Rear View: Rage against the machine (2016)

The Rear View Column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rage against the machine

‘Decelles, a scientist at Princeton, has just published some very telling research that illustrates the broader social costs of unequal treatment by focusing on a very specific instance. She looked at what happens when those travelling in economy class on a plane pass through the first-class section on the way to their seat, and found that this encouraged bad behaviour . . .  Much less predictable was the discovery that when economy-class travellers have shuffled past the luxurious first-class seats on their way to the back of the plane, first-class travellers become more badly behaved too. In fact . . . it’s possible the first-class traveller is just as prone to raging at the cabin crew as the one in economy, when – and this is the bit that matters – they both are made unavoidably aware of the difference in their status’ (theguardian.com, 4 May). These remarks would come as no surprise to Marx. He made a similar observation: ‘a house may be large or small; as long as the neighboring houses are likewise small, it satisfies all social requirement for a residence. But let there arise next to the little house a palace, and the little house shrinks to a hut. The little house now makes it clear that its inmate has no social position at all to maintain’.

Work, work, work

Socialism will not see the end of all boring work, but many occupations considered so will simply not exist as a result of automation or historical redundancy. A world of production for use not profit will have no use for banks, bookmakers, cashiers, economists, estate agents, loan sharks, security staff, stock brokers, etc. This should be of interest to wage slaves everywhere, including 44-year-old Parisian Frédéric Desnard, who ‘. . .  is demanding more than $400,000 from his former employer, a perfume enterprise, as compensation for the boredom it allegedly caused. According to the Frenchman, the company should be held responsible for mental and other health damages’ (washingtonpost.com, 5 May). Frederic also states that he was ‘ashamed to be paid to do nothing’. Usually being paid to do nothing, or nothing useful, is the preserve of the capitalist. Bored members of the 1 percent are welcome to apply for membership of the Socialist Party and do something more meaningful instead. Capitalism stinks: vive la révolution!

Money first, medicine second

Who needs gods when we can make the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and bring back the dead? We can perform many other miracles, but capitalism rather than lack of ardent prayer gets in the way. We can cure many diseases once considered fatal. ‘Hepatitis C-related deaths reached an all-time high in 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday, surpassing total combined deaths from 60 other infectious diseases including HIV, pneumococcal disease and tuberculosis. The increase occurred despite recent advances in medications that can cure most infections within three months’ (cnn.com, 4 May). Treatments are developed with profit not people in mind. Can’t pay, can’t have. This is the situation throughout the world. In central and west Africa as many as five million AIDS sufferers have no access to anti-retroviral drugs. Former South African President Thabo Mbeki promoted alternative remedies such as vinegar rather than ARVs, which saved the state’s funds at cost of at least 300,000 lives.

Abortion

‘There are 49 countries in the world today where abortion is still completely illegal. In many more, it is legal only under the narrow pretext of saving a woman’s life, and many other countries have strict regulations relating to abortion that ultimately take away a women’s control over their own bodies even in cases of rape or incest’ (indy100.independent.co.uk, 1 May). Celibate men dressed in frocks, often with more interest in young boys than women, expect their pronouncements on sex to be taken seriously. Lack of sex education and access to contraception as well as the pervasive poison of long dead generations are driving pregnancies among girls and women throughout the world. Lack of pre- and postnatal care for millions results in unnecessary deaths. You know the solution.

50 Years Ago: China’s Bomb (2016)

The 50 Years Ago column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Good news for all lovers of militarism and destruction was that China detonated her third nuclear bomb ― it may even have been a hydrogen one.

Good news, also, for all lovers of the distortion of words was that this latest test was described by Peking as ‘a great victory for the party’s general line of Socialist construction.’

Good news for all connoisseurs of hypocrisy was that the State Department condemned the test because of its effect on the atmosphere ― as if the United States had never exploded nuclear weapons in the air, and as if they are not continuing to test the things underground.

The Chinese bomb is yet another lap in the desperate nuclear arms race which has been in progress since Hiroshima. As each new country joins the race it justifies its presence with lies about its concern for peace and world security.

And the countries who are already in the race always ‘deplore’ and ‘condemn’ and murmur about having a disarmament conference somewhere, sometime ― because they are concerned about any threat to their dominant standing in the world.

China is a rising capitalist power, and she has paid for her entry in the race in the coin which all the others have used and which is the only one universally recognised ― force.

If it were not so terrifying it would be laughable that this onward march to destruction should be called Socialism. We live now in a society of madness, in which the very words we use often lose all sense and meaning.

Happily, there is one band who work determinedly to keep the word Socialism sane and clean, and who will not have it confused with the terrorism and hypocrisy of capitalism.

[From News in Review, Socialist Standard, June 1966.]

Scarcity and Infinite Wants: The Founding Myths of Economics (2016)

From the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you open any textbook on economics you will find the definition at the beginning as to what economics is will include the concept of ‘scarcity’. On the one side, it is taught, there are scarce resources and, on the other side, unlimited wants, and that economics is the study of the choices people make (as individuals and societies) to deal with this.

However, the concept of ‘scarcity’ used in these definitions is an abnormal and circular one and human wants are not unlimited. The relationship between scarce resources and unlimited wants is not what economics actually studies. The definition above is an ideological construct to justify one particular way of organising the production and distribution of goods and services – the capitalist system of production for profit, involving markets, money, prices, profits, wages, interest, banks, etc. That’s what economics really studies.

What is scarcity?

When someone says that something is scarce what comes to your mind? Probably you think that there’s not enough of it, that it’s in short supply. That’s the normal usage, but for modern academic economics it’s something rather different. In his widely used textbook Economics Paul Samuelson writes of ‘the law of scarcity’. Actually, it’s not a law but a definition. In setting it down Samuelson contrasts scarcity to a situation where ‘an infinite amount of every good could be produced’. The opening chapter of another American textbook, with the same title, by Ralph T. Byrns and Gerard W. Stone is entitled ‘Economics: The Study of Scarcity and Choice’. One paragraph, headed ‘Scarcity’, starts: ‘A world in which all human wants are instantly fulfilled is hard to imagine.’ Yes, it is. In fact it’s preposterous.

But that’s what’s behind what economics means by ‘scarcity’ – it’s the absence of an infinite amount of every resource and every good, the absence of a state of affairs in which everything would be provided free by nature, in which, as in the mediaeval legend of the Land of Cockayne, geese would fly around ready-cooked saying ‘eat me!’ And we’re supposed to take their definition seriously.

It’s the same with what economics means by what is normally regarded as the opposite of scarcity – abundance. The normal definition of this is, to quote a few dictionaries, ‘plenty’, ‘more than enough’, and even ‘ample sufficiency’. It does not mean everything being what economics calls ‘free goods’. ‘Free goods’, in fact, is the last trace in economics of the Labour Theory of Value, which was embraced by Adam Smith and David Ricardo as well as by Karl Marx, since they are goods that are available without having to be the product of human labour. They are ‘free’ because no labour has to be expended to produce them.

