socialist Party in Britain, but minority socialist action: socialism was to be introduced by a dictatorship exercised by a minority of socialists. This was how the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in the course of the 1917 Russian revolution was presented. This was never going to work as a way to socialism since socialism can only exist on a democratic basis with majority participation in decision-making. And it didn’t. Instead of the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia leading to socialism, it led to state capitalism with the members of the “socialist” vanguard evolving into a new ruling class exercising a brutal dictatorship over the workers of Russia.

The 20th century confirmed that minority dictatorship was no more a route to socialism than parliamentary reformism. The worst thing about it was that the Russian dictatorship claimed to be socialist, with the result that millions of workers all over the world were put off the whole idea of socialism. To tell the truth, socialism is still suffering from this unwelcome legacy, with the view that “socialism has been tried (in Russia) and failed” being widely held.

In fact, of course, socialism has not been tried. What has been tried are two strategies – gradualist reformism and Leninist minority dictatorship – for supposedly progressing towards socialism. Both failed. But what has not been tried is the strategy proposed by the founding members of the Socialist Party in 1904: conscious, majority, revolutionary political action.

Just as socialism remains as relevant today as it was in 1904, so too does this strategy. “No socialism without socialists” remains as true today as it was then. And “making socialists”, as a step towards the emergence of a majority desire for socialism, remains the task of those who want to see established a socialist world of common ownership, democratic control, production to meet people’s needs and free distribution on the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs”.

Adam Buick

Poverty, nationalism and the Wales Millenium centre. (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Friday 26 November was a ‘good news’ day. It marked the beginning of a three-day gala opening of the Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) in Cardiff, an event that was greeted by a media fanfare that relegated all other news in Wales to the back pages. Built in the Cardiff Bay area that was once home to the city’s red-light district, the WMC is a replacement for the Cardiff Opera House project abandoned for being too elitist almost ten years ago. The construction, plagued with funding problems and originally due to open on St David’s Day (1 March) 2001 was finally completed (after a £37 million Welsh Assembly grant in January 2002) at a total cost of £106 million.

Amongst the host of celebrities in raptures over the building, lovingly described by many as having looking like a cross between a giant computer mouse and an armadillo, was the patriotic Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel.  Gushing with adulation he exclaimed, “The eyes of the world will be on the opening this weekend, but it’s important that the good work continues over the next year and that we, as a nation, embrace it.” (Western Mail, 26 November)

Many, including Terfel, share a patriotic delusion that people born in the same country have a common interest, unique to their particular geographical location and a source of misguided pride. This nationalistic nonsense and talk about ‘nations’ disguises the actual division of the world’s population into two classes, the minority who own the means of producing and distributing wealth and the majority of working people who are compelled to work for a wage or salary in order to live. These two classes have opposing interests, since the wealth enjoyed by the owning class depends on depriving working people of the things they need and reduces them to a life of servitude, insecurity and poverty. Working people have no country or nation, only a place where they were born and where they are exploited for the benefit of the owners. The interests of working people in Wales are common to working people throughout the world and antagonistic to the world’s capitalist class, including those in Wales. It is class not nationality that determines your role in society.

So instead urging people to ‘embrace’ the ‘Theatre of Dreams’ Terfel and his nationalist friends might stop to embrace a few facts about people in Wales, with many of its three million population in dire poverty. Does he embrace the fact that NHS waiting list cause BMA staff in Wales to “weep in despair”? On the day of the gala opening, “Dr Calland spoke as new monthly figures showed 311,000 people were waiting for treatment – up 2,400 on last month.” (BBC Wales Ceefax, 26 November)  Or perhaps he might embrace the news that on the day of the gala opening reassurances that ‘Support Line Cymru,’ the teacher’s telephone support line, would continue to get Assembly government funding. The support line, set up in 2002, received no fewer than 650 calls from teachers suffering from stress last year (ITV Wales, Teletext, 26 November).

 

Or even the unpleasant facts about those victims of work related injuries, the subject of a TUC report also reported on BBC Wales news (Ceefax page 165) on the morning of the 26 November. The report concluded, “Wales is the worst place in the UK for injury sustained by people slipping and tripping in work.” Stress, repetitive strain injury and back strains are itemised as the top three health risks facing workers.

Perhaps it’s a little too embarrassing to consider the facts about Cardiff’s environment. On the morning of the gala opening, the WMC’s new neighbours, the residents of Leckwith were told to embrace the fact they must “take special precautions” after traces of arsenic, lead, nickel and mercury had been found in the soil in their gardens, stadium and local allotment. Council investigations revealed “unacceptable levels of contamination” prompting the issuing of a warning to children and pregnant women, “to limit the amount of Leckwith-grown produce they ate.” The area had once been a railway yard and later a landfill site but is now a place where working people live. (www.bbc.co.uk, 26 November).

Reviewing the facts about unemployment in Wales will probably be even less palatable. John Osmond, Director of the Institute of Welsh Affairs observed, “On the surface in Wales, unemployment appears to have reached tolerably low levels, but when combined with sickness and disability claimants, the proportions not working are higher than almost anywhere else in the UK. There are pockets of extreme poverty throughout. The Valleys pose particular problems, with their legacy of ill health, low skill levels and low employment activity rates. But there are also concentrations of poverty along the North Wales coastline, in south Pembrokeshire and in parts of Cardiff, Newport and Swansea” (www. jrf. org. uk /pressroom, 27 February). Nor the facts about the 55,000 inhabitants of Merthyr Tydfil, unless, of course, their quality of life has improved significantly since 2001. Then, 66 percent of homes had less than £10,000 income a year, 48.6 percent of people were in employment, 28 percent of homes receive housing benefit, 12.5 percent of homes are not fit for habitation, 44 percent of 16-60 year-olds had no qualifications and 30 percent of people suffered from long-term illness (Welsh Assembly Government, Mapping social exclusion in Wales, 1999; 2001 census)

Perhaps the plight of youngsters highlighted two years ago in a BBC examination of poverty in Wales that reported, “Youth unemployment in Wales is now the second highest in the whole of the UK” is worthy of being embraced by the nationalists. The BBC report showed that 14 percent of youth were jobless, 19 percent of the population received benefit and 700,000 people were below the low-income threshold, which meant that in the EU only Greece had more in so-called ‘official poverty.’ (news.bbc.co.uk, 30 July, 2002) In the period 2002-3, 27 percent of Welsh 15-year olds (10,000 children) failed to obtain any GCSEs above grade D and 8 percent obtained no GCSEs at all (3,000 children) compared to 4 percent in England (www.poverty.org.uk/intro/index.htm).

