Editorial: Nats whae hae (2007)

Editorial from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nationalism is anathema to socialists. Wage and salary workers have no country. We have more in common with people like ourselves in other countries than with the privileged owning class of the country where we happen to live and work.

The world-wide working class has a common interest, to end its exploitation and solve its problems, to join together to establish a world without frontiers in which the resources of the planet will have become the heritage of all, so that there can be production to meet needs and not for profit. One world, one people, where cultural differences will still be celebrated, but where we’ll all be citizens of the world.

It is clear, then, why socialists don’t take sides in the debate, aired in this month’s elections to the Scottish Parliament, about whether it is better for workers there to be ruled from Edinburgh (as the SNP says) or from London with a little help from Edinburgh (as say the British Nationalists of the Labour, Liberal and Tory parties).

The SNP argues that the problems facing workers in scotland are due to “Westminster rule”. If only there was an independent Scotland, they say, separate from the rest of Britain, then there would be full employment, higher wages, job security, better state benefits, a healthy health service and all the other things politicians promise at election times.

This view is echoed by the so called Scottish “Socialist” Party and Tommy Sheridan’s Solidarity (with Sheridan) Party. But it is patently absurd. This would be a purely political, not to say mere constitutional change which would leave the basic economic structure of society unchanged.

There would still be a privileged class owning and controlling the means of production with the rest having to work for them for a living. Just as now. Maybe the pillar boxes would be painted tartan but that would be about all.

An independent Scottish government would still have to operate within the constraints of the world capitalist system. It would still have to ensure that goods produced in Scotland were competitive on world markets and that capitalists investing in Scotland were allowed to make the same level of profits as they could in other  countries.

In other words, it would still be subject to the same economic pressures as the existing London-based government to promote profits and restrict wages and benefits. And as the government of Ireland, which broke away from the United Kingdom in 1922 and where things have never been any different. Not even the national state capitalism proposed by the SSP and Sheridan would make any difference. As in Cuba, exports would still have to be competitive and popular consumption restricted to achieve this.

Since it is this class-divided, profit motivated society that is the cause of the problems workers face in Scotland, as in England and in the rest of the world, so these problems will continue, regardless of whether Scotland separates from or remains part of the United Kingdom.

The SNP is promising a referendum in 2010. What an irrelevant waste of time and energy that would be, but it’s their alibi. If they get to form the regional government of Scotland their excuse for not delivering (as capitalism won’t let them) will be that their hands were tied and that their promises will only be able to be honoured after separation.

Our opposition to the SNP should not be interpreted as support for the Union or the Labour, Liberal or Tory parties that support it. We are just as opposed to them. A plague on both their houses is what we say. To adapt a slogan, “Neither London nor Edinburgh, but World Socialism”.

Pathfinders: Crystal ball gazing (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Prediction is very difficult, the great physicist Niels Bohr once observed, especially about the future. Future trends in economics and geopolitics may be difficult to map out, but surely nothing is harder than attempting to guess what’s going to happen in the realms of science and technology in the next thirty years. Nevertheless, the UK Ministry of Defence has had a go. Within the broad sweep of their hundred page strategy document (see The Military Are Not That Unintelligent, page 14) the MoD’s think-tank, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) includes an illuminating discussion on probable developments across the range of applied science, together with its implications for society and social stability.

The most substantial developments, according to the DCDC, will be in the fields of nano and biotech, energy, cognitive science, and the universe of communications, network and sensor technology that comes under the general heading of ICT. Nanotechnology has so far failed to produce any ‘wow’ factors, being still in the low foothills of an Everest of development, but it has nevertheless turned out some pretty useful materials, from sun creams that don’t turn white to carbon-fibre compounds that are both lighter and stronger than steel and which will be used in everything from electronics to aircraft. As an enabling technology, it is predicted to underpin breakthroughs in computing, biology, chemistry and physics. Biotechnology, uniquely vulnerable to ethical, religious and political disputes, may see advances in disease control, customized drug treatments, stem-cell and gene therapy, age limitation or reversal, bionic and biochip implants and human-computer interfaces, memory and intelligence enhancing drugs, and revolutions in food production.

The controversies over stem-cell research and GM crops are of course old news, but now there is a growing debate about drugs that make you smarter (look up Modafinil or see Drugs May Boost Your Brain). Should we take them, or are we merely making ourselves into harder-working super-proles with enhanced durability and XXL productivity, and all for the same wages as before? The answer to both questions is: probably. The limitations on capitalist exploitation are that we get worn out and die too fast, and the rich could get a lot richer with our continued labours into a second century of living, however, if the DCDC’s predictions for cognitive science are anything to go by, we won’t have a choice, because we’ll be up against machinery that’s soon going to be as smart as we are. As they put it: “ Soft Artificial Intelligence is already well established with self diagnosing and self reconfiguring networks in use and self repairing networks likely in the next 10 years. Mapping of human brain functions and the replication of genuine intelligence is possible before 2035 (p.59, original emphasis.) Just imagine, robo-workers you don’t even have to pay. Or worse, soldiers you can’t kill, demoralise or turn off. In among the section on future military battlebots, aerial drones, microspies and other products of the MoD boffins’ preoccupation with violence, we find an uncomfortable marriage of AI to super-advanced battlefield hardware. While US troops have for some time been testing prosthetic enhancements that make them as strong as ten men, the future of warfare as described here does not involve humans at all – at least not on the side that can afford these autonomous proto-Terminators.

But perhaps it won’t be that bad, as the DCDC recognizes that any extreme military or other technical advantage by one power may be undermined by the leakage of secrets, perhaps by scientists themselves keen to preserve a ‘level playing field’. If everybody gets the Terminators, and they just slug it out between themselves without involving any real humans, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing at all. Ah well, some hope.

So, are they right? Yes and no. They’re right in that all or most of these things are possible, and they’ve covered all the bases as they see them. At one farthest extreme they speculate on a lasting technological ceiling which will not be broken until various disparate strands of development conjoin, but the possibility of a Kursweil-like ‘Singularity’ event, one so explosive that it launches a scientific and social revolution, remains off their radar. At the other extreme they envisage a reaction to globalisation leading to greater cultural conservatism, with science throttled by economic protectionism leading to a global economic downturn, but they do not entertain any more extreme scenarios, such as the rise of a powerful religious fundamentalist anti-science lobby, or an anti-globalisation retreat into luddite neo-medievalism. There is no consideration of the raging debate about patent laws and their ambiguous role in innovation, on the one hand supposedly stimulating it, on the other, most certainly stifling it.

And did they miss anything? They only missed what you’d expect them to miss, firmly rooted as they are in the authoritarian assumptions of the government ministry of which they are a part. World social organisation to them is a question of which set of rulers has their hands on the gadgets. Thus, cheap technology may be acquired by terrorists and rogue states in order to blow up or poison innocent civilians, but it does not occur to the DCDC to ask what those innocent civilians themselves might do with this technology. Although other parts of the report mutter darkly about a resurgence of Marxism, it is clear that they have in mind the authoritarian, doctrinaire parody which existed in the Soviet era, and there is no indication that the writers suspect that ‘ordinary people’, as opposed to rulers, might start punching their weight in the decision-making process, and that governments might for the first time find themselves on the back foot. Of course, people may not take advantage of the information revolution to effect a personal and social revolution that destroys the power of the owning class and sets the human race free to manage its own future. However, the DCDC may well be overestimating the power of states to keep control amid this tidal wave of ‘enabling’ technology, and they may also be underestimating the ingenuity and collective strength of those same ‘ordinary people’ who increasingly do not see the need for capitalism at all – especially if they’ve all been knocking back the get-smart pills.

Paddy Shannon

The military are not that unintelligent (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Everyone has heard the one about “military intelligence” being a contradiction in terms. But military planners can’t afford to be stupid – and aren’t, as a recent Ministry of Defence publication shows.

Earlier this year the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) of the Ministry of Defence published a document on Strategic Trends which set out their view on the context for the activity of Britain’s armed forces over the next thirty years (see www.dcdc-strategictrends.org.uk). The man in charge, Rear Admiral Chris Parry, explains in the introduction that the trends identified in the document are “probability-based rather than predictions”. The degrees of probability being will, likely, may, possible.

