Voice From The Back: The Third Way (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Third Way 

The government deplores the forces of conservatism. It detests Old Labour. And now the Home Secretary Jack Straw is a ferocious critic of “woolly-minded” liberals. The only constituency and philosophy that draws its uncritical admiration is business. It was the fact that businesses in Manchester might make losses with the cancellation of the Tyson fight, explained Mr Straw last week, that had decisively influenced his decision to alter the law of the land and admit a convicted rapist. Thus the Labour Party enters its centennial year: as the declared enemy of liberalism and of the use of the state to redistribute wealth; an uncertain custodian of public services, and the firm friend in every circumstance of business, entrepreneurship and profit. Observer, 16 January.

Cause and effect 

The rich got richer last week. City bonuses went through the roof, with 2,500 staff at investment bankers, Goldman Sachs sharing £100m in salary top-ups . . . Elsewhere in Britain, 2 million children are living in homes where no one has a job. According to a Joseph Rowntree Foundation study published last Thursday, the first years of a Labour government have done little to close the gap between rich and poor. There are 14 million people living below the poverty line—a line which defines “poor” as having an income of £132 a week. That’s half the national average income. Independent on Sunday, 12 December.

African capitalism 

Close to 60 families were left homeless yesterday at Farm No. 1270, Malkerns, owned by Matsapha businessman, Tom Kirk , after their homes were demolished in their presence . . . A strong force of 85 fully armed police officers from Hhohho, Manzini and Operational Support (OSSU) was in full guard to make sure the squatters’ houses were brought down and to counter any resistance . . . A number of grieving families interviewed were very angry with the exercise as they had thought the king was going to save them, after his speech over the weekend when he arrived from the trip to Malaysia and Singapore. The king made a general statement that the evictions of squatters in farms should not be encouraged. From a Swaziland newspaper, 5 August 1999.

The childhood of capitalism 

Last week the national security adviser to India’s Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, on a goodwill visit to London met Trade and Industry Secretary Stephen Byers and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook. He warned them privately of India’s fear of being locked out of vital Western markets because of the country’s heavy dependence on child workers. India is likely to raise the issue with Tony Blair during next weekend’s gathering of heads of Commonwealth governments in South Africa. A few years ago, India’s fireworks industry calculated that employing children saved around 32 million rupees a year in labour costs. A survey of children employed to stitch footballs in Sialkot, Pakistan, revealed that they provided nearly a quarter of their families’ annual earnings. Almost all worked to pay for basic items such as food and clothing. Observer, 7 November.

Giving up 

The Samaritans, the organisation which has helped save the lives of thousands of desperate people, has seen an alarming slump in its number of volunteers . . . While fewer people are willing to listen and assist, suicides among young males have increased sharply during the Nineties, claiming the lives of 17 out of every 100,000 young men in 1997. Independent on Sunday, 12 December.

The Utopians 

[Amory] Lovins is visiting England to promote his new book, Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution. The product of an intense two-year collaboration with his wife, Hunter, and US green business guru Paul Hawken, it attempts to set an agenda for “the next industrial revolution”, based on “capitalism as if living systems mattered”. Earth Matters, Winter 99.

Bleak Christmas 

An estimated 4500 children without a permanent roof over their heads face a bleak Christmas, Shelter Scotland claimed yesterday . . . The study reveals between 16,000 and 24,000 children become homeless in Scotland every year, with between 4000 and 4500 living in temporary accommodation at any one time. Domestic violence is the root cause of homelessness for nearly 4000 families every year. The Herald, 16 December.

Religion still pays 

He was the mastermind behind the cynical marketing ploy that gave the world Death brand cigarettes. Now BJ Cunningtham is lighting up the soul of business. He is among the young entrepreneurs bringing back religion to the boardrooms, with executives keen to prove that profit and principle can mix. The trend has taken root in the US and there are signs that a wave of spirituality is spreading to the UK . . . Californian hippie Walter Cruttenden, who runs E*Offering, an internet business that brings ethical companies to the stock market is one example of the new spiritual entrepreneur. A follower of mystic Paramahansa Yogananda, he gets up at 4.30am each day for meditational yoga . . .”I come out of meditation with a clear idea of how to solve a business problem.” Financial Mail on Sunday, 9 January.

National nonsense (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Nationalism is utterly opposed to socialism. Socialists therefore oppose nationalism in all its forms.

It might be supposed that people who profess an interest in the doings of human beings—such as, say, journalists—might well consider a solid and determined strike by nurses over pay to be a worthwhile subject for their notice. This should be especially so when such a strike is going on within but a few hundred miles of their offices, as happened when in October the nurses of Ireland voted by an overwhelming majority (90 percent for) to go on indefinite strike over their shoddy pay. Devoted consumers of the British media, however, would have found nary a whisper on the subject. Clearly, a story of dedicated health care professionals—usually referred to as “angels” by our sharp-eyed reporters—feeling so ill-used and battered by the system that they decided to take action for themselves, is not of interest to human beings on the other side of a small stretch of water. Instead we were treated to facile dissertations upon the constitutional significance of Prince Charles skipping dinner with the Chinese president.

The story is ever the same. Events that occur outside of Britain’s boundaries are of no concern to our intrepid observers of humanity, unless they somehow have a “British interest”. We are not meant to be interested in the affairs of humans generally, but instead to be concerned with “the British” first and foremost. Indeed, when BBC journalist Kate Adie reported on the Dunblane massacre, using exactly the same style and technique as she would have reported a massacre in some far-flung war-torn region, she was execrated for her insensitivity. The deaths of British children are clearly more important than children dead in war.

Tool of rising capitalist class

Historically, nationalism and national feeling have been the tool of the capitalist class for both winning and retaining power. England, for example, can be seen as having developed through the growth of the economic power and influence of London. As London grew, and began to dictate the economic priorities of the surrounding regions, so to it began to need to control them politically, and socially, in order to protect its own interests. Up until the reign of Henry VIII the feudal barons had lived in almost total autonomy, specifically the far-flung magnates like the Percies of Northumbria. Most regions, villages even, maintained a distinctive identity, set of values and traditions. As their influence grew, it became incumbent upon the London capitalists to try and tailor these values and traditions to win over more support for themselves, or at least to ensure an absence of conflict.

In order to achieve this they adapted the traditions they found among the subjected communities, or even made them up when none suitable existed. A classic example was the myth of the Norman Yoke—that Saxon England had been a bastion of Freedom and Democracy, but that William the Conqueror had imported the tyrannical monarchy and feudalism with him. The historical record shows that the Saxons had extensive feudal structures of their own. Of course, that was irrelevant to the myth-makers. They had a tradition to invent, specifically, one which would unite people behind them against their feudal opponents.

The aristocracy itself maintained a preference of looking towards the complex familial power structures across Europe, rather than to a feeling of community with people of their own domain. Title, land and religion were the factors that mattered to them, not nation. They were more concerned with status among their peers. It didn’t matter what language the people who lived on their lands spoke. Further, avowal of the doctrine of the nation was seen as placing an ideological category above the monarch; where before the monarch was the state, now the monarch was to be subordinated to the state.

Making (up) a nation

As the power of the proponents of these ideas grew, so pronouncing an adherence to their ideas became a swift and secure way to win preferment. Hence the power of their ideas grew too, to become the dominant, ruling ideas. There was a further practical impetus for cultural standardisation: the extension of state and bureaucratic power further into life, in order to more efficiently control the economy and delineate property. Coupled with the increased capacity and need for rapid communication, this meant that standardised linguistic practices were needed. Language became a factor in establishing state power, and thus it became a factor in determining a “nation”. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the nation-state coincides with the invention of the dictionary and the encyclopaedia. It’s no coincidence that nationalism is accompanied by a mania for classifying, delineating and defining people into categories. These practical considerations were made explicit by the Polish nationalist Pilsudski, who observed that “It is the state that makes the nation, not the nation the state.”