So, economics is defining ‘scarcity’ is such a way that it exists by definition and irrespective of human needs; that it’s part of the human condition. In a way it is, though this is a strange way of putting it. A much more straightforward way would be to say that humans have to produce by their own work what they need. But that of course leads back to the dreaded Labour Theory of Value as it would bring out that the only sort of goods that economics is interested in are those that are the products of human labour, past and present.

But this definition of scarcity is still not adequate for the ideological aim of justifying a system where people’s consumption is rationed by money. The imagined killer argument here is that productive resources, however abundant (in the normal sense), will never be enough to satisfy human needs and wants as these are ‘unlimited’. So there will always be a need to ration what people can consume.

This view is stated very clearly in the Byrns and Stone textbook in its definition of economics:

‘Economics is the study of how individuals and societies allocate limited resources to try to satisfy their unlimited wants.’

On the same page there’s ‘Figure 1: The Origins of Scarcity’ which aims to illustrate this. On the left side there’s ‘Limited Resources and Time’ and on the right side there’s a list of ‘Virtually Unlimited Human Wants’. This is introduced by a statement which already begs the question of the existence of a system with monetary incomes and spending:

‘Scarcity occurs because our limited resources and time can only yield limited production and income, but people’s needs are virtually unlimited. Output is produced by using knowledge (technology) to apply energy to a blend of resources. Production, in turn, generates the income people spend on the limited goods and services available.’

What are human needs?

Philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists. sociologists, nutritionists and others have argued over the definition of both ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ but clearly there is, to coin a phrase, a ‘hierarchy of needs’ based on, first of all, physiological/biological needs, primarily food. But ‘Man does not live by bread alone’ as humans are social animals and have other needs beyond this level, basically to be members of a community and to have social recognition and esteem within it. This is not purely social but has a material aspect to it as what a person consumes affects how they are socially regarded, how they regard themselves, and what their aspirations are. In other words, ‘wants’ are socially-determined, not just a matter of individual whim. They are determined by society, not by biology in the way that basic human needs are (though even how these too are met is socially-determined).

So we’ve got: (1) Basic, physiological needs; (2) Non-material, social/psychological needs; and (3) Material needs and wants arising out of both of these. These categories can be applied to the textbook’s list of ‘Virtually Unlimited Human Wants’.

The list contains what can be regarded as basic needs: food, clothing, housing, etc.

It also contains some goods to meet people’s survival needs over and above the minimum to stay alive, e.g: transportation, comfort, good health but also useful objects such as microwaves, telephones, washing machines, computers, CDs, CD players, VCRs. But there is no problem in producing enough of these for everyone. In fact most people have already got them now. (It’s not certain, though, that people still want CD players and video recorders but the book came out in 1992 – another example of how wants are socially determined and depend on what’s available).

And then there’s non-material, social needs: recognition, sense of personal worth, peace of mind, success in life.

And finally, and this is where it becomes revealing, the material goods to satisfy these non-material needs: jewellery, three-car garage, golf lessons, plastic surgery, swimming pool, Hawaiian vacations, fancy automobiles, ski boats, yachts, designer wardrobes, country estate.

Non-material needs (such as the listed recognition, sense of personal worth, and success in life) can be met in a number of ways depending on what kind of society people have been brought up in and live in. The textbook’s list of ways to meet them today clearly reflects a society divided into rich and non-rich where to be rich is a measure of success in life and a way of gaining recognition.

The dogma of unlimited human wants which economics preaches assumes such a society and that wants are infinite because the non-rich aspire to be rich and the rich want to be richer. This latter itself is an internalisation by the rich of the fact that capitalism is a system of endless capital accumulation.

The ‘wants’ that capitalist society generates may well be ‘virtually unlimited’ but capitalism is not the only way of producing and distributing wealth nor of satisfying people’s need for recognition, sense of personal worth, and success in life. These needs can be met in other ways in a different society and have been in past and would be in a socialist society of social equals producing to satisfy people’s needs rather than for sale with a view to profits and their accumulation as capital.

Adam Buick

Exhibition Review: 'Imitation of Life' (2016)

Michael Armitage, Campus Divas

Exhibition Review from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imitation of Life was a 1959 film, directed by Douglas Sirk, that dealt with issues of ‘race’ and gender in the US. One of its characters was a black woman whose daughter had a light-enough skin to pass as white, and the film looked at how successful she was in making her way in the world. The film was controversial at the time, and remains so, in terms of the extent to which it questioned or reinforced stereotypes about black people.

Now an exhibition of the same title is on at the Home arts centre in Manchester. Its sub-title is Melodrama and Race in the 21st Century, with ‘melodrama’ meaning something which is exaggerated and appeals to the emotions. Works by twelve artists are displayed.

Photos by Sophia Al-Maria deal with facial whitening creams, which are produced to be sold in South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Many people in India are obsessed with having lighter-coloured skin. The packaging of the products is distorted in these shots, presumably echoing the faces to which these creams are applied.

Martine Syms looks at American situation comedies. The Cosby Show, which ran from 1984 to 1992, was attractive to a black audience as it showed black people as just like anyone else, but it erased ideas of black struggle.

Jayson Musson provides a video, using his alter ego Hennessy Youngman, on ‘How to be a successful black artist’ (it is available on YouTube). Success involves, for instance, being angry, which can be achieved by looking at a photo of Emmett Till in his coffin (Till was beaten and shot in Mississippi in 1955 at the age of fourteen after speaking to a married white woman). If all else fails, fall back on slavery, as white people lack a comparable shared cultural experience. White people, he claims, do not want to understand black artists, as this would mean the artists being just like the white spectator. This is clearly satirical, but its aim is to comment on power relationships and hierarchies within the art world, since black artists (and women) are under-represented in galleries.

So an exhibition that different visitors will quite likely react to in different ways. But whether it is quite as significant as the curators claim is another question.  

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Great Men of Straw (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Items in the news last month included a NASA report that April was the seventh month in a row to break global temperature records, that five Solomon Islands have now disappeared underwater, that the Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, and that the first ever global assessment, from botanists at London's Kew Gardens, has declared that 21 percent of all plant species are now under threat of extinction.

This litany of climate-related misery was not in the least relieved by news that politicians have completed the business of ratifying the Paris Climate accord, whereby the world's nations will join arm-in-arm and shoulder-to-shoulder to fight climate change with their combined unstoppable forces of piety, chewed lips and crossed fingers.

It surely won't be just socialists who, on reading the paper every morning, have that familiar Solomon-sinking feeling that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and nobody, especially not the capitalist politicians, has a blind clue what to do about it.

It's anybody's guess what effect climate change will have on global politics in the future. Perhaps the world will look over the precipice and experience a dramatic epiphany and adopt world socialism in a process which the German sociologist Ulrich Beck described as 'emancipatory catastrophism' (New Scientist, 30 April). Somehow though we don't think so. The best way to make a house habitable is not to burn it down first.