But, we shouldn’t let awkward facts spoil something as grand as the gala opening and many facts are best left unsaid. These might include the despair of thousands of people in Wales seeking help with debt problems, which three years ago had reached a total of £120 million. In September 2001, “The Welsh Consumer Council report+ reveals consumer troubles with loans, overdrafts, credit and store cards have risen by more than a third in the last four years. And trading standards officials are increasingly concerned about the activities of unlicensed loan sharks who use illegal or threatening tactics to collect cash. Today’s report reveals Citizen Advice Bureaux in Wales dealt with more than 56,000 debt inquiries” (Tom Badden, Liverpool Daily Post, 13 September 2001). Meanwhile, “the figures show there were 11,967 individual insolvencies in England and Wales in the third quarter of 2004. It was an increase of 6.2 percent on the previous quarter and 31.1 percent on the same period a year ago” (www.clearlybusiness.com).

Equally unattractive is embracing the knowledge that Shelter Cymru are “helping over 13,000 in housing need every year” and “estimate that 50,000 children are living in unfit housing in Wales according to the last house condition survey.” Or perhaps the estimated 33 percent of children in Wales who suffer asthma symptoms, more than three times the levels in Spain, Poland and Denmark. “The link between poor housing, homelessness and poor health are so obvious but they often seem overlooked when it comes to resources.” (www. sheltercymru, 7 July)

John Puzey, Director of Shelter Cymru had earlier warned that the housing ‘boom’ meant, “Fewer people are able to access the housing market with the average price of a home in Wales at £120,000. There is more pressure for social housing because people can’t afford to buy properties but social housing is less available due to lower levels of building and a continuing loss through the right to buy” (www.sheltercymru, 17 June).  During 2003-4 the number of homeless households in Wales rose to 9,147, while those in temporary accommodation rose to 2,890 by March 2004, an increase of 94 percent in a year. “Even more damaging are the increasing numbers of families with children with no alternatives but to stay in overcrowded bed and breakfast accommodation – the latest figures show almost 700 households in B&B with about a quarter having dependent children.” Puzey continued that housing children in temporary accommodation “can cause serious life long problems, disrupting education and arresting development.” (Shelter Cymru, 29th September 2004). The BBC noted, “It is estimated that £3 bn is needed to bring every home in Wales up to a decent standard”(www.news.bbc.co.uk, 26 October).

We can be sure that life in “The South Wales Valleys [who are] facing a drugs ‘epidemic’ with heroin dealers operating “every quarter of a mile,” is a fact that won’t be embraced. Assistant Chief Constable of South Wales Police, David Francis, said “The drugs problem is the biggest crisis that is facing our communities – people in these communities are being torn apart by what drugs are doing to their families and the crime that is related to it.” (www.bbc.news.co.uk, 25 October, 2002)

Wake up, Bryn and all those peddling delusions of  ‘nations.’ The only things that working people need ‘embrace’ are the undeniable truths that capitalism cannot work in our interest and the nationalist message is everywhere poisonous and divisive, embracing the notion that capitalism is somehow better when administrated locally. The socialist message is that working people everywhere must end the servitude, insecurity and poverty that capitalism is incapable of curing by embracing socialism, a world community without nations, class discrimination, production for profit or money. In socialist society each, according to their individual taste, will be freely entertained in venues like the WMC throughout the world, while the fear that we must sink back to a life of deprivation and misery after the final curtain falls will have become nothing more than a distant memory.

Steve Trott

The elections in Iraq (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The indications of a  new social order, or re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as Iraq slides ever deeper into civil war?

Since the end of the Second World War, when the US forced the Italian government to discharge its Communist Party cabinet members as a prerequisite for aid, to its support for the coup attempt in Venezuela in 2003, the US has been regularly subverting elections around the globe for the benefit of its own corporate elite.

Ever fearful that foreign governments might, among other things, introduce labour and environmental legislation detrimental to US investments, Washington has opposed the principle of democracy on almost every continent, even helping to overthrow democratically elected governments whenever it felt its interests threatened (e.g. Iran in 1953, Guatemala 1954, Congo 1960, Ecuador 1961, Bolivia 1964. Greece 1967, Fiji 1987).

Nor have its methods been peaceable. Indeed its agents in the CIA have carried out assassination of prominent individuals with as much indifference as its embassies have supported right-wing death squads and bloody coup attempts throughout Central and South America. Across the world, the US has backed dictators of every hue, turning a blind eye to their horrendous affronts to the democratic process.

We are now to believe that the US, presently occupying “sovereign Iraq” (for President Bush has declared Iraq is now “sovereign”), a country with sizeable oil reserves, and which has lost 100,000 of its people since the US-UK invasion, will see  that free and democratic elections take place on 30 January. Bush has since informed the people of Iraq – the same Iraq in which the CIA helped Saddam Hussein pull off the military coup that originally brought him to power: “We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.”

