Editorial: Goodbye to Bambi (2007)

Editorial from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Enfeebled by their thrashing at the polls in 1997, the most damaging comment the Tories could think of about Tony Blair was to liken him to a political Bambi – a young, doe-eyed innocent deficient in any ambition or ability to control the wild beasts in his party and their scheming to bring back Clause Four. Those who were closer to the New Labour heart knew differently. Even before all the results were in on that night in May 1997, an iron discipline was being imposed on Bambi’s party. Jonathan Freedland, a Guardian reporter and a Labour supporter, was unable to celebrate Blair’s victory because he was brusquely ejected from the Hall as he was in a “forbidden zone” there. Three years later another Guardian writer, Andrew Rawnsley, recalled the situation: “Power within the party had been concentrated at the top. Discipline was everything. Dissenters were ruthlessly smothered and marginalized”.

According to Blair (and to most other politicians) “The only purpose of being in politics is to make things happen” – which leads to the questions of what are the “things” and whether it is worthwhile, in terms of human interests, that they should “happen”. Naturally, Blair is quite clear in the matter. In his farewell speech to the party members in his Sedgefield constituency he congratulated himself on what he had made happen during his ten years in Number Ten: “As for my own leadership, throughout these ten years . . . one thing was clear to me – without the Labour party allowing me to lead it, nothing could ever have been done” and in more detail: “ . . . more jobs, fewer unemployed, better health and education results, lower crime, and economic growth in every quarter . . .The British are special, the world knows it, in our innermost thoughts we know it . . . This is the greatest nation on Earth”.

These extravagant claims are based on a number of minor changes in working class conditions which some people – Labour politicians – may choose to interpret as improvements but which, compared to the everyday grinding problems of capitalism, are insignificant. For example we were invited to vote for Blair’s party because they legislated for an increase in paid maternity leave from 18 to 29 weeks; because there has been a rise in rate of employment of lone parents, so that the poverty of people with children may be just a little less severe; because during Blair’s ten years at the helm recorded crime fell, after the passage of no less than 53 criminal justice bills, some of which have created a crisis of overcrowding in the prison service while alarmingly eroding some civil liberties.

At the same time the number of children officially assessed as living in relative poverty rose by 100,000 to 2.8 million, making nonsense of Labour’s stated objective of cutting this figure by half by 2010. Then there has been the matter of governmental sleaze, in which Labour assured us they would be a refreshing improvement after the Tories but which began with the Bernie Ecclestone affair and which was exposed in the recent scandal of the award of honours to anyone rich enough to “lend” the party large sums of money. And of course there has been Iraq, which deserves to be the event by which Blair is best remembered – the war which he secretly agreed with Bush to support, which he attempted to justify with lies about the existence of powerful weapons and which has now plunged that hapless country into a chaos of murder and destruction.

Blair began his time as prime minister with high hopes from an electorate deceived by the Labour Party’s propaganda machine that here was a new, fresh leader to usher us into a secure future. It took some years to expose him as a typically ruthless and manipulative, if highly skilled, practitioner of the cynical art of capitalism’s politics. He will not be missed.

Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW! improved recipe, the manufacturers are challenging you to do what is probably impossible, and spot a difference that doesn’t exist, due to a change they didn’t make on a formula they didn’t modify. Why the manufacturers do this, in a fast-changing world where novelty has a short shelf-life, is too obvious to need spelling out, but one has a deep-rooted suspicion that many consumers too are so accustomed to these everyday revolutions that they would manage to find a difference between ‘old’ cola and ‘new’ cola even if there wasn’t one. This may be because they desire to see themselves as sophisticated and discerning customers with subtle palates that can detect changes at homeopathic levels, and thus they delude themselves and their peers, and in so doing become accessories to the grand illusion, perfectly trained pavlovian customers of capitalism.

Anyone who remembers, say, the adverts of the 1970s will have a strange feeling of detached deja-vu when seeing modern commercials for ‘revolutionary new products’ such as sunglasses that react to light (aka ‘reactolites’ in the 1970s ), but the feeling is somehow detached because nobody seems to remark on the fact that this is yesterday’s leftovers being served up as fresh. Perhaps to the extent that we stop bothering to protest, we join those consumers who can detect non-existent changes to recipes and in our own way become complicit in the grand illusion, finally for the sake of a quiet life pretending we don’t remember or don’t care. Meanwhile those who don’t remember previous incarnations will of course be under the happy impression that they are getting the newest and the brightest and the best of everything.

So it is part of the heavy labour of any forward-looking revolutionary to be backward-looking as well, in order to recall all the previous times society, debates, ideas and individuals have trod the same paths and been down the same blind alleys, and to remind those who are listening that the most heavily signposted routes are usually the ones that don’t go anywhere. And where politics, or its twisted and malicious great-aunt, religion, impact on the one truly novel field of human endeavour, science, the same dead hands of bigotry beckon us down the same old cul-de-sacs, winding along scenic back roads that skirt the evidence and obscure the real lay of the land.

So it is with the ‘controversy’ over Darwinian evolution. Just when you think, after the recent court judgments in America against it, that creationism is becoming a laughing stock and the American public are finally becoming tired of being caricatured as vegetable-brained hicks who praise the Lord and marry their sisters, the debate convulses once again, a bubble emerges from the fetid swamp, and a NEW! argument explodes over the scenery. Neoconservatives, it seems, are now at war with the religious right in an attempt to reclaim Darwin as the ideological figurehead, not of the scientific liberal progressive agenda, but of red-blooded two-fisted Republican screw-the-other-guy frontier capitalist values (‘A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin’, New York Times, May 5). The argument of the neo-cons is of course that evolution, being ‘red in tooth and claw’, and involving the ‘survival of the fittest’, is perfectly suited to the conservative view of capitalism. Never mind that the first of these phrases was coined by T H Huxley and the second by Herbert Spencer, Darwin is held up as the perfect justification for any amount of callous disregard by the rich of the vast majority of the world’s poor population, and the only people persistently getting in the way of this wonderful ‘proof’ of capitalism’s natural and therefore inevitable provenance are those silly religious evangelists who don’t seem to understand how to intelligently design capitalism’s propaganda machine.

And it is at this point that the reactolite factor sets in. People new to this debate might screw up their eyes, dazzled by the spectacle of conservatives being pro-Darwin and fighting their own religious brethren. But there’s more. What would they make of the logical extension to this scenario, which is the emergence of a liberal progressive element opposed to evolution? Yet the world has seen it all before, where the conservatives championed Darwin and the liberal progressives championed creationism. It was a sell-out gig, it was a set-up, it ruined careers, and it made history. It was the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, a trial so bizarre that the defendant deliberately got himself accused as a teacher of evolution even though he was actually a football coach, where his friends were on the prosecution counsel, and where the jury was instructed by the defence not to find him innocent. The story of this world-famous publicity stunt, engineered entirely by the defendant and his team of bible-baiters, is hugely entertaining and too long to indulge here (but look it up in Wikipedia).

Why the pro-evolution lobby, and people like Clarence Darrow and H L Mencken, would want to crucify the religious right in public is not difficult for any scientifically-minded progressive to comprehend, especially one with a sense of humour. But, asked Stephen Jay Gould, in his perceptive article on the subject, what on earth possessed a liberal and progressive, three-times Presidential candidate like William Jennings Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to social reform, to lead the prosecution, in what he must have known was an ambush (see Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1999)? Bryan, ever since lampooned as the villain of the piece, was according to Gould motivated not so much by any fondness for the theory of creationism or its adherents as by a truly messianic hatred of the iniquitous implications of what had already by then become known as Social Darwinism, a vicious ideology of social callousness which owed more to Spencer than Darwin and whose consequences in social inequality and poverty Bryan had spent his life trying to battle. Gould, himself a lifelong bitter opponent of creationists, nevertheless manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a decent man consigned to history as a buffoon, who found himself on the wrong side for the right reasons.

