Sting in the Tail: Perm x from No. 11 (1989)

The Sting in the Tail column from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Perm x from No. 11

It has recently been reported that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is a keen football pools investor.

We can only hope that he is a little bit more gifted in his pools forecasting efforts than in his budget forecasts.

For example in his budget of 1988 he confidently forecast that the inflation rate over the coming year would be 4 per cent and that the balance of payments deficit would be £4 billion.

In fact the inflation rate has turned out to be double his forecast and the balance of payments was more than treble his forecast.

Mr. Lawson received a terrible drubbing from his critics so his latest forecast is a little less confident. According to The Independent (11 April):

But Mr. Lawson was less certain of his predictions that the current account deficit would remain at £14.5 billion. The forecast, he said was "a genuine best guess" but "we Just simply don't know" whether It would be achieved.

In Mr. Lawson's defence it can be argued that the vagaries of form of Fulham or Partick Thistle are models of consistency compared to the unpredictability of the capitalist market place.

Libertarian?

Here's an interesting little publication from the Libertarian Alliance: Brian Micklethwait on Why I Support The Contras.

When it comes to fighting Communism, the most important rule is: win . . . it may well, for example, be unwise for the Contras to get caught torturing people, on the grounds that this hurts their support In Congress. But the answer is not for the Contras to surrender: It is for them to fight smarter and not get caught torturing people. If they can fight successfully without torturing people at all, then they should do that as well.

In Sickness and Health

In an attempt to generate funds the Mid-Glamorgan Health Authority has come up with a nice little earner.

According to a report in The Independent 11 April:

After shopping mails and one-armed bandits, contraception machines and the sale of puzzles and games to placate patients during the long wait in casualty, the NHS Is about to add another wheeze to the ranks of Its schemes for generating extra income — the car salesman.

Health is just another commodity Inside capitalism. If you have the money you can afford the £1,000 per night London Clinic, If not you can take your chance In the queue at some under-funded public hospital.

Red Sales in the Smart Set

Andrei Fyodorov lives in Moscow and his ambition is to become an old fashioned capitalist. He is all for the freedom of market forces, and is a real Russian Thatcherite. 

At present he is merely the manager of Moscow's first co-operative restaurant but he is about to branch into sales of computers and imported liquor. He also has a joint venture with Spanish businessmen to open a Spanish restaurant in Moscow and a Russian one in Barcelona.

His answer to complaints that his prices are too high is that he is in a monopoly situation and, like a good free marketeer, will charge whatever he can get away with.

Yet he is not a happy man, for although his workers have some shares in the business they don't work any harder than the ones he knew when he managed a state-controlled hotel.

But Fyodorov is no fool. He recognises that Russia is a long way from becoming a western-style economy because the workers cannot throw off overnight the anti free market history of the last 70 years.

He explains in The Guardian:

Millions of people in this country are against the market. They're afraid of prices going up. They fear inflation. They're against private enterprise because it’s a violation of socialism. Yet we don’t know what socialism is. It certainly doesn't exist here.

As we said, Andrei Is no fool.

Fyodorov and his like are as yet an insignificant force in Russia, but unless the die-hard central planners within Russia's ruling class manage to topple the dominant Gorbachev faction then these would-be capitalists will surely grow in wealth and seek a share in political power.

Holiday Planning

Last year the package holiday operators drew up their brochures for 1989. Thomson's, the biggest operator with 40 per cent of the market, estimated that the market would grow by 10 per cent but now find that It has SHRUNK by 10 per cent.

So Thomson's and its subsidiaries have cancelled around one million of their advertised holidays and some trade estimates put the number of cancellations by all the operators at two million, about 16 per cent of the total market.

Why did this happen? Well, the mild winter means that people don't have the same determination to "get some sun” when the holidays come round, and the big increase in interest rates for mortgages and personal borrowing ensures that many people will simply be unable to afford a holiday.

What it adds up to is that the anarchy of the market has triumphed once again. When the brochures were drawn up interest rates were much lower and the consumer spending spree was in full swing. Also, no one could forecast with any certainty what kind of winter we would be getting. True, the operators have their "experts" who try to take these and other factors into account but really, all they can do is make a guess and then hope.

But now that they've cancelled all those bedrooms in Spain, Yugoslavia, Greece, etc., what if we get a cold wet June or people make a late decision to get away after all? They will be clamouring for a holiday in the sun but the operators will be unable to supply them.

What was that about the perfectability of the market?