John Negroponte, the US Ambassador in Iraq, has been adamant that the US will not allow a delay in the 30 January vote. Speaking to reporters he stated that the elections would go ahead and that the security situation would be improved by then, and went so far as to say that conditions in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces were already safe enough for elections to be held.

He said: “I think once they realize that the elections will go forward as planned, then they [Sunni opponents of the election] are going to have to deal with that reality” (Washington Post, 1 December). However the Sunni resistance looks set to spiral, his comments coming  just after it was reported that US deaths in Iraq in November matched the post-invasion record set in April – 135 troops dead.

In Washington and London,  the claim is that the ongoing attacks by insurgents are an all-out attempt to disrupt the coming elections, when in truth the overriding fact is that many Iraqis still see the US as an army of occupation whose presence they have a right to oppose. An opinion poll carried out in September by the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority confirmed that opposition to the US presence was widespread. It revealed that just 2 percent of Iraqi Arabs – that is, minus the Kurdish population – agreed wholeheartedly with the occupation. If anything, this shows that in spite of the age-old hostilities between Sunnis and Shiites, one thing that could unite them is their hostility to an occupying army of 138,000 – a figure set to increase before the election.

Securing the peace in Iraq in time for the elections has so far meant installing a pliable puppet regime, and implementing Order 39, which the Economist (25 September 2003) described as “a capitalist’s dream” and which opened up the Iraqi economy to complete foreign takeover. It has meant the deliberate bombing of homes, hospitals and religious buildings by squadrons of bombers and helicopter gun-ships, turning cities into rubble (Fallujah was napalmed), cutting off water, electricity and medical supplies and spreading hunger and disease.

A comprehensive new study by the British-based charity organisation Medact, which looks at the impact of war on health, reveals that acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years has increased from 4 percent prior to the invasion to 7.7 percent since the invasion and that about 400,000 Iraqi children are suffering from ‘wasting’ and ‘emaciation’ conditions of chronic diarrhoea and protein deficiency.

Despite such facts as these, Washington would have it that people in Iraq are being irrational in not supporting US-organised elections.

As we go to press, Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians are at odds over whether elections can take place on 30 January as planned. Iraq’s 60 percent Shia majority, who clearly suffered worst under Saddam’s reign, are keen for the elections to go ahead on time, knowing they are likely to consolidate the increased power they have enjoyed since overthrow of the essentially Sunni president Saddam. However, as rebels have continued their assaults on other towns since the fall of Fallujah, a campaign led by Sunni politicians has gathered momentum, with Shia leaders claiming that a postponement of the election date would only play into the hands of the insurgents.

The head of the Shiite Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, has insisted that the elections go ahead. He has been backed by 42 mainly Shia and Turkmen parties who have issued a statement to say moves to delay the elections were illegal.

Conversely, Adnan Pachachi, a former Sunni minister, is heading a group of 17 political parties asking that the 30 January vote be delayed by six months because of the violence, fearing the insurgency in Sunni towns will discourage people from voting, thus disenfranchising them. Significantly, the two major Kurdish parties have also signed up to the delay

Alawi, the interim leader appointed by Washington to run Iraq, has said that in centres of resistance like Fallujah elections could be “delayed” until stability existed there, without the vote being invalidated, or in other words Washington-style democracy would will be available in the first instance only to those who did not resist the occupation by US forces.

Alawi, it seems, has no real control over the situation, and though it is said he has the power to cancel the election if he wished, there still exists the US hand-picked seven-member commission set up to run the elections, which can bar any candidate or party from standing and which will be deciding who is and who is not eligible to stand as a candidate.

Under the rules, the Iraqi electorate will vote for a 275-member Transitional National Assembly. Political parties will submit a list of candidates and every third name has to be a woman’s. Those Parties with alleged connections to militias are disqualified from taking part, along with former leading members of the Baath Party.

The US hopes to have 150,000 troops in place in time for the election, evidence if ever it was needed that the crisis in Iraq is escalating. It was not so long ago that Bush was boasting how US troops had been greeted as liberators and projected that the country could be policed with 50,000 troops by the end of 2003. Now military analysts are cautioning that the Iraq army and police force will not be in a position to police the country for another ten years. So much, then for Bush’s claim that once a legitimate Iraqi government is up and running the troops will be on their way home.

And as for the post-election situation, make no mistake, any government elected in Iraq will be permitted to function only so long as it kowtows to the dictates of Washington. Whatever, government is elected to ‘rule’ Iraq on 30 January it will only be allowed to do so with the endorsement of the White House.

Here in Britain, Bush’s sidekick, Tony Blair, is likewise looking forward to a post-election regime in Iraq that has no real say on foreign investment. Moreover, Blair is desperate for elections to take place in Iraq for the simple reason that he needs something resembling a foreign policy success to present to voters in the run up to the election. Indeed any good news at all at the moment would be welcomed by New Labour.

The essential goal of the Bush regime in the Middle East remains the same as that of preceding administrations going back to WWII, and that is to reinforce control of the region’s oil reserves and the profits that arise from them. Furthermore, Washington is well aware that control of Middle East oil gives the US enormous leverage over its economic rivals, Europe, Japan and China, all of whom are more dependent on Middle Eastern oil than the US. China in particular is expected to have the same oil demands as the US within 25 years.

That Iraq has huge oils supplies is the sole reason the US cannot allow a government –  freely elected by its people and one advocating a US departure – to exist.

John Bissett

Devastating competition (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

When Russia ratified the Kyoto Protocol on the emission of greenhouse gases in October there was some rejoicing in environmentalist circles as this meant that the treaty now became binding on all the governments that had signed up to it. The environmentalists were well aware that the agreement was quite inadequate to achieve its stated purpose, but took the view that something was better than nothing.

