Socialism and anarchism (1982)

From the September 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

In so far as it can be said to exist at all. the anarchist movement is characterised by a conviction that the destruction of the state must be the principal aim of those who value individual freedom. When the ideas of its philosophers and adherents are closely examined, however, the phenomenon disintegrates into a jumble of competing tendencies, each marching resolutely in different directions. But then, by definition there can be no authority on anarchism, no authentic anarchist path.

The desire to abolish the state has a long history. Some anarchists claim certain ancient Greek and Chinese philosophers as their precursors. Anti-statism has been most popular among producers operating at a fairly low technological level, such as peasants, artisans and those working in “cottage industries"; in their individual and narrow lives they often failed to perceive the wider social relationships within which they laboured. To these small producers the state was an alien, exploitative and oppressive force — intruding into their lives in the form of police and tax collectors and maintaining large armies and swollen bureaucracies at their expense. It was supposed that the abolition of the state would leave a “natural" society governed only by natural laws, customs and agreements between free individuals.

The social conditions which gave rise to anarchist groupings in the nineteenth century were exactly those which stimulated the emergence of the Chartist and communist movements. The new capitalist class was squeezing the small producer, destroying the independence of artisans and homeworkers through mechanisation and creating a huge proletariat; the liberal and "modernising" state generally supported the accumulation of bourgeois property. In the struggle to overcome social problems thrown up by capitalism, several anarchist philosophies were developed, the most important of which were anarcho-syndicalism, Bakuninism, syndicalism and anarchist communism.

The liberal view of society as a mass of independent individuals was taken to its logical extreme by anarchists like Max Stirner, who evolved a philosophy in which the ego was conceived as the main force in the world. Each ego had to strive for as much personal satisfaction and independence of action as possible without regard to the interests of others. Many of the Young Hegelians held Feuerbach’s view that god was a symbol of alienated human powers; Marx extended this line of thought to show that the state and commodity exchange also exemplified human alienation. However, Stirner took the concept of alienation to absurd lengths by regarding society itself as oppressive of the human individual. Much of Marx and Engels’ materialist conception of history was clarified in opposition to Stirner’s egotism — as is testified by a reading of The German Ideology. Marx held that it was only in and through society, where the range of resources and cooperative talents facilitated the development of personalities, that individuals could fully exist; to a considerable extent we are the products of our social environment (though simultaneously helping to reproduce and transform it).

Stirner’s obsession with individualistic, anti-social revolt (which he assumed would eventually produce a “union of egotists”) could easily lead to political quiescence. In his literary guise as Mad Max, Stirner ranted and raved against society and all its forces, but in his everyday life, under his real name of Johann Caspar Schmidt, he was a mild-mannered teacher of young ladies. The practical application of his philosophy would result in the domination of society by those with the greater physical and economic power — in other words, it would merely preserve the present class divided society, changing only the rhetoric of its rulers and the labels attached to their instruments of power.

The term “anarchy" was first widely used to describe the ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who introduced the term in his famous work, What is Property? (1840). While Proudhon declared that property is theft he was far from wanting to do away with property altogether. Coming from a peasant-cum-artisan background, he regarded petty proprietorship as the basis for any free society. What Proudhon objected to were large accumulations of capital by the ruling class and the existence of the dispossessed class of proletarians into which petty proprietors were increasingly being depressed. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx describes Proudhon as a “bourgeois socialist", one who seeks to abolish the proletariat but preserve the bourgeoisie. More accurately, we can say that Proudhon sought a society composed exclusively of petty bourgeois and peasant elements.

Two of Proudhon’s key ideas were federalism and “mutualism". The problem of federalism in a property based society is that, within the federation, different economic interests will invariably pull in different directions and consequently there will be a power struggle between the various members (individuals, regions, federal executives) for de facto political/economic advantage. Only in a society based on common ownership, where everyone has the same basic interests, can voluntary factions operate without degenerating into sordid politicking. However, as we havenoted, Proudhon remained firmly wedded to property ideas.

Similarly, Proudhon's “mutualism" is built on shaky foundations. His central economic idea was that there should be a national bank dispensing “free credit" (with only minimal interest to cover bank administration costs) so that everyone could acquire property and hence become “independent". However, the direct exchange of products that he assumed his bank would facilitate could only take place in a technologically underdeveloped society. Proudhon’s economic thought was essentially outdated; in an increasingly industrialised society it was impossible for everyone to be a petty proprietor, as the process of mechanisation required an accumulation of capital beyond the reach of small producers. His legalistic notion of fixing the value of commodities for all time was hopelessly naive, as the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labour time socially necessary for its production and hence technical development constantly reduces cost.

Proudhon's ideas, therefore, were basically conservative. Not only did he stand out against the current of technological development and class polarisation, but his highly conservative notions of the family, the subordinate role of women, democracy and party politics (as well as more than a hint of national and racial prejudice) combined to make him posthumously popular among the fascists of Action Française. He opposed Marx’s attempts to organise a socialist political movement, preferring to combat capitalism on a purely individual basis. Likewise, Proudhon opposed trade union combination, as strikes appeared to him a distasteful form of coercion and he held that any rise in wages would instantly lead to a rise in prices — a view that Marx successfully debunked in The Poverty of Philosophy and Value, Price and Profit.

In much of his thought, Proudhon was anticipated by other petty bourgeois theorists. In America Josiah Warren, who had participated in Owen's “New Harmony", established various schemes for the exchange of goods proportionate to their preconceived values; they all failed for the reasons already noted in the case of Proudhon’s "mutualism". Another school of North American anarchist individualism was founded by Benjamin Tucker, whose philosophy stands mid-way between Proudhonism and modern anarcho-capitalism. Believing that if everyone minded their “own business" a hidden hand would ensure social harmony. Tucker went on to justify individual and group violence, including capital punishment, in the enforcement of contracts between allegedly "free and equal” individuals and for the defence of egotistic pursuits.

Modern anarcho-capitalism, which has recently gained a tiny group of adherents in Britain, essentially continues the ideas of Tucker, though shorn of any Proudhonian notions. The anarcho-capitalists take one step further the Liberal view that the state should be prevented from “interfering" in the affairs of society by demanding its total abolition. In reality, of course, the state is an integral part of capitalism and uses its police and armed forces, judiciary and prisons, and its bureaucracy and “welfare” apparatus to maintain the capitalist class in its privileged position. If, under capitalism, the state were ever to be declared “abolished” it would immediately be reconstituted.

So long as private property continues the state, no matter what its form, will remain. Capitalism requires an authority to define property rights and employ, or sanction the use of, physical force to maintain them. Only when a socialist working class takes control of the whole of society, including the governmental machinery, will it be possible to dispense with the state. Then we will have a form of society in which, in the words of Marx, the free development of each will be the condition for the free development of all.

Brian Philips

In our next issue the relationship between anarchism and the workers' movement will be discussed.

Blogger's Note:

Sadly, there's no record of a follow up article in the Standard. I wonder what happened?

Technofeudalism – is capitalism dead? (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists might seem a bit obsessed with how words are used, not because we consider ourselves to be the special constables of whatever language we speak, but because we are interacting with our fellow members of the working class, engaging with ideas about what words represent and defending and advancing our political tradition, in order to gain working class freedom.

So it is of some interest that we have had a globally known political individual, celebrated by many, stating in bold capital letters on the back cover of his book that ‘CAPITALISM IS DEAD WELCOME TO TECHNOFEUDALISM’.

It is this assertion, made popular by Yanis Varoufakis with his book Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism (2023) and its consequences that will be examined here.