Nations have taken a great deal of building. There is almost no nation-state that has not had its boundaries drawn in blood, its foundations dug out of human flesh. England was nationalised by Cromwell with the deaths of the Cornish and the Irish. France was nationalised by bloody wars between the monarchy and local lords and interests (not to mention the interminable wars with the Germanic states to set the exact boundary between the two “nations”). America was built on the bodies of the native population. It is a process that continues today in the form nation-building, which has taken in Yugoslavia and Central Africa.

The effort, though, has to be ongoing. States have required the use of an education system, to standardise learning, spread a national history and a sense of shared culture. An example of this can be seen in the Thatcher government’s enforcement of the intellectually bankrupt notion of a Literary Canon in the National Curriculum: a gallery of literary luminaries, led by Shakespeare, that bored, uninterested children are told are great and something for them to be proud of. On the continent, it was the task of “turning peasants into Frenchmen” that the Republic set itself. Nations are made, not born.

In order to enforce the new system of property over the whole range of its influence, the capitalist class needed the state, and its legitimising idea of nationalism and the nation. Culture resides in sets of ideas, values and practises that set out a sense of precedent, self and future possibility. By imposing the idea of the nation upon a culture, complete with its inherent notions of territorial ownership and property, the ruling class impose their notions of property on the very self-image of the people within that culture.

All possibilities and plans are circumscribed by, or at least must be made in relation to, this logic. So long as people think in terms of the “common good” of the “national economy”, in terms of the overall performance of one unit in the world-wide division of peoples, they are, whether consciously or not, serving the interests of the capitalist class. All evaluations, priorities and hierarchies of value within a “national culture” are made from the point of view, from the self-interest, and, indeed, the apprehended self-hood, of the members of the capitalist class. When the economy is “doing well” it is doing so for the capitalists, when the economy is ailing, it is ailing for the capitalists. Their interest and feeling is the condition for action and evaluation of a national culture.

The idea of “the nation”, then, functions as a supreme good, beyond the physical and mechanical functionings of the state, to which any cause may appeal. Thus, both Blair and Hague are claiming that their position on the Euro is the true “patriotic cause”. Put another way, it is a fantasy, a dream, which can be used to cover up for problems and contradictions in the practice of the state’s daily life. Its function is to legitimise both the state and class rule, and sustain a large quantity of support, through workers who identify with the ideals of nationhood and believe themselves to be the same as, and have the same interests as, their masters.

No common interest 

Workers, of course, do not share a common interest with their masters. It does not follow that if the “national wealth” increases, or if trade increases, or even if profit increases, that higher wages will be gained by workers. In fact capitalists can only make a profit by appropriating the wealth produced by the workers to themselves; but in the topsy-turvy world of ideology, it seems that workers will only have good pay and wealth when the capitalists are doing well. So it appears that workers and capitalists share a common interest. In fact, the interest of workers is conditioned by the interest of the capitalist, in exactly the same manner as hostages held by a kidnapper: unless the kidnapper-capitalists’s demands are met, they will not allow the hostage-workers to have what they need to live.

There is a well-documented effect of hostage situations, called “The Stockholm Syndrome” in which hostages under duress began to identify with their kidnappers, and believe in their cause. Nationalism works in much the same way. It is the Stockholm Syndrome on a grand scale. The working class who are dependent (under the current system) on the capitalists, to whom they are bonded by state-boundaries across which they are not permitted to escape, begin to believe that they share an identity with them. Hence the ridiculous comments we’ve all heard from people flipping burgers in McDonalds, insisting blindly that they don’t like socialism because they’re capitalists. Hence further, the ridiculous spectacle of people wittering on about the Union Flag being on British Airways’ planes, as if BA were anything more than a vehicle for enriching share-holders.

Workers have no country

The only way to define such national identity is to define it in terms of what (who) it is not, i.e. negatively. Thus nationalism sets itself as being against other countries, striving to define a uniqueness of national culture so as to once and for all set its country apart from others, to know itself by what is un-like it. At one extreme this can include myths about race and blood, trying to attach the national abstraction to some trait of genetics or similar such nonsense. Since people have a strong desire to retain their own perceived identity, and to have a good opinion of themselves, often the creeds based on such identities function in a highly irrational, and ultimately, defensive way. Thus it is usually a sign of desperation and of an incapacity to formulate a coherent argument when our masters resort to playing the nationalist card.

It is clear, then, that socialists must oppose nationalism in all its forms: not just refusing to espouse their creed, but defying the rituals, the anthem signing, flag saluting and other expressions of craven loyalty to the nation-state, that help enforce the idea of nation in our minds. There is no national interest for workers, and any attempt to reform capitalism must be based on a national interest and thus be opposed to socialism. Self-determination for “nations” just equates with freedom and self-determination for a ruling class. It must be opposed in favour of self determination for people, concretely and actually in their own lives. It must be opposed with socialism.

Pik Smeet

Letters: Making Socialism happen (2000)

Letters to the Editors from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Making Socialism happen

Dear Editors,

JIMBOB hit it in one (letters January). If we really do want socialism to happen but are waiting for the rest of the world to understand it, then we’ll wait for ever! To combat capitalism we regrettably need to use the tools of capitalism, i.e. marketing—tell the people. Any business consultant will tell you that sales and marketing are the most important aspect of any business for profit (I do understand that the “profit” of Socialism is a better life for all).

In years gone by, at least we used to have “SPGB” painted on railway bridges, walls etc. That was before I had heard of the Socialist Party but at least, it made people curious as to its meaning and many must have followed it through and discovered the truth. I found socialism through a small advert in the Big Issue. After taking the Socialist Standard for 3 years now, together with other research, I realised that I have been a Socialist all my life!

There are billions of Socialists out there but we are not doing a very good job of educating them. Poorly-attended meetings in dingy pubs involving philosophical discussions are going nowhere—at least we had some News out of William Morris! Resources and Internet are possibly the most used words of these times. Resources are well understood—you can’t do ‘owt ‘bowt brass, but surely starting in a small way—car stickers, ties, T-shirts, sweatshirts, fly-postering etc—would be better than nothing. Internet—forget it—topics on the Internet need to be accessed—they don’t jump out and hit you in the face.

People are basically lazy and need to have information placed before them at all times—billboards, TV, newspapers, magazines—the Internet has a long way to go to using these marketing tools and I, for one, am not sure that it will ever do it. Encyclopaedias never became best sellers, did they?

Trevor Smith, 

Bury, Lancs

Disillusioned

Dear Editors,

Nature abhors a vacuum. So, Labour were lucky to have government handed to them on a plate by that blank space we remember as the Major years. But now we are grown up. A pity, then, that we should be considered witless enough to need governing by a political celeb called Tony Blair. Worse still, as a mirror image of the Tory industrial-strength hypocrisy of old, this major-Domo leads a band of recycled Trotskyists, turn-again Socialists and ambitious but ideological blank pages to do his bidding. Time and again, we see lesser ministers fall by the wayside, soon outliving their usefulness but forever hamstrung by the Downing Street Policy Unit, and certain sure that Mr Blair will come up smelling of New Labour roses. Inferior brands of minister are mortal, and if he could only find a better electorate, I fancy his problems would disappear entirely. We must strive to be as new as today’s version of events. But being too old—and sceptical—so putting me outside Tony Blair’s remit, I remain staggered by a mentality that says it’s OK to be seen as a famous face on the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines, while presiding over quite objectionable policies such as confiscation of disabled voters’ income, and glossing over a banana-republic pauperisation of public services. When I canvassed for Labour—but mainly to get rid of the Tories—I imagined, foolishly, we’d been promised something a touch closer to Marx, than Imelda Marcos.