What emerges from the document is that the military thinkers behind it share the socialist analysis that conflicts in the modern (capitalist) world arise out of competition between states over sources of raw materials, markets, investment outlets, trade routes and strategic points to control and protect these.

Against the sub-heading “securing natural resources”, the document says:

  “Key natural resources, especially oil, gas and minerals of strategic value, will continue to be sourced from unstable areas and unreliable regions. Maintaining access and containing instability risks in these area is therefore likely to increase in importance, alongside wider developmental and stabilization roles. Where oil and gas sources are located in areas of doubtful security, military intervention may be used to protect the integrity of sites and to secure investments” ( p. 29).

In fact, the document regards “competition for energy” as one of the “hot topics” of the period. “Competition for energy supplies”, it says, “will dominate the economic landscape during the next 30 years” and that “requirements to access sources of supply in unstable regions or countries could lead to intervention to protect assets and investments” (p. 31).

  “Overheating of energy markets may lead more countries to follow the example of China in establishing bilateral arrangements that seek to dominate or control the global market in their favour, possibly fuelling tension among those who are excluded or who cannot or will not compete in a market environment. This may lead to political and even military interventions in order to protect access and safeguard supply” (p. 26).

Then, there’s the trade routes:

  “Most of the world’s trade by bulk, particularly energy, will continue to transit by sea and through maritime choke points such as the Straits of Hormuz, the Suez Canal and the Straits of Malacca, in areas which will remain highly unstable. This will demand high levels of international cooperation and a continuing dependence on the deployment of maritime power” (p. 54).

And the strategic points:

  “There is likely to be more emphasis on the active containment of aggressors, symptoms of crisis and irregular elements, to deter and defeat military threats to partners and the international system. In these circumstances, the ability to secure and maintain free access to areas of strategic and operational interest will remain vital” (p. 54).

The MoD strategists don’t think that these tensions will lead to war in the sense of “state-on-state” conflicts (“Major interstate wars will be unlikely”, p. 67), at least not until after 2020:

  “Although large-scale interstate warfare is unlikely, competition for finite resources and intolerance at market forces may lead to tensions and greater potential for confrontation and conflict between 2020 and 2035” (p. 43).
  “Global economic and financial interdependency is likely to reduce, but not eliminate, the risk of major interstate warfare before 2020. However, increasing pressures on resources, particularly energy, and the growing assertiveness of emerging powers such as India, China and Iran, beyond this date may result in the return of great power rivalries as the defining characteristic of geopolitics, with a consequent increase in the risk of interstate and inter-bloc conflict” (p. 48).
   “Conflict and crisis will become increasingly complex and unpredictable, both in their incidence and character, during the period to 2035, with serious interstate rivalry probably expressing itself through proxy actions by hostile groups who may or may not have issues of their own” (p.67).

Even before 2020, however, the strategists think that conflict between states will take place through proxies (as already happened during the Cold War period):

  “In the absence of direct, open state-on-state conflict, there will be a marked increase in the prevalence of irregular activity . . . There will also be increased sponsorship of irregular activity and groups by states, seeking to utilize and exploit, through proxy, gaps in the international system, either to assert themselves or secure advantage without exposing themselves to state-on-state risks” (p. 52).

The document is not confined to narrow trends that concern the military directly but also mentions economic, political and other issues, singling out climate change, globalization and global inequality as the three “areas of change” which “will touch the lives of everyone on the planet” and underpin all the other trends.

On the world scale, the strategists think that “while life for most people is likely to improve materially, a significant number will continue to experience hardship, and unevenness and fluctuations within a globalized market-based economy will still mean that life will be uncertain for most” (p. 1).

   “While material conditions for most people are likely to improve over the next 30 years, the gap between rich and poor will probably increase and absolute poverty will remain a global challenge. . . Absolute poverty and comparative disadvantage will fuel perceptions of injustice among those whose expectations are not met, increasing tension and instability, both within and between societies and resulting in expressions of violence such as disorder, criminality, terrorism and insurgency. They may also lead to the resurgence of not only anti-capitalist ideologies, possibly linked to religious, anarchist or nihilist movements, but also to populism and the revival of Marxism” (p. 3).

Let’s hope that on this very last point they are right.

Adam Buick

It’s a bloody crime – or is it? (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

   “The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business” (Clarence Darrow).

The man in front of me in the bus said to his companion “You know, it’s a bloody crime!” He was obviously referring to the front page story in the evening newspaper which he was holding and which I had read earlier.

The story referred to a sick child who needed intensive care. The hospitals locally and elsewhere had been canvassed by medical staff for an intensive care cot but none were available. Last year, given the same level of demand, a cot would have been available but pressure on NHS funding had necessitated cuts in services. The child died, a newshound got a story and the grieving parents were left to wonder why.

But the man in front of me on the bus was wrong; it was not a crime. In fact he was using the term ‘crime’, as many do, as a designation for something that is obviously wrong or bad or evil and these qualities are not necessarily the considerations that determine what is and what is not a crime.

Crime is a transgression of the laws governing particular societies; specifically rules usually endorsed by a ruling executive that, in a political democracy, has been elected by the people or, in a dictatorship, has amassed sufficient coercive power to impose its authority upon the people.

Laws or rules of behaviour

It need hardly be said that whatever the form of society some form of behavioural rules or mores are necessary; equally, of course, the form of society we live in creates the conditions that determine the need for specific rules. Society is continually evolving and it is this evolution that continually creates the need for ruling executives amending existing laws and passing new laws to meet the exigencies created by new situations like, for example, the social implications of technological advances in automotive transport.

Much of this form of legislation should be straightforward, at least in motive; if people driving cars did not abide by defined regulations road accidents would increase incalculably. If anyone was allowed to pilot an aircraft there would be frequent air disasters. Unfortunately, in our present society, interests outside the province of safety can impact on the lawmakers. The vast wealth of vehicle manufacturers, petroleum refiners, civil engineering contractors, et al, can be used, and is used, to ensure that as far as possible their specific interests are not adversely affected and such interests are rarely in the general interest. It would be difficult to think of any new regulation, even one patently beneficial to the general good, like restrictions on passive smoking, that will not find opposition from some commercial interest.

Arising from property

The overwhelming body of laws in all countries today are not primarily concerned with public health, public safety or public well-being. They are concerned with property in all its forms; with the endorsement, protection and conveyance of possessions. In fact, the greatest volume of law, the millions of pages of legislation, the myriad volumes of case law, is based on relationships arising from the existence of property.

The whole legal circuses, clown-attired judges, wigged councillors, solicitors, the solemn decorum of the courts, the years of legal study and practice behind the imposing façade of erudition, these are not necessarily concerned with acts that are in themselves bad or injurious to people nor are they faithful to some abstract principles of good and evil. The entire fabric of what is absurdly known in the United Kingdom as ‘the Queen’s justice’ or elsewhere as State Justice is solidly founded on the appalling injustice of property society; specifically today, the Laws of capitalism and the Order necessary to allow for the smooth functioning of those Laws.

The French anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, affirmed that ’Property is theft!’ He was, like the man on the bus, wrong. The act of theft is a crime but the possession of property rather than being a crime is lauded by the major religions and is the very foundation of capitalist civilisation.

The cornerstone of freedom

Inevitably, in a property society people will aspire to ownership and those who claim that the right to property is the cornerstone of freedom often cite this aspiration as proof that capitalism conforms with the natural order of things. But the capitalists and their political defenders are not promoting some unworkable concept of equality within a property society nor are they referring to the right of every citizen to a home and such personal appurtenances as reflect the material needs of everyone in the pursuit of a full and happy life.

What the capitalists and the political advocates of capitalism effectively promote is the legal right of a minority class of people to own and/or control the machinery of production and distribution; the land, the factories, mills, mines, warehouses; in fact the resources of nature and the machinery and tools used by the working class to produce all the vital goods and services needed to sustain the whole of society.

It is the Law that enforces the right of a minority to use its ownership to take possession of all the goods and services produced by those who labour by hand or brain in exchange for a wage or salary that restricts the overwhelming majority of workers to conditions of relative poverty or dire want. It is in fact capitalism’s law that confers on the working class the apt designation of wage slaves.

