Who benefits from lower ‘Third World’ wages? (2021)

From the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We conclude our series refuting the view that workers in the developed capitalist parts of the world exploit workers living in the ‘Third World’.

Third Worldist ‘anti-imperialism’ basically contends that the interests of workers in the Global North are objectively aligned with the capitalists there in seeking to perpetuate the ‘super-exploitation’ of the Global South. Allegedly, this super-exploitation has the effect of raising these workers above the status of an exploited class by enabling them, via a process of ‘unequal exchange’, to receive the full value of their labour contribution.

As Jason Hickel explains:

‘It was the Egyptian economist Samir Amin – a well-known critic of neo-colonialism – who first articulated this argument in the 1970s. He noticed that that if we look at the labour that goes into producing goods for trade between the south and north, we see that workers in the south are paid much less than their northern counterparts – even when adjusted for productivity or units of output per hour. This means that when the north buys goods from the south, they pay far less than those goods would otherwise be worth. In other words, the north effectively siphons uncompensated value out of the south’ (Guardian, 18 May 2017).

While this explanation might seem superficially plausible, there is an intrinsic problem (as we saw last month) with trying to quantify the magnitude of this global transfer of value – let alone quantify the extent to which workers, as opposed to capitalists, in the north allegedly benefit from this transfer – due to value being based on the elusive notion of ‘abstract labour’. Hence the use of price as a surrogate measure. But while the sum of all values must equate with the sum of all prices, for any given commodity, value and price must necessarily diverge under conditions of disequilibrium resulting from the continual adjustment of supply and demand to each other.

Take the commodity, labour power – the skills the worker sells to the capitalist. Its price is the wage that worker receives. However, this transaction is conditional upon the capitalist expecting to make a profit by employing the worker. A business is not a charity. It is not concerned with the well-being of its workforce as such. Competition between businesses pushes such sentiments aside and imposes on all the overriding need to secure a profit.

Without profit the business risks being bankrupted. This is as true in the Global North as in the Global South and it is surely significant that the overwhelming bulk of capital – even foreign direct investment – originating in the North is invested there and not in the South. That wouldn’t happen without the prospect of profit.

Profit is the money form of the economic surplus the worker produces in exchange for a wage. She produces more value than she receives in her wage. Hence she is ‘exploited’. It doesn’t matter whether she is ‘well paid’ or not. Whether she can ‘purchase the product of ten hours of another worker’s labour through one hour of her own’ as Zac Cope puts it, is simply not relevant (Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism, 2012, p.173) Her means of purchasing that product – her wage – is conditional upon her producing a surplus for her employer in the first instance and, thus, being exploited.

Wage levels and the rate of exploitation

What determines the ‘rate of exploitation’ cannot simply be inferred from the level of wages paid to workers; it must take into account, also, their productivity. Paradoxically, higher paid workers can be subject to a higher rate of exploitation if the ratio of the surplus they produce compared to the size of their wage packet is higher than in the case of a low-paid worker. However, this can change if you reduce the wages of the low-paid worker thereby increasing his rate of exploitation.

Commentators, like John Smith, argue that depressing wages below their value in the Global South – super-exploitation – is now the primary mechanism under capitalism for increasing the rate of exploitation (Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century, 2016). Capital is highly mobile today while labour, hemmed in by national borders, is relatively immobile. This obstructs the equalisation of international wage rates (but not the equalisation of profit rates whereby surplus value is siphoned out of the Global South). Multinational corporations can play one poor country off against another in their quest for lower production costs while a corrupt ‘comprador bourgeoisie’ running these countries assists in this race to the bottom by imposing political repression and banning trade unions.

This argument has merit but, still, we cannot overlook differential rates of productivity. According to Hickel:

‘Southern workers are probably at least as productive since these days many of them work in foreign-owned factories (think of Apple’s iPad factories with highly efficient technology and rigid Taylorist rules, designed to extract as much as possible from every movement).’

Clearly, this is just cherry-picking. The vast majority of Southern workers don’t work in foreign-owned factories. Some do and, doubtless, productivity in these cases matches Western levels. But you have to look at the situation across the country as a whole to get a more realistic picture.

Even in an emerging industrial powerhouse like India, the formal sector accounts for only 10 percent of the workforce, the rest working in the informal sector. Globally ‘a staggering 2 billion workers are in informal employment, accounting for three in five (61 per cent) of the world’s workforce’ (ILO, World Employment Social Outlook: Trends 2019).

These are overwhelmingly concentrated in the Global South. Given the paucity of formal sector jobs and the lack of unemployment benefits, workers here often have little option but to eke out a living in the low-paid informal sector. This is characterised by rampant ‘underemployment’ and relatively inefficient small-scale ‘involutionary’ forms of activity.

There is some truth in Hickel’s claim that ‘wages are not somehow naturally low in the south – they have been made low by design. Wages are an effect of power’. But his explanation is incomplete. The bargaining power of those workers is, in turn, undermined by the depressing effect on wages caused by mass unemployment and, even more, underemployment, which is much more pronounced in the South.

The much larger ‘industrial reserve army’ also helps to explain the persistence of generally more labour-intensive forms of production there and, by extension, the significantly lower per capita productivity. According to the ILO there is a strong correlation between output per worker and international variations in wage rates (bit.ly/2OhfIK2).

Indeed, Marx himself maintained that ‘The more productive one country is relative to another in the world market, the higher will be its wages as compared with the other’ (Theories of Surplus Value, Ch. 8). Key to this is raising the ‘organic composition of capital’ via mechanisation thereby bringing about a fall in the rate of profit.

Ironically, Cope himself contends that ‘the capitalist system has been able to maintain itself in recent decades’ only because, among other things, ‘industrialisation of large parts of the Third World have ensured the entry of millions of (super-)exploited workers into the global workforce. This has undoubtedly raised the rate of profit by reducing the rate of growth of the organic composition of capital’ (ibid p.201). So he is effectively conceding that production there is more labour-intensive and we can assume this means less productive in per capita terms.

There is a further point to consider. As we saw earlier, part of Cope’s argument rests on the claim that most Northern workers are ‘unproductive’ in the sense that they do not produce, but are financed out of, surplus value. But what of the Global South? While some workers in the small formal sector could be classed as unproductive – for example state employees – in the much larger informal sector the predominant form of labour – 70 percent in sub-Saharan Africa – is ‘self-employment and unpaid family work’. Strictly speaking, this does not constitute productive labour either since it does not involve what Marx called the ‘exchange of capital for labour’ which is a precondition for such labour being considered ‘productive’.

However, to reiterate – being ‘unproductive’ does not mean not being exploited. ‘Being exploited’ does not depend on you being directly involved in producing surplus value but rather on your functional contribution to a wider system of surplus extraction.

Furthermore, even if 80 percent of the world’s productive labour is ‘performed in the Third World by workers earning less than 10% of the wages of First World workers’, as Cope claims, one should bear in mind that at least 80 percent of the world’s population lives in the Third World anyway.

As for workers there earning less than 10 percent of the wages of First World workers we need to relate this to international differences in price levels. In this regard, the position of Third Worldists comes across as muddled.

On the one hand, we find Cope suggesting that workers in the Global North benefit from the ultra-cheap prices for goods produced by super-exploited workers in the Global South; on the other we are told by him that ‘as soon as these goods enter into imperialist-country markets, their prices are multiplied several fold, sometimes by as much as 1,000%’(p. 159). This is because the capitalists there can ‘afford’ to pay their workers higher wages to buy these goods which presumably means they are making a profit by employing them.

Who benefits from lower import prices?