Two years before the publication of Varoufakis’s book, a French academic published a book titled Technofeudalism: A Critique of the Digital Economy which argues along similar lines to Varoufakis’ book but with a more philosophical perspective. Durand puts the root of the digital economy’s structure in what he calls ‘The Californian Ideology’ – radical individualism, libertarianism, and neoliberalism emerging from Silicon Valley – but does not go as far as stating that technofeudalism has replaced capitalism. Varoufakis mentions Durand’s work in the acknowledgements of his book.

The book by Durand locates the first use of the word ‘technofeudalism’ to a science fiction role playing game manual – the GURPS (Generic Universal Role-Playing System) Cyberpunk Adventures where it is mentioned once:

‘As the world becomes tougher, the corporations adapt by becoming tougher themselves, out of necessity. This “we protect our own” attitude is sometimes called techno-feudalism. Like feudalism, it is a reaction to a chaotic environment, a promise of service and loyalty from the workers in exchange for a promise of support and protection from the corporation’.

GURPS Cyberpunk Adventures book has an interesting story in itself: the editor’s home and publisher’s office were simultaneously raided by the US Secret Service who were under the impression that the book was a computer hacking manual and confiscated the disks containing the book. The publishers got them back in the end although the hard drives no longer worked and the book had to be re-written from memory. Several of the people involved in that episode went on to become founder members of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Technofeudalism

In the body of Varoufakis’s book, the author makes the case for technofeudalism in the form of a conversation with his father, who had recently died. There are lots of interesting examples, anecdotes, bits of history, and the recalling of conversations about current events as they happened in the context of his father nearing the end of his life. The book has an appendix named The Political Economy of Technofeudalism, where Varoufakis lays out his case in a much more direct way.

In the main part of the book there are lots of sweeping statements made without qualification, and somewhat gross generalisations. The author makes similar statements in some of his interviews. He has said capitalism ‘is defined by profits and markets’ and left it at that, but in this appendix he shows a greater understanding:

‘Under feudalism, the power of the ruling class grew out of owning land that the majority could not own, but were bonded to. Under capitalism, power stemmed from owning capital that the majority did not own, but had to work to make a living. Under technofeudalism, a new ruling class draws power from owning cloud capital whose tentacles entangle everyone’.

‘Cloud’ here means data centres. That data may be data (information) or it may be code which enables networked software like Zoom to work. Like most resources in capitalism, the cloud is mostly owned by a few capitalists and is thus used to ration access to software and data via subscription services, such as Netflix.

Capitalism

Varoufakis states there are eight keys to understanding capitalism: commodity production; distribution of revenue into wages, interests, rents and profits; circulating money capital; capital accumulation, frequent crises; social classes (capitalist, middle class, waged labourers); extractive power (inequality and state enforcement); and a ‘techno-structure’; marketing and behavioural modification infrastructure.

Varoufakis also has a spin on the Labour Theory of Value to support his view. He states that value in capitalism has an experiential form – which seems to be synonymous with what Marx called use-value – examples given include – both commodities such as drinking water – and non-commodities like sunsets, or feeling appreciated. Exchange or commodity value, he states, is a quantity at which goods and services trade for one another. Labour is treated as a separate category but in similar terms as experiential labour and commodity labour. He states the ‘exchange value of commodity labour equals the sum of experiential labour that other workers have put into commodities that a worker’s wage can buy’.

According to Varoufakis two main forces cause capitalism to enter crises – the falling rate of profit and debt crisis (financiers going on credit strike). Rent he considers to be any price paid by a buyer above the price which most closely reflects the exchange value of the commodity. This includes ground rent, financial rent (interest), monopoly rent and brand rent (higher prices associated with in-demand brands, eg Apple computers or Nike training shoes). Varoufakis considers capitalism to be driven by profit and private debt.

Private debt he says is created by financiers from thin air – which qualifies him as a bit of a ‘currency crank’ – his note on this simply says bankers create loans from thin air by an audacious transfer of future values to the present. In the main text he states:

‘Most people think that banks take Jill’s savings and lend them to Jack. That’s not what banks do. When a bank lends Jack money, it does not go into its vault to check it has enough cash to back the loan. If it believes Jack will return the loan, plus the agreed interest, all the bank needs to do is add to Jack’s account the number of dollars it lends him. Nothing more than a typewriter or, today, a few strokes on a keyboard are necessary’.

We would disagree here and state that crises are caused by the chaotic nature of capitalist production that doesn’t know when to stop producing. Debt crises are a symptom of over-production in the real economy. The falling rate of profit is a real tendency but is generally negated by the development of new markets and labour market flexibilities. The Thin Air Theory of Debt is debunked (as detailed in the Socialist Party Pamphlet The Magic Money Myth). There is no reason to extend the concept of rent to the price pain of money loans (interest) or monopoly prices.

Cloud serfs, cloud proles and cloud fiefdoms

Varoufakis goes on to define technofeudalism. He starts with cloud capital, defined as the agglomeration of network machinery, software, AI-driven algorithms and communications hardware criss-crossing the whole planet and performing a wide variety of tasks. These include inciting billions of non-waged people (‘cloud serfs’) to work for free at replenishing cloud capital’s own stock (eg by uploading photos and videos to Instagram or TikTok, or submitting film, restaurant and book reviews, allowing their every click to be tracked across their social media use). Two further ideas central to his case are introduced here: the industrialisation of marketing to buy goods on platforms (‘cloud fiefdoms’), plus and the enhanced automation of actual physical production of goods by what he calls ‘cloud proles’.

Here the word capitalist is replaced by “cloudalist”. He states that because there are major cloud-based services (such as Twitter/X, or Uber) that have not made significant profits but managed to grow via issuing shares. He also states that Big Tech were the main effective recipients of extra currency produced by central banks in the post-2008 growth period and particularly during the pandemic. Via the money and share markets, and the inflation of the value of fictitious assets low interest loans were obtained to spend on cloud infrastructure. So profit via the direct exploitation of labour, became irrelevant for the cloudalists, instead their focus was on market dominance – the establishment of “cloud fiefdoms”. Varoufakis argues that profit is no longer the goal of the cloudalist, instead they seek “cloud rent” paid by “cloud vassals” (the “terrestrial capitalists” who now sell their goods and services via the cloudalist platforms).

Using social media services is of course not working for Big Tech for free: that is not an obligatory activity for survival based on social class like wage-labour is for most people. In fact, those who are doing the value-creating work are those collecting data – which is a whole industry: it’s the bread and butter of Google and Facebook and their thousands of workers. And almost every other firm selling on the internet is using in-house or third party SEO (search engine optimisation) software and expertise to boost sales by exploiting data about potential clients. It’s as if shopkeepers don’t rearrange their window displays to attract their customers, just because they can now do it remotely tailored for individual customers. Profit is still the driver, and movement of surplus capital from one section to another has always happened, including via the state’s capital which is sourced by skimming off capitalist production by means of taxation.

Many of the trends identified in Varoufakis’ thesis are in fact the continuation of long running trends in capitalism. Capitalists in different sectors are in constant competition for access to shares of the surplus value created by work. As the review in this journal stated: ‘What Varoufakis is analysing is not the downfall of capitalism, but its purest application’.

Critical and uncritical reception

Publicity material for the book garnered positive comments from a variety of sources: ‘The dark scary exciting song of our age’ (Irvine Welsh), ‘An urgent demand to seize the means of computation’ (Cory Doctorow), ‘Remarkable’ said the Financial Times who made it ‘Best Book of the Year’, ‘This is the world grappling with an entirely new economic system and therefore political power’ (Observer).

