Letter: Distortions of Private Property (1994)

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

The following letter was sent to one of our members by Dick Frost, who was the Green Party's candidate for Cumbria and North Lancashire in the recent Euro-elections. We publish it, with his permission, together with our comments. We have also received a letter from the Green Party Local Support Coordinator, to which we reply, too.

Distortions of Private Property

Dear Mr Cummings,

Thank you for your letter and the material with it. I have had a quick read (knowing something about the subject already) and it is clear that we have much in common. I fear you over estimate the degree of anarchism in the Green Party: I am one and I can assure you I belong to a very small minority.

I read the review of the Pepper book (Socialist Standard, September 1993) and the interview with Jonathon Porritt and both raised some valuable points. One area of dispute between us might well be on the appropriate level of political and administrative organisation for a good world: the reason I am now an extreme de-centralist (in fact, I advocate the autonomy of any group in any and every area in which it claims competence) is that every social organisation must be consciously and directly controlled by every person who belongs (by choice) to it and who is subject to its decisions. To my mind, that places a low maximum size on social organisation. I do not accept that politicians, bureaucrats or representatives have a place in democracy; once they exist, democracy is dead. Administration has to be equally democratic.

Of course, I envisage the cooperation and federation of small autonomous communities; I also envisage a statute of universal human rights to which all communities would have to subscribe and consequently, an enforcement agency. However, everything I suggest has to be placed in the context of economic adequacy (not mere subsistence) which I believe is the normal condition in which our species would live had the distortions of private property etc. not intruded (Rousseau. Marx etc) and that adequacy is available to us now; it requires us to bring it into reality. The ordering of economic life has to be in the hands of people in small communities, directly, to ensure that they know immediately the effects their actions have on their environment and on themselves, though I do not mean lots of tennis ball-type organisations, rather a complex of Russian dolls; or better, an eco-system.

I am not concerned with the existence or not of money, but cannot see why the communities I envisage would require it

I reject Marx's class analysis, not because I can’t see class differences in our society, but because I don't think people exist, existentially or subjectively. in classes and the proletariat is not. therefore, going to act as a class “for itself'. I do not agree with Marx's historical analysis of human life and do not consider it is important because I believe the objective conditions for human economic freedom have always existed and the need to realise that freedom by destroying oppression in all its forms has not varied significantly from epoch to epoch. It has not been necessary to wait for the triumph of capitalism.

I also reject revolution because revolution cannot but be autocratic and establish a new autocracy. From my understanding of sociology, I think you and Jonathon Porritt do not take into account the essential conservatism and conformity of our species, traits which lead to masses of people accepting dreadful repression, for which they find innumerable excuses. From Roemer's Law, however, change comes about by species attempting to maintain a given way of life in changed conditions; revolution is likely when the changes are frustrated by a powerful minority.

The point I make is Jonathon Porritt’s: there have to be interim steps which allow of interim achievement; hence I am odds with the Green Party because I believe it should be fighting for democratic advance at low levels of government now, as well as seeking elected power. It should be campaigning against loss of residual local democracy, both by working on elected authorities and in community groups.

Dick Frost, 

Orton, Cumbria

Reply:

Dick Frost and other members of the Green Party are quite right to emphasise the importance of local democracy. However, your idea that the modern world could be run on the basis of local production for local consumption by a collection of autonomous local communities is not only impractical, it is not even desirable.

For a decent quality of life we depend upon machinery, equipment, energy, goods and services which are produced throughout the world. This includes materials such as metals and oil which are found in particular locations and a wide range of foods which require different climates for their cultivation. The technical division of labour which makes up modern production extends throughout a world-wide network of links and can give us the benefits of consumer goods and the pleasures of leisure equipment. To give some examples, it would be impossible for every local community to produce its own refrigerators, televisions, radios or music equipment.

And how would they deal with facilities and services concerning regional populations such as airports, transport systems, universities, specialised health services, energy supply, use and development of land? On a bigger scale, surely it is vital that we establish a world energy authority and other world agencies to co-ordinate action on the threats to the planet from pollution, and to continue such things as the investigation of space, the running of world communications for telephone links, and the celebration of such festivals as the Olympic Games.

We should certainly get rid of the State with its tentacles of power that keep us all in its centralised grip. But the answer is not to replace it with an idea of local autonomy which has no practical connection with the conditions of modern life.

What is needed is to replace the State with an integrated system of democratic organisation which would be adaptable for use at local, regional and world levels. Local communities, however we might define them, could be the basic unit of organisation but these should also be associated as regional populations which in their turn would be associated as the world community. Such a system of world democracy could be established, by a majority of socialists, from the existing structure of local and national government and such bodies as the United Nations Organisation.

You want to define the size of your autonomous local community by the maximum number who could consciously and directly control it. and say "that places a low maximum size on social organisation". Indeed it does and wouldn’t they all be busy! Even for a small community they would be so involved in day-to-day affairs they will hardly have time for their personal lives.

Fortunately, democracy does not require that every person should be directly involved in all decisions. The important thing is that every individual, institution, production unit or council should be accountable. The practice of delegated function would allow people to get on with their jobs. We do not anticipate that in a socialist society they would act against the policies laid down by the majority. Nevertheless, the community would retain procedures whereby the decisions and actions of people could be challenged and reversed if circumstances required it.

It is surprising that you say you are not concerned with the existence or not of money, even though you add that you cannot see why the communities you envisage would require it. In fact, the use of money or not is of fundamental importance. The use of money means the production of goods for exchange and this means the operation of the market. Production for sale on the markets inevitably sets up a range of constraints on social action because it limits what can be produced to what can be sold and puts profit before need as a motive of production. It also follows that all the corrupting features of property relations will operate.

Members of the Green Party seem to place too much emphasis on the scales of social organisation whilst neglecting the fundamentally important question of the kinds of productive relations we should have. If they think through how best to achieve the kind of better world they undoubtedly want, they will surely conclude that common ownership of the earth's natural and industrial resources is the key, together with democratic control at regional and world levels as well as at local level as appropriate.

Editors.

Letter: Socialists and Social Credit (1987)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists and Social Credit

As a member of the Green Party, I was greatly impressed with the August issue of the Socialist Standard, particularly with the fair and balanced interview with Jonathon Porritt. At least on this occasion you seemed to have dropped the customary "we have an answer to everything" boast which has turned so many otherwise sympathetic potential socialists away from the SPGB before now. I was sent the August issue by a union colleague who is a SPGB member, and if this change is not just a one-off, I may become a regular reader or even subscribe.

The article on Ireland was similarly refreshing in its balance, but Ivan's piece on Parliamentary Rituals was an absolute classic. It should be distributed outside the TUC and Labour Party conferences as a leaflet, and at the next General Election. Great stuff. And now my question. What is your attitude to social credit? You must be against it because everyone else seems to be. Even the Green Party will not mention it by name. I am assuming that you know what it is as the SPGB pre-dates it by sixteen years.

Bill Whitbread 

London N22.

Reply.

We are pleased that Bill Whitbread enjoyed the August Socialist Standard and we hope that he will not only take out a subscription but decide, as a person who is concerned for the future of the world and its population, that his place is with us socialists in the work to replace capitalism with socialism.

Social Credit was a proposal by a Major Douglas to pay everyone a "social dividend" to make up for the chronic lack of purchasing power which, he alleged, was built into the financial mechanism of capitalism. It was one of a number of "under-consumptionist' theories that flourished during the 1930s.

All such theories assert that not enough money is distributed to enable people to buy all that has been produced. If this were true, capitalism would be in a permanent state of depression, whereas in fact it goes through alternating periods of boom and slump; indeed it would be difficult to see how capitalism could ever have come into existence in the first place.