Wages, being the price of labour power, will tend to adjust to changes in the prices of other commodities. Cheapening the price of imports into the North by intensifying the exploitation of Southern workers will not materially benefit workers in the North. Actually, if anything, it has induced capitalists to outsource production to the South and close down factories in the North at the expense of northern workers.

Like water finding its own level wages will ultimately tend to gravitate towards the value of labour power. Marx’s observations on the early nineteenth-century struggle to repeal the Corn Laws which restricted food imports to boost domestic prices are pertinent here:

‘The English workers have very well understood the significance of the struggle between the landlords and the industrial capitalists. They know very well that the price of bread was to be reduced in order to reduce wages, and that industrial profit would rise by as much as rent fell’ (bit.ly/2LvHt0p).

While it is undeniable that there are marked differences in wage rates between the North and South there are some suggestions that the gap may be closing. A report in the Economist noted that while wage growth in the advanced countries has been slight or stagnant: ‘The crucial change that has taken place over the past decade or so is that wages in low-cost countries have soared’ (19 January 2013). Ironically this has encouraged a limited ‘reshoring’ of manufacturing back to the US where wage stagnation has made US manufacturing slightly more competitive.

Of course, we are still quite a long way off from the ‘equalisation of international wage rates’ but current developments seem to be tending in that direction. In Asia, for example, wages have been growing annually nearly ten times faster than in the world’s richest nations (Nikkei Asian Review, 28 November 2018).

Moreover, if you apply ‘purchasing power parity’ exchange rates to reflect the varying costs of buying an identical basket of goods in different countries, the gap between rich and poor countries narrows considerably. Cope himself notes that ‘according to calculations based on data compiled by the Union Bank of Switzerland, OECD wages have an average 3.4 times more purchasing power than non-OECD wages’ (p.163).

This is far less than the cited ratio of 1:11. This difference can be adequately explained in terms of factors already discussed such as differential productivity rates. But compared to the difference in purchasing power between capitalists and workers everywhere in the world, it is pretty negligible.

It is this fundamental class division that the proponents of Third Worldist ‘anti-imperialism’ wilfully obscure in their pointless pursuit of a reactionary nationalist agenda in an age of global capitalism.

Robin Cox

Rear View: Court jesters (2021)

The Rear View Column from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Court jesters

As of 30 January 2021, more than 102 million cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed, and over 2.2 million deaths attributed to the disease. Given that the knowledge and resources exist to reduce the number of epidemics and minimise the possibility of them becoming pandemics, the vast majority of these deaths can be considered premature. Little wonder then that some people think ‘It is time to impanel a citizens’ tribunal to investigate the utter failure of the governments of Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, and others to break the chain of the infection of COVID-19. Such a tribunal would collect the factual information that would ensure that we do not allow these states to tamper with the crime scene; the tribunal would provide the ICC with a firm foundation to do a forensic investigation of this crime against humanity when its own political suffocation is eased’ (counterpunch.org, 22 January). Supporters of this approach take the short-sighted view that the prosecution of a motley crew of misleaders is enough. They are but temporary pustules on the ever-hungry, profit-chasing beast whose tentacles reach across the world.

Master of puppets

The vast majority of the working class fail to see the beast and blindly support capitalism. None of them can escape responsibility for the consequences. For the power wielded by the rulers of world capitalism is a reflection of the political ignorance of the working class everywhere. It is absurd to blame misleaders, particularly those elected by millions of us. The depth of that ignorance was shown recently when after four years as president of USA Inc., the cockwomble Trump received more than 74 million votes. Tanzania’s equally odious President Magufuli also got there with our support. It was reported that he recently stated ‘. . .  that no lockdown was planned because God would protect people from COVID-19 while homespun precautions such as steam inhalation were better than vaccines. ‘Vaccines are not good. If they were, then the white man would have brought vaccines for HIV/AIDS,’ he said in a speech in western Tanzania, contradicting the global scientific consensus and advice from the World Health Organization (WHO). Tanzania has officially reported a total number of 509 COVID-19 infections and 21 deaths, WHO data shows, but it has not updated the figures for more than six months. ‘We Tanzanians haven’t locked ourselves in and we don’t expect to lock ourselves down. I don’t expect to announce any lockdown because our God is living and He will continue to protect Tanzanians’ …’We will also continue to take health precautions including the use of steam inhalation. You inhale while you pray to God, you pray while farming maize, potatoes, so that you can eat well and corona fails to enter your body. They will scare you a lot, my fellow Tanzanians, but you should stand firm’ (yahoo.com, 27 January).

ANC Inc.

Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa (1999-2008), once compared AIDS scientists to Nazi concentration camp doctors and viewed black people who accepted orthodox AIDS science as ‘self-repressed’ victims of a slave mentality. He saw the ‘HIV/AIDS thesis’ as entrenched in ‘centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans’. Mbeki promoted alternative remedies such as vinegar rather than antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) which saved the state’s funds at a cost of up to 365,000 lives. Winnie Mandela to her credit ‘… said to president Mbeki: ‘Why are ARVs not toxic for the members in Parliament who are taking them but toxic for the poor?’’ Members of the 99 percent have also called for him to be tried for crimes against humanity. Others, less myopic, have pierced the miasma of misinformation: ‘The working class all over the world have far more in common with each other than they do with the bourgeoisie in business, politics and the media within their own borders. Covid-19 has taken millions from us – but we cannot allow the global bourgeoisie to play their divisive games using nationalism, or narratives of political catastrophe to fool us. Let us not side with our countries or one flavour of politician – let us unite in the class war – and let us see through the luxury the political, media, and business bourgeoisie enjoy for what they really are – scared and incompetent’ (rt.com, 28 January).

Social justice or socialism?

In an open letter to South Africa’s current president, billionaire Cyril Ramaphosa, entitled ‘Maybe there should be different laws for the ruling elite and ordinary citizens’ (news24.com, 25 January), Dikeledi Molatol, a ‘social justice activist’, writes: ‘Perhaps what should happen, Mr President, is that you and your Cabinet must just consider declaring special laws and regulations for elites and your fellow politicians in the ANC, and different ones to govern us, ordinary citizens. In that way we will stop being under the illusion that we are all equal before the law and all committed to combatting this pandemic.’ King Zuma has his palace and shares responsibility for the Marikana massacre with Ramaphosa. Anti-apartheid activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu said of the ANC: ‘They stopped the gravy train just long enough to get on themselves.’ He went on describe the Zuma administration as ‘worse than the apartheid government’ and that he would ‘pray for the downfall of the ANC.’ South Africa today is the most unequal society in the world – economic apartheid persists for millions. ‘How many more presidents will come and go before the billions see that you cannot change the nature of the capitalist beast, and as long as we continue to feed it, war and want, pestilence and famine will persist?

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

Proper Gander: An Emotional History (2021)

The Proper Gander TV column from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Adam Curtis’s latest documentary, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (BBC iPlayer), is a fascinating watch, weaving together eight hours of archive footage, music and narration, delivered in Curtis’s serious, concerned style.

The six-part series describes itself as ‘an emotional history of the modern world’, telling how fear and paranoia shaped global events since the start of the Cold War. In Britain, this took the form of post-colonial racism and retreating into a romanticised vision of village greens and red telephone boxes. America promoted itself as proudly individualistic, defined against the image of Soviet citizens as a grey, uniform mass. But America’s individualists were living in anonymous suburbs, numbed by post-Vietnam anxieties and suppressed by valium, oxycontin and crack cocaine. The brutal regimes in China and Russia replaced their figureheads and spoke of progress, but each new set of rulers operated with the same divisive motivations as their predecessors. The ideologies which propped up society were based on misconceptions and antagonisms, resulting in aggression.