Several Trotskyist papers criticised the book on similar lines as this journal. Meanwhile a lengthy review in Jacobin Magazine said it was wrong about serfdom and that the economy still relies on a class of wage labourers.

However, for every review that seriously engaged with the idea and agreed that capitalism was not dead and that technofeudalism was not a new form of society, there are a multitude of newspaper reviews and blogs that just repeat the ideas in the book – trading on the excitement of something apparently new, it seems. Whilst not widespread, we have seen the term ‘technofeudalism’ spring up across social media: in posts by commentators suggesting that it is now the new social system and needs to be escaped from, in adverts for security software that will prevent cloud serfdom, for crypto-currencies, and for introductions to join slightly shady looking discussion groups on Telegram which promise to spill the beans on how to break out of the system.

Viewed generously Varoufakis’s contribution in Technofeudalism – What Killed Capitalism has put discussion of ideas about capitalism, the system we have now, into the ‘Recent Publications’ section of bookshops and libraries, both physical and in the cloud. But socialists have not been convinced that capitalism is dead. What it will take to kill capitalism is a politically organised working class that understands capitalism and wants socialism.

PDH

Blogger's Note:

There is a review of Yanis Varoufakis' book by Pik Smeet in the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The man on the flying trapeze (1975)

From issue number 2 (1975) of The Western Socialist

A chronic(le) expounder of "simpleminded" politics tells it like it is not!

Charles McCabe is a newspaper Journalist who writes a dally column for the San Francisco Chronicle. He is widely regarded around these parts as a liquor drinking philosopher; a commentator upon man’s many foibles, his failures and his successes, but an Omar Khayyam he is not. A wiseacre yes, and when in his cups a savant of no mean regard.

Now Mr. McCabe Is one of those high-wire journalists, who is able — so it would seem — to oscillate effortlessly from problem to problem, subject to subject, without so much as even a casual glance at the danger below. Or even regard for the accuracy of his undoubted mental gymnastics. He is, to boot, a latter day Cassandra. A self-proclaimed Humanist, a Liberal-Anarchist, going along with J. S. Mill who “argues not only for political freedom but social freedom, not only against the tyranny of the majority but also against the social tyranny of prevailing conventions and opinions.” So he says.

So last Monday’s (1/27/75) sermon to the “laity” (McCabe’s term) was no less tendentious than most if not all of Mr. McCabe’s intellectual carousing.

Friendship vs. Politics

It seems that Mr. Alistair Cooke, who is well known on both sides of the Atlantic (whereas Mr. McCabe only this side) in a recent talk to the BBC made this observation : “To be close only to people who share your own political views and prejudices is not only a terrible restriction on the world of friendship, but is a denial of life itself, since life itself is a good deal larger and richer and more complicated than politics.”

Now no one but a myopic wombat would deny that life without friendship would indeed be a very sad mess of pottage. But for Alistair Cooke to claim that life as we now experience it is larger than politics and more complicated to boot, is a proposition of another vintage.

However, as I have said before, Mr. McCabe is no slouch, and if the wind is in the right direction, he will dribble niftily along any old intellectual tightrope, not only not caring whether it sags in the middle — and this one certainly does — but proclaiming his unqualified support with Alistair Cooke’s statement with the following unctuous observation: “A well-put statement as nearly all of Mr. Cooke's are, and one very near to my heart, as nearly all of Mr. Cooke’s sentiments are.”

Mr. McCabe then goes on to compound Mr. Cooke's naivete with the sure-fire prerogative of the ignorant by proclaiming “My politics are, in fact, rather simpleminded. I’m against all well-intentioned kindnesses to others, apart from the essential kindness of letting them do their own thing within the framework of laws against hurting, killing and stealing.’’ (Wanna bet!)

In support for this muddled-thinking, Mr. McCabe (who is also a name-dropper) drags in poor old Mrs. Patrick Campbell’s trite remark about homosexuals “It doesn’t matter what you do in the bedroom as long as you don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.’’ The irrelevance of this quote by Mr. McCabe, in relation to the substance of his article, would make Mrs. Campbell and the horses whinny in their graves.

The milk and water approach to human affairs as evinced by Mr. McCabe is touching, and no doubt would get a lot of votes from most sections of a befuddled populace! it is therefore pertinent to ask of Mr. McCabe whether his sentimental approach to violence, killing and stealing would motivate an advocacy against the laws in favour of the appropriation by the capitalist class of the surplus wealth produced by the working class, because it is this particular situation that at base causes the hurting, killing and stealing which Mr. McCabe tells us he finds so objectionable. And also if Mr. McCabe felt so disposed to crusade against capitalism would the columns of the San Francisco Chronicle still be available to him?

Politics Bigger Than He Thinks

Mr. McCabe expresses the view in his column that “politics is but a part of the full life and not so damned big part at that.” Is that so? Let him read the San Francisco Chronicle, for which he writes, and see how much space is allocated to that which is supposed to constitute the full life! Unless he is referring, of course, to the Society Columns.

The blood and guts of the situation is that our whole existence today is dominated by economics, and politics is the stock in trade, the tools we use to deal with the problems spawned from a particular economic predicament—that of poverty amidst plenty.

Capitalism is the society that has long since overcome all of the main problems of production to the extent that all human life could adequately be sustained: its failure, however, lies in its inability to distribute these goods and services which it so obviously hasn’t the power to do. Distribution in capitalist society demands the repository of the market place and the possession of money. The latter presupposes the former.

With the exception of the capitalist class most of us are quarantined to live out our lives on a wage packet. Capitalism’s problem is to dispose of the surplus wealth produced by the working class, for which they do not get paid. If society were able to have free access to this surplus wealth, not only would we then be able to live the full life, but It would mean the end of politics as well.

Politics, political activity, is that function that lays claims to the various opposing interests between (1) rival sections of the capitalist class, primarily over the vexing question of taxation — who shall pay what to whom and how much, and (2) between rival national capitalists the world over. Over the question of markets; cheap or cheaper sources of raw materials; trade routes and spheres for investment; warfare, internecine warfare, is the scenario which politics has to deal with and in the process whole countries are decimated, and many, many more live in constant deprivation. If after this “ball game” there is anything left over to live the “full life” perhaps Mr. Alistair Cooke would care to comment on it, and Mr. Charles McCabe would care to drool about it.

Harry Hamme

An ‘anarcho-capitalist’ explains (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last November voters in Argentina elected as President, Javier Milei, who must have styled himself at one time an ‘anarcho-capitalist’ since that’s what the media keep calling him. In January he was invited to the gathering of global elites in Davos in Switzerland and gave a speech in which he expounded his views. He had some harsh things to say about the state, seeing it, as individualist anarchists do, as the negation of ‘freedom’:

‘The state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively. . . This means that the state is financed through coercion and that the higher the tax burden, the higher the coercion and the lower the freedom’ (tinyurl.com/29vuvjwr).

Strict anarcho-capitalists want to abolish the state completely and transfer all its functions, including the judiciary and the armed forces, to profit-seeking private enterprises. Milei doesn’t go that far as he sees a very limited role for the state (to protect and enforce private property rights and commercial contracts) and so is technically what has been called a ‘minarchist’.

Defining his ‘libertarianism’ he said:

‘Its fundamental institutions are private property, markets free from state intervention, free competition, and the division of labour and social cooperation, in which success is achieved only by serving others with goods of better quality or at a better price. In other words, capitalist successful business people are social benefactors who, far from appropriating the wealth of others, contribute to the general well-being. Ultimately, a successful entrepreneur is a hero.’