While the Green Party does not mention Douglas by name, their manifesto for the last election bears evidence of the influence of his mistaken ideas;

The Green Party would take steps to end the monopoly of private banks over money creation (. ..) Community banks would be encouraged, subject to licence and with the power to create money, a power which would be withdrawn from private banks. Community banks would invest local savings in local enterprises, and invest newly-created money in those enterprises.

Closed factories alongside mass unemployment suggest that if only people had more money to spend boom time would return. But at no stage of the business cycle is there a shortage of purchasing power; there is however a difference between having the power to buy something and actually using that power. In a slump some capitalists choose not to invest all of their money in productive activity, as they would in a boom. Rather than being hoarded it is lent out at interest on the money market. This is the situation today and explains the paradox of the growth of financial institutions — evident from a stroll down any High Street — in the middle of a depression.

Douglas also believed that the banks had the power to create purchasing power, in the form of credit, by the stroke of a pen. If they had this power, why would firms ever go bankrupt, or make losses, or resist wage claims from their workers? Banks are in fact one of a set of financial institutions which make a profit out of the difference between the interest they charge borrowers and the interest they pay their depositors. The amount they can lend is thus limited by the amount they borrow from depositors as also applies (and nobody contests this) to building societies. In fact, due to the need to hold some money as ready cash, banks can only lend less than their deposits.

The solution to problems like unemployment does not lie in the reform of capitalism's monetary system but in the abolition of capitalism with its class ownership and production for profit, which involves the complete disappearance of money, banks, credit and all the rest of the financial system.

Editors.

Meat, Money and Malnutrition (2005)

From the March 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (VIVA) make the claim that meat causes famine. Is this really the case, or does the real problem lie in the profit system? Rob Stafford investigates.

The Bristol-based charity Viva! in a recent pamphlet Join Viva! Join the Fight for Life claim that “millions of children in the developing world die from hunger alongside fields of high quality food, destined for the West’s farmed animals. The startling truth is that meat causes starvation.” Despite claiming that they monitor “the latest research from all over the world in the environment and development issues and argues for change with hard science” Viva provide absolutely no supporting evidence for their contention. Furthermore, a request for such material has yet to be answered.

Viva’s position is accepted as a common truth by other campaigning groups and individuals including Animal Aid, George Monbiot, Peter Singer, and repeated in some sections of the press, such as the Guardian and New Internationalist. While there is no doubt that growing crops as a source of food for the production of meat rather than feeding humans directly is less efficient in terms of land and energy, is there a direct relationship between meat and starvation? Consider a field of corn standing next to a group of starving children. The corn is destined for export as animal feed. Hence meat causes starvation. But if the corn was not grown for use as animal feed would the children be free to eat it? Indeed, would it even be grown in the first place? Simply because two effects (corn, starving children) are found side by side does not imply that one caused the other. Perhaps, however, the supporters of this position consider we have reached the limit of agriculture on this planet and therefore because some people eat meat fed on grain others, as a direct result of this practice, starve.

Over twenty years ago WHO stated that the technology existed to feed a global population twelve times its (then) size. The American Association for the Advancement of Science reported in 1997 that 78 percent of all malnourished children under the age of five in the developing world live in countries with a food surplus. Just over five years ago the United Nations reported that Africa could easily feed a population five times its current size if western technology were introduced. (And what of future technology?)

There is, in fact, a wealth of evidence to support the view that “famine exists largely because the hungry cannot afford to buy food, not because there is insufficient food produced” (New Scientist, 3 September 1994). Agricultural economist M. S. Swaminathan stated earlier this year that the “problem of undernutrition . . . is a lack of purchasing power” (Newsweek, 31 January). Even an establishment figure such as Sir Jonathan Porritt in his introduction to Compassion in World Farming’s report entitled The Global Benefits of Eating Less Meat (2004) is not blind to such facts. He quotes approvingly from Colin Tudge’s recent book, So Shall We Reap, and states that the author “develops an eloquent argument demonstrating that contemporary food and farming policy has very little to do with meeting human needs, guaranteeing food security, providing high and consistent levels of nutrition and food safety…Much more simply, it’s all about profit: squeezing the maximum financial yield out of every link in the food chain to benefit a tiny number of an already inconceivably rich minority of citizens” .

And those inconceivably rich do not just live in the West as Porritt states. For example, at the peak of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia such people enjoyed the benefits of exporting crops to the UK and taking delivery of Scottish malt whisky. This was just business as usual. Thus it should come as no surprise to learn that although the value of food exported by Ethiopia and other countries in the Horn of Africa during 1983 exceeded imports by $1 billion, hunger in this region increased (World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Frances Moore Lappe et al, Earthscan, 1998).

 

For some – but certainly not the 840 million malnourished (or the more than a billion existing in a state described by the UN as absolute poverty) – the ‘problem’ is an inconceivable embarrass de richesses. Try and imagine yourself as one of the 225 individuals owning wealth equivalent to that of 47 percent of the world’s population. Consider that the wealth of just three of these individuals exceeds the Gross National Product of the world’s 47 poorest nations. And that for four percent of the combined income of the three wealthiest people we could provide universal access to basic education, health care, adequate food as well as safe water and sanitation for all.

 

OK, so is it perhaps not meat on its own that causes starvation, but that it is one of a number of possible factors including problems relating to distribution, drought and natural disaster as well as war and poverty caused by unfair trade, third world debt, insufficient aid, etc? Well, the US recently was able within a few months to send 130,000 people (with supplies) half way across the world. Alas, their mission was one of death and destruction rather than to rescue, provide food, shelter and deliver other essentials to the suffering multitudes. War and poverty even after hundreds of years of social activism are still, patently, with us. But why? Oscar Wilde, writing over a hundred years ago about charity, provides some clues. “[T]heir remedies do not cure the disease; they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible” (The Soul of Man under Socialism).

It is to be hoped that historians living today will in the not distant future look at present day society and recognize that by failing to see starvation as one of many symptomatic problems that no amount of ‘band aids’ could cure, Viva and other well intentioned but misguided groups delayed the use of effective treatment. The activities of such groups will however probably be seen as benign in comparison with the likes of the Animal Liberation Front and PETA – who have more in common with companies such as Monsanto than either would like to admit – and other Malthusian-inspired misanthropes. All will be on record as failing to see the economic law which transcends government and companies however large or powerful: no profit, no production: can’t pay can’t have.

These future historians will indeed be deeply saddened that we took so long to see the link between this law and a myriad of contradictions (clues) in plain view today: people starving while food rots; brick mountains and empty homes existing alongside unemployed builders and the homeless; millions dying of curable diseases. On this last point, pharmaceutical chemist Dr Victoria Hale has made the telling observation that  “parasites and poverty are inextricably linked”. Referring to conditions such as leishmaniasis and Chagas disease, found almost exclusively in areas of the world where grinding poverty for the vast majority is the normal way of life (and death), she went on to say: “People with these diseases are not in sight as they cannot pay” (New Scientist, 25 September 2004).

Revealingly, Tudge is on record as proposing that if food production were designed to feed people rather than make a profit, then there would be no problem. Eureka! Imagine that: a world in which everything is produced for need, not profit! However, in asking “why we, humanity, allow the world to be run by people who have long since lost the plot?” (New Scientist, 13 March 2004) Tudge implies a change in leadership might suffice. But, two hundred years earlier, the Marquis De Sade saw through leadership and in doing so glimpsed the answer to securing “a saner sustainable future”: “You can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want”.