An interesting clue about climatic effects in history was reported recently by a team of volcanologists and historians who looked at events in Roman history from around 250 BC and matched them with evidence (from Antarctic ice cores et al) of volcanic eruptions (New Scientist, 7 May). The team claims a close correlation between eruptions and domestic uprisings in Ptolemaic Egypt, due to poor rainfall in the Ethiopian uplands and corresponding flood failures in the Nile valley, leading to failed harvests. They argue that eight out of ten documented revolts against the Ptolemaic rulers started within two years of an eruption. Ultimately, runs the reasoning, this weakening of Egypt led to the defeat of Anthony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 BC, which opened the way for the Augustan Empire and the beginnings of the modern western world.

You can argue the pros and cons of this fun idea. Clearly the modern world doesn't owe its origins to the teleological absurdity of a couple of volcanoes going off pop at crucial moments. For one thing, Egypt was not especially weak, economically speaking, as was shown by the fact that Marc Anthony stopped the supply of Egyptian grain, upon which Rome heavily relied, in order to blackmail the Senate. As for Actium, Octavian's general Agrippa probably ought to have some credit, and besides it may just be that the Egyptians were never that great at winning sea battles - if you look at a Wikipedia list of ancient naval battles, there are numerous Egyptian naval defeats and the only instance of a victory was c 1190 BC against an unidentified opponent (the 'Sea Peoples'), making the event more legend than fact.

Quibbles aside, the thing to note in all this is that you never hear anybody, scientist or historian or for that matter the bloke down the pub, nowadays saying things like 'That Augustus (or maybe Julius Caesar) was a genius, you know, we wouldn't be anywhere today without him.' It's worth noting this because in Victorian times the dominant view was somewhat different, as summed up by Thomas Carlyle: 'the history of the world is but the biography of great men' (and he meant men). This 'heroic' view, set out in his 1841 book On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, gave scant consideration to social conditions, economic affairs or other environmental circumstances and instead saw history rather like a mute and passive baton passed from one hero to the next, to do with as they saw fit. The only reason to study history, as Carlyle saw it, was to understand heroes like Muhammad, Pericles or Napoleon in order to behave more like them.

The obvious fact that most people are not in a position to behave like these 'heroes' (and would be locked up in a psyche ward if they did) means that they don't count for anything at all and are written out of history as irrelevant. Small wonder then that the heroic view flattered the conceits of the bourgeoisie and was also popular with intellectual academicians like Nietzsche.

Not everyone was persuaded. Herbert Spencer considered the heroic view as bordering on infantile and responded furiously that 'before he (the great man) can remake his society, his society must make him', an argument that socialists more generally associate with Karl Marx and the materialist conception of history.

In the materialist view, change can occur due to many non-material factors, whether social, psychological (or heroic), cultural or historical, but economic conditions tend usually to be the crucial and generally decisive factor. Marx used the terms base and superstructure, and we can envisage this as a piece of land with buildings on it. Thus, a fire in an upper storey of one cultural building (say paedophile scandals in the Catholic Church) might have some small effect on other structures but none at all on the material foundations of society. In contrast, an earthquake in the economic base, the land itself, would certainly upset all the cultural structures built on top of it.

O tempora, o mores. Nowadays the materialist perspective has achieved orthodoxy among academic historians (Carlyle would be flunked out of college), while workers in general are conspicuously divided between materialists on the one hand and hero-worshippers on the other. This is a big problem because how you look at history deeply influences what you intend to do and can expect to achieve in the future.

Materialists ought to be socialists because they instinctively grasp that real change can only occur through a shaking up of the economic base of society, or what we call revolution. The hero-worshippers continue to hope in the face of all the evidence for a hero to emerge and save them, in the form of some politician or demagogue, and are thus grasping at nothing at all except straws and straw men.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: Give Us the Vote (2016)

The Material World column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right to vote matters little if you can’t cast your vote. On the basis of its claim to be defenders of democracy one would expect the United States of America to be in the forefront of encouraging participation in the electoral process since voting is held up as the foundation of democracy. Over 100 million Americans will cast a ballot in November’s presidential election but many will face disenfranchisement — those without IDs, those convicted of crimes, those that need to work, those that can't find childcare, those that can't travel, and often this disenfranchisement is deliberate. In 2008, the Supreme Court opened the door to more restrictive voting procedures when it upheld an Indiana law that required all voters casting a ballot in person to present a federal or Indiana photo ID. Since 2010, many other states have either introduced restrictive voter procedures or tightened up those in operation. Events are, of course, currently unfolding as legal challenges are being made to restrictive laws.

The American Civil Liberties Union noted that new restrictions on voting will affect up to 80 million and critics argue that photo ID laws create a financial barrier to the ballot box. Former Attorney General Eric Holder compared the laws to a poll tax during the ‘Jim Crow Era’ when Southern states imposed voting fees, to discourage blacks from voting. About 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don’t have government-issued photo ID and many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome. While many states with strict laws offer a free state ID, these require documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25. Researchers found that states with a strict photo ID law saw a significant decrease in turnout among minority and immigrant voters and an increased gap between white and non-white voters.

Some states are also trimming back or eliminating measures which bolster electoral participation by minority and younger voters. Eight states have enacted new laws cutting back on early voting days and hours.  In 2013, North Carolina reduced early voting days from 17 to 10, ended the ability to register and cast a vote on the same day and abolished a pre-registration programme for 16- and 17-year-olds. But one of the major barriers to universal suffrage is the disenfranchisement of ex-prisoners.

The Constitution permits states to adopt rules about disenfranchisement ‘for participation in rebellion, or other crime’ [our emphasis], by the Fourteenth Amendment. Individual states themselves decide which crimes could be grounds for disenfranchisement so laws vary from state to state. There were 1.2 million in 1976 denied the right to vote due to felony disenfranchisement. In 2008 over 5.3 million people. Nationally in 2012, an estimated 5.85 million Americans are denied the vote because of laws that prohibit voting by people with felony convictions.

Due to the racial disparities in the criminal justice system, this has resulted in one in every thirteen African Americans unable to vote. The disenfranchisement of felons was used by Southern states combined with other tactics to neutralise the black electorate, in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment, which ostensibly guaranteed African Americans the vote. A study found that the larger the state’s black population, the more likely the state was to pass the most stringent laws that permanently denied people convicted of crimes the right to vote. In three states (Florida, Kentucky, and Virginia) by 2014, more than one in five black adults were disenfranchised. Very different from Maine and Vermont where there is no significant black population and who have placed no restrictions on voting rights for people convicted and actually allow inmates to vote from prison (something the UK still doesn’t.)

Felony disenfranchisement is an obstacle to participation in civic life. Conditions have improved for at least 200,000 Virginian ex-felons who have served their time and had their right to vote restored by the Governor. He explained, ‘These individuals have completed their sentences. They have atoned for their actions. They live, work and raise families in communities all across the commonwealth, and they will continue to contribute to our communities, but they now will do it with the full rights of citizens.’

The socialist position upon all this is that we can fully expect sections of the ruling class to gerrymander elections to protect their interests but as long as the system is sufficiently democratic to provide a mandate from the majority and reflect the will of the majority then we will make use of what exists, warts and all.

ALJO

Living on Tick (2016)

From the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Shakespeare’s Shylock to Dickens’ Scrooge, moneylenders have generally had a bad literary press, probably revealing people’s instinctive reaction to them, but their place in society remains central. We examine the role of debt in working-class life.

