Voice From The Back: Youth Unemployment (2012)

The  Voice From The Back column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Youth Unemployment 

The economist Paul Krugman paints a frightening picture about youth unemployment. “In Spain, the unemployment rate among workers under 25 is more than 50 percent. In Ireland almost a third of the young are unemployed. Here in America, youth unemployment is “only” 16.5 percent, which is still terrible — but things could be worse” (New York Times, 29 April). Supporters of capitalism often laud its “efficiency” but it is difficult to think of anything more wasteful than debarring young workers from taking part in the production and distribution of wealth. Half of all young Spanish workers on the dole? Some efficiency!


The Plight Of The Elderly

It is only one case amongst thousands of how elderly men and women of the working class are treated, but it highlights the daily experience of workers everywhere. “A health board has been ordered to apologise to the family of an elderly man sent home from hospital in winter in his shirt, trousers, dressing gown and one slipper. David Spelman, 85, had hip replacement surgery at the Southern General in Glasgow after a fall in February 2011. Days after being discharged he fell again and died shortly afterwards” (BBC News, 8 May). An apology from the health board may satisfy some jobsworthy official.


The Pay Rises That Aren’t

One of the illusions beloved by supporters of capitalism is that while the system isn’t perfect at least there is a steady improvement of conditions. The Income Data Services has come up with figures that prove that is complete nonsense. “Of Britain’s 29.1 million-strong workforce around 80 per cent, or 23.1 million, work in the private sector. The vast majority of these received a pay rise which failed to keep pace with inflation, said the report by pay experts, Incomes Data Services (IDS). It said the average pay rise between January and March was 3 per cent, compared with inflation at 3.5 per cent. And 8 per cent of workers, typically those working in the manufacturing, construction or not-for-profit sectors, saw pay frozen” (Daily Mail, 8 May).


The Uncaring Society

As the government looks for more and more ways to cut support for the sick, the elderly and the disabled, recent figures show how it is affecting voluntary carers. “Almost six in 10 admitted that taking care of vulnerable family members had put them under so much stress and strain it caused depression, anxiety and nervous breakdowns. The same number said their caring responsibilities had harmed their careers, research by the newly-formed Carers Trust found. There are about six million unpaid carers in Britain looking after older parents or disabled children” (Daily Express, 8 May). Capitalism always seeks to cut overheads to increase profits and caring is just not one of its priorities.


Another Cunning Plan

In the BBC TV comedy series Blackadder one of the characters keeps coming up with a “cunning plan” that always turns out to be completely useless. The present government has a cunning plan to deal with the economic crisis. Cut the workers’ wages, increase their pension contributions, slash their pension’s benefits and increase the pension age to sixty-eight. This has led to hundreds of thousands of public sector workers taking part in a 24-hour, UK-wide strike in a dispute with the government over pension changes. “Cabinet Office minister, Francis Maude said pension talks will not be reopened and “nothing further will be achieved through strike action”. Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the PCS union – which estimates that an “overwhelming majority” of its 250,000 public sector members are on strike – said the UK would have “the highest pension age of any European country” (BBC News, 10 May). The truth is that inside capitalism slumps and booms are part and parcel of the system and there is no cunning way to plan it despite the efforts of Baldric or Francis Maude.


A Rare Flash Of Truth

Occasionally politicians have been known to tell the truth. This is such a rare occurrence that we feel we have to record it for posterity. “Education Secretary Michael Gove has attacked Britain’s class divide between rich and poor children, branding the split ‘morally indefensible’. In a speech at private-school, Brighton College, Mr Gove told teachers and pupils that Britain ‘has failed to tackle’ the widening parameters between the country’s social classes” (Daily Express, 11 May). “Morally indefensible” it may well be but as an out-and-out supporter of capitalism, an Old Etonian and a Conservative MP he has aided the day-to-day running of this “morally indefensible” social system.


Piety And Poker

It should come as no shock to socialists to learn that outwardly religious devotees are often dreadful hypocrites. We have, after all, had plenty of evidence of the Vatican covering up child abuse cases. The following news item nevertheless is an extreme example of religious hypocrisy. “Six leaders of South Korea’s largest Buddhist order have been forced to resign after being caught on video drinking, smoking and playing high-stakes poker at a memorial event for a dead Zen master” (Independent, 12 May). Well, at least they didn’t interfere with young children and unlike the priests they did resign.


National Ill-Health Service

Capitalism rewards the exploiting class and victimises the working class. A case in point is the treatment of the sick and the infirm. “Patients are being left lying on trolleys for up to 24 hours because hospitals are alarmingly short of beds, the union representing Britain’s nurses has claimed. Pressure on beds is so great that some people end up being treated in corridors, especially in A&E departments, according to a survey of 1,246 UK nurses and healthcare assistants belonging to the Royal College of Nursing who look after some of the sickest patients” (Observer, 13 May). This treatment only applies to the working class; if you can afford it you will get the most expert care quickly and efficiently.

Letters: World Without Money (2012)

Letters to the Editors from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

World Without Money

Dear Editors

I remember the struggling “thirties” for my Mum and Dad, hard to find work and being abused by the capitalist system. Then with five children war took place and sent three of us to evacuation. Money I thought of was pounds shillings and pence and farthing and three penny piece Mum put in the Christmas pud.

Peace arrived and as time has gone by you heard of money crisis, tighten your belt, “you’ve never had it so good”, “a new beginning” and “we’re all in this together”, ” big society”, yes Cameron rich and poor!

Money blinds me with calculations I don’t understand, not pounds shillings and pence but millions, billions and trillions now.

The needs for people are to be fed well, sheltered and to understand to have the best of everything. Hospital, housing, schools and everything that provides a good living.

I don’t want to hear that I have an enemy today, I didn’t know him yesterday but my so-called country tells me and my family to fight him and his family. So where in the present money crisis we are unable to put money into every good and necessary need they can suddenly find millions and trillions for fighter planes and every killing machine you can think of.

Is this all insane or could there be another way to live on this great planet of ours. A global moneyless society for the whole human race. Co-operation not competition. We have the manpower, technology, resources and voluntary know-how. Capitalism has shown us how it could be but money gets in the way! So?

I’ve never been any good at understanding maths and missed out education during the war but am able to think about and see things that I hear and see. I don’t need leaders telling me what’s good or bad for me and at the same time dancing to the tune of capitalism putting profit before need.

Florrie Barwick, 

Aveley, Essex

What about the family?

Dear Editors

How do we see the Family and the upbringing of children in society after the transition from capitalism to socialism?

In the Kibbutzim in Israel from the 1950s to the 1980s people lived in a collective environment without private property where there were communal children’s homes and sleeping arrangements and the collective upbringing of children. Kibbutzim would ultimately fail as ‘socialist’ enterprises because they existed inside a capitalist framework.