According to Curtis, then came the failure of world leaders to predict the fall of the Soviet Union, and the later realisation of the threat of climate change, which further weakened confidence to explain events using stories or ideologies, unless they were conspiracy theories. Abstract systems were increasingly used to try and rationalise a chaotic world. When computers harvest and process data they can find patterns, but they can’t link them together as stories, and therefore meaning is irrelevant. And where data-processing is applied, it’s used to watch over, control or manipulate people. So although the technology is new, the aim remains to exercise power.

Curtis’s style of film-making counters the data-crunching method, as he follows the personal stories which emerge from our experiences of authority. The characters he chooses to illustrate his points aren’t those you’d expect; Margaret Thatcher, for example, only appears briefly to tell us about her preferred way of ironing the hem of a dress. Chinese leader Mao Zedong takes up much less screen-time than his wife, Jiang Qing, who, like the documentary’s other main players, held a pivotal role which might otherwise stay under-acknowledged and which expresses wider trends.

Jiang Qing wielded considerable influence during China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ of the 1960s and 70s, including over state propaganda, and in which enemies of the government and herself were hunted down by the Red Guards militia. Mao turned on Qing, having used her to destroy his opponents. She was one of the Gang of Four, a faction of the Chinese Communist Party who were convicted of treasonous offences soon after Mao’s death in 1976. Qing is portrayed as ruthless, ambitious and individualistic, her approach just a reaction against existing power networks without changing anything fundamental. The same applies to Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping with his economic reforms, making it clear by the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 that if China no longer even pretends to believe in democracy what does it believe in apart from money?

The other people featured in the series are mostly radicals and would-be radicals, including Eduard Limonov, Michael X, and Afeni and Tupac Shakur. Through each of their stories Curtis explains how they all set out to challenge those with power, but they revealed old conflicts lurking underneath, fuelled by anger and resentment. And each failed because they couldn’t or wouldn’t escape from the power structures they knew.

Eduard Limonov was a Russian dissident who lived for a time in a poor neighbourhood in 70s New York, the setting of his novel It’s Me, Eddie. This argued that people think they are free and living in a democracy, but it’s all a sham and we follow the rules set by the money system. Despite this promising view, Limonov slid into believing that nationalism is the way to convey collective strength. So, after returning to Russia he founded the National Bolshevik Party as a grim fusion of fascism and ‘communism’, with the goal of reawakening oppressive ideas.

Michael de Freitas arrived in London from Trinidad in 1957. He found work as an enforcer for notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman, and discovered a callousness behind British society. Renamed Michael X, he joined the Black Power movement in Notting Hill. His activism led to him being sent to prison for inciting racial hatred (at the same time as Enoch Powell made his racist speeches as an MP) and when he was released he found that his previous support among white liberals had gone. They had instead turned their energies to setting up community centres, which made Michael believe that now, black people in Notting Hill were being treated as subjects to measure and manage by liberals with their own position to protect. He decided to set up short-lived communes where, Curtis tells us, he reverted to old ways to gain influence he learnt working for Rachman – extortion and violence.

From the mid-1960s, Afeni Shakur was prominent in the New York Black Panthers, a group infiltrated and pushed towards a bombing campaign by undercover police. Her son, Tupac, later aimed to revive the movement through his music. He began by wanting to turn hostility outwards from gang culture to be directed at those who oppress, but ended up being more cynical and self-promoting. According to Curtis, he intensified aggression rather than changing anything, driven by individualism.

As with his prior film HyperNormalisation (2016), Curtis argues that lacking a vision of a different, future society holds back real change, both on a personal and collective level. The characters he describes failed because of this, only acting within existing antagonistic frameworks. Unfortunately, Curtis doesn’t go into enough detail about what these structures are. He hasn’t taken the next step, on screen at least, of directly criticising the economic root causes of power struggles, nor explaining what kind of future society he would advocate. Despite this, and his loose use of the term ‘revolution’, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head is refreshingly provocative, and worth getting into your head.

Mike Foster

Hexham Riot: A Lesson for Today? (2021)

From the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Bloody Monday! Not a Sunday night expostulation over the prospect of another working week, but a reference to 9 March, 1761. Two hundred and sixty years ago 50 or so men and women were killed and over 300 wounded in the market square in Hexham, Northumberland.

Ask most people for an example of Crown (state) brutality in the period of the burgeoning industrial revolution and they will cite St. Peter’s Fields, Peterloo, in Manchester, that quite rightly was written into the annals of infamy. However, it was not the first, nor the last, confrontation between the authorities and working people.

The specific issue in the 1760s was a form of conscription known as balloting. This had nothing to do with elections and certainly not democracy. The Militia Act had been passed through parliament to boost the said military force to free up and support the army heavily engaged in the Seven Years War (1754-63).

Potential militia recruits were to be identified and those whose names were then drawn from this census had, by law, to serve. The North East of England was nominated as the first area in which to begin this process, with Hexham one of the main centres.

9 March, 1761 was to be the initial enlistment day and rumblings of discontent had been gathering force throughout the preceding weeks. Conscious that opposition might be rather more than just grumbling, local magistrates brought a detachment of the North Yorkshire Militia into Hexham and deployed them in front of the Moot Hall.

Before them protesters gathered in huge numbers in the market square, drawing widespread support from many local parishes as well as the town itself. It was at this point that the gathering officially became a riot.

This is not to say an actual riot with violence towards persons or property was taking place, although the crowd was undoubtedly vociferous and menacing. The magistrates read The Riot Act, which instructed the crowd to disperse by law.

The assembled did no such thing and thus, officially, became rioters. They did nothing to dispel this notion, instead they advanced, many bearing staves, on the bayonets protecting the Moot Hall. In that febrile atmosphere, two militia men were shot with their own weapons. The magistrates panicked and gave the order to fire.

When the gunpowder smoke cleared, so had the market square, leaving the dead and seriously wounded. Reports at the time noted that many of the militia men were visibly shocked by the consequences. This did not prevent the authorities seeking out and arresting many of those who got away on the day.

260 years later there are still lessons to be drawn from events such as this one. Those who advocate the necessity for the violent overthrow of the capitalist state would do well to reflect on such incidents. If a crowd superior in numbers can be dealt such a dreadful blow with muskets, how much worse with modern automatic weapons.

Flying police squads

The deployment of a militia force from a different region was, in principle, utilised during the miners’ strike (1984-5) when police were brought from non-mining areas into the coalfields. The state has long since recognised the greater efficiency of its coercive powers when applied via forces deficient in local sympathies.

It also a dramatic confirmation of the importance of democracy, however imperfect it may be under capitalism. The Hexham ‘rioters’ had no means by which to pursue their grievance or exercise choice. Confrontation would have seemed their only option as they could not challenge, or change, the law used against them.

Collective expressions of outrage, such as that gathering in Hexham, are essentially reactive, an expression of weakness. The best that could have been hoped for was a return to the status quo. A forced repeal of The Militia Act might have inconvenienced the Crown in the short term, but was no real threat to its actual authority.

Had the ballot system been stopped at that point, life for those assembled would have simply gone back to the way things were. There would have been no forward movement, politically, economically or socially. This is the way with all immediate, pragmatic demands, even when initially met.

The state, to this day, continues to enact and employ laws to the advantage of capitalism against the interests of the vast majority, the working class. But only for as long as the working class chooses to tolerate this state of affairs. It is within the means of the working class to not only challenge, but take control of the state away from the capitalist class.

There is a danger to the state of over-reacting; the seeming solution to a local problem can become a national, and persisting difficulty if a general perception of unfair or brutal treatment develops. For all the repressive apparatus available, the Warsaw Pact states, and eventually the Soviet Union itself, could not assuage popular discontent.