Jeffrey Wheeler, 

Nuneaton, Warwicks

Reclaim the streets

Dear Editors,

I liked the tone of the Open Letter to Reclaim The Streets (January) but then when I saw the recent thing on it all on TV late last week I tend to think that we should be pushing the fact that theirs is a futile method of social and political change as it completely ignores the power of the state. This is one of the reasons that I’m a keen supporter of the party, due to the fact that it does not ignore vital questions that “radicals/anarchists” should be asking about methods. Wishy-washy do-goodism on their part only ends up being self-seeking and self-repressive.

There are many cross-sections of people at the RTS-type events and, yes, “J18 Carnival Against Capitalism” was a breakthrough. I still got the feeling that some of the people are there because it’s this year’s thing, some because it’s a lifestyle-type thing, some because they have reformist agendas to push and a section of people who are influenced by the ideals of Anarchism. It’s these last people who I think we are more likely to persuade to the Socialist case because they are actually looking for answers as to why the world is in a mess. In my opinion it’s only because the “Anarchists” are out there and visible that we had people pointing but vaguely and incoherently in that direction (which in a way is fine) but there is no coherent method that Socialism has to offer. That’s why I think we need to be there and at these events with truck loads of leaflets and having a dialogue with anyone prepared to listen. It’s also why I think it’s important for us to attend the Mayday 2000 thing this year also, on a similar level.

‘Stair, 

Norwich

Land of soup kitchens (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sweet charity? Emergency Food and the End of Entitlement by Janet Poppendieck (Penguin, 1999) is an interesting and well-documented analysis of the process by which hunger emerged as a problem in the United States. Local assistance payments to destitute individuals drifted downwards in the 1980s and were the frequent target of cut-backs in the 1990s. Over the same period, the minimalistic federal Supplemental Security Income programme for the aged and disabled barely kept up with rising housing costs. The value of family allowances (AFDC) has been declining since 1989 and it is no longer sufficient to cover real rents and leave enough for food. The food stamp programme is based on an outdated calculation of needs and a highly restrictive means test. In the early 1980s, however, the Reagan administration operated cut-backs in Medicaid, housing assistance, energy assistance, unemployment compensation, income support and food assistance.

Given that this all took place during a major recession, the effects of the cut-backs were immediately felt by charity workers operating in the field of food relief :

“It used to be just two or three people a day coming for food,” Brother Giles Needler of the San Damiano Friary told a New York Times reporter late in 1981. “Now it seems that the doorbell is always ringing. And before it was the knights of the road. Now it’s mothers with five kids, families.”

Before long the existing network of soup kitchens was swamped with the “New Poor”. A survey undertaken by the Centre for Budget and Policy Priorities finding that in some 16 areas demand for emergency food had increased by 50 percent between 1982 and 1983. In a third of agencies demand had doubled.

But whilst this was not, in itself, sufficient to shift attention towards the soup kitchen ‘solution’, two events more or less guaranteed the emphasis placed on emergency food. The first of these was the substantial cut-backs in the food stamp and child nutrition programmes. The fact that hundreds of individuals were involved in the food assistance programmes that had been cut, meant that a highly articulate lobby could use what appeared as a food emergency to focus attention on what was, in fact, a larger problem of social deprivation, unemployment and homelessness :

“It takes a while to lose your home, but you get hungry right away, and when you do, it is hard to think about anything else.”

The second even was the discovery of massive stockpiles of surplus dairy products created by agricultural price support. These products cost a lot to store and could well have gone to waste. So, naturally, enough attention focused on this food, the government seeking to deflect criticism by distributing what was often mouldy cheese to individuals prepared to wait in line in the middle of winter to receive it. This food distribution was helped along by a small army of volunteer workers. What happened next was entirely predictable:

“With hunger a recurrent topic on the nightly news, and dairy surpluses calling attention to the abundance of food available, a sort of snowball process occurred in many communities. As more kitchens and pantries sprang up, more food drives and appeals for financial support were organised, more people became involved with hunger-related activities, and more hunger stories appeared in the press.”

The voluntary effort was encouraged by city heads and belatedly endorsed by the Reagan government. This transformed the individual emergencies into a social emergency. Pretty soon, the distribution of other food surpluses (rice, cornmeal, and honey) was pressed for and obtained whilst the federal government intervened to provide financial and logistical support. In the mid-1980s projects were irrupting right across America, helped in this by the government which was by this time providing grants to local administrations.

The fact that reformers concentrated most of their attention on hunger led to the demand for subsidies for emergency food programmes whilst encouraging concerned citizens to step into the breach which had been opened up by the government. This was clearly detrimental to the demands for the restoration of statutory entitlements. Yet the shortcomings of emergency food aid are well documented. It is more often than not insufficient, nutritionally inadequate, and inappropriate. The supply of food is subject to the vagaries of market surpluses; cheese one week, peanut butter the next. Distribution points are often inaccessible and geographical distribution tends to be patchy. The incredible inefficiency involved in improvising a food distribution system contrasts with the sophisticated commercial operation which panders to the needs of the financially solvent :

“This nation has a food distribution system that is famous all over the world for its ability to deliver variety and economy to even the most remote places in the country. Ironically, the period in which soup kitchens and food pantries have proliferated is also a period that has seen the reduction of supermarket availability in many inner-city neighbourhoods.”

Even by the narrow standards of the food stamp programmes, soup kitchens are a logistical non-starter. Food stamps at least have the advantage of allowing a modicum of participation in what’s left of the commercial set-up in poor neighbourhoods. So why build a food distribution system from scratch? The answer, of course, is that charity mobilises unpaid voluntary labour. It can therefore afford to be profligate with regard to the utilisation of human energy. The fact that recipients have few alternatives means that there is little need to closely tailor supply to needs. More importantly, because charity is uncertain it removes poverty from the public domain of statutory requirements and therefore releases pressure to raise welfare levels. Not to put a finer point on it, it’s cheap.

MM

The Price of Everything (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

One aspect of capitalism’s spreading tentacles which Marx correctly predicted was the way in which the money system has constantly expanded to take over areas of life that were previously free of that rationing. Things that had been taken freely without question start to be priced. Even the most minute details of our daily progress through existence are turned into commodities, items to be bought and sold at a profit for those who own and control the productive resources of the planet.

New Age dreamers get excited if one out of a thousand predictions made by some old Nostradamus type charlatan happens to accidentally come true. Karl Marx, on the other hand, used the ultimately hardheaded, scientific, rational approach to prediction. Looking at the material, economic and social forces developing around him, he saw the trends that existed and where they were leading. He predicted that if capitalism were allowed to continue as a global social system, things would get worse for the majority of people. And those predictions have proved right time and again.

The proportion of people across the world who starve to death in the face of plenty is today higher, not lower, than a hundred years ago. The gap between rich and poor has grown wider over the past decades, even in so-called modern countries like Britain. Mergers grow larger, monopoly increases, and both absolute and relative poverty expands globally. Individual despair and depression is worse than a hundred years ago. Social conflict, repression and violence across the world are both more brutal and more inescapably sophisticated than ever before. Exploitation, in the widest sense, has even become taken for granted.