Robert Roberts’ The Classic Slum describes life in Salford in the first part of last century. The pawnshop was an essential part of the local community; many people were dependent on the short-term loans offered, with women often pawning the family’s ‘best’ clothes on Monday until the following Saturday. There was a social hierarchy among the working class, with skilled workers at the top, and various ‘disreputable’ individuals at the bottom; and position ‘was judged not only by what one possessed but also by what one pawned’. True destitution meant pawning not just clothes but also pots and rugs, and finally not being able to redeem what had been left with the broker. The interest charged was usually a penny in the shilling per week; sky-high, but less than the moneylender, who charged threepence in the shilling per week.

Pawnbroking is not now the widespread industry it was in the days Roberts was writing about, but it began to grow again from the 1980s. There are now over two million loans a year, and the market as a whole is worth £850m, though the average loan is less than £200 and is for three or four months. The National Pawnbrokers Association states that 88 percent of loans are redeemed, but that still leaves around 250,000 which are not (though this does not mean that the value of the goods has been completely lost). The NPA describes pawnbroking as ‘a serious alternative to using the services provided by the High Street bank’ and ‘a modern, friendly and convenient way of getting cash quickly’. They claim it is cheaper than a bank loan or using a payday lender.

In July 1954 war-time food rationing came to an end, as did restrictions on hire-purchase (‘never-never’) agreements for consumer durables such as radios, fridges and vacuum cleaners. This meant buying what were then relative ‘luxuries’, in contrast to buying essentials such as furniture this way back in the 30s. Nowadays, hire purchase is often used in buying cars, including companies buying a fleet of cars. For personal consumers, it avoids the need to pay a big sum up-front, but it can lead to problems: if you return an item after paying less than half its cost, you have to pay enough on top of what you’ve already paid to make up that half cost (so you might get just three months’ use of something but have to pay a year’s worth of instalments).

The extreme case of hire-purchase is that of the weekly payment stores, which make big profits, primarily from the massive interest rates they charge on their loans and the service cover they also sell. Back in 2012 the Guardian gave an example of an oven that could be bought from one such company for £562 (or £389 elsewhere) but would cost a whopping £1433 if bought on weekly instalments from that same company with service cover over three years. Sales pressure plus an inability to pay by other means can easily result in people taking on such commitments without quite realising what they are letting themselves in for.

If people are having trouble repaying any kind of debt, they may well have recourse to one of the payday loan companies that now exist on almost every high street. But these again are incredibly expensive, with annual interest rates sometimes topping several hundred percent. The debt charity Step Change gives an example of someone borrowing just £200 for twenty days at the maximum allowable rate of 0.8 percent a day. If you repaid the loan on time, you would pay back £232, which is already quite a stiff rate of interest. But if you are late, then the interest mounts up, a late fee is added and you have to pay interest on the late fee. If you are ninety days late repaying, you would repay £400 (double the original loan, and the legal maximum that can be charged).

As this suggests, being poor is in itself expensive. Using prepayment meters for energy is more expensive than a standard tariff; and borrowing money means a higher rate of interest if you do not have a good credit record. No wonder debt counselling has become a minor industry in its own right. Some writers have even referred to there being a ‘poverty industry’.

Mortgages are of course the biggest source of debt, while students typically have over £40,000 in debt when they graduate. But plenty of people borrow – especially from payday loan companies and even doorstep lenders – to pay for everyday expenses such as food and energy as they struggle to make it to the next payday. They also borrow to pay for Christmas and so avoid disappointing their kids. And they borrow to pay off existing debts, which can swiftly lead to things spiralling out of control. Losing your job, falling ill, the break-up of a relationship: all these can tip people over the edge into chronic indebtedness.

The Money Charity provides a great many statistics on the extent of debt. For instance, in February this year, the average debt per household, including mortgages, was over £54,000. Outstanding consumer credit lending was £180bn, including £63bn on credit cards. Every day over two hundred people are declared insolvent or bankrupt, and twenty-five properties are repossessed. Other sources have noted the big increase in household debt over the last year or so, with the average increasing by over a third to £13,500 (mortgages aside). Shelter reported that one in ten parents thought that they might be unable to pay their rent or mortgage bills in January this year. Moreover, in March the increase in borrowing was the biggest since March 2005, before the recession began, leading debt charities to become increasingly worried.

The definition of ‘problem debt’ is when a family pays more than 25 percent of their gross monthly pay on servicing unsecured debts, and this applied to 3.2 million families by 2014 (up from 2.5 million in 2012). The pressure of debt can be overwhelming. In the words of one man who eventually did cope with his problems: ‘I felt like I was drowning, felt trapped. There was no light coming from anywhere, it was horrendous. And at one point I did go really dark and I did want to end it all’ (BBC Online, 20 January). Some people do in fact commit suicide because of their debt problems. In November 2013, for instance, a 60-year-old man from Southampton killed himself after taking on £20,000 in debts from twelve payday loan firms: his jobseeker’s allowance had been stopped on the grounds that he was fit to work, even though he had an illness that prevented him from swallowing (Daily Mirror, 22 July 2014).

Pawnbroking dates back at least to Ancient Greece, but it takes capitalism, with the cash nexus touching almost all aspects of life, with the never-ending influence of advertising, and with the insecurity felt by many workers, to make so many people subject to the worry and pressure of debt.

                                                                                                                                     Paul Bennett

Cooking the Books: Mises is Irrelevant (2016)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 'Weekly Worker' (28 April) carried an interesting article by the Trotskyoid Hillel Ticktin which, unusually for someone from his political background, gave a good description of socialism which (also unusually) he called socialism:

‘A distinguishing mark of socialism is that distribution would operate according to need, rather than input … people will be able to walk into a distribution point and pick up what they need.’‘In a socialist society you would expect workers to work in the way that they judge is correct. Since a worker’s incentive under socialism is not money, they work as best they can in order that they not only fulfil what they are doing for the collectivity, but for themselves. You would expect that they would work as well as they can, without any need for discipline from outside.’

Curiously though, at one point he says ‘von Mises was right’. Mises, the arch-advocate of the dystopia of a free market capitalism, argued that in a socialist society, with common ownership and no free market in means of production, rational economic calculation would be impossible and that such a society would not last for long but would eventually break down in economic chaos. This was a circular argument in that he defined rational economic calculation as calculation based on prices set by the free play of market forces.

Ticktin was accepting Mises’s argument that in a situation where productive capacity is not enough to satisfy people’s needs, calculation in some general unit of account such as money or labour-time would be necessary. He speculates that Marx’s ‘period of the revolutionary transformation’ of capitalist into communist society during which he says this would have to be the case could last ‘let us say anything between 10 and 50 years.’

Ten years is one thing but fifty is another. Maybe in Marx’s day, in 1875, any such period might have been nearer to the fifty end. Today, however, in view of the tremendous development of the forces of production since then, even ten years seems on the long side for a period in which to re-orient production so as meet people’s needs, especially as, unlike Mises’s followers, Ticktin rejects that humans needs are infinite:

‘The bourgeois concept of the human being having infinite needs is ridiculous, but it is the basis of bourgeois economics. … In fact there is a limited amount that needs to be produced for a given society and consequently under socialism we will be able to identify the limited areas in which increased production is needed.’