But the effects of this much-vaunted ‘cornerstone of freedom’ do not end there. Ownership of the means of production and distribution also gives the capitalist class the right to embargo any productive activity that does not hold out for the owning class the promise of profit. Additionally, in today’s world, technology has facilitated the mobility of capital thus gifting to the capitalists the ability to locate wherever the rate of profit is most beneficial to them irrespective of the hardships they impose by unemployment on the workers whose labour is already enshrined in the fortunes of the capitalists.

Additionally, this mobility has given capital an effective weapon in enfeebling trade unions and resisting wage claims with the threat of re-locating plant where the slaves are paid less.

Majestic equality

Behind capitalism’s legal system is its vast array of coercion; ultimately the armed forces of the state but more usually police forces, judges, magistrates, lawyers and jailers. We hear about their work through the media; overladen, they toil diligently as a vast conveyor belt of capitalist justice, keeping vandals and villains and thieves and robbers off the streets; stuffing the jails to overcapacity. Essentially virtuous in their majestic equality.

The French writer, Anatole France, perhaps better than most exposes the vacuity of capitalism’s legal charade when he said:

  “The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the streets, sleep in the parks or to steal bread”.

Reality means that we live in conditions determined by capitalism and it is those conditions that almost without exception create the circumstances in which all forms of crime occur. In the past the power of the cop and the judge, unquestioning instruments of class justice, were reinforced by the fictions of religion and the Ten Commandments.

In today’s world the sins of the gods, like the legal misdeeds of the rich are increasingly evident. None would challenge the observation of the eminent American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow – he of the famous ’Monkey’ trial – that “the law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business”.

The Order that capitalism needs to underpin its Law is showing evident signs of breakdown. The hired hands that the system needs in the political system and the pensioned media to maintain its rotten values scream for ever more laws, ever greater penalties, against the evidence that crime is a reflection of capitalism and will remain as long as that system does.

Richard Montague

Cooking the Books: Just a yellow metal (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Gold prices could pass $850 record” read a headline in the Financial Times (5 April), reporting a forecast by a metals consultancy of what might happen over the next 12 months. As gold is currently selling at around $670-80 an ounce, this would be a huge increase. If something like this had happened a hundred years ago, it would have brought about financial and economic chaos by causing a huge fall in the general price level.

This was because at that time gold was still the money-commodity, as the product of labour having its own value in which the values of all other commodities were expressed. Prices were expressed in units of currency, but these were defined as a given weight of gold. A pound, for instance, was defined as about ¼ oz of gold. This meant that anything taking the same amount of socially necessary labour time to produce as an ounce of gold would have a price of £4.

If the amount of socially necessary labour needed to produce an ounce of gold fell, a rise in the general price level would result since other commodities, containing more value, would exchange for more gold. If, on the other hand, the labour-time cost of producing gold increased, the result was the opposite: a fall in the general price level. Which is why an increase of the order of from $680 to $850 an ounce would have caused chaos a hundred years ago.

The reason it won’t do so today is that gold is no longer the money-commodity. Up to WW1 gold was used to settle international payments. Also, there were gold coins in circulation, along with paper notes that were convertible into gold at a fixed rate. This system collapsed with the outbreak of war in 1914 and, despite attempts to revive it between the wars, never really worked again. Nearly all currencies became “inconvertible”, i.e. no longer exchangeable on demand into a given amount of gold, which has remained the case ever since.

At the end of WW2 a new system for settling international payments was established based on the dollar. The exchange rate between other currencies and the dollar (and so between the other currencies) was fixed, but, since the dollar was defined as 1/35 oz of gold, gold still played an indirect role as the money-commodity as a standard of price.

This system, with its repeated devaluations of the different currencies, came to an end in 1971 when the US government abandoned its commitment to pay $35 for an ounce of gold. After that, all currencies floated and, though central banks still retained gold reserves for a while, gold became an ordinary commodity, another precious metal alongside silver and platinum, whose price fluctuations have no effect, either way, on the general price level.

The price of gold is still expressed in dollars but, nowadays, rather than a change in the price of gold leading to a change in the value of the dollar, it’s the other way round. One of the reasons for the expected rise in the price of gold is the current weakness of the dollar. Another is perceived future economic insecurity in that gold, as a product of labour, is still a store of value which, if the fears are realised, is better to be left holding than a mere piece of paper.

When socialism, where of course money will be redundant, has been established, there will be a long-standing proposal as to what to do with gold waiting to be considered. In his book Utopia in 1516 Thomas More proposed it be used for making chamber pots. Some 400 years later Lenin moved an amendment to replace the words “chamber pots” by “urinals”. In the end, we’ll probably just use it for jewellery and other ornaments.

William Wilberforce was no saint (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you believe all the eulogies to him recently for pushing through the Act of Parliament 200 years ago banning slave trading in the British Empire you might be surprised that he’s not called Saint William. But for that he’d have to have been a Catholic whereas he was an evangelical Christian of the Anglican persuasion. He was a founder of a “Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion” which specialised in prosecuting people for enjoying themselves on the Sabbath. He supported “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” as the natural order of things and preached to the poor that:

  “their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest”.

In other words, pie in the sky when you die. And

 “Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin, and naturally depraved. Christianity recognizes no innocence or goodness of heart” (both quoted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class).

A nasty piece of work, then. But there’s worse. He was a King-and-Country Tory who encouraged mobs to burn effigies of Tom Paine and other “Jacobins”, i.e., sympathisers with the democratic pretensions of the French Revolution. He was also instrumental in the passing of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 under which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were later sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay.

A. L. Morton says of him in A People’s History of England:

  “When the industrial discontent was crossed with political Jacobinism the ruling class was terrified into more drastic action, and the result was the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. These laws were the work of Pitt and his sanctimonious friend Wilberforce, whose well known sympathy for the negro slave never prevented him from being the foremost apologist and champion of every act of tyranny in England, from the employment of Oliver the Spy or illegal detention of poor prisoners in Cold Bath Fields gaol to the Peterloo massacre and the suspension of habeas corpus”.

Yes, he was opposed to chattel slavery. From a capitalist point of view, this was an outmoded and inefficient method of labour exploitation. They wanted the only form of slavery to be wage slavery. To which Wilberforce had no objection whatsoever.

(from the Socialist Party’s blogsite at socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/)

Letters: Postscript on racism (2007)

Letters to the Editors from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Postscript on racism

Dear Editors

Just a short postscript to my article in the February issue on racism. The Guardian for 4 April carried an article on Lawrence Dennis, a leading American fascist from the 1930s and 40s. Dennis’s mother was black, so by the ‘one drop’ rule would have been regarded as black himself. But he had a relatively light skin and, having cut himself off from his family, was able to pass as white. A striking demonstration of the point that ‘race’ is a matter of social attitude and acceptance rather than a biological category.

Paul Bennett, 

Manchester.

Climate change?

Dear Editors

I have enjoyed by trial subscription to your journal Socialist Standard, the second edition of which I received yesterday. However, I am writing now to request that the subscription be discontinued.

The reason for this early curtailment is the article on page 4 of the April edition relating to climate change, and the Channel 4 programme on this subject broadcast last month. I cannot recall reading a review of any programme in any publication, that was quite so dismissive of the basic tenet of a particular documentary without a shred of evidence to back up your assertions. The best that is managed, is that you allege that the writer of the programme is associated with a left wing political grouping that the SPGB does not agree with.

To denigrate the wide range of academic and other experts quoted on the programme as “denial monkeys” falls well below the high journalistic standards I have observed in your journal. Not a single reference is made in your review to any factual errors in the programme; in fact, the quote truthfully in your introduction that “climate change” is a $4bn gravy train sums up the essential truth of the programme. You later refer to every “nutjob with a theory” as a further effort to dismiss as cranks the many genuine experts who, on the programme, proposed a lucid and essentially straightforward and honest debunking of climate change which, if indeed it is occurring at all, is of entirely natural origin.

I would have hoped that the original (though often misguided) concepts and ideas found throughout the Socialist Standard would have encouraged your reviewer to look at the objectively at this controversial topic.