Rob Stafford

50 Years in the Party (2020)

From the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

I first heard about the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1970 when I was a student in Hull. A couple of fellow students in the house I lived in were always going on about it. Until then I’d followed my parents in being a Labour supporter and saw the nationalisation of industry as the thing to support. But now I was being told that wouldn’t make any difference and I needed to look beyond it to an entirely different kind of society – and on a world scale. This was a society of common ownership and free access to all goods and services. No money, no buying and selling, no market – just production and distribution according to need. No leaders, no national frontiers, just one world – and this was to be achieved by majority democratic political action. This, I was told, if looked at closely, was what Marx had originally advocated and what socialism really meant.

I was incredulous at first and brought out all the arguments I’ve heard countless times since over the years. Human nature, need for gradual reforms, utopianism, over-population, shortage of resources, need for leaders, etc., etc. And I argued for a long time – until I no longer had any more arguments, since they’d all been answered. But I still somehow didn’t want to join a political organisation. I’d never been in one before and it didn’t seem to fit for me. Since no one actually pressed me to join, I just carried on talking and going to the meetings that the SPGB group organised and then helping to sell its journal, the Socialist Standard, in the town centre. But what then finally got me on side was the special edition of the Standard in August 1970. It was called ‘A World of Abundance’ and had articles with titles like ‘The World Can Feed Us All’, ‘Capitalism – Waste – Want’, ‘Not Too Many People’, ‘World Administration’ and a particular compelling one by Ron Cook with the self-explanatory title ‘Progress Perverted: the Technology of Abundance’. With all this it had to happen sooner or later and so, 50 years ago this month, I filled in the membership questionnaire and joined.

In the year that followed I attended meetings in Manchester, where I came from, in Sheffield and in London where, in 1971, the Party held its 66th annual conference. I found tremendous enthusiasm among members, tremendous knowledge of all things social, political and historical and tremendous optimism that the ideas were spreading and the movement growing.

Swansea

When the same year I moved into the world of employment, I found myself in a city, Swansea, with a long-standing branch of the Party, I found myself attending meetings regularly, selling Party literature on the steps of the town’s Central Library, helping to organise public meetings and going to other parties’ and organisations’ meetings to put our case there. A lot was going on at the time. It was the heyday of CND, Anti-Apartheid and Friends of the Earth as well as of those small left-wing political organisations that called themselves ‘socialist’ (IS, IMG, SLL, etc.) but, as far as we were concerned and despite their ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, at the end of the day were (and still are) just going for reforms of the system and so were just part of the capitalist furniture. I was the branch’s ‘press officer’ and often wrote to the South Wales Evening Post putting these points as well as other aspects of our case. Many of the letters I sent were published. I found all this activity educational and exhilarating and soon found I was able to give talks and engage in public debate myself.

In the late 70s and 80s Swansea Branch built a core of active members across the age range and organised regular meetings that we advertised in the local press. There were topics as diverse as ‘Marxism and Science’, ‘Thatcher and Freedom’, ‘Women are Workers too’, ‘Animal Rights’ ‘Youth and Unemployment’, ‘How Politicians Con You’, ‘Feed the World’, ‘Energy for the Future’, ‘Soap Operas and Socialism’, and ‘John Lennon’. We got good attendances too, and as a key part of our activity sold the Socialist Standard in the city’s shopping precinct and set up an outdoor platform where I was one of our speakers. I would shout myself hoarse on a Saturday morning and got a surprisingly small amount of heckling. I was also writing regularly for the Socialist Standard. We had record Saturday morning sales with an edition of the journal with the words ‘Sex, Sin and Socialism’ emblazoned across the cover. It contained an article written by me on the recently published and much talked about book by anarchist Alex Comfort entitled The Joy of Sex.

We were hawking our literature on the same pedestrian stretch as Ian Bone, a self-avowed anarchist who was later to set up an organisation called Class War. Unlike most of the others there, he really did seem to want a different system of society even if he didn’t quite know what that system was to be and thought the best way to get it was by smashing things. The People newspaper later called him ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, in which he took great pride. And, perhaps extraordinarily, when some 30 years later he wrote a book about his experiences in Swansea and elsewhere called Bash the Rich, I found myself debating with him at a packed meeting at the Party’s Head Office on Clapham High St with the subject ‘Which Way the Revolution?’. He was still the ‘one-off’ he’d ever been, but we did manage to agree on quite a few things regarding the revolution, even if we remained apart on others, for example violence and the number of classes in capitalist society.

Then there were the ‘speaking tours’ when I gave talks at various branches of the Party as far apart as Bristol, Bournemouth, Cornwall, Bolton, Canterbury and Guildford, some well attended, some pretty sparse. A ‘highlight’ for me was the debate with right-wing guru, Roger Scruton, organised by the Party’s Guildford branch. At the time Scruton, who remained a well-known public figure right up until his death earlier this year, wrote a weekly column in the Times and had raised debate with his book The Meaning of Conservatism. When we met in a pub before the meeting, I found him modest and affable. But he hadn’t bothered to find out what we were about and he asked me to tell him. He seemed to get the hang of it but then in the debate kept forgetting and referring to what had happened in Russia.

Another outstanding moment was a debate in Bolton Town Hall with local MP Tom Sackville, organised by the Bolton branch of the Party and chaired by a local cleric. It was a packed meeting and I managed to put our ‘version’ of socialism on the agenda immediately, after which the MP to his credit didn’t attempt to tar us with the Soviet brush.

I was also, together with a fellow member Pat Wilson, able to arrange a Q and A session for the Socialist Standard with a then leading figure of the burgeoning Green movement, Jonathan Porritt. It was a friendly occasion with Porritt strangely seeming to agree with most of what we said about the need for socialism.

The culmination of all this activity for me was the local election campaigns Swansea Branch ran in the late 1980s when, with the assistance of members from other branches, we knocked on every door in the local ward – twice. Even though we found a surprising amount of agreement on the doorstep, that didn’t really translate into votes, with 92 the maximum number we got in one of the three elections we ran in. An internal Party issue at the time was whether our candidate’s picture should appear on one of our election manifestos. The Party has always eschewed personalities as part of its antipathy to the idea of leaders and so a heated debate took place at the Executive Committee table about whether the candidate, myself, should show his ‘human face’. In the end the picture did appear, as it also did in the local press.

Trade union activity

The 1990s were a bit of an anti-climax in Party activity. The main thing was that the Socialist Standard kept being published and the case it propagated kept being put to readers. This was a period when I started to involve myself in trade union activity in my place of work. It was something I found extremely satisfying – and still do. That’s because you often saw quick results in terms of helping to resolve people’s problems at work, both individually and collectively, and felt you were making some kind of immediate difference, however small. For me it complemented the longer-term project of spreading socialist ideas in society at large and fitted well with the Party’s view of trade unionism as a necessary form of resistance to the tendency of capitalism to take for itself an increasingly large share of the surplus value produced by workers. It also made me fully conscious, if I was not already, of the need for trade unions to be fully independent of political parties and groups and not to succumb to the will of the union’s ‘politicos’ from the left-wing largely Trotskyist groups who were small in number but could still dominate union decision-making and use their position not for the benefit of members but to promote their own political ends. They would (and still do) constantly seek to bounce members into industrial action, even when such action is more likely to be damaging than successful.

Anti-capitalism

In the first decade of this century, as the Party celebrated its 100th anniversary, capitalism found itself facing the twin crises of terrorism and recession. The recession in particular gave rise to a phenomenon I found first surprising and encouraging but then disappointing, that is the quick spread in use of the term ‘capitalism’ with widespread discussion about it in books, magazines and the media. The Party had always freely used the term and, at a personal level, this made me feel a bit uneasy. I wondered whether people would know what we were talking about or would maybe just regard us as cranks or supporters of Russia. Now it was (and still is) everywhere. However, the trouble was, while often calling themselves ‘anti-capitalist’, critics of the system tended to propose more ‘benign’ models of capitalism via reforms seeking to achieve less poverty (e.g. universal basic income) and less waste of resources (e.g. the ‘green’ agenda) without taking into account the fact that reforms, even if alleviating things a little for some, can do nothing to change the basic profit-seeking nature of the system and the inevitable antagonism between what Marx called wage labour and capital.