In 1884 in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels describes how humanity in its hunter-gatherer stage of development lived in a primitive-communist society with female solidarity, a brotherhood of man and collective upbringing of children. It is with the end of the matrilineal clan and the beginning of patriarchy we get the beginnings of the family and private property. Professor Chris Knight’s 1991 book Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture follows on from the work of Engels and he states that for 95 percent of our existence, our species lived as egalitarian hunter-gatherers without family, private property and the state.

I am not proposing some return to primitivism-communist society but that the capitalist system has only been in existence a short time and is not the eternal state of things the bourgeoisie would like us to believe.

Wilhelm Reich in his 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascism sees the family as one of the most important institutions that supports the authoritarian (capitalist?) state and is basically the centre for the production of reactionary men and women.

Following from Reich we have critique of the family in the writings of RD Laing in the 1960s, the seminal work The Death of the Family (1971) by ‘Marxist Existentialist’ psychoanalyst David Cooper, and volume 1 of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972) by Deleuze and Guattari.

Marxists have seen the family as an important conditioning agent in capitalist society, the cause of gender inequality and also the cause of much psychological damage to individuals. With the transition from capitalism to socialism will the family be redundant and collective upbringing the way forward?

Steve Clayton, 

London SW8.

Not free

Dear Editors

Regarding ‘From Handicraft to the Cloud Part 2’ (April Socialist Standard), when you say “Linux”, you probably mean the GNU operating system that I launched in 1983, in combination with the kernel Linux. People often call this combination “Linux”, which is unfair to us.

Linux is just one component of the combination. That component was developed starting in 1991 by Torvalds, who never agreed with the ethical principles of the free software movement. Thus, when people call the whole system “Linux” and give all the credit to him, they lead people away from our ideas of freedom.

Torvalds’ current version of Linux actually includes non-free pieces, and depends on other external non-free pieces. When we make 100% free GNU+Linux distributions, we have to remove those pieces from Linux before putting it into the distribution.

See http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html for more explanation of this issue, and http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html about the name question.

If you were thinking of the complete system that people use, that is GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux.

If you were thinking of Torvalds’ program, I never particularly supported that.

Dr Richard Stallman, 

President, Free Software Foundation, 

Boston, USA

Halo Halo!: Why Jesus Wasn’t a Socialist (2012)

The Halo Halo! Column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

News stories about the stupidity of religion are sometimes just too bizarre to take in – despite the often serious consequences of the events they describe. A woman facing the death penalty in Saudi Arabia after being arrested for witchcraft for example (Guardian 19 April). The Catholic Church in India that had a sceptic arrested for blasphemy after he revealed that the cause of its ‘miraculous weeping cross’ was a leaking drain (Richard Dawkins website, 14 April). And again from the Guardian of 21 April, the latest antics of Terry Jones the nutty pastor from Florida who stokes up equally nutty Islamic fundamentalists by burning Korans.

Depressing stuff so lets leave the loonies alone this month and look at another widely repeated but mistaken idea often bandied about by trendy vicars and religious lefties: the idea that Jesus was a socialist.

In short, no, he wasn’t. Nor could he have been. Two thousand years ago the material conditions required for socialism simply didn’t exist.  More important from a Marxist point of view, the conditions that did exist (primitive productive forces, slave labour, widespread illiteracy and superstition) meant that he would not have been able to imagine a socialist society of common ownership and free access – had he existed, of course, which is doubtful.

Ideas don’t spring from nowhere. Before ideas of a new society can be contemplated, material conditions that can give rise to those ideas must be in place. As Marx put it, “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for it’s solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation” and “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness” (quotations from the preface to ‘The Critique of Political Economy’ 1859).

A light-hearted example of this is provided by one of the dialogues of the ancient satirist, Lucian. In his True History (of which he admits not a word is true) he describes an imaginary trip to the moon. Although he was a clever and witty storyteller, he was writing in the 2nd century CE, and the most technically advanced forms of travel familiar to him and which he could have imagined were powered by horse, oar or sail.  Living nearly 1,700 years before Stephenson’s Rocket, therefore, he was unable to imagine or equip his characters with even a steam-driven sky rocket, and so his moon voyage was made in an ordinary sailing ship which was whisked into the air by a powerful whirlwind and blown through the sky for seven days.

An excellent pamphlet dealing with Historical Materialism and a Marxist analysis of religion is John Keracher’s How The Gods Were Made originally published in 1929 (and, if you haven’t read it, now available from The Socialist Party).

Right! That’s quite enough classical culture and Marxian theory from the Halo Halo column. Next month it’s back to ridiculing the ridiculous again.

NW

Brief Reports (2012)

The Brief Reports Column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Leicester secondary school headmaster was under fire last week for mounting an 88mm howitzer on the roof of the school hall during the annual school egg and spoon race. Local parents complained that their children were being enlisted as gun crews when they had only volunteered for the 100 metres hurdles, and councillors expressed alarm at the unprecedented cost of ramping up school security. The headmaster, Mr Geoffrey Barking, said in a statement: ‘It’s a rough area. If it’s good enough for the Olympics, it’s good enough for us.’

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Education Secretary Michael Gove is to examine claims the Gay and Lesbian Teachers Association broke impartiality rules on the topic of Catholicism. It emerged this week that the GLTA wrote to nearly 400 state-funded schools inviting them to back a petition against Catholics.  Schools and teachers are forbidden to promote one-sided political arguments. The GLTA has denied breaking any laws, saying gay views on Catholics are personal, not political: ‘It is central to gay culture to treat everyone with respect, even people who commit unnatural acts in churches.’

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Labour is demanding that David Cameron makes a Commons statement on the row surrounding the Transport secretary, Jedi Walker. There have been calls for Mr Walker to resign after it was revealed that he appeared not to be doing his job properly. Mr Cameron told Newsnight last week that: ‘It may be true that Jed has not been taking bungs from BSkyB, that he has no special advisor working with the Murdochs, that he has never been to one of their parties, that he has no directorships in Murdoch-controlled companies and that he has never in any way been dishonest in the Register of Members’ Interests. However, I wish to put on record that in spite of this I have every confidence in him as a politician of my own calibre.’

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It was announced this week that the Home Office was to simplify the induction process for new members of MI5 and MI6 following an internal survey that revealed that recruitment was dropping because the BBC series ‘Spooks’ is not on anymore. A spokesman said: ‘We now ask applicants if they want to join the secret service, and if so, whether they can lock themselves successfully into a hold-all while lying in a bath. If they can do that, they’re in.’

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James Naughtie the Radio 4 presenter who famously introduced the culture secretary during a coughing fit in 2010 as ‘Jeremy Cunt the Hulture Minister’ has publicly apologised to listeners for publicly apologising to listeners. Mr Naughtie, 60, is seeking to assure Radio 4 fans who may be annoyed at his gaffe: ‘I wish to reassure readers that I was right in the first place. I hope nobody was offended by my unforgivable retraction’.

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Business Secretary Vince Cable has condemned proposals to make it easier for firms to sack under-performing staff as “the wrong approach”. Mr Cable told reporters: ‘There’s no sense scaring the pants off workers when they can’t afford pants. Besides, we don’t want to go round saying that incompetence is a sackable offence. People might get ideas.’