Unfortunately, your reviewer seems to have fallen “hook, line and sinker” for what will, in the course of time, be revealed as a total hoax, a worthless and erroneous theory with which the world is being misled. In reading your “Declaration of Principles” on page 18 I note that you believe that “the capitalist or master class, and consequent enslavement of the working class..,” is the foundation of modern society. So “climate change” is not the only myth in which members of the SPGB believe, but it is one of many listed in the “Declaration”. Fortunately, by “tilting against windmills” evident in your “Declaration”, and throughout the Socialist Standard, what will be the truly successful way forward from the crisis in Britain in 2007 has been overlooked.

William Reid, 

Stafford

Reply: 

If you are determined to believe that the large majority of the world’s climate scientists are involved in a conspiracy to distort science and cover up the truth then we can’t stop you, however the evidence suggests otherwise. The claims made in the programme are almost universally false, as five minutes perusing of any reputable online source will easily reveal (see for example George Monbiot’s article, Guardian, 13 March). There is not space in this magazine to rehearse all of the arguments again, however here are some main points.

The claim that recent temperature variations on Earth are in strong agreement with the length of the cycle of sunspots has been shown repeatedly to be the result of incorrect calculations. In fact the opposite seems to be the case: the length of the sunspot cycle has declined, while temperatures have risen.

The argument that volcanoes produce more CO2 than human activity is false.

The fact that CO2 increases as a result of global warming is true, but is a known feedback mechanism and in no way supports the proposal that global warming is not attributable to CO2 emissions.

The argument that cosmic rays are a significant cause of cloud cover is not supported by the evidence and has been rejected by the IPCC.

The concomitant proposal that the sun is the principle cause of global warming is similarly unsupported.

References to apparent fluctuations like the ‘Little Ice Age’ and the ‘Medieval Warming Period’ in the programme do not say that the data for these is regional, not global, and most probably only apply to Europe during those periods.

The much-vaunted drop in temperature during the smokestack decades of the mid 20th century can be attributed to the known effects of global dimming by airborne particulates, and in no way undermines the case for human-attributable warming.

The argument that CO2 cannot possibly have a big effect as it is present in very small amounts in the atmosphere is akin to arguing that a small amount of asbestos in the lungs must be harmless. CO2 is a highly efficient absorber of radiation in the part of the spectrum which matters most, the part which includes sunlight reflected from the Earth’s surface.

Lastly, it seems strange that you are prepared to trust implicitly the word of the ‘genuine experts’ you saw on a Channel 4 entertainment show, but not the word of the vastly greater number of scientists whose opinions were not represented on that show and who were given no opportunity to present the alternative case. The credentials of the programme ‘experts’, most of whom are either retired, non-academics, non-climatologists, or in receipt of oil industry funds, or there to sell their next book or their weather-prediction business, or indeed there by mistake, can be read in their extraordinary completeness at http://www.climatedenial.org.

Bizarrely, you go even further than the show itself by questioning whether global warming is happening at all, something even the programme producer, with his long history of making junk-science anti-environment documentaries, didn’t dare to do.

As for your suggestion that our class-analysis of capitalism is a myth, we invite you to tell us which particular windmill you think we are tilting at. You don’t choose to reveal what the ‘truly successful way forward’ will be for workers in the future but we respectfully suggest that it won’t involve ignoring the evidence that is staring all of us in the face and embarking on a simian crusade against the downright obvious – Editors

50 Years Ago: Should Irish workers support the I.R.A.? (2007)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the recurrence of I.R.A. activity, attention is again focussed on the “Irish Question.” The familiar tragedy of young workers dying for “The Cause” is again being re-enacted.

There are those who would tell us that as Irish workers we must be in the vanguard of the “National Struggle.” Coming from the I.R.A. this means that we should join that organisation, procure arms, and train ourselves in their use. If called on, they say, we will attack the armed hirelings of the State, regardless of whether or not we fall in the fray, dangle on the hangman’s rope, or find ourselves condemned to long years of imprisonment. The militant Republican assures us that we owe it to “our” country; that we must be prepared to sacrifice everything for “The Cause.” (…)

On finding a job the young worker becomes acquainted with the reality of the class-struggle: on the one side the Masters with the porridge—on the other the Olivers, perpetually with just enough to “keep body and soul together”, and only with occasionally enough courage to ask for more ( . . . )

Such an economic set-up makes nonsense of the claims made by Republicans, Unionists, or any other political party, that the people can control their own destinies, by raising this flag, or lowering that. The problems that beset us in Ireland to-day do not originate in our capacity for colour appreciation, in the qualities of Green and Orange. They are problems inherent in the Capitalist system—that system which has the blessing of both Governments in Ireland; that system which would continue to afflict us if the I.R.A. concluded a successful struggle to-morrow.

(From an article by R. Montague, Socialist Standard, May 1957)

Voice From The Back: How The Other Tenth Live (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

HOW THE OTHER TENTH LIVE

The trial for fraud and tax avoidance of Lord Black threw up this insight into the parasitical nature of the owning class. "If only his wife hadn't boasted about her extravagant lifestyle in an interview, Lord Black's empire might still span three continents. It was to readers of Vogue in 2002 that Barbara Amiel showed off the size of her wardrobe, the racks of designer clothes inside, and talked of how 'her extravagance knows no bound'. She confided: 'It is always best to have two planes, because however well one plans ahead, one always finds one in the wrong continent'" (Times, 10 March)


PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL

"At least 11 people were killed and 39 injured yesterday when farmers in eastern India, angered over government plans to build an industrial park on their land, fought police with rocks, machetes and pickaxes. The clashes broke out when police tried to enter villages in Nandigram, West Bengal, where the government wants to build a petrochemical plant and a shipyard. All those killed in the clashes were farmers." (Times, 15 March) Away back in 1867 Karl Marx was describing in Capital this capitalist process that he called "the so-called primitive accumulation" in Europe from the 16th century onwards. "The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil, is the basis of the whole process."


MIND THE GAP

The gulf between rich and poor under this Labour government has become so great that even the capitalist class are warning the government about it. "Gordon Brown's closest ally in the City has warned that the gap between rich and poor in Britain is now so deep that it threatens to provoke 'violent reactions' in society. Sir Ronald Cohen, a venture capitalist, also warned on the eve of Brown's last Budget that the boom in the City was in danger of grinding to a halt. Asked whether the huge wealth flooding to an elite group of City professionals was disfiguring society, he agreed, adding: 'I think we're at the top of the cycle. I think the pendulum has swung too far'". (Observer, 18 March)


ESCAPE (1)

The Observer has a supplement each week called "Escape", containing articles about various holiday destinations, and, of course, many advertisements for holidays. Why do they call it "Escape"? It is targeted at all the people whose jobs are so boring or so stressful that they feel they can stand it only if they can get away for a short break in the summer. And the enormous size of the holiday industry shows that there are very many such people. But how can such a holiday be called an "escape" when it is of strictly limited duration, and all the holidaymakers know they will have to go back afterwards to the very same conditions which made them long to "escape" in the first place? "Escape" is clearly the wrong word. Whoever heard of a daring escape from prison or a prisoner-of-war camp, when the successful escapee celebrated his release by going back in two weeks' time to the main gate and asking to be re-admitted?


ESCAPE(2)

The previous item brings to mind the story that an old Glasgow speaker was fond of telling from the outdoor platform. An Eastern potentate was visiting a Glasgow factory when the lunch-time hooter sounded and all the workers made a bee-line for the canteen. "Look out, sir. Your slaves are escaping." "Don't worry, Omar. Wait 40 minutes." Sure enough 40 minutes later the hooter sounded and the wage slaves streamed back into the factory. "Amazing", cried the eastern visitor. "I must buy some of these magic hooters."


GETTING THINGS DONE

Supporters of the Labour Party are always telling socialists that while Labour may not be socialists "at least they get things done". Here is a recent example. "The number of children living in poverty jumped by 100,000 last year, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said, showing that the government is not on course to meet its target of halving child poverty by 2010-11. In 2005-06, 2.8 million children lived in poverty." (Times, 3 April) It would seem that what is "getting done" is the working class in Britain.

Forever Blowing Bubbles (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Those attracted by the 'buy-to-let' bonanza, turning themselves into mini-rentiers in a bid to escape wage slavery forever, are likely to get their fingers burnt.

