Life and Times: The Strike (2022)

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

Over the last two months the University and College Union, which I’m a member of, has been taking strike action against the universities that employ them. This has involved not going into work during the strike periods, not doing any ‘extra’ work outside the strike periods (action short of a strike) and standing on picket lines holding banners and giving out leaflets to people. In the past, efforts, physical ones sometimes, would have been made to persuade those people not to cross the picket lines. But those days are over, and now it’s mainly a question of politely informing them, if they’ll listen, why you are striking. The days when postal vans and commercial vehicles would turn away from a picket are also over and now they come merrily through, sometimes hooting their horns in support, but that’s the extent of it.

Pensions

The strike in some universities is mainly about changes to pensions (in others it is more focused on pay, which has fallen significantly in real terms since 2009). University employers are planning to bring in cuts to university employees’ pensions in the USS scheme of around 35%. Staff and their unions are resisting this, as workers will naturally try to resist cuts to their living standards, whether in the present or in retirement. Negotiations have been tried but so far failed, so the only weapon workers have left is to withhold their labour, a tactic that can be successful but in this case has not so far brought about any change in employers’ intentions. And in the meantime we are losing the pay withheld by those employers for the days we are on strike.

Built-in antagonism

It’s not an easy situation, but it’s one that’s existed for workers ever since the antagonism of interests between employee and employer first started, in fact ever since the capitalist system first existed. And capitalism, in its current more advanced stage, shows no signs of removing that antagonism. Nor can it, because it’s an integral part of the system of workers selling their energies to an employer for a wage or salary and pits one’s interests against the others. It’s true to say, therefore, that the organisations that exist to defend workers’ interests, unions, are a necessary feature of capitalism, even if they don’t always manage to do that.

We’ve had no joy in this dispute yet and it may well be that we end up not having any and having to swallow lost pay for time on strike now and diminished pensions later. I hope not of course and it’s not always like that when workers go on strike. Sometimes the balance of forces is tilted in the workers’ favour, if, that is, they can cause enough disruption to the working of the enterprise they’re employed in. And then they might manage to get the pay rise or improved conditions they’re looking for and so secure a slightly larger share of the surplus value they generate. And throughout the history of capitalism, workers organising in trade unions has been a necessary and beneficial accompaniment to their struggle to maintain and, if possible, improve their living and working conditions.

Political agendas

What isn’t beneficial, however, is when unions get used for political ends by groups who see an advantage in manipulating or controlling them. These are usually Trotskyist groups who work, and often manage, to have influence in trade unions far in excess of their numbers in order to further their own political ends. This usually means urging workers to strike come what may, as a kind of article of faith. They view industrial action as a consciousness-raising operation for workers, as a rehearsal for bigger struggles to come when the vanguard these groups see themselves as will lead the workers to a different society. It’s a society in which they see the state as playing an overriding role, and, though they often call that socialism, it bears no relation to the moneyless, wageless and leaderless society of free access to all goods and services that is socialism for the Socialist Party.

And, in the strike I’ve been involved in, there seems to be a significant number of Trotskyists who’ve managed to get themselves elected to the National Executive of the UCU and are seeking to drive an agenda of strikes come what may. And in so doing, though claiming to be Marxists, they ignore Karl Marx’s own 150-year old warning that action by unions, though necessary in capitalism, cannot be more than ‘fighting with effects… applying palliatives, not curing the malady’. But for the time being union members, including myself, have sufficient hope that this particular strike is happening for the right reasons, has the backing of the majority of members and will not end up being damaging to our interests.

The struggle for money

Time will tell, but one thing is clear. The dispute I have talked about and almost all such disputes are driven by one overriding factor – money. Employers are constantly seeking to find ways of maintaining or increasing the amount of money or profit that their enterprise can yield for them, while their employees, using unions as a means of defence, are seeking to maintain (or even improve) their conditions of work or living standards, and this usually means pressing their employer not to reduce the money spent on them, or indeed to spend more on them in order to improve their conditions of work or give them better pay packets. This is just one of a multitude of ways in which life under capitalism is an ongoing struggle over money – absurd in fact at a point in history where there is sufficient potential abundance for the money and wages system to be abolished on a global scale so that the whole of humanity can do work that truly fulfils them and live fulfilling lives at all levels in a world of cooperative endeavour, voluntary work and free access for all to all goods and services.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Original Sin (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Original Sin 

In 2012, broadcaster and current affairs pundit Andrew Marr wrote and produced a BBC/Open University documentary series called Andrew Marr’s History of the World, a lively saunter across 70,000 years of human history which helpfully included the invitation to download a free ‘How do they know that?’ booklet from the OU website, in case you wanted to check any of the facts presented (bbc.in/3EwNvF1).