Greasy Pole: A Kick in the Worst Nightmares (2012)

The Greasy Pole column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago Nadine Dorries, obsessively thespian Tory MP for Mid-Bedfordshire, sneered that David Cameron and George Osborne are two arrogant posh boys who don’t know the price of milk.  This was aimed to hit Cameron where it should hurt – his determined campaign to convince us that being an Old Etonian heir to a posh-boy family fortune need not get in the way of his being sympathetic about the emergencies of survival confronting what he and his clique condescend to call decent, hard-working people and their families. And as for what it costs to get some milk onto those stricken meal tables – well, he knows all about that from his regular shopping trips to Chipping Norton with his intimidatingly aristocratic and solvent wife. It would probably be comforting to Cameron in promoting this self-image if he led a party churning out that same cant. But many Tories out there in the wide world insist on having other ideas: to be governed by harshly nostalgic concepts about society and who should represent them in Parliament.

SAS Training

The Honourable Jacob William Rees-Mogg is undoubtedly posh but says he does not regret it. He is the son of Baron Rees-Mogg whose time in career journalism peaked with his editorship during 1967 to 1981 of The Times, when he was a regular source of material for Private Eye. Jacob, who was gratifyingly precocious, wrote his first letter to the Financial Times when he was twelve and went first to Eton and then Oxford before spending 15 years in the City in his firm called Capital Management. It was unsurprising that he should have ambitions about getting into Parliament. 

This required him to survive an SAS-like training by first standing in the kind of Labour seats where Tories had become the rarest of species. His first such venture was in 1997 in Fife Central, which could be characterised by the fact that it had been the last constituency to elect a Communist Party MP – in 1935 and 1945 – and where unemployment stood at 9 percent. His campaign, feeble as it was, could not have been helped by his canvassing with his nanny (who had, he said, come to Eton “ . . . to change my sheets every week and bring me anything I needed”) and his unwavering accent (“. . . whatever I happened to be speaking about the number of votes in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth”). As for the result, ‘obliterated’ would be a more useful word than ‘defeated’ and he hung on to his deposit by a whisker. He was given another chance at The Wrekin – a key seat – in 2001 where the outcome was close enough to give him some optimism about his future in politics.

Cosy Electioneering

This optimism seemed to have been justified in May 2006 when he was selected by the Tories in North-East Somerset as their candidate for the next election. The fact that his sister Annunziata was selected soon afterwards as the candidate for the adjoining Somerton and Frome might have made for cosy family electioneering except that the effect was seen by those closer to the scene as rather less comfortable for Cameron. One correspondent likened the selections as “a kick in the cobblers … for Cameron’s new-look Tories”.  After Rees-Mogg had compared pupils of state schools to “potted plants”, a friend admitted that he was “not an expert media performer”. That same year he strayed into the field of economics with his analysis that it was “…about time we had a recession”.  The remark was not apparently based on any world-wide assessment but on the assumption that it would not affect his gold stocks. In March 2009 he was again instructing us on economics and finance when he sent round his constituency a newsletter mentioning the “crashing pound” and “soaring unemployment”, The newsletter’s content was revealed to have been substantially lifted unacknowledged from an article in the Sun – of all newspapers – by Trevor Kavanagh, the Associate Editor.

Another Rees-Mogg effort at leafleting, ironically entitled Honesty On The Economy, contained a picture of him as the candidate talking to “a lady in Midsomer Norton”. The implications of that title were intriguing because that “lady”, assumed to be a constituent, was in fact an employee in his London office, allowed to make a 206-mile round journey to take part in that feeble deception. Another photograph probably intended to prove his credentials as a devoted countryman tackling a farmyard stile (in a smart city suit) looked as if he had been caught out urinating on the obstruction rather than climbing over it. Considering Rees Mogg’s obdurate tendency to attract such damagingly negative publicity it was little wonder that during the 2010 election – he won the seat in North-East Somerset by 4914 votes – The Times saw him as threatening to turn out as “David Cameron’s worst nightmare”.

Strategies

Well, in his public appearances Cameron does now convey the impression, too often for his own reassurance, of being under a degree of stress typical of a political leader striving to dress up his party image – the presentation of outworn, discredited policies – as the offspring of fresh and effective thinking. This dismal aspect of managing our lives is part of what is called politics, a politics in which there is also Rees Mogg, known as “a toff beyond caricature”, struggling to assert his obsolete style of the privileges of capitalism against those already in operation in Westminster. A clash between these two methods is not due to any divergence of principles, for they are solidly together in support of this cruel, stagnant society. Anyone concerned with a valid remedy for progress must stand aside, and move on from this sterile squabble in which our lot is to be kicked where it most hurts.

Ivan

France: No Socialist President (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

   Despite what the media said, France has not elected a “Socialist President”.

What did happen on 6 May was that a member of the so-called “Parti socialiste” (PS), which is not a socialist party but a party of capitalist reform similar to the Labour Party in Britain, won the presidential election there.

François Hollande finished top in the first round of the election in April, but as he polled less than 50 percent a second round took place in which he beat the outgoing President, Nicholas Sarkozy. In the first round 6.4 million (18 percent) voted for Marine Le Pen of the National Front and a further 4 million (11 percent) for Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the Left Front.  This means that some 30 percent voted for isolationist nationalism. It seems that the history of the 1930s may be beginning to repeat itself.

Mélenchon, a one-time PS minister (and a former Trotskyist – of course), left the PS in 2008 to form the Left Party. He has been seen as more “socialist” than Hollande but the Guardian came up with some more accurate descriptions. Seamus Milne (3 April) described him as a “radical left populist” (comparing him to George Galloway) while for Philippe Marlière (19 April) he was a “radical reformist”. He certainly employed a more anti-capitalist rhetoric but, while he is opposed to “neo-liberal”, corporate capitalism, what he stood for was an isolationist, state-capitalist France.

Record of failure

The PS was formed in 1971 as a result of the merger of the old, reformist SFIO (which, believe it or not, was the French for “French Section of the Workers’ International”) and various other groupings, under the leadership of François Mitterrand, who was to be elected President of France ten years later.

In its founding declaration, the PS proclaimed its equivalent to Labour Party’s former Clause IV:

  “Socialism fixes its object as the common good not private profit. Progressive socialisation of the means of investment, production and exchange constitute the indispensable basis for this”.

It went on:

 “The socialist transformation cannot be the natural product of reforms correcting the effects of capitalism. It is not a question of re-arranging a system, but of substituting another one for it.”

This was just rhetoric. When Mitterrand was elected President of France in 1981 he made it quite clear that he had not been elected to bring about a change of system, but only to bring about a change in the existing system. It was the same distinction that had been made by the pre-war SFIO Prime Minister of the Popular Front, Léon Blum, between “the conquest of power” (for socialism) and “the exercise of power” (within capitalism).