To socialists this is all old hat now, and they won’t be tempted into the debate between neo-cons and evangelists in the neo-neo-Darwin saga. They know that Darwin wasn’t a social Darwinist, that capitalism doesn’t show the survival of the fittest but in fact destroys the healthy host and preserves the degenerate and useless parasite, and also that the enemy of your religious enemy is not necessarily your friend. Those addicted to the NEW! however might end up scratching their heads over this one.

Paddy Shannon

The Illusion of Freedom (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We are always being told that we live in a free society, but do we?

It would appear that a ban has been introduced on spontaneous protest within one kilometre of Parliament. According to a recent feature in the Sunday Times, as a form of low-key protest against this, a man called Neil Goodwin regularly dresses up as Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, holds a placard carrying the slogan “Not Aloud” and stands within the vicinity. This means, of course, that he is liable to get into trouble, and he has indeed been arrested several times. Many of the passing crowd think he is a tourist attraction and on one occasion, when a policeman told him to move on, one of them said, “It’s a free country, isn’t it?”, whereupon the man is said to have shook his head ruefully.

But surely in Britain, we live in a free society with the right to protest? It’s a democracy after all; we have a choice of leaders to vote for. And in between elections, there are a whole host of issues we can give our voices to in order to make a difference to the world around us, knowing that we won’t get jailed for our views or actions. So maybe our tramp is just an eccentric exception.

People power is in evidence everywhere and more and more we see individuals and groups “standing up for their rights”: minorities of every kind have a voice. The right for a woman of a certain religious persuasion to wear a black mask over her face while teaching…the right for gay couples to adopt children…it sometimes seems we have rights spilling out of our ears.

And democracy, it would seem, is proliferating with the advance of technology – through participation in phone-ins and on-line voting you can give your view on everything from road pricing to who should be ejected from Big Brother.

Again, society is so much less formal than it used to be. Everybody is on first name terms and we dress more casually than previous generations. It can be easy to believe it when we’re told that class doesn’t exist any more and that we no longer have any superiors to doff our caps to.

And what about all that freedom of choice for the consumer? The range of brands and products you can buy in any high street store or supermarket is mind-boggling.

Big business, too, is seemingly much more aware of our needs than it used to be. We have an increasing number of companies practising “customer care”, “responsible companies”, trying their hardest to please customers and employees alike. And if they do something we don’t like, we can sue them.

But we don’t have to scratch the surface very hard to see that our tramp in the first paragraph is only one small example of the ways in which our freedom is restricted.

A lapse into Grumpy Old Man mode evokes cash-strapped local councils trying to squeeze more and more money out of us and at the same time clobbering us with a barrage of regulations: smoking bans, parking fines, fines for not putting rubbish in the correct recycling container, or, as happened to one no doubt bemused man, for momentarily placing a drinks can on the pavement while tying a shoelace.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks, we are herded like cattle to be searched at airport queues for anything that may be vaguely dangerous.

On a more sinister note, there is a government proposal that children are to be fingerprinted when applying for a passport. Additionally, according to Labour’s recent crime review, every child will be assessed to see if they are likely to turn to crime. Those that comply with a certain profile will be “actively managed” by social services. Also mentioned in the review are ID cards, mobile fingerprint readers, crowd scanners and an expansion of the DNA database of people who have committed no crime. It seems we are all to be guilty until proven to be responsible adults.

Looking at the wider world, we have innocent people routinely held in prisons, with that bastion of western democracy, the United States, habitually ignoring Habeas Corpus in places like Guantanamo Bay.

There are millions of people worldwide, many of them children, working in conditions that rival those of the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries look like a fairground game. Not to mention the number of people working for pittances in call centres and other soul-destroying jobs.

So what is the truth of it? Are we more free or less free than we used to be? On the one hand, we seem more prepared to stand up against authoritarianism. But on the other hand, there seems to be a lot more of it to stand up to.

By and large, any concession of rights and privileges by our leaders, any freedoms won by trade union activity or direct action, are limited in nature. Governments as a whole, acting on behalf of capitalism, concede just as much freedom as they think we need to do our jobs effectively and keep contributing to “the economy” (for which read the profits of the rich minority).

In some ways capitalism has had to relax its attitude to the people who produce its profits. The rigid old social divisions were counter-productive, and people are more street-wise as a result – but don’t use their power effectively. Efforts are mostly directed towards ameliorating one narrow aspect of the capitalist machine while leaving capitalism itself, and the repressive governments that do its bidding, alive and well.

As proof of this, the newspapers every now and then toss their rich lists at us, to rub our noses in the widening gap between the ultra-rich and the rest of us. This despite the ever increasing competitiveness that compels businesses to spend less and make their goods and services as cheaply as possible. The resulting squeeze hits the ordinary working person, while our lords and masters rake in ever increasing profits.

And as long as we hit our deadlines and keep the money rolling in for our bosses, it doesn’t matter what we wear while doing it, or whether we call our boss Richard instead of Mr Branson. We still know our place. And what capitalism gives us with one hand, it takes away with the other much larger one.

Capitalism limits our freedom in so many ways because it rations us by the amount of money we earn and carries with it a mass of rules to make sure we don’t overstep the mark. Most of us in Britain are undoubtedly more fortunate than many in other parts of the world, but we are all chained to our jobs, our pensions (if we are lucky enough to have either), and to our governments.

So how do we really become free? If the examples above haven’t made it obvious, we need to realize that it’s not a free country in any meaningful sense. Then we need to question some ingrained attitudes.

We don’t have to live in a world full of leaders who do nothing but lead us up the garden path. We don’t have to accept that money is essential to making the world go round. And we don’t have to take for granted that oppression will always be with us.

We need to see the world as a whole because capitalism itself is a world-wide system and as such produces world-wide problems. The only effective route to freedom is its world-wide abolition and replacement with a classless, moneyless, world society without governments or national boundaries – socialism.

In socialism we wouldn’t be free to do whatever we wished. But the constraints on our personal freedom would be self-determined by local communities agreeing as equals and not imposed on us by the state or one of its local government offshoots. Whatever freedoms we decided to sacrifice would genuinely be for the good of the society we lived in, i.e. the people around us and the world at large.

Rod Shaw

Camouflaging class rule (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our society is routinely described in terms that camouflage the reality of exploitation and class rule.

The story goes like this. Everyone is basically equal. There is no ruling class as we are all citizens in a “democracy.” We live not in capitalism (that outmoded concept) but in a classless “market economy” where we are all consumers, taxpayers and investors (if only through our pension schemes). In some countries the camouflage is taken one step further: the social system is officially defined to be not just democratic but actually socialist. Those who insist on pointing out the reality behind the camouflage are labelled “extremists,” denied access to the mass media, and banished from respectable society.

This camouflage is so familiar to us that it is easy to assume it has always existed. In fact, it is quite a recent development in historical terms. Pre-industrial ruling classes never thought of pretending that they did not exist. On the contrary, they glorified or even deified themselves as intrinsically superior beings. The Greek philosopher Aristotle, who for many centuries was considered the fount of all wisdom, wrote that some people are slaves and others masters in accordance with their natures. Feudal law highlighted class by specifying in detail the dress appropriate to each class and making it illegal for people to wear clothes inappropriate to their station in life.

The situation started to change when the thinkers of the Enlightenment (such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) questioned the doctrine of natural inequality as well as other received ideas. In 1789 revolutionaries overthrew the French monarchy and aristocracy in the name of the Enlightenment ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. But some of them (Babeuf and his followers), disappointed that the revolution had failed to achieve these ideals, wanted to go further and strike at the roots of property itself. For the first time a ruling class felt the need for some camouflage.

In Britain, where the transition from feudalism to capitalism was accompanied by less political upheaval, the need for concealment did not become urgent until later. Democracy was condemned as a dangerous extremist notion, while the class structure continued to be sanctified by religion and custom. Nineteenth-century British economists like Ricardo and Adam Smith talked quite openly about the division of society into classes. They were closer in this respect to Marx than to their twentieth-century successors (see the article on Smith in January’s Socialist Standard). You may also recall a verse in the nineteenth-century hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful that goes:

“The rich man in his castle, The poor man at his gate, He made them high and lowly, And ordered their estate.”