Adding ‘and this is the model that we are advocating for the Argentina of the future’. So, it looks as if he is going to try to introduce ‘minarchy’ there. The result could well be some sort of ‘anarchy’.

Capitalist heroes?

It is a measure of the desperation of workers in Argentina that they were prepared to vote into the top office a person who calls capitalists heroes.

Are successful capitalists really heroes? To have a chance to be successful you first have to obtain money to invest in producing some good or providing some service. You can get this in various ways — inherit it, borrow it, even acquire it illegally — but you have to get it. Having identified what you think might be a profitable market you use the money to rent premises, buy machinery and materials, and hire workers. You put the workers to work at producing your product which you hope to sell at a price that covers these expenses plus a mark-up for profit. If your hope is realised you end up with more money than you started with. You have made a profit.

But what is the source of this profit? Since the only way that wealth can be produced is by applying human labour to materials that originally came from nature (usually after having been fashioned and refashioned many times) the source can only be the work of those who produced what capitalists sell. It’s the difference between the value of what workers add to the materials and what they are paid as wages. The source of profits is the unpaid labour of workers. Contrary to Milei’s assertion, capitalists do appropriate wealth produced by others. That’s not very heroic.

It is true that while some capitalists succeed others fail, and that how well you know your market or can identify a new market can affect how much profit you make and whether you succeed or fail. But this doesn’t increase the amount of wealth that has been produced. It is competition between capitalists to get a share of that part of new wealth produced by the working class over and above what it costs to maintain them. ‘Capitalist successful business people’ are those who do best in this competition at the expense of their capitalist rivals.

All on their own?

Milei argued that it is ‘free trade’, ‘free enterprise’ capitalism that has been responsible for the immense increase in both productive capacity and the amount produced since 1800.

It is a bold claim to say that this was achieved by private enterprises acting all on their own in pursuit of profits without any state intervention; in fact in spite of such intervention. We hold no brief for those pro-capitalists who favour state intervention, but we must point out that the state provides a range of key services that help private enterprises to operate and succeed. For instance, by arranging for a supply of literate and educated workers, or a health service to patch up workers so they can go back to work as quickly as possible, or payments to workers who are temporarily unemployed during a slump so that their ability to work doesn’t deteriorate for when they are needed in the next boom.

Milei denounced this state provision of services for capitalist enterprises as a whole as ‘collectivism’ (and also, as might be expected, as ‘socialism’):

‘The problem is that social justice is not just, and it doesn’t contribute to general well-being. Quite on the contrary, it’s an intrinsically unfair idea because it’s violent. It’s unjust because the state is financed through tax and taxes are collected coercively.’

In his view, taxing capitalist enterprises to pay for such collective services amounts to stealing some of their profits by force:

‘[T]he market is a discovery process in which the capitalists will find the right path as they move forward. But if the state punishes capitalists when they’re successful and gets in the way of the discovery process, they will destroy their incentives, and the consequence is that they will produce less.’

There is an element of truth in this in that, if the state goes too far in this direction — as reformist politicians want as a way of trying to improve conditions for workers under capitalism — this will have the consequence both of undermining the quest for profit that drives the capitalist economy and of rendering capitalist enterprises uncompetitive compared with their rivals from other states. It’s why all reformist governments fail and are doomed to fail. But if a state which did not provide these services for its capitalists and left their provision to profit-seeking private enterprises — as ‘anarcho-capitalists’ and ‘minarchists’ want — then this too would undermine the competitiveness of its capitalists.

It’s the job of governments, as the executive committee of their capitalist class, to get the balance right. In any event, no state has ever not provided such services, so it cannot be claimed that capitalist development since 1800 has been due to private capitalist enterprises alone. In fact, capitalism has never existed without the state. The state helped it to come into being and has helped maintain it ever since.

Can the market fail?

Milei also took a pot shot at neo-classical economic theory which, he said, ‘designs a set of instruments that, unwillingly or without meaning to, end up serving intervention by the state, socialism and social degradation’. He had in mind in particular its theory that the state should intervene to correct ‘market failures’.

According to him, market failures are impossible:

‘The market is a mechanism for social cooperation, where you voluntarily exchange ownership rights. Therefore based on this definition, talking about a market failure is an oxymoron. There are no market failures. If transactions are voluntary, the only context in which there can be market failure is if there is coercion and the only one that is able to coerce generally is the state, which holds a monopoly on violence.’

Notable ‘market failures’ that he rejected as such were the emission of too much CO2 into the atmosphere and the emergence of monopolies. He says they are not examples of the market failing. Okay, let’s accept this and see them as the result of ‘free market capitalism’ working normally. That rather weakens his case for ‘free market’ capitalism. These are indeed results of how the capitalist market economy does work and why its operation prevents states from dealing effectively with problems such as climate change. In any event, state intervention to try to correct what are perceived as market failures has nothing to do with socialism.

Milei began his address by saying that he was there to tell his audience, made up of the world’s leading capitalists and political rulers, that ‘the Western world is in danger’. This danger, he told them, came from continuing to practise ‘collectivism’. At the end he remarked: ‘I know, to many it may sound ridiculous to suggest that the West has turned to socialism’. He was right. It does sound ridiculous but that’s because it is ridiculous.

Adam Buick

Pieces Together: Pay Up or Burn Down (2010)

The Pieces Together column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pay Up or Burn Down                                          

“A small rural community in western Tennessee is outraged and the fire chief is nursing a black eye after firefighters stood by and watched a mobile home burn to the ground because the homeowner hadn’t paid a $75 municipal fee. South Fulton city firefighters – equipped with trucks, hoses and other firefighting equipment – didn’t intervene to save Gene Cranick’s doublewide trailer home when it caught fire last week. But they did arrive on the scene to protect the house of a neighbor, who had paid his fire subscription fee. ‘I just forgot to pay my $75,’ said Cranick.  ‘I did it last year, the year before. … It slipped my mind.’ Later that day, Cranick’s son Timothy went to the fire station to complain, and punched the fire chief in the face.” (AOL News, 6 October)

The Rich Get Richer                                           

“The shift of income to the top has occurred in the most prosperous English-speaking nations, such as Australia, Britain, and Canada. But it has been most pronounced in the United States. Thirty years ago, the richest 1 percent of Americans got 9 percent of total national income. By 2007, they had 23 percent. Last year, new census data show, the rich-poor income gap was the widest on record. Wealth is more unevenly distributed. The top 20 percent of wealth-holders own 84 percent of America’s wealth.” (Christian Science Monitor, 18 October)

Capital Gains

“The bosses of Britain’s largest companies are enjoying lavish pay rises despite the wobbly economic recovery, with most of the surge in rewards coming from long-term incentive schemes and gains from share options. The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies have seen their pay surge by 55% in a year, according to a report released yesterday by research group Incomes Data Services (IDS), while across the top 350 listed companies, total board pay rose by an average of 45%.” (Guardian, 29 October)

Situations Vacant                                          

“In Baltimore this weekend more than a hundred Roman Catholic bishops and priests gathered to discuss a skills shortage within their congregation; it seems there are simply not enough exorcists. Just as US industry has suffered a lack of engineers, the number of men capable of casting out demons has declined, even as demand for their services has increased. In parts of the country they are now harder to find than a good plumber.” (Times, 15 November)

Cooking the Books: An anarcho-capitalist president? (2023)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August the media reported the success in Argentina’s presidential primary elections of Javier Milei, ‘a self-described ‘anarcho-capitalist’’ (Financial Times, 31 August), ‘the ultra-right libertarian and ‘anarcho-capitalist’ who represents angry Argentina’ (El País, 14 August).