It is also the case that it’s not enough to secure what turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory when the result is a case of ‘the state is dead, long live the state’. The bureaucrats become oligarchs and capitalism continues along its (not so) merry way.

What history shows

There are those of a radical bent who might argue the tragic outcome in Hexham is a demonstration of the need for a disciplined body to covertly organise rebellion. However, history does not hold much promise for such a notion.

Nearly sixty years after the Hexham ‘riot’, one year after Peterloo, such a clandestine operation occurred in the West Riding of Yorkshire. There had been a number of radical working men’s clubs established in the West Riding and Lancashire, some of their leading lights being ex-Luddites. Many a plan was drawn up with Huddersfield being an initial target for insurrectionists.

Barnsley’s Union Society was one such club with around 600 members. The Society received word that an assault on Huddersfield was scheduled for 12 April. The plan was for Barnsley men to go and join a bigger assembly at the village of Grange Moor, close by Huddersfield.

Through the night of the 11-12th approximately 400 men from Barnsley marched to a beating drum with banners bearing political slogans and carrying pikes and guns. At Grange Moor they met not with the expected thousands from across the Riding and Lancashire, but 20 or so radicals from Huddersfield. Aware of a military presence in the town, panic ensued resulting in a disorderly dispersal and the abandonment of weapons and banners. Seventeen were eventually arrested.

Years later Chartists who were sympathetic to the idea of physical force had their ardour cooled by General Napier’s invitation to some of their leaders to witness a display of cannon fire. The romance of violent revolution soon gives way faced with the grim realities of actual combat.

The British state has learned these lessons over two hundred years and more. If there is an instance of over-reaction, Bloody Sunday for example, first allow time to pass. Then set up a public enquiry, hold some official of the time responsible – all the better if he has died in the meantime or can resign from some prestigious post – and even offer an apology, possibly with compensation, but not too much.

Appearances are thus maintained, while the dead and injured slip away into the history books, the rule of law preserved. The state protects itself to protect capitalism and will continue to do so until the working class decides otherwise.

There was one positive factor to be found in the immediate aftermath of the Hexham debacle – the reports that the militia troops were shocked by the results of their actions. Socialists know that military men and, these days, women may be trained to kill, but are not inured to the results, as so many cases of PTSD indicate.

Also, despite being the coercive arm of the state they are workers, from working-class families. When the working class collectively decide they will democratically replace capitalism with socialism, soldiers are not going to be unaffected.

As the Hexham magistrates knew, they couldn’t rely on the local militia to confront their own neighbours so had to bring in others from elsewhere. When the socialist movement becomes worldwide, as it must to achieve socialism, there won’t be an elsewhere to draw soldiers from.

Dave Alton

Anti-Putin Protests (2021)

From the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s clear who they’re against, but what are they for?

What is the significance of the current Russian protests against the Putin regime? Western media have called them ‘unprecedented’. That is not so.

Mass protests are a frequent occurrence in Russia, though rarely do they attract much attention abroad. Many give voice to local grievances. This January, for example, residents of Ufa protested (successfully) against a big increase in heating charges. In 2019 there were mass meetings in Moscow against an urban renewal programme that threatened people’s homes – meetings larger (so a Russian correspondent tells me) than the anti-Putin protest. However, nationwide protest movements also occur, such as that in 2018 against a ‘reform’ to raise by five years the age at which people can start to draw a pension (43 percent of Russian men die before reaching the new retirement age).

Even focusing solely on protests organised by the anti-Putin opposition, today’s protests are similar in size and geographical scope to those that began in December 2011 and continued into 2012. Those protests were not on a large enough scale to have any chance of toppling the regime, nor are the current protests. They mobilise a much smaller proportion of the population (1 percent at most) than the opposition demonstrations in Belarus did last October (about 5 percent).

Enormous power potential

The Putin regime is not going to collapse any time soon. Its power potential is still enormous. It retains full control over TV – still the medium on which most Russians rely for information – and print media. Oligarchs connected with the regime (independent ones are no longer tolerated) own most of Russia’s natural resources and heavy industry. The state bureaucracy and armed forces remain loyal.

True, the regime has reason to be concerned about a gradual long-term erosion of popular support. Younger people have access to a wider range of information through the internet and social media. Tens of millions have watched the opposition video Putin’s Palace, about the president’s luxurious residence on the Black Sea coast.

Polls show that Putin’s approval rating has fallen over the last couple of years to about 60 percent, which is considered too low. This too, however, is not unprecedented. It hovered just above 60 percent from 2011 to 2013. Then in 2014 confrontation with Ukraine bumped it up to 85—90 percent. The annexation of Crimea was especially popular. No doubt the remedy of ‘a short victorious war’ – first recommended as a means of ‘averting revolution’ by Tsarist interior minister Vyacheslav Plehve in 1904 – can be applied yet again.

Nature of the ‘Putin regime’

But what is this ‘regime’ that Putin has established in Russia?

The Putin regime is neither a democracy nor an out-and-out dictatorship. It is officially described as a ‘guided democracy’. It can be represented as three concentric circles:

• at the core: Putin, his presidential administration and government, and his loyal ‘party of power’ – United Russia (the opposition calls it ‘the party of crooks and thieves’);
• the ‘intra-system opposition’ of parties that accept Putin as president but advocate their own policies within permitted limits. There are at present three such parties: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Zhirinovsky’s ultra-nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) and Just Russia, a ‘social-democratic’ reform party that belongs to the Socialist International;
• the ‘extra-system opposition’ of parties and groups that oppose Putin, including Navalny’s ‘Russia of the Future’ (formerly the Party of Progress). Refused registration, they operate under duress and are unable to contest elections.

The term ‘opposition’ is therefore ambiguous. In its broad sense it refers to the intra-system as well as the extra-system opposition, in its narrow sense only to the extra-system opposition.

Uniting the opposition

The political situation in Russia has changed in one significant respect. Nine years ago the extra-system opposition was deeply divided, as we reported in the Socialist Standard (Material World, July 2012). The three main components of the movement were Russian nationalists, Western-type liberals, and leftists of various sorts. Opposition rallies were enlivened by verbal and even physical clashes between nationalists on one side and anarchists or gay activists on the other.

These internal conflicts have been resolved, mainly due to the rising influence of so-called ‘national democrats’ who claim to combine Russian nationalism with Western-type liberalism. Alexei Navalny has played a central role in this development. Leftists have been marginalized within the opposition or have abandoned the movement. A group of anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists recently issued a declaration in which they renounce:

  ‘all participation in the political spectacles organised by supporters of the right-wing populist Navalny, sadly renowned for his openly nationalist attacks on immigrants, people from the Caucasus and Jews. Whatever excuses or ‘explanations’ may be offered, joining in their demonstrations would mean turning into an appendage of one of the political gangs waging a dirty and unprincipled struggle for power’ (LINK).

Since 2019 Navalny has urged his supporters to vote ‘smart’ – that is, tactically – for the strongest opposition candidate standing in any election, even if that candidate is a ‘communist’ or one of Zhirinovsky’s people. Tactical voting will tend to strengthen the oppositional character of the intra-system opposition and narrow the gap between the intra-system and extra-system oppositions.

Who is Navalny?

Katya Kazbek in The Grayzone says that Navalny is ‘first and foremost … an investigative journalist’ who exposes corruption within the Putin regime. This is certainly the centrepiece of his public activity. However, the investigations on which the anti-corruption campaign relies have for some time been conducted mainly by researchers at his Foundation for Fighting Corruption rather than by Navalny personally. Is fighting corruption an end in itself for Navalny? Or is it an instrument in his bid for power? It is hard to think of any other theme that would be equally effective in bringing diverse elements together in a broad coalition. Who, after all, is in favour of corruption?