British ruling class attitudes shifted in face of the growing movement for universal male suffrage represented by the working class Chartists. The capitalists began to wonder whether they had exaggerated the threat inherent in political democracy. Perhaps it would not endanger class privilege all that much, provided that at the same time they made greater efforts to indoctrinate the workers. That is why the 1867 Reform Act, which first extended the franchise to part of the working class (male householders), was followed by the 1870 Education Act, which first made provision for general elementary education. “We must educate our masters,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Lowe cynically remarked.

By the early twentieth century the ideological transformation was complete. Capitalist society could now be defined as “democracy” and its demands imposed in the name of democracy, as when US president Woodrow Wilson christened World War One “a war to make the world safe for democracy.” The class structure was henceforth to be camouflaged rather than openly justified. It was also about this time that there appeared new economic theories – in particular, the marginalist school – in which class was no longer a central concept.

With the rise of the so-called “communist” regimes in Russia and elsewhere, a similar fate befell the word “socialism.” The new class system in these countries was defined as “socialism,” just as the old class system in the West was defined as “democracy.” But the essence of the matter was the same: in both cases, in mainstream or official discourse the real class structure of the society simply did not exist. In the countries under Communist Party rule, just to say that there was a ruling class was grounds for condemnation as a “Trotskyite” or “counterrevolutionary.” (For an example from the Chinese “cultural revolution” see http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1969/06/intro.htm)

The camouflaging of class rule generates endless hypocrisy, and hypocrisy is not one of the more appealing character traits. But, as poet Matthew Arnold remarked, “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” The prevalence of hypocrisy is a sign that it is no longer possible openly to justify certain evils, showing that there has after all been some progress in human thinking. Class society is now on the defensive, and there is no way to defend the indefensible.

Stefan.

What free access means (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists often describe socialism as a society where there will be free access, but what could this mean in concrete terms?

Socialism will be a society of free access to what has been produced. This does not mean alcohol being made available to children or anyone being able to get hold of guns. But there’ll be no money, credit cards or cheque books, no artificial barriers to people having what they’ve decided they want. But how would free access work, and would it lead to a free-for-all and chaos as people just took more and more? 

It doesn’t matter whether they’ll be called shops, stores or warehouses, but there will be places where people will go to collect goods. Whether it’s food, clothes, electrical gadgets or whatever, these places will in some ways be like the shops that exist nowadays but in other ways will be rather different. There will be no price tickets, check-outs or security guards. There’ll be no ‘buy one get one free’ offers, no brightly-coloured promotions trying to pressurise you into buying certain goods. There may well still be shop assistants, whose task it really will be to assist people rather than talk them into purchases. There will still be plenty of choice, and probably more real choice than exists today, when you can ‘choose’ among masses of near-identical products. If you want food, no doubt you will go with a shopping list and make sure that you load what you want into the shopping trolley. And then you’ll just leave, since you won’t have to pay for anything.

Another big difference between the shops of today and the warehouses of the socialist future will concern the quality of what is in them. Everything will be the best quality, as production for use means there would be no point in producing cheap food or shoddy goods. Nowadays, the cheap and tacky are for those who cannot afford to buy the best, an idea which will be completely alien in socialism. A ‘prestigious’ brand name or logo will not be used to inflate the price of something or to make the consumer fit in or feel a cut above the rest.

Having only the best doesn’t mean that we’ll be eating caviar all the time, just that — even if you’re having bangers and mash for tea — you’ll be having the best of its kind. Furniture or TVs won’t be designed to wear out: a sensible use of resources would involve making things to last and recycling as much as possible.

The standard objection to the socialist account of free access is rooted in a view of human nature. People would take and take, it may be claimed, irrespective of what they actually wanted. But a bit of thought should show that this objection does not hold water. For one thing, the people who live in socialism will be convinced of the superiority of this way of organising society and will not act against its interests. And further, think about the things you consume and whether you would really benefit from hoarding them. Most people can only consume fairly limited amounts of milk or bread or toilet paper and won’t need to keep cupboards full of any of them. Even in these days of home freezers, where people do stock up on some foods, they don’t keep massive amounts of anything. In a society of free access, you’ll always be able to get more butter or dog food from the local warehouse, so you won’t need your own mountain of either.

But aren’t there other goods for which these considerations won’t apply? Well, again, people won’t need several cars or ten dining-room tables. There probably are some items which people may well want a lot of: no doubt it will vary from individual to individual, but clothes, books, CDs and DVDs might be good examples. In some cases, producing extra copies (say of a CD) requires very little extra resources. There might well be first-class public libraries or comprehensive book-recycling schemes, which would obviate the desire to own individual copies of some books. And clothing won’t be subject to the whims of fashion as it is now, so people won’t want new outfits each year. In general, the whole idea of consumerism, of possessions making you happy, won’t apply.

The point is not that we can explain in detail now just how the demand for every item will be realised in socialism. Rather, we can just set out some general principles about how free access would function and suggest that the human nature objections to it are based on a very narrow view of how human beings behave under capitalism. The combination of socialist consciousness and good old common sense will ensure that people will take what they need rather than all that is available or all they can carry.

A society of free access, then, will mean what it says. People will select their weekly food needs and take home what they’ve chosen, without anyone asking them to pay for it. They will choose clothes, furniture, sports gear, lawnmowers in the same way. And they will know that none of what they’re eating or using is dangerous or nasty, that none of it has been produced in an environmentally-unfriendly way or to make a profit for a few rather than to satisfy the needs of the many.

Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Economic cycling (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, laid down a “golden rule” that the government’s current spending and its income from taxes should balance, not every year as hard-line fiscal conservatives want, but at least over a complete “economic cycle”. But how measure the beginning and end of one of these?

The trend of economic growth (additions to GDP) under capitalism is upward but not smoothly in a straight line; rather it is like the teeth of a saw, only with each peak being higher than the previous one, with a trough in between. Brown’s Treasury officials defined a cycle as the time between two peaks of growth above the long-term trend. So, if the long-term growth trend was, say, 2.5 percent then, if for a number of consecutive quarters, it was above this level, that counted as the beginning of the cycle, which could be considered as coming to an end the next time this happened.

This is reasonable enough in principle. The trouble is that it is open to manipulation by redefining the long-term growth trend. Which is what the government has been accused of by the opposition. And is why the financial editor of the Times, Graham Searjeant, wrote an article headlined “We need new economic cycle to understand changing world” (26 April). He was just interested in defining a measurable economic cycle so as to establish a period over which government spending and income balance. But government spending and taxes are irrelevant to the economic cycle as such.

In the 19th century, it was generally accepted that the economic cycle lasted about 10 years and was measured from one financial crisis to the next. Marx shared this view, and described the course of capitalist economic activity as typically taking the form of “a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis and stagnation” (Capital, Vol. 1, ch. 15, section 7).

Marx saw financial crashes as being a symptom of industrial overproduction (in relation to market demand). As the market for a key product expanded, the firms producing for it all invested in expanding their productive capacity in the expectation of it being them who would benefit from the increased demand, with the result that when the new productive capacity came on stream output proved to be greater than the demand; sales fell off meaning that firms had less money from which to repay loans contracted to expand productive capacity; credit (loans) became harder to get; creditors demanded repayment in cash; in the end a financial crash occurred.

Searjeant’s argument for a “new economic cycle” is that today industry has become less significant:

  “Conventional economic cycles lean heavily on factors specific to industry, such as investment in new capacity and changes in materials and parts. But UK industry is now too small to drive the cycle, which is as well because manufacturing has been in near-recession for years”.

He speaks instead of “an economy powered by London financial services”. In answer, two points can be made. While UK industry is not so important as before, world industry – as in China, India, Brazil, etc – is and the world economy is driven by world industry, which is still liable to crises of overproduction. Second, financial services are dependent upon and subordinate to (world) industry since the services in question are precisely services connected with world trade in industrial and agricultural products, including hedge betting on how their prices will move. The production of material things is still the basis of the economy.