Also, Ticktin accepts that there is an enormous amount of wasted production under capitalism whereas in socialism:

‘Obviously there will be no such thing as finance, and whole sections of economic activity will no longer exist because they are completely wasteful and unnecessary. There will be no arms production, no advertising and, of course, no City of London – you can go through the different wasteful forms that will cease to exist. It is quite clear that the standard of living could very quickly be raised if such waste is removed.’

So, once this waste is ‘very quickly’ removed, we would already have a situation of relative abundance and so should be able to move equally quickly to socialism and free access to available goods and services.

So, why would we need to go to the trouble – and waste – of setting up a vast bureaucracy to measure the labour-time content of everything with a view to reducing it to a minimum and an individual’s input to production with a view to calculating their entitlement to goods and services, when the supposed need for this is not going to last for long? Even Mises conceded that socialism could continue for a while without having recourse to his ‘rational economic calculation’.

Why did Syriza fail? (2016)

Book Review from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Syriza: Inside the Labyrinth. By Kevin Ovenden.  Pluto Press. 2015.

This is the first book issued by the new Left Book Club. An attempt at reviving the famous left-wing book series of the 1930s and 1940s, the new Left Book Club is part of the efforts of different shades of left-wing politicos to rejuvenate the Labour Party in the light of the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. In its promotional literature, it sees itself as supporting the efforts of the Momentum campaign group in trying to produce a substantial and lasting leftwards shift in the Labour Party and British politics more widely.

Kevin Ovenden’s book on the rise of Syriza in Greece is a sympathetic account of the rapid rise of that political party’s rise from left-wing fringe group to a party of government. It is a readable enough account but suffused throughout by the optimism that behind Syriza’s rise and resistance to government cuts and privatisations lay revolutionary possibilities. Take, for example, the strikes and occupations of the state broadcaster ERT whose workers had been made redundant en masse and whose occupation of their workplace and continued broadcasting on a voluntary basis in new collaborative ways that replaced prevailing hierarchical management control. Ovenden claims that these were ‘a lived experiment of how democratic participation and control might be extended deeper into the society – if the central structures of economic and state power were brought under control’ (p.62-3).

Now, we can agree that workers taking over the workplace and running it on a wageless, democratic basis does provide a basis for socialist optimism but not in the way that Ovenden does. Despite Ovenden’s claims that the radicalism that resulted in the election of Syriza was anti-capitalist his use of the phrase ‘brought under control’ hints at the role of state ownership envisaged in this process by many on the radical left. The outcome for the ERT workers was to be re-employed by the state following the election of the Syriza government in 2015. Whatever revolutionary potential may be latent in the action of ERT workers they were not opened up by its end in state ownership. Whatever hope such actions inspire for socialists, without the intention to infuse them with a consciousness of the limitations of capitalism in serving human development in a fuller way then it can only be a transitory protest. If political action is to be meaningfully anti-capitalist it must not only have a clear idea of what capitalism is but of what it is not, a clear idea of what it is to be replaced with. Not only was action such as that of the ERT workers a minority experience in the struggles against government cuts and attacks on pay and conditions of employment but even within the radicalised minority there was and is no clear idea of how Syriza’s putative anti-capitalism was anything different from what had been tried before by left-wing governments of various hues. Essentially what was put forward was a change of management with radical intentions but still having to create favourable conditions for Greek capitalism or risk a worsening of state finances that would result in even greater cuts in expenditure than were already occurring.

The needs of capital to self-expand, that is, for economies to grow, is of its nature. Capitalists or politicians can no more get around this than Canute could hold back the tide. This was a central theme of Karl Marx who repeatedly wrote of capitalists as the personification of economic categories. Capitalists were (and remain)’embodiments of particular class relations and class-interests… the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remain’ (Capital, Vol. 1, Preface to German 1867 edition). It is not a matter of ethics, then, of capitalists and their crony politicians being bad men and women. It is that for capital to self-expand, for national economies to grow, certain requirements need to be met. As Marx colourfully put it, capital ‘lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Capital, Vol.1, p. 342). Politicians elected to run capitalism such as Alexis Tsipras, however sincere, can only tweak the amount of blood the vampire sucks but suck blood he must. Working class protest can only become revolutionary when it reflects on the nature of capitalism and its essentially exploitative basis, the inability of the economic basis of capitalism to allow workers full and free access to the results of its collective labour and demands its emancipation from wage slavery. The vampire is such by nature and must be slain – it cannot be befriended or counselled to suck blood benevolently.

Ovenden’s account stops as the story of Syriza starts to unravel with the acceptance of harsher terms on the extension of Greek government debt rather than the promises of easier terms or an alternative strategy (such as Greek withdrawal from the EU and the euro). Ovenden quotes from the left of Syriza on the unnecessary and defenceless abandonment of any alternative strategy, such as Younis Varoufakis and Costas Lapavitsas. The latter (a professor of economics in London and former Syriza MP) has commented that ‘the Syriza party is faithfully implementing the austerity policies that it once derided’ (Guardian 25 January) and that ‘Syriza is the first example of a government of the left that has not simply failed to deliver on its promises but also adopted the programme of the opposition, wholesale’. It is far from the first. The British Labour government in the late 1970s and the French ‘Socialist’ government in early 1980s spring quickly to mind but there are many other recent examples. Lapavitsas argued that ‘the Syriza leadership was convinced that if it rejected a new bailout, European lenders would buckle in the face of generalised financial and political unrest. The risks to the Eurozone were, they presumed, greater than the risks to Greece. If Syriza negotiated hard, it would be offered an “honourable compromise” relaxing austerity and lightening the national debt.’ The Syriza leadership were over optimistic to the point of delusion and unprepared to actually follow up with an alternative economic policy, which would have involved the exit of capital from the Greek economy. Therefore, the ‘EU calmly turned off the liquidity tap at the European Central Bank, and refused to give a penny of additional financial support until Greece complied.’ Lapavitsas (and Ovenden) conclude that the lesson for working class politics is to be prepared to break away from the EU and its monetary policy in order to break with neoliberal austerity politics as if life in capitalism before neoliberalism was a bed of roses. Lapavitsas is concerned that the failure of Syriza to deliver radical change encourages the perception that ‘austerity is the only way and nothing can ever change’. However, it is not politicians that shape capitalism but capitalism that shapes them. The vampire always needs to feed.

Colin Skelly

Proper Gander: Monarchy Malarkey (2016)

The TV Review column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prince Charles finds out that he has a grown-up mixed-race son from a forgotten fling pre-Diana. Newly-pregnant Camilla fears that this will disrupt her plans for the Parker-Bowles dynasty. So she buys her new step-son a motorbike with faulty brakes, and after he dies in an accident her unborn child is back closer to being the heir to the throne. This is just one of the daft plot threads crammed into The Windsors, Channel 4’s soapy sitcom featuring caricatures of the royal family, or nearly all of them.