Like François Hollande, Mitterrand promised “growth”. His government immediately drew up a plan to reduce unemployment by growing the economy 3 percent a year through increasing both popular consumption and government investment. The government did increase the minimum wage and benefits and it did employ more people as well as nationalising the banks, but the economy didn’t grow by 3 percent.

Instead, the workings of capitalism forced the government to devalue the franc three times within two years, the first as early as October 1981 (Mitterrand had only been elected in May of that year). A second followed in June of the following year. The third, in March 1983, was accompanied by a programme of austerity which clawed back the increase in wages and benefits introduced in May and June 1981. (For those who can read French, there’s description of what happened and why here: http://www.worldsocialism.org/canada/frechec.htm )

In short, the Mitterrand government’s attempt to grow the economy by increasing government and popular spending failed miserably. It failed because governments can’t control the way the capitalist economy works. It’s rather the other way round:  the workings of the capitalist economy oblige all governments, whatever their original intention and whatever they might prefer to do, to give priority to profits and the conditions for profit-making. In a slump such as today, this means imposing austerity, as President Hollande will find out, despite the fact that the people of France have just voted against it – yet another demonstration of how the workings of capitalism frustrate what people want.

Bid to reform capitalism

Like Mitterrand before him, Hollande only wants to “exercise power” within the context of capitalism and its rule of “no profit, no growth”. On a visit to London in February he blamed financial deregulation for the crisis and said this needed to be reversed. Ed Miliband, who was with him, chipped in:

 “We need to reform the way finance works and to reform the way that capitalism works. He is absolutely right” (Times, 1 March).

It’s clear, then, that Hollande wants to try to reform “the way that capitalism works”. He has set himself an impossible task. We can predict here and now that he won’t succeed in making capitalism work in the general interest, and that, like the last so-called “Socialist” President of France thirty years ago, he will fall flat on his face.  He will then have to pick himself up and accept the economic realities of capitalism and keep austerity to facilitate profit-making. TINAUC. There is no alternative under capitalism.

Adam Buick

The Greek Tragedy: A Tourist-Eye View (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Re-visiting Athens after twenty-odd years and in the middle of a severe economic crisis I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect or how visible signs of the crisis would be. The drive from the airport gave few clues and once within the city there seemed to be plenty of large stores full of expensive clothes and all the latest electronic technology for those who could afford them.

Approaching the city centre though it became clear that numerous large shops and businesses were permanently closed and shuttered up. There was a heavy police presence on the streets too and the police motorcycles roaring about, usually two up and with blue lights flashing were a constant sign that all was not well. Angry looking graffiti and political posters began to appear, almost covering entire buildings from one end of the streets to the other. A sure sign of widespread anger and discontent.

Even a non-Greek speaker like myself could tell that this was not the kind of stuff we have decorating railway bridges and derelict buildings at home. The anarchist logo and the hammer and sickle were daubed up everywhere, and non-Greek speakers were well catered for. “Wake up-Rise up”, “Fuck the politicians”, “Fuck the Police” were scrawled intermittently between Greek slogans. The message of one anarchist poster pasted up every few yards, although written in Greek was perfectly clear. It’s artwork showed an angry looking muscular man, standing on a high ledge overlooking the city, hurling a ballot box far away into the distance.

My hotel, behind Omonia Square in the city centre turned out to be very close to the main office of KKE. The Greek Communist Party. And it was quite an eye-opener to see the constant activity and stream of people, young, old, male and female purposefully filing in and out at all hours of the day, seven days a week.

Obviously with drastic cuts in wages and massive unemployment, the main concerns of most people on the streets was going to be how to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads – if indeed, they still had one. Discussions with KKE members though, I hoped, would give some idea of their view of what communism was, and how it was to be achieved. Unsurprisingly perhaps, I was told that KKE would first establish communism in Greece. This would happen when workers, through their unions, took control of their workplaces and the state. The process would then be repeated throughout Europe.

One of their slogans in both Greek and English, “Down with the Dictatorship of the Monopolies European Union” had been reproduced on a massive banner hanging from the acropolis and was intended, apparently, to pave the way for this.

Syriza too, who’s supporters I spoke to, described themselves as “Marxist Leninist” and, who assured me that their aim was the establishment of socialism, held a massive rally in Omonia Square. Their “anti bailout” message was certainly popular and seemed to have attracted vast numbers of converts. These converts however, have only been attracted by Syriza’s hopes to reform, or to scramble out of, Greece’s current economic mess. Most probably have no knowledge of what socialism is, or any hopes or ideas for its establishment.

My main reason though for going to Athens though was not to see Greece wrestling with its economic crisis. I was here for the history. And to visit the Agora, the market place and centre of activity in classical Athens. And the Pnika (or the Pnyx as the guide books have it). This is the place where the people who came up with the idea of democracy in the first place met to address their fellow citizens, to listen to each others arguments, and to discuss and vote on them.

It’s a long, hot, uphill climb to the Pnika (it took half an hour just to descend to the ancient market place again) And it was quite sobering to reflect on what the Athenian citizens who regularly made that trip to engage in direct democracy would have thought of our idea of democracy, where we are just offered the chance to elect a new leader every 4 or 5 years. And what would they have made of that poster in today’s Athens showing the angry and frustrated anarchist hurling the ballot box away?

NW

Breivik’s Philosophy of Hate (2012)

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at mass murderer Anders Breivik’s attempt to imitate Mein Kampf.

On 16 April the trial of the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik started and is scheduled to conclude by the end of June. Breivik has confessed to the bombing in Oslo, killing eight, and the shooting of sixty-nine at the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth camp in Utoya.

Like young, white, male right-wing terrorists before him, such as Timothy McVeigh and David Copeland, Anders Breivik (despite his claims to be part of the Knights Templar) seems to have acted alone. Like McVeigh and Copeland, Breivik became disillusioned with co-operating with anyone in larger far-right organisations preferring a kind of messianic narcissistic individualism.

All grew up under the capitalist system, but with varying provision for welfare. McVeigh became transient after the leaving the army, and ended up in a dead-end job with long hours. Copeland struggled through a series of failed jobs before working on the London Underground. Breivik perhaps enjoyed the best welfare provision growing up, McVeigh quite possibly the most meagre. All were alienated from society and all found familiar scapegoats for their degrees of alienation. McVeigh expressed some of this in writing before the bombing and after in a 1,200 word essay. Only well-educated Breivik, however, seemed well-paid and not precariously employed (traditionally the far right exploit unemployment), and took a language other than his first and wrote a 1,518 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence by Andrew Berwick. This somewhat troubles those keen to label anything outside the political mainstream as “extremist” and medicalise his condition as insane. He wrote that his main motive for committing the atrocities on 22 July was to market this manifesto.