This does not mean we can assume that a regime led by Navalny would prove any less corrupt once he came to power. Navalny has himself been convicted for fraud in his business dealings, though he calls the charges ‘frame-ups’.

Navalny is not only a public speaker but also a prolific blogger and video star who exploits social media to the full. He has a characteristic ironic style and sense of humour.

What does Navalny stand for?

The cruel treatment of Navalny by the Putin regime has won him much sympathy and admiration. Nevertheless, this should not bias our view of what he stands for.

Navalny’s constitutional proposals envision transition from a ‘super-presidential’ to a ‘presidential-parliamentary republic’ with an independent judiciary. His economic platform appeals to capitalists who lack close connections to the regime. He undertakes to transform the existing ‘twisted’ and ‘authoritarian-oligarchic model’ of ‘crony capitalism’ into a fully competitive model of capitalism with a level playing field and a strong high-tech sector. He promises to restart economic growth, ‘create a well-functioning pension system’, move towards an all-volunteer military, reduce crime, improve roads, transfer authority and taxes to the regions and municipalities, and stay out of wars abroad.

Not all of Navalny’s slogans seem compatible. For example, is it really possible to ‘fight corruption’ but also ‘trust people’? And how will he fund all his programmes, including a doubling of state spending on healthcare and education, and at the same time cut taxes? He says he will do this by reducing spending on the security services and ‘bureaucracy’ – but that is easier said than done. Although he criticizes the extreme inequality of wealth in Russia, he does not back Just Russia’s demand to replace the current flat-rate income tax (13 percent) by a progressive tax (though he does want to make the property tax more progressive).

Closer examination suggests that not all of Navalny’s promises should be taken at face value. He highlights a promise to establish a minimum monthly wage of 25,000 rubles (£242.50 or $325), but further on we learn that this is a goal to be achieved by stages, the pace to be set by regional governments (LINK).

It is difficult to assess Navalny because he is such a master at projecting different versions of himself at different audiences (an essential skill of any good politician). Facing west, he poses as a champion of human rights and condemns Russia’s ‘aggression against Ukraine’. But he is unwilling to give Crimea back to Ukraine. And he shares Russian nationalist ideas that militate against full recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty – the perception of Russians and Ukrainians as constituting a single nation and the concept of a ‘Russian World’ that extends to Slav areas beyond state borders but does not encompass the Northern Caucasus, which he proposes to sever from the Russian Federation.

Dehumanising ethnic minorities

Most alarming, however, is the internal aspect of Navalny’s nationalism. Of course, the Putin regime itself is nationalistic. But Putin’s is a state nationalism. Navalny’s is primarily an ethnic Russian nationalism. He demands the full assimilation of ethnic minorities: those who wish to live in Russia ‘must become (ethnically) Russian in the full sense’.

Navalny’s main targets have been the Moslem immigrants from Central Asia (above all, Tajikistan) and the Caucasus. They originally came to Russia to earn some money and return home, but increasing numbers have settled in Russian cities, where they have been allowed to build mosques. Even though they do the hardest and dirtiest jobs, they are widely hated and abused. Their position resembles that of Hispanic immigrants in the United States. Like Trump, Navalny has taken full advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment.

In April 2017 Shaun Walker interviewed Navalny for The Guardian. To quote Walker:

  ‘Several years ago, he released a number of disturbing videos, including one in which he is dressed as a dentist, complaining that tooth cavities ruin healthy teeth, as clips of migrant workers are shown. In another video, he speaks out in favour of relaxing gun controls, in a monologue that appears to compare migrants to cockroaches.

I ask him if he regrets those videos now, and he’s unapologetic. He sees it as a strength that he can speak to both liberals and nationalists. But comparing migrants to cockroaches? ‘That was artistic license,’ he says. So there’s nothing at all from those videos or that period that he regrets? ‘No,’ he says again, firmly’.

Another example of Navalny’s dehumanization of ethnic ‘enemies’ came during the 2008 invasion of Georgia, which he enthusiastically supported. Indulging in a play on words, Navalny called Georgians (gruziny) rodents (grizuny).

Russia in Western media

We can conclude by agreeing with the remarks of Katya Kazbek concerning how Western media cover events in Russia (as well as in other countries regarded as adversaries of the West). ‘The overwhelming majority of Western journalists,’ she observes, ‘are busy communicating their own narrative, which does not have anything to do with the real situation on the ground’ but ‘too often reflects the opinions’ of NATO governments. It is therefore ‘misleading and dangerous to judge Russia by what you hear most often about it’.

Stefan

Muddled Money Theory (2021)

Book Review from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The deficit myth: modern monetary theory and how to build a better economy. Stephanie Kelton, John Murray Publishers, 2020

You may have read or heard about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which has become popular in some left-wing circles as a means for justifying government spending programmes. In essence, it affirms that any state that can issue its own inconvertible (fiat) currency, cannot go bankrupt (so long as it only borrows in its own currency).

This leads to a model of the state in which it is not reliant on taxation nor borrowing to spend. Taxes, for MMT, are merely a means for driving demand for the state-issued currency, and any money paid in tax is effectively destroyed. All state spending is simply the issuing of newly created money. The national debt is simply a different form of money that attracts interest in the normal money the state issues. The national debt, in this model, is merely a means to regulate interest rates.

The only limit to state spending, for MMT, is the availability of resources in the real economy. These limits only become evident through the appearance of inflation: prices would begin to rise as demand from government spending outstripped supply. The method that Kelton promotes to regulate this spending is a government jobs guarantee scheme, so that full employment is maintained at all times. If private sector employment drops, the government jobs scheme kicks in to offer employment, at a minimum rate. As the economy recovers, people leave the job scheme, attracted by private sector wages.

This is, then, unlike the Keynsian prescription, in that MMT encourages government spending at any stage of the business cycle, rather than cutting spending during the upswing and borrowing during the recession.

The core premise of MMT is banally true: the state can always issue more money in its own currency. There is a question of just how much scope there is for increasing state spending before inflation kicks in, and Kelton certainly seems to write a lot of cheques against that spending capacity: healthcare, university education, pensions, etc.

She seems to imply that the current models, wherein the state is assumed to be funded through taxation and borrowing, are simply an error, rather than representing the ideological form of the interests of the owners of money and capital.

Before 1971 other currencies had a fixed rate of exchange with the dollar and the dollar was convertible into gold at the fixed rate of $35 an ounce. This provided an indirect link between a currency and gold. The currencies themselves, however, were not convertible into gold and states could issue as much as they wanted. To the extent that they over-issued them this led to inflation and in the end to a formal devaluation of their exchange rate with the dollar.

When this ‘gold exchange standard’ was abandoned by the US in 1971 the commodity origin of currencies was completely disguised, giving rise to the illusion on which MMT is based that money is entirely a creation of a state. Since then currencies have floated up and down against each other in accordance with the demand for them, for instance to pay for imports. An increase in their supply was still liable, if excessive, to cause inflation. The result wasn’t a formal devaluation, simply a downwards float vis-à-vis other currencies.

To an extent, the commodity origin is still relevant because the state monopoly of fiat currency is not absolute. People can abandon pounds or dollars by buying foreign currencies or value-bearing commodities (in a crisis, the price of gold shoots up, as people buy gold to try and protect the value of their assets). Contrary to Kelton’s assertion, the banks do not have to buy the national debt, they have other options, but it has to remain attractive, and the currency has to retain confidence.

Further, her dismissal of ‘crowding out’ theory only goes so far. The usual idea of crowding out is that government borrowing attracts investable capital and pushes up interest rates, making it harder for private sector businesses to find investment and thus damping down overall economic growth. Kelton argues that the state can effectively set its own interest rates for borrowing, and can thus borrow and hold down interest rates at the same time.