If they now have a chance of one of theirs being elected as president, the anarcho-capitalists have come a long way since we debated them in the 1980s and 1990s, challenging their argument that socialism (as a society based on common ownership without production for sale) was impossible and refuting their spurious ‘economic calculation argument’.

The theory, the Financial Times noted, was the brain-child of Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) who ‘developed a radical version of libertarianism that he called ‘anarcho-capitalism’. In this worldview, states are ‘organised banditry’ and taxation is nothing but ‘theft on a gigantic, and unchecked, scale’. As Quinn Slobodian points out in his recent book Crack-up Capitalism, in Rothbard’s ideal polity, ‘contracts would replace constitutions’ and people would not be citizens but ‘clients of a range of service providers’’ (tinyurl.com/484hr8b8).

We can confirm this from the many debates we had with them. They did argue that capitalism can, and should, exist without the state; in fact that as long as the state existed there was not real capitalism but ‘statism’ or ‘corporatism’. Capitalism, they said, had never been tried. In their view, the functions of the state, including the courts, the police and the armed forces, should be exercised by competing private enterprises whose services individuals could buy according to choice. In fact, everything should be dealt with by buying and selling contracts between individuals and groups of individuals.

This includes the sale of body parts. They are divided over whether parents can sell their children. Milei, who is evidently a loud-mouth who speaks before he thinks, confirms both. According to El País,

‘In June of last year, he referred to the sale of organs as ‘just another market’ during a radio debate. ‘Who are you to determine what [a person] does with his life?’ Milei questioned. (…) Days later, a journalist asked him if he subscribed to another theory that suggested ‘the sale of children.’ Milei replied, ‘It depends,’ and further got himself tangled up. ‘Shouldn’t the answer be no?’ the journalist pressed. ‘If I had a child, I would not sell it,’ Milei said. ‘The answer depends on the terms in which you are thinking; maybe 200 years from now it could be debated’ (tinyurl.com/ykvn5baj).

Capitalism in Argentina must have reduced workers there to the depths of desperation if so many are prepared to vote, even as a protest, for a person with such crazy ideas.

Anarcho-capitalism is a dystopian nightmare that, if it could be implemented, would make capitalism even worse than it is now by subjecting everything, literally everything, to being bought and sold. It would reduce us all to isolated atoms only interacting in the market place.

Capitalism has never existed without the state and never could have. It was helped into being by the exercise of coercive state power both to accumulate the first money invested as industrial capital (colonial plunder, slave trade) and to create a propertyless proletariat by driving peasants off the land (enclosures, clearances). As Marx put it, capitalism came into the world ‘dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Capital, vol 1, ch. 31). Once established, capitalism still needed a social organ of coercion to maintain the monopoly over the means of production by a few and to exclude the working class from them except to work for wages and produce profits.

In any event, if Milei is elected president, there is no chance that he will abolish the state in Argentina. ‘Anarcho-capitalism’— capitalism without a coercive state — is a contradiction in terms.

Life and Times: What a contrast! (2023)

The Life and Times column from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Last month’s column was entitled ‘What an example!’ and talked about a striking act of kindness and altruism by a young man working at a car wash. Round about the same time as this happened, I happened to listen to a play on Radio 4, a drama-documentary on the 20th century American writer and social theorist Ayn Rand, who was renowned for praising and encouraging just the opposite forms of behaviour, that is selfishness and self-interest. The previous column mentioned how several hundred people responded in a strikingly positive way to my relating on my local community Facebook page what had happened outside the car wash. This substantiated the idea, much supported by many recent studies on the topic, that humans, given the chance, are a fundamentally cooperative species. But the Ayn Rand programme (it was called ‘Talk to Me’) showed a person not just doubting this idea but recommending a completely different form of behaviour among humans and being lauded by many with particular opinions on politics and society.

Greed is good

In ‘Talk To Me’, we found out how Ayn Rand’s Russian parents had been rendered destitute by the Bolshevik regime in the 1920s but had nevertheless managed to send her to America as a teenager for her education. When she left, she said she would become famous, and that’s what happened. She never returned to Russia but nursed an abiding hatred of its dictatorial government, and this fed into her entirely anti-collectivist, anti-cooperative theory of society which argued that all interaction should be conducted by what she called ‘rational self-interest’ and in practice meant advocacy of and dedication to the idea of a society governed by the free market with minimal state intervention. Initially Rand produced books of fiction which, though attracting little attention at first, later became famous and sold in their millions. Her two major novels were The Fountainhead (1949) and Atlas Shrugged (1957), the latter famously referred to as ‘the bible of selfishness’. These depicted heroic individuals who prospered or won out through egotistic behaviours regardless of any negative impacts their actions might have had on others. In fact, if the weak fell by the wayside, then this could only make the world a better place. For this kind of depiction, and through her later writings, Rand is often seen as the inspiration behind the slogan ‘greed is good’.

A gateway drug?

After these novels she focused largely on works of social and political theory putting forward what is often referred to as her philosophy of ‘objectivism’, whose essence is that a person’s individual happiness via ‘rational self-interest’ should be the moral purpose of their life and that any consideration of ‘society’ or altruism can only obstruct this (one of her books was entitled The Virtue of Selfishness). Rand’s ‘objectivism’ emphasised individual rights, including property rights, seeing laissez-faire capitalism as the only moral social system, because in her view it was the only system based on protecting those rights. And the radio play showed how appealing these ideas became to a significant number of people and how, in her later years, many – some of them high up in the US establishment – sat at her feet and venerated her. And even though she herself rejected the label ‘libertarian’, that has not stopped her becoming a kind of cult figure on the libertarian right of American politics. Historian Jennifer Burns has referred to her as ‘the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right’.

The radio play also showed how unsatisfactory this view of life and the world made her personal relationships, how she never seemed able to connect on a truly human level even with those closest to her. One scene, for example, showed how, when a close relative spent a significant period in hospital, she never visited, the implication being that to do so would not have served any purpose for her and would therefore go against her philosophy of a human being needing to put their own perceived happiness and pleasure before everything else. Given her view of egoism as virtue, should we be surprised that, in more recent times, she is mooted as Donald Trump’s favourite writer?

Car wash kindness

What a contrast then to what happened outside the car wash close to my home a short time ago. There a complete stranger chose to use his specialist knowledge to resolve in an entirely cooperative way a potential dispute between two drivers and then to adamantly refuse any monetary reward for what he had done. Then, following that, close to 700 people on social media took the time to congratulate him for his act of kindness and human solidarity. Instead of following Ayn Rand’s famous dictum that ‘altruism is evil’ and that all that counts is the interests of the individual (ie, yourself), he had chosen the opposite path, of kindness and collaboration, showing it to be a more ‘natural’, perhaps a more ‘instinctive’ human reaction. He refused to accept any material gain, but his gain was that he felt good about himself and no doubt good about seeing the approbation of his fellow human beings.

This kind of helpfulness and generosity without thought of material gain is something we see on a daily basis in so many interactions between people – and this despite the fact that we live in a system of society – capitalism – that has built into it an ethic of competition and individualism. Of course little of these daily interactions gets talked about or considered newsworthy in the information media, and this precisely because it is so common, normal and everyday. Rather what does get reported is the other kind of news, ‘bad news’, ie, those far less common instances of negative behaviour such as selfishness, unkindness, violence or ruthless maximisation of self-interest.