Rarely a week goes by without the TV news reporting that house prices in the UK are at 'an all time high'. And rarely does a week go by without newspapers like the Daily Mail running stories about how rising interest rates are going to negatively affect house prices and end up bankrupting half the country. In the popular press, if house prices are rising it is a case of 'feel the wealth'; if there is a sense they might decline it is 'fear for the future' instead. You could be forgiven for thinking that the health of the entire economy rested on rising house prices.

In a sane society, of course, houses and other buildings would be wanted simply as desirable places to live in rather than as supposed generators of wealth, and it is tempting to suggest that an economy based on house prices can only come about because the generation of real wealth through industry must no longer be an attractive or viable proposition. Though superficially appealing, this would be wrong. The sphere of production is where real wealth is created, not in the realm of buying and selling houses or anything else. The inherently cyclical nature of the market economy and the various sectors within it (not all of which move in the same direction at once) means that throughout the history of capitalism 'bubbles' have developed in everything from tulip bulbs to micro-chips, based on periodic excess demand, speculation, and the psychological momentum which develops when people perceive that particular assets or commodities are increasing in value.

Since the 1970s and 80s, the way people view housing in the UK (and many other countries too) has changed. In capitalism's 'property-owning democracy' houses are seen as a store of wealth and those buying them are encouraged by an entire industry of property firms, banks, building societies and estate agents to pin their faith on ever-higher house prices. That this is peculiar never occurs to most, but it is one of the strangest facets of the modern economy. What other commodity, when subject to massive price rises, garners such a positive response - rising car prices, food, or furniture? Only houses - and precisely because, in a society where over half of all households have less than £1,500 in savings, they are now seen as the main store of wealth and, ultimately, as an investment.

Rising prices are nearly always seen as being bad, except when it comes to house prices - indeed, with annual house price increases often running between 10 and 20 per cent in recent years, this has been viewed as especially good. What makes it odd is that a house is the single biggest thing most people ever purchase, and in a great many cases it eats up a higher proportion of income than all other expenditure put together, which is one reason why falling house prices are not the one-sided disaster usually supposed (at least not for buyers).

Importantly, houses are evidently not a source of wealth for most people with huge mortgages to pay - they are a source of debt. Average household debt in the UK is currently around £45,000 and four-fifths of this is accounted for by mortgage debt. There is widespread confusion about the extent of debt involved in buying a house too, as the powers of compound interest are not always apparent - few with a typical 25-year £120,000 mortgage will realise that even at current (comparatively low) interest rates they will be paying back a total of around £270,000 in today's money.

Myths about house prices
There are problems with houses as a store of value in that they are an illiquid asset (you cannot convert them into cash easily) and, other things being equal, merely buying and selling them is what economists would call a 'zero sum game' - and not even this if costs and taxes are taken into account. This is, of course, unless you can (profitably) add value to them in other ways, are wealthy enough to own more than the one you live in and can sell at a real profit to the original price paid, or you sell up and move somewhere prices are cheaper on a like-for-like basis.

Spurred on by the popular press and relentless so-called 'property porn' programmes on television, myths about houses and UK house prices abound, the following probably being the most prevalent, and illustrative of the present speculative bubble:

• House prices never go down
• Buy-to-let is a sure-fire winner
• Renting is 'dead money'.

The idea that house prices never go down is as bizarre as the notion that stock markets never fall. And it is just as incorrect, redolent of the kind of short-sighted mania that occurs during any bubble, from the 'tulip-mania' affecting Dutch tulip bulbs of the 17th century to the recent 'dot com' crash. The United States - which has had far higher levels of home ownership than Britain over the last 150 years or so - has seen several house price crashes, including after the bubbles of the 1830s, 1880s, 1920s and 1970s. A Florida mansion, for instance, bought in 1925 during the bubble of the 'roaring twenties' would not have reached its initial buying price again until forty years later.

Since the increase in home ownership in the UK over recent decades, a similar pattern has emerged. Just as with the stock market, the overall price trend may be upwards, but with some very noticeable periods of decline. The picture is sometimes partially obscured by the effects of general inflation, but once this is stripped away, it is clear.

For instance, the property boom of the early 1970s led to an 18.1 percent fall in house prices in real terms (i.e. taking inflation in account) between 1975-77. When the recession of the early 1980s hit, real house prices fell again. As unemployment took off to the highest levels since the Second World War, between 1979-82 house prices fell 17 percent (accounting for inflation). Then, as house ownership spread among the working class under the Thatcher government and levels of indebtedness soared to pay for it, the biggest crash was the most recent one in the 1990s, plunging millions of people into 'negative equity', where their houses were worth less than their outstanding mortgages, ending with hundreds of thousands of homes being re-possessed by the banks.

On this occasion, house prices fell 37.3 percent in real terms from their peak during the 'Lawson boom' in 1989 and didn't recover fully on this measure until the beginning of 2002 (using the nominal 'headline' figures, the average UK house price in 1989 peaked at £62,782 and eventually rose above this level again in early 1998, but this doesn't take inflation into account as £62,782 was worth considerably less in 1998 than it was in 1989). The bottom of this crash was in late 1993, and after that the housing market first started to recover, and then soared, to the extent that the average UK house is now around £180,000, an increase in real terms of over 150 percent since the 1993 low (all figures supplied by, or calculated from, the Nationwide Building Society quarterly surveys). This is over three times the rate at which the UK economy as a whole grew during the same period.

As a housing bubble, it is unparalleled in the history of the UK economy. Apart from the usual cyclical upswing and the relative boom in the UK economy over the last decade, it has been fuelled by two other factors. The first is the particular, continued expansion of the financial services sector centred in London and the South-East, which has had a 'ripple effect' on house prices across the country. The second has been the 'buy-to-let' bonanza, whereby people, realising that owning just the one house isn't the best way of taking advantage of a rising market, borrow speculatively to buy two or more instead, hoping that the rental yield from the houses purchased will cover their massively increased mortgage payments. This development has, in turn, partly been sustained by the influx of migrant labour from Eastern Europe which has provided a rental market when most people in the UK have been encouraged to buy.

While historically it has often been the case that it is cheaper to take out a mortgage than rent (one of the few advantages of mortgages is that they are a cheaper form of debt than most), nevertheless this has not always been so. The over-supply of rental accommodation in many areas is such that is now cheaper to rent than to buy, and the rental yield received by the 'buy-to-let' brigade (the market rent for property divided by its price) is currently falling to around 4 percent.

Unsustainable debt
How has this house price bubble been financed? Purely and simply through debt, and increasing amounts of it. The two best measurements of the growing indebtedness underpinning UK housing market rises are average incomes as a proportion of average house prices, and the average multiple of income allowed by banks and building societies when they agree mortgage levels with house buyers.

The average house price to average earnings ratio tends to increase notably during housing bubbles as prices rise at rates that far outstrip any growth in incomes. The long-term UK average has been for house prices to be around 3.5 times average earnings, though in the early-mid 1970s bubble this rose to over 4.5 times earnings, and in the late 1980s bubble to just under five times earnings. Today, it stands at nearly seven times average earnings.

The salary multiples which banks and building societies use to determine how muchthey will lend house purchasers when they grant mortgages has also increased massively. This had to happen because house prices have risen far more than wage increases. In the 1970s it was rare for financial institutions to issue mortgages that were greater than three times household income, then it went up to four times income in the 1980s until Abbey confirmed what many knew to be a reality last year when they admitted that they (and others) now lend at multiples of five times income, placing a massive financial burden on those with mortgages. What this huge indebtedness means is that the risk of default on mortgages, including mortgages for 'buy-to-let', is now significant; but this is a risk financial institutions have taken in the hope that rising house prices can be maintained forever.

Housing as an investment
Those who have been persuaded by the financial institutions and the media to get onto the 'housing ladder' largely on the grounds that it will be a good investment, might not have realised that in the popular game there are snakes as well as ladders whereby you can go down as well as up. This is largely due to the cyclical rhythm of the market economy (where it is better to buy when prices are low and sell when they are high, rather than follow the herd and buy near the peak when things have never looked better, just before it all turns to dust). Furthermore, there is a phenomenon at work behind all this that is rather revealing.