Nothing for free

Was it not once a common saying, “as free as the air we breathe or the water we drink”? Now water has become one of the most significant of household bills, and even a point of controversy as the authorities recently acknowledged that the water “companies” might be “overcharging” for it. Charging for water is quite unavoidable, within the warped logic of the capitalist system. To get water from its natural sources into the glass on your kitchen table does involve work, measured in hundreds of person-hours. It can be mathematically quantified. The customer pays a sum of cash reflecting the value which effort has embodied in the product, then the manufacturing company which controls the process can make a profit and hence expand its capital, by paying salaries to those who have done that work, and holding on to the surplus. That surplus is the difference between the wealth created by those workers and the smaller value, paid as salaries or wages, on which they struggle to survive.

In fact, from the point of view of capitalism, anything that is free is an abhorrent aberration to be corrected as urgently as possible, if any essential items of consumption are not charged in this way (whether because their cost is being underwritten by government or other subsidies, or because it has just been overlooked). For decades, if you went into a cafe for your breakfast, there would be those big, round, red plastic tomatoes on each table, from which you could squirt a dollop of watered-down tomato ketchup which came served with a disgusting sound, if there was any left. Then, with greater modern style and sophistication, Heinz 57’s monopoly of the market allowed them product-placement advantage in which their little angular bottles could be found on the tables of cafes and even cheaper restaurants, for the free and liberal use of their customers. Of course, nothing in capitalism is free, and the cost of such extras would have been built into the prices charged for meals. But at least there was some individual leeway as to how much of the sauce each individual could add to the side of their plate if they desired. Now the almost universal norm in such places is those absurd tiny, individual sachets of ketchup and other condiments.

Did their designer have any awareness that one such sachet would be enough only to adorn a pea? So you need to use at least three or four for a plate of chips, and the fact that they are almost impossible to open means frustration, mess and a rapidly congealing plate of chips. The ratio of plastic to sauce is such that the 10p generally charged to the customer is probably more than half for the packaging – which, under the previous system did not even exist for individual portions. This, although it seems a trivial example, sums up perfectly how capitalism expands its control over our lives in a negative way, with every year it is allowed to continue. Individual consumption in that detail has become more precisely controlled, monitored and charged. A new and pointless product has been created. Profits have been increased. And the net effect to its consumer? Inconvenience, complete lack of dignity and an extra bill at the end.

Competition time, suckers

The telecommunications industry is now one of the biggest and most rapidly growing sectors of the worldwide economy. It has proved to be an almost inexhaustible source of “new product” creation, with needs that people never realised they had mysteriously emerging, shrink-wrapped, from Soho advertising agency back-doors to be introduced as marvels to those who are going to suffer from them and pay for the privilege. Do you recall a time when concert promoters were keen to sell tickets and would therefore publicise their contact-numbers, so that you could phone up and buy your supply? It has now become common for them to use premium rate numbers, so that the thousands of keen punters, if they want to even find out more details of the event in question, must pay not only the phone operators via their phone bills, but a substantial additional fee incorporated in the higher call charge to . . . none other than the promoters themselves!

Cheap capitalist tricks

The audacity of this is breathtaking. I am willing to sell you a ticket to my show. And if you pay me a pound, I might tell you when and where it is. For another pound, I’ll tell you how you can get a ticket. And when I do, and you have your thirty pounds ready for that ticket, there will be a special “buying” fee, which we call a booking cost, of another two pounds! The Rolling Stones made more money than any other band from touring during the 1990s, sharing a staggering £470 million, but you can be sure that their promoters did not go away empty-handed. Of course, the extra costs of employing people to actually sell the tickets and so on would have been allowed for in the ticket price previously. But what is happening here is a crude and exploitative bit of nasty psychological manipulation. If the tickets were advertised at £50 it might sound off-putting, so, the logic goes, these scum punters will be more likely to go for it if we chip away at them for the money bit by bit.

The exploitation of this cheap psychological manipulation is all the more sickening when used against the young and naive, and yet here it has become so taken for granted that the presenters of children’s television who supervise these scams on Saturday mornings in particular can scarcely sometimes suppress their own smug chuckles with each other, as they announce the latest absurd competition. The technique, which has become popular throughout the week on TV and is used even with adults, is to have people phone in the answer to a multiple-choice question, in the hope of winning a prize.

The cheap and transparent trick they use is to make the question stupidly easy. All but one of the multiple-choice answers are meant to be patently silly. The singer Tom Jones comes from a) Dolphins b) Wales c) China? The object of this is not in the humour of those silly options, however much that might be milked for laughs. It is to maximise the instant profit of tens or even hundreds of thousands which each of these numerous “competitions” creates so easily. Foolish viewers spot that they know the answer, and rush to phone and claim their prize, paying premium rates for the call (shared between the programme makers and their pimps at BT), conveniently forgetting that if they found the answer so obvious to this stupid question, so will millions of others.

Clifford Slapper

Greasy Pole: Let’s Be Frank About Dobson (2000)

Our Frank.

The Greasy Pole column from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If it was a victory it could only be called a Pyrrhic one, for whichever way anyone looked at it the selection of Frank Dobson as Labour’s candidate for mayor of London promises to be vastly damaging to the party. To begin with there are all those party members who voted for Livingstone. Will they willingly accept a defeat for their man based on gerrymandering so blatant that it almost takes the breath away? What will they do, then, after their experience of the party which they trusted to administer the emergence of a new, vibrant, caring Britain as really a cynical manipulator of power? Then there are the voters outside the party. What will they think of Labour promising in its 1997 manifesto to introduce an elected mayor for London but not then going on to say something like “and we promise to make sure, through some outrageous fiddling of the votes, that our candidate will be someone who will always give unquestioning obedience to our great leader Tony Blair”? Then there is poor old Frank Dobson himself, who did not want the job in the first place, who was eventually forced into publicly distancing himself from the slick operators of Millbank and who is likely to be a shamefaced bearer of Labour’s standard.

It was not so long ago that an important part of the drive to “modernise” the Labour Party was the introduction of the principle of One Member One Vote (OMOV). This was aimed at undermining the power wielded by the unions through their block vote at conferences and in the election of leaders. Labour had not always experienced such ambivalence about their relationship with the unions. During the Attlee government the unions could be relied on to support any government policy, no matter how damaging to their members. This meant that if any trade unionists wanted to offer any serious resistance to the depression of their living standards which the Labour government were demanding they had to do this as unofficial strikers, without the support of, or even at times in the face of opposition from, their union. There was no doubt then about the value which the Labour leadership placed on the block vote. This changed when the unions began to elect leaders like Frank Cousins, Hugh Scanlon and Mick McGahey, who were expected to give a higher priority to protecting their members’ interests than to mindlessly obeying the government.

Electoral College

And so it came to pass, that the policy of OMOV was considered to be essential if the Labour Party was ever to get back into power. Neil Kinnock thought so and so did John Smith. And among the most ardent supporters of the idea was a young, thrusting MP called Tony Blair.

But that was then and this is now and it quickly became clear, when it was time to select who would be the Labour candidate in the mayoral election in London, that if the OMOV principle was left to operate without interference there was a good chance that Labour’s candidate would not be from among the ranks of those who are dazzled by the charisma of Tony Blair—or who are so desperate for advancement that they would never dream of opposing the leadership line on any issue. So OMOV had to go, until it becomes convenient for the leadership to again represent it as essential to any political party with pretensions to being democratic. In its place the party erected a complex system of voting for an electoral college in which the votes of London MPs and MEPs and of unions which supported Blair’s favoured candidate carried a disproportionate weight. An article in the Observer on 20 February calculated the percentage value of each vote in the electoral college. The vote of a member of the union GMB, which largely supported Livingstone, was worth 0.000427 percent of the total. The vote of a member of the AEEU, which refused to ballot its members and supported Dobson, was worth 0.065 percent. The vote of an individual party member came to 0.001 percent while that of a London MP was worth about 0.45 percent.