This is one of the things that socialists are at pains to point out in response to the common objection that the moneyless, wageless, free-access society we campaign for could not work because people are uncooperative, lazy, selfish, violent, etc. Well, actually, they’re not, and this is all the more reason why the society we advocate, based on cooperation not competition, would work. The coercion implicit in having to ‘get a job’ would go and human not monetary transactions would prevail.

Howard Moss

Letters: Super-nurses (1998)

Letters to the Editors from the November 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Super-nurses

Dear Editors,

Being a student nurse I had spent the day looking after nine seriously ill patients, together with a junior staff nurse and part-time nursing auxiliary. Most of the patients required help to perform the basic activities of living, some in the terminal stages of illness. Just dealing with the urinary and faecal incontinence was a full-time job,. With the best will in the world, we tried to get basic care completed and to a large degree we somehow managed, needing the ability to do three things at once. Or did we? Struggling to get basic care completed leaves no room for the so-called “holistic” approach required by the models of nursing. The gap between theory and practice is measured in light years.

After a mentally and physically exhausting day I arrive home to be told that Tony Blair is going to introduce the concept of the super nurse. The concept is flawed and ignores the real problems in the NHS. Nurses are not angels or super, just workers seeking meaningful work, doing a job that helps to care for people. a caring attitude that is exploited to get nurses to do as much as possible for as little as possible. The clinical grading system already means that a few nurses are paid higher rtes of pay than the average nurse and it is the higher grades that are now being made redundant at my present hospital, because the Hospital Trust is in the red. If any NHS Trusts can afford the super-nurse it will represent a desirable post for the few and help pit nurse against nurse in the competition of who can achieve the most unpaid overtime or least amount of sickness.

The UKCC code of conduct for nurses requires that they serve the interests of society, to do this nurses need socialism not super status.

M.T., 

Wessex

 

Nothing but the truth

Dear Editors,

Herewith is a short piece which I wrote when serving with the West Midlands Police in the early 80s. I have been prompted to send it to you as the result of reading the short story by Heather Ball in September’s issue of the Socialist Standard.

It was whilst serving with the police that I came to the conclusion that it is the values upon which society is based which creates world-wide dishonesty. The world revolves on dishonesty.

Before giving evidence at any judicial proceedings it is practice to take the Oath or make a sworn affirmation, thereby promising to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth in the name of God, Allah or any other mystical omnipotence that you have been conditioned to have faith in. a sworn affirmation amounts to much the same thing except that the “almighty” is not brought into it.

Having completed this solemn and apparently sincere ritual all that remains to be done, so you might think, is to relate your evidence to the Court as honestly as you can recall . . . but, it doesn’t end there. Having given evidence the witness is then invariably subjected to a verbal flailing form a highly trained advocate with the sole purpose of proving that the witness has, wholly or in part, told anything but the truth. This so called cross-examination has the full backing of the Court and effectively reduces the value of the Oath/affirmation to something akin to the scribblings to be found in most public toilets.

Regardless of any promise to tell the truth the fact remains that the honesty of a witness is not enhanced one jot in the eyes of the Court by taking the Oath. If any value at all was placed on this ritual then there would be no need for the demeaning Court scenes where highly educated and articulate lawyers seek to prove that some hapless (though possibly truthful) witness is telling porkies.

If you or I should be so naïve as to believe that all witnesses, some witnesses or just a few witnesses tell the truth or, are expected to tell the truth, despite having taken the Oath/affirmation, then the procedure in our Courts confirm beyond all reasonable doubt that such a belief is just wishful thinking. So why take the Oath? It certainly doesn’t do anything to elicit the truth and what is more no one expects it to . . . and so the Oath/affirmation is without value and meaningless. Additionally it reduces any concept you might have of God to something less than a scab on a donkey’s ear and the holy scripture might just as well be a pile of second-hand comics.

John Phazey, 

Sutton Coldfield

 

Goldwater

Dear Editors,

Dave Alton (September Socialist Standard) was far too lenient to Barry Goldwater.

In the first place, the word “libertarian” is a gross misnomer for those who advocate capitalism without a welfare state or government intervention in the economy, and we should not use it uncritically. What they actually stand for is slavery—wage slavery. As Dave says, “there can be no liberty to defend until humanity is liberated from capitalism”.

Secondly, Dave claims that Goldwater’s opposition to welfare spending involved “detesting the concept of people becoming dependent upon the state”. Leaving aside the point that most capitalist who spout this stuff are more than happy to accept state subsidies for themselves when they’re available, the fact is that such campaigns are basically designed to cut taxes and so keep up profits. Goldwater of course wasn't opposed to workers being dependent on selling their labour power.

Paul Bennett, 

Manchester

Goodbye Goldwater s.o.b. (1998)

From the September 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

I wish to acknowledge my debt to former senator Barry Goldwater, who died recently aged 89. When socialists write about other socialists it is hardly surprising to discover a general tenor of agreement. The rather more difficult trick is to find something in common with someone who appears completely antithetical. For me, Goldwater was just such a person.

Unlike the more usual mealy-mouthed politicians whose opinions are for sale to any multi-millionaire prepared to part with his loose change, the senator staunchly advocated an ideology to which he remained faithful, even though it denied him his ultimate goal, the presidency.

Of course, the libertarian conservatism Goldwater espoused is anathema to socialists. Yet, I maintain that even here there is a recognition of human worth and potential, even if this is seen as being achieved within the restraints of capitalism that deny it. These are basic human aspirations, however perversely expressed, that accord with the socialist case. Those aspirations are important for they are a step to human understanding. How many come to socialism because they perceive humanitarian need and then go on to develop the rational understanding that allows them to analyse the present and advocate the future?

As an enlightened (for the 1930s) employer he introduced a 5-day week, established medical and life insurance for his employees and a profit-sharing scheme. Of course, these are all devices paid for by the labour of those workers and I do not wish to suggest otherwise. However, it does indicate a trend of thought he confirmed on becoming a politician. He vigorously opposed welfare spending, detesting the concept of people becoming dependent upon the state. This is a line of thought socialists can appreciate. Consider the ideological damage done by the false identification of socialism with state charity. What he didn’t do, and this was true of all his politics and business practice, was think things through to their conclusion.

The vendors of various publications from the many stalls in the Leninist stable have very similar aspirations. It’s why so many, particularly young, idealists (and I use the word advisedly) join these misguided groups. They have accepted a basic Marxist analysis of capitalism, but failed to pursue what needs to be done to bring about change. Instead they opt for an advocacy of state capitalism.

Barry Goldwater simply wanted to drop the state from the formulation. It is true he did not profess any Marxist underpinning, but he was avowedly Libertarian. An ambition for freedom is a testimony to human potential. In truth, his ambition was as bound to be frustrated in this respect as was his tilt at the White House. Capitalist economics will have its own way and the radical Conservatism of Reagan (or Thatcher) had little or nothing to do with freedom, not even with free enterprise, no matter how much this was hailed as the official ideology. Trans-national corporations devour individual entrepreneurs as readily as whales swallow plankton.

So even in Barry Goldwater there were latent tendencies towards the betterment of humanity. At a Republican Convention he declared, “Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” A socialist would have to say that there can be no liberty to defend until humanity is liberated from capitalism, but for that to be achieved there can indeed be no “moderation in the pursuit of justice”. To really be libertarian you have to want freedom from exploitation for all and that is not achievable under an economic system that actually depends for its very existence on exploitation. Free capitalism is an oxymoron.