Within capitalism there's a variety of competing asset classes for those who are looking to expand their wealth (primarily capitalists and large institutions, but also anyone else with some spare cash to invest). These mainly include equities (company shares), bonds (such as government gilt-edged securities), cash in savings accounts, and property (commercial and residential). Led by financial institutions like Barclays Capital and Credit Suisse First Boston, there is quite an industry comparing the performance of these leading asset classes. Some are far more volatile than others, with equities being the most volatile, cash the least so. But property has been the next most volatile asset after equities with considerable short-to-medium term risk attached to it. While historically performing better than cash or bonds, property has performed noticeably less well than equities too (even though shares are rightly viewed as risky short-to-medium term assets by most - apart from when there's a bubble, of course).

The US sub-prime market
Such has been the rush to buy houses at almost literally any price that the fortunes of the housing market have spilled over to affect other assets. Most notably, in February and March world stock markets were adversely affected by growing problems in United States' sub-prime mortgages, caused by what are now falling house prices there.

Sub-prime mortgages are those offered in the US to customers with poor credit ratings or already high debt levels. Because they are riskier, interest rates tend to be higher than those on safer (prime) loans. But as the US housing market falters, more sub-prime loans are going bad and at an even faster rate than expected, with over an eighth of them already in arrears (Money Week, 2 March).

The bursting of America's housing bubble could have widespread impacts on US financial institutions and others who have exposure there (in the UK, this ranges from HSBC bank to construction firms like Taylor Woodrow). And it is perfectly possible that the UK housing bubble may follow suit, with similarly high prices and unsustainable levels of debt no longer being able to defy gravity. Indeed, the entire housing bubble phenomenon is wider than commonly supposed - while the US and UK economies have a particular problem with their housing markets, so do many other countries where identifiable bubbles also exist, from Ireland and Spain to New Zealand.

Where next?
Past history demonstrates that sooner or later, the current housing bubble will end in tears. When asset prices become completely disengaged from what is happening in the real economy where wealth is produced and value created, and are only sustained by ever increasing amounts of indebtedness, it cannot last - capitalism just doesn't work that way. Its growth is not planned or smooth and some sectors expanding rapidly beyond that which the market can bear is a natural feature of the system. When the crash comes, it will return markets to more realistic levels that are more in line with real incomes and values, and this is what has happened on every other previous occasion.

Just as the major world stock markets (including the UK) lost a colossal 50 per cent of their value in the 'dot com' crash of 2000-2003, before beginning their more recent recovery, so - sooner or later - the housing market will follow suit. And two factors in particular could be the trigger for it when it happens.

The first of these is interest rates, which have already been moving higher, and this movement could be propelled further by the backwash from the US sub-prime mortgage problems. Increases in interest rates have been associated with housing market crashes on the majority of occasions they have happened, and for obvious reasons.

The second issue is unemployment. There is a noticeable but unsurprising correlation between movements of house prices in the UK and rising and falling unemployment. Rising unemployment in the mid 1970s helped burst that particular housing bubble, and it also played a major role in the housing market corrections of the early 80s and then of the early to mid 90s, both of which coincided with more general economic slumps. When unemployment began to rise again last year, house prices tailed off, much to popular concern, but since then unemployment has eased slightly and house prices have resumed their upward trend.

What will trigger the crash this time is impossible to tell in advance, even if rising interest rates and unemployment are the most likely causes. Interestingly for those who now see houses primarily as investments rather than places to live, competing returns on asset classes might also give us a clue.

One of the tell-tale signs of a pending stock market crash is when the earnings yield on shares - effectively the profits from capitalist enterprises in relation to share prices - falls below the yield on long-term government bonds, which gives a signal to investors and capitalists generally that the risk associated with owning shares is no longer worthwhile and that investments like gilts are more attractive, being safer and suddenly with a better comparative return. The two most significant stock market collapses since the 1929 Wall Street crash have been 1974, when the UK market, for example, lost three-quarters of its value, and the aforementioned 2000-3 tumble, when the market halved in value. On both occasions, the earnings yield on shares had fallen by some margin below the yield on long-term government bonds (on both occasions the gap was more than 1 percent).

The analogy for the housing market at present is this: if housing is now very much an asset class for investment purposes, it compares unfavourably. According to the Financial Times, the earnings yield on UK equities is currently around 7 percent and for 10 year government bonds just under 5 percent. The rental yield on residential property is now 4 percent and falling, which means that 'buy-to-let' is looking like a lot of debt and a lot of risk for a very poor reward (nowhere near enough to cover mortgage payments).

The lessons from this situation seem clear:

• that in capitalism what goes rapidly up must come down at speed too, in housing as in much else;
• the vast majority of people in society who do not own enough wealth to buy houses outright and who must effectively pay by instalments are likely to be squeezed ever harder by an uncontrollable financial system;
• those attracted by the 'buy-to-let' bonanza, turning themselves into mini-rentiers in a bid to escape wage slavery forever, are likely to get their fingers burnt.

Sooner or later the bubble will burst, and it will be wage and salary earners without 'independent means' - drowning in debt - who are likely to be hardest hit, as the market economy solves a problem it created in the only way it knows.

Dave Perrin

Greasy Pole: Hazel Blears – nuts in May? (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The question is not who will be the next Deputy Leader of the Labour Party so much as who would want the job in the first place. None of the hopefuls to succeed the risible John Prescott has felt able to campaign as an exuberant optimist, encouraging the party to look forward to building on ten years of glowingly successful government. Far from it; in almost identical phraseology all of them have argued that what Labour needs now is to undergo some kind of purgative re-assessment of its record and its objectives, raking over the rubble of old controversy in the hope of finding something fresh and voter-seductive, to prove that they are still the party of progressive change. All of them call for a "debate" but only political zombies will be persuaded that this means a free-ranging discussion from which a constructive consensus will emerge. Anyone with a vote to cast in this election - and who is deceived enough to think it worthwhile to cast it - should be more than a little confused; some of them may choose between the candidates by reference to their having some personal eccentricities.

Which brings us to Hazel Blears - the Right Honourable Privy Counsellor, Member of Parliament for Salford, previously Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Health and Minister of State at the Home Office, now Labour Party Chair and candidate for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party - who makes a point of being different. To begin with she is not one of your run-of-mill party hack carpet-baggers, forced onto a constituency by party headquarters. She was born, brought up and partly educated in Salford, where her father worked as a maintenance fitter. She was a councillor in Salford, chairing the Community Health Council there for several years and, inescapably, she supports Salford Reds, the local Rugby League team. Among her passions is motor cycling - in appropriately black leathers astride a pedigree, vintage Italian machine.

Supporters
All of this designed to prove that she is unstuffy, approachable, honest. "I am never," she announced "complacent" – as if anybody should be, in face of the record of the party she aspires to lead. Her candidacy attracted what might be called a variegated band of support. Apart from MPs like Stephen Pound, who strives never to be taken seriously, there were the likes of Alan Milburn, who sees her as "energetic, innovative, gets things done" and David Blunkett, who thinks she has energy "more . . . than anyone I have ever come across". Of course, support from someone like Blunkett may not always be helpful and the same can be said about the endorsement of Tony Booth, Cherie's father, who applauds the fact that Blears has "come up the hard way herself, she really knows and understands what life is like in working class communities" - as if an understanding of working class life has ever affected how political parties behave towards them. Such unremitting praise for an aspiring politician need not impress anyone who is willing to contrast it with the real experience of how those politicians measure up in their efforts to run capitalism. So what else, in the real world, is there to say about Blears?

Disengaged
Announcing her candidacy, she confessed that the Labour Party is far from being in robust health for while it must "remain the party of success and aspiration" there is a problem about members' motivation: "after 10 years in office some members feel disengaged . . . we should recognise that one product of a lengthy period in office is that some party members feel left out. They don't have a relationship with their Labour government, other than what they read in newspapers". She did not venture any deeper into why that "disengagement" should have happened, probably because to do so would have confronted her with that government's abysmal record, which has so often left party members angry at their own impotence. For example there was the refusal - supported by Blears - to allow party members to vote on the matter of renewing Trident before it was voted on in Parliament. There was the allegation that Blears abused her position in the chair to run an undercover campaign for the Deputy Leader's job. If proved, this would be just one more example of the sleaze which Blair's government has been so readily and deeply involved in. Then there was the fact that Blears appealed for the votes of party members by selling them cringe-inducing tat like tee shirts ( "Nuts About Hazel" – men £16.80 each, women £10.30), clocks (£15.90) and coffee mugs (£9.90). Questioned about this on Sky News, Blears airily advised the viewers that "in politics you've got to be able to campaign" - which leaves nothing to be said about her campaign, her party and the politics of capitalism.