Charity versus equity (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just before Christmas last year a letter arrived from Action Aid citing a number of manifestations of the iniquities of global capitalism. The letter was an appeal for funds, specifically for the ‘Global Campaign for Education’ to ‘make sure the governments of the world keep their promise to provide free primary education for all by 2015.’

Action Aid stressed that a donation isn’t a hand-out or an imposed solution but a project that puts power, decision-making and responsibility back into the hands of a whole community. In fact the appeal had a letter within the letter. Two teenage Guineans appealed by letter for the world’s poorest people to the people of Europe, wanting to give their message of a life of poverty in Africa, believing that the people of Europe could bring a solution. All they wanted was education, the key, they believed, to a better life in their home country. They said that because their families were poor the choice was between food and education. In attempting to carry their letter to Europe (believing their oral message may not reach its destination) they both perished in the undercarriage of the plane in which they’d stowed away, but their message did arrive in Brussels International Airport with their dead 14- and 15-year-old bodies.

The main points of their letter were wishing to seek help with the development of Africa; help to fight poverty; and to bring war to an end in Africa. (Guinea, with a population of about 9 million, shares borders with Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal and Guinea-Bissau and has had to contend with tens of thousands of refugees and numerous cross-border incursions in the last decade.) Finally, ‘however, our greatest need is education.’

Action Aid and other charities may be able to make a dent in alleviating some of the pressing problems affecting impoverished societies in Africa and other areas of the world, but these can only be dents because they don’t aim to change the system to one that can continue to support all societies in an equitable and sustainable manner.

Appropriate development such as desired by local communities, poverty elimination, an end to war everywhere and universal lifelong education are some of the fundamental principles of socialism as are power, decision-making and responsibility to be firmly in the hands of the people.

Certainly, support and compassion are needed meantime, but just imagine teams of people like these already established with logistics skills, people on the ground experienced in organising, a worldwide workforce empathetic to the importance of working for and with the community for common goals, at the time when the majority of the world’s people – in Africa, in Europe, in Asia and the Americas – are intent on working together with the sole aim of establishing a socialist world for the benefit of all, with no hindrance of class, colour, religion or wealth.

What better tribute could we give to these two courageous youths and to the thousands of others dying daily from malnutrition and preventable and curable diseases than to double our efforts at bringing about an end to the horrific, inhumane system called capitalism and replacing it with one based upon common ownership and democratic control by and in the interest of the whole community?

Janet Surman

Letters: Labour leaders (2007)

Letters to the Editors from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour leaders

Dear Editors

I am a subscriber to the Socialist Standard and am always absorbed by every article. As a former member of the Labour Party (not very active) and reader of Socialist Worker I realise that your organisation and beliefs represent a clear unambiguous alternative to capitalism unlike the latter.

The fanfare of eulogies and general sycophancy devoted to Tony Blair after his long awaited departure announcement not only obscured that his principal legacy is that most of New Labour legislation since 1997 required the support of the Tories, but to create the illusion that the direction of governments and related events are somehow influenced by an individual’s personal characteristics. Behind all the talk about “end of eras” and legacies the reality is that Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer has had to be more “New” Labour than anyone else within the government and the red carpet to No 10 which is clearly being unrolled for him is solely to ensure that the political landscape in the UK is even more bi-partisan than it is now.

It is interesting to note that many, particularly in the Tory Party, who call for an election now because of a mid-term change of personality in No 10 have not been equally insistent that Mr Blair faced a leadership contest in the first place rather than being allowed to just walk away like some revered abdicating monarch. Moreover if their concern about accountability is genuine and not about political point scoring over personalities they would surely be at the forefront to insist Mr Brown faces an open leadership contest with a candidate from the traditional left, a contest that many mainstream political pundits are trying to eschew in fear of what it might reveal.

With so many political issues at stake, particularly Iraq, such a contest would be a reminder of what politics should be about in a democracy albeit confined to one party.

Nick Vinehill, 

Snettisham, Norfolk

Thieves and robbers

We have received the following comment from journalist Dominic Lawson on the article on crime that is on our website:

Thank you for sending me the article from the Socialist Standard. In common with most Marxist analysis it regards those who rob, burgle and steal in capitalist countries not as robbers, burglars and thieves, but as co-workers in the fight for a more equitable distribution of wealth. Of course, once the socialist society is born then these same people are indeed robbers, burglars and thieves and deserve the harshest of punishments. In China, for example, crooks are executed on a grand scale. In short: this argument is politically self-serving and morally derelict.

Dominic Lawson

Reply: 

China and other similar and past regimes are not and never were socialist, but state capitalist (see the article on Maoism in this issue). And we don’t regard workers who steal from their fellow workers as engaging in the class struggle against the capitalist class (themselves a class of robbers). – Editors.

Cooking the Books: Back to the seventies? (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year the Oxford economist Andrew Glyn brought out a new book called Capitalism Unleashed. Thirty-five years ago he was the co-author of a Penguin Special that came out in 1972 called British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze. In it he and his fellow author (Bob Sutcliffe) argued that capitalism, at least in Britain, had been brought to a life-or-death crisis because working class militancy, on the one hand, and international competition, on the other, had squeezed profits, the life-blood of the system without which it couldn’t survive. One more push from the workers, they suggested, and capitalism could be overthrown.

We ourselves were sceptical about the whole analysis, suggesting that they were greatly exaggerating trade union “power” and that the crisis was not a life-or-death one but just a phase of the ordinary business cycle which capitalism goes through and from which it would recover sooner or later (see our review in February 1973 Socialist Standard). Actually, it turned out to be a bigger turning point than we thought, as capitalism has never since returned to the “full employment” days of the 50s and 60s.

In any event, capitalism did survive. So what does Glyn think now? Modern-day, “unleashed” capitalism, he says, has its problems (financial turbulence, corporate corruption, etc) but cannot be said to be in a state of crisis in the sense of the Oxford Dictionary definition of “the point in the progress of a disease when an important development or change takes place which is decisive of recovery or death” that he believed it to have been in in the 70s. In fact, his view is that there is now no alternative to capitalism on the horizon, so all we’ve got is a choice of different kinds of capitalism.

  

“The longer-term objective of socialism was always to facilitate the development of people’s lives in a more fulfilling direction”, he writes, and asks: “Is it possible to make serious moves in this direction even within what is still a predominantly capitalist economy?”.

His answer is, perhaps surprisingly from someone who was associated with Militant for a while, “yes”, in the form of the scheme proposed by the Belgian social thinker, Philippe Van Parijs, for paying everyone a Basic Income as of right and irrespective of whether or not they work, referring to an article by him in a book with the revealing title of Redesigning Distribution: Basic Income and Stakeholder Grants as Designs for a More Egalitarian Capitalism. Or, as Van Parijs himself has put it:

  “In classical Marxism, socialism is just an instrument for achieving the society in which people can work freely according to their abilities but still get enough according to their needs. If socialism doesn’t work, because of threats to freedom and problems of dynamic efficiency, then why not harness capitalism to achieve the same objectives?” (The Bulletin, Brussels, 19 July 2001).

It’s a pipedream of course and a bit currency cranky (though to give Van Parijs his due, he did come up with a brilliant title for one of his books in What’s Wrong with a Free Lunch?). A Basic Income paid as of right would have to be funded (even squeezed) out of profits and would either undermine the wages system (why work for a capitalist employer if the State is paying you whether you work or not?) or make no difference (since wages would fall by the amount of the State wage subsidy that a Basic Income would represent). Or it would be fixed at so low a level as to be just another name for “Income Support”.

The simple fact is that capitalism can’t be reformed, humanised or made more egalitarian. It must be ended not mended.