The far-right scapegoat which finds the most traction post-9/11 happens to be Islam. It used to be Jewish immigration or Afro-Caribbean immigration. While Copeland talked of a Zionist conspiracy, the far-right, after 9/11, switched support from Palestine to Israel. In any case, like European efforts of the English Defence League, Breivik is more pan-nationalist than nationalist. He writes:

  “One of the reasons why hardcore anti-Semites (David Duke would be a case in point) are unreliable allies is that they hate Jews so much that it shuts down the rational parts of their brain and they end up making common cause with Muslims, based on mutual hatred. The same logic applies to hardcore anti-Europeans, of which there are many even at ‘conservative’ websites such as LGF. They have an irrational hatred, a dark cloud in their minds which prevents them from seeing the world clearly. In a way, some LGF-ers thus have more in common with David Duke than they’d like to admit. If mindless anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism should be considered a problem then so should mindless anti-Europeanism.”

What matters chiefly is that the group persecuted by fascists is in a position of weakness. Breivik implicitly acknowledged this “If I was a bearded jihadist there would be no question of insanity”.

Only about half of the manifesto was written by Breivik and the rest is compiled from other sources. “I’ve spent a total of 9 years of my life working on this project. The first five years were spent studying and creating a financial base, and the last three years was spent working full time with research, compilation and writing.”

The introductory chapter of the manifesto defining “Cultural Marxism” is reprinted from Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology by the right-wing think tank, Free Congress Foundation. Very early on, the fabrications and leaps of logic jump out. “Political Correctness now looms over Western European society like a colossus.” then “Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order, and, ultimately, a totalitarian state.”

By the end of the introduction, Political Correctness and other restrictions of freedom of speech or language are treated as synonymous with Cultural Marxism. The conclusion then is to get rid of both, which somewhat discredits later claims to defend free speech.

It should come as little surprise then that Breivik’s particular bête noire was “Marxists”. He is reported to have repeatedly shouted during the shooting, “You are going to die today, Marxists!” and the badge on the left arm of his diving suit read “Marxist Hunter”.

A lot of what follows is tortuous, wrongly interpreted, one-sided opinion, or just plain invented. Long-term demographic projections, an old favourite of fascists, make an appearance despite being notoriously dubious.

Book 1, entitled “History and Islam” focuses on largely historical disputes about genocides, falsification and apologism.  Islam and its adherents are selectively demonised while religion generally gets a get-out-of-jail free card.  The manifesto states “Negationism in Europe is practised with the most prowess by historians and writers who are under the spell of Marxism. Lenin had wanted to use the Muslims against the French and British colonialists. Modern Leftists with Marxist sympathies see Islam as an ally against Israel and the US.”

Book 2, entitled “Europe Burning” is dull speculation about a conspiracy theory of “Eurabia”, and some reprinted rambling about Feminism. ‘Cultural Marxism’ is also used interchangeably with multiculturalism and becomes a phrase for any bad thing you can think of.

One chapter is entitled “Why the discipline of Sociology must be completely removed from Academia”. As far as Breivik is concerned, the reason for this is that it is Marxist. He suggests replacing it with ideas from The Bible, Machiavelli, George Orwell, Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Ayn Rand and William James. The selective philosophising is tedious and tiresome to read. Perhaps because he knows he is on shaky ground with capitalism and democracy, the chapter on “Globalised Capitalism” gets a mere four pages and in any case is traditionally code on the far-right for anti-Semitism.

In the rest of Book 2 he writes chapters entitled “Discrimination and harassment against cultural conservatives” and “ ANTIFA/Labour Jugend – State sponsored Marxist lynch mobs” where he states, “These brave Leftists or ‘anti-Fascists’ do, for some curious reason, seem to behave pretty much like, well, Fascists, a bit like the Brown Shirts in the 1930s, physically assaulting political opponents to silence them.” Some of this unfortunately can be levelled at SOS Rasisme and Blitz in Norway.

The manifesto concludes in Book 3 with a mixture of practicality and pure fantasy. One of the final chapters oddly reproduces a ‘Marxist’ study course.  Breivik also credits Wikipedia. All in all, the manifesto represents years of wasted time, money and effort and, most important, wasted lives.  It reads as a hotchpotch of prejudices, has little nuance and is full of generalisations, principally about wrong assumptions. As if to remind us where these prejudices come from, U.S. conservative commentator Glenn Beck came out with the most offensive stupid response. He compared the victims to the Hitler Youth before being reminded that groups affiliated with the Tea Party movement and the Beck-founded 9-12 Project also sponsor politically oriented camp programs for children.

The trial continues.

DJW

Another Sea Disaster (2012)

Rena aground

From the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The MV Rena ran aground on Astrolabe Reef off Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty, North Island, New Zealand on 5 October last year, spilling fuel oil and containers into the sea. The Rena is a Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned Flag of Convenience (FOC) vessel. The crew consisted of 23 Filipinos.

Not surprisingly, the grounding of the Rena, and subsequent oil spill, has caused outrage and concern, and has been reported worldwide. The ship disintegrates on the Reef. According to Joe Fleetwood, general secretary of the Maritime Union of New Zealand, writing in The Maritimes (Issue 36, Summer 2011/12), many in New Zealand are confused as to how the disaster happened, and who was responsible. People have a right to know, he said.

Flag of Convenience

The Maritime Union blames the New Zealand government and authorities as much as individual crew members. The authorities have created a situation where FOC shipping has been encouraged. Their “open coast” policy has meant that “unacceptable practices have become the norm in New Zealand waters”.

Many in New Zealand were shocked to discover that the FOC system operates on the New Zealand coast. They should not have been. In many of these FOC states such as Liberia, there are few regulations. Says Joe Fleetwood: “This is deregulation operating in a globalized market, with no oversight, no responsibility and no morality.” Quite. He continues:

 “Flag of Convenience ships are notorious for their exploitation of crews, and safety risks. They endanger our environment and port security, and are a threat to the future of New Zealand maritime industry… It is a cheap way of doing things. But as we all know, doing things on the cheap has a funny way of ending up being more expensive in the long run.”

Legacy of Neglect

Was the Rena faulty? Apparently, prior to its arrival in New Zealand, it had been hauled up in China and Australia for numerous issues and multiple problems.

Was a full inspection by Maritime New Zealand made given numerous documented failings? According to the union, a Maritime New Zealand “inspection” consisted of asking the Master of the Rena if the previous problems had been fixed. Presumably, he said they had. So that was OK then! Following the disaster, the Master was arrested. He was blamed two weeks after the grounding and spillage; a convenient scapegoat.

According to The Maritime, a TV3 News investigation noted that the government was repeatedly warned that New Zealand wasn’t prepared sufficiently for such an oil spill. An Official Information Act indicated that the New Zealand government had considered whether a specialist oil response vessel was needed. But it decided against. It had, it said, such vessels as “The Awanvia”, with suitable equipment which it could seek for assistance. In the event, however, it was almost five days before it arrived on site and began pumping fuel off the Rena.

Union Criticism

Not surprisingly, the New Zealand Maritime Union is highly critical. General Secretary, Joe Fleetwood complains that workers are under threat because of lack of proper regulations and enforcement in the industry. Workers are expendable. Both local and overseas workers are being harmed in the workplace because of slack regulations. And, it is worse on FOC vessels.