While the last decade too has been full of proposals for coping with the problems of capitalism within its existing framework, disappointingly it has not seen an obvious rise in consciousness among wage and salary earners of the need for an entirely different kind of society. This is an idea that the Party and the World Socialist Movement have continued to keep alive by publishing literature, holding meetings and seeking to spread the idea in all other ways possible. For example, via our website and, in these pandemic days, the Party’s virtual ‘Discord’ platform.

Looking back over my 50 years in the Party, though a lot has happened, a lot has also remained the same. Capitalism has gone on its merry way with its wars, poverty, unemployment, glaring inequality, environmental degradation, and now a global pandemic. Many campaigns to try and improve it have come – CND, Shelter, Greenpeace, Right to Work, Anti-Nazi League, Child Poverty Action, Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, just to mention a few – and many have gone. But to be fair there have been some changes for the better – racism and sexism for example are definitely on the back foot in many parts of the world, and a whole slew of recent books on human nature have shifted opinion away from the long-held notion that human beings are selfish and competitive creatures rather than naturally cooperative ones.

In addition there is widespread consciousness of the environmental destruction which Rachel Carson pointed to in 1962 but which I only found out about the year I joined. At the same time the ‘experts’ who two years after this published The Limits of Growth, predicting ecological breakdown by the end of the century and calling for population control, were proved wrong. The profit system has of course gone on despoiling the planet but at the same time managing to adapt sufficiently not to cause an environmental apocalypse. It has also given better living standards to many wage and salary workers, while however heaping misery of varying degrees on many others. And it has made a very small number of individuals massively and increasingly wealthy, with the richest 1 percent of the world’s population owning 29 times more than the poorest 20 percent. All of which will continue as long as the capitalist mode of production continues and as long as those with good intentions (and there are many) say they support our aims but somehow think capitalism can gradually be reformed into something better or even into socialism.

I’m not planning to stop any time soon. I’ll carry on helping to keep alive the idea of a society I first heard about more than fifty years ago, since nothing I’ve heard in all that time from either supporters or critics of the present system has discouraged me from seeing the World Socialist Movement’s concept of socialism as the most desirable and most feasible next stage in human social development.

Howard Moss

Porritt remodels capitalism (2006)

Book Review from the July 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism As if the World Matters. Jonathon Porritt. Earthscan. 304 pages. £18.

Capitalism can be reformed so as to be compatible with achieving an environmentally sustainable society. That’s the view put forward by Jonathon Porritt, well-known Green and unofficial political adviser to HRH Prince Charles (as he refers to him in his latest book) which presents a version of capitalism that is supposed to allow it to function while taking ecological considerations properly into account, which it doesn’t do today.

What would a society have to be like to be environmentally sustainable? Basically, says Porritt (and we can agree), this would be a society whose methods of providing for the needs of its members did not use up non-renewable resources quicker than renewable substitutes for them could be found; did not use up renewal resources quicker than nature could reproduce them; and did not release waste into nature quicker than the environment’s ability to absorb it. (Porritt himself adds – and we’d be the last to disagree, even though it ups the bar considerably – that it would have to be a society in which “human needs are met worldwide”.) If these practices are abided by, then the relationship and interactions between human society and the rest of nature would be able to continue on a long-term basis – would be able to be “sustained” – without harming or degrading the natural environment on which humans depend.

Socialists contend that these practices could be systematically applied only within the context of the Earth’s natural and industrial resources being the common heritage of all humanity under democratic control. In other words, we place ourselves unambiguously in the camp of those who argue that capitalism and a sustainable relationship with the rest of nature are not compatible. The excessive consumption of both renewal and non-renewable resources and the release of waste that nature can’t absorb that currently go on are not just accidental but an inevitable result of capitalism’s very nature.

Capitalism is a society in which:

1. nearly all new wealth is produced for sale on a market;
2. money is invested in production with a view to obtaining a monetary profit;
3. those who produce the new wealth are exploited in that the source of profits is work they are not paid for;
4. production is regulated by the market via a competitive struggle between separately-owned enterprises for profits;
5. capital is accumulated out of profits in the form of new means of production, leading to the growth both of what can be produced and what is actually produced;

To which it can be added that capitalism exists as a single global system and not as a collection of separate national capitalisms.

Porritt accepts all of these as features of capitalism except point 3 (of course). His case is that if the government set the limits within which the market, the pursuit of profits, separately-owned enterprises and competition operated, these could operate to allow an environmentally sustainable society. According to him, capitalism and environmental sustainability “are only compatible under certain conditions (it isn’t capitalism per se that is at issue here, but which particular model of capitalism)”. He therefore subscribes to “a ‘reform from within’ strategy: identify those characteristics of today’s dominant capitalist paradigm that most damagingly impede progress towards sustainability and set out to change them through the usual levers – government intervention, consumer preference, international diplomacy, education and so on”.

In short, a classic reformist strategy. This is based on the assumption that “today’s dominant capitalist paradigm” is only one of a number of different possible capitalist “paradigms” or “models”. But the evidence is against this: there is not a range of different models of capitalism from which government can pick the one they prefer. Capitalism is a single, organic whole (to use a term Greens will understand), functioning to pursue and accumulate profits,  which cannot be remodelled mechanically. Past attempts to re-form capitalism in this sort of way, as for instance by the Labour Party and similar parties in other countries, have shown that, if there’s capitalism, it imposes its priorities – profit, competitiveness, accumulation – over all other considerations, and that in the end governments have no choice but to go along with this.

Rather than Labour-type parties changing capitalism it has been the other way round. These parties have ended up accepting that priority has to be given to capitalism’s priorities. The same is beginning to happen to the Greens, who have already participated in the government of capitalism in a number of European countries. In fact, Porritt’s own shift of position could be seen as a sign of this, though it can be admitted that some of the earlier Green positions he used to espouse but has now abandoned – such as “zero growth” and that decentralised local communities could solve global problems – were never tenable.

One of the ways in which Porritt suggests that governments could achieve a “a market-based model of sustainable capitalism” would be to force the competing enterprises to treat natural resources as if they were capital, subject to depreciation which had to be accounted for in monetary terms. He talks of “natural capital”, while acknowledging that even some Greens find treating nature as an economic category with a price-tag abhorrent.

All governments set as a policy goal increasing the “Gross Domestic Product” (GDP) of the country they govern. GDP is supposed to be a measure of the new value produced in a country in the course of a year. (Actually, strictly speaking, this should be Net National Product since GDP includes an element for depreciation and replacement of used-up fixed capital, which is not really new value.) This aim of governments is an unconscious reflection of the logic of capitalism since the new value created over and above what is consumed during the same period of time is the source of new capital which capitalism is driven to accumulate.

Endless “growth” (even if in fits and starts) – and the growing consumption of nature-given materials this involves – is built in to capitalism. However, this is not the growth of useful things as such but rather the growth of money-values, which is only indirectly the growth of things since money-value can only be embodied in things (not that all of these things are useful from a human point of view, even if they are within capitalist society, such as bombs and automatic cash machines).