Bombing Russia

My personal debt to senator Goldwater dates back to the early 60s when I was but a wee nipper. He is the first politician who scared the blue blazes out of me. I don’t recall his words, but I do remember that during the 1964 presidential campaign he seemed intent on A-bombing Russia if he won. In the context of the then recent Cuban missile crisis and the pervading feeling that utter destruction was just four minutes away, that sort of thing can bother a little head in the darkest hours of the night. And there, perhaps, the first ill-formed thoughts began develop what would lead to a socialist conclusion. I was relieved when Johnson won: but there again, I did not live in Hanoi. It takes a while to learn it matters not a jot who wins elections, until, of course, everyone wins.

An editorial in the Daily Telegraph (30 May) marking Goldwater’s passing also offered inadvertent succour to those who advocate the socialist cause at a time when so few seem to be listening: “above all, Goldwater proved that electoral defeat need not entail ideological oblivion”. It went on: “what Goldwater did was tell an alternative narrative to the orthodoxies of mid-century America”. What the Telegraph was referring to was the senator’s pursuit of his anti-liberal establishment line throughout the 60s and early 70s.

A real alternative narrative is indeed required, one telling the true story of the twentieth century. The false dichotomy between East and West as if there had been some profound ideological or economic difference between them. Two large-scale wars and countless small ones and the unnumbered workers who’ve been sacrificed in their execution. The development of technology and productive potential that means no-one should be poor or hungry, for satisfaction of need could be the raison d’etre for industry, not profit. Then there would be true “free enterprise”, with everyone able to offer all they can according to their abilities. That is an alternative narrative worth relating.

Commenting on the campaign run against him by the Democrats, the senator is reported as saying, “In fact, if I hadn’t known Goldwater, I’d have voted against the s.o.b. myself.” Politicians misrepresenting other politicians, surely not? Anyway, you son-of-a-bitch farewell and thanks, thank you for all you inadvertently did in helping to create one more socialist and showing in yourself that the merest flicker of a flame of humanity continued to burn-even if you might have used it to set fire to the world, given the chance.

Dave Alton

Greasy Pole: The mass debaters (2008)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who will win the race? Which horse is your money on? Will we notice when they win?

The excitement is killing me. Who has seen whiter, glossier, teeth and lies whiter and glossier still than those that were bared on television during the recent debates between Democrats and Republicans? The race culminating in the presidential trophy in late 2008 is solidly on, with these wealthy members of the capitalist class vying for leadership of the world’s most prosperous land, brought to them by the generous contributions of our dear readers’ unpaid surplus value.

These sellers of capitalist reforms are so impeccably dressed and groomed, so charming and witty, so passionate in their determination to give a structurally exploitative society a new lease on ideological life, that it might well take an Odyssean resistance to temptation on your part to keep from falling for their well-oiled sell, written and rehearsed with a large team of marketing professionals from behind the curtains.

Obama

Senator Obama, for all his oozing liberal rhetoric and strong likeability factor, while an Illinois Democratic senator has always supported a free market system. Isn’t that the one in which most of us must work so hard to produce free surplus value for our employers that we don’t even have enough free time to ourselves? One of the most popular bills that he signed in 2007, the Shareholder Vote on Executive Compensation Act, also known as “Say On Pay,” allowed shareholders to limit the inflated salaries of corporate CEOs but while this was easily and incorrectly perceived as a Robin Hood move, the reality was that studies in the Wall Street Journal had previously demonstrated that poorer CEO performance was correlated with more inflated salaries, and also that in economically troubled companies, worker morale suffered the most when CEOs were receiving pay of exceptionally bloated dimensions. In short, fiscal policies and laws must attempt to look after the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, even at the minor expense of individual capitalists. Behind each liberal dream sits a wallet somewhere waiting to bulge.

Obama was further criticized and praised last year for spending $18 billion on promoting merit pay of the nation’s teachers by cutting costs from the NASA Constellation Program, delayed now by 5 years. On the surface, noble and caring, no? Well, in capitalism the only nobility are the ones who still own parts of the land, and even the most caring sentiment finds a way out of the heart and into the coffers of the rich. His plan to improve merit pay for teachers was harshly criticized by the National Education Association (the largest labour union in the U.S.), the Urban Institute and the Cato Institute, on the grounds that merit pay could actually end up favouring schools in better neighbourhoods whose track records were stronger as a result of the inflow of local resources, could lower the morale of teachers owing to the resulting competition between them, and could create a new expensive bureaucratic superstructure overseeing the programme itself. Isn’t it sickening that in capitalism resources cannot be directly accorded to those who deserve it the most, our children’s teachers, without producing such negative consequences upon the institutions and atmosphere in which our children are learning?

Obama is also on record for stating that he is not opposed “to all wars, only dumb wars” (famous Fall 2002 speech at the anti-war rally at Chicago’s Federal Plaza). While urging for a date by which de-escalation of the militarization of Iraq should begin, Obama has also consistently refused to actually cut funding for the Iraq War. Capitalism makes it hard for seemingly honest, intelligent and good-intentioned politicians such as Obama to take a solid stance against the murder of the innocent (who are always the ones in war to die in greater numbers than the intended targets), even for those politicians who would likely come across as largely anti-war in a private conversation (if they too openly challenge the status quo, they may be attacked for undermining the war on terrorism – and as a result of their careful public manoeuvring, their platform always seems unpredictable and inconsistent).

Clinton

Hillary Clinton lost the Iowa caucus but won the Democratic Party primary in New Hampshire. She is thus very much in the race to become her party’s presidential candidate at this time, with the biggest next date that may tip the scales in favour of Clinton or Obama what is dubbed by the press Big Tuesday on February 5th (something to get so excited about when we get home from work that day). Clinton is garnering a lot of support for her life-long struggle to medically insure all Americans, however she no longer advocates a single-payer insurance system as she once did and as all other capitalist nations around the world presently provide. Another example of the compromise she had to make to remain a viable leader of the Democratic Party, and a perfect example of how the needs of capitalism so taint the original ideals of those running for big offices that by the time they arrive there, they look, smell and sound like anyone else in the White Lie House. Indeed, the only Democratic Party candidate who does presently advocate a single-payer insurance plan is John Edwards, who is presently tailing significantly behind the other two in the race.

Hillary Clinton is assuredly not going to be making the world any safer from war, either. It is true that she has worked to improve the medical and psychiatric treatment benefits available to veterans, thus leading one to assume that she is more willing to improve in the patching up of those who fought abroad than in preventing their being massacred physically and emotionally there in the first place. However, as the potential leader of one of the world’s great powers, her job will be to make sure that she protects the economic interests of this country’s industries and their standing in the marketplace as a whole. Rather than attempting to make the world safer from war, her own website recites the same sort of patriotic dribble one finds frothing out of the mouths of every other leader running for president, in her case: “every member of our armed forces will receive a fair shot at the American dream when their service is over.” We all know, of course, how “fair” the American dream is, especially the millions of American presently failing to pay off their mortgages at a landslide rate, and the volunteers at the 51,000 food pantries across our “fair” land that are presently providing food assistance to the millions of extra customers turning up at food banks in recent years (according to America’s Second Harvest “2006 Hunger Study”).

Ron Paul

Ron Paul, a Republican presidential candidate, actually came out in the recent debates the strongest opponent of the Iraq War. His opposition seemed partially fiscal in nature, as he deplored the $300 billion spent on it thus far. But it was also ideological, as he felt the arming of groups who later turn against the United States (e.g., the Kosovars who aided Islamic terrorists, or the Afghan jihadists themselves, and their friend Osama bin Laden) had acted to fuel increased national insecurity rather than security, and increased terrorism rather than less. And of course, Ron Paul is probably right on this score, surprisingly coming from a member of the Republican Party, the party that always advocates small government but seems in each office hell-bent on creating a bureaucratic gigantean proto-fascistic war economy state.