To an extent that is true, but only within broad limits governed by general confidence in the security of the government debt. With international money markets, setting the interest rate too low or too high would make the currency a target for speculation, as people would move their assets into or out of the country. Further, leaving interest rates to one side, as the state can only consume resources (as a state) all the resources employed by the state cannot be employed by private capital to produce profits. Whether this transfer really comes from borrowing, taxation or from creating money is moot, the fact remains that from a capitalist’s perspective, state spending is a threat to their profitability. This means less wealth overall is created for the state to commandeer.

The same can be said for a jobs guarantee. It is useful for Kelton to tell us that the US Federal Reserve sees it as part of its role to deliberately sustain a certain level of unemployment in order to control inflation. While she sees this as the result of mistaken theory, we would see it as part of the essential features of capitalism. Capitalism relies on the lash of the threat of poverty and unemployment in order to sustain its profitability for the capitalists, as well as having a buffer of laid-off workers in reserve for the next boom.

A job guarantee scheme would see wages pushed up to the point where they cut into the profits the capitalists make (and this would happen without causing inflation, since the demand would simply be transferring effective demand from one pocket to another). This would likely result in a capital strike occasioning a form of economic crisis. Just as likely, the state might be called in, as it was under the Keynesian nostrums, to regulate wages and use its job guarantee to control wage levels.

To the extent that Kelton talks about looking past money to think about real economic resources and how they can be commanded for the interests of the whole community, she is on the right path. The lever of state-issued money is insufficient. The distortion of money markets would get in the way of that. Likewise, simply seeing the problem as a misunderstanding of theory, rather than actual contesting class interests, is a greater barrier than any theory of how the state is financed.

Pik Smeet

Global Socialism (2021)

From the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ is a Sanskrit phrase found in Hindu holy texts such as the Maha Upanishad, the Rig Veda and the Bhagavata, which means ‘the world is one family’. Although anti-religion, the companion parties in the World Socialist Movement embody that concept in our axiom ‘One world, One people.’

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency has shown us that there is something very wrong with the system we live under. It has led many people to contemplate a future other than apocalyptic catastrophes and instead hold hope that the threat of pollution and plague might lead to a better world. Both crises have made clear the oneness of the peoples of the world. What we share is much more powerful than what keeps us apart. All people are inescapably interconnected, and the more we can come together to solve our problems, the better our chances that we can avoid a possible collapse of civilisation.

Capitalism, through its creation of a world market, has broken down many of the barriers between the nations. The capitalist method of production draws all the peoples of the globe together. But this same capitalism also promotes the strengthening of nationalism through trade wars that from time to time turn into armed conflicts to secure more of that world market. Commercial rivalries intensify national enmities. That is why the idea of a world community and universal peace cannot prosper under capitalist society.

Whereas the globalisation influence of the corporations is continually frustrated by competing national capitalisms, the internationalism of the working people is strengthened by the mutual solidarity of the interests of all the workers, regardless of their location or nationality. The position of the workers is almost identical in its essential features throughout the world. While the interests of the capitalists of different countries unceasingly conflict with one another, the interests of the working class coincide and workers come to realise this in the course of their struggles. For instance, in their attempts to secure higher wages, a reduction of hours, and other workplace protections, our fellow workers continually meet obstacles, which arise from the competition between the capitalists of various nations. An increase in wages or a reduction of the working day in any particular country is undermined by the competition of other countries in which these reforms have not yet been achieved. Such things convince workers of the solidarity of their interests and of the necessity for joining forces in the struggle to improve their condition.

Emancipation from wage slavery is unthinkable without a worldwide socialist reconstruction of society. The Socialist Party’s goal is the union of the workers of the whole world in a common struggle for liberation, the greatest social movement in human history. A movement is rooted in the blood, sweat and tears of millions who have spent their lives throughout history clamouring for a better society that works for everyone. This movement does not appear by magic and we need to consciously commit ourselves to the systemic transformation to a classless society where the resources of the Earth become the common heritage of all humanity. Humanity can work together to prevail over problems and learn the folly of battling one another.

The climate crisis and the pandemic demonstrate the mutual dependencies of the world’s peoples and the requirement that the planet’s resources be redirected for the service of health and peaceful life. The overriding goal must be human security, providing food, water, a clean environment and good health for people. Socialists recognise the value of collective social relationships. We’re brothers and sisters who must think and act cooperatively to achieve common goals.

We must become one world through genuine cooperation and collaboration among all the people of the world, coordinating to protect humanity. We need a mighty movement to transform the political institutions and economic structures. The same dedication and determination with which wars have been conducted through the ages must now be applied to building a peaceful and prosperous planet.

Human beings can only take so much. The living natural world can only take so much. The peoples of the planet are ripe for change. But unless we make the world socialist commonwealth our goal change may not be necessarily progressive. It could be reactionary and fuelled by religious extremism, xenophobia, racism, and tribalism.

What is up to us within the socialist movement is to present a positive vision of the future. To point out all the mutual aid networks we see flourishing across the world. Now is the time for the alternative. Society must redirect the resources it’s currently wasting and instead provide for the needs and wants of people.

To survive and prosper, to fulfil our potential, we must reject divisions and recognise that it is possible to build a new system of social justice. From the chaos of the old, we can create a future civilisation in which humanity can live in harmony. In times of crises such as these, people are offering support to one another. This as an opportunity to reset society for a better future. We can rebuild our society in an egalitarian way, in an environmentally friendly way. We can banish the politics of hatred.

The Socialist Party proposes a society-wide democracy, and an end to the profit system. Working people have had enough of being fed the false arguments that human nature, over-population or shortage of resources prevent socialism and that we need leaders and a process of gradual reforms to bring about a socialist society. We have had enough of waiting. It’s possible now. We can bury forever all national chauvinism, racial prejudice, and religious bigotry beginning today.

ALJO

Cooking The Books: Is capitalism based on unsustainable debt? (2021)

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

A new group calling itself ‘Blue Revolution’ has sent us a couple of pamphlets. In one of them, The History of Politics Simplified, they talk of the ‘debt based free market system’ and make the claim that the ‘free market … relies on an economy that is dependent on debt’. They invoke Marx in support of this:

  ‘… unless change take place the western economy will in the words of Karl Marx collapse under the weight of its economic contradictions … Reliance on this system will bankrupt the government first and then, the nation.’

Marx never expressed such words. He never wrote of capitalism collapsing under its economic contradictions. He did point out capitalism’s contradictions – such as between use-value and exchange value, and between co-operative production and private ownership – but did not expect these to lead to the system’s economic collapse. What they did cause was production under capitalism to be erratic, veering continuously between boom and slump and back. His view was that capitalism would have to be brought to an end through conscious action by the wage-working class.

Marx didn’t even see dependence on debt as one of capitalism’s contradictions. Debt is something owed by somebody or some organisation to some other person or organisation that has lent them money. So, if you are claiming an economic system is based on debt you are at the same time claiming that it is based on lending.

Borrowing (i.e., getting into debt) and lending are certainly features of capitalism, and if lenders stopped lending the system would be in trouble, but why would lenders do that? Banks and other financial institutions make money by lending money (theirs or other people’s or organisations’) in return for interest, a part of which is their profit.

There are three types of borrowers – individual workers, capitalist enterprises, and governments. Lenders lend workers money to buy consumer items such as household goods, a car or a house but they always check first the chances of getting their money back out of future wages; if they don’t think these chances are high enough they will refuse a loan. Lenders lend to capitalist enterprises to invest in some profitable project and calculate whether they will get their money back out of future profits. They lend to states for the interest states will pay them out of taxation.