Left Wingers
Coming up the hard way as approved by Tony Booth would have taught Hazel Blears something about politics - about back-stabbing, about lies, about betrayal. Like so many other tediously aspirant Labour ministers she started out as an ardent left winger, a devotee of, and driver for, Barbara Castle, the flame-haired rebel who moved from left to right wing in time to be Harold Wilson;s Minister of Labour and help compose the notoriously anti-trade union White Paper In Place of Strife. As an activist, Blears opposed the abolition of Clause Four, so necessary to Blair's design for New Labour but her time as an MP has been smoothly conformist, as she voted in favour of Control Orders, replacing Trident, Foundation Hospitals, University Top-Up Fees. There was just one rebellious blip in this when, last December, she was exposed picketing against the closure of the maternity unit at Hope Hospital in Manchester. This was embarrassing for Blears because, although some other ministers - John Reid, Jacqui Smith - had joined similar protests in their constituencies, during her time at the Department of Health she had help to draft the plans for such cuts and as a member of the Cabinet she had approved the closure she protested against. Her attempts to excuse herself - that Labour;s overall policy for the NHS is sound but she differed on this particular way in which it was applied - was too feeble even for a wobbling ex-left winger to use. But she survived; perhaps it was all that energy.

But Blears has recently taken to describing her constituents as "the people of Eccles and Salford". This is not a slip of the tongue; forthcoming boundary changes could cause a run-off for a new, redrawn constituency, with Blears standing against the present Eccles MP Ian Stewart. Perhaps she is already preparing her campaign to hold on to the nomination. When it comes to using a bit of ruthless cunning the woman who likes to be different shows that she is the same as the rest.

Ivan

Obituary: Pieter Lawrence (2007)

Obituary from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We regret to report the death at the end of March of comrade Pieter Lawrence of South London branch. He was born in Western Australia in 1932 where his parents had emigrated to try to make a living as farmers (his mother was Dutch, hence the spelling of his name) but the great slump of the 1930s forced them to return to England. In 1951 he joined the Socialist Party, of which his elder brother, Charles, was already a member. A conscientious objector to National Service, after a short spell in Wormwood Scrubs he agreed to go into the medical corps. Then, disliking being a wage slave to an employer, he worked on his own, first as a tree surgeon then as an antiques dealer. He was for many years an active member of the school parents association in his local village.

In the Party he was a writer, outdoor speaker, indoor lecturer and a memorable contributor to Party conferences. He served on the Executive Committee on a number of occasions, most recently in 2006, as well as on the Editorial Committee of the Socialist Standard, and the World Socialist, and also on the Party’s Education Committee. Arising out of the latter he was instrumental in the setting up of an ad hoc committee about Production for Use, to examine the evidence for how, once the barriers of minority class ownership and production for profit had been removed, the world could produce enough to supply all its inhabitants with adequate food, housing, clean running water, medical services, education and other amenities. The committee also looked into ways in which socialist society could organise the production and distribution of goods and services without money, involving a self-regulating system of stock-control. One result of this was the Party’s pamphlet Socialism As A Practical Alternative, the first edition of which was published in 1987 and which Pieter drafted.

The practicality of socialism as a solution to the problems created by capitalism remained his primary concern thereafter. This was reflected in the publication last year of a political novel The Last Conflict (reviewed in the December 2006 Socialist Standard) and of an on-line book Practical Socialism: Its Principles and Methods which can be found at www.pieterlawrence.com. He also actively promoted the view that socialists needed to reflect on our attitude towards the need for some coercion and restraint in a socialist society (particularly its early days), though not all aspects of his views on this found majority support within the Party, especially regarding whether law and legal institutions would continue into socialism.

Our sincere condolences go to his partner, comrade Phyllis Hart, and to their son and grandchildren.

Pushing The Envelope (2007)

Book review from the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jörg Blech: Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills. Routledge

Most of us are probably familiar with the idea of companies creating a market and a demand for their products: advertising toys to kids would be an obvious example. How this kind of thing is put into effect will naturally vary according to the industry in which a particular company operates. A pharmaceutical concern, for instance, may need to convince people not just that their product will cure a particular disease but that they quite probably suffer from this disease in the first place and so need curing. This is the kind of thing that Jurg Blech chronicles in this informative book.

Thus diseases are invented, people are given unnecessary check-ups, and good health is turned into a virtually unattainable state. Normal life processes, such as hair loss, are argued to be medical problems, and slight symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome are sold as serious disorders. Disease awareness campaigns are set up to publicise a 'disease' which people may be unaware they are suffering from. Almost everyone can be categorised as unwell in some way if the criteria for health are redefined at will. The companies that make the medicines have doctors on their side, of course - doctors whose research they finance. Drugs and medicines can do a great deal of harm: undesirable side-effects are the fourth most common cause of death, after heart disease, cancer and strokes.

As a specific example, the amount of testosterone in men usually decreases after their fortieth birthday, though not necessarily by a significant degree. But of course this last point hasn't stopped the identification of (among other names) 'testosterone deficiency syndrome'. Fortunately this can be remedied by rubbing a gel into your stomach or shoulders every morning. In the words of a spokesperson for one company who make such a gel, 'Androtrop gel will only be successful if demand for it is created.' Selling a disease and its 'cure' is little different from selling cereals or the latest fashion.

In his final chapter, Blech notes that disease and poverty are related. Richer smokers live longer than poorer smokers, for instance. A Swedish study indicated that, when workers are sacked, they produce more stress hormones, which is likely to lead to the constriction of blood vessels. But those who market a disease have no time for such ideas: a person is ill because they are not taking the right medicine rather than because of the pressures of their lives. While we cannot argue that socialism will be a society without illness, we can certainly suggest that it will be a society without artificially-created illness - whether resulting from the stresses of capitalism or the bogus disease-marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.

Paul Bennett

The Anti-War Right (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US anarcho-capitalist Libertarians are wrong to think that capitalism could exist without a state or that its competitive struggle for profits does not lead to wars.

The anti-war movement in the United States may be underwhelming at the moment, but clearly anti-war sentiment today, four years after Bush declared the mission accomplished, is very strong. This does not mean that everyone in the US who opposes the war in Iraq (and/or Afghanistan) does so for the same reason, or that they share the same political outlook.

It is true that the bulk of anti-war activists view themselves as belonging to the "Left," as that hard-to-pin-down political place is known. And there is a tendency to view the Pro-war vs. Anti-war dynamic as closely reflecting the Right-Left divide. The leaders of the Democratic Party certainly benefited from this perception in the recent election, despite their history of issuing Bush one blank cheque after another to wage his wars.

It turns out, though, that a growing number of "rank-and-file" Republicans are taking an anti-war stance. Indeed, the recent electoral success of the Democrats reflects the growing disgust of that creature known as the "moderate Republican" with Bush's foreign policy. In many cases, these are people who thought invading Iraq was a swell idea back in early 2002. Their newfound opposition to the war is not based so much on the mountainous death toll or destruction of that country, as the obvious fact the war is unwinnable.

It would be a gross caricature, however, to imply that anti-war sentiment on the Right is limited to these unprincipled Republican "flip-floppers" who wisely turned their backs on the "dead-enders" sticking with Cheney and Co. There are more than a few on the Right who have opposed the war from the outset, for principled reasons.

Take the Libertarians, for example. Or I should say, some Libertarians, as they are split into pro- and anti-war camps. The former, sometimes called "pseudo-Libertarians" by the anti-war camp, essentially seem to be individuals who don't mind the world going up in flames as long as their taxes remain low.