In a socialist world, once a problem like this had been identified, the necessary remedial action could be taken rapidly. If scientists advised that greenhouse gas emissions had to be cut to avoid global overwarming and its consequences, then they would be, with the methods of energy production being changed to achieve this. It would essentially be a question of organisation, or rather of reorganisation. Everybody would have an interest in this being done, and it would be done.

But, under capitalism, while in the abstract everybody including those in charge of capitalist corporations has an interest in tackling the problem, the vested interests of capitalist corporations and governments get in the way.

Most of the excessive emissions of greenhouse gases come from burning oil and coal, but some countries depend more on this than others. They stood to be penalised vis-à-vis their competitors using other sources of energy in that their costs would rise more. So, supported by their governments, they fought against the treaty. This was the reason America refused to sign. Its government was not prepared to see its corporations rendered less competitive on the world market. And still isn’t.

But even in countries which have signed, the arguments about competitiveness still go on. At the end of October, the British government announced that it was raising the amount of carbon dioxide that factories, oil refineries and power stations in Britain could emit by 6.6 million tonnes a year for the next three years. Hardly a contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Referring to “the need to protect the competitive position of UK industry”, Environment Secretary Margaret Beckett explained: “projections suggested that if we stuck with the original formula, it would have had a devastating effect on our industry” (Guardian, Times, 28 October). In other words, capitalist firms in other countries would be able to outcompete British ones through being able to keep their costs lower as a result of not having to spent so much on equipment to cut emissions.

Competition is said by supporters of capitalism to bring all sorts of benefits. Socialists can’t see any. The sad story of attempts to limit greenhouse gases shows that having production organised by separate enterprises all competing to make a profit has “devastating effects” both on the environment and on those working for them.

Party News (2005)

Party News from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party will be standing a candidate in Vauxhall, in the coming general election. This is the constituency covering our Head Office in Clapham High Street and the campaign will be run by the South London, Central London and West London branches.

A programme of monthly activities (literature stalls, leaflet distribution, public meetings) is planned between now and the elections.

For details of how you can join in these activities, write to: London Election Committee, Socialist Party, 52  Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

Obituary: Paddy Boylan (2005)

Obituary from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paddy Boylan, Socialist, died aged 86 in Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry, on Sunday 24 October.

Paddy had been a member of the Socialist Party of Ireland in Dublin before emigrating to England in 1958 to work, like many others from Ireland, in the then booming car industry in Coventry. He was secretary of the Coventry Socialist Group in the early 1960s, made up largely of other Socialists who had also been forced to leave Ireland to find work.

In Paddy, Socialism has lost a lifelong advocate here in Coventry and in his native Dublin. We who had the pleasure of knowing him will miss him.

PS

Editorial: Blunkett is guilty (2005)

Editorial from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Blunkett is unquestionably guilty. We are not referring to all the inconsequential fuss about the ex-lover, her nanny, a visa and free rail tickets. No. The important position that Blunkett has abused is his own professed core belief in self-help which he has summed up by saying “Old Labour is the idea that you did things to people, New Labour is about enabling people to do things for themselves.”

Despite his experience of working class poverty, suffering and injustice in childhood, the political course he has followed, and is now transforming into government policies with his cabinet colleagues, in no way enables people to “do things for themselves”.

Blunkett has participated in fast-tracking British capitalism towards as much profit as possible, and because of this, New Labour has continued to “do things to people” which the minister declares he deplores. New Labour helps coerce people to work for employers who extract surplus value which is pocketed by parasitical shareholders. It restricts people from accessing goods and services with laws and enforcement, unless they’re capable of paying. It compels children to be conditioned (“educated”) into becoming the next generation of wage and salary slaves for employers to prey on. It assists in forcing upon us pollution, inequality, deprivation, stress, prostitution, drug abuse, gambling, inferior food, warfare, increased levels of cancer, corporate patenting of plant, animal and human genes and inevitable periodic economic downturns. It seeks to comprehensively pry and spy on us. It insists on imposing ID cards (or “entitlement cards” which reveals their true purpose). It makes a human being from one part of the world (the Philippines) who wants to work as a nanny in this part obtain a  permanent residency visa, or face being deported

All this is still done to us, despite Blunkett’s claim to want people free “to do things for themselves”, because his government, like any other, has no option but to put business profits before voters’ needs. As Home Secretary he has fiercely condemned the “scourge of drugs” and traffickers “making multi-million pound profits out of the misery of others”, yet he ignores the scourge of approved capitalists doing exactly the same thing. Bogus Blunkett, who said of his appointment: “As new Home Secretary I will be looking to listen and learn”, certainly won’t be listening to criticism of minority class ownership of the means of production and distribution, nor learning from history that governments don’t control capitalism — it is capitalism that controls governments.

Blunkett’s philosophy of “hand up rather than hand-out” welfarism, self-help, giving everyone an opportunity to succeed, and “participatory democracy” is worthless within capitalism where, at any stage, only a tiny few will prosper and hold sway at the expense of everyone else.

In a recent Observer (6 October) interview, the Home Secretary said “I do look back with a smile that many of the people who were in socialist societies [at Sheffield University during the 60s] ended up as being chief executive of some of our major companies. Like me I suppose”. Yes David, just like you. Corporate chiefs running the business side of British capitalism while you’re administering its political side. Still, when your cut from its profits is around £250,000 per annum with all manner of lucrative perks, grinning must be irresistible for an electoral hoodwinker working hand in glove with the boss class.

Greasy Pole: All good clean fun? (2005)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Michael Howard will have been delighted that David Blunkett’s entangled difficulties pushed the Boris Johnson affair off the front pages. Sacking Johnson for denying his relationship with Petronella Wyatt enabled Howard to appear as a fearless guardian of moral standards. It would be churlish to entertain the idea that acting with such speed had something to do with Johnson being spoken of as the next Tory leader. Then there is the “morality” of why Howard appointed Johnson in the first place and what this says about the whole process of what is called politics.