Unfortunately, in the very first episode Marr somewhat marred his own enterprise with the extraordinary claim that homo sapiens drove the Neanderthals to extinction by hunting and eating them. How did Marr and the OU know that? Well, they didn’t, and the booklet didn’t mention it. Indeed the OU’s own published research instead ‘suggests that climate change was the primary factor in the extinction of Homo species, despite their great ecological plasticity and cognitive abilities’ while ‘in the case of Neanderthals, the climate-driven increased extinction risk was probably exacerbated by competition with H. sapiens’ (bit.ly/3JRkiWw).

Why did Marr make this odd and sensational claim? Perhaps in the absence of hard facts, a racy narrative won out instead. But why did the respectable OU let him get away with it? The thing is, it’s part of the ‘Original Sin’ apology for capitalism, the gist of which is that, like it or not, we need to be ruled by powerful elites because we’re all murderous psychos at heart. This view, popularised by Thomas Hobbes and latterly by his fanboy Steven Pinker, is baked into the foundations of capitalist ideology so thoroughly that it is usually the first objection to socialism that people reach for. This is also why anthropology continues to be such a hotly politicised area of study (see pages 14-16 and 20-21 in this issue).

In the case of Neanderthals, the circumstantial evidence did initially seem damning, with Neanderthals dying out in Europe around 40,000 years ago, just around the time humans from Africa were supposedly first smuggling their bone Neander-bashers through customs. But now new evidence points to H. sapiens already being in Europe around 54,000 years ago, meaning there was a potential overlap of 14,000 years, which in turn hardly suggests wholesale genocidal mayhem (bbc.in/3vrLmGz).

So the hunter-killer scenario, with one species as ruthless restaurateur and the other as regional plat du jour, is almost certainly a caricature. In fact, given the small and sparse populations in early Europe, the two may not even have had much to do with each other, though Neanderthal traces in the human genome do attest to some contact. According to Prof Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum, ‘we don’t need to invoke violent causes for [Neanderthals’] demise. There are already two main factors they had to contend with.’ The first of these was rapid climate change: ‘Most of the north Atlantic was switching from bitterly cold to nearly as warm as the present day every few thousand years, sometimes in less than a decade, and so Neanderthals had to deal with an extremely unstable climate in western Europe before modern humans arrived there’ (bit.ly/3KWs171).

The other factor was humans’ competitive success, due to the fact that, as Prof Stringer says, ‘we were networking better, our social groups were larger, we were storing knowledge better and we built on that knowledge’.

This is not to say that early humans were eco-friendly hippies. Early modern humans very likely hunted most megafauna to extinction, and certainly deforested huge areas of land, contrary to those romantics who impute mystical communion with and respect for nature to all aboriginal populations. But let’s not allow shameless apologists for capitalism to get away with misrepresenting the past for their own propaganda purposes.

Last year’s models

‘We’ve been here before and been disappointed, but we are all secretly hoping that this is really it, and that in our lifetime we might see the kind of transformation that we have read about in history books’ (bbc.in/3MgSTik).

You might think this is a socialist talking about the revolution to abolish capitalism. In fact it’s a scientist referring to the fact that the fundamental W-boson particle appears not to weigh quite what it ought to. It’s only a small difference, but as Prof Brian Cox once observed about a study purporting to show neutrinos travelling slightly faster than the speed of light, to a physicist that’s like saying that you’ve done the sums and found that 2 + 2 don’t quite equal 4. It fractures your whole world like a thunderbolt.

Instead of being horrified at this prospect, physicists are as excited as kids on E-numbers. They have no stake in the current ‘standard model’ of physics because they already know it’s wrong in at least three ways. There’s a whole bunch of anti-matter that should be out there but isn’t. There’s a whole bunch of dark matter and dark energy that shouldn’t be out there but is. And gravity haunts it all like the ghost in the machine, inexplicably analogue in an otherwise digital quantum reality. There are all sorts of theories to account for these problems, and the race is on to find evidence for a winner.