Says the union:

  “The incidents on Flag of Convenience vessels, including foreign charter vessels in the New Zealand fishing industry, make for a long and grim list. Sinkings, drownings, asphyxiations, severe injuries, physical attacks, underpayment, pollution and overfishing, abuse and exploitation are all documented throughout the maritime industry. For years the problem has been out of sight and out of mind.”

And not just in New Zealand, I would add. Indeed, complacent politicians come and go, and “profits kept flowing to the shipping corporations”. Fleetwood observes that in the current environment, profit comes first. “Unless we have strong unions on the job to defend health and safety, and legislation that is backed by some teeth, then we will see more and more preventable deaths and injuries.” Too true. But, unfortunately, legislation and reform measures, even if acted upon, will not solve the problems. Only the abolition of the cause – capitalism and the profit motive system – will do that.  This is what the World Socialist Party of New Zealand, and socialists elsewhere, propose and for which they are organised.

Peter E. Newell

Beyond The Global Capitalist Crisis (2012)

Book Review from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beyond The Global Capitalist Crisis. Edited by Berch Berberoglu. Ashgate. 2012

This collection of essays is a restatement of classical Leninist economics and politics. The authors argue that the current global crisis “is permanent and irreversible”. The theoretical framework is provided by Lenin’s theory of capitalism as imperialism, in which the contradictions of capitalism which “would have led it to collapse on the national level were thus transferred to the global level”. In 1917 Lenin “showed the way forward” by identifying the source of the crisis and its solution: “socialism – i.e. a state and society ruled by the working class”.

One contributor claims that, for a number of unexplained reasons, “actually existing socialism” succumbed to a crisis of its own in which “socialism” in the USSR and elsewhere collapsed. It’s no mystery. These state capitalist regimes stagnated under the rising costs of a bureaucratic-military state machine (since this must be largely financed out of surplus value redirected from the productive sector of the economy) and an increasingly expensive dictatorship over the proletariat.

Capitalism will not collapse, nor will the crisis be permanent – if for no other reason than that there is currently no working class movement for socialism. In the absence of that understanding, desire and action for change, capitalism in one form or another will persist. State capitalism (nationalisation or state ownership) is not socialism; nor is a step towards socialism as Lenin believed.

 Lew Higgins

Long Day’s Journey Into the Night (2012)

Theatre Review from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill (Apollo Theatre)

This 1956 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, written in 1942 and recently staged at the Apollo Theatre in London, was not performed until after O’Neill’s death.  This was because of its autobiographical nature, its inclusion of characters clearly drawn from members of the O’Neill Irish-American family and its descriptions of real incidents within it.

O’Neill was a breath of fresh air in American theatre in the 1920s, a writer of realistic dramas inspired by the naturalism of Chekhov, Strindberg and Ibsen. He avoided melodrama and sentimentality and concerned himself with tragedy, pessimism, and socialism.  He used vernacular speech and portrayed working-class characters in works like ‘Anna Christie’ and ‘The Iceman Cometh’.

O’Neill moved in left wing circles in Greenwich Village, New York City, where he met John Reed and Louise Bryant (their menage-à-trois is portrayed in the 1981 film ‘Reds’). Reed, a member of the Socialist Party of America, was in Russia in 1917 at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and wrote about it in his book ‘Ten Days That Shook The World’.  He helped form the Communist Party of America.

In the early twentieth century there were exciting times for socialism in the USA. These saw the formation of the Industrial Workers of the World in 1905, an organisation which advocated the abolition of capitalism and the wage system and opposed the First World War.  The increasingly reformist nature of the Socialist Party of America led car workers in Detroit to leave in 1916 and form the Socialist Party of the United States.  This later became the World Socialist Party of the United States, the fraternal party of the SPGB.

‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ dissects the conflicts of  the bourgeois thespian James Tyrone (O’ Neill’s father) and his wife and two sons, and covers themes of patriarchy, the lack of fulfilment for women, addiction (alcohol and morphine), resentments, self-deception, illness, greed, failure, artistic promise, and general dysfunction in bourgeois family life in early twentieth-century American capitalism. The Irish-born family patriarch emigrated to America at the time of the Great Hunger of the 1840s when the potato famine and subsequent failure of the British government led to a million deaths and mass emigration from the Emerald Isle. O’Neill describes Tyrone’s experience of child labour and family poverty in the expanding industrial capitalism of nineteenth-century New York City.

Tyrone’s son Edmund (O’Neill) is a budding playwright, with a TB condition who has left Princeton early.  O’Neill himself left after a year because as the apocryphal story goes “he threw a beer bottle through the window of Professor Woodrow Wilson” (later the US President who promised voters to keep America out of the First World War but took them in, and later oversaw the Volstead Act which prohibited alcohol in the USA for 13 years).

O’Neill analyses the dysfunctionality of a bourgeois family in capitalism and shows the neuroses associated with bourgeois family life. Marx and Engels pointed out that the bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course with the abolition of capitalism.

Steve Clayton

Film Review: J. Edgar (2012)

Film Review from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In J. Edgar, Leonardo Di Caprio, under Clint Eastwood’s direction, gives a thoroughly credible performance as FBI Chief, J. Edgar Hoover. Di Caprio portrays him as the paranoid, vindictive, delusional, hypocritical (he refers to Senator McCarthy as an opportunist) and egotistical man that he was; certainly not high on the list of guys you’d want your daughter to marry.

Arnie Hammer as Hoover’s paramour, Clyde Tolson, Naomi Watts as Helen Gandy, his long-serving secretary and Judi Dench as his overly attentive mother (“You will restore our family to greatness”) all turn in fine performances. Hoover is, in fact, shown as a mama’s boy who went in for crime-busting to please the law-and-order obsessed lady.

Too much is devoted to exploring Hoover’s sexuality, though screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who is gay, probably felt it necessary. To quote Black, “it was a thing you couldn’t discuss even in the privacy of your own home and even with someone you might have feelings for, because it was still a love that did not speak its name.” Black, surprisingly, has Hoover enrage Tolson by confessing he once shared a romantic liaison with Dorothy Lamour.

This gives one some idea how petty he was. Hoover’s ambitions knew no bounds; when shut out of the Lindberg kidnapping investigation by the New Jersey State Police, he had Congress pass a law making kidnapping a federal instead of a state crime so the FBI, could horn in.

Surprisingly, Black makes no mention of Hoover’s greatest ambition to make the FBI a world-wide intelligence organization, which the CIA eventually became. Hoover had his vast army of agents pursue whatever grudges: criminal, political, sexual or personal, that he held – and he held plenty of them. He kept tabs on the extra-curricular activities of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Eleanor Roosevelt.  In Eleanor Roosevelt’s case that included spying on her trysts with lovers of both sexes. No-one in the FBI was allowed to be more popular than Eddie baby. That meant destroying the career of agent, Melvin Purvis who had gunned down John Dillinger.

