Cooking the Books: The really big slump (2020)

The Cooking the Books column from the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

We know that capitalist production moves in ever-repeating cycles of boom and slump and that governments can do nothing to prevent this. But they can produce a slump, either unintentionally through a mistaken policy or deliberately. The present slump is an example in that it has been largely government-induced rather than resulting from the normal workings of capitalism.

The lockdown imposed by the government at the end of March and maintained for the next three months led, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) at the end of September, to a fall in GDP during those three months of 19.8 percent, which they described as ‘the largest quarterly contraction in the UK economy since quarterly records began in 1955’.

This was a much higher fall than in many other countries:

‘Revised figures yesterday from Germany showed that its GDP fell by 9.7 per cent, less than half the UK’s decline, while the eurozone and European Union falls were 12.1 per cent and 11.9 per cent respectively … The United States recorded a similar drop to Germany, just under 10 per cent’ (David Smith, Times, 26 August).

Why this difference? Was the government-induced slump in Britain really twice as deep as in Germany and the US? If so, why? It turns out that it was mainly due to the different way that the ONS statisticians calculated the fall compared with those in other countries.

GDP is measured in various ways, one of which is to add up what persons spend, what businesses invest and what the government spends. With only key workers, as in the health service and food distribution, allowed to go to work during the period and the income of some 9.4 million reduced to 80 percent of their previous earnings, private consumption fell by 23.1 percent, manufacturing production by 16.9 percent and business investment by 31.4 percent. Government spending, on the other hand, went up by 14.1 percent. Calculating GDP in this way gave a fall of 14.5 percent.

This way of calculating the fall didn’t satisfy the ONS as, while the government spent more, it did not provide the same level of ‘service’. In calculating GDP, the government is regarded as providing various services – education, health care, ‘defence’, ‘justice’, administration,etc – which have to be priced.

Normally this is simply the amount of money the government spends on them. During the lockout, however, although the government spent the same amount on education, because schools were closed it didn’t provide the same level of ‘service’; similarly with normal NHS services.

Taking this into account, the ONS reduced government ‘output’, so increasing the fall in GDP from 14.5 to 19.8 percent. Other countries didn’t do this.

We don’t want to get involved in the arguments amongst statisticians as to the best way to calculate GDP except to point out that the concept of government ‘output’ is rather dubious. Governments as such produce nothing; everything they spend derives ultimately from surplus value produced in the profit-making sector of the economy and is obtained by them either through taxation or by borrowing.

So all its spending is as much a ‘transfer payment’ as are benefits and pensions.

In any event, whether the fall – the plunge, in fact – in GDP over the three months was 19.8 or 14.5 percent it was much more than in any slump caused by

the normal workings of capitalism. In the previous biggest slump since accurate records began, the one that followed the Crash of 2008, GDP fell by only 4.6 percent and that over a period of 16 months.

Proper Gander: Gathering storm (2023)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Staying behind at work to get drunk and tunelessly sing karaoke with colleagues every few weeks isn’t in most people’s routine, and certainly wasn’t during the Covid pandemic. But that’s what happened then in 10 Downing Street, the place which issued the restrictions on gatherings for the rest of us. During the lockdowns which began in spring and winter 2020, at least 16 leaving dos, quiz nights and ‘Wine Time Fridays’ were held behind the shiny black door while the rest of the country was policed for illegal meet-ups. Channel 4’s docudrama Partygate was a sobering reminder of the Conservative Party’s not-so conservative parties. The programme’s dramatised scenes of government staff’s boozing, trips to the alcohol aisle in the supermarket and incriminating email exchanges were derived from findings in the inquiry headed by senior civil servant Sue Gray and the police’s investigation. Alongside these scenes were clips from past news broadcasts, often of Boris Johnson saying something crass.

The drama focuses on the party-animal team of ‘special advisers’ working in Number 10, particularly a newcomer to the Brexit Unit when the pandemic hit, Grace Greenwood, played by Georgie Henley. While she and many of the other characters aren’t specific real people, they plausibly represent a breed of young, posh graduates from the ‘right’ establishments who sycophantically support Boris Johnson. He’s only depicted in the dramatised sections from behind or at a distance. When he speaks, as voiced by Jon Culshaw, he comes out with embarrassing strings of half-formed quips which his fan club laps up. Other real people portrayed include Johnson’s special adviser and head of operations, Shelley Williams-Walker, who was made a Dame in his resignation honours list, perhaps for services to DJing during the parties. Another is Helen MacNamara who, as the government’s ethics chief at the time, presumably thought that providing a karaoke machine for a leaving bash was the morally right thing to do.

Cleaners and security guards are the only staff depicted as having any sense of responsibility, but too low down the pecking order for this to count, such as when a guard is given the brush-off after trying to object to one of the get-togethers. The police’s response to attending at least one Downing Street gathering hasn’t been revealed to the public, although details of some of the fines awarded have been. Boris Johnson and Helen MacNamara each paid £50 fixed penalty notices for attending parties, with MacNamara denying any partying. Rishi Sunak, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was also issued with a £50 notice, along with 80 others, meaning that Downing Street was the address with the most Covid regulation penalties in the country. Between the dramatised scenes we hear from people fined larger amounts, like Xen Watts, the organiser of a snowball fight in Leeds who was issued with a £10,000 fine and Toriano Reed from London who was ordered to pay £14,300 for being held responsible for a gathering in his shed.

The programme also includes interviews with people who kept to the lockdown rules through their most difficult times. Alan Handley from Tamworth talks about his wife’s funeral, which only eight family members could attend, sitting two metres apart. Emma Jones from London speaks about how her daughter couldn’t meet with her friends or relatives before she died of cancer. While these, and others, aren’t likely to forget how Downing Street staff ignored the rules, after enough time passes, scandals like Partygate tend to get pushed away from most people’s attention, replaced by different criticisms of the government (such as debates around immigration or the HS2 railway line) and wider bad news. So, the programme was a useful reminder of how the Conservative Party has operated, with a smug assumption of superiority. The characters working in Number 10 featured in the programme consider themselves above the rest of us, and therefore not subject to the same rules, especially the lockdown laws they devised. They act like this not because they’re Tories as much as because of their distance from the populace created by the institution they work (and partied) in. The framework of government comes with a very limited type of democracy, but the special advisers are unelected. Instead, they’re selected from a small bubble of objectionable yuppies active in whichever political party is dominant. So, they’re even less accountable than voted-in politicians. The Partygate scandal drew attention to this aspect of government, behind the polished spin which it prefers to present.

Sue Gray’s report was published in May 2022, soon after the police completed their investigation, so Channel 4’s dramatisation of their findings has come late to the party, so to speak. Its broadcast was still timely, though, coinciding with October’s Conservative Party conference. This scheduling looks like a jibe by Channel 4 at a government which has wanted to review its broadcasting remit but probably won’t get the chance before the next general election. But the programme does more than reproach hypocritical Tories drunk on power as much as on red wine. It highlights how they acted as they did because the institution they are part of is so detached from the rest of us.

Mike Foster

Action Replay: Back to the roots (2023)

The Action Replay column from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the consequences of the Covid lockdowns was a drastic reduction in the physical exercise that most people took part in. They were encouraged to go out once a day for a walk, run or bike ride, which led many to get to know their local area rather better. But team sports and visits to the gym were not allowed, and this created financial problems for sports centres, firms that made or sold sports gear and so on, quite apart from the effect on people’s health.

This applied not just in the UK, of course, and large international organisations are doing their bit to improve things and mitigate some of the effects of Covid: ‘Fit for Life' is UNESCO’s sport-based flagship designed to accelerate COVID-19 recovery, support inclusive and integrated policy making, and enhance the wellbeing of youth around the world’ (unesco.org). It is young people in particular who are targeted, with the aim of increasing grassroots participation and reducing inactivity and chronic disease. Focus on women and girls is intended to increase inclusivity.