It was an effective, if transparent, scam but it needed some fine tuning. Like allowing someone who is no longer an MEP and who does not live in London to vote. Like disallowing the votes of unions which supported Livingstone but were late with their affiliation fees. And from this discreditable fraud emerged Frank Dobson. Stout, bearded, genial Frank. Everyone’s favourite uncle. The man you can trust to run London as if it isn’t one of the great centres of world capitalism. A bit dishevelled after all that infighting and vote rigging but apparently as game as ever.

Tamed dog

Until recently not a lot was known about Frank Dobson. He was becoming more and more famous as the Health Secretary who could not keep Labour’s election promise to reduce hospital waiting lists (one hospital chief executive may have been trying to cheer Frank up when he cut his waiting lists by the simple expedient of pretending that a lot of patients were no longer on it). By the time he had reached the exalted heights of Westminster Dobson may well have been hoping for an uninterrupted climb up the greasy pole, untroubled by an embarrassing past. During the Sixties and Seventies the Tory press had a lot of fun with the antics of the so-called loony left councils. With a little journalistic licence it was easy to characterise these councils as wildly unrealistic, pumping extravagant sums of money into all manner of exotically useless causes and organisations. The truth was rather less lurid but those councils were a serious embarrassment to the Labour Party. One of the most publicised and derided was Camden. Its leader was Frank Dobson, then beardless, dark-haired and less avuncular. His left-wing credentials were impressive enough for Ken Livingstone to award him some warmly fraternal mentions in his book If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish It:

“At the same time as we were rebelling at the GLC, the Camden Council Labour Group, led by Frank Dobson . . . decided to convene a London-wide meeting to oppose the new housing expenditure controls which had been imposed on all councils by the Labour Government . . . Between 1971 and 1975 First Millie Miller and then Frank Dobson had provided strong leadership with a clear sense of direction.”

Of course Dobson is not the only left-winger to be brought to heel by the prospect of a powerful job in the romance of running capitalism’s chaos while telling the rest of us that they have the system under control. This government is thick with such people: Stephen Byers, Margaret Hodge, Paul Boateng, Blair himself. Their changes in attitude are bound to expose flaws in the theories and practice of their party, to show how futile it is. Capitalism can’t be run other than in the interest of its ruling class. The system’s politics, in other words, are a ruthless trickery and in the case of the London mayoral election the trickery has been transparently frenzied. Tony Blair runs this government, and shows his contempt for the working class who voted for his party, on the principle that lies, false promises and U-turns can be as blatant as necessary because the votes are influenced by other factors. Harold Wilson once said that in politics seven days is a long time. In Blair’s timing seven hours seems more than enough.

The whole sordid story has discredited Labour’s claim to be a democratic party, let alone one which will have a significantly positive effect on the lives of the working class. That is something for the voters in London to remember when they go to vote for the Mayor in the near future.

Ivan

World View: The two Chinas (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The President of Taiwan (the Republic of China) is today Li Têng-hui, a spokesman for the big capitalists with the greatest stake in the island’s wealth. Opposing him and his colleagues of the Kuomintang are the island’s smaller capitalists, campaigning for Taiwan’s independence as a nation-state. China has threatened to invade Taiwan and impose Beijing’s rule should the Taiwan nationalists ever topple the Kuomintang. The large capitalists of China and Taiwan now engage in full trade relations and the difference in flag colour is largely irrelevant. While Taiwan remains under the rule of the Kuomintang and its new sister parties it remains a province of China in reality, under “renegade” rule in name alone. In the eyes of China’s—and Taiwan’s Chinese—capitalists, the real “renegades” are the Taiwanese capitalists seeking a “completely separate” nation-state, an ambition which is unlikely to be realised.

Li Têng-hui and Têng Hsiao-p’ing possibly manipulated the Taiwanese national elections by the staging of Chinese military manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait at which Li could pose as the champion of Taiwanese independence and an opponent of China, stealing votes from the nationalists. Whatever the future of the two states, workers in Taiwan have to realise they have no interest in supporting either side in what is a struggle between gangs of rival businesspeople for the right to exploit the workers most efficiently.

Têng Hsiao-p’ing, the hero of the Chinese peasants, is now dead. A hero for the peasants of the 1930s fighting against the feudal landlords, he was no friend of China’s workers at the end of the century and is not to be missed by them any more than any other engineer of mass exploitation. While China’s government is still run by the so-called “Communist” Party, private businesses are proliferating and the greater exploitation of people and resources in the interest of profit is gaining ground as never before. Rampantly exploitative and pollutant capitalist industry is booming. (This includes the clearing of the Yangtse for greater commerce through the extermination of one of the world’s rarest species of dolphin.) China is now a trading superpower and the seeds of future conflict with the United States are steadily being sown.

None of this is in the interest of the Chinese working class nor of the majority of humankind, who must still face the task of organising to establish a world community of common ownership of the Earth—if we, human beings, are to avert another, and final, world war, and survive as a life-form at all.

Anthony Walker

World View: In whose interests? (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

In late January, Robin Cook, British Foreign Secretary and master of Orwellian double-speak, made another keynote speech, devoid this time of any reference to “ethical dimensions” to foreign policy and instead focused on the advancing of “British values” of freedom and democracy around the world in the “national interest”.

Although he made references to “common interests”, “international interests”, and “national identity”, as well as the token allusion to democracy and diplomacy, it was the rehashing of the term “national interest” that sickened all but the brainwashed.

Cook speaks of national interest as politicians have for the past century, as if it were something tangible, something that can be seen, something unquestionable. It is indeed a much bandied about term—and many are prepared to take it for granted—but what does it mean?

Well, for one thing, it’s not something the lay person ponders too much. After all, if the politicians think something is in our interests then it must be just that. They know best and if we didn’t trust them we wouldn’t have voted for them. This is, in fact, the kind of mind-set politicians count upon before they can come out with such drivel.

That politicians continue to use terms like national interest is evidence that they premise their speeches on the assumption that the average person on the street is an imbecile. Moreover, the term is so designed, and used, as to distort our perception of reality. From the cradle to the grave we are discouraged from asking significant and searching questions, the type that might embarrass our betters and superiors. We are nurtured to mistrust our own ideas, to respect the views of the clergy, teachers, parents, politicians, the royals and all manner of counsellors and advisers. Little wonder, then, that so many injustices prevail and that so many can speak in defence of the government line, unwittingly acquiescing in their own exploitation, all in the national interest. But this is how it is. So many are prepared to accept that the government embodies the people’s interests.

The national interest conjures up an image that we are all one happy family, all pulling and working together for the good of all, that we all have something to be proud of, to defend and to benefit from. It suggests an absence of strife and antagonism and that the real enemy is “out there”. We’re meant to feel good about the national interest, secure in the knowledge that the well informed are thinking on our behalf. It harks back to the “bulldog spirit” of the blitz years, when even the king and queen seemed half decent because they had been bombed (“Gawd bless ’em all, Guv.”).

In reality, the national interest is anything the master class and their executive, the Blairs and Chiracs and Clintons of this world, deem it to be at any given time, or rather anything that helps perpetuate their ideology and keeps them in power; anything that can undermine the potential for political action geared towards real change. The national interest is the paternalistic jargon of a profit-hungry elite, trying to rationalise in our eyes the lengths they will go to accrue more profits at our expense. It is used by politicians largely to secure support for a course of action they are finding difficult to promote. It is designed to block serious discussion of an issue—who’ll argue against the national interest?—and to marginalise opponents, thus stifling deeper understanding of issues.