SPGB Meetings (1990)

Party News from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Libertarian attack (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A great deal of abuse is heaped on the Socialist Party by David McDonagh of the Libertarian Alliance, described by his organisation as a "libertarian writer and lecturer". McDonagh has filled the first issue of The Libertarian Student with stuff about the SPGB.

It consists of an "Address to Birmingham branch of the SPGB on the Virtue of Libertarianism or (Classical) Liberalism" and an article entitled "The Last Socialist Party". The first offering may have been all right as a talk but as a written piece it's disjointed and doesn't have a clear thread. John Rawls's theory of the "Original Position" keeps popping up and may be the key to the whole thing. But the explanation of it lacks clarity and this doesn't help the argument. We might expect better than this, because the Anarcho-Capitalists (or Libertarians) have a genuinely interesting case which can't be lightly dismissed. Unfortunately. McDonagh's piece makes you want to do just that because it's full of silly jibes that spoil and disperse the argument rather than give it weight. There is no need to repeat them but we can stick to the serious points which, with some effort, can be abstracted from the insults.

The basic argument is that you can't have socialism — a world moneyless society of free access without the market and without prices — because such a society would have no way of allocating what will always be scarce resources. "We would not know", says McDonagh "what to do without the market signals". And even "superabundance", he argues, would not solve the problem since the possible lines of production are infinite and "we cannot do all things at once". So, the argument goes on, even if water, for example, can be superabundant, "we could always be doing something else" and only the market can tell us the correct economic thing we should be doing. According to McDonagh, therefore, the practicalities of organisation make free access society impossible and what we should go for instead is a free market system operating throughout the world without states and with a single world currency.

McDonagh 's objection to socialism is one, he says, that the Socialist Party made no effort to answer till 1984 when it published an article in its bi-annual international journal. the World Socialist. The article didn't satisfy McDonagh but, for accuracy's sake, it should be said that a previous article on the topic had appeared in the Socialist Standard (December 1982), that other articles had dealt with it implicitly and that the Socialist Party has, since 1979, been debating with Libertarian opponents publicly and putting on public sale or hire tape recordings of these debates. And if before 1979 the Party had not dealt explicitly with the Libertarian point, this is because only since then has it started to be put to us. It may, as McDonagh tells us, have been around since the 1850s and been argued most strongly by Mises and Hayek in the 1920s. But if we didn't hear it. how could we answer it?

One thing is certain however. The Libertarians do have a serious argument which has to be answered. The best way to answer it would be to set out a blueprint for socialism showing exactly how resources can be efficiently planned and allocated without the market as an economic calculator. But this we cannot do: firstly because it would be quite undemocratic for the small minority we are now to think we can lay down detailed plans for how the majority must organise their democratically established society in the future; and secondly we have no way of knowing what the level of technology and expertise at the time of a socialist majority will allow in terms of planning and organisation. What we can do, however, and what we are doing is to put forward informed suggestions as to how a socialist majority, if it inherited the present level of technology and expertise, might decide to co-operatively organise the world's resources on the basis of production for need. It's probably true, as McDonagh suggests, that we don't have enough data to do this with any accuracy. However, this is not because the data can never be available but because capitalism, working as it does through the market, does not give the impetus for the large social task of assembling that data to be undertaken. A growing conscious majority anxious for socialism will have the impetus to undertake that task and will certainly make detailed democratic plans ahead of taking political power about how socialist society will be organised.

The speculative work we are doing at present on the details of socialist organisation won't of course satisfy the Libertarians' demand for a blueprint. But then it's not meant to be a blueprint. It's meant to be a move towards demonstrating in a practical way that it's well within the skills, the techniques, the intelligence and the powers of organisation of collective humanity to run the planet in its own common interest.

More about this is to be found in the recent pamphlet, From Capitalism to Socialism: How We Live and How We Could Live and in the soon to be published Socialism as a Practical Alternative. All Anarcho-Capitalists should read both.

Howard Moss

Moscow's orphans (1998)

Book Review from the January 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The British Communist Movement and Moscow’, by Mike Mosbacher. Libertarian Alliance, 1997.

Have you ever wondered what became of the Communist Party after the collapse of state capitalism in Russia and East Europe? This short pamphlet will tell you.