Nothing at all wrong with boosting people’s physical activity and health, but there are economic arguments here too (this is capitalism, remember). The UNESCO page refers to a report produced in 2020 by the management consultancy firm McKinsey & Co (mckinsey.com) which argued that health ‘contributed almost as much to income growth as education’. The cost of ill health in 2017 was estimated as $12 trillion, about one-sixth of global GDP, as those who are seriously ill or die prematurely cannot be economically active. Covid and its repercussions were forecast to reduce global GDP by up to 8 percent in 2020. Promoting more participation in sport and exercise more generally is only part of improving the health situation, but it is not negligible, and the UNESCO programme is seen as contributing to this.

In an article summarised at sportanddev.org, Ben Sanders and Jay Coakley drew a distinction between elite or performance sports on the one hand and grassroots sports on the other. Elite sports generally receive more resources (from governments and so on), but it is grassroots sports that promote greater participation and, supposedly, ‘the application of sport for development and peace.’

Last year’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham received £6.5m in funding via the National Lottery to increase sporting activity by young people (it’s called funetics). Let’s hope that those who take part in it really do have a good time, but don’t forget that capitalism’s priorities are really behind it all.

Paul Bennett

The economic is impersonal (2023)

From the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

The Light is a monthly free newspaper aimed at winning people over to a particular point of view. It’s been going since 2020 and champions various conspiracy theories, in particular that the Covid pandemic and the climate crisis are hoaxes designed to get people to accept restrictions on their freedom imposed by a secretive, self-serving elite. It is also a place where various other eccentric theories, as against conventional medicine, 5G, ‘transgenderism’, MMR and other jabs, are aired as well as for ‘natural’ cures and currency reform. It doesn’t seem to be antisemitic, as has been alleged. According to Wikipedia it has 100,000 copies printed each month, and so will have some influence.

The front page article in March this year sets out its basic position. Headlined ‘Agenda of lies to control us. World is awash with disinformation’, it begins:

‘People often ascribe failures and disasters to incompetence, greed or corruption. And while these play a part, there is a plan in place to continue to degrade everybody’s standard of living to the point where we will be grateful for handouts — a universal basic income’.

The next page explains who it thinks is behind this plan:

‘It should now be clear that a cabal of corporations, bankers and non-governmental organisations, aided by progressive political leaders (the Davos set) is really running the world. They care not for the ordinary people, but for their own elevation to an elite-run technocracy. The contrived climate crisis is the means by which citizens are held in a tightening ratchet of supposedly ecological policies’.

Its language can be quite radical. Its aim, the editorial in June declared, is ‘to help raise awareness of the evil agenda to control the entire population, and all the world’s resources, by a tiny few.’ And from the same issue:

‘Wage/Debt Slavery. While we all need money if we want a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, spending our entire lives working for a government bureaucracy or corporate kleptocracy is as soul-destroying as it is a waste of a life. No-one was born to just drudge by and pay the bills. That’s why they give you cheap entertainment and let you get drunk and high — so you don’t explode with boredom and meaninglessness and start raging against the machine’.

And ‘The Owners do not have enough real power to control the 99% through overt force, which is why they must trick us with deception’ (March).

There is some truth in what they say. There is a privileged elite in whose interest governments act and the economy functions. And our standard of living has been under attack and has in fact been reduced over recent years. So their message could appeal to those who resent both of these. Those behind The Light are latching on to this discontent and resentment, offering an explanation and, less frequently, what they see as the way out.

But there is much more that is wrong in what they say. Indeed, the charge of ‘disinformation’ could be levelled at them. The threat from global over-warming may be exaggerated by some but it does exist. The Covid pandemic could not just have been left to run its course (it would have been irresponsible for any central administration, even a capitalist one, to let that happen). Their basic mistake is assuming that everything that happens in society and the economy has to be ‘planned’ by some group.

Unplanned

The capitalist economy is by its nature unplanned; its working gives rise to impersonal market forces that governments cannot control and which, on the contrary, exert pressure on them to give priority, over meeting people’s needs, to profit-making and capital accumulation by the minority class who own the means of production. Because governments do not have a free hand but have to act in line with the economic laws of capitalism, the impression can arise that the world is controlled by some ‘cabal’ that plans what happens and instructs governments what to do. But once it is understood that the economic laws of capitalism act as if they were a force of nature then the need to have recourse to a cabal with a plan disappears. There is no cabal. There is no plan. There is just the operation of capitalism’s impersonal economic laws.

Until the Covid pandemic and the lockdowns that were imposed those with such views were confined to theorising about the coming of a ‘new world order’ that was going to suppress the individual’s freedom to act as they chose. The lockdowns, and the demonstrations against them involving many thousands of people, gave them a chance to acquire an activist base. This still exists. The Light is distributed free by volunteers. Street stalls are held. Protests are organised to resist what they see as the cabal’s plan. Like the anarchists and Trotskyists their emphasis is on ‘resistance’; they even use the same slogans such as ‘the power of the people is stronger than the people in power’.

However, unless they are simply what someone once called ‘mindless militants’ who just ‘resist’ without having any idea of an alternative (which of course is entirely possible), presumably they want the ‘plan’ to be defeated and the ‘elite-run technocracy’ to be overthrown. So, what do they envisage should take its place, where we will all be ‘free’, our standard of living won’t be degraded and we won’t be a drudge ‘working for a government bureaucracy or corporate kleptocracy’? What will be its basis?

Individualists

Here they fall back on the philosophical views of intellectuals who are in the American tradition of individualism, ‘libertarians’ as they are called over there. There is also an overlap with individualist anarchism. The April issue had an article advocating the ideas of Henry Thoreau, including not taking part in elections (contradicted by an appeal a couple of pages later for candidates to stand as independents in local elections). In the same issue there was an interview with a freelance illustrator, Lee Simpson, who echoed the anarchist Proudhon:

‘My suggestion is an old idea called mutualism, where people freely organise into worker co-operatives, using a money backed by labour (the only thing we have a monopoly on) and take part in a legitimate free market’.

But mutualist anarchists are not the only ones who laud the ‘free market’. So do out-and-out defenders of capitalism in the tradition of a reactionary like Hayek and his polemic The Road to Serfdom. An article in May against paper money was subtitled ‘Free exchange of goods and services is bedrock of freedom’ and ends

‘ … those who value liberty know that personal ownership and the unfettered exchange of goods, services and ideas remains the bedrock of those free nations that refuse to be enslaved.’

Like, presumably, the United States.

An article in the previous issue on ‘How to build a resilient economy’ answered ‘Keep using cash and resist digital currencies’, arguing that:

‘Cash provides the opportunity to build a robust, resilient, and inclusive economy. An economy in which high streets prosper and in which towns aren’t some identikit version of each other. An economy in which goods and services are mostly produced locally. And most critically: an economy which doesn’t collapse every time there is a minor contraction in the money supply. The use and re-use of cash is the key to realising this sound economic foundation’.

The article went on to give as one of the advantages of cash that ‘it tends to be spent locally’ and that ‘it is more frequently spent in small independent businesses than large multinational chains’.

Exactly the same argument that Greens use to advocate local currencies. In fact, the author evidently shares the Green Party’s ideal of going back to a smaller-scale capitalist economy with no Big Business and no Big Banks.

Against ‘communism’

There is a tension, even a contradiction, between the different supporters of the free market, between those who appear near to the anarchists and Greens and those who think that the US is a ‘free nation’. The former won’t normally be attracted either to views expressed by other contributors against ‘transgenderism’ and refugees. All that unites them is a belief that a ‘free market’ will make things better and opposition to state capitalism that they misidentify as ‘communism’ and ‘authoritarian socialism’.