Too much attention is devoted to his relationships with Tolson, Miss Gandy and his mother in this 135-minute movie, which fails to pursue more intriguing matters – such as, Hoover’s refusal to pursue organized crime as opposed to nickel-and-dime bank robbers. Rumour has it the mob had photographs of Hoover in drag and in a compromising position with Clyde Tolson who he made his number two man in the FBI.

Nor did the movie show his relentless persecution of homosexuals, eventually forcing them out of the closet as an act of retaliation. One psychiatrist would later say, “They should call that the J. Edgar Hoover Syndrome – persecuting the very thing he was.”

When Richard Nixon was elected it was the proverbial and possibly the literal death knell for Hoover. Nixon, though heterosexual, was very similar; mean, ambitious and unscrupulous (no kidding). Nixon wanted possession of Hoover’s files and the only way to get them would be to kill him. It isn’t mentioned that Hoover wanted to be Director for life, a life many would like to see end ASAP. It is only slightly implied that his doctor injected him with chemicals that wouldn’t exactly prolong it. Rumour has it that a life shortening pill, which looked like an aspirin tablet, was put in amongst them.

The most significant aspect of Hoover’s career wasn’t mentioned. He became head of the FBI in 1924, a year after the Teapot Dome Scandal in which some senior members of the Harding administration were implicated. In 1973, a year after his death, the Watergate Scandal broke out, but in the intermediate 48 years in which he reigned as the Bureau’s boss, there were no major scandals affecting the presidency.

One may wonder if the seven presidents he served under and their administrative staffs were not like Nixon’s thugs at all; that they were all goody-goodies who wouldn’t stoop to an illegal act.  Or, perhaps – just perhaps – once or twice they did and J. Edgar was on hand to contain the mess, conditional on getting the laws passed and the budgets he wanted – take your pick.

One comforting thought is that it’s highly unlikely in a sane society that anyone would be as sick as J. Edgar Hoover, but if there was such a person, he would receive help, and as the movie makes clear, he surely needed it.

Steve Shannon

Proper Gander: A Masterclass in Manipulation (2012)

Charley Says . . . 

The Proper Gander Column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The goggle-box has burned some pretty bizarre images onto the nation’s psyche over the years: squirrels wearing yellow trousers learning to cross the road, an unintelligible orange cat warning us not to talk to strangers, and gloomy icebergs as AIDS metaphors. Public Information Films have lurked in the gaps between programmes for sixty-five years, waiting to jump out and attack us with a government instruction. But not any more. Tufty the squirrel and Charley the cat have been made redundant by the closure of the government’s Central Office of Information, which produced the films. Britain Beware (ITV1) marked the demise of the Public Information Film with a nostalgic retrospective presented by a jovial Adrian Edmondson.

The early films told bemused middle-aged men how to use new-fangled zebra crossings, and nosey housewives how to sniff out Nazi spies. As the tone and content of the films changed over the years, and as censorship rules were relaxed, the producers set out to shock. Each drink-drive campaign has been a bigger pile-up of gore and emotional blackmail than the one before. And the notorious Apaches film traumatised a generation of flare-wearers into not playing on tractors or drinking weedkiller. Then, when the public grew tired of shock tactics, humour would often be used on the next campaign. Such as slovenly Joe and Petunia, who showed us how not to behave when picnicking in a cartoon field. Occasionally, shock and humour would collide in a mess of awkwardness, like when Jimmy Savile joked to a teenage car-crash victim in a wheelchair that he wouldn’t be going to any more discotheques.

As Britain Beware points out, Public Information Films told us to avoid dangerous things like using drugs or having unprotected sex, but they also encouraged us to sign up for a risky career in the Army. Each Army recruitment campaign has led to a rise in the numbers of naïve applicants hoping for the jet-set adventures the films promised them.

Public Information Films used all the tricks up the advertisers’ sleeves – shock, humour, exaggeration – to drive home their message. Watching them is like a masterclass in manipulation. And the changing subject-matter of the films – wearing seat belts while driving, avoiding smoking around children – reflected wider changes in legislation and attitudes. As a gauge of social trends, Public Information Films tell us more than just how to avoid grisly, slow-motion accidents.

Mike Foster

50 Years Ago: Russia Puts the Clock Back (2012)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the first flush of Bolshevik victory radical parties all over the world acclaimed the victory and gave them generous support, even where they had doubts on some of the methods adopted. The German Social Democratic Party, when threatened, sent to Russia the writings of Marx and Engels and other archives for safe-keeping, believing that Russia was now a budding free Socialist state where writings and documents would be safe from interference. How wrong they were!

It soon became evident that Russia was not embarked upon even a democratic society. The secret police and the concentration camp were on the way.

The mass of the Russian people knew nothing about Socialism; most of them could not even read. The peasants, who formed the bulk of the population, wanted land, and all wanted peace and bread. It was on the basis of the peace, bread and land programme that the Bolsheviks were enabled to seize power.

Once in power the Bolsheviks established what they misnamed the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. In fact, it was nothing of the kind. It was not even the dictatorship of the Bolshevik party (which again they misnamed the Communist Party), but the dictatorship of a small inner group with Lenin as the guiding star. They established a system of treachery and terrorism, first against opposing elements and eventually internally against those who would not abjectly submit to the dictates of the inner circle. In the end this led to members of the inner circle trying to destroy each other. It reproduced the position in the French Revolution when one group ate another until finally Napoleon was left at the top. First Trotsky, then Kamenev, Zinoviev and Radek fell victims to the terrorism they had built up. Fortunately for him, Lenin died before he could become a victim of the system in which he was the leading actor.

(From article by Gilmac in Socialist Standard, June 1962)

Action Replay: Playing Partners (2012)

The Action Replay column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Olympics will soon be on us, with their massive TV and press coverage and their never-ending opportunities for sponsorship and money-making, as well as some sporting contests. The International Olympic Committee is a brand in its own right and a very powerful one at that, as it can require host governments to introduce legislation protecting its copyright.

So in 2006 the UK parliament passed the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act, which went even further than existing law in preventing companies who have not paid for sponsorship or partnership rights from making any use of Olympic terminology or symbols. Even using ‘Games’ and ‘2012’ together might constitute an offence, unless you’ve paid for permission. So Coke and Adidas (as official sponsors) will be OK, but Pepsi and Nike will have to be very careful about what they say. During the Games themselves, athletes will not even be able to blog about their breakfast cereal unless it’s made by a Games sponsor. A spokesperson for the local organising committee put it bluntly: “Without the investment of our partners, we simply couldn’t stage the Games.”

This is not working as well as those behind it might wish, however, with so-called ambush marketing (where a non-sponsor manages to link itself to an event in some way) proving very effective. Thus Adidas is apparently less associated with the Games in people’s minds than Nike, and British Airways (the official airline partner) less so than Lufthansa.