However, Ron Paul, like the rest of the Republicans or Democrats, feels that capitalism can somehow behave more rationally than it does – or at least they want us to believe that with our vote they can transform its foul waters to fine wine. The reality is quite the opposite, as history shows again and again. Tensions between nations are always present over shifts in political allegiances between countries that may benefit some better than others. Global politics is a macrocosm of the local economy, with each company vying to get as much of the business as it can, such as trade, material resources and opportunities for future economic growth. From the perspective of a capitalist enterprise or a nation, the planet is a great big hamburger to chow on, with the unneeded parts thrown away on the landfill – children, nature, women, the elderly, education, health, and common sense. It is, at the bottom-line, a violent and wasteful way for humans to treat both each other and their world. It benefits only those in control of the resources and keeps the rest of us in a state of emotional tension about the relative lack of security that exists around the planet, at any time potentially plunging us all into another world war or terrorist attack. It is a world gone mad.

Daniel Vogel,

WSPUS

Between the Lines: The Yawn of Capitalist History (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Yawn of Capitalist History

"Politics" is boring. This might seem odd coming from a socialist, but the more TV presents what it calls "politics" the more this reviewer yawns. On Sundays we are treated to two consecutive hours of heavy political discussion: Weekend World (midday. ITV) and This Week, Next Week (1pm. BBC1). In these programmes the supposed "matters of the moment" are analysed, discussed and debated in a manner which leaves viewers who want to be informed believing that they are watching history in the making. Not so: they are in fact watching two hours of sterile political drivel of no importance whatsoever for the working class who constitute the overwhelming majority of society.

Take the programmes of Sunday, 30 November as an example. On Weekend World the Big Issue was Reagan's credibility as a leader after being caught flogging arms to terrorists. The forgettable, dull presenter rambled for a while about international consequences and whether this affair "could reach Watergate proportions" — whatever they are. Fleet Street hacks were called in and twenty-second bits of edited wisdom were shown: "This is the biggest political crisis of Reagan's Presidency" declared one of them. Who the hell cares whether it is the biggest or the smallest; what is it that the President is supposed to be credible at doing anyway? Six American political commentators participated in a studio discussion: "What do you have to say about what Mr Himmelfarb says?" asks the boring presenter. "He has a point, but I don’t go along with him all the way. I think big heads in the State Department will have to roll''. Let them roll. I thought to myself: let them rock, let them roll, let them do the hokey-cokey as far as I’m concerned. Are workers really supposed to care about how the bosses manage their deceit and allocate the seats on the Boards of National Governments?

Then on to This Week, Next Week which was all about Europe and NATO. A Tory Minister called Stanley — perhaps a cousin of Sid the Gas — was all in favour of more bombs — the only way to-preserve peace, don’t you know. Denzil Davies, the Labour man, said that Britain needs more bombs and the Tories were underspending on defence. (But not nuclear bombs, because they hurt people.) The Liberal speaking from a screen because he was in Bristol could not be heard at first, and then he could be heard but not understood. I think that he was saying something about a moderate approach to blowing up cities. A couple of Americans — again, on screens — said that more bombs are needed in Europe, and just to balance the programme there was a Minister who looked like he was sitting on an uncomfortable chair — on a screen from Hamburg — who favoured more bombs in Europe. None of them disagreed for a moment that war is on the agenda; none of them disagreed that more bombs, of one sort or another, were the way to achieve peace. This was "politics". Workers were invited to take sides. At 2pm it ended and the East Enders omnibus came on: Michelle had married Lofty. Into the land of make-believe we go; but where had we been for the previous two hours?

Boys in Black and Blue

Did you know that British police use unfed dogs to terrorise unconvicted prisoners? Or that they point guns through prison cell doors at men from whom they want confessions? Or that they beat up grown men until they scream? World In Action (8.30pm. ITV. 1 December 1986) presented a clear report on how the men convicted of the Birmingham pub bombing in 1974 were the victims of police brutality which would have been expected in Nazi Germany or modern South Africa. What was unusual about the programme and therefore worthy of note — was that the evidence given of these acts being committed by the police was offered by an ex-policeman, Tom Clark, who was on duty at the police station on the night that the men who are now serving life sentences for the bombing were allegedly forced to confess to a crime they did not commit.

In fact, this latest programme is one of a series which has demonstrated very forcefully the degree to which the state appears to have framed innocent workers in the early 1970s for IRA bombings which they had no part in. This shows three things: firstly, that the power of the state to arrest and imprison workers is always going to be open to abuse as long as there is a need to get someone behind bars as revenge for the crime; secondly. it shows how campaigns of indiscriminate violence against workers, such as those which the IRA and 1NLA have pursued, create a situation in which it is easy for the police to persecute workers who take no part in violent activity; thirdly, it demonstrates that the undemocratic, anti-working-class methods of dishing out "punishment" for which the IRA is notorious are amateur in comparison with the dirty tricks and covert brutality of the official state terrorists: the police. It is just possible that as a result of exposing the alleged framing of the men convicted for the Birmingham bombing a few innocent men will be released from prison. But how many will remain there and how secure does their remaining there make you feel?

Enlightenment and Dogma

The age which historians have come to call the "Enlightenment" — the mid-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — was marked above all by the abandonment of hitherto sacred dogmas. Religion came to be questioned and science permeated social thought with an obsessive determination to arrive at truths. In fact, as Engels was to demonstrate so well in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (a classic which has yet to be serialised on BBC2). the enlightened truths were only partial truths and that which was obscured was what was ideologically unpalatable to the capitalist class who appropriated science for their own ends.

Channel Four ran a four-week series, funded by a right-wing American foundation, called The New Enlightenment (8.30pm. C4. November/December 1986) with the purpose of expounding the "new" ideas of the so-called libertarian economists — the apostles of the illusory free market. But this was no account of enlightenment, even of a partial kind. This was dogma. The newly-enlightened followers of Hayek and his kind seek to perpetrate the myth that, left to itself without state interference, capitalism can adjust to meet the needs of the majority. Of course, there will still be deprivation and inequality and insecurity caused by wars and a lot else, but at least it will be "practical".

Socialism is rejected by the newly-enlightened dogmatists. But it was abundantly clear from the programmes that these defenders of capitalism are clueless — not enlightened — as to the meaning of socialism. Not once did these dogmatists use the term socialism without in fact describing state capitalism. One of the first principles of science concerns definition, but it clearly did not occur to Professor Minogue (presenter of the programmes) that in attacking the deficiencies of what he called socialism, he was in fact attacking a system of wages, profits, money, nations — capitalism. In saying that socialism offers no alternative these pro-capitalists are trying a victim who is not even allowed to appear in the dock and, worse still, is represented in the dock by a witness guilty of the same offence as the prosecutor.

The whole concept of "balance" is spurious and there is no reason why one-sided programmes should not be shown. Our objection is to one-sided programmes which distort that which they purport to be opposing. When socialists are given our chance to put out a four-part series on the case against capitalism and for socialism — and we will be a long time waiting for an invitation from the TV controllers — we shall make sure that we address the best arguments for capitalism, that we deal with the profit system as it is and not as we might wish to make it appear. Socialism does not exist, but as a theory it stands as a mighty threat to the dogmatic ideology of capitalism, a threat reflected in the fact that our opponents, when given a mass audience before which to discredit socialism, are forced onto the ground of distortion and linguistic trickery.

Steve Coleman