But, properly understood, communism (or socialism, the same thing) is not state capitalism. It is the negation of capitalism in all forms, and means the end of the whole market economy, whether ‘free’ or regulated by the state. A return to the smaller-scale capitalism of yesteryear, even if it were possible, would not solve the problems faced by ‘wage slaves’; the whole process which has led to the corporate capitalism we know today would start all over again and we would eventually end up where we are now.

The only way to stop people being subjected to economic forces that dominate them is to end capitalism with its class ownership of resources and its production for sale with a view to profit. To replace it with a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, so allowing them to be used to directly turn out what people require to satisfy their needs. That, not an idealised free market, would put an end to the impersonal market forces that The Light mistakenly takes for the machinations of some imaginary cabal.

Adam Buick

If not now, then when? (2020)

From the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

The days pass by now in a strangely routine way — I rise early, turn on the radio and whilst having breakfast listen to the news; now, as each and every day, entirely filled with Covid-19. I then set about my work. I am a sculptor, so what little work I did have has now evaporated, along with any income (the arts are not really that important in a society where beauty has little value). Life has become a little like the one experienced by the character played by Bill Murray in the 1993 film Groundhog Day.

In the early days of the pandemic, I, like many people in that peculiar British way, drew humour from the awful truth of the virus, and jokes about the lack of toilet paper did the rounds on social media. The actual reality had not, perhaps, hit home. Also, (and this was widely discussed, particularly in those early days) there was the universal awareness by people of which jobs really were important and necessary to allow society to function in a meaningful and efficient way — refuse collectors, shop workers, delivery drivers, bus drivers, farm labourers and, of course, care workers and nurses. Ironically, all were notably workers with the lowest pay scales (and also jobs that were looked down on by many people). People even came out of their houses to ‘clap for our carers’ — a gesture heartily supported by the government, who seemed to experience an odd case of amnesia when it came to remembering how, a few years previously, they had treated the nurses who could not afford to live near the hospitals where they worked and were forced to resort to food banks, or Jeremy Hunt’s jack-booted handling of the junior doctors’ requests. As the conversations between people developed during April, it was not unusual for them to reflect on the possibility and likelihood of a ‘new form of society’ that would rise, phoenix-like, from the smouldering pile of post-pandemic ashes. Lots of people were finding life less stressful (although, it should be said, not those who were confined in flats with an abusive partner or whose lives meant that the lockdown just exacerbated an already dire existence), with no need for urgency or frantic meeting of deadlines, and were beginning to question whether the media’s often-used ‘return to normal’ phrase was appropriate. Was where we were and how we were living before ‘normal’ at all?

Slowly and inexorably, society was, due to the pressure and dictates of the virus, moving towards a new way of living; people were organising themselves, very rapidly, into caring communities, displaying selfless generosity and acting locally. Hours were spent by individuals making PPE items for health workers, or providing meals for delivery drivers. Freed from the constraints of daily toil and exploitation, the real human traits began to emerge. Far from lazing around, work and contribution towards a happy and functioning society was becoming the ‘new normal’. So surely, one would think, if not now, then when would humanity reflect on the manner in which capitalism functions, and realise that nothing we do requires the physical existence of money, let alone a system predicated on profit and ever-growing destruction of resources, the environment and people. I must admit that I felt the time was perfect; all the indicators were there — it only needed people to reflect and think for a moment. It did not need a revolution, just a simple change of perception — an epiphany moment when people realise that ‘this cannot and need not go on’ and, more importantly, understand what to put in its place.

So, why then are we where we are now — nearly four months on? The initial talk has, it seems, settled into a state of ennui. The media has relentlessly bombarded us with promises of ‘relaxing lockdown rules’ and ‘returning to normal’. Of course we all know (and it doesn’t take an economist to figure this out) serious economic malaise will follow very soon if workers are not working and businesses are not trading and ‘growing’. Therefore, and despite the fact that there is no cure or vaccine, the governments worldwide are desperate, largely regardless of the risk to workers’ lives, to get people back to work. The economy has, once again, triumphed over the needs of the people.

So, with no fundamental change in the dangers imposed by the virus, queues stretch for miles outside Primark, KFC, Homebase, Starbucks, Sports Direct and dozens of other faceless commodity outlets as lockdown is relaxed and the public are being encouraged to spend their cash on ‘non-essential’ items, is there any chance of change? Sadly, things aren’t looking hopeful; the power of a capitalist society to engineer the way the majority of people think is so powerful — the belief that buying the latest item of shoddily made tat will somehow make you a better, happier or more fulfilled person seems now to be ‘hard-wired’ into the masses.

‘Socialism? That’s just utopia!’, to which we reply — have you actually checked out the meaning of utopia?

Glenn Morris

Tang Ping, the new China virus? (2021)

From the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Usually it’s only Christmas, and maybe a week or two in summer, when more fortunate workers get to stay home for a while and put their feet up, though the break from the rat race is always too short to ever get used to.

But then we got the pandemic. Richer capitalist states collectively took a huge hit – the cost equivalent of a world war – by paying their workers to stay at home with furlough schemes. This might look like paternalistic generosity but in reality they didn’t have much of a choice. Capitalism has to have an available workforce, even when there’s no work, because workers producing wealth is how profits recover after a downturn. That’s why there’s a welfare system and why, historically, the British capitalist class tried to prevent the emigration of workers even during famines. So it was either a question of continuing to pay wages for nothing and probably bankrupting themselves in the process, or get the state – the executive committee of the capitalist class – to borrow the money and do it for them. From the government’s perspective, the enormous furlough bill was certainly more politically survivable than presiding over the wholesale economic and social destruction that would otherwise have occurred, even though it will very likely take generations to pay off the debt.

For workers this has been a true black-swan event, an unprecedented opportunity to stay at home and, basically, find out what it feels like not to be a worker, ie, not be forced to slave away in some dull and shitty job for 40 hours a week just to earn the price of their rent, food and bills.

What was the result? Well of course workers loved it, and now a lot of them don’t want to go back to work, or at least not the same work. When hotels, pubs and restaurants opened up after the lockdowns they found they couldn’t get staff, which may be because the hospitality sector is traditionally the least unionised and so generally has the worst pay and conditions. But it’s not just hospitality that’s suffering. The UK is seeing a record shortage of workers which economists are struggling to explain with a mixed bag of reasons including a spate of early retirements, Brexit, and people living on savings or starting their own micro-businesses. It’s not just the UK either, there’s a global labour shortage, estimated by the US government to be around 40 million, which is causing massive supply chain disruptions just as food and energy prices are hitting the roof. Capitalism has rarely looked so close to coming apart at the seams, though there’s no doubt it will recover in the fullness of time if workers stand by and let it.

What might not recover though is workers’ attitudes to employment after their recent prolonged holiday. For months the western media has been talking in gleeful tones about the phenomenon in China of tang ping, or ‘lying flat’. Just as the Chinese economy is set to overtake the US to become the most dominant global force, Chinese youth is apparently staging a quiet revolt against the ‘996’ turbo-capitalist culture of working non-stop, from 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week, to get ahead at any price. Instead, young people are proposing the less stressful and more humane option of taking it easy and doing the least amount of work possible to get by, aka ‘lying flat’ or, as we would call it, being a slacker. Naturally this has alarmed the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party and is one reason why it is currently cracking down on everything from karaoke to computer games to combat what it sees as a dangerously westernising trend (bloom.bg/3HyhGNd).