Just imagine the effort that intelligent and creative people are putting into ensuring that companies keep within the law but exploit the Olympics for their own profit.

Paul Bennett

Material World: Updates – Iran, Egypt, South China Sea, Asteroids (2012)

The Material World Column from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

In January 2008, this column described preparations then underway for a US attack on Iran. It is not impossible that the long-awaited attack may finally be launched this year, either by the United States or by Israel (with or without American permission). Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defence minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman all want to go ahead, and are using the “Israel lobby” in the U.S. to exert pressure on Obama.  

They may not get their way, however, because there is strong opposition to an attack from inside the Israeli and American political establishments. Former chief of the Mossad (foreign intelligence) Meir Dagan calls it “the stupidest idea I have heard in my life.” Former chief of the Shin Bet (domestic intelligence) Yuval Diskin says that Netanyahu and Barak are “incompetent” and prone to “messianic delusions” and have “a poor grasp of reality”. The current intelligence chiefs and chiefs of staff have let it be known that they agree. Less information has become public about views inside the US establishment, but Obama’s cancellation of joint military exercises with Israel is a hopeful sign. 

Iran has declared that it will draw no distinction between an American and an Israeli attack. Its immediate response in either case would be to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which Persian Gulf oil has to pass to reach the ocean. The impact on the world economy would be devastating. Only a large-scale invasion by ground troops could reopen the strait. US forces in Iraq would be vulnerable, as would Israeli territory (despite Israel’s expensive but overrated anti-missile defence systems). An attack may well fail even to achieve its ostensible goal of stopping Iran’s nuclear programme; the result might in fact be to accelerate it.

The likely outcome depends in part on the real strength of the Israel lobby. Many people think that American decision makers are so afraid of the lobby that the US is unable to pursue a Middle East policy in line with its own interests (see, e.g., John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2007). Norman G. Finkelstein, who has himself been persecuted by the lobby, cogently argues in his latest book (Knowing Too Much, 2012) that this is a grossly exaggerated view. The US supports Israel because it continues to view its client state as a regional asset –all the more so now that its hold over Egypt has been weakened. But the US will not jeopardize important interests of its own at the bidding of Israeli leaders. 

The political situation in Egypt

In our analysis of the democratic revolution in Egypt (March 2011), we distinguished between the Mubarak clan, which had lost power, and the military regime as such. It was unclear at that point whether the popular movement would be able to push through the transition to political democracy and civilian government.

It is now clear that behind a parliamentary façade the military regime has succeeded in consolidating its position. A major factor was the deal that the generals reached with the Moslem Brotherhood, which mobilized its supporters, especially in the countryside, to block further change. Impressive as the popular movement appeared, it was always confined to the cities.

Parliamentary elections were held in Egypt from November 2011 to January 2012. The various Islamist forces did very well, winning a clear majority of votes (65 percent) and seats (70 percent). The liberal groupings –i.e., the parties united in the Egyptian Bloc plus the Reform and Development Party — obtained 11 percent of votes and 8.5 percent of seats, while the “socialist” groups brought together in the Revolution Continues Alliance gathered merely 3 percent of votes and 1.5 percent of seats.

South China Sea

In April 2009, we surveyed conflicts between China, neighbouring states and the U.S. over the resources of the South China Sea. We suggested that an armed clash between China and the US might be more likely in this region than in connection with a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Two recent developments support this prediction. In April a confrontation began between China and the Philippines over fishing rights around the Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal, which is claimed by both countries. This is one of 200 or so small islands, banks and reefs in the sea whose ownership is disputed.

This particular problem could disappear over the next few years as the sea level rises with global warming and the islands are submerged. But this will only make the issue of hegemony over the South China Sea as a whole more acute. In May, China took the assertion of its claims to a new stage by starting deep water drilling for oil in the sea. 

Mining asteroids

In May 2010, we discussed the possibility of mining Near Earth Asteroids in the context of the US space program. American capitalists have now brought this prospect one step closer by setting up the first asteroid-mining company –Planetary Resources, Inc. (Washington Post, April 24). 

We did get one thing wrong. We assumed that mineral-rich asteroids would be brought into earth orbit. It turns out, however, that planners are considering the idea of bringing them into orbit around the moon. So there is a close link between asteroid mining and the issue of control and exploitation of the moon (see Material World, December 2008).

Stefan

Anarchist economics (2012)

Book Review from the June 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Accumulation of Freedom: Writings on Anarchist Economics. AK Press. 2012

Anarchists have a reputation for being weak in economics. This collection of articles is an attempt to refute this. It doesn’t succeed entirely and in fact tends to confirm that most modern-day anarchists get their economic ideas from Marx (as did Bakunin who was once going to translate Capital into Russian). Some of the writers don’t seem to be anarchists at all, in particular Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert, the inventors of a blueprint for an ideal future society they call “parecon”. Hahnel seems to be a Keynesian, advocating more state intervention (yes!) as a way out of the present crisis and of avoiding future ones. Albert is a supporter of President Chavez of Venezuela, and urges people to vote for him.

Even so, the book does give a view of the range of opinion amongst anarchists. Some – the modern-day followers of Proudhon – are “market anarchists” who hold that there is nothing wrong with production for the market, except that the competitors should be worker-cooperatives rather than capitalist corporations and there should be no state to interfere in it. This is a minority view these days (though well represented in the US), but there are other anarchists who are against full, free-access communism (known as “collectivists” rather than “communists”) who favour instead relating people’s consumption to the amount of work they do.

Marx himself sort of endorsed this for the very early days of post-capitalist society and some in the Marxist tradition still argue for labour-time vouchers. We don’t. Neither do some anarchists. In fact, two contributors to this book describing themselves as “libertarian communists” – Deric Shannon and Scott Nappalos – argue against this in the same terms that we do. Nappalos even quotes from our pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative.

Nappalos says that, as a libertarian communist, he stands for “a society based on the abolition of remuneration in the form of wages and democratic control” and “an economy based on the destruction of the wage system, and a de-linking of the value of labor in production from the distribution of society’s wealth to its members.” He makes the valid point that it is not possible anyway to measure an individual’s contribution to production. He writes “in our time, production is largely social. The contribution of an individual is very difficult to isolate from the contributions of countless others that make work possible”. Any such attribution can only be arbitrary, as in the parecon blueprint, of which he says: “having co-workers judge each other’s work would turn gossip and infighting at work presently from an annoyance into a system of power over wages.”

Shannon’s criticism is directed more at “market anarchists”. He quotes another libertarian communist, Joseph Kay:

  “The assets of a co-op do not cease being capital when votes are taken on how they are used within a society of generalised commodity production and wage labour. That is to say there remains an imperative to accumulate with all the drive to minimise the labour time taken to do a task this requires, even in a co-op.”

Other articles describe anarchist economic practice such as factory occupations, setting up vegan cafés and campaigns directed at particular capitalist firms (called PEDCs or “political-economic disruptive campaigns”). However, these are not specifically anarchist activities, only activities in which some anarchists engage.

Adam Buick