Editorial: A missed opportunity (2004)

Editorial from the December 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The American workers have spoken. They have made their choice. Unlike many on the left, the Socialist Party has always stood by the simple principle of assuming that when voters vote for a party, they do actually support – however grudgingly or partially – its policies. We accept that millions upon millions of American voters voted for the wrong choice – the incredible, unbelievable choice, of another four years of being ruled by a bluffing, blundering buffoon in the White House. Almost 110 million Americans voted for one or other multi-millionaire to be their elected Monarch.

Our comrades in America did their best to dissuade them – members in the United Kingdom here wrote letter to American workers asking them not to vote for the billionaires. But the result was a resounding vote for capitalism, for war and its continuation, for despoliation of the environment. It is, frankly, patronising and ignorant to assume that millions of American voters, after months and months of debate and discussion voted the way they did because they are stupid.

We have to credit them with wanting what they voted for, with supporting the policies of the capitalist class. In a more or less free election, when they had the opportunity to raise their voice they failed to do so, and so must bear the responsibility for their choice. It is the sons and daughters of American voters who will be sent to fight in a boiling desert, and live the rest of their lives with the scars of battle. It is the sons and daughters of American voters who will have to rise at dawn and walk miles to work. It is the sons and daughters of American voters who will have to watch their partners suffer poverty heaped upon bereavement because they have voted to allow discrimination against gays and lesbians.

Obviously, it is difficult to make a change. It requires patience, organisation, effort – but millions of Americans were able to put all that effort into electing one of the millionaires. The existing politicians may throw hurdles in the way, may have more money to spend, but all those advantages rest on the essential acceptance of the current system of society by the vast majority

We must not, though, imagine this support for capitalism is confined only to American workers. Billions of workers across the globe keep voting for capitalism because they continue to believe its illusions and aspirations. It remains the job of socialists to continue to try and shatter those illusions, while the leftists weep into their beers because their millionaire lost.

Although we are – to be utterly blunt – a pathetic minority now, that does not mean we must give up hope. That so many millions of workers support capitalism today, does not mean they will do so tomorrow. America itself has changed out of all recognition in its two hundred years of growth, and will change again. Across the world there are countless examples of sweeping changing to political landscapes from one election to the next. Until then, all we can do, is turn to our fellows and say “There is a better way”.

Political freedom offers the best means to make that change, and the tools are to hand were the workers to take them up. George Bush and John Kerry are irrelevances, because no politician can be better than the system they administer, and socialists need to draw the discussion back to the things that really matter.

A Very British Hit Job (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

This June saw a very British hit job. Charles, the heir to the throne, reportedly made comments that indicated that he considered the British government’s policy of off-shoring irregular migrants to Rwanda as ‘appalling’. The Times reported this, indicating that the remarks were made in private. Nonetheless, this led to banner headlines in many papers. Unnamed government ministers were quoted as saying ‘He is in danger of over-reaching himself. He cannot make pronouncements on government policy when he is king. Even in private there is always a chance those remarks will get out and put him in a difficult position’.

Undoubtedly, the government had initiated this policy to get a strong reaction so they could have a storm about taking a strong stance over their handling of irregular migration across the Channel. They probably didn’t expect the flak to come from the prince, much less the Archbishop of Canterbury: they wanted to be able to point to soft liberals who ‘hate their country’ rather than the absolute pillars of the very Establishment itself.

This must have hit home, because, just a week or so later, we saw more banner headlines about Mr Windsor. The Sunday Times led with a splash about him receiving large charitable donations from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, the former Prime Minister of Qatar. The issue being that the €3 million was received in €1 million cash instalments, personally handed to the aristocrat in Fortnum & Mason carrier bags.

These reports noted that ‘Each payment was deposited into the accounts of the Prince of Wales’s Charitable Fund (PWCF), a low-profile grant-making entity which bankrolls the prince’s pet projects and his country estate in Scotland. There is no suggestion the payments were illegal.’

So, if the donation was not illegal, was not given personally to Mr Windsor, why did it merit a front page splash? The journalists provided weak gruel with questions of ‘judgement’: it simply looked shady to accept large donations of cash (though, apparently, trustees later said due diligence on accepting the donation was done). Presumably, if the donation had been done by bank transfer, there’d have been no issue.

They also drew in other allegations of courtiers offering cash for honours, which, while shady, were themselves not relevant to the princeling accepting charitable donations.

In his final novel, Numero Zero the Italian scholar of communication and meaning Umberto Eco presented an examination of the fictional establishment of a new newspaper: the issue-zero proofs of concept that are a prelude to releasing a newspaper proper. The idea being that an Italian millionaire wanted to ‘enter the inner sanctum of finance, banking and perhaps also the quality press. His way of getting there is the promise of a new newspaper ready to tell the truth about everything,’ a newspaper that could be stopped, for such rewards.