Prince William is played with a permanently furrowed brow and steely determination to be a helicopter pilot. His father doesn’t approve, and thinks that William only needed to be in the RAF so he could wear the uniform at his wedding. Kate has a wide-eyed enthusiasm about finding her place in the monarchy, even if her ‘Gypsy heritage’ risks being an embarrassment. Pippa Middleton is portrayed as a sneering, devious gold-digger ‘with a fantastic arse’. Envious of Kate’s promotion to royalty, she tries to inveigle herself into the clan by seducing Harry. He’s depicted as being a bit thick, with the occasional hint that he’s not Prince Charles’ son. Harry Enfield plays Charles, the only actor doing anything close to an impersonation. He fills his time overseeing an organic biscuit company and writing to the government about green issues like woodlice habitats. Camilla is impatient to be Queen and worried that Wills and Kate’s popularity will mean the line of succession to the throne will skip a generation. She works to sabotage their reputation among ‘the Great British scum’ by engineering Kate insulting a group of amputees by dressing as a peg-leg pirate.

Washed-up Fergie gets disappointed when she isn’t recognised and annoyed about having her nickname usurped by Alex Ferguson and the singer in the Black Eyed Peas. Beatrice and Eugenie are faced with having to support themselves, so they set up businesses as ‘online make-up tip girl sensations’ and then a dating app for aristocrats. They fix-up a date between Fergie and a caddish Prince Andrew hoping ‘we can be a happy family again, just like we were in January and February 1994’. Prince Edward’s TV production company folded long ago, so he tries to scrape some money together by working as an incompetent removals service and babysitter for Wills and Kate.

So far, Prince Philip only features in the sweary, racist letters he sends to his grandsons, reminding them that he’s ordered MI6 to assassinate Fergie if she goes within five miles of Buckingham Palace. The Queen has been conspicuous by her absence in the show, and doesn’t even get mentioned. Depicting her has been a risk the programme-makers haven’t wanted to take, perhaps mindful of the controversy when Spitting Image introduced a puppet of the Queen Mother. In the mid-’80s, many thought that mocking ‘the nation’s favourite granny’ was a step too far, and the producers of The Windsors haven’t wanted to take the equivalent step today. Despite the irreverence, the show doesn’t really want to risk offence or encourage republican feeling. The royals’ naivety about the world everyone else lives in is shown in an endearing way. Those who’ve failed to stay in the inner circle (Edward, Fergie, Beatrice, Eugenie) are likeable hard-up has-beens. Apart from Kate, those not in the royal bloodline (Pippa and Camilla) are portrayed as conniving harridans. The world outside the Windsors’ window is largely populated by stereotypes; Northerners wear cloth caps, put ferrets down their trousers and eat chip butties, while Gypsies tarmac drives, grow lucky heather and collect scrap metal. The programme tries to get away with this by pitching all the performances as too knowingly over-the-top to take seriously. The plotlines are also too overblown for the show to have much satirical bite.

The Windsors is the latest in the line of succession of royal caricatures on the telly. Its closest descendent is The Royals (recently shown on E!), a largely poorly-received American melodrama about a made-up royal family’s shenanigans. Spitting Image (1984 – 1996) remains the benchmark, and spawned similar successors like 2DTV (2001 – 2004), Animated Headcases (2008) and Newzoids (2015). Whereas these shows turned the royals into cartoon characters, Doubletake, a 2003 BBC2 series took a different approach. This featured celebrity lookalikes in personal or embarrassing situations, as if captured on CCTV or shaky hidden cameras. Images like doppelgangers of the Queen sitting on the toilet and Camilla in her underwear were intended to demythologise celebs, not make them even larger than life. In contrast, The Windsors is overdone and doesn’t have anything original to say, a bit like its subject matter.

Mike Foster

Obituaries: Bill Critchfield and Bernie Flitter (2016)

Obituaries from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bill Critchfield

Bill Critchfield died on 1 April. He was 91 years old. The official cause of death was pneumonia but this was a development of his remorseless decline, over some ten years, through Alzheimer's disease. He came from an extended family of which there were seven members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

During the war he volunteered to join the Air Force and he was sent to Canada to train as a Bomb Aimer. After returning to England he flew on a number of bombing raids over Germany. In 1945, with the end of the war in Europe he was posted to India where he completed the term of his time in the Air Force.

When he returned home it was to find his two brothers were members of the Socialist Party and after a lengthy period of disagreement with them he was convinced that he should do the same. He joined the Ealing Branch, where he took on several administrative jobs and regularly spoke to introduce the Party at street corner meetings, which were then a regular feature of our propaganda.  When, following the outbreak of the Korean War the Labour Government re-introduced military conscription Bill informed the Air Ministry that as a socialist he would refuse to be re-called. Towards the end of his life, with the cruel decline of his senses, he took comfort from the anti-war poems of the likes of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

RC

Bernie Flitter

We are saddened to have to report the death in April at the age of 90 of another longstanding comrade, Bernie Flitter. He joined the then Bloomsbury branch in 1943 after listening to our speakers in Hyde Park. He later transferred to Fulham branch where he was an active member and outdoor speaker in the 1940s and 50s. He earned his living as an accountant. Latterly he was a member of Central branch. Our condolences go to his wife, Marie, also a member, and family.

RC

This is life? (2016)

Book Review from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'This Is London: Life and Death in the World City'. By Ben Judah, Picador. 2016.

This is a sad, insightful and ultimately haunting insider account of life in London by a writer who can really write. It is a picture of what life is truly like for hundreds of thousands of London’s current inhabitants by someone determined to identify their struggles and recount their lives – people who most of us know are there, but perhaps never quite get to know. The Romanian beggars working for gangs to pay off their debts in the subways under Hyde Park Corner, the Mayfair Arab princess out of her mind on skunk most days because her every move is controlled by her father (even remotely via his security team), the itinerant Polish builders of Beckton creating the ‘dig down’ basement flats for the rich in Knightsbridge, the East European and Latin American street walkers of Ilford Lane, ever fearful of the next attack from a punter.

Judah’s opening lines tell us his motivation: ‘I have to see everything for myself. I don’t trust statistics. I don’t trust columnists. I don’t trust self-appointed spokesmen. I have to make up my own mind. This is why I am shivering again, in Victoria Coach station, at 6 am.’

By spending months trying to uncover the ‘other side’ of London to the one the tourists see, he has managed to create a fascinating and compelling book based on his experiences of the street. The facts are clear – as few as 45 percent of Londoners now are ‘white British’ and over a third have been born abroad. But this is not a UKIP manifesto in disguise, it is book that focuses on the lives of real people who are now more genuinely representative of those scraping a living in ‘the world city’ than the occupants of the glossy colour supplements and property magazines. These are the 95 percent of cleaners working for Transport for London who are immigrants, doing the job that others won’t do or can’t. The occupants of Zones 3 and 4 who have been pushed by the global elite out of central London – the traditional first home to UK immigrants – into what were once mainly white working class suburbs full of semis and terraces. This is where multi-occupancy now reigns courtesy of buy-to-let landlords, and life is precarious and often dangerous – the Edmontons and Leytons of this world, the Harlesdens and Neasdens. This is the world of pounds shops, ‘cash converters’, mobile phone un-locking, and pubs now converted into African churches, of betting shops, and fried chicken and kebabs.