Thus, the national interest is a Labour government contemplating the selling of arms to Indonesia, Pakistan and Zimbabwe, the mobilisation of a Western coalition of 750,000 soldiers to tackle a third-world army of farmers in the Middle East. It is a government campaign urging us to shop our neighbours to the state’s protectors. It is an army of police wading into a picket line, truncheons swinging. It is the appointment of drug tsars and the teaching of the benefits of marriage to schoolchildren. The national interest is the Russian army in Chechnya, the USA in Vietnam, Israel’s airforce bombing Lebanon, and Uganda supporting Congolese rebels.

One thing is clear, while all the above can be pushed as national interests, none are in the interests of the working class. The interests of the majority—or the working class—are diametrically opposed to the interests of the capitalist, class. True, we all have basic needs and desires. whichever class we belong to, but talk about shared interests in a two class society is nonsense. The capitalist class have one real interest—and let them deny it—to maximise their investment and to accrue more profit. How many people get hurt and trod on in the process is of no consequence. Neither is much consideration given to environmental concerns. The working class, on the other hand, own little more than our ability to labour, an ability we sell to the master class. Our interest under capitalism becomes getting the best price for our labour power. Indeed such is the onus on us to sell our labour power at as a high a price as possible that its consequences dominate every aspect of our lives.

It has to be remembered that the master class depend on our complacency for their continued survival. Our silence, our willingness to accept everything they say without question, is the victory they celebrate every day. Our job should therefore be to doubt and question everything they say. If we stand for nothing we fall for anything. For we do have interests. As a globally exploited class, denied so many of the benefits of civilisation in a world of potential abundance, it is in our interests, our real class interests, to help put a stop to their insane system, not just for the future of humanity, but for the future of our planet.

Our real class interests lie in establishing a global system of society, devoid of borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders, states or governments, force or coercion, money, wages or salaries, a world in which production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used to its fullest potential and the benefit of all.

John Bissett

TV Review: ‘The Eleven o’clock Show’ (2000)

TV Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Rest For the Wicked?

Channel Four has just welcomed back its flagship nightly satirical review ‘The Eleven o’clock Show’ for another series, though whether the fact that it appears at almost any time in the late night schedules is part of the joke or not is anybody’s guess. This is the show that launched Ali G, the black “homeboy” from Staines who is played by a Jewish white man, and who endlessly employs a stilted Afro-Caribbean patois in his toe-curling interviews with politicians and academics who are singled out precisely because of their ignorance of the idiom.

There has been a debate of sorts in the press over recent weeks about Ali G, specifically over whether he is a racist creation of the actor who portrays him, Sacha Cohen. Whatever else he might be though, Ali G is no Black and White Minstrel. His dialogue is carefully scripted and intended as a comic caricature of a certain strata of British youth subculture where phrases like “wicked”, “posse” and Ali G’s ubiquitous “keep it real!” are trotted out as a substitute for joined-up conversation. That pompous authority figures with little or no conception of modern life and culture can be made to look foolish by their inevitable attempts to take Ali G’s moronic posturing at face value are the nub of the joke, none more so than the Irish republican leader who was asked by Ali G “Why are people always dissin’ da RAC?” and who then tried to answer the question.

What seems to be confusing to some of Ali G’s critics on the left is that his conversation is sprinkled with outrageous and politically incorrect language. But this is where the joke really hits the mark—whether Ali G’s interviewees will go along with his ignorant comments on the grounds that they do not wish to seem “unhip” or whether they will actually confront him—and if so, how. Many of course do not understand his questions and are in no position to form a rounded opinion. Fewer still seem to understand the various sexual references sprinkled throughout his speech, though Tony Benn did on one occasion memorably chastise him for his sexism—including his references to his girlfriends “me bitches”—and with some humour too.

By and large Ali G is well scripted and nicely performed, though unfortunately one suspects that his fame is spreading that fast that he will have no unsuspecting victims left before long willing to be interviewed. He has his own show coming up soon on Channel Four which will be worth looking out for as a follow-up to his Christmas special last year.

Send in the clowns

Now that Ali G has departed, ‘The Eleven o’clock Show‘ is left exposed and bereft. More than ever it now appears to be little more than a post-modern version of ‘Not the Nine o’clock News’, written by the politically ignorant and driven on by a desire to replace humour with shock-value in the hope that at that time of night no-one will notice the difference. A typical example of its approach surfaced—if that is the right word—in its first show back. Sitting behind presenters Daisy Donovan and Iain Lee was an electronic scoreboard labelled “The Dr Shipman Snuff-o-meter”, the score on which rose ever upward as the show progressed. But as the score increased, the tastelessness of the programme’s makers shot up exponentially.

Would Daisy Donovan and Iain Lee, it is tempting to ask, have willingly sat in front of this “joke” scoreboard if their own parents or grandparents had been among those murdered by Shipman? Hopefully not, though they might care to remember the effect this sight would have had on the many in precisely that position, and then feel suitably ashamed. Frankly, better than this could have been expected from a dysfunctional five year old.

It is also curious to note that the programme which spawned the controversial Ali G seems to have attracted few press comments about the little streak of homophobia which is evident in most editions. Perhaps this is because most TV critics still find jokes about Michael Portillo funny regardless of whether they really are or not.

That The Eleven O’clock Show lets itself down in this way is disappointing because it is certainly not all bad and there are occasional rays of sunshine which break through the fog. However, its makers must learn that no truly great comedy programme ever made it on the back of shock-value alone and Daisy Donovan and Iain Lee should note that they do not have quite as much to appear self-satisfied about as their demeanour would suggest. Well observed, original humour and characterisation is needed, and lots of it. Unfortunately, without Ali G ‘The Eleven o’clock Show’ can appear as naked as the emperor with no clothes and, for the most part, just as unsightly.

Dave Perrin

Capitalism’s chaos (2000)

Book Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Capitalism’s World Disorder’, by Jack Barnes. (Pathfinder Press 1999)

“You can shirk [the trouble of expressing yourself clearly] by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in . . . [this] will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning, even from yourself.” So wrote George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language, in 1946. Anyone who wants to see what he meant should read Jack Barnes.

While reading a book about capitalism which claims “not to mystify and obscure but to reveal and clarify”, you might expect to find an explanation of exactly what capitalism is and how it works. When you read Barnes, however, all you will find is a collection of words and phrases that sound good, but which he intends to mean very little: capitalism, imperialism, socialism, communism, vanguard, leadership, revolutionary, class struggles . . . the reader is left to figure out what these glorious-sounding words might mean.

But this isn’t an error on Barnes’s part. It must be, to some degree, his aim. If the author (who is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the US) went to the trouble of defining his terms, then he would have more of a problem convincing people of his argument. He would certainly have trouble recruiting martyrs for his “revolutionary” war—a war between different groupings of the working class, killing each other in a pointless debate over who should lead and exploit them. If anyone is in any doubt about what Barnes aims to achieve, he tells us clearly in the conclusion to one of his chapters: “It can be done. It was done in Russia, and the way the Bolsheviks did it is what we seek to emulate”.

In other words, Barnes wants a revolution to establish capitalism in a capitalist country! He wants us to fight a war with the modern state. Any volunteers?

Practically every page of his book makes some reference to the need for good leadership and a strong vanguard. Without that, the working class are lost, he thinks. But be careful! Because although “good” leadership—such as that provided by their heroes Lenin, Guevara, and Castro—will lead you to the paradise that is Cuban state-capitalism, what will “bad” leadership give you? Something even worse. The offspring of the coup d’etat will then be born “deformed”, and you will have to make do with a “deformed workers’ state”. Although we are not told exactly what this means, either.