The Tories have plenty to worry about right now, including the fact that few of their leaders are “recognisable”.  It is assumed that workers are more likely to abuse the power of their vote by casting it for people they feel familiar with, regardless of what that person represents. A canny politician understands this and, on the assumption that there is no such thing as bad publicity, relentlessly courts media attention. John Prescott, for example, is one of the most recognisable of politicians, especially since he appeared on the nation’s TV screens chinning a bystander who threw an egg at him at a meeting in the 2001 election. But the Tories?  Who recognises Prescott’s counterpart Michael Ancram? What London cabby boasts about having that John Redwood in the back the other day? Who queues to catch a glimpse of Oliver Letwin?

Henley

Even before he made it onto the opposition Front Bench, Boris Johnson was not one of the featureless, unrecognised Tories. Overweight, bumbling, rumpled, dishevelled and speaking with the plummiest of accents, he was ideally suited to play the victim on Have I Got News For You. The merciless verbal mauling he got on his first appearance on that show ensured him a place in the catalogue of eccentrics who do such an effective job of blanketing the realities of capitalism and its politics from the people who could, if they wished, put an end to the system. Johnson moved smoothly into the Tory candidature for the constituency of Henley on Thames, after Michael Heseltine had left the Commons.

Henley suited Johnson very well and he suited Henley, an excruciatingly posh, smartly ancient town on a beautiful stretch of the Thames. Howard, surrounded by tedious, but grippingly ambitious, shadows, may have seen Johnson and his effortless talent for attracting publicity as a vote-fertile gift. In all the circumstances, it was understandable that Howard should overlook some of Johnson’s little lapses, like being asked by a fellow Old Etonian, the convicted fraudster Darius Guppy, for the name of a journalist Guppy wanted to have beaten up in revenge for exposing his offences (typically, Johnson couldn’t put his hands on the information) and being sacked from a job on The Times for making up a quotation.

Petronella Wyatt is the daughter of the late Lord Wyatt, who as Woodrow Wyatt was a Labour MP during the 1950s and 60s. Wyatt always made it clear that he had no truck with all that nonsense about designing socialism for Britain, or allowing the workers by hand or brain to have access to the wealth they produced. He was notable for very little other than opposing the renationalisation of steel and carrying on a McCarthy-type campaign against Communists in the trades unions. In 1987 Thatcher made him a life peer – by which time he was thoroughly under her spell.

Petronella was a child of Wyatt’s fourth marriage and he was said to dote on her, to the extent of pulling many an influential string to get her to Oxford and then, in spite of her being notably unqualified, into media jobs. There were many rumours about her job as deputy editor of the Spectator relying on the closeness between her and Johnson the editor, and of Johnson’s readiness to buy the silence of anyone who got to know of their relationship with gifts of space in the magazine.

Buffoonery

So in terms of her background and personality Petronella Wyatt seems to have been an ideal match for a man whose buffoonery is relentless to the point of tedium. Perhaps that was why there was such an upsurge of support for Johnson, which more or less advised Michael Howard that such a lovely couple should be left untroubled and that if he thought he had done the Tories a good turn by the sacking he was very much mistaken.  According to the Guardian of 15 November a recent poll put Johnson as the third best known Tory, after Howard and William Hague. David Mellor (as if anyone pays any heed to anything he says) described him as “one of the few MPs with genuine charisma and a favourable public profile”. The Independent of 15 November raved that he “created a buzz around political life, making at least his portion of it attractive, youthful and entertaining . . . someone with a rare ability to bring politics alive”. And Norman Tebbit burbled that Johnson “added a lot of colour and fun and I suspect it’s that which has caused his downfall”. (Of course the last thing anyone  associated Tebbit with when he was in the government would be “colour” or “fun” and the fact that he bestirs himself to use such words is a measure of the hysteria stimulated by Johnson’s sacking).

All of this was based on the assumption that introducing “fun” or “entertainment” into politics has to be a good thing. It avoids the question of what politics is, why political parties exist and what they do. To begin with, politics is peculiar to capitalism; it is all about the exercise of power over society, about the establishment, the rule and the running of states and units of them. Political parties are the expression of class interests and any differences between parties such as Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat only express varying views about the details of how capitalism should be organised, with a basic agreement that it must be in the interests of the capitalist class. With a classless society, without states, without government, there will be no politics and no political parties in the current sense.

Capitalism

Meanwhile, while capitalism exists, we have politics and it is no cause for fun. For example it was a political decision to start the war in Iraq, in which countless thousands have died (a recent article in the medical magazine the Lancet put the number at 100,000; Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said it was “only” about 16,000, which to any politician makes it all right). It is through political decisions that capitalism’s burdens of poverty, which means its burdens of mental and physical ill health, its social ailments, its human alienation, are administered. Poverty is a matter of class; according to a recent report by the Office for National Statistics the share of national wealth of the poorest 50 percent of the British population declined from seven percent in 1996, just before Labour came to power, to five percent in 2002.  During the same period the portion of the national wealth owned by the top one percent increased from 20 percent to 23 percent. A survey in late 2003 found that the death rate of the poorest people are four times that of the richest. One informed opinion is that the biggest killer is social stress, with all that entails. Being poor means a greater chance of suffering a host of problems – like being ill, of being arrested for an offence, of a child being excluded from school.

Capitalism’s waste and destruction continue, whatever government exercises its political power in office. None of it is amusing and none of it is a subject of fun for politicians who think to demonstrate what they regard as their superiority by never having anything useful, or indeed relevant, to say.

Ivan

Pathfinders: SocialSim City (2005)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

How can you ever prove socialism will work?