What would wipe the schadenfreude off the faces of western employers is if tang ping inspires workers to start spreading a new global ‘lazy virus’. And many post-pandemic workers are just in the mood to do so. Elle Hunt argues in a recent Guardian article that people should quit their job and join something called the ‘anti-work movement’, which questions ‘careerist values and the erosion of workers’ rights, while celebrating idleness’. Naturally Bertrand Russell’s well-known essay In praise of idleness gets a mention, although Hunt seems strangely unaware of the even-better-known The Right to be Lazy, by Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue. At any rate, the argument is one that’s familiar to any socialist: what’s the point of flogging your life away solely for the benefit of the rich, when we should all be free to enjoy life and do whatever we want, just as the rich are? Now there is an ‘anti-work forum’ devoted to discussing the viability or otherwise of such a lifestyle choice in capitalism, as well as the reactions of employers to it (reddit.com/r/antiwork/). The forum has ‘gone vertical’ in the past year, with subscribers growing by 400 percent to around 900,000. Here you can find a big reading list from the likes of Bob Black, Fredi Perlman and David Graeber, plus little gems like ‘The idea of having to earn a living implies that, by default, you don’t actually deserve to be alive’. But it also includes opportunistic PC game adverts as well as dubious comments like: ‘you shouldn’t worry about your career. The world will be completely unliveable within 20 years. Just try and have a good time while you can.’ Such millennial fatalism is partly fuelled by climate change anxiety, but is also seen among today’s UK students, many of whom are spending their student loans with gay abandon on the assumption that they’ll probably never get a job earning more than the minimum £27,295 threshold which triggers loan repayments – which is undoubtedly why the government is proposing to lower the threshold to £23,000. That’s right, Rishi, kick the kids when they’re down!

On the other hand, the current labour shortages are driving up pay rates, as employers are faced with a seller’s market and forced to be a little less Scrooge-like, along with the UK government also raising the minimum wage again, this time by a comparatively whopping 60p to £9.50 an hour. All this ought to be great news for workers but unfortunately in many cases the gain on the swings is being offset by the losses on the roundabouts through the highest rate of inflation in the UK for a decade and in the US for thirty years, leading to a US net decline in wages of 1.2 percent (cnb.cx/3clYFiK).

Even so, employers are currently on the back foot as they try to increase profits with a workforce that stubbornly won’t play ball, so we should expect an epidemic of strikes in the next year or so as workers organise to press their collective advantage.

Elle Hunt does not tell us whether she’s planning to ditch her job as a journalist, however she does end with ‘The key, at this crucial juncture, is for all workers to align as a class of people’. Unfortunately she envisages this emerging class consciousness as serving only to ‘keep up the pressure on employers to make work work for us’. This is neither ambitious nor even realistic given that all profit derives from the exploitation of workers’ unpaid labour, so capitalist employment can never be made to ‘work for us’ but only for the bosses. While capitalism exists, workers are always going to be hamsters on a wheel, turning over profits as fast as they can.

So what are we to make of tang ping, anti-work and the mutterings of workers who sense they are in a strong position for once? Well, it’s a long way from revolutionary class consciousness. They’re not generally talking about getting off the hamster wheels for good, just about turning them a tad more slowly, or insisting on nicer-looking wheels and maybe better quality hamster food. And it may only be temporary. Once capitalism swings back into full operation, employers will return to grinding down workers’ pay, undermining class solidarity and stepping up their state and media propaganda against unions and opposition to capitalism. Meanwhile in China, anyone ‘lying flat’ may well find a tank rolling over them at some point.

But it’s all a step in the right direction. Workers need to be doing this, questioning their miserable existence in capitalism and asking what is the point of it all. And the fact that young people are doing just that is evidence for what socialists have always said, which is that, despite what you might think from the propaganda-wash of the movies and the media and the ‘official discourse’, capitalism never really wins the argument for capitalism because the everyday experience of it is viscerally hated by workers, even if they don’t always recognise or acknowledge the fact and they often have a tendency to blame the wrong things.

Something else we always say, which any aspiring slackers should note, is that work is not the same thing as employment. Employment in capitalism is, largely speaking, a useless waste of our lives in which, if we have any sense, we do as much slacking as we can. Bosses want as much work out of you for as little money as they can get away with paying. It’s only logical that you should aim to do the opposite. The class war exists whether you like it or not, and if you’re not actively fighting it, you’re passively losing it.

But work that you like and choose to do is a very different matter. Humans are not made to be idle. We’d get bored far too quickly. Idleness would be like a prison sentence. Anyone so jaded as to believe that humans hate work should see how eager young children are to help adults by doing whatever little jobs they can. In socialism there would be no lazy attitudes because ‘laziness’ is a construct of property societies that rely on forced labour and pour judgmental scorn on anyone who resists. And there would be no tang ping either, except at the end of the day when you’re lying down for a relaxing snooze after a nice day doing exactly what you wanted.

Paddy Shannon

Key work, key workers and shorter hours (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

One effect of the whole Covid experience was so many people discovering the concept of key workers. With the country locked down it was shown just how much work it took to keep the population supplied with food and energy. Of course, this was a reduction to the very core of economic activities, and many of the furloughed or otherwise-reduced occupations remain essential in the longer term. But the experience overall did shed some light on how we could restructure work if we were to rid ourselves of the requirement for each employee to make a profit for an employer.

One consequence of that approach to organising work is that a number of people find themselves working more intensively, while other people are thrown into enforced idleness. One of the goals of the socialist movement is to decrease the burden of work and win more time for us to freely live and meet with each other. That would be a truly meaningful increase in human freedom.

Capitalism has promised to help lift that burden. There is an inbuilt incentive for capitalists to reduce labour. Being able to produce the same products as their rivals with less labour (by employing more or better machinery) enables capitalists to make higher profits. The result of reducing labour though is not leisure, but unemployment, and with unemployment comes a fall in wages generally. That in turn opens up the possibility of making previously uneconomic activities profitable. For example, while automated car-washes are available, when labour is cheap enough, a hand wash becomes more economically viable.

At the turn of the last century, some 1.4 million people were employed in UK agriculture. These days there are some 400,000. The trend worldwide is for agriculture to be shrinking as a share of overall labour activity.

This points to the possibility of lightening the burden of work, generally. Of the 30 million people in employment in the UK, just over 1 percent are involved in producing food. Many more are involved in unnecessary occupations. 60,000 people are employed by the HMRC: a society of common ownership would have no need for taxes or taxation administration. Likewise, we’d have no need for 79,000 to work in the Department for Work and Pensions. For each of those people, at least as many are employed as tax accountants, finance planners and benefits advisers.

If we directly put our efforts into producing useful wealth – food, clothing, housing – then we could create an abundance without needing the cheeseparing restrictions on wealth that capitalism demands. So, that being said, we could free up many of the 3.7 million people employed in retail, who are only there to deny people access to the goods unless they pay. Obviously, stacking shelves and doing stock checks are essential tasks, so not all those people could be redeployed to other work: but many of them might also be part of the 2.5 million underemployed in the UK (that is, people who would work more hours if they could find them).

1.4 million people work in finances and pensions (beyond those involved in taxation above), almost all of whom could do more useful productive work if the opportunity presented itself. We could also add in the 149,000 or so vigorous and able people being kept out of productive work by being in the armed forces.

Of course, these figures are simply coming from the UK alone. If we expand the scope, we can see that there are 15 million unemployed in the EU. Socialism is necessarily a worldwide system, and so will be able to utilise all of the skills and talents of all those millions of people, and thus allow them to develop themselves. The end of borders and sharing the wealth of the world would mean that people could come together to get the most out of our natural resources.

Obviously, there are real world limits to how we can apply labour; we need the productive resources that can accommodate all this available labour. The availability of machinery, land and transport will still limit who can work where, along with educational resources and geography.

After all, we can’t move whole populations easily (nor would we want to) and any economic activity would require pleasant homes for the workers carrying them out, and adequate transport links (after all, would we want to keep the dreary experience of the daily commute? One outcome of Covid has been to free some people from that by promoting home working).

These will all still need administering and co-ordinating: not everyone can be doing the spade work. Instead of administering to make the most profit, they would be administering to reduce the burden of labour on everyone and ensure that everyone has access to the things they need.