50 Years Ago: Communist commotion (2007)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard 

“FREE HARICH, SACK HARRY,” painted with true Communist zeal in large white letters on the roadway greeted the faithful as they entered Hammersmith Town Hall over the Easter week-end to receive their annual dose of dogma from the cardinals of King Street, and to indulge in some public confessions of political sins. This slogan was not a rabble-rousing challenge to strike fear into the hearts of Yankee capitalists or warmongering Tories; it was directed not outwards, but inwards, to the heart of the Workers’ Mass Party itself. Harich is the young intellectual imprisoned by the East German government, and guess who Harry is? Yes, none other than Cardinal Harry Pollitt. Alas! we confidently predict that this slogan will have as little effect in altering the status quo as others which have appeared on walls from time to time to enliven the working-class scene have had (e.g., “Hands off Guatemala,” “End Eden’s War,” “Chuck The Tories Out,” etc.). Harry is still there, and so, presumably, is Harich—but in a different place.

The irreverent slogan was, however, a sign of a definite air of revolt which hung over the proceedings, a revolt which, if not quite amounting to “ruthless self-criticism,” was at least an indication of a fairly advanced state of political masochism. Cardinal J. Gollan, the Party secretary, had to announce that 7,000 of the faithful had left the flock during the preceding year: others were all too ready to voice their doubts, especially about the Russian intervention in Hungary.

(from article by M. L. in Socialist Standard, June 1957)

Greasy Pole: Baldwin versus Blair (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Intolerably squeezed by a hostile audience, Tony Blair was liable to try to escape by declaring that while he accepted their right to disagree with him he was unshaken in his confidence that he was doing the right thing and was happy to be judged on that by history. Which is what would be expected from such a kinda straight sorta guy; yeah. Except that some months before he had gone off into the sunset, or wherever it is that unmasked, exhausted prime ministers go, he had in a sense been put through a type of historical assessment, compared to a number of other occupants of Number Ten.

Rating

In the August 2006 issue of the BBC History Magazine an article by the historian Francis Beckett rated the prime ministers of the 20th century according to their effectiveness as “change managers”. Their place on the list was based on how clear they were about the change they aimed to bring about, how successful they were in this and how efficiently they “managed” the change. In joint first place were Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher; Attlee because his governments nationalised so much of industry while it introduced the National Health Service and the so-called Welfare State and Thatcher because her governments demolished so much of what the Attlee governments had built: “She broke the Attlee settlement, which had lasted more than 30 years, largely by force of will” was how Beckett put it. Blair may have been disappointed to learn that he only made it to third place, along with Harold Wilson, because although he “made a lot of progress in his chosen direction…The private sector has now been brought even into the running of schools and hospitals, and since the Conservatives agree with it, this will probably be a relatively permanent change” and there is the little matter of the war in Iraq, which “…undermined his ability to implement his vision”.

Baldwin

One place above Blair in the Beckett table of change management efficiency is Stanley Baldwin who, if he ever wanted to change things, did so by appearing to prefer this to be backwards, to a time when the fields were ploughed by pairs of heavy shire horses guided by a sweating farm hand and harvested by teams of locals wielding scythes – all presided over by wealthy, benevolent landowners like Baldwin. He had inherited his wealth, as well as his parliamentary seat in Worcestershire, from his father and he set himself to play the part, among the ravenously ambitious Tories in parliament, of the simple, honest countryman. But this was only part of the story, for Baldwin was fond of being photographed in tweeds and a soft hat, sucking tranquilly on a pipe. His rivals, angrily outbid by this appeal to a group of voters identified in the newly-sprung suburbs known as “villadom”, hit back with sneers about his posing for his appearances in the picture-hungry newspapers. They were blind to the fact that Baldwin was, dangerously, much more than a transparent, disengaged colleague – Churchill called him “a great turnip” – for he was a leading influence in the undermining of the apparently impregnable Lloyd George coalition in 1922 and then, when Bonar Law had to resign through ill health shortly after replacing Lloyd George, emerged as a strong candidate to succeed as prime minister.

Modesty

Baldwin’s previous efforts to present himself as a plain and simple man did not match with his elevation to the premiership; in the past he had said that he would rather keep pigs and he had told a friend that a one-way ticket to Siberia would be more acceptable to him. He almost achieved his stated ambition to be a porcine carer in the snowy wastes when, in the 1923 general election, the country’s first ever Labour government emerged. That was not a happy introduction to power for the Labour Party and the following year Baldwin’s modesty was searchingly tested when he was propelled into Number Ten by his party winning a landslide victory. That government was quickly immersed in a financial crisis which, following from the coal mine owners’ efforts to protect their profits by imposing wage cuts, led eventually to the General Strike.

Thatcher

This was a time when Baldwin’s professed yearning for a unity of purpose between employers and workers was put to the test. In January 1925 he had unburdened himself: “There is only one thing which I feel is worth giving one’s whole strength to, and that is the binding together of all classes of our people in an effort to make life in this country better in every sense of the word”. This was in the course of discussions with the miners over the employers’ plans to cut wages and increase working hours. In May 1926 he was to declare “All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet”. But in 1925 the government were not ready to carry this policy of Baldwin’s to the point of confrontation; instead they subsidised the mines. At the time this was seen as a capitulation but, as became obvious when the General Strike was called, it had been a manipulated pause to allow the government to prepare for a more serious conflict – an episode the implications of which may not have been lost on the Thatcher government in their dispute with the miners in 1981 and 1984.

Defeat

It is all history now; the General Strike collapsed, leaving the miners to struggle on alone until starvation drove them back to work – at which time it became clear that being on strike, with all its pressures, was a healthier option than working down those pits. The Cabinet, exultant that what they saw as a serious threat to the constitutional basis of the relationship between employers and wage slaves had been defeated, passed a motion of thanks to Baldwin for his handling of the crisis and the Daily Mail trumpeted that he was “one of our greatest prime ministers”. It was not long before inexorable reality took hold and he was reviled for his association with that time of deep poverty and, eventually, the war. Over eighty years after, Blair has also wrestled with the pressures and the contradictions of trying to control – or rather to “manage” – the capitalist system, with problems perhaps superficially different from those which confronted Baldwin but which are completely alike in their urgency and their implacable power. Capitalism cannot be managed and so, in any real sense of the word, does not change.

Ivan

Unvarnished History of the Panama Canal (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The story of the building of the Panama Canal at the turn of the last century is an expose of the operations of the capitalist system and the enormous damage that is done to workers under it.

Matthew Parker's recent book Panama Fever (Hutchinson) is a piece of unvarnished history that makes the case for socialism more powerfully than any political tract could do. The construction of the canal and the ambitions, machinations and cold calculations that lay behind it make for grim reading. There were two elements in the building of the canal; the first, a failed French attempt under the leadership of De Lesseps ('builder' of the Suez Canal) and the second successful effort of the government of the United States. Over both construction stages, in the region of 28,000 workers lost their lives, mostly from diseases, which is a toll on a par with many wars.

As soon as fifty years after the 'discovery' of the continents of North and South America, the advantage to World Trade of a man-made opening through the narrow isthmus of lower Central America was appreciated. Construction though had to wait until the appropriate technology had advanced and such a project began to appear feasible from the middle of the 19th century onwards. One of the main drivers was the rapid economic growth of the United States and its trade with the rest of the World, including both Europe and Asia. The canal which would be about 80 kilometres (50 miles) long would shorten the sea-going distance between New York and San Francisco from 22,500 km (14,000 miles) to 9,500 km (6,000 miles). In the 19th century Panama was a still a province of Columbia, ruled from Bogota. For the major powers of Britain, France, Spain (all three of which still had remnants of their colonies in the Western Hemisphere) and the United States, the future and control of the region provoked strong strategic rivalry. Panama itself had a sparse population and Columbia was weak and prone to recurring civil wars. Along with its own ambitions, each country was fearful of the significant commercial and military advantages that would accrue to the nation that would dominate the region.

While some 'understandings' were present between the powers, the most explicit posture was that of the United States with its self-declared Monroe doctrine of 1823. This policy began as a defensive mechanism whereby the US stated that it would not accept any future European re-colonisation of any part of the Americas; though ultimately it was used to justify exactly such activities by the United States itself. More specifically, as the idea of a canal was mooted, it became US policy that, if the canal was to be built, it would not be allowed to be under the control of any foreign power. As early as 1848, the Americans forced Columbia to grant it the right to land troops on the isthmus if free transit across it (by road, rail or future canal) was prevented. This was the only foreign treaty signed by the US in the 19th century and for almost the first time the country declared it had strategic concerns outside its continental borders. American interest was whetted by its acquisition of vast Pacific territories from Mexico after the 1848 war, which made the isthmus a key strategic artery for the country. The California gold rush accentuated this trend and an American financed railway across Panama was completed in 1855. Simultaneously, the US Navy made itself routinely present in the neighbouring seas.