The official Communist Party – or Communist Party of Great Britain, to give its full name, by which it was only known on formal occasions and in an international context – in effect dissolved itself in 1991 when it changed its name to Democratic Left and became a trendy left green-feminist-gay pressure group. Its previous policies, however, were kept alive by the Communist Party of Britain (CPB) which broke away in 1988 and which still publishes the Morning Star. In Scotland another group of ex-CPers set up the Communist Party of Scotland in 1992. An earlier breakaway in 1977, the New Communist Party, still exists but has become, according to Mosbacher. little more than a group denying the atrocities that occurred under Stalin in the same irrational way as Nazis deny those that occurred under Hitler.

Immediately after the CPGB changed its name to Democratic Left in December 1991 this name was taken up by a group which had no historical, political or, for that matter, legal right to do so. The organisation that goes under this name, and publishes the Weekly Worker, is in fact a super-Leninist sect, apparently originating as a splinter from the Turkish Communist Party, which employs the same unscrupulous tactics of infiltrating other organisations (at the moment Scargill’s SLP) as the Trotskyists; indeed, according to Mosbacher, it does have Trotskyist members.

Mosbacher, surprisingly perhaps for a supporter of the mad free market ideas of the Libertarian Alliance, has produced a useful and well-informed little pamphlet. He gets our position right too when he states:

  “The Socialist Party of Great Britain takes the view that the Soviet Union never was socialist in the first place. This has been its position since 1917. In a way this party goes further than any other on the revolutionary left in criticising the Soviet Union, in that it views Leninist principles and modes of organisation as non-socialist, indeed anti-socialist”.

Adam Buick 

Capitalism defended (1983)

Pamphlet Review from the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is Socialism Impossible? by D. R. Steele (Libertarian Alliance Ltd, 50p).

If this constitutes the most effective assault on the idea of socialism which the apologists for capitalism can muster, then we can feel quite confident in our claim that there is no serious opposition to our case. The guiding inspiration for ideas presented in this pamphlet is Ludwig von Mises, a forgotten economist of the 1920s who, among other worthless achievements, was the tutor who taught the modern priest of monetarism. F. A. Hayek, everything he does not know about economics. Like Mises, Steele proclaims that “market prices are the only methods . . . for performing economic calculation in an advanced industrial society". The sole point in Steele's argument is that the market, with its price mechanism, enables society to know how much to produce in response to the demands of the population. In the midst of a crisis of overproduction, where food is being thrown in the sea while millions starve, houses stand empty while workers arc homeless and factories close while there is enormous deprivation among the world’s working class, one might conclude justifiably that only an idiot could assert that the market is anything like an effective communicator of needs. Under capitalism, the function of the market is to realise profit, regardless of human need.

Steele's sole point is based on a sole error — not his, but that of Mises. The latter dismisses the possibility of socialism on the grounds that such a society would have to regulate production and distribution on the basis of a central plan which could not possibly keep up with the varied and localised needs of a complex, industrial world society. As Steele says. "Mises always made clear what he meant by socialism . . . social production would be planned and managed as a single unit by a single supreme planning body” (p. 13). On the next page we are told that "Mises defined socialism in terms of ownership by ‘the community'. In passing he indicated that this could mean nothing other than state ownership . . .". So, like most devastating critiques of socialism, Mises and Steele have erected a model of state control of society and then, with effortless case, shown how such a society offers no workable alternative to the market. And they are right. Socialism, which can only be established when the vast majority of workers want it and understand what it entails, will be a classless, stateless, moneyless society where democratic conscious control of resources will have one sole aim: to produce for use.

Steve Coleman

Party News (1981)

From the October 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month two debates took place between the Socialist Party and organisations standing for free market capitalism. On September 10 in Islington, with 83 people present, Ron Cook of the SPGB debated with David Steele of the Libertarian Alliance. The declared principles of the Libertarian Alliance include "The right of all persons to life, liberty and justly acquired property". For the Libertarians, "justly acquired property" includes the wealth accumulated by the owners of capital through the work carried out for them by the rest of us, with the threat of enforced hunger of we refuse. David Steele's objection to socialism was that without the mechanism of profit and prices, goods could not be efficiently distributed to those who need them. It was pointed out that millions starve at this moment, precisely because they cannot afford to pay the prices, and that a system of production for use according to needs could be based on the modern means of communication which already exist. People could declare needs directly and worldwide as the basis for production, instead of the present buying and selling mechanism. The following day, in Guildford, Steve Coleman of the Socialist Party debated with Professor Antony Flew of the Philosophy Department of Reading University. 65 people attended the debate, which was on the question of "Is Equality Just a Socialist Myth?"