How different from the world of everyday affairs, whose social organisation also has its own ‘standard model’, currently known as capitalism. In this case too, there are all sorts of things systemically wrong with it, and many people can see this, not just socialists. But, unlike physics, some people do have a huge financial stake in the status quo, and that doesn’t just skew the debate, it prevents it taking place. So whereas physicists are looking excitedly for a better and more coherent model that they know must be out there if only they can figure it out, the rich are making sure that no such endeavour is taking place in the social realm.

Which is unfortunate, because whereas in particle physics the most that’s probably at stake is a Nobel prize and some departmental funding, for human society the consequence of not having a constructive debate about the future might be not having any future at all.

Paddy Shannon

David Graeber’s False Dawn (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Graeber and Wengrow’s new book, The Dawn of Everything, is making waves. Its cover may not be sitting, face out, on the shelves of all the high street bookshops, but it is gathering a lot of positive reviews in both the left- and right-wing press. For a book written by a prominent anarchist, getting any reviews at all in the conventional media is quite a feat in itself. So, what is going on? Well, for one thing, The Dawn of Everything sets out to challenge the conventional narrative of human origins – or claims that it does. And since the conventional narrative in anthropology is one which, since the 1960s has tended to favour left-wing interpretations of ‘human nature’, it is no surprise the right has welcomed it.

The Dawn of Everything is a big, fat book, some 500-plus pages in length. It is teeming with fascinating accounts of recent archaeological findings. And it is worth reading for this alone. Anthropologists are not great popularisers of their work, and much of the information contained here is normally only available on the shelves and stacks of university libraries. As the subtitle of their book tells us, however, Graeber and Wengrow (G&W) are not merely interested in informing the public of these new findings, they are attempting nothing less than A New History of Humanity.

Their book opens with a historical survey of the way in which the debate about human origins has been framed in Europe. In essence, it’s an argument between those who, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, view ‘human nature’ as essentially co-operative, and our early human relations as egalitarian, and those who, like Thomas Hobbes, regard us as competitive creatures, and conceive of our early existence as a ‘war of all against all.’ These claims, of course, have distinct political alignments. For left-wing Rousseauists, humanity is best suited to living in an egalitarian society, while for right-wing Hobbesians, no degree of human flourishing is possible without a restraining dominance hierarchy. Numerous variations on these two opposing myths have emerged over the centuries, but they have continued broadly to shape the debate.

Egalitarian hunter-gatherers

In 1966, however, a milestone was passed when the first ‘Man the Hunter’ symposium of hunter-gatherer specialists was held in Chicago (the name of the symposium reflected the patriarchal assumptions still prevalent in the anthropology of that time). As researcher after researcher took to the podium, a radical picture of hunter-gatherers began to emerge. Above all, the evidence showed that hunter-gatherer peoples had notably egalitarian features, and there was a subset among them that was hyper-egalitarian in virtually all aspects of their social lives, including relations between men and women. This suggested that humanity itself had egalitarian origins. Within the academic discipline of anthropology, at least, the Hobbesian view of humanity’s hierarchical nature and beginnings had been blown clear out of the water.

Around the turn of the millennium, this view of hunter-gatherers was given new theoretical depth by Christopher Boehm in his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest. Boehm pointed out that the Rousseauist and Hobbesian narratives both contain elements of truth. Human beings are undoubtedly capable of seeking to dominate others, but they are also innately predisposed to resist being dominated, and wherever possible will band together to repulse those who would subordinate them. In Boehm’s view, whether a society became egalitarian or hierarchical depended on whether the material conditions within that society advantaged those with a will to dominate or those who resisted being dominated. Our early societies were egalitarian, he argued, because the conditions they lived under favoured coalitions which could resist domination. One example of such a condition was the invention of projectile weapons which could be used by everyone, large or small, male or female, to undercut the physical strength possessed by alpha males. This resulted in a state of reverse dominance, or counterdominance as it is now more commonly called.