As socialism has never yet existed a very big obstacle for socialists is the lack of a working model. In the absence of this we are obliged to rely on theoretical arguments in order to persuade people. But not many people enjoy theory. Help however may arrive from a quite unexpected source, the computer games industry. As the internet becomes all pervasive and as computer games become ever more sophisticated, a new type of game may be able to create this model by simulation. The Sims launched in 2000 it became the all-time best selling computer game, and parents reported how their children’s perception of life and relationships changed after playing the games. So popular is the idea of simulation that now political parties are using it to promote their policies. In Uruguay the opposition left wing  coalition Frente Amplio devised a game called Cambienos (Let’s Change) for the October elections, while in the US elections there were five or six ‘party games’ on offer (BBC OnlineTechnology, Sat Oct 23). More significantly, sophisticated computer simulations offer a way of conducting complex what-if analyses of live systems from ecology to economics.

Maxis, the company behind SimCity, was approached by the military, governments and oil companies to design sim games that could help planners see the consequences of making different strategic decisions. Maxis designed models for the oil industry, healthcare sector and the environment protection agency, but discontinued development because of the extreme legal complications involved. see the consequences of making different strategic decisions. 

So could a socialist sim game be developed? The short answer is yes. But would it be any good? That depends on the number of variables in play, and the processing power available. Using distributed  processing across home PCs, as the NASA SETI project and the British Astronomical Association do, would provide a computational power unequalled by the world’s largest supercomputer, and with continual update and modification by online participants there is no theoretical reason why a working prototype could not provide valuable insights into some of the complexities of socialism in practice. If a simulation could give us an idea in advance of what sort of production and distribution problems are likely to occur, we can begin to find concrete answers ahead of schedule. And if we can show a stable model of socialism in practice, audited by independent third parties, it will go a long way to destroying the claims of economic calculationists and others who insist that socialism could never work in practice.

How do you know what to produce, where it goes and what happens to it?

Capitalist theorists are comfortable with the argument that the only variable they need to track is price.

Consumption and distribution don’t matter in themselves and can’t really be gauged anyway, whereas  in socialism, with no prices, the unmeasurable needs to be measured. But even capitalists have uses for better information and better tracking, and a revolution is taking place in stock control which has  enormous potential for socialism – the humble RFID tag. A radio frequency identification chip is inserted into all products which then emit a unique identifier bleep, a kind of audio bar code, enabling a receiver to identify all goods present, and track the passage of all goods through time and space, anywhere in the world. The applications however go well beyond supply chain tracking, with the US State Department issuing a million RFID tagged passports next year (New Scientist, 23 Oct) and supermarkets hoping to use CCTV to monitor which tagged items customers tend to pickup (NS, 28 August). What this means in capitalism is that the technology become mired in a new row about  state and corporate surveillance. What it means for socialists is that for a fraction of a cent per item capitalism has produced an easy way  to measure the ‘unmeasurable’, which in turn could greatly facilitate the operation of a socialist non-market economy.

Goodwill to all . . . ? Well, just now and again (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well did we Standard readers?  Show goodwill to all or at least to some of our fellows during the Christmas and the New Year break and, was it a good feeling?  Was it good to give as well as to receive – was it better to give or better to receive?  Now that we are all back nose to the grindstone, the conflict going on in our heads between the drudgery of factory, the office or the shop, or wherever it is that we find ourselves tied to again, and with the frolics of the holiday extant in our memories.  That song still in our heads which occasionally finds its way to our lips, constantly interrupted and usually ceased, by the numbing thoughts, the bland conversation and presence of that cold relation between the product and its maker.  Just some of the elements of the workplace which seem to demand for themselves all the space in our heads.  We are quickly reminded what a misery and a waste of our lives is this daily drudge.  ‘Oh!  I wish it could be Christmas everyday…’  

Socialist readers say that the only aspects of any value worth considering about this holiday break are that we proles get some time off the drudgery of everyday work and get time with our families and friends.  Also, we can pig-out on all the good food, if we are so inclined, enjoy the special TV programmes and have at least one chance in the year to give some kindness, affection and love to our fellows and hopefully, to receive like in return.  Readers north of the border enjoy a little extra indulge on Hogmanay. . .

Otherwise, that whole charade has very negative feelings for us.  All the money and debt required, the huckstering, the pretence, and the religious connotation and, that feeling that all the kindness, affection and love is primarily expressed in a material form — that sort of love that I can only describe as counterfeit — material love (gifts) to satisfy some fetish with the must-have commodity.  We know too that unless we give a gift, a card or a calendar to another we are unlikely to receive like from them in return — a sort of coercive love.

Our children are deceived and urged to request gifts from a fictional figure called all the way up from the 4th century Bishop of Mrya re-branded by Coca Cola and renamed Santa Claus and, unless they behave themselves, he will not deliver — more coercion.

Finally, the ideology or culture demands of us that we all undertake the same ritual every year.  Go out and spend as much money as we’ve got and more that we haven’t got, on gifts, cards and calendars as well as buy the same fattening foodstuff, stuffing the turkeys with sausage and the capitalists with profit.  And on Hogmanay we are to praise the last year as well as the New Year as though they were something special.  Perhaps last year was, if we’ve survived. Unless we follow this line we will not enjoy ourselves and we might be seen as outcasts or spoilsports. In no time at all it seems we are back again in the world we know (but don’t love) where other rituals dominate the scene and here its not “goodwill and love” we hear, but, “go on, stick one on him and then wrestle him to the ground”.

At this time of the year are these feelings of goodwill — kindness, affection and love between fellows — , an ideological or cultural thing or are they symptomatic of deep longing for another world where humans could be free to behave with kindness, affection and love as a matter of course all the year round? We are also to wish each other well for the coming New Year, and hope our luck will bring us a better life despite the cruel truth that our material conditions are likely to remain the same.  In the cold miserable light of a capitalist day, nothing much has changed by the notching up of another year since the supposed birth of the fantasy Jesus Christ.  Sure, one or two of us might in a New Year win the lottery — and then we can begin to live a little easier, if you can square you conscience with a world of haves and have-nots.