For example, agriculture in the UK is currently administered via around 210,000 holdings. Each one of these must do its own accounts and paperwork (as well as compliance with regulations and environmental standards). There may well be good reasons (transport, environmental, etc.) to keep these as distinct holdings, and so, even with a reduced administrative burden, they may delimit how people can be deployed on the land most efficiently (and conversely, they could, much as when farmers buy or sell land today, be altered to make administration easier). To get the best out of this would require co-ordination.

That is why common ownership matters and can be the only basis on which we can get ourselves meaningful freedom. We can all become key workers, so that, by sharing the necessary burden of keeping society running, we can all also benefit from the free time that would result. People ask why would anyone work in socialism without wages or salaries? One answer is that if we can, say, reduce the working week to a couple of days each, why wouldn’t anyone work to secure their own and their friends and family’s access to the means to continue to be able to live well?

Pik Smeet

Life and Times: To Vax or Not To Vax (2022)

The Life and Times column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To Vax or Not To Vax

A woman in my own home town has made the national headlines by vowing not to apply the Wales Covid pass rule to people visiting the small independent cinema she runs. She said it was ‘nonsensical and unnecessary’ and she was determined ‘to take a stand’. The Covid vaccine passport for cinemas, theatres and concert halls was, she said, ‘an infringement of our human rights and discriminates against those exercising their right to bodily autonomy’. The Wales government said it was introducing the scheme in response to a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and the local authorities responded promptly to the cinema owner’s defiance by shutting down her venue and sticking up closure notices on it. When she attempted to defy the Council by re-opening, she was taken to court where she was ordered to pay the Council’s £5,000 legal expenses and faced imprisonment if she failed to comply. All this elicited a mass of comment on social media and very quickly, in an online appeal, several thousand people raised some £60,000 in support of the cinema and its owner.

Right and Left

What to make of this? Well firstly the issue was taken up and quickly became a cause célèbre among far-right groups. One group in particular calling itself ‘Voice of Wales’ and known for its open Islamophobia and anti-Semitism seized on this to urge people to attend the cinema and its café and form a ‘defence force’ to keep it open. This brought condemnation from the local left-organised ‘Stand Up To Racism’ group calling upon the owner to publicly distance herself from ‘Voice of Wales’ and its supporters. The owner announced that she owed no allegiance to any of these organisations and would not accept any money collected. She repeated that what she was protesting about was ‘an infringement on our fundamental and inherent rights’ (though later she said she would use the money ‘to support others’).

‘Rights’ and freedoms

But what are the ‘rights’ being talked about here and indeed frequently talked about over the last 20 months or so as, in an effort to combat the spread of Covid, governments have brought in laws and rules to curb or limit activities previously permitted? It’s a common belief that, under Western democracies at least, people have inalienable ‘rights’ which it’s illegitimate for governments to try and limit or remove. Among these are said to be the right to ‘free speech’, to peaceful assembly, to move around freely, to use our bodies as we wish, and so on. That’s one reason why the regulations brought in to try and deal with Covid have irked many people, since this has been seen as meaning that these ‘rights’ no longer exist, or at least not to the same extent as before. Of course some of the protesters, those from the extreme right wing of capitalist politics or harbouring fantastical conspiracy theories, have deliberately seized on the Covid restrictions to try and recruit supporters for their views or movements. But there are also many people who genuinely regard the measures, even if seen by most as sensible precautions, as irksome limitations on what they see as their rights or freedoms. The measures we are talking about are such as the compulsory wearing of masks, the prohibition on assembly and now the various regulations to push people into having anti-Covid vaccinations. Hence the protests about people needing to be in possession of ‘vaccine passports’ to attend cinemas, restaurants, etc.

Yet, without judging the efficacy or otherwise of mass vaccination (though this writer finds it hard not to see it as a sensible precaution), it is quite mistaken to think that, in trying to make it compulsory, governments or other authorities are somehow crossing a ‘rights’ line that is fundamental. We all know that the very idea of ‘rights’ is relatively recent. It’s an invention of governments overseeing the system we live under, that of wage and salary work and production for profit. Its underlying purpose is to gain the relative consent of those carrying out the work and ensuring profit is made for the owners of capital. So ‘rights’ form a sort of peace treaty between the ruling capitalist class and the working class allowing routine matters of potential conflict to be resolved and the system to operate in a way which is considered broadly fair by the wider population. But when that peace treaty breaks down, for example through war or unexpected external events such as a killer virus, those ‘rights’ can be easily modified or removed and then there can be open fighting between those who mistakenly considered the previous ‘rights’ situation ‘fundamental’ (such as the owner of ‘Cinema & Co’) and the authorities seeking to impose the new less ‘free’ regime. Disruption can take place and, as we have seen, can happen not only in this country but in the wider world.

Which system?

The plain fact is that, in the system of society we live in, ‘rights’ are not guarantees but, like all reforms instituted by that system, contingent and easily disposable measures. Some readers may remember the hapless ‘right to work’ campaign of the 1980s which fizzled out when it became obvious that the system that rules us does not and can never guarantee such a right. In the moneyless, wageless society of economic equality based on free access to all goods and services, instead of rights on paper, we would have the practical fulfilment of human needs with equal access to the democratic control necessary to secure those needs, making the whole concept of ‘rights’ redundant.

Howard Moss

Parasites (2021)

From the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Will we ever see the end of these airborne parasites?

There can be little doubt about the impact this dreadful virus has had on predominantly the world’s working class.

Nowhere has escaped this awful pandemic. With some parts of the world faring worse than others, and so much loss of life and suffering – much of it down to the gross incompetence of world governments and their inept ministers trying to grapple within the financial considerations and constraints of life under capitalism. Nearly everything boils down to costs and affordability.

But could and would things have been handled any better within socialism?

It would be crass to suggest that viral outbreaks such as coronavirus could never happen within socialism. However, it’s also fair to say that in a society where all due care and attention will be given to the living conditions and welfare of farmed animals, and the preparation and storage of agricultural foodstuffs for human consumption stored in careful conditions, this should reduce the chances of any such occurrences considerably. Moreover, in the event of an outbreak, humankind will have developed a much quicker and more effective way of dealing with the issue. Without being burdened by considerations of costs and the search for profits, response time in closing down the spread of the virus in the shortest possible time would take priority, without the dither and delays that have impacted on the efficacy of dealing with pandemics under capitalism.

Coming out of lockdown

The past 18 months of living through lockdowns and restrictions has been difficult for most people. Each of us have had different experiences, with some finding the quiet routine of lockdown and staying at home actually bringing some comfort and respite from, amongst other things, the daily commute. Meanwhile others have been craving the social contact and routines of life before COVID-19. With most restrictions now lifted in the UK, it’s understandable for some to feel nervous about the new challenges we’re facing, such as the anxiety of returning to the office or finding it difficult to socialise in groups again.

Although some people may seem excited about the lifting of restrictions, rest assured that for many the uncertainty and potential insecurity of employment and a regular income is a source of great anxiety. Socially it might be about when we should or shouldn’t wear a mask, how close to get to people or where to go and what to do in any given social situation.

And let’s not forget the ongoing impact on our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world where coronavirus is every bit as severe now as it ever was. Countries such as India, where the government saw fit to export 66 million doses of vaccines overseas. Enough to have inoculated the major cities of Delhi, Mumbai, and Kolkata. While the virus was still raging and people were still dying in very high numbers. All in the name of profit before people.

Life has changed unimaginably since the beginning of the pandemic. The idea of ‘going back to how things were’ may feel completely impossible. Our mental health has been affected by the financial pressures of being furloughed and the reduction of income, and your life may have changed so much that it can be hard to see a positive way ahead.