Evolved cooperators

Boehm’s argument set the scene for a revolution in anthropology. The next step was taken by Sarah Hrdy, in her ground-breaking 2009 book, Mothers and Others. Although Boehm had argued for egalitarianism among males in early human societies, he had made the assumption, common at the time, that in early societies males had dominated females. Hrdy pointed out that there were biological grounds for not taking this assumption for granted. Humans differ from their great ape cousins in one very noticeable respect: they give birth to big-brained babies. Human brains including the brains of infants gobble up calories at a furious rate, and human children mature slowly, remaining dependent on their caregivers for many years. In the Machiavellian world of our close cousins, chimpanzees, with its alpha males and hostile, shifting alliances, no mother could or would trust her infants to another female and certainly not to a male. In the human world by contrast, mothers could not cope with feeding and bringing up their children alone. If humans were to survive, they would have to develop co-operative childcare arrangements, something we invariably see among egalitarian hunter-gatherer peoples. Among great apes, males are the leisure sex. The only contribution they make to the next generation is a dollop of sperm. In human societies, that was no longer feasible. Mothers needed help from their own mothers and from the rest of society, males and females alike. Humans, Hrdy argued, are evolved co-operators. We co-operate on a grand scale, and this requires the development of a great deal of trust. Numerous evidences that we are biologically wired to coordinate our activities exist. We see signs of it marked on our bodies, in our ‘co-operative eyes’, for instance. Whereas the eyes of our great ape cousins are round, and the sclera which surrounds their irises is dark, our eyes are almond shaped and our sclera are white. We can see immediately where some other person is looking and therefore what they might be thinking. It is hard for a chimpanzee to read much from the eyes of a rival. Humans on the contrary are extremely good at interpreting other people’s thoughts and reactions from their eye movements, a process known as intersubjectivity. Research has demonstrated that humans are capable of working out how someone is reacting to the way we are reacting to their reaction.

Strange synthesis

In The Dawn of Everything G&W set out to challenge this orthodoxy. Like Boehm, they propose a kind of synthesis between the Rousseauist and Hobbesian myths, but a synthesis of a rather strange kind. They argue that in fact there is no particular way in which our original societies organised themselves, that humans have always adopted a range of different social forms, sometimes egalitarian, sometimes hierarchical, and that we have done so purely out of choice. Graeber, in particular, had long been of the view that conditions of individual freedom can arise at any time irrespective of the economic context. Similarly he has denied that there exists any such real thing as culture, that there are merely individuals who are free to create their own identities. This suggests that Graeber believed that there was no value in attempting to overturn capitalism, since no society will ever be governed by a single principle. At best we should seek out liberated zones where community can assert itself.

For G&W, however, the ability to choose our own social structures is part of what makes us human. In support of this claim, they make several arguments in the course of their book. They point to a number of groups such as the Inuit that are known to vary their social structures seasonally. During one part of the year, they form hierarchical relationships in which, for instance, women are subordinated to men, and egalitarian ones during another. These relationships, according to G&W are chosen in a playful, carnivalesque spirit.

As an approach to understanding social organisation, this idea has multiple problems. Societies are rarely, if ever, the result of unified or even collective decision making. It seems hardly credible, for instance, that women would have playfully chosen to occupy a role subservient to men, or that one section of society should have placed itself freely and experimentally under the oppressive rule of another. To say that ‘society chooses’, means, at most, that some section of society with some material advantage over the rest has exercised a prominent influence over social relations. Class societies are cockpits of competing interests with built-in fault lines, and even classless, egalitarian societies are full of members whose desires and wishes come into conflict with one another.

A second line of argument that G&W advance in The Dawn of Everything is that in the last few decades, evidence has been accumulating which challenges the ‘standard’ view that we had egalitarian origins, or that hierarchical (class) societies emerged only with the onset of agriculture. In particular they turn to archaeological evidence from the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe (approximately 40,000 – 15,000 years ago). This evidence includes, for example, the discovery of large-scale ‘ceremonial’ buildings and a number of ‘princely’ burials that contain artefacts which would have taken a great many hours of collective labour to produce.

Multiple problems

These arguments should be treated with care. G&W, for instance, have limited their examination of the evidence to only one small part of the globe, to Europe, which is conveniently the only area in which clear evidence for hierarchical society definitely exists during this period. They have also limited their view to the last 40,000 years, a relatively short, and relatively recent, period of time. If we go back beyond this period, evidence that could indicate the existence of hierarchical societies becomes vanishingly rare (which led one critic, Chris Knight, to point out that the book should have been titled The Tea Time of Everything). The authors attempt to justify their limited time frame by arguing that evidence before 40,000 years ago is scant and we cannot reliably know what was going on in this period. It is true that archaeologists have less evidence than they would like from before the Upper Palaeolithic, but is not negligible as G&W suggest, and with modern methods of analysis, a lot of information can be gleaned from it. Moreover G&W’s argument cuts both ways. If we take the view that the evidence we do have is unreliable, then we certainly can’t conclude, as G&W do in one of their most bizarre arguments, that because the physical appearance of individuals varied widely in earlier periods (several human species still existed side by side), we can simply assume that their forms of social organisation were also various and not necessarily egalitarian.