In all cases they weigh up the chances of getting their money back with interest and, if the chances are not good enough, they won’t lend. They sometimes get it wrong, but not on the systematic and massive scale assumed by those who think that debts are likely to get out of hand and bring the system down.

Ironically perhaps, it is governments that are the least likely to default. This is because they have the power to raise money from taxes. Which is why, when they scent a recession coming, financial institutions switch to buying government debt (bonds). The leading capitalist states are not going to go bankrupt; their borrowing is sustainable and lenders know it.

It is lending to capitalist enterprises that causes trouble for the system from time to time. Capitalist enterprises are driven by the pursuit of profits; in a boom one sector always eventually overestimates the chances of this, as do those who lend them money. The result is an economic downturn and financial crisis. However, this is not the end of the system. Slumps eventually create the conditions for a recovery by restoring profit-making prospects, and profit-making and capital accumulation resume until the next slump.

The present economic system is not dependent on debt but on making profits.

Material World: Crackdown or Backdown?

The Material World column from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

While there are many unsettling questions posed by Aung Sang Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy (NLD)’s complicity in the persecution of ethnic minorities, the World Socialist Movement expresses its solidarity with our Myanmar fellow-workers in their present struggle. Having had a taste of liberty, no matter how limited, the people of Myanmar have shown that they will not passively submit to the return of the army dictatorship. The pro-democracy movement has taken on a life of its own in rejecting the rule of an authoritarian military junta. There is now a new generation of young people accustomed to accessing social media. The defiant three-fingered salute of the Hunger Games movies, adopted by pro-democracy activists in Thailand and Hong Kong has now become the gesture of resistance in Myanmar.

‘This movement is leaderless — people are getting on the streets in their own way and at their own will,’ said activist Thinzar Shunlei Yi to AP Press.

Peaceful public demonstrations and spontaneous unofficial strikes have become widespread, actions which are full of personal risk as this army has not hesitated in the past to brutally suppress opposition.

There is much speculation about why the army re-imposed full control but we do know that it was not because of any concern about fraud in the November’s election. The only way to counter the coup is non-violent civil disobedience of one kind or another to win over the state’s forces of coercion, which our fellow workers are now engaged in. This cannot be a fight between the NLD and the generals. It has to be to deprive the junta of legitimacy and recognition and hinder it from functioning by strikes in the hope that this type of mass participation tactic will disable the dictatorship’s ability to rule and disrupt the vast business empire of the Tatmadaw (the armed forces). In addition is the anticipation of possible mass defections from the police and army. Nearly fifty police departments in Loikaw, the capital of eastern Kayah state, crossed lines and joined the protest march where the banner read, ‘No military dictatorship.’ Importantly, without mutinies within the armed forces and police, the ruling clique is likely to win, at least, temporarily.

As the major actor in the Myanmar economy, owning substantial investments, the Tatmadaw has been reluctant to yield meaningful political power. The coup could have been a business decision made in the boardroom rather than the war-room by the upper echelons of the military who feel threatened by Suu Kyi’s continued popularity which could potentially lead to a campaign against corruption and further constitutional change. Suu Kyi and her NLD have tried to re-model the military-dominated economy by implementing the ‘Myanmar Sustainable Economic Development Plan’ which welcomes foreign investment but could bring the hegemony of the military clique to an end.

Who knows what might happen? Information still remains mainly limited to hearsay and guesswork. What we do know is that the NLD collaboration with the Tatmadaw led to garment workers on strike being attacked in 2018 and union activists in May 2020 being arrested. Suu Kyi calculated that Burmese Buddhist nationalism was a winning electoral strategy. Ethnic minorities represent around 40 percent of Myanmar’s total 54 million population. But around 2.5 million ethnic minority citizens were unable to vote in last year’s election – including 1.5 million voters in conflict-affected areas due to security concerns and one million Rohingya who are denied citizenship and voting rights. Political democracy in its current shape has not served Myanmar’s ethnic minorities, but it’s still better, even in an illiberal form, than Tatmadaw rule, a hybrid civil–military system which protects military dominance. The previous political reforms were orchestrated by the country’s military in ways that safeguard its own power interests. This explains the persistence of authoritarian rule and military dominance in contemporary Myanmar politics.

And because the global economic system was interested in profiting from Myanmar’s economic potentials, its largely untapped natural riches – including minerals, natural gas, and hydropower and an undeveloped market – it presented ideal commercial opportunities and so the looming shadows of the generals in the background were conveniently ignored.

Many commentators have excused Aung Sang Suu Kyi’s complicity in the oppression of the Rohingya as a sign that she and her party were never really in charge and that she was obliged to compromise her own democratic ideals in a Faustian pact with the army. If true, the lesson is very clear for all to see now – that those who sup with the devil should have a very long spoon.

Critics of socialism say that what has arisen in Myanmar will happen if there is a socialist victory at the polls — those in control of state power won’t concede their power. Our answer is that if there exists a majority for socialism the socialist movement will eventually prevail one way or another, sooner or later. The immediate reaction would be strikes and demonstrations and mass disaffection, the same disobedience which we witness happening in Myanmar.

ALJO

Not the alternative (2021)

Book Review from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why America Needs Socialism. G.S. Griffin, Ig Publishing, New York, 2019

It wasn’t a bad idea to introduce socialism to Americans prejudiced against it, by quoting people and writers they know of such as Einstein, Martin Luther King, Helen Keller, Mark Twain, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, George Orwell, all of whom made criticisms of capitalism as a system based on inequality and production for profit. Technically, this is the invalid ‘argument from authority’ but Griffin puts their quotes to good use to back up his argument against capitalism, at least against private capitalism.

The facts he presents are referenced in 70 pages of footnotes. All the same, there are a few inaccuracies. In 1936 the Spanish people did not rise up against the fascist dictator Franco; Franco rose up against the elected Republican government. The Mondragon cooperative had nothing to do with any Marxist tradition in Spain; it was set up under Franco by a Catholic priest.

When it comes to describing the alternative to capitalism, what Griffin (a member of the Democratic Socialists of America) sees as socialism, the book fails. He describes socialism as a society ‘full of cooperatives’; all places of work – factories, farms, offices, shops, transport, hospitals, schools, colleges, theatres – are to be owned and run by those working in them. This would not be socialism, as in a socialist society the means of life would be owned by society as a whole and not by those who worked in them. Society-wide common ownership allows production to be geared directly to meeting people’s needs; the question to solve is then not to sell what has been produced but how to distribute it to where it is needed.

Certainly, in socialism workplaces will be democratically run by those working in them but they won’t be their property. Griffin’s scheme, on the other hand, involves worker-owned cooperatives producing for sale on a market, which means that they will have to at least break even, with money spent being balanced by money from sales, while free services will have to be financed from taxes. The objection to this is not that it wouldn’t be better than what exists now but that it wouldn’t work, at least not as intended. Market forces would still control things and, since in practice the cooperatives would have to aim to make a monetary surplus (aka profit), eventually lead to a return to capitalism as we know it.

Adam Buick

Letter: Reflections (2021)

Letter to the Editors from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reflections

Dear Editor

I think we can say that, if it doesn’t abolish capitalism, humanity doesn’t have a very long time, because capitalism is destroying the very planet we live on. As a system, it cannot go against its own raison d’être, which is the accumulation of capital. This is the very definition of capitalism, and life itself is sacrificed for it and must always be while the system lasts. Governments cannot resolve this because they are the representatives of capital. Their helmsmen (leaders, presidents, prime ministers, etc.) lead nothing. They cannot control capitalism. It controls them.

Nothing stands still; not in nature nor in society. Ironically, capitalism, with its very destructiveness, is socialism’s greatest ally. People, throughout history, become political when the environment they are in compels them to, and this is our hope.