As socialists we understand the pressures that workers around the world are facing, not only because of the impact of the pandemic, but because of the social system that underpins it. As a party we kept in regular contact with each other through online communication platforms such as Discord and Zoom. These modern sources of digital technology have enabled many of us to share, learn and laugh together in a way that only a generation ago would not have been possible.

What lies ahead?

Although still very much with us, COVID-19 is gradually becoming less of a threat. More and more people are surviving this dreadful disease, thanks to the ingenuity of science and scientists, through widespread vaccination. This naturally gives us hope as a political party that we can once again resume our programme of various activities and reconnect with our fellow workers in the physical environment, including for example the forthcoming COP26 conference in Glasgow later this year. Something we have been preparing for with much anticipation. And should you wish to participate in that particular event in any way, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Your input would be most welcome. We have a world to win and nothing to lose but our chains.

Will we ever see the end of these heir-born parasites?

As one of the oldest extant monarchies in the world, the British royal family seem to have survived the test of time – so far. Whilst its immediate existence is reasonably secure despite Prince Harry and his wife Meghan Markle’s recent claims of racism, the cultural rifts exposed by the row could signal trouble ahead. The revelations certainly do raise questions about whether the monarchy can or should survive at all.

Queen Elizabeth, on the throne since 1952 (no quips about constipation please) is now 94 and still remains reasonably popular with the general public, with a 79 percent approval rating that many a politician could only dream of. A recent Ipsos Mori poll also indicated that only 17 percent of people believed the country would be better off without a monarchy. This despite a year in which Harry and Meghan quit the royal family and questions swirled about Prince Andrew and his involvement with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. A closer look at the poll also reveals a much less favourable opinion of the queen’s oldest son and heir Charles, particularly amongst younger generations, making him a potentially greater risk to the future of the monarchy. The reason for this must in part have been the characterisation of his uncaring attitude, as disclosed by his son and one-time piss artist and party animal formerly known as Prince Harry, during his recent infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey. This generational attitude also bodes ill for the royal image overseas, with the under-40s in the USA far more supportive of Harry and Meghan’s version of events, than that of the other royals who tried to play down the allegations.

Meanwhile further charges of racism against an ‘unnamed senior royal’ particularly resonated with Britain’s younger generation, who have grown up in an increasingly diverse country. Only 29 percent of the 18–34-year-olds polled said Britain would be worse off if the monarchy was abolished, while 45 percent said it would make no real difference– a view we largely share, and 19 percent saying that it would make the country better.

So while the British monarchy’s immediate survival is relatively secure despite Harry and Meghan’s claims of racism, the cultural rifts exposed by the row could signal trouble ahead. The revelations do raise questions over whether the monarchy can or should survive at all, with Charles next in line to the throne and not scoring well for general popularity.

While we as socialists might sense an opportunity as the current monarch’s reign draws to a close, we still face the prospect of persuading many of our fellow workers that these blue-blooded spongers, malingerers and work-shy freeloaders have outstayed their welcome. One only has to observe the absurd out-pouring of grief from so many misguided flag-waving subjects whenever a member of the royal family dies and the BBC’s royal correspondents begin their sanctimonious arse-kissing rituals, crocodile tears and fake platitudes, to realise what a challenge we have ahead of us.

And while as a party of the working class we may not have been around for anything like as long as the monarchy, we should all rise to the challenge to stop this outdated institution from reigning over us, and look forward instead to the day that their position of privilege will come to an end. When the castles and palaces they inhabit become little more than museums, we might look back in wonder and incredulity at a period in our history when we lived under that kind of rule and all the other insane rules and regulations of capitalism.

Paul Edwards

Cooking the Books: Is inflation going to increase? (2021)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Markets were right to be spooked by the threat of rising inflation’ was the headline of an article by Philip Aldrick, Economics Editor of the Times on 15 May. Nowadays the word has come to mean simply ‘an increase in the general level of prices’ (David Smith, Times, 2 June).

Originally, as the word suggests, inflation referred to an over-issue of a paper currency in the sense of printing more than the economy needed for its transactions; in which case the currency depreciated, resulting in a rise in the general price level.

The price of individual products can go up for various reasons such as an increase in paying demand compared to supply or to a fall in productivity. In fact, for most products, the tendency is for their real price to fall due to increasing productivity, though this is masked by the depreciation of the currency causing the money price to rise.

A rise in the general price level is something different. It is a rise that affects all products. The most common cause of this is a depreciation of the currency due to too much being issued. Currently the policy of monetary authorities nearly everywhere is to bring about a rise in the general price level of about 2 percent a year. This is why prices rise continuously from year to year. Inflation already exists; what is worrying some economic commentators is that it might rise above this level.

Over-issuing the currency is not the only reason why the general price level can go up. It can also go up when, as in a boom, the demand for all goods runs ahead of supply as capitalist enterprises seek to make hay while the sun shines, producing more to sell, so increasing the demand for raw materials and labour (it always ends in overproduction and so a fall – a slump –in production),

Something similar is what some economists are expecting to occur when the Covid restrictions are finally removed. Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s Chief Economist, has written of a ‘move from bounce-back to boom without passing “go”’ (Times, 10 June). Unused consumer purchasing power has built-up because shops have not been fully open and because many people have been working from home, so saving travel and lunch costs. It’s going to be a sellers’ market, where businesses can put up their prices without risking losing customers. As Smith put it with reference to restaurants:

  ‘Businesses are responding logically to the release of pent-up demand. If they can raise prices and restrict the special offers they used to need to attract customers, they will do so.’

Aldrick adds that businesses will also be in a position to pass on increased transport and materials costs:

  ‘In the short term, business will want to raise prices. They could absorb higher costs by squeezing margins, but with more debt to service and many cash-rich households able to pay up, why would they?’

The implicit assumption behind both these comments is that businesses don’t have a free hand but can only increase prices when ‘the market can bear it’. They can’t raise prices above this level (at least not without losing customers) even if taxes, wages or other costs go up. If the market won’t bear it, then they have to let their profit margins be squeezed. On the other hand, if the market will bear it they can increase their price even if their costs haven’t gone up.

What the economists are saying is that, due to the demand built up during the Covid restrictions, the market will be able to bear it and the general price level will rise as a result.

It could never happen here (2021)

From the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may not have not escaped the notice of some, the irony of the police response to the vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common. There were scenes of big burly policemen man-handling women, peacefully gathered to mourn the death of Sarah a 33-year-old woman snatched from the street and murdered, allegedly by an off-duty police officer. Women not only came to mourn but to express their anger over domestic violence, street harassment and sexual assault, mainly perpetrated by men against women and girls. The protest had been ruled unlawful due to the restrictions of the 2020 Coronavirus legislation, but women obviously felt that this was too important to adhere to the rules. Also in March a 61-year old nurse was issued with a £10,000 fine for organising a demonstration of about 40 people protesting against the government’s paltry 1 percent pay increase for NHS workers.

Governments need to keep control, even if this means quashing dissent and stifling anti-establishment ideas. States are passing ever more draconian laws, whittling away perceived freedoms workers think they have. Laws that are rushed through in response to calamities like the attack on the USA Twin Towers and the Coronavirus pandemic were and are supposed to be temporary, however, these laws so often never get repealed.

The USA Patriot Act, designed to counteract terrorism, was signed into law by George Bush in October 2001 six weeks after the attack on the towers. The Act expanded the abilities of law enforcement for surveillance, including the tapping of domestic and international phones, and abuses of the Act led to government spying on innocent individuals. It had to be periodically reviewed because of concerns that certain provisions could be used to violate privacy rights. Most of the Act, however, been written into permanent law.