You will have sensed this not an uplifting read. Some of the laziest racism, for instance, is to be found among poor, black evangelical Christians in Peckham, ever suspicious of the Asian shopkeepers they think fleece them at every turn. And when you have nothing, materialism and competition can be brutish enough and a descent to drink, drugs and desperate gambling close around the corner.

It is partly because of situations like this that socialists are socialists – not because of some abstract moral pity for those less fortunate, but because the society we live in is based on the need to keep us insecure and fearful, with a descent into the ‘underclass’ or ‘precariat’ all too vivid a misfortune for those who struggle every day in the grandly- named ‘market economy’.

Dave Perrin

Angry Christians, Hot Dogs and Venezuela (2016)

The Halo Halo! column from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A majority of millennials now reject capitalism’ reported the Washington Post (26 April) after a recent Harvard University poll concluded that 51 percent of people between 18 and 29 do not support the system and only 42 percent said they did. More interestingly, 33 percent said they supported socialism.

Let’s not start winding up the World Socialist Movement just yet though, our job isn’t quite done. The Washington Post pointed out that ‘Capitalism can mean different things to different people’, and noted ‘Bernie Sanders is profoundly changing how millennials think about politics’. Ah, Bernie Sanders, that American capitalist politician who thinks he’s a socialist. Perhaps someone should inform the Washington Post that ‘Socialism’, too, means different things to different people.

Whether the rightwing Christian Post website has been bamboozled by Bernie, too, is not clear but some joker seems to have told them that socialism has been established in Venezuela and they’re not happy about it. And that Harvard poll has pushed them right over the edge. Anyone browsing their website be warned, you can almost feel their anger and indignation blasting its way through cyberspace and smashing against the inside of your computer screen.

This survey, they say, ‘goes to show you that higher education can’t fix stupid – especially when it’s flowing from the mouths of anti-capitalist educators’. ‘These educators’ they go on, ‘take advantage of their captive audiences, rambling on with their vast “knowledge,” mistaking the blank stares and half-smiles in the room as “interest” having no idea that if they heard themselves in playback, they’d probably stab themselves with their pointing sticks’.

And we thought Christians were such nice, peaceful people. ‘Before all you anti-capitalists jump on the socialist bandwagon’, they warn us, ‘why not first take a look at what’s happening in Venezuela, that pitiful place on the globe where it takes a wheel barrel full of cash to buy a hot dog’. Ah, hot dogs are involved. No wonder they’re angry.

‘I know American socialists are far above eating hot dogs’ their writer explains, ‘and probably prefer munching on exotic tree bark, but if a hot dog is what’s available thanks to your beloved socialism, needing a wheel barrel full of cash to buy one is a bit much, wouldn’t you say?’

It descends into a bit of an incoherent rant after that, although a few paragraphs later we do get a clue about their anger or, at least, their confusion.

Still seething about nasty university lecturers who, although they don’t actually blame them for the economic situation in Venezuela, they do hold responsible for the result of the Harvard poll, and inform us, ‘Venezuela happened – amidst their attempts to paint a rosy picture of socialism, omitting from their lectures historical facts about the collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc’.

Well, Christian Post, here’s a historical fact for you.  There was no communism or socialism in Russia and the Eastern bloc, or in Venezuela for that matter. What they had in Russia, and in Venezuela was just another form of capitalism – administered by the state instead of by big business. And, as we saw in Russia, state administered capitalism is just as useless as private capitalism.

As for your concerns that ‘The International Monetary fund says this year Venezuela’s inflation rate will rise to 500% while other experts predict 700%. That’s why you need wheel barrels loaded with worthless cash to buy hot dogs’. Well, that’s capitalism for you – private or state run. And, we seem to recall, capitalist America too had a bit of a depression back in the 1930s.

And more recently (See wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States) ‘Recent census data shows that half the population qualifies as poor or low income, with one in five millennials living in poverty’ and ‘In 2011 child poverty reached record high levels, with 16.7 million children living in food insecure households’.

Rest assured, when we have real socialism, even in America you won’t need a wheel barrel (or wheelbarrow as we call them on this side of the pond) to collect your hot dog – you just won’t be that hungry.

Pass that on to Bernie, will you?

NW

In? Out? Big Business or Little England? (2016)

From the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the run-up to the referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union, we assess the views of the Far Left on this ‘vital’ issue.

Although divided into a 57 or more mutually antagonistic sects, an ever-expanding sea of alphabet soup,  many of them put up a surprisingly united front.

What say ye, oh my brothers?

SWP: We say OUT! Although diminished from its pre-Delta days, the Socialist Workers Party (Socialist Worker) is still the largest of the Left groupings. As such, it very much sets the pace in regards to the ‘questions of the day’. Its pamphlet, The EU, a left case for exit, gives a good account of the nature of the European Union. The dedication to neo-liberal economic policies, such as the infliction of austerity misery on the Greek people and widespread privatisation in the interest of the ‘fat cats’, is made clear. Equally, the creation of a murderous Fortress Europe policy to keep out migrants is spelt out, as is the fact that the EU is no source of progressive social reform. To weaken ‘British Imperialism’ vote no.

RS21/ Counterfire: We say OUT! These meaningless SWP splinters follow the example of their older brother.

SPEW: We say OUT! The ‘Socialist’ Party of England and Wales (formerly the Militant Tendency) (paper: The Socialist) says ‘We call for a vote to leave the capitalist EU, and to build a socialist Europe’ for much the same reasons as its arch rivals. They may not have noticed but their much-vaunted construction project has not even got to the planning stage. The choice on the ballot paper is not between a ‘socialist’ (whatever nonsense that might mean to them) Europe and a capitalist Europe but between a capitalist UK as a member of the capitalist EU and a capitalist stand-alone UK.  SPEW takes no part in the Lexit group, the anti-EU campaign group formed on 13 April.

CPB: We say OUT! The third (maybe second) largest Left party has an influence beyond its size due to its activism within the unions. Its pamphlet Britain and the EU: What next? sets out the pro-business agenda of the EU, its anti-democratic nature (pots and kettles?), the decline and fall of Delors’ Social Europe, pro-US origins as a political version of NATO, war-mongering interference in Ukraine and Yugoslavia. The Communist Party of Britain is the prime mover in Lexit. CPB General Secretary Robert Griffiths is the group’s chairman. To be fair, although the CPB are nay sayers, a fair crack of the whip is given to the INNERS in the CPB associatedMorning Star.  

CPBML: We say OUT (very loudly)! In a large and glossy handout, this group of ‘anti-revisionists’ say “Out of the EU!” The Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist), producer of Workers, is notorious for its nationalist stance. Much talk is there of ‘our country.’  Our country? No, Their country! Nation is a capitalist concept. They own, they control: We are their slaves who must break our mental programming. The workers of the world have no country. Even by Left standards, this group is a disgrace.