Barnes urges us to fight and struggle for socialism. But what does he mean by the term? Does he see the revolution leading immediately to a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth? We don’t know what he means because he won’t tell us. He’ll take us there. How will we know when we’ve got there? Don’t worry. Barnes will let us know. It’ll all look something like Cuba. That is, something like what we’ve got already. The new rulers will tell us where we are and what we are to do: Go to Work. After the “revolutionary” war, everything stays the same.

Unfortunately, the book’s title and the blurb on the cover make the right noises. Imagine someone interested in the causes of their problems—and in what the recent J18 and N30 demonstrations might have been about—turning to this book to gain an understanding of capitalism and the revolutionary alternative. Although people are intelligent enough to reject the ideas presented in this book, the problem is that they might assume that this is what revolutionary politics is all about. Barnes and his Trotskyist party will then have been responsible for turning yet another person away from radical political ideas, and back to apathy and cynicism. Their deformed workers’ party is one of the greatest friends the capitalist system could have.

So what is the appeal of Trotskyism? Its romanticism. The remoteness of its ideas from the experiences of real life. Its appeal to emotion rather than thought. Its vision of revolution is something like the war in JRR Token’s Lord of the Rings. It is a fantasy far more interesting than the wage-slavery of everyday life, but which is dangerous because it is not the lives of elves and hobbits that are at stake: it is ours. Jack Barnes sees himself as Gandalf the wizard, and one day he believes that he will mount his white horse and lead us to war, then on to freedom. For the sake of entertainment and escapism, read this book. For the sake of humanity, don’t even follow Barnes to the corner shop.

Stuart Watkins

Trotwatching (2000)

Book Review from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Adherents of Permanent Revolution: A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International’. By Barry Lee Woolley (University Press of America, 1999)

With the decline in the fortunes of the left-wing of capitalism’s political apparatus, books about the organisations of the radical left – once commonplace – are now much rarer. Here Barry Lee Woolley charts the rise and fall of the Fourth International in a largely narrative account of the coalescence of the Trotskyist movement at the International’s foundation in 1938 through its various sclerotic episodes in the post-war period until the mid-1970s.

Though much of it is well researched, this is an unusual work for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is rather US-centric, focusing overmuch on the role of the US Socialist Workers Party in the Fourth International. As Woolley is a former member of the American SWP and still has a great number of contacts in the US Trotskyist movement, this is perhaps understandable; whatever, Woolley certainly provides a good genealogical chart of the US Trotskyist movement and is able to calculate that in America alone three new Trotskyist parties have arisen on average per year.

Rather less understandable than all this is his current political orientation which seems to owe less to the political God Trotsky than the Christian Lord Almighty worshipped by the evangelicals in the American Bible Belt. This is evidenced in his peculiar obsession with ‘morals’ in general and male homosexuality in particular, the growth of which he claims was largely responsible for changing the outlook of the world Trotskyist movement in the 1960s:

“[a] change in recruitment patterns transformed the predominantly burly worker cadres of the early Trotskyist movement into the predominantly petty bourgeois, college-recruited, effeminate cadres of the world Trotskyist movement at the time of the tenth World Congress . . . [The Socialist Workers Party] even participated in the building of mass marches around the issue of special legal privileges for sodomites.”

Woolley would certainly appear to have an unhealthy preoccupation with this topic, with one chapter even having the bizarre, incomprehensible by-line “Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery”. Perhaps Woolley is living testament to the charge that membership of Trotskyist sects buggers up the brain.

Despite the large amount of time that has clearly gone into producing this generally well-referenced work, there are a number of factual errors too. The account of the British Trotskyist movement is good if only partial, but there really is no excuse for Woolley referring to British Trotskyist leader Tony Cliff as Ygael Gluckstadt when he is correctly mentioned elsewhere as Ygael Gluckstein. There are many other similar errors, so much so that they eventually become annoying.

Woolley is shortly to produce another volume, this time on the history of the American Trotskyist movement. For his sake and ours let’s hope he gets in contact with a good therapist before then, preferably one that can also give him a hand with his proof-reading.

Dave Perrin

50 Years Ago: the General Election (2000)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

After five years of Labour Government the workers have shown what effect that experience has had on them by reducing almost to vanishing point the very large majority that the Labour Party had in the old Parliament. The Government may, for a period, continue a precarious existence, but it will do so representing a body of electors substantially smaller than the combined votes of Tories and Liberals.

The Labour Government is now in effect a minority government. In the past the professional politicians of the Liberal and Tory parties were used to the pendulum swing that put first one and then the other into office; but for the Labour Party the event is of vastly greater significance. For them it is the ominous writing on the wall, the visible proof of the sterility of their foundation policy. They believed that they could inspire more and more enthusiasm among the workers by the success with which they would—while retaining capitalism—tackle one by one the evils of the system. They believed that once they had become a majority government they would never look back. In their innocence they thought that Labour Governments live for ever. This election has proved the correctness of the S.P.G.B. case, that a Labour Government is powerless to make capitalism acceptable, let alone inspiring, to the workers. Labour reformism has done its utmost and has failed.

(From editorial, Socialist Standard, March 1950)

Capitalism and the Internet (3) (2000)

From the March 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 2

Despite a clear tendency towards enlightening social relations, the Internet does not promise to give revolutionaries their socialist society on a plate. In fact, it offers us the parallel “disinformation revolution” as well. Unlike misinformation, disinformation is deliberate.

 Although mass propaganda can be expected to decrease quantitatively, customised propaganda may increase qualitatively. Propaganda and spin could become more, not less, powerful, as mass media gives way to “mess media” and a proliferation of micro-channels, micro-markets and perhaps micro-cultures makes the targeting of disinformation against selected individuals more feasible. It’s as if the ultimate dream of the free-marketeers is of six billion separate Earths, a doppelganger for each of us, and consensus or revolution impossible in any of them. But humans aren’t so easy to control, nor communication so easy to stop. The right-wing utopians forget about our critical faculties and our propensity to gossip amongst ourselves:

The hypnotic spell of years of television and its intense public relations is broken as people learn to deconstruct and recombine the images intended to persuade them. The result is that the population at large gains the freedom to re-examine previously accepted policies and prejudices” (Rushkoff, Cyberia, p.55-6).

Micro-propaganda just isn’t going to cut it unless we collectively agree to brick up our windows and doors and never go out. Realistically, the ideology of capitalism will not be able to rely on permanent, large-scale disinformation. The best it can expect is to muddy the waters.

The danger of participation is that there are . . . thousands of potentially critical eyes watching every entry. A faulty fact will be challenged, a lie will be uncovered, plagiarism will be discovered. Cyberspace is a truth serum (Rushkoff, p.18).

Monocultural studies 

As global monoculture advances upon us in the real world of Wal-Mart and McDonalds, cyberspace , in contradistinction, is going the opposite way by reinventing diversity. There is a double irony at work. First, the right-wing free marketeers parade their hypocritical “cult of the individual” as a justification for a sociopathic mentality of self-centred consumerism, while at the same time making every effort to destroy cultures and reduce individuals to a grinding uniformity of alienated clones. Second, their own system is producing an atomised multicultural cybersociety which may yet undo their work. Where capitalism tried to keep us apart while making us the same, cyber-capitalism will have the effect of bringing us all together while making us different.