Eco has the fictional editor of this pseudo-newspaper say: ‘It’s not the news that makes the newspaper, but the newspaper that makes the news. And if you know how to put four different news items together, then you can offer the reader a fifth.’ The simple act of contextualising a story on the page makes the story. Of course, Charles Windsor consorts with rich people, and gifts and favours are swapped all the time, and his simple unearned privilege is an affront to humanity. But, putting a small example on a front page gives it an appearance of impropriety, even when in fact none exists.

It is also an excellent example of ‘swiftboating’, an act named after the campaign of Swiftboat veterans for truth, a move by Republican Party strategists in the United States to neutralise a natural strength of then Presidential candidate John Kerry. He was a decorated Vietnam war veteran, something that is normally an advantage in elections, however, merely raising a question mark about this turned his greatest strength into a liability.

The Royal Firm uses its charitable work as a shield to protect it from criticism of its undemocratic power and unearned opulence and luxury. By turning charitable collection into a point of concern, and even possible malfeasance by the princeling (especially by reference to his Scottish estate which the charity supports), the media ‘swiftboated’ him.

The message sent was loud and clear: the press could manufacture a story any time they want. And, given how long ago these transactions are supposed to have happened, it also sent the message that they are sitting on an arsenal of stories that they could pull out at any time to trash Windsor in the public imagination – much like the infamous list of ‘handsy’ Tory MPs that was leaked from the Whips’ office in 2017 and contained details of 40 MPs’ sexual and other misconducts, including Chris Pincher – the revelation of whose behaviour was just the trigger for the downfall of Boris Johnson.

We have just witnessed the punishment beating of a Royal, with the clear implication that the mass media can destroy the monarchy if it wished, and that if it hinders the agenda that parts of the press want to have the government follow, it will not hesitate to do so.

If that happens, we would not shed a single tear: indeed, given how some members of the Royal firm whine about the unfairness of press intrusion, we’d heartily encourage them to save themselves the bother, and leave the business, and take the whole stinking operation with them.

Pik Smeet

Pathfinders: Climate Change – Somebody Else’s Problem? (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

In May the International Energy Agency released a report entitled Net Zero by 2050: A roadmap for the global energy sector. The 224-page report describes itself as ‘ the world’s first comprehensive study of how to transition to a net zero energy system by 2050 while ensuring stable and affordable energy supplies, providing universal energy access, and enabling robust economic growth’.

Universal energy access? Stable and affordable? Even someone supportive of capitalism would be inclined to say ‘pull the other one’. If a commodity is to make a profit, it can’t be so cheap that even the poorest can afford it, so the idea of universal affordable energy is already a non-starter before you’ve got past the introductory blurb.

But the roadmap is nothing if not ambitious, ‘setting out more than 400 milestones for what needs to be done, and when, to decarbonise the global economy in just three decades.’ A forest of charts and graphs are there to underline the gigantic strides that capitalism needs to make, each one liable to have the supporter of capitalism once again muttering sceptically, especially given the admission at the start that global state commitments are ‘well short of what is needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5°C and avert the worst effects of climate change’.

Even if we had socialism – a global society of democratic and cooperative common ownership where the imperatives of profit and commercial growth would be absent – this might be a tall order given the time frame, although doable because we wouldn’t have to battle with private competing interests. More to the point, if we had socialism already, the world wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. The independent behaviour of private actors seeking profits regardless of ‘externalities’ has driven us to the brink of a global tragedy of the commons that would not have occurred if the commons were truly owned in common. Now, even the International Monetary Fund is starting to talk in shrill terms about a potential extinction-level event: ‘There is growing agreement between economists and scientists that the tail risks are material and the risk of catastrophic and irreversible disaster is rising, implying potentially infinite costs of unmitigated climate change, including, in the extreme, human extinction’.

We don’t take this view, as it’s hard to imagine anything short of a planet-busting asteroid taking out all of humanity, and we don’t subscribe to a counsel of despair because we say there is a solution – urgently getting rid of capitalism and letting socialism off the leash. Failing that, capitalism is going to have one hell of a job slamming on all its brakes simultaneously in order to stop short of the abyss. Can it succeed in doing what looks like the impossible? We don’t know. We’ve learned not to underestimate capitalism’s ability to adapt, and in the past year’s pandemic we’ve seen it do things that previously people would have said was impossible, albeit it at a staggering cost to itself. And that’s just the trouble. Capitalism has been knocked for six, having just paid out the equivalent of a world war due to the pandemic. If you think that’s an exaggeration, the Second World War is thought to have cost around $23 trillion in today’s money. The IMF estimates the cost of the pandemic to the global economy as $28 trillion. So not only does capitalism have to do the seemingly impossible, it has to do it under the worst possible economic circumstances.