In 2020 the UK Coronavirus Act over-rode Articles 10 and 11 of the Human Rights Act which refer to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly and association. The Guardian (3 November) commented:

  ‘Protections for protestors are set to be removed from the Coronavirus rules under the second national lockdown. An exemption that permits demonstrations to take place with additional conditions to mitigate the spread of the virus is expected to be omitted from fresh regulations being drawn up from this Thursday. The police had allowed and facilitated some demonstrations, however there have been questions as to whether the prohibitions on demonstrations were impartially and proportionately policed’.

Once the pandemic has subsided and we go back to no restrictions as promised, one wonders whether these laws will be repealed or will they be dragged out every time there is a demo or protest, citing health concerns.

Under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, currently going through parliament, protestors causing ‘annoyance’ could theoretically be jailed for up to 10 years. The government has passed almost 400 new laws and regulations in the past year, only a few of which have been approved by parliament.

Online social media groups are now being censored. The Department for Education has instructed schools not to use materials from organisations working to overthrow capitalism. There have been state shut-downs of the internet all over the world. Protestors have been using the internet to organise online and to assemble and protest offline. Governments are increasingly resorting to shutdowns in times of crisis, arguing they are necessary for public safety or curbing the spread of misinformation. Misinformation potentially meaning information contrary to what the government wants you to have. The worst offender is not some openly authoritarian state but India, the so-called ‘largest democracy in the world’. In Germany Netz GD is a network enforcement law which compels social media companies to remove ‘hate speech’ and other illegal content, illegal content as defined in the 22 provisions of the criminal code. This has been criticised by the Human Rights Watch saying ‘this law sets a dangerous precedent for other governments to restrict speech online by forcing companies to censor on the government’s behalf’.

In China the citizen identification number system or ID card is the only acceptable document used for everything from opening a bank account to registering for a mobile phone. It is used to buy train tickets and pass through security checkpoints and can be inspected by police for any reason; these cards also state the holder’s ethnic identity. Boris Johnson had at one time scoffed at the idea of ID cards and referring to China said it would never happen in Britain. At the moment we have to have special permission by way of a form or permit to travel out of the country, reminding one of the old USSR. There is the ongoing debate in parliament regarding the introduction of health passports which seem highly likely now despite murmurings to the contrary.

How long before these ‘ID’ cards carry more information than our supposedly private health status?

At the moment surveillance technology is mostly used for law enforcement and selling us stuff but information could theoretically be shared with companies or departments without our permission and used to monitor us.

An article in the South China Post (18 November) tells us:

  ‘Facial recognition technology has been increasingly deployed by countries to secure access and improve surveillance especially during the pandemic. The technology is controversial not just because data leaks are common but because of its potential to exacerbate racial or gender biases’.

In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, several companies including IBM, Microsoft and Amazon announced they would either pause selling their facial recognition technology or stop producing it entirely.

We are now encouraged to snitch on our neighbours for not following the rules, snitching on those in receipt of ‘undeserving’ benefits or lately on Covid ‘non conformers’. Workers turning on workers leaving the establishment unfettered.

The Socialist Party does not advocate reforms but we do denounce the worst excesses the state can dish out. What we cannot afford is complacency and the conviction that it could never happen here.

Carla Dee

Pathfinders: Speaking of tongues (2021)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A year ago most of us were hearing terms like lockdown, social distancing and furlough for the first time. Since then the pandemic has spawned a host of new coinages, such as Miley (as in Miley Cyrus, geddit?), covidiot or morona (someone who behaves as if there’s no Miley), quarantini (home martini) fresh from your isobar (well-stocked booze fridge), zoom bombing, coronials (babies conceived in lockdown), and spendemic (the increase in online shopping).

These neologisms probably won’t last, but they do showcase the effervescent wit and ingenuity of the working class. People like language. It’s not just a tool, it’s a toy. And it can be a political hot potato.

Just last December it was reported that Germany is going to revert to its pre-1940s phonetic spelling table (equivalent to English call-signs Alpha, Bravo, Charlie), which the Nazis had altered as being ‘too Jewish’. Now Germans will have to remember to say Samuel instead of Siegfried, Zacharias for Zeppelin, Nathan for Nordpol, and David for Dora. It’s kind of funny, in a dark sort of way.

Not that we should laugh. Jack went up the hill with their bucket while Jill fell down and broke their crown. Er, whose bucket, whose crown? Apparently it doesn’t matter. The woke war against pronouns is making us all into undifferentiated plurals, even when our individual gender is neither an unknown nor a contentious issue. English is abandoning clarity for the sake of a political point, but perhaps that’s the price we have to pay for diplomacy. The Germans call each other ‘they’, the French retain the polite you-plural centuries after the English stopped caring about politeness, while the Italians were put off the you-plural because Mussolini liked it, and now call each other ‘she’.

From the standpoint of modern English, which has dispensed with a lot of language rules we were too bored or incompetent to follow, the use of gender in other languages seems bizarre and mysterious, as well as hard to learn and inconsistent. Why is salt female in Spanish, but male in French? Why does the German for ‘girl’ have a neuter article? Why does ‘hand’ in Italian have a male form but a female article? What is it with all this sex anyway? It’s very unBritish.

After much official foot-dragging, the French are now feminising male nouns so as to recognise the existence of female ‘docteures, professeures, pompières’ (firefighters), although in highlighting gender instead of erasing it completely they’re arguably rowing the language in the wrong direction. Meanwhile the appearance of the weird composite form ‘musicien.ne.s’ and ‘lecteur.rice.s’ (readers) is creating a Gallic backlash against what is known as ‘inclusive writing’, with the French Prime Minister in 2017 imposing a ban on its use in state documents. It may well be true, or at least plausible, that male-biased language forms tend to create male-biased social paradigms, but structurally there’s a limit to what you can do. Gendered noun classes run through a huge number of languages like Brighton through a stick of rock. To make them gender-neutral you’d have to dismantle the languages and rebuild them from the ground up.

That’s not going to happen, on purpose anyway. People with good pattern-recognition skills often learn to like the forms and structures of languages for their own sake, and can become prim sticklers over its rules, decrying the slightest deviation as an offence of ignorance or heresy. But language was always a matter of ignorance and heresy. People spelt things the way they sounded, and frequently misheard. Un napron became an apron because the Saxons wrote it down wrong. Snottingham became Nottingham because the Normans couldn’t pronounce it. Latin crocodilus became coccodrillo because the Italians couldn’t pronounce it. Jewellery becomes joolery, nuclear becomes nucular. What the hell, we know what we mean.

The intolerance set in with Dr Johnson’s dictionary and a desire for standardisation. It’s impossible to imagine modern capitalism managing its business and communications successfully without such language standards, but it ultimately goes against the grain of what language is, a dynamic and creative process that does not want to lie still and play dead. And it won’t, no matter what the rules say.

After dropping genders, case systems and polite forms English is now busily merging its simple past with its perfect past (Sink, sank, sunk = Sink, sunk, sunk). It often doesn’t bother with a future tense (I’m going tomorrow), even less with archaic subjunctives (If I were you), and seems increasingly confused about perfect conditionals (I should of known).

Somewhat counter-intuitively, languages tend to become simpler as they evolve, at least if they’re allowed to. That being so, it’s tempting to wonder if socialism will strip out a lot of legacy linguistics that only really mean anything in culture-bound capitalism.

Most obviously, you’d expect vocabulary changes. For instance, we may see words like property, money, market, trade, buy and sell fall out of use entirely, along with an entire lexicon of financial, business, judicial and military terms. The words steal and robbery would surely disappear, and hopefully murder and rape along with them.

As for gendered noun classes, it’s not hard to envisage socialist society dropping them. And in a society where time isn’t money and you don’t have to watch the clock, is it a stretch to suggest that even tenses might simplify or even disappear? It’s not impossible. Mandarin Chinese manages quite well without tenses (It is cold yesterday).