Trouble at’ McMill 

Yet if this view of capitalism’s future seems to have a rosy tint, it’s probably a bloodstain. There is likely to be a ferocious and global scramble for the ever-decreasing number of real jobs in the hi-tech labour market. The “digerati” may get excited about their hi-tech utopias but the future looks grim for workers. The former proletariat may become the future sophisticated “cognitariat” (Toffler), but they are going to be mostly underemployed part-timers battling each other for short contracts. Meanwhile the rest of the population will presumably be fighting for work in leisure malls, call centres and other dispiriting and low-paid McJobs. And when things get really bad, workers tend to wake up from the American Dream and smell a rat. Carl Davidson, editor of Cy Rev, a “Journal of Cybernetic Revolution, Sustainable Socialism & Radical Democracy”, sounds a warning:

 In 1992 the size of the world labor force was something like 1.76 billion people; by 2025, if current trends stay more or less what they are, the world labor force is going to be 3.1 billion people. That means every year for the next thirty years the world economy needs to create 38 to 40 million new jobs. And it’s got to do that at a time when the main technological trend is going in the opposite direction of net job liquidation” (http://www.eff.org/pub/Publications/E-journals/CyRev).

What then of free-market philosophy, this wonderful doctrine from two centuries ago which thinks capitalism would work fine and dandy if the stupid politicians would just go away? Free-market capitalists think the poor don’t matter and will obligingly roll over and die, but when the first riots start, these same capitalists will remember pretty quick what they were paying the state for in the first place. Civil unrest may be most cheaply staved off by bread and circuses, and excuses, as it once was in ancient Rome, but for these angry modern workers the bread will have to be good and the circuses had better be terrific, since the excuses, as usual, will be lousy.

Virtual Unreality 

Of course, the entertainment will be awesome, if nasty, after capitalism’s tastes. Frighteningly convincing graphics and sensory experiences will create seamless mirages, a virtual unreality that might forever close the door to political change. Certainly it is curious to note that technology has brought the “circus” ever closer, from arena to stage to screen to TV to PC monitor. Ultimately we will watch our little mirages on “drop-down” corneal displays, a final triumph of the circus as it climbs right inside our heads. Better still, with full-body virtual reality, the viewer gets to climb right into the ring. But for all that, the charade, however mindbending, has to stop sometime. Circuses pall, just ask any overworked clown. Humans will never really lose sight of the distinction between real and virtual, unless they can be made to forget that they are rational animals. Besides, so much of their reality is patently bullshit that nothing short of mass lobotomy could disguise it.

Credo Greedo

And bullshit is what lies at the heart of capitalist ideology. Even capitalists themselves believe it. On Page One of every school economics textbook it says that resources are limited but wants are unlimited. As wants are satisfied, new wants always appear. Now if this were true, socialism would be impossible. Relying on this anti-human and quite unsubstantiated prejudice the capitalists, knowing the extremely short shelf-life of information commodities, expect to be able to produce new commodities indefinitely, to replace old ones that have become free or nearly so. Yet here is their mistake, for wants are not infinite. As more things become free (for example, MS Explorer, Netscape, Winzip, Apache, Acrobat, Linux and a thousand other useful programs) they expect us to keep paying for upgrades, assuming we will always want more, but we won’t. Instead, we will reach a satisfaction threshold. And then, we’ll just start expecting everything else to be free too. And why not? With modern robotised manufacturing, costs are falling in all sectors of commodity production. If they cost next to nothing to produce, why should we pay at all? Kevin Kelly, founder editor of Wired, doesn’t see a problem for capitalism in this, and argues that businesses should give their products away for free, in order to reap later returns:

Ubiquity drives increasing returns in the network economy. The question becomes: what is the most cost-effective way to achieve ubiquity? And the answer is: give things away. Make them free (New Rules for the New Economy, Fourth Estate, 1998).

One can only hope that all capitalists, convinced of our insatiable natures, are daft enough to follow Kelly’s advice, and indeed many companies are doing just this, and not just with software, (free mobile phones, free calls, free satellite decoders). Even if this loss-leader strategy just makes a loss, it plants another expectation in the public mind, and subtly undermines its own creators. Things can be free. There is such a thing as enough. Abundance does exist.

It may be that the sacred cows of capitalism and property society will be sent to the slaughterhouse one by one. Even that feared and revered symbol of ultimate power, the coin, may lose its lustre, its relevance reduced to a meaningless abstraction. Where once we bartered real things like sheep or sacks of salt, then paid with iron bars, gold ingots or copper coins, then latterly with decorated scraps of paper, now we will be held to ransom by mere electronic digits. The case for abolishing digits may not seem so far fetched in the future when nobody handles real cash anymore and the fetishised idol no longer has even a visible face.

The Socialist Virus

As well as the notion of insatiable greed, the ideology of capitalism also rests on the notion of natural inequality, the cult of the leader and of the expert. The better educated workers become, the more this cult suffers. As contempt for our politicians rides as high as voting figures sink low, the idea that we must rely on the unique expertise of superior individuals is beginning already to look decidedly comical. But in the wired network consciousness, where “no-one is as smart as everyone” (Kelly, p.14) the expert and the leader may become positively antiquated concepts. The days may be dying when the “ignorant masses” can be led, misled and mystified by some “social elite” who know better. Instead, the wired world may experience a new renaissance of democratised creative thinking, as good ideas begin to spread through the ports and wires of a billion terminals, the electronic synapses of a revolution: “You don’t attack the monster. You infect him, like a virus.” (Rushkoff, p142). And small ideas can grow big in cyberspace, as Kelly, in a backhanded paraphrase of William Morris, makes clear:

 The network economy has set into motion the power of hobby tribes and informed peers . . . The law of increasing returns can feed a small interest into a mid-sized interest. Whereas once there was a lone fanatic for every notion, now there is a devoted website for every fanatic notion; soon there can be 10,000 fellow enthusiasts for every fascination (Kelly, p.105).

Internet disinformation

Yet disinformation remains for the time being the best weapon against workers. When the truth can no longer hide in the dark, the logical thing is to dazzle us with data. It doesn’t even have to be false data, just so long as it’s irrelevant and it wastes precious time. And as the Nobel economist Herbert Simon points out: “What information consumes is rather obvious. It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of knowledge creates a poverty of attention.” (Kelly, p.59). The grim truth is that this crude strategy will probably work, for a while at least. According to the Critical Art Ensemble, who may be perhaps thinking primarily in the short term, the vast majority of Internet users will be passive consumers, rather than active participants:

They will be playing computer games, watching interactive TV, and shopping in virtual malls. The stratified distribution of education will act as the guardian of the virtual border between the passive and the active user, and prevent those populations participating in multi-directional interactivity from increasing in any significant numbers (Alinta Thornton, Ch.5, http://www.wr.com.au/democracy/thesis1).

If this sounds depressing, one has to remember that it is a conservative estimation of human behaviour as it is now, schooled into a passive consumption of goods, news, ideas and entertainment. If there is one key hallmark of pre-internet mass society it is probably this conditioned passivity. Our pre-internet generation cannot in all fairness be expected to adapt thoroughly to such a major cultural innovation, and will certainly fail to exploit its real long-term potential. A second-generation wired society is likely to be very different, more individualistic yet better integrated, more critical and proactive, and with higher expectations. The longer capitalism lasts, the more bolshie the workers are likely to become.

For now, like everything else in capitalism, any attempt at disinformation overload will work only partially and unreliably, if it works at all, and cannot depend on any conscious or systematic conspiracy by the owning class. Conversely, we as workers have no free ticket to easy victory through the Internet. When all is said and done, it is an instrument only, an “enabling technology”. The printed word didn’t liberate us either, but it made a huge difference, and so will this, if we learn how to use it properly. With the means of knowledge—the key to the means of production—now out of the private bag and in the public domain, it is fair to say that the working class has never been in a stronger position to take control of its own future.

Revolutions are made by people, not machines, people working together, people in communities. Much is made of supposed “online communities”, but it is precisely in the real physical world of community, rather than its ersatz virtual counterparts, that the revolutionary potential of the Internet may be storing up its greatest surprise.

Paddy Shannon

(Next month, in the concluding article, we examine the Internet and Community.)

Link to Part 4