It isn’t that the Socialist Party (that is, the real socialist movement for a stateless, classless, moneyless society) could ever convert the majority of the world’s workers through its political activity, but that the world’s workers themselves will come to the same conclusion as us through many independent routes and threads and coming to that conclusion (that the system of prices and profits, buying and selling, wage-slavery and capital accumulation must go, if we are to save the Earth and if our grandchildren are to live) without any need to study Marx or even to read a single book.

They will come to that conclusion because every reform they attempt, every conservation project they undertake, every patching-up attempt they make, every charitable endeavour of theirs, is punched to the ground by capitalism every day, it being the root cause of all of it: famine, war, poverty, pollution, destruction.

The threads are yet to come together, but I think they are heading in that direction, bit by bit, and independently of us socialists today. That may sound optimistic but the pessimistic alternative is that capitalism will never be got rid of, and will, instead, get rid of life on Earth. That is the distinct possibility. Maybe that will happen, and socialism remain a fond dream. So, are we to give up? I think giving up would be unethical.

It would be unethical toward not just our fellow humans, but all our fellow animals and our planet, and to all the yet unborn too.

A mass movement becomes a reality not one by one, but by tipping points being reached. Initial tipping points are the longest to reach, and successive ones more and more rapid. The first need only take a couple of thousand, after which the pace quickens thereafter – with tipping points also being reached independently in different parts of the globe before contact, after which the pace becomes a deluge.

And this last is why the capitalists’ state apparatuses would be helpless to stop it.

Anthony Walker

Obituary: Suhuyini Nbang-Ba (2021)

Obituary from the March 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

A socialist’s life

Anoushka Alexander writes: Suhuyini Nbang-Ba, socialist activist, journalist and teacher died at home in the Gambia on 16 September 2020. He was nine days short of his sixty-first birthday and is survived by a brother, a sister, three nieces and four nephews.

Suhuyini was born in the small town of Ejura, near Kumasi in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. He was, however, a Dagomba, a member of the Muslim tribe of that name from Ghana’s Northern Region. He was originally named Mohammed Yacabou, and known as M.Y. to his friends, but chose the name Suhuyini Nbang-Ba in later life. This was a political act reclaiming his ancestry and history — his Muslim name could be traced back to colonisation of the Dagomba area by traders between the 12th and 15th centuries. Instead, Suhuyini chose a name in his mother tongue, Dagbani — ‘Suhuyini’ meaning ‘unity’ (literally ‘one heart’) and ‘Nbang-Ba’ meaning ‘I know them’— a reference to his ancestors and the act of reclaiming them embodied in changing his name. In fact, having previously been very religious and renowned for his piety, as a young man in the early eighties he renounced Islam and publicly denounced both the activities of certain Muslim leaders and religion in general.

As a schoolboy, Suhuyini was sent to live with his aunt in the north so he could attend Tamale Secondary School. He was also educated at the prestigious University of Ghana, Legon, where he took his undergraduate degree and then later began an MPhil in African and European history. While at university, he became very active politically and was a member of the United Revolutionary Front (URF), an underground anarchist movement opposed to the military junta led by Jerry John Rawlings. However, Suhuyini later opposed armed struggle. During his time as an undergraduate, he was beaten up by the military, hospitalised and placed under house arrest due to the student union’s opposition to the military junta.

Suhuyini then spent two years as a teacher back in the Northern Region, also setting up a self-help association for impoverished women and a drama troupe.

In the late eighties, when the ruling regime introduced District Assemblies to lend a semblance of democracy to the dictatorship, Suhuyini contested the Nalung Constituency seat and won 75 percent of the vote. He became one of the first members of the Tamale District Assembly (a sort of district parliament.)

After his time in the north, Suhuyini returned to Accra to take his MPhil.

While studying for this he joined the communist Weekly Insight newspaper as a reporter and columnist; the Insight was at that time the only non-governmental newspaper. His column was titled ‘The Dark File’ and targeted corrupt government officials. As he did not use a pseudonym, he started receiving anonymous threats from the top echelons of Ghanaian society and from hit-men of the military dictatorship. Despite this he continued his political work.

When he could stand the threats no longer, and when the military turned up at his home while he was out, he fled on foot to the Gambia, having to sell the very shoes he was wearing to pay for his passage and to bribe border guards. Once in the Gambia he continued his teaching and journalism.

During this period, five of Suhuyini’s close Gambian friends were rounded up by the military on suspicion of being involved in a failed coup attempt; all of them died while being transported between prisons. Officials claimed at the time that they had died when the car they were in crashed, but the circumstances surrounding the event were suspicious and his fears for his safety led to Suhuyini finally giving up his political journalism in the Gambia.

However, Suhuyini continued his political work by writing for publications based outside West Africa. He became a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) and contributed articles to the party’s journal Socialist Standard. He also edited a magazine of the SPGB called African Socialist which was later renamed Socialist Banner.

At the time of his death Suhuyini was working on a book of essays, despite limited access to a computer and an erratic electricity supply. Although the hospital did not give a cause of death, he had been increasingly weak for a year with little appetite.

I came to know Suhuyini in the late nineties when he was living in Nsawam, Ghana, teaching English literature and French at secondary school and working at the Weekly Insight. Here he was known by pupils and teachers alike by yet another name: Afah, a Dagomba word meaning a Muslim teacher. This name had sprung up spontaneously and was indicative of the respect in which his pupils and colleagues held him.

Tellingly, it was not widely known outside his home region that Suhuyini was born into Dagomba royalty. In fact I doubt any of his colleagues in Nsawam knew of this fact. His father was the sub-chief of the tribe and he was the only son of his mother, the tribal queen. However, when Suhuyini became an atheist he also chose not to inherit the chieftaincy and he kept his royal lineage as secret as possible.

I only became aware of it myself at the school where we both taught when one of his pupils, also a Dagomba, prostrated herself on the ground before him as a sign of respect. Suhuyini quickly told her to get up and that she did not need to do this. It was only when pressed by me that he explained the meaning behind her actions, otherwise he would not have mentioned it.

This was typical of the man. There are some people who make a show of espousing socialism in theory, but fall short of its principles in the way they live their lives. This was never true of Suhuyini — his political views were deeply held and stemmed from his character; he lived socialist principles. Unlike some of his nominally socialist colleagues in West Africa, he refused to bribe his way into a lucrative post, preferring to remain a poorly-paid teacher with his principles intact. He tenaciously battled depression, ill-health and constant technical problems to work on his political writing, and throughout his life he campaigned tirelessly, experiencing violence and risking death many times for his principles.

More than that, Suhuyini treated everyone he met as an equal and spoke to everybody with the same friendly respect, from the highest born to the most lowly street-seller. While teaching in Nsawam he sponsored a schoolboy through his education, even though the child was no relation, out of pure compassion. He sponsored a child again later in the Gambia, despite his own limited means. When he died in the Gambia, the family where he rented a room told me he had been like a son to his landlady and like a second father to her grandchildren, who knew him affectionately as ‘Baba.’

He certainly had a life-long effect on me. When I first met him I was seventeen, and my discussions with him then and over the intervening years helped form the political beliefs I still hold today.

Indeed, Suhuyini left his mark on everyone he met. He held strong views, yet was always willing to hear others out — debates never became rows — and with his humanity, sharp wit and easy, infectious laugh he enriched the life of all who knew him, no matter which name they knew him by. He is deeply missed by those he left behind and the world is a lesser place without him.

Suhuyini Nbang-Ba, political campaigner, journalist, teacher and loved one, born  25 September 1959; died 16 September 2020.

The articles he wrote for the Socialist Standard can be found here.