When setting out this evidence for hierarchical societies in the Upper Palaeolithic, the authors are careful not to tell their readers how extensive it is or how it compares with evidence for other forms of social organisation. As their review of it takes up a significant amount of space it is easy to get the impression that it is rather extensive, when in reality this is not the case. Covering a period of 35,000 years, for example, archaeologists have found no more than six ‘princely’ burials. More-over, as G&W admit (when they are not directly advancing their claims for hierarchy) the individuals found in these burials show evidence of some sort of physical deformity making them difficult to interpret. It is not possible to conclude with certainty, therefore, that they indicate the existence of hierarchical or class societies at all. The meaning of big ceremonial buildings is also ambiguous as similar constructions have also been discovered in societies that are at least partially egalitarian.

There is a lot about G&W’s arguments throughout The Dawn of Everything that doesn’t add up. And their book presents other concerns as well. They tend, for instance, to suggest that anthropologists habitually ignore the evidence now available for hierarchical societies in Upper Palaeolithic Europe and cling to older egalitarian narratives. In reality, most anthropologists are very aware of this new evidence and in the last two decades have modified their views to take note of it. They have pointed out, however, that the balance of evidence is still in favour of predominantly egalitarian early societies. Instead of addressing the evidence for this claim, G&W go noticeably silent, preferring instead to poison the well by tossing aside such views as ‘Utopian’ or as ‘Garden of Eden’ narratives. Their treatment of Christopher Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest, is an example of their general attitude to the subject. Having presented a positive assessment of his theory of reverse dominance, they feign surprise and confusion at why he, like the majority of anthropologists, should commit to belief in human egalitarian origins. The answer is not hard to find by anyone who wants to find it. In his book, Boehm sets out explicitly the grounds on which he takes this view. As for the extensive work of Hrdy and others on co-operative childcare, G&W hand-wave this away in a single sentence. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the authors are trying hard to present themselves as pioneers, as edgy and iconoclastic rebels against the academic status quo.

Graeber’s dismissal of the idea of early egalitarianism is one that has a long history in his writing. Anyone who reads through the bibliographies of his earlier works, for instance, is unlikely to find reference to authors who have pursued this research. He has consistently refused to address it, and is notorious for accusing colleagues who have published reports of their fieldwork on egalitarian hunter-gatherers as having made it all up. At first sight, this seems a curious attitude. Knight has argued that it can be traced back to Graeber’s early experience of fieldwork in Madagascar where for specific historical reasons the state had dwindled in significance and self-organising communities had arisen in the interstices. However, a simpler explanation might be that to accept the idea of hunter-gatherer egalitarian origins runs counter to his deeper political instincts as an anarchist. If egalitarianism is only to be found among immediate return hunter-gatherer peoples, then that might suggest (as many right-wing critics argue) that it is only possible for it to exist in societies organised into small bands and with little property. That in turn implies that it would be impossible to reproduce in more populous societies with large-scale social production. There is no evidence for this claim, but neither is it the real issue. The undeniable fact that egalitarian and hyper-egalitarian hunter-gatherers do and have existed has never been proof positive that a future society of free association and free access is possible. Our knowledge of egalitarian hunter-gatherers has a different value. It reveals to us the material circumstances under which an egalitarian society can function, and this is not an insight to be tossed aside in favour of a rather weak and unproductive theory.

Material circumstances

What egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies show us is that in order for a dominance hierarchy to arise two conditions must be met. The first is that one section of a population must gain a material advantage of some kind over the rest. This could be something as simple as having access to weapons or other means of coercion. The second is that alternative means of satisfying needs must be unavailable. The disadvantaged population then has no choice but to accept the domination of others. Together, these two conditions allow a dominant group or class to stand between the rest of the population and the satisfaction of their needs.