Porritt cites the first law of thermodynamics (“energy is neither created nor destroyed as it is changed from one form to another”) to make the point that the production of wealth is not the creation of new material; it is merely a transformation of existing material that either comes directly from nature or originally did so into something useful or considered useful to human life (the definition of “wealth”). The material substratum of wealth comes from nature but, because it is not itself the product of labour, it has no value in the capitalist economic sense. Marx was fond of quoting the 17th century writer Sir William Petty’s remark that labour is the father and nature the mother of wealth. The problem is that, as under capitalism it is only labour that confers an economic value, nature is neglected when it comes to economic calculations and the operation of the economy.

Porritt complains that “we show nothing but contempt for the contribution from nature, valuing it at zero as some kind of free gift or subsidy” and that, as a result, “today’s dominant paradigm of capitalism” leads to the plundering of non-renewable resources (such as oil and minerals) and the over-harvesting of renewable ones (such as fish and forests).

This is true but his proposed solution – to take into account the non-renewed consumption of natural material as a negative amount when calculating GDP, as an incentive to cut back on it as a way of avoiding a reduction in GDP – is merely mucking about with the thermometer while leaving the real world unchanged. In the real world, which GDP merely attempts to measure, the competing enterprises would still only take into account as a cost what they had to pay for. As it costs no labour to produce natural materials (only to extract or harvest them, not to create them), whether or not they are renewed doesn’t enter into the calculation. If enterprises were forced to artificially take into account using up non-renewed natural resources in their business accounts, that would distort the calculation of the rate of profit which is the key economic indicator for capitalism. Mucking about with that under capitalism would cause all sorts of problems.

There is no way round this under capitalism, which simply cannot be remodelled or reformed on this point. To be fair, Porritt does concede that he could be wrong about capitalism and environmental sustainability and muses how bad it would be “to be committed to a reform agenda if the system one sought to reform was inherently incapable of accommodating the necessary changes in the first place”. Actually, this is precisely his case. This being so, he ought to draw the conclusion which he says then imposes itself:

“If, as a politically active environmentalist or campaigner for social justice, one’s answer to the question is that they are, indeed, mutually exclusive (that capitalism, in whichever manifestation, is in its very essence inherently unsustainable), then one’s only morally consistent response is to devote one’s political activities to the overthrow of capitalism”.

We have nothing to add.

Adam Buick

Ecology and revolution (1991)

From the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The world ecological crisis is on such a scale that many workers believe environmentalism has superceded the need for class struggle. “A genuine redistribution of power", says Jonathan Porritt, “can no longer be simplistically interpreted in terms of setting class against class . . .  the need to serve the general interest of humanity now transcends any such old-world divisiveness" (Seeing Green). Given the seriousness of the crisis it is hardly surprising that such a view has a widespread appeal in the Green movement. Nevertheless it is a naive analysis which socialists totally reject. Why?

The most common argument used to hack up the claim that human beings have overstretched the Earth’s ability to sustain us is that there are simply too many people. David Icke’s view is typical. ”Humankind has a choice to make. We can be sensible and limit our numbers voluntarily or we can go on until nature does it for us with disease and hunger and the time isn't too far off’ (It Doesn't Have To Be Like This).

There is nothing new in this. Parson Malthus was spouting his own brand of naturalistic determinism nearly two hundred years ago. In his Essay on the Principle of Population Malthus argued that food production increases over fixed periods in proportion to the arithmetic series 1. 2. 3. 4. 5, . . . while population increases over fixed periods by the geometric scries 1, 2. 4. 8. 16 . . .

Fortunately for us. Malthus’s apocalyptic vision had not an iota of scientific validity. His theory, like those of his modern-day followers, is completely arbitrary. The facts refute it. Since Malthus’s time food production has grown considerably faster than population and there is more than enough to go round. The figures bear this out. The surplus world grain stockpile in 1988 was 360 million tonnes—36 greater than the estimated 10 million tonne grain shortfall for all of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1987-88 crop year. To feed the 15 million children who starve each year would require just 3.6 million tonnes of grain, a mere 1 percent of the world’s stockpile (Susan George, Ill Fares the Land).

Famine remains of course, but its causes are social, not ecological. People do not starve for lack of food under capitalism, they starve for lack of money to buy it.

Benefits of technology

A close second to population growth in the Greens' litany of fear is industrialisation. “The Industrial Revolution”, says Icke. “was a change in human activity unprecedented in history and it has brought about an equally unprecedented threat to life on Earth”. There is no doubt that the development of the factory system has blighted the lives of millions. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels chronicled the living hell of workers in the mid-nineteenth century industrial towns. And today the smog masks worn in Tokyo and Mexico City are symbols of the stinking and poisonous reality that is modern industry.

But there is another side of the story. Industry has brought many of the things that we now take for granted in the home: electric light and cooking and warmth, telephones, washing machines, fridges and vacuum cleaners. Modern transport and telecommunications have widened the experiences of millions, rescuing men and women from "the idiocy of rural life". New printing processes, radio and television make accessible books, music and art that were once the privilege of a few.

All these things and more are the products of "industrialism” and are not to be despised for it. The crux of the matter is this. Just as no-one should have to go hungry today when we have the ability to produce more than enough food, so has capitalism by developing industry and technology brought us to the point where we have the potential to solve the age-old needs for warmth and shelter.

Yet the Greens oppose large-scale industry and argue instead for the dismantling of the world economy, replacing it with small, localised, self-sufficient output. In naive disregard for the economic necessities of capitalism, Icke wants to see “a change to smaller companies and an end to the present trend of a few giants swallowing up the rest and controlling local markets". He fails to see that the concentration of production under capitalism is not an optional extra; it is part of the very dynamic of the system. As Marx pointed out that:

 The battle of competition is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities . . . depends on the productivity of labour, and this depends upon the scale of production. Therefore the larger capitals beat the smaller. (Capital, Vol I. Chapter 25. section 2).

From their “forest clearing" called Europe, many Greens would deny the benefits of technology to others. Their smug Eurocentric argument is that Third world countries “must find ways of gradually delinking their economics from those of the developed world” (Jonathan Porritt). In reality the current level of world production depends on there being a world division of labour. It is this ever-increasing socialisation of labour that makes the world socialisation of ownership— socialism—an ever more realisable goal. It is only with this social ownership and control of the means of production that we can start talking about employing materials and methods of production that are ecologically acceptable. Until then, production will be governed by blind economic laws which impose their own priorities.

But the Greens oppose socialism with their utopian dreams of de-industrialization under capitalism. They want to cut down the size of the means of production while leaving the relations of production intact.

Mysticism versus Marxism

By considering ecological problems in isolation from the basic contradictions of capitalism, the Greens fall inevitably into the trap of presenting them as above classes and independent of the society we live in. Humanity itself gets the blame, not the social system. Relief is sought in anthropological solutions: the need to change people, their beliefs, morals, education and the like. Theodore Roszak expresses this view in his book Person/Planet The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, saying that “a militant class-consciousness would politicise the personality out of existence". He adds later that “a new human identity requires a politics that has outgrown the modern infatuation with science and industrial necessity”. He does not explain what he means and refers only to the need for a “spiritual dimension of life".

This concern with an inner world of personality marks a failure to understand the indissoluble links between the individual and society, and the fact that only social revolution is the key to real individual freedom through liberation from economic coercion.

Roszak's “adventure of self-discovery through to its planet-saving purposes" may have a romantic appeal to the Greens. But as Marx pointed out:

  It is ridiculous to long for a return to that original fullness as it is to believe that the present complete emptiness must be permanent. The bourgeois view has never been more than the opposite of that Romantic view, and so the romantic view will accompany it as a justified opposite till its blessed end. (Grundrisse, Notebook 1).