This desperate task becomes all the more farcical when you realise that ‘net zero by 2050’ is not actually good enough, because it’s aimed at limiting global temperature increase to 2°C, not the 1.5°C target as specified by the Paris agreement and which would require ‘net zero by 2030’. What difference does half a degree make? Maybe not much, maybe all the difference in the world. The Energy Watch Group, often highly critical of the IEA in the past for being too soft on fossil and for being a poodle of the USA, issued a report last December entitled ‘The path to climate neutrality by 2050 misses the Paris climate targets – The rocky road to truthfulness in climate politics’. It quotes the IMF ‘extinction’ scare cited above and goes on to explain why 2°C might be too close for comfort: ‘It is widely scientifically recognised that a global temperature increase by more than 2°C threatens to lead to a so called Hothouse Earth scenario in which human civilisation as we know it can no longer exist’.

Is that true? Well, it’s true that +2°C ‘threatens’ to do so, because of tipping points and feedback loops following each other ‘like a row of dominoes’, at which point ‘we see that the Earth system tips over from being a friend to a foe. We totally hand over our fate to an Earth system that starts rolling out of equilibrium’ (bbc.in/3bJNAb6). But it’s an unquantifiable threat and nobody really knows for sure. On the one hand, the Earth has certainly been hotter in its history than it is now, without turning into Venus. On the other hand, there have also been five mass extinction events involving upwards of 80 percent of life forms, and climate may have been a factor in some of them. As a researcher from York University reported to Scientific American in 2007: ‘There have been three major greenhouse phases in the time period we analyzed and the peaks in temperature of each coincide with mass extinctions’ (bit.ly/3f9nX5O).

One might wonder then if there is any point in the IEA issuing a so-called roadmap for the Paris Agreement, given that the likelihood of capitalism being able to follow it looks so remote, and given that it’s not ambitious enough anyway. But if there is an agreement, there has to be a roadmap, however rocky and untruthful it is. Whether or not the planet is facing an existential crisis, capitalism is certainly suffering a credibility crisis. It has no answer to the environmentalist’s well-aimed charge of requiring ‘infinite growth on a finite planet’, and more and more people are waking up to that fact. But the policy makers have to say something, and look as if they’re doing something. US climate envoy John Kerry was held up to ridicule recently for saying that the climate would be stabilised using technologies that don’t exist yet (bbc.in/3v7oElE), but he illustrated a fundamental truth about how today’s politicians think about the future. By 2050, all this will be somebody else’s problem.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: What the market does (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘No politician’, John Kerry told a virtual climate summit called by the US President, ‘no matter how demagogic or how potent and capable they are, is going to be able to change what that market is doing’ (i paper, 24 April).

As Biden’s climate envoy he was expressing the view that investment in technologies to combat global over-warming had now become so profitable for capitalist enterprises that no government would be able to stop it happening. He may have been over-optimistic or premature but his reasoning was based on a more general assumption – that no government can change what the market is doing.

Applied more generally, it is what socialists say. It’s even the basis of our case against trying to make capitalism work for the benefit of all instead of, as it does, as a system geared to making and accumulating profits. So it is rather strange that a long-standing reformist politician – Kerry was the Democratic Party candidate for President in 2004 – should be saying this.

He could come back and say that he only meant it to apply to the particular case of investment in anti-climate-change technologies. But why would governments not be able to change what the market is doing in this case but would in others? Such as when market conditions mean building luxury flats rather than decent homes for those who need one; or not producing food for malnourished people who can’t pay for it; or cutting back on the production of needed useful things when there’s an economic depression?

Capitalism is an economic system based on the ownership of productive resources by rich individuals, capitalist enterprises or states, where production is carried on for sale on a market with a view to profit. It is driven by the economic imperative not just to make profits but to accumulate them as more capital invested in production for profit. This imperative is enforced via the market.

A capitalist enterprise won’t make a profit unless it can sell what it produces. To do this, it needs to keep its costs down. This involves keeping up with the latest methods of production, installing technologically more advanced plant and machinery. The market obliges capitalist enterprises to do this just to stay in the game. If they don’t, they will be out-competed by rival enterprises and eventually go out of business, either through bankruptcy or being taken over.

This is the context within which governments have to operate and which constrains what they can do. The main constraint is that they don’t have resources of their own and have to get them, directly or indirectly, from the profit-making sector. They must take care not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Or even discourage it. Just the opposite; they have to positively encourage it, by maintaining or creating favourable conditions for making profits.

How much they can take from the profit sector depends on how that sector is doing, whether it is expanding, contracting or stagnant. They can’t stop the boom/slump cycle that is built into capitalism, so they can’t do much more than navigate by sight. They can’t control capitalism but are at the mercy of its vagaries.

Kerry is right. No politician can successfully buck the market. As he said, they have to go with its flow.