This situation was neatly illustrated in the 1820s by the fate of the unfortunate Thomas Peel, a cousin of the soon-to-be Prime Minister, Robert Peel. As leader of a syndicate of financiers, Thomas proposed to develop a colony at Swan River in western Australia (now the city of Perth). Setting out in 1829 from England he took with him provisions, seeds, implements and other means of production to the tune of £50,000, a huge sum at that time. He also took with him 300 men women and children whom he intended to employ in the 250,000 acre colony. Once he arrived in Australia, however, Peel discovered that with land and opportunities available, employment seemed less than desirable to his 300 workers and they rapidly decamped to pursue independent lives elsewhere in the colony. As a proponent of colonisation dourly observed, ‘Mr Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’

As Thomas Peel’s workers demonstrated, we will often resist the domination of capitalist employment if an escape route is available to us. Hunter-gatherers tend to fiercely resist employment when colonial or post-colonial governments try to impose it on them. Workers too in early capitalist societies demonstrated the same reluctance to accept wage relations. Thanks to a flourishing working-class press in the eastern states of America during the ‘Golden Age’ of capitalism, we know how strongly workers resisted capitalist employment and how humiliated and defeated they felt when it was eventually forced upon them.

Capitalism is a clear example of a dominance hierarchy. Ownership and control of the means of production by the capitalist class is backed up by the coercive force of the state. Historically the elimination of forms of subsistence other than employment was achieved by the enclosure of common lands, thus turning peasants into landless labourers. Material conditions thus gave the capitalist class the ability to stand between the working class and the satisfaction of its needs. With no escape routes available, workers today have no alternative but to accept the domination of capitalist relations. For the majority, employment is the only option. A smaller number become self-employed and escape the domination of a human boss, but are still at the mercy of the capitalist market. Fewer still attempt to go down the risky and insecure road of starting a business. A few will succeed and end up dominating others, but most will fail, often with dire financial consequences to themselves and their families. For the vast majority of us as workers within the capitalist system there can be no escape from a life of domination and exploitation through capitalist employment. We do, however, have a means of escape from the domination of capitalism itself. And that is not because it is in our human nature to be able freely to choose any social system we like, as G&W would have it, but because material conditions at this time allow us a real and sustainable alternative. As members of the working class, we have the option to act consciously and collectively, to challenge the system, to eliminate class society and put an end to the patterns of domination it inevitably entails. A society of free association and free access is within our grasp – if we choose to reach for it.

Hud.

Watch:

• A lecture given by Camilla Power providing an evolutionary perspective on the origins of egalitarianism (bit.ly/3rqCMGX).
• The first of a series of videos critiquing The Dawn of Everything in great detail (bit.ly/3jKKzv2).
• A lecture given by Jerome Lewis on a group of contemporary egalitarian hunter-gatherers in Africa (bit.ly/3rv0z8D).

British fascists online (2022)

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few weeks ago, YouTube’s algorithms carried me towards some video essays made by the alternative media commentator known as Morgoth. I’d been vaguely aware of Morgoth and similar reactionaries, such as Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes and Keith Woods, for some time, but hadn’t paid too much attention to them. After all, I knew that they called themselves ‘traditionalists’, ‘racial nationalists’ or ‘third positionists’ – in a word, fascists – and I only have so much time to devote to the ramblings of people who would happily deport or kill my non-white friends and family. On the other hand, it’s good to know your enemies, so I resolved to trawl through some of the videos and livestreams made by Morgoth and his cronies in order to get a sense of what the far right are saying and doing online these days.

Racial nationalists

Morgoth’s worldview is a macabre one. In between garbled references to right-wing philosophers, Morgoth rails against the ‘liberal elites’ and ‘globalist’ technocrats whom he sees as running the world – all controlled and funded, of course, by rootless cosmopolitans like George Soros. According to Morgoth, these elites are set on crushing the ‘Western Spirit’, subjecting the population to their nihilistic ideology of hyper-individualism, hedonistic consumerism and, worst of all, racial diversity. By promoting mass immigration and miscegenation throughout the Western world, the elites, according to Morgoth, want to undermine and ultimately eradicate the white native stock. To stop this from happening, Morgoth proposes that whites should unite to reactivate the Faustian spirit of the West by creating a racially pure ethno-state. As he puts it at the end one of his videos: ‘We’re going to be the masters in our own land again!’ (YouTube, ‘Roger Scruton & Words of Power’).