Some of the most informed and spirited anti-war Libertarians can be found at the website antiwar.com, including its leading light, Justin Raimondo. The website was created back in 1995, and at the time may have seemed a Republican effort to score points on the Clinton administration (because Libertarians have burrowed deep inside that Party like Trots cuddling up inside the Labour Party). Pro-war liberals in particular labelled this anti-war viewpoint "isolationism" to suggest a fascistic or anti-Semitic quality, as this was the term applied to the "old Right" that opposed entry into World War II. The preferred term among the Libertarians themselves is "non-interventionist," and they largely supported Bush in the 2000 election based on his pledge to not get involved in "nation-building." When Bush soon showed his true colours, and the bulk of the "anti-war" Republican flocked to his crusade, these Libertarians, to their credit, stuck to their principles.

Capitalism: antithesis of war?
So what are the principles of the Libertarians that allowed them to hold their ground in the face of the war-hysteria on the Right at the time?

Setting aside the strong sense of moral outrage that they share with any sensible person witnessing the atrocities in Iraq, Libertarians have opposed the war there and elsewhere because of a general opposition to expanded state power, which they view war as facilitating. The mission statement on antiwar.com notes that the Libertarian "opposition to war is rooted in Randolph Bourne's concept that War is the health of the State," and emphasizes that, "With every war, America has made a 'great leap' into statism."

The opposition to the state might sound pretty good to your average anarchist or socialist, but the Libertarian anti-state position is based on a blind faith in the free market. They argue that the benevolent forces of the market economy are curbed by the centralised power of the state, which results in a curtailment of individual liberty.

The logic goes something like this: Free-market capitalism on its own would naturally lead to a world of personal freedom and economic prosperity, but this is thwarted by the power of the state, an organism that grows robustly at times of war. Hence, war must be opposed not only because of its own obvious evils, but as a way to drive back the power of the state which is standing in the way of a better life.

For Libertarians, moreover, capitalism is an inherently peaceful system. They ridicule the idea that there is a connection between the nature of capitalism and the wars that constantly break out under it. Raimondo, for instance, goes so far as assert that, "capitalism—free markets—is the antithesis of war" (28 October 2002 column). The Libertarian economist Walter Block, for his part, describes the essentially peaceful Libertarian (free-market) principles that should govern capitalism:

"The non-aggression axiom is the lynchpin of the philosophy of Libertarianism. It states, simply, that it shall be legal for anyone to do anything he wants, provided only that he not initiate (or threaten) violence against the person or legitimately owned property of another. That is, in the free society, one has the right to manufacture, buy or sell any good or service at any mutually agreeable terms. Thus, there would be no victimless crime prohibitions, price controls, government regulation of the economy, etc." ("The Non-Aggression Axiom of Libertarianism")

This Libertarian view of the benevolent nature of a market economy (= capitalism) is a selective one, to say the least. Their focus is on exchange, as a mutually beneficial act. This is a real "win-win" situation, where I give you my widget and get your gadget in return. What is left out, however, are some of the strikingly war-like aspects of a capitalist economy, starting first and foremost with the cut-throat competition that goes on in the pursuit of profit. Nor do they dwell on the class divisions inherent to such a system and the conflict that that results.

In the Libertarian's mind, capitalism is—or should be—a world made up of enterprising capitalists, minding their own business(es) and interacting peacefully, without any need for the state to intervene in these affairs or for wars to be waged overseas. Here we are basically dealing with the viewpoint of the individual capitalist, particularly the small-scale one, who experiences the state as an unpleasant institution that appropriates his hard-earned wealth through taxation, sometimes to pay for wars that bring him no direct benefit. Remove this alien force, he reasons, and life would immediately be much rosier.

The "liberty" that Libertarians wax so philosophical about is the freedom of this economic actor to chase after his profit in peace; never minding the fact that his own profits are squeezed out of workers, thus depriving them of their own personal liberty!

The wider view
The state and the wars it wages may seem a complete waste of taxpayer money to the individual capitalist (and to the Libertarian who translates his myopic viewpoint into a grand philosophy), but things look a bit different if we consider the capitalist class as a whole.

Like any ruling class throughout history, the minority capitalist class needs the state, as an apparatus of coercion, to maintain its grip on power. And in addition to this age-old function of the state, a capitalist state is also necessary as a means of coordinating the diverse interests of individual capitalists in order to represent their collective interests as capitalists. The example of Enron alone shows how deregulation may benefit a tiny stratum of capitalists at the expense of their bourgeois brethren who have to purchase exorbitant or shoddy products. (This does not mean, however, that state intervention and regulation can turn capitalism into socialism, as Libertarians fear and leftists hope.) Given this twin-necessity for the state - as policeman and mediating judge - the more far-sighted or financially comfortable capitalists view the taxes directed to the state apparatus as money well spent.

Libertarians, in short, loathe the state without understanding why it must exist and play certain roles under their cherished capitalist system. And the same shallowness characterizes their view of war, which is fervently opposed without an understanding of its root causes.

Capitalism, as already noted, generates its own war-like behaviour at home, where capitalists will go to any lengths to vanquish the enemy (= competitors). We may find this selfish behaviour deplorable from the standpoint of human decency, but it does have its own necessity. And there is a similar capitalist logic at play when nation-states jostle and throttle each other for access to markets and resources, despite such behaviour being the height of idiocy from the perspective of humanity as a whole.

That does not mean, of course, that every war goes as planned, achieving the greedy goals intended. Just as the best-laid plans of a company to win out in competition may fail, military adventures have been known to backfire perfectly (just look at Iraq!). Still, regardless of whether or not goals are met, the ultimate impetus for conflict between nations can be found in the unceasing competition over raw materials, access to markets, and the like, which itself is the direct outgrowth of that insatiable thirst for profit among the capitalists within a given nation. Even if a conflict is directly triggered (or at times averted) for this or that specific reason, war itself is inevitable under the capitalist system of production for profit, as the experience of the past decades alone amply demonstrates.

A world without war
An anti-war Libertarian reading this criticism might say: "Our free-market principles are really beside the point; the important thing is to end the war now!" Libertarians at antiwar.com and elsewhere are calling for a political realignment through a Left-Right "united front" to end the war. They are more than willing to join hands with leftists (who they mistake for socialists) over the single issue of ending the war immediately. And there is every chance that such an alliance can succeed, because bringing the disastrous war in Iraq to an end has become an urgent necessity for the capitalist class itself - although it still dreams of salvaging some benefit from the fiasco.

Meanwhile, the "Far-left" is happy to hide its own "socialist" principles from view in order to build a broad anti-war coalition (which is just as well considering the state-capitalist content of those principles). Looking at the political landscape, it is hard not to have a sense of deja vu, as it resembles the situation in the late sixties and early seventies when those who pointed out the need to do more than just end a single war - and who called for "Socialism now!" - were branded "sectarians" and given a moral browbeating for distracting attention from the immediate task at hand.

But recall what happened after the Vietnam War. The US was gun-shy for a couple of years, sure, but less than a decade later Reagan was revving up the war machine again. Since then we have seen conflicts on an ever-escalating scale, culminating (so far) with the horrifying carnage in the Middle East. The reason is not simply the malevolence of US leaders or an insufficiently powerful anti-war movement, but that the competitive economic system that triggers the war-impulse remains firmly in place. This system was not overcome in the Vietnam War era, when socialists were written off as unrealistic dreamers, and today the people of the Middle East are paying a heavy price.

End war in Iraq? Yes, right away! But let's not - once again - forget about the victims of future wars. They can only be saved by all of us deciding to rip out the weed of capitalism (which Libertarians mistake for a precious flower yet to bloom) by the roots. The hard truth of the matter, but also a source of hope, is that we will be stuck with the tragedy of war until we manage to move beyond capitalism, to a society where things are produced to meet human needs, not as a means to the profit-making end. In such a society, which is cooperative rather than competitive, there is no longer any basis for war, as the divisions and conflict between classes and nations will have dissolved along with the very existence of those categories.

If Libertarians are serious about liberty, and truly want to live under a state-less system where peace (not just the temporary absence of war) reigns, then they need to consider ending their silly love affair with capitalism, whose invisible hand has been slapping all of us around and pushing us to slap and to slay each other.

Michael Schauerte