CL: We say OUT! The Communist League, an intrusion into the UK of the American MilitantTrotskyists, succinctly state ‘the challenge facing workers is to see our independent class interests… not to look to the capitalist rulers for protection – be they inside or outside the EU’. Quite right but this doesn’t stop them voting OUT.

NCP: We say OUT! The (not so) New Communist Party (New Worker) leaflet The truth about the EU features a cartoon of a trio of what look like B-17s bombing a town of peaceful demonstrators. While no one can ignore the neoliberal agenda of the EU, such alarmism is rather over the top. NATO is not at all the same thing.

SL/B: We say OUT! The Spartacist League/Britain, the Sparts, once known for their chanting, with publication Workers Hammer, decry the European Union as the ‘Enemy of Workers and Immigrants’ (aren’t migrants workers too?). But in or out austerity and racist anti-migrant policies will continue.

WRP: We say OUT! The orthodox Trotskyist Workers’ Revolutionary Party (daily paper: News Line, its masthead strangely Sun-like) says Vote Leave  to ‘bring down the broken Cameron government… bring in a workers government’.  A likely outcome  – we don’t think. And, plural or singular, workers don’t need governing.

CPGB-ML: We say OUT! Noisy and unapologetically Stalinist, the Communist Party of Great Britain Marxist-Leninist (paper: Proletarian), consider Brexit will ‘weaken British, European and even US imperialism’ (i.e., providing opportunities for Chinese, Russian and Arab imperialism) ‘taking our struggle for socialism one small step forward’ (or making not a blind bit of difference).

RCPB(ML): We say OUT! The Revolutionary Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist) (Line of March) holds that ‘working people themselves must set the agenda’. Quite right too. Yet the agenda of the referendum has already been set by the ruling class. By voting in their referendum, we are playing their game.

SLP: We say OUT! Scargill’s Socialist Labour Party ‘lambasts’ the ‘free movement of both labour and capital’ and boosts import controls on goods and people. The less said about this (especially the latter) the better.

ISLP: We say OUT! The Independent Socialist Labour Party – an anti-Scargill Scargillite – also go for the OUT vote.

RESPECT: I say OUT! The fan club of the man with the hat call the EU an ‘undemocratic plutocracy, a bankers’ Europe’. And is not the UK an undemocratic plutocracy, a bankers’ paradise? And did not the gorgeous one rethink his views after being booed when sharing a platform with Farage? He did not.

Against the flow

RCG: The Revolutionary Communist Group, very active backsliders from Trotskyism, is yet to declare. The publishers of Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! seem to have little interest - presumably because the effects on its beloved Irish, Palestinian, etc, etc, nationalism and Cuban state capitalism are negligible.

IMT: The International Marxist Tendency issuing Socialist Appeal, still boring within the Labour Party, are hedging their bets. ‘The task of Marxists… is not to come out in favour for either reactionary camp’. So neither an IN or an OUT. That’s a good start.

Workers Power: After nicely contrasting the ‘racist and chauvinist OUT campaigners’ to the ‘pro-capitalist/ neoliberal IN campaigners’, the fighters for a Fifth International (as if four weren’t bad enough) say IN! Workers Power (publishing the pleasantly pink Red Flag) is now entryist in the Labour Party. Which is an IN. Strange huh?

SR: Socialist Resistance ‘Ecosocialist Feminist Revolutionary’ are INNERS. Leader Alan Thornett simplistically aligns Europe and manufacturing (good) and US and finance capital (bad). Although the drawbacks of the European Union are noted, they call for the opposite vote to the chief leavers, UKIP and the “Tory Right” (aren’t they all that?).

AWL: The Alliance for Worker’s Liberty (Solidarity) stands for an IN vote, saying, in particular, it reduces ‘nationalist antagonisms’.  The AWL has always used hostility and contradictoriness to create a clear red line between it and the other Left groups. Its reasoning on this issue seems a little half-hearted.

SEP: Socialist Equality Party are for an active boycott. ‘No to the European Union – No to British nationalism!’ Fair enough. ‘For the unity of the British and European working class!”  And of the world, one might add. ‘For the United Socialist States of Europe!’ This slogan, thought up by Trotsky himself, has been used by INNERS and OUTERS and, here, by abstainers.

CPGB: The Communist Party of Great Britain (journal: Weekly Worker) also recommends a boycott of the referendum. Its essentially tactical reasons include opposition to British nationalism, opposition to the EU as a capitalist body, as well as a theoretical opposition to referenda as undemocratic.

How would ‘Brexit’ affect the working class in Britain?

Capitalism:  No change. The European Union is just as dedicated to free market capitalism and neoliberalism as the British government is or is likely to be. The latter’s austerity programme, independently arrived at and carried out, is just as brutal as the one that the EU imposed on Greece.

Working conditions: No change. For the average worker, in terms of pay and conditions, the benefits of membership or non-membership of the European Union are negligible. The days of the ‘Social Market Economy’ are long gone and will not return.

Civil rights: No change. In or out, we are dependent on our rulers,  on how much they think they can get away with.

Privatisation: No change. One aim of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is to ‘open up’ (privatise) health care and education. Does anyone believe that such a programme is not on the British government’s agenda anyhow? In any case, state bureaucrat or company director, a boss is still a boss.

Democracy: No change. The undemocratic nature of the European Union is matched by the undemocratic nature of the British state. In or out, we, the working class, have little or no say in the decision-making process. In the most crucial decisions, the endless blood-soaked ‘interventions’, even our ‘democratic’ representatives in parliament have little or no say.

Migration: No change. The European Union is responsible for the Mediterranean massacres, a direct result of the Fortress Europe policy. Would these deaths continue if the UK was not part of the EU? Of course. Would the Calais concentration camps still be there? Of course. And perhaps greatly swollen with Poles and Eastern Europeans too (we can only hope, think the UKIPers).

We say

A plague on both your houses!

Membership of the European Union is a concern for the capitalist class, not the working class. Because the master class is divided on this and cannot decide amongst themselves, they have passed the buck to ‘the people’ in the form of a referendum. Its timing is a cynical ploy by the Cameronian old boys’ club to head rival UKIP off at the pass. The referendum is a non-choice between two all but identical forms of capitalist oppression.

The outcome of the referendum can’t matter that much to the capitalist class – otherwise we would not have been asked. Have we been generously granted a referendum about the constant rounds of military intervention that have caused the deaths of millions? Or on global warming, a possible result of which might be the destruction of the entire planet? Or on nuclear weapons, the most colossal and dangerous waste of resources? Or on austerity, whose grinding misery has resulted in scores of suicides and deaths through stress?

Voting either IN or OUT is an act of class collaboration, to stand alongside either slimy representatives of finance capital like Cameron and Osborne or loathsome opportunists like Farage and Johnson. Your choice: Big Business or Little England. Those who swallow this are deluding themselves.

The working class interest lies in the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. This referendum is not worth the shedding of a single drop of working class ink.

Vote neither IN nor OUT. Either is a vote for capitalism. Instead, use the opportunity to positively express your desire for socialism. A ballot paper ‘spoilt’ for socialism is a happy ballot paper.

Kaz