Financial swindle
The European powers, while mindful and wary of the obvious growing strength of the United States, were not ready to relinquish their presence in the western hemisphere. Confident from their success in building the Suez canal, a private French company headed by De Lesseps came to an agreement with the Columbian authorities and began work on a canal in Panama (more or less along the exact path of the current canal) in 1880. There was strong American suspicion that this was another attempt by France to gain leverage in Central America after the debacle of its involvement in Mexico in the 1860s, while the US was pre-occupied by its own Civil War. The US made its displeasure known with the result that this private French effort could not be officially backed by the government in Paris. Nonetheless, there was a patriotic flavour to the French enterprise with the project being seen as a means to improve France's standing after the defeat by Prussia in the war of 1870.

There were two main tasks for the De Lesseps organisation: the raising of capital to finance the project and the sourcing of adequate numbers of workers for the huge construction effort that would be required. To lessen the dependence on what were regarded as Jewish-dominated monetary institutions, small investors were encouraged to come forward to give the project a more 'authentic' Catholic French flavour. This could be regarded as an early type of 'Peoples Capitalism'. From the outset, dubious methods were employed to raise finance and maintain investor confidence. Payments to newspaper editors and financial journalists for positive coverage, sweeteners to senior bank and stock exchange executives and payoffs to government deputies for a favourable attitude were prevalent and seen as necessary. This of course is still a practice that is widespread today by Western companies in undertakings such as the massive gas and oil pipeline projects in the former Soviet Union and in southern Asia.

The British Caribbean islands were identified as a promising source of labour, principally Jamaica owing to poor economic conditions on the island. Large numbers of workers were shipped from there to Panama. In fact initially so many Jamaicans left the island that plantation interests there lobbied to stop the outflow as it was driving up the price of labour. In Panama, the workers had to contend with extremely difficult and dangerous conditions; the diseases of malaria, yellow fever, pneumonia, dysentery, typhoid and tuberculosis were all present in addition to the hazards of physical exhaustion and frequent industrial accidents. The workers toiled outdoors in one of the wettest places on Earth with poor food and rudimentary accommodation. They were completely open to exploitation as there was no labour law in Panama except 'the freedom to work'.

By the late 1880s the French effort had run into serious problems. They had grossly underestimated the scale of excavation involved and persisted with an unrealistic sea level plan for the canal. The project was plagued by mismanagement, extravagance and corruption amongst the contractors and senior officials with huge profits being taken by some engineering firms and financial middlemen. In addition, periodic civil unrest in the province of Panama and a weak police force hindered any meaningful advance. The high death rate amongst the workforce (approximately 20,000 died in the eight year period) caused demoralisation, led to a high turnover of workers and thus pushed up the wage rates. The scale of the deaths amongst the West Indians, combined with some high profile fatalities amongst the senior French administrators and their families, caused doubts about the canal's prospects for success. Hence raising money in Paris for the scheme became more and more expensive. The project eventually collapsed in 1889 with most investors losing their savings. A bitter atmosphere of recriminations developed in France with professional anti-Semites, in the years just prior to the Dreyfus case, using the collapse to make allegations about the role of some Jewish financiers. The canal company was accused (and indeed was guilty) of misleading investors by false announcements of progress. An enquiry, driven by angry shareholders, was held to determine whether embezzlement and corruption had occurred. The fact that 20,000 people had lost their lives, as opposed to their savings, was not regarded as a cause for scandal.

Land grab
After the failure of the De Lesseps venture, a new French company was formed to try to keep the project going but little extra progress was recorded. The remaining investors realised that they could not hope to complete the work and the whole asset would have to be written off, unless they could find a purchaser for the, by now, quarter finished canal. They turned to the United States government as the only feasible body and employed intermediaries (what we would today call lobbyists) to petition the administration in Washington. They were helped by the advent of Teddy Roosevelt to the Presidency after the assassination of McKinley in September 1901. While regarded as a progressive Republican in domestic issues, Roosevelt was one of the new breed (and still historically one of the most important) of American imperialists who rose to power at the turn of the 20th century. At the outset, the new President decided that absolute American control over the canal zone would be necessary for success. This was opposed by the authorities in Bogota, who would only grant a lease arrangement that respected ultimate Colombian sovereignty. In a move that would be repeated many times in years to come, the US sponsored an independence movement amongst the top levels of society in Panama which was also supported by people with a financial interest in the canal. A successful coup against the small local Colombian garrison took place. This could have been subsequently suppressed by Bogota but crucial American intervention took the form of warning the Colombian government off. A pliant administration was formed in the newly independent country and in fact the US obtained decisive control over internal Panamanian politics for decades to come. One of the first acts of the new government was to cede the canal zone (a strip about fifteen miles wide) to the US government in perpetuity. The United States had total control over the zone and appointed a series of Governors and Special envoys to the region. While such a naked land grab was clearly unpopular with nationalists in Central and South America, it also provoked a backlash in America itself. Critics claimed the country was behaving more like an Empire than a Republic; defenders of the move replied that such operations were essential to the economic future of the United States and such arguments proved hard to refute in the Age of Imperialism.

From the start in 1904, the US effort was much more substantial than the French, backed as it was by the enormous resources of the American government. It was also free of the constraints to continually raise capital on the stock markets. The US army took effective control over the project, operating as a quasi-autonomous government and the military oversaw most aspects of workers' lives in the canal zone. Undesirables could be immediately deported from the zone with the police given almost unlimited discretion as to who constituted an 'undesirable'. Everything (health, housing, schooling, canteens, entertainment) was provided or organised by the state and at the time the project was viewed as having all the characteristics of paternalism and 'welfare socialism'. So much so that a member of the then US Socialist Party working on the canal was asked by a visiting journalist whether this was the type of society he wanted to see in the future. He replied, 'government ownership don't mean anything to us working men unless we own the government. We don't here – this is the sort of thing Bismarck dreamed of'.

Diseases
It was recognised that one of the main reasons for the failure of the French attempt was the crippling effect of disease on the white administrators and black workforce. Using prevailing medical advances and knowledge gained from conditions that faced US troops in the recent war in Cuba, the Americans were in a position to eradicate yellow fever and control malaria. This was accomplished by a massive sanitary campaign against the mosquito transmitters of both diseases. The huge resources put into this campaign were also seen to have wider strategic advantages in permitting safe settlement of the tropics by Caucasians. In actuality, pneumonia was a much bigger killer of black labourers but was almost unknown amongst the white work force. Malaria affected the success and efficiency of the project more significantly, both because this disease affected whites mainly and because, being generally not fatal, it resulted in expensive hospital treatment. Thus virtually nothing was done against pneumonia compared to the large programme to minimise malaria. This bears out the socialist view of the ultimate purpose of state-run health systems: they are financed precisely to the amount where the cost of dealing with the consequences of not having then would exceed the cost of having them. Hence hospitals were not constructed and maintained for workers' benefit but as a judicious investment to ensure the profitability of the enterprise.

As with the French effort, the supply of an adequate labour force was seen as essential. The skilled workers and foremen would of course be white Americans but as regards manual labourers, white US workers were regarded as too expensive, too unionised and susceptible to tropical disease. Black Caribbean labourers were again seen as the most suitable being English speaking (thus able to understand instructions) and having some immunity to tropical diseases (to reduce hospital and sickness costs). More importantly they would be 'cheap' in all senses of the word. The island of Barbados was this time identified as the best source. The island was overpopulated with descendants of sugar plantation slaves who were now landless labourers and there was a tradition of emigration. Over the course of the first decade of the 20th century, Barbadians in their thousands were shipped in cattle boats to Panama. Technically of course these were all voluntary migrant labourers though because of economic pressures, the real situation was little different to slavery. It highlights the socialist case that slavery can exist long after its formal abolition which is something those proponents of 'Apology for the Atlantic Slave Trade' could do well to remember. In many cases, the Barbadians were victims of racism from the local Panamanian police and from their American supervisors.