We do not have to kneel down before nature like the sun-worshippers of old or the Gaia mystics of today. Action can and must be taken to save the planet. The requirements are familiar enough and embrace, amongst others, the following: use of renewable energy sources and the conservation of non-renewable ones, agricultural practices that preserve the fertility of the soil, emission controls combined with tree-planting to take up the carbon gases, use of non-polluting technology to transform materials, and the manufacture of solid goods without built-in obsolescence. Sufficient technical knowledge and scientific understanding of the laws of nature exist now to make these things, and more, a real possibility. What we lack is the social framework which would allow them to be carried out.

The Greens fail to understand that it is the economic necessities of capitalism that make it impossible to establish a sustainable relationship between human society and the rest of nature.

Theirs is essentially a static and superficial vision of the universe. They see no further than the surface appearance of things. Famine to the Greens means simply too many people. Pollution comes from industrial processes so they conclude that industrialism is the enemy. They fail to locate the real problem in the blind economic laws of a social system that is driving us on to the edge of irreversible ecological disaster. No wonder all they have to offer is a futile programme of reforms.

The socialist vision is not static. Engels’s observation that “motion is the mode of existence of all matter” is a major tenet of the Marxist guide to action. Human activity has always changed the environment and will continue to do so. There is no going back to some pre-industrial golden- age.

Looming ecological catastrophe makes more urgent the necessity of socialism. Workers have no choice but to expropriate the capitalist class and plan production for need not profit. Only then can we start to organise production in an ecologically acceptable way. Only then will we manage nature and control changes in our relationships to it through an understanding of its laws and the unfettered ability to apply them.

John Dunn

Letter: Green capitalism? (2008)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Green capitalism?

Thanks very much for your email of July 15 (with the article “Capitalism versus Nature“, July Socialist Standard). Excellent article!

And I certainly agree with the broad thrust of your analysis, though I guess I would distinguish between capitalism as some monolithic entity incapable of any change, and the kind of capitalism which might (just!) be able to avoid coming into conflict with nature. Touch and go, I have to admit, but I guess that’s what I’m still working away at trying to test out.

Jonathon Porritt

Reply: 

Reforming capitalism to serve the common interest has been tried before and has never worked. Our view is that it never will.– Editors.

Between the Lines: And Now For Our Younger Viewers . . . (1992)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

And Now For Our Younger Viewers . . . 

During the Earth Summit last month it was hard to switch on the telly without encountering some green reformist or another uttering tales of woe about "our" planet. They even gave Jonathan Porritt his own series, modestly titled How To Save The World. Salvation via Porritt’s greenery involves leaving the profit system intact and picking off the scabs which it inevitably breeds. It was salvation for the simple-minded, a sort of secular, modernist Jesus Is Coming message. Switch on BBC's Going Live on a Saturday morning and you will be highly likely to bump into Jason Donovan or Jonathan Porritt; the former can’t sing and the latter can’t offer solutions, only pathetic reforms. The destruction of the environment has assumed the proportions of a children's issue; those talking about it are free to indulge in the sugary platitudes of reformers for whom caring renders unnecessary the requirement for being logical. Saving the rain forests in the late 1990’s is getting to be like collecting pennies to ’save black babies’ which Catholic schools did recently as the 1960’s. One of the most urgent problems of our time, which is the global destruction of the social environment, is reduced to nursery rhyme reasoning and Porritesque posturing.

News Mystification

The ecological crisis is no joke; it could be capitalism's literally most foul attack upon us. but it is reported in terms which mystify rather than illuminate. So, instead of talking about how whole species are being wiped out for the sake of profit, the talk is of "biodiversity". Instead of getting to grips with the industrial poisoning of the atmosphere we are told of "CFC emission levels". In short, the simple and the comprehensible is converted into scientifically grandiose terms to frighten us away from thinking that it is ours to solve. No, such convoluting problems had better be left to statesman and state scientists. Economists have long performed the same task in relation to production, turning starving millions into "the underdeveloped South" and food mountains into "regional agro-over-production". What sounds like an explanation becomes mystification, the result of which is to distance the viewer of TV from a sense of power in questioning or rejecting the self-appointed experts.

The Pushers

First Tuesday (2 June, 10.30pm, ITV) was about drug pushing on a grand scale. These were not gangs making a few million in an illegal market. Here were multi-million dollar companies going into Asian countries and promoting their addiction. In Malaysia packets of of the drug are given free to people in shopping centres. In Taiwan, where it is illegal to advertise drugs, the companies ignore the law by using the drug logo to advertise holidays, even though the companies are not in business to sell holidays. The expansion of this drug pushing into Asia has led to a corresponding increase in fatal diseases there, far outstripping those caused by heroin addiction. A US Congressman from Kentucky, the main state where the drug is grown, defended the pushing campaign into Asia on the grounds that, although it can ruin people's health and will certainly kill many, it is important that Asian consumers have the freedom to choose what they buy. We did not hear the Kentucky Congressman’s views on the right of Kentucky courts to imprison people for choosing to smoke cannabis. Oh, the drug in question was not dope, but tobacco.

Steve Coleman

Green Reform or Socialist Revolution: a discussion between Jonathan Porritt and the Socialist Party (1987)

From the August 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is an edited transcript of an interview between representatives of the Socialist Party and Jonathon Porritt, Director of Friends of the Earth.

Socialist Standard: Can I begin by saying that the Socialist Party, which we’re representing, differs from other political parties and organisations on what you call the left, by advocating something different: a non market society, a society of free access to goods and services. with production for use and not for profit. Now a number of things you're on record as saying ring a fair number of bells with people in the Socialist Party and people who are sympathetic with the Socialist case. For example, you're on record as saying that you favour the transition from production for profit to production for need. Now how do you envisage this can come about within the context of a society based on buying and selling and wages and salaries? The Socialist Party wants that as well, it wants production for need, but we don't think this is possible within the context of a society where you've got a means of exchange, where you've got buying and selling, where you've got the need built into it — regardless of the will of individuals — to make profit.

Jonathon Porritt: It depends what level you're talking about. If you're talking about an improvement in the existing situation, which is what essentially Friends of the Earth is talking about, it is quite conceivable to imagine patching the system up and improving it and making it more responsive to environmental considerations, so that the appalling damage that's being done and the appalling waste and the abuse of people and earth is mitigated. ameliorated. At that level, one can argue quite conventionally about the ways in which the existing system can be adapted or reformed to do a slightly better job than it's doing now. At another level, which concerned me most before I came to Friends of the Earth, the level of deep Green politics rather than light Green politics, which is what we here at Friends of the Earth are primarily about — at that deeper level, there isn't any way of fudging with this existing system. It is not amenable to reform in such a way and to such a degree as to allow for fundamental ecological priorities to come to fruition.

Socialist Standard: What follows from that, then, if you say it's not amenable to reform?

Jonathon Porritt: What follows from that is that the system absolutely has to go. The nub of it for us, for me as a Green, is that the productivist system that we have now, the system that depends upon an expansion of the process of production and consumption as a good thing in itself but is primarily geared towards exchange rather than anything else, as a way of generating "wealth' — that system is not compatible with a finite planet and it doesn't matter how often technology steps in and seems to persuade us that we can overcome some of this finite nature. It doesn't matter how many times one resource seems to substitute for another if one is running short. It doesn't matter how often there seems to be a technological fix that persuades us that we human beings don't have to change our ways. Ultimately, the nub of the reality for Greens is that we have only a certain resource base to use; you can either use that resource base to promote the kind of appallingly inequitable and destructive system that we have now. or you use the resource base to meet the needs of all people on earth.

Socialist Standard: What stands in the way of our doing that then?