How might this realistically come about? By revolution, of course, not reform. Consider what happens if people become more mobile, as is quite possible when location and occupation cease to be a ball and chain, and where available transport systems are free at the point of use. Suppose you are a sixteen-year-old and you want to go off and see the world. There’s nothing to stop you travelling, perhaps to every country in the world, helping out with the menial jobs wherever you fetch up, and soaking up a global cultural and linguistic experience beyond anything conceivable today except for the idle rich. When 18th century officials of the East India Company returned to England after plundering Bengal, they spoke fluent Hindustani, wore flowing Indian silks and turbans, and built ‘Nabob’ country houses replete with minarets and domes. They also brought curry to England, thereby transforming the British favourite food. Imagine what worldwide free and open mobility might do for your local town and culture. And with this mobility, languages might flow and merge into a global travellers’ creole with remnants of everything in it, just like we get ‘sky’ from the Vikings, ‘telephone’ from Greek, ‘shampoo’ from Hindi and ‘paradise’ from Persian.

Young white Londoners today speak a hip new Asian-Cockney that didn’t exist a generation ago. ‘Street’ dictionaries have to be updated weekly. The one constant thing about language is change. And that’s just as true of the people who speak it. When people get around to creating the post-scarcity world of common ownership which we call socialism, we should expect our languages and cultures to start doing all kinds of interesting and surprising things.

Paddy Shannon

Cooking the Books: Capitalism cannot be reset (2021)

The Cooking The Books column from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the ‘Great Reset’ was proposed last June the only people to take any notice were conspiracists who saw it as a plan by a cabal of world leaders to impose a ‘New World Order’ with the ‘plandemic’ as the first step. This is nonsense but the proposal to ‘reset’ capitalism is not much better, as is explained in the same way as we would in this extract from a podcast by Peter Joseph on 20 January (LINK).

"The great reset was put forward by Klaus Schwab, the head of the World Economic Forum, if I remember correctly. He started talking about this around the beginning of COVID-19 in early 2020. Here’s what it says on their actual website, ‘To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country from the United States to China must participate, and every industry from oil and gas, to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a great reset of capitalism.’ Yes, the great reset of capitalism. Which makes no sense at all since capitalism is actually the fundamental problem, affecting sustainability and all other such issues that this great reset professes to address.

I suppose it’s good to see more conversation, especially when it comes to the environment, but the very fact that the limits of debate have been set and that this is really about preserving capitalism, even though they want to create some idealized version of it called stakeholder capitalism, all this simply reveals another well-meaning pro-establishment spasm in the end. No different than all the climate conferences and biodiversity conferences that accomplish nothing because everyone refuses to look at the system structure as the actual problem, the economic system. It’s actually quite comical if you think about it, ‘We want to change the world, but not capitalism.’

And of course this notion of stakeholder capitalism is one from a long line of nonsensical, qualifying adjectives that people amend before the word capitalism to try and pretend like some sub distinction would ever make a meaningful difference. You see all over the place, crony capitalism, responsible capitalism, vulture capitalism, the social entrepreneur. My favorite is conscious capitalism, as if it ever could be given the very nature and incentives of the structure, once again. It doesn’t matter who’s in the positions. It matters what the structural incentives are.

Just to be clear here, this stakeholder capitalism is defined as ‘a system in which corporations are oriented to serve the interests of all their stakeholders. Among the key stakeholders are consumers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and local communities. Under this system, a company’s purpose is to create long-term value and not to maximize profits, and enhance shareholder value at the cost of other stakeholder groups.’ I’m not even going to address the insurmountable idealism in that vague description other than to say, you can never take the core incentive out of the system if the system remains in any respect or form. It is nonsensical to say that somehow corporations are going to orient themselves respecting everybody in this kind of stakeholder environment and the ecosystem without maximization of profit and hence, exploitation. You can’t have capitalism without exploitation and profit and hence, exploitation. If those things are removed, then you’re in a completely different system by default.

So this great reset thing is just another spasm, a well-meaning joke, a ploy in fact to sort of pretend like we can make capitalism better when all empirical evidence shows that we cannot.

Proper Gander: Control And Coercion (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most disturbing consequences of the pandemic has been an increase in domestic abuse. During the first three months of the lockdown, there were over 40,000 enquiries to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, mostly made by women. In June, the number was almost 80 per cent higher than usual, according to the charity which runs the helpline, Refuge. Working from home and being unable to mix with other households or go to the shops have made it harder for people trapped with an abusive partner or relative to get some distance or escape. And worries about money, health and unemployment have been compounded by the pandemic, and then exacerbate already toxic relationships.

Domestic abuse doesn’t just mean physical violence; it often takes more subtle and calculated forms. Several years ago, legislation was changed to more clearly incorporate this. The Serious Crime Act 2015 included a new offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in intimate or familial relationships. This refers to a pattern of behaviour by the perpetrator which makes their victim fearful or otherwise has a substantial adverse effect on them. Such behaviour would involve manipulating the victim or limiting what they can do, possibly by cutting them off from family and friends, taking over their finances or imposing rules on them. So, controlling and coercive behaviour is a combination of psychological and emotional abuse, sometimes with financial abuse, with or without physical violence.

Coercive and controlling behaviour can be difficult to recognise, both from inside and outside the situation. A recent documentary on BBC3 – Is This Coercive Control? – looked at whether a group of young adults would be able to identify its signs. Over two days, they watch and discuss a specially made drama about the relationship between two twentysomethings. Rachel gets fired from her office job and moves in with Alex, her boyfriend of a few months. She fails to find other work and gets increasingly in debt and withdrawn. Alex pushes on her his expectations about what she ‘should’ wear and how she ‘should’ keep the flat tidy. The plot then jumps to a courtroom, with each getting interrogated about their now-disintegrated relationship. The show’s presenter, journalist Ellie Flynn, asks the group of volunteers about their interpretations of how Rachel and Alex relate to each other, and particularly if they believe that any behaviour in the scenario constitutes a crime. All the volunteers see that Alex’s actions are unacceptable, while nearly three quarters don’t think that they’re illegal. In the drama, Alex escapes prosecution because of a lack of evidence that he has been abusive. Emotional and psychological abuse is hard to prove, and realistically enough, the court in the drama doesn’t get the full picture. It’s revealed that Alex engineered for Rachel to lose her job and not get another one, while also isolating her from her friend and leaving threatening voicemail messages, clearly coercive and controlling behaviour.

It’s a step in the right direction that domestic abuse is recognised more than it used to be, and many people sincerely try to address the problem. However, the services run to support victims of abuse are sadly unable to help all those in need. There’s never been enough funding available, and this year’s disruptions have added further pressures. According to a survey by charity Safe Lives, three quarters of domestic abuse support services which responded have had to reduce their capacity due to the pandemic, when there is greater need for them.

These services, and the law, have assisted many victims with getting support and, less often, a sense that justice has been served. But they can’t address the deeper causes of domestic abuse. Each situation is different, but they all happen in a society which enables them. Money is such an important aspect of capitalism that it’s bound to impact on how we relate to our partners and families. In the scenario featured in the documentary, Rachel and Alex’s relationship is shaped by money as much as by other factors: when Rachel loses her job she can’t afford to do anything but move in with Alex, and her lack of money gives Alex a way to control her. People who are trapped in a destructive relationship are often trapped partly because they don’t have much financial autonomy. This is one reason why women, who tend to have lower incomes than men, are more often victims of domestic abuse. As our society is based on division, and competition, and exploitation, it encourages us to want power or at least an advantage over others, financially or otherwise. For some people, these tendencies take over and come out in their close relationships, pushing out empathy and affection. Perpetrators have usually been damaged themselves in some way, and in turn go on to damage those they can.

Understanding how capitalist society creates the situations where domestic abuse can happen isn’t enough, though. Really tackling the problem of domestic abuse means addressing its root causes: the social system we live in.

Mike Foster