While conditions for the black workers were materially better under the Americans (principally because of a major reduction in the death rate and appreciation of the cost benefits of maintaining a healthy workforce), compared to the French era, there was much more rigid colour stratification. The first decade of the 20th century marked the approaching apogee of the Jim Crow system in the southern US states. Intermingling of the races was seen as undesirable and was actively prevented; there were separate schools, canteens, bars, churches for blacks and whites. Not surprisingly living quarters and canteens, etc. were of a much lower standard for black workers. They endured conditions such as working in the rain 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Black workers (unlike their white colleagues) did not have paid sick leave and could lose their jobs if they became ill. The West Indian workers were three times as likely as other workers to die from disease or accidents. Furthermore, to weaken worker solidarity and to prevent the occurrence of strikes (of which there were very few) the authorities had a scheme of periodically bringing in labourers from different European countries to lessen solidarity amongst the manual workers. Spain, Italy and Greece provided the majority of these extra men who were given double the wage rate of the black workers. This was a deliberate and successful Divide and Rule policy by the authorities.

Less important
The canal eventually opened under the Wilson Presidency in the summer of 1914 just as World War I started. It remains a busy trade route to this day. As it happens one of the main military reasons given for its construction, namely to permit US warships more rapid movement between the East and West coasts of the US was soon rendered redundant. The huge and permanent expansion in the US navy in the 20th century to police America's global commitments made it necessary to have separate Atlantic and Pacific fleets and the development of aircraft carriers (too large to pass through the canal) as the crucial naval warship made the canal militarily less useful. Hence it was important but not vital to America in World War II and the Cold War. Increasing Panamanian resentment at the permanent ceding of a portion of their territory to the United States led to the signing of a revised treaty in 1977, in spite of vehement opposition by American conservatives. This set in motion the process of the return of ownership of the canal to Panama which was fully completed in 1999.

Would the canal have been built if socialism existed? In my personal opinion, yes, though clearly with a careful analysis of the costs and benefits to humanity. Instead of the needless and pointless diversion of time and resources into raising finance, political manoeuvring, wining and dining the people with influence, maintaining confidence etc, the focus under socialism would be on the engineering aspects of the project, its environmental impact and the health and safety of the people involved. The story of the Panama Canal serves as reminder of the totally avoidable waste that occurs under capitalism and the bizarre priorities of the money system. The fever for profit that gives the book its appropriate title was fundamentally the cause of the devastation wreaked upon the workers by exposure to the yellow fever and malaria fever on the Panama Canal.

Kevin Cronin

June Socialist Standard

Editorial

Goodbye To Bambi

Regular Columns

Pathfinders Old Bones

Cooking the Books #1 Economic Cycling

Cooking the Books #2 Back To The Seventies?

Greasy Pole Baldwin versus Blair

50 Years Ago Communist Commotion

Main Articles

The Illusion of Freedom We are always been told that we live in a free society, but do we?

Camouflaging Class Rule Our society is routinely described in terms that camouflague the reality of exploitation and class rule.

What Free-Access Means Socialists often describe socialism as a society where there will be free access, but what could this mean in concrete terms?.

Maoism as a class society: illusion and reality Both supporters and opponents saw China under Mao as an egalitarian society without hierarchy but this was an illusion.

Unvarnished history of the Panama canal The story of the building of the Panama Canal at the turn of the last century is an exposé of the operations of the capitalist system.

Philosopher, heal thyself Marx said that philosophers only interpreted the world. To what extent has the philosopher Julian Baggini done this?

Charity versus equity Commentary on a recent action aid letter citing a number of manifestations of the iniquities of global capitalism.

Letters, Reviews & Meetings

Letters to the Editors 'Labour Leaders' & 'Thieves and Robbers'

Book Reviews Oil Wars edited by Mary Kaldor, Terry Lynn Karl and Yahia Said & A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle

Meetings London, Manchester & Birmingham.

Voice From The Back

They Call It Democracy?; Prisoners of Want; They Call It Truth?; Tough at the Top ; Down and Out Down Under; So What's New?

Voice From The Back: They Call It Democracy? (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

THEY CALL IT DEMOCRACY?

One of the greatest cons of all time is to call the USA a perfect example of democracy. Very rich people make all the decisions and American workers are told to wave flags and sing hymns. "America is on course to stage the world's first billion dollar election with candidates already raising in excess of $100 million, fully 19 months before voters choose which one will be the next US President." (Times, 3 April) Lets face it who is donating $26 million to Clinton, $20 million to Obama or $17 million to Giuliani? Giant corporations or individual millionaires are the only ones with that kind of bread. The rich not only dictate how you live, but they are trying to dictate how you think.

PRISONERS OF WANT

"Murderer and kidnapper Michael Sams has said he is better off in prison than he would be living as a free pensioner. Sams, 66, was jailed for life in 1993 ... Sams, from Nottinghamshire, wrote to prisoners' magazine Inside Time to oppose a call for convicts' pensions. He said he had better living conditions inside Whitemoor jail, Cambridgeshire, than many people on the basic pension. In his letter, Sams wrote: .. "Materially, we OAPs in prison are far better off than those in the community. .. "Most struggle to keep warm in winter, afraid to put the heating on, barely eating, let alone getting three square, ready-made, meals per day." (BBC News, 18 April) What a society capitalism is! It treats murderers better than old workers.

THEY CALL IT TRUTH?

In 1917 Hiram Johnson in a speech to the US Senate said "The first casualty when war comes is truth." This perceptive view was recently re-inforced when Private Jessica Lynch of the US army exposed the lies of the Pentagon in her testimony to Congress. "The Pentagon said initially that she was shot after emerging from her vehicle, guns blazing, before being abducted. It later emerged that she was injured in the ambush and was incapable of fighting. She was taken to an Iraqi hospital by Iraqi troops and owes her life to Iraqi doctors, who even tried to return her to American troops. Speaking to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Ms Lynch told of waking up in hospital with terrible injuries, unaware that the Pentagon was circulating "the story of the little girl Rambo from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting". "It was not true", she said yesterday. (Times, 25 April)

TOUGH AT THE TOP?

"What has the world come to when £1m isn't enough to make you a millionaire? These days you need nearly £6m to live a millionaire's lifestyle, according to the results of research by luxury life-style co-ordinator Carbon Black, which interviewed 200 millionaires in the UK to study their spending habits. ... David Bonderman, a Texan millionaire, celebrated his 60th birthday by paying the Rolling Stones a reported £4m to play for him and 2,000 guests, but Sir Phillip Green, billionaire retailer, beat him in the show-off stakes by spending a reported £5m for a toga party on his 50th birthday party." (Observer, 29 April) Although it is so tough for the extremely rich to survive amidst soaring costs of Rollers, jet planes and hiring pop bands for your knees-up, there is some consolation to be found in the following figures. "The combined wealth of the UK's richest 1,000 people has risen by 20% - or £59bn - in the last 12 months. According to the Sunday Times Rich List 2007, the steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal again tops the table with £19.25bn, up more than £4bn on last year after acquiring Arcelor, the world's second-largest steelmaker behind Mittal Steel." (Guardian, 30 April)

DOWN AND OUT DOWN UNDER

"Health standards among Australia's Aborigines are as poor as those among the white population before the advent of penicillin nearly a century ago, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). A WHO report found that Aborigines still suffered from leprosy, tuberculosis and rheumatic heart disease, all of which were eradicated decades ago in other developed nations. In some parts of New South Wales the average life expectancy for Aboriginal men was 33." (Independent, 2 May) Whenever capitalism invades the territory of indigenous people living in a pre-capitalist society the consequences are disastrous. The plains Indians of USA, the forest-dwellers of the Amazon and the Australian aborigines all of them slaughtered and impoverished by the advance of capitalism.