In socialist society, not only will we have free access to the products and services of human production and to life itself, too we’ll get free access to all the human support, kindness, affection and love from all our fellows all year round, instead of for just a mean two weeks.  In free society this behaviour will become the norm in our human world.  Why would you want to pay, when you can have free access?  In addition, we will be free of the drudgery and stressful life that is our everyday experience now, that which we are glad to see the back of for a skimpy two weeks of partying at the end of the year.

William Dunn

Cooking the Books: Acceptable capitalism? (2005)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Addressing a press dinner in London in November, the head of BMW in Britain, Jim O’Donnell, attacked the behaviour of the four businessman who BMW sold Rover to in 2000 for £10. Apparently, they paid themselves an average of £3 million each in 2002 as well as setting up a generous pension scheme for themselves, despite MG Rover still making heavy losses. This, said O’Donnell, was “the unacceptable face of capitalism” (Times, 12 November).

Edward Heath, when Prime Minister, had famously said the same thing about Tiny Rowland and Lonrho in 1973. But this criticism implies that there is an acceptable face of capitalism. If so, what is it? Is it acceptable that capitalist firms (such as BMW, for instance) make a profit out of the difference between the value of what their workers produce and what they are paid as wages and salaries? Is it acceptable that capitalist firms should direct their investment to producing what is the most profitable, while essential human needs are left unmet? Is it acceptable that governments should support and encourage all this?

Apparently so. Supporters of capitalism only get worked up when some capitalist lines his pockets at the expense of other capitalists. But the four businessmen can easily reply that they did nothing illegal, and that in fact they were following the economic law of capitalism by taking money out of an unprofitable line of production and investing it, or making it available for investment, in some line that is profitable.

As far as Socialists are concerned, capitalism has no acceptable face. Everything about it is unacceptable. Its accumulation for accumulation’s sake. Its exploitation of wage-labour. Its putting of profits before satisfying people’s needs.

50 Years Ago: ‘1984’ unthinkable? (2005)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month an adaptation of George Orwell’s famous novel, “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” appeared as a  television play. The impact on audiences was generally agreed to have been startling—too startling, according to newspaper complaints about unsuitability and lack of “entertainment value.” The intention of the author, however,was not to horrify people, but to make them think and reflect, and certainly the play must have succeeded to a large extent in doing just that.

The story is set in London of the future, which has become Airstrip One in Oceania, one of three States into which the world is divided. These states are permanently at war with each other, though the actual fighting takes place in remote parts, in the jungle or the desert. The social structure in Oceania is a  hierarchy consisting of the Proles, the Outer Party and the Inner Party. At the bottom are the Proles, people doing purely routine work, ignorant, stupefied by abysmal and degrading conditions. Not very different are the Outer Party members, without privileges, living and working like automata, named and numbered on their clothing, rationed—and ceaselessly spied on by the two-way tele-screen through which the Thought Police watch and rule.

By contrast, the Inner Party members are the privileged, the givers of orders, the only people with  servants, with such luxuries as wine, and with freedom to switch off their tele screens when they wish. Above all stands the figure of the leader, Big Brother. Whether he is a real person is immaterial—he is the “expression of the Party.” (…)

All the most detestable aspects of the world today are enlarged and caricatured; the slogans like  “Ignorance Is Strength,” “War Is Peace”; the Ministry of Plenty announcing ration reductions as increases, the Ministry of Peace proclaiming “another great victor over our enemies,” the Ministry of Truth adjusting the facts of past history and “amending all records accordingly.”

The newspaper critics of this television play generally assumed that it was to be taken as a warning against totalitarianism as exemplified by Hitler’sGermany and in Russia today. When he wrote the book in 1949, Orwell doubtless drew inspiration from the Nazi regime and “Big Brother” Stalin. Yet the warning is not really against the tendencies and conditions in one “bad” part of the world sullying the “good.” It is against the actual and potential denial of human qualities that is implicit in the world set-up today. The theme is a powerful condemnation of the whole system of privileged and subject classes, of governmental control to preserve the system by crushing out any opposing idea. More than anything, perhaps, it is a warning of the effect of the mass-production of ideas on those who lose the desire to think for themselves, and who leave everything to “Big Brother.”

(From an article by “Stan”, Socialist Standard, January 1955)

Fox-hunting, Privilege and Power (2005)

From the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is not really about hunting. This is about the last hunting horn blowing the last call for the feudal system and the House of Lords...

In August 1997 the Socialist Standard wrote (half) jokingly, of the imminent demise of the quaint rural past-time of hunting landowners. Half, that is, because the joke contained some truth on the matter of the contretemps over the banning of fox hunting which will come (finally) into force next month.

Much fuss has been made about banning this blood-sport, its supporters twisting and turning, saying one minute it’s a cultural past-time, the next it’s an economic necessity of farming life. Either way, it’s by-the-by. What is interesting is the raw process of power involved in this debate.

Under any normal circumstances, such a Bill – like the banning of dangerous dogs (under the Tories), or the banning of raves (also under the Tories), or any other sundry such measures that restrict the mythic beast of personal choice – would have been nodded through parliament after a swift and enjoyable debate. With foxhunting, however, the inner secrets of the British constitution were revealed in all their ugly goriness as the New Labour hounds tore into the privileges of the owners of vast tracts of land who wanted the right to literally be a law unto themselves.

Under ordinary conditions, most legislation and acts of government are passed by the passive (at least) co-operation of the responsible bodies. For example, in the direct democratic aspects of the constitution of California, if the Lieutenant General does not oppose an initiative going to referendum it is much easier to have the vote – as in the recent one on stem-cell research held there in November. It could still be forced through, but unless the issue is strongly desired, most people wouldn’t bother to fight against the grain.