Jonathon Porritt

Jonathon Porritt: So much that I can't help but sometimes get depressed. What stands immediately in the way in terms of political perceptions and political realities is a very strong feeling that we have, and I suspect that you may have, that there isn't a great deal to differentiate between what is on offer from the Labour Party and what is on offer from the other parties. This is largely because their area of autonomous operation within the existing international and economic order is tiny and it doesn't actually matter very much whether they talk about wider distribution of ownership in this country, or whether they talk about more production for need in this country. They are still locked into an international economic order which demands of all its participants that the resources they have at their disposal, both human and physical, are converted into a form of wealth that is not directly geared to meeting needs, but is directly geared towards creating profits. When I read the learned and wise, so-called radical, words of opposition parties in this country — not your party, I agree, but the people who call themselves the opposition in this country nowhere is there a perception that they are the slaves of that system, as much as the Conservatives are the willing protagonists of the system. That is a very, very important point of principle for me as a Green. Therefore, to end this point, when one talks about production for use or production for need, it is far more than what it has become in the Labour Party. To them it is essentially a bit of history, which needs to be trotted out from time to time because that is the way many of the ideas in the Labour Party develop, but it is not a meaningful concept when you actually look at the Labour Party's economic and industrial policies.

Socialist Standard: But we've been saying that a revolutionary change is the only way to solve the problems that arise under capitalism since 1904 and movement after movement, reform campaign after reform campaign, has arisen over those years. If in fact attention had been paid to the fundamentals, then maybe we'd be nearer a solution.

Jonathon Porritt: I don't dispute that. I'm fairly well aware of that and obviously I live with that reality day to day myself. To answer the question from a personal point of view, I would not myself dismiss the work of people who are in the reform area as worthless. But I also know the forces that we're up against and I know that we cannot sit around waiting for a Green society to happen, or indeed pit ourselves against some of those forces, unless we are at the same time attempting to do something about the most pressing problems that we're up against at the moment. And there are a very large number of people involved in reformist work of one kind or another which does not rule out awareness on their part, and a commitment on their part, to an extremely radical change in the system But their perception is — and this is a question of personal judgement — that their energy and their efforts are, given the existing status quo, better used, in the short and medium term, on doing that kind of work, rather than on committing themselves to a political revolution as you call it, which, a lot of people have come to accept, will never come about in this country. Unless, that is, there is some desperate, juddering, ghastly collapse of the system. that brings people head-on against reality.

Ideology of Money
Socialist Standard: But even so. revolution is conceived in people's minds normally as a change of government. Now in relation to this, if I can come back to something which you said a little bit earlier, what it seems to me you said is that there's an ideology which embraces all the well-known political parties whether right or left. This is an ideology of growth: they're locked into this international economic system and there's no way out of it for them. Can I ask you about an ideology that is equally all-embracing? That is the ideology that we've got to base our relationships, personal and economic, on money, on this money-bound mode of thinking, the idea that we need a society in which buying and selling is paramount, a society in which we've got to work for wages, in which there have got to be employees and employers. It seems to me that this is a super-ideology which in a way goes far deeper than the ideology of growth. What would be your reaction to the suggestion that we should do away with the ideology of buying and selling and working for wages, as well as the ideology of growth?

Jonathon Porritt: The idea of wages, and the notion that every working person has a price, as it were, or a monetized value, is something which I personally do not find a lot of sympathy with. If you look at the way in which work patterns are emerging in the future, there is just as much of a potential for a complete revolution in work attitudes, and what work is all about, as there is for a tightening of the existing capitalist system.

Socialist Standard: How close are the trade unions to recognising that? Do you say you've moved a little bit nearer or there's a little more sympathy within trade union circles to Greens?

Jonathan Porritt: I've got no false expectations there. When it's a question of wages, salaries etc. then my feeling is that there is scope for a tremendously exciting shift in attitudes, so that work ceases to be the debased way in which people assess someone's merit or someone's value in society merely according to how much they can earn. And work becomes again what I have always felt it should be — probably from a hopelessly old-fashioned point of view — an essential part of the way in which a human being expresses his or her ability to serve other people, to enrich their lives, to improve their community and so on. You can't talk about Green attitudes towards employment and the economy unless that shift of attitudes towards work is at the back of it. On the question of buying and selling things: I don't feel confident enough about how alternatives to that might come about to argue that as part of Green politics. We would have to look very carefully at barter economies and the way in which they developed up until the point where local scale markets developed, quite organically, in a quite different way from what "the market" means today (which is a real non-word — it isn't a market at all).

Socialist Standard: Can I interrupt to say we're not talking about barter; what we're talking about is production directly for use.

Jonathon Porritt: Ah. but then you're coming back to something that I think we have already agreed on — the concept that the resources of a society could be so geared that they were primarily directed at meeting need rather than creating money through salaries or wages, or creating surplus through profits or whatever else it might be. Now that is a different way of looking at it, but money might still be involved.

A Society of Free Access
Socialist Standard: Well, what is the objection to free access to what is produced, without the intermediary of money, or barter? Money is simply a sophisticated form of barter. If one excludes barter altogether either in the form of goods or of money, what is the objection to people producing what they need in the quantities that they need and simply taking those things as necessary? The objection people often put — that people arc naturally greedy — I presume would not be put by people in the Green movement because it would be quite a damning one. Our argument is that people are made greedy by the circumstances in which they find themselves. But what's the objection to that kind of arrangement?

Jonathon Porritt: The objection, which I'm sure you've encountered just as often as we have, is your interpretation of need and the extent to which one person's interpretation of need might be another person's interpretation of greed or simple want, rather than need. A lot of work in the Green movement, particularly in terms of international economics and developing world economics, has gone into the whole definition of need. How can you use that word with any sense of it being applicable objectively to every person in a country, let alone to every country on this earth? How can one actually use that word as an absolute standard, where you can lay down what a person's needs are?

Socialist Standard: We're talking about self-determined need. I don't think you can talk about it in any other way. because you can't lay down what somebody else's needs are.

Jonathon Porritt: But are you talking about that? Because I honestly feel that that's questionable.

Socialist Standard: Yes. that is our conception, that that is the proper basis of human society meeting needs.

Jonathon Porritt: Right, but then your point about human nature becomes not only important, but all-important. Unless one is able to see human nature as a totally different potentiality from what it is now. It would be fine if, expressed and articulated in a different society with a different set of values and a different set of priorities, human nature allowed for self-determined need to flourish as a principle. But then I would have to put it to you — and this is, I feel, more on the basis of ten years' experience as a teacher, rather than three years' experience as Director of Friends of the Earth — the reality of it is that every single one of the major shaping influences in our society at the moment, from top to bottom, tends to reinforce a concept of need which is not self-determined, which is culturally and socially determined in the most destructive way. destructive both of human dignity and of the planet.

Class Society
Socialist Standard: We hold that the shaping influences can be lumped together as the influences emanating from one class — those people who take the decisions that production shall proceed on the basis of profit. So it is that class which shapes ideas and therefore we see a class-divided society. It's not a social or an emotional thing. It's a rational analysis and until that class, who are in a position of power and can determine what production is undertaken and so on, and until that social system with that kind of minority authority is altered, nothing will change.

Jonathon Porritt: I don't hold to that view, and I personally believe that some of the things that are holding back a change in the nature of the debate, the political debate in this country, are the way in which we get hooked on the class issue before we are able to move through to what I consider to be the real issue, which is that of who holds power. I don't share your perception that the only people who hold power in our society are those from a certain class and that they use that power permanently to keep other people disempowered. From my perception of it, from the perception of an ecologist, there is no justification for that theory when one looks at patterns of damage and the ways in which different economies, left and right, are able to put people into positions of power in such a way that they use that power against the interests of the majority of people and against the interests of the planet. When you look at the power base in Eastern Europe, it's obviously structured in a different way than it is in the West, but it shares so many points in common that although you may not be able to spot a class system emerging in quite the same sense . . .