SO WHATS NEW?

"British doctors will take the historic step of admitting for the first time that many health treatments will be rationed in the future because the NHS cannot cope with spiralling demand from patients." (Observer, 5 May) What is historic about that? Everything that is produced inside capitalism whether it be food, clothing, shelter, education or health care is always available to the rich, and they make sure they get the absolute best. How often at your local doctor's surgery or emergency ward in a hospital have you found yourself rubbing shoulders with millionaires?

Maoism as a class society: illusion and reality (2007)

From the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Both supporters and opponents saw China under Mao as an egalitarian society without hierarchy but this was an illusion.

The image of Maoist China conveyed in the poster art and other propaganda of the regime was that of a regimented and spartan but egalitarian society, without hierarchical class distinctions. Curiously enough, anti-Maoist propaganda conveyed a very similar image: several authors, for instance, dehumanized the Chinese under Mao as "blue ants." In accordance with its egalitarian image, Maoism is commonly classified as a leftwing - indeed, "extreme left" or "ultra-left" - ideology. The blatant inequalities of post-Mao China have served only to enhance the image in retrospect.

And yet the image was always an illusion, a meticulously maintained lie. The rich memoir literature that has become available since the "thaw" of 1978 begins to dispel the illusions and portray the realities of Maoist China. And one of those realities turns out to be a class structure that differs in detail but not in broad outline from that of the "old China."

The class geography of Chongqing
In her autobiographical Daughter of the River, Hong Ying gives us a moving account of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a working class family in the provincial city of Chongqing. She maps the local landscape into three sharply divided domains.

First, the hilly slum district on the south bank of the Yangtze River, where the author used to live - "the city's garbage dump," its "rotting appendix," crowded with ramshackle wooden sheds and with hardly any sewers. The residents are mostly "coolies" - unskilled labourers; it is very rare for a youngster to pass the college entrance exams. So it was before "liberation"; so it was in her time; so, judging by the photos in the book, it remains today.

Second, on the north bank, the city proper. "The centre of the city," she observes with bitter irony, "might as well be in another world, with red flags everywhere you look and rousing political songs filling the air [and] youngsters reading revolutionary books to prepare themselves for the life of a revolutionary cadre" – like the cadres (officials) who ridicule and humiliate her when she tries to get her father the pension to which as a disabled sailor he is entitled.

And third, though she has never set eye on them, "the summer houses of the rich and powerful, hidden amid the lush green hillsides surrounding the city." Here, it must be admitted, a minor change has occurred: "Once occupied by Chiang Kai-shek's closest aides and his US advisers [Chongqing was the Kuomintang capital in 1937-45], they now accommodated high-ranking Communist Party officials."

Decoding the official "class struggle"
So China under Mao was, like China before Mao and China after Mao, a class-divided society. And, as in any other class-divided society, class struggle existed in various forms. However, the real class struggle between the real classes that made up the society was obscured by unrelenting official propaganda about an illusory "class struggle" ("Never forget class struggle!") that was actually something else entirely.

In Maoist China the authorities assigned every citizen an official "class" label or political "hat." A great deal depended on this hat, from political influence and social respect to work assignments and access to medical care – not to mention the chance of ending up in a labour camp or on an execution ground. Most labels referred not to current social position but to the alleged former status of the person or of his or her parents and grandparents in the old society. Thus, "poor and lower middle peasants" ("red" categories), "upper middle peasants" (an intermediate category), and "rich peasants" and "landlords" ("black" categories) were currently all collective farmers. The harshest treatment (justified as "class struggle") and most unpleasant jobs were reserved for "landlords," who became a hereditary caste of pariahs like the Indian untouchables.

The real function of the labels was to measure the presumed degree of loyalty to the regime. Party leaders in good standing, irrespective of family background, belonged to the "red" category of "revolutionary cadre." Both prime minister Zhou Enlai and secret police chief Kang Sheng were sons of big landlords and Mao's own father was a small landlord, but that did not count against them. Conversely, worker or poor peasant origin provided very limited protection to those who challenged party policy: a "class" label could be arbitrarily changed or the malcontent could be dumped in the catch-all category of "bad element."

So we must decode the official "class struggle" as a continuing campaign to crush all actual and potential dissent. In official discourse "proletariat" (working class) was a codeword for the regime (or whichever faction controlled the regime at any given time). When workers went on strike in 1966-67, they were accused of falling under the influence of class enemies wielding the weapon of "economism." In other words, they were tools of the capitalist class striking against themselves!

The Cultural Revolution: a campaign against bureaucracy?
Many Maoist sympathizers acknowledge that China under Mao was a highly unequal society, but put the blame on Mao's opponents within the leadership - the notorious "capitalist roaders" supposedly headed by Liu Shaoqi. Mao himself and those who helped him launch the Cultural Revolution were, we are asked to believe, fighting against the party bureaucracy for a classless society.

This "anti-bureaucratic" interpretation of the so-called Cultural Revolution is at variance with the official definition of its purpose. It was basically a brutal witch-hunt, assisted and supervised by the secret police, against anyone suspected of disloyalty to the "Emperor." So intended targets did include many specific bureaucrats suspected of opposing Mao's policies, but not the bureaucracy as a whole. True, in some places control over the movement was lost for a time, and Red Guards started deciding for themselves whom to attack. One organization even denounced the "butcher" Kang Sheng, who acted promptly to isolate and arrest its activists. In Hunan a Red Guard alliance called Sheng-wu-lien published a manifesto redefining the enemy more broadly as "the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie." Denounced as a "counter-revolutionary" by Mao himself, Yang Xiguang, author of the manifesto, was jailed for ten years and narrowly escaped execution. (For more on Sheng-wu-lien, see here. On Yang Xiguang, who died in Australia in 2004, see here and his book Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution.)

At least since 1949, all top party leaders have lived and worked under extremely privileged conditions and in virtually total isolation from ordinary people. In Beijing they cloister themselves (and their servants) inside the Zhongnanhai complex, while in summer they vacation together at the seaside resort of Beidaihe. We get a sense of the unhealthy, claustrophobic and paranoid atmosphere of this environment from the memoirs of Mao's personal physician, Dr. Li Zhisui (The Private Life of Chairman Mao). Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and other members of Mao's faction were certainly no less privileged, corrupt or cynical than his opponents. It is absurd to cast them as champions of the people.

The Red Guards appeared to be attacking privilege, but appearances were deceptive. First, they only attacked the privileges of those who had already been identified as "class enemies" on other grounds. Second, the net result of their rampage was merely the redistribution of privilege and property within the elite. Some individuals temporarily or permanently lost positions of power, while others - favoured Red Guard leaders and assorted opportunists - were elevated into the nomenklatura. The numerous antiques that Red Guards confiscated from well-to-do homes ended up not in public museums and art galleries but in storerooms where army generals and their wives took their pick -- as did Kang Sheng, himself a keen collector (John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon).

Styles of capital accumulation
What then were the real policy differences between Mao and the "capitalist roaders"?

Any state capitalist regime must pursue the long-term goal of capital accumulation within the context of great-power competition. In this respect there is no difference between Mao's "Great Leap Forward" (1958-61) and the "Four Modernizations" of the post-Mao period. But there is an important difference in strategy and style of management. Mao, a romantic with a pre-scientific mentality, relied on unrealistically ambitious and consequently disastrous campaigns. Aiming to overtake Britain in steel production, he forced the peasants to neglect agriculture and build small "backyard" furnaces that produced junk, plunging the country into history's greatest famine. The "capitalist roaders" wanted a more rational, steady and sustained strategy for the accumulation of national capital. Mao's idiosyncratic impulses kept on messing things up for them.

What did Maoism mean for ordinary people? Some of Mao's policies may have been of benefit - for example, the (now defunct) "barefoot doctor" program that attempted to make basic medical care available to the rural population. On balance, however, the modest positive impact of such policies was surely outweighed by all the suffering, repression, waste and disruption for which Mao was responsible.

Stefan