At least in California, though, the electorate have a chance of voting for new officials. With the House of Lords, the British legislature has the remnants of the descendants of cronies and toadies of monarchs past mixed with the cronies and toadies of top-politicos today. The toadies of kings past also have the advantage of owning the country – a kind of fringe benefit – and the latter-day toadies like to hang out with these wealthy landowners. The incentive for resisting encroachments onto their eminent domains is clear.

Posture politics

Add to the mix the quest of the increasingly marginalised Tory party to find a solid political base from which to challenge a government that tries to pretend to represent the whole nation, and you have a recipe for government attempts to compromise with the uncompromisable, reconcile the irreconcilable, and the spectacle of hard-done-by landowners taking to the streets under the banner of the “Countryside Alliance”.  And, after themselves banning raves and pitbulls, of the Tory party now crying out about restricting personal cultural liberties and who weep about the unnecessary slaughter of dogs.

That is a recipe for the most debased, ridiculous, irrelevant and futile posture politics stirred up by has-been politicos on the make, squabbling over the crumbs of power. That hundreds of hours of parliamentary time apparently needed to be spent over banning foxhunting, as compared to the single vote needed to launch a murderous war, shows where the priorities of these disinterested Lords and their Commons co-conspirators really lie.

The whole history of the House of Lords has been one of the rich and powerful trying to retain a voice and a vote to protect their vested interests against democracy. It had nothing to do with organically evolved institutions, rationally devised systems of checks and balances, and everything to do with shabby compromises and naked self-interests of the landed elite demanding their place in the legislature. Every twist of their fight with the Commons has come from their naked self-defence of their property – most famously with the Irish and other Lords conspiring to defeat Gladstone’s Home-Rule Bills in the late nineteenth century.

The first Parliament Act of 1911 came when the Lords tried to block a Liberal budget. They are only supposed to be able to delay legislation for two years under that Act (and now after the Act under the Attlee government, only one year). However, in a busy parliament, any delay means disrupting the whole schedule for other bills, and so can mean wreckage of any plans it wouldn’t be worth putting up a fight over.

After the Attlee government, the Lords agreed not to vote on anything contained in a government election manifesto, a concession to democratic legitimacy in order to be able to keep their undue place in the halls of the legislature. When New Labour removed (most of) the hereditary peers, they declared themselves no longer bound by this agreement, and began to make life difficult for the government. Hence why it has taken eight years to pass this Act.

The Countryside Alliance now is set to challenge the legitimacy of the Parliament Act 1945 – the power that finally allowed the Government to force the Act through despite Lords opposition – on the grounds that it wasn’t passed properly (the Lords never voted on it). Sixty years late, they discover this idea.  If they can’t win under the rules, they try and change the rules.

The government has pledged to continue with its reform of the Lords, removing the last vestiges of hereditary peerage, but keeping the likes of Lord Sainsbury – a man who gave millions of pounds to the Labour Party, with nothing in return save a peerage and a ministerial post.

In Scotland, where the new Parliament is not bound by an un-elected second chamber, a bill banning hunting was passed with ease, and, strangely, the world hasn’t come to an end. A stark illustration of the power exerted by the Lords in the British Parliament.

Hereditary property rights

The landed rich cannot begin to conceive that their will cannot run untrammelled. Representatives of the hunts have talked of landowners exerting their property rights, and withdrawing co-operation from national infrastructure. Withdrawing co-operation with the army (so much for their vaunted patriotism); withdrawing access to land holding electricity pylons railways and waterways. Some have even called for civil disobedience. They have claimed the police will not be able to enforce the Act (something the police deny), which is again betraying their usual stance that law and order must be respected (and also forgetting that the police could just turn up to their houses and serve warrants on them).

We have already seen their civil disobedience – abandoning cars in the street, storming parliament, fighting with the police in ways that could only impress hardened direct actionist anarchists (indeed, London Class War in the Autumn 2004 edition of their paper have called upon the pro-hunters to, erm, bring it on). Yet, they escape with only a slapped wrist compared with anarchists who get heavily fined and locked up.

The BBC have contacted various utility companies to find out what the ramifications for the withdrawal of co-operation would be. The answer is, whilst it could make life difficult, if withdrawal of co-operation were to conflict with operational needs of the electricity, rail or waterways, then there is legislation for them to force access. The landowners could be shocked, again, to find themselves at the wrong end of a copper’s truncheon.

They retain their faith in the holy rights of property, of the power of property holds to exert influence in society. They forget that the power of property rests upon the political power to enforce it, and now the law is for once against them, they don’t like it. Much as they don’t like the right to roam, for ordinary people to walk across their vast open spaces that they have a piece of paper saying they own.

The sad thing in all of this – apart from the genuinely moving look of surprise and hurt that hunt supporters have when they discover the police can be a bit nasty – is that many of them feel genuinely, passionately moved by this ban. Some have been heard to say in interviews that this is the first political issue they have ever felt strongly or passionately about. So, never mind thousands dying in war, millions dying of preventable diseases, the AIDS pandemic, millions dying every year of starvation, privation, squalor, poverty, meanness and misery in every town bred by poverty. The right to hunt foxes is what exercises them.

The countryside should not be a preserve of a tiny minority, shouldn’t be a source of division or overweening power. Disputes should be settled democratically, without tiny rich groups having more say than others. All of this just serves to show how the nexus of power and privilege that is part and parcel of capitalism prevents those sensible sentiments being carried out. The attempts of the rich and the powerful to maintain their power over making the rules and laws of society is an affront that serves to illustrate how shallow democracy under capitalism really is.

A telling strength of the remaining power of aristocratic privilege, is that at the dawn of 2005, we have still had to devote some 1500 words to discussing people in silly costumes hunting foxes at great expense and waste.

Pik Smeet