Socialist Standard: Oh, but we do.

Jonathon Porritt: I would have some difficulty about that. 1 would call it a caste system, rather than class. I would say you're using the concept of class in an inaccurate way. What you're talking about is those who are allowed in these different political systems to dominate others through the power that they have and through their capacity to disempower others. That I would share with you; I don't actually believe that that's any longer the sole prerogative of any one class. And if you look at this country, at the extent to which not just the upper classes are involved in this continued oppression of people but others, other people who don't necessarily fit into that category, one has to raise the notion that the so-called leaders of the working class have actually done as much to destroy the potential for a genuine liberation of politics in this country as the so-called leaders of the upper classes.

Socialist Standard: Trade union leaders are in the business of maintaining the price of labour, as an element in the capitalist system, so of course they're locked into the system as well.

Jonathon Porritt: But if the word class means anything, one would have to say that they feel an affinity with that class of people. Now that's why to a certain extent your own analysis may be suggesting that we may need to move beyond the very simplistic way in which class is used as a concept in British politics, and get back to the thing that underlies class, underlies privilege, caste, all the rest of it, whatever the determinant may be that puts one person in power over another, and get back to that issue of power.

Socialist Standard: Can I say that we argue that a class is a group of people that has economic interests in common, and therefore we define the owning class, the capitalist class if you like, as those who own and/or control the means of production. And in Britain you've got maybe 10 per cent of the population who are in the position of being able to survive without having to work, because they have the means to do so through dividends or whatever other unearned forms of income come to them. In Russia the situation is not one of people owning in a legal way but in a de facto way, of controlling the means of production and in so doing having privileges which in effect make them into an owning class, into a capitalist class, even if they're not called that

An Alternative Value System

Socialist Standard: But perhaps I could come back briefly to one thing you said earlier, and that was basically "the world's in a mess", that people's values are on the whole fairly negative, and people are being encouraged to move in directions which all ecologically-minded people would deprecate, and this comes from values which we'd essentially be against. Now what we'd advocate would be a society of self-determined need. Now if at present what we've got is a society where people aren't capable of determining their own needs because of the pressures upon them, surely the logical answer to that is for those who are in favour of a society of self-determined need to advocate that. They should do as much as possible to make people see that it would be in their interest and in the interest of the community as a whole to have that kind of society, rather than the kind of society we've got at present where people are at one another's throats and encouraged to have values which are not in their own individual interests and not in the social interest.

Jonathon Porritt: I couldn't agree with you more, but what lies behind your question is the suggestion that unless you're doing that full time everything else which you do is going to be second-best. Now I wouldn't agree with that because I feel very strongly that there are so many different ways in which one can encourage people to come to that perception. I don't believe that the only way in which you can do that is by beating them over the head with a different political ideology. And I actually believe that there may be many more indirect ways of eroding that value system, by holding it up to inspection so that people begin to question whether or not it's any longer valid for them. And that's what I meant when I said that Friends of the Earth is not just a reformist organisation, not just a single-issue campaigning pressure group, but actually has a deeper goal behind it. namely to suggest that today's environmental problems are symptoms of a system that is suffering a profound breakdown or malaise, and that system is in the state of crisis it's in because of the values that dominate our society. As an ecologist, one is then able to touch upon alternative value systems, which would give greater priority to things like: concepts of inter-generational equity, how one generation is responsible for the well-being of the next by the use that it makes of the resources available to us; how one can talk about the distribution of wealth North and South, not just in a charitable syndrome. i.e. we owe them more because we're rich and they're poor, but in terms of the way in which the earth's wealth has been ripped away from them by us and is still being done so, so much to their detriment that it's now impossible for many of those countries even to contemplate the beginnings of a sustainable future. And all of those ways of talking about equity and justice, which start from ecological underpinning, and yet still lead through to the same point that you started out at, namely that today's value system is both immoral and unsustainable — that is something that Friends of the Earth can do.

I'm sure that one of the things we would have in common is a grave concern about the level of political debate in this country, which in my opinion is a source of genuine despair. So many people see it as a kind of abstract thing up there, "let the politicians get on with it, it's nothing to do with us, well live our life" — that is a real problem.

But you're quite right to call organisations like Friends of the Earth to book and say, How can what you do be more effective than going out there and pitching the challenge absolutely directly and not in the faintly mealy-mouthed way — which I would acknowledge — that we sometimes use. I wouldn't necessarily defend our line to the hilt, but I would say, from our experience, that it is a question of finding the most effective way of reaching different kinds of people

Reform or Revolution?

Socialist Standard: Many people have said to us: we agree with your ideas, and we think as a long term goal they're very laudable, and we want to work towards them. At the same time, there are lots of other things that need to be done in the meantime, and we're going to do those as well. In other words we re going to engage in 50/50 activity — 50 per cent reform, short-term activity, 50 per cent long-term, revolutionary activity. In actual practice, what happens is that within a very short time those people are thoroughly, 100 per cent engaged in the reform activity because it takes all their time and all their energies, and the long-term revolutionary activity gets completely forgotten. The German SPD Party once had these revolutionary aims of the abolition of the wages system and a society of free access; they were finally removed but these date back to the end of the nineteenth century; people in the nineteenth century actually had these ideas. So the reason why we in the Socialist Party say. No, we've got to keep our ideas in clear, logical focus is that otherwise they get lost completely. Not only do we not advance the idea of Socialism as a wageless, moneyless society, a marketless society. with self-determined needs, but we actually put it back; there's not even anybody there to put the case.

Jonathon Porritt: I'm certainly not critical of you and indeed the party for the position that it takes there. I've always said this, that there is a need for that kind of expression, a very important need. What I'm trying to put to you is that it's a bit of a vicious circle because you are dependent upon so many people making that their priority that the thing assumes a different status in society, it assumes a different level of credibility. Until that threshold is reached, an awful lot of us say. "Yes. but it isn't possible psychologically and personally endlessly to go on re-motivating, re-committing, spending literally 18 hours of every single day of the year putting one's heart and soul into doing the kind of thing you're doing. You must have attainable, shorter-term goals than the longer-term revolutionary change. I couldn't have gone on much longer in the Green Party, at the level of involvement I had there, because there wasn't any short-term achievable goal; it was all very much pitched at the same level that you're talking about. I'm still obviously very committed to the goals and the ideals of the Green Party, and I feel I'm still working for those goals and ideals by working here. Everything I do here, however short-term, reformist, opportunistic. and pragmatic it may sometimes be, I justify because all of the shorter-term things that we do I see as very humble, but nonetheless extremely important, steps on the path towards achieving that broader, more revolutionary framework.

Socialist Standard: And the things that in a revolutionised society would be done as a matter of course, without having to apply pressure to achieve them.

Jonathon Porritt: Precisely. But it's become impossible for me to work in any other way, because of the pain that we cause by so abusing each other and so abusing the earth, that we're incapable of seeing how different it could be. I can't claim any major revolutionary breakthroughs in Friends of the Earth over the last three years, but I can claim on behalf of the organisation some small improvement in things that would otherwise be worse than they are. And I personally feel that's better than not having done it. It's not much of a difference — I don't deny it. In terms of moving the world forward to some of those goals that we might have in common, I don't have any pretensions that I've achieved very much over the last three years.

Socialist Standard: We'd argue that this vicious circle does exist, and unless we break out of it by a sufficient number of people espousing the more long distance course, we're always going to be in a position where people say, 'Well I'll do something else in the meantime', and we'll never reach the position where the thing can really take off.

Jonathon Porritt: I agree. I can't get through that one myself. I'm not being despairing or fatalistic about it, but I can't deny the reality of what you're saying. I can't actually see a solution to it.

Howard Moss

Pat Wilson