For obvious reasons, Morgoth never appears on camera. Judging by details contained in his various monologues, he seems to be a Generation X factory worker from North-East England. He has a blog, Morgoth’s Review, and a large number of video essays on YouTube and other digital platforms favoured by the far right, such as BitChute and Odysee. He also occasionally pops up as a guest on other so-called ‘dissident right’ social media channels and has now started to consolidate his oeuvre on his Substack page. His video essays, which are often illustrated by footage or photographs from his countryside walks, address a wide range of topics and Morgoth often sweetens the red pill of ethno-nationalism with discussions of contemporary popular culture. In recent years, far-right organisers have been using online gaming as a recruitment tool, pipelining young men towards racial supremacism during in-game chats and associated livestreams, and Morgoth himself often combines his political rants with analyses of videogames, fantasy novels, television dramas and films.

Many of Morgoth’s videos rhapsodise about the wonders of Nature, although even these are shot through with expressions of hatred towards minority groups. In one video (YouTube, ‘A Tale of Two Country Walks’), for example, Morgoth laments that, on a visit to the Norwegian fjords, he was obliged to share his authentic appreciation of the awe-inspiring landscape with ‘cripples’ and ‘fat slobs’ who were able effortlessly to enjoy the same scenery from the comfort of an adjacent car park. Morgoth’s main business, however, is racial hatred and his regular attacks on racial minorities often contain elements of so-called scientific racism or ‘race realism’. In a 2017 blog post (‘Equality is a Cruel Mistress’), for instance, he cites a table of national IQ rankings to argue that the black Labour politician Diane Abbott, as the daughter of Jamaican immigrants, is too unintelligent to be the Shadow Secretary of State.

Morgoth, and the British far right in general, are obsessed with the so-called ‘Asian grooming gangs’ that have come to light in English towns such as Rochdale and Telford in recent years. Research produced by the Home Office suggests that the sexual grooming of young girls in Britain is not a disproportionately ‘Muslim problem’, but Morgoth, like other far-right figures in Britain such as Tommy Robinson, talks exclusively about Pakistani men preying on white English girls and defiling the racial purity of the nation. There’s an all-too-familiar racist fantasy at work here. In his memoir Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler wrote luridly about the ‘satanic joy’ of ‘the black-haired Jewish youth’, who ‘lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people’. The image of a racialised Other who enjoys what is rightfully ‘ours’ and stands in the way of our own satisfaction is deeply imprinted on the fascist imagination.

Paranoid

Indeed, Morgoth, like the rest of the political far-right, is very paranoid. To justify his sense of victimhood, he conflates completely different traditions of political and philosophical thought into a single straw-man enemy. Liberalism, leftism, postmodernism, neo-liberalism and socialism are lumped together and presented as the more or less interchangeable snares of the Machiavellian globalists. Unsurprisingly, this leads Morgoth into incoherence and self-contradiction; in one video he even makes the bizarre claim that socialists have been responsible for ushering in ’a globalist, capitalist society’ (YouTube, ‘The Good, the Bragg and the Stormzy’).

The question therefore arises: why should we pay any attention to confused bigots like Morgoth? One reason is that there is clearly a receptive audience for their ideas. Research findings published by the organisation Cybersecurity for Democracy last year showed that far-right news stories produce far more user engagement, in the form of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, than other types of online content. Some of the key figures on the far right, meanwhile, have significant numbers of followers. At the time of writing, Morgoth himself has nearly 50,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. He has also been given mainstream credibility – if that is the right word for it – by featuring as a guest on the podcast of the British conservative hack James Delingpole. In 2019 the singer Morrissey even shared a Morgoth video on his website. All in all, it’s a level of exposure that socialists could only dream of. It’s therefore worth considering the reasons for the popularity of this type of content.

It has to be said that some of Morgoth’s material is quite entertaining. Morgoth can turn a good phrase and knows how to appeal to his listeners’ interest in popular culture. In one video, for example, he indulges in a fairly amusing rant against the 90s television chef Jamie Oliver, suggesting that the ‘middle-class’ neo-liberal multiculturalism that arose in the New Labour years was ‘forged in the basket of Jamie Oliver’s moped, alongside the quail eggs and Japanese lager’ (YouTube, ‘Do Millennials Dream of Jamie Oliver’s Moped’). This combination of comedic sarcasm and pop-culture awareness gives Morgoth’s content a certain piquancy.

Phoney radicalism

Another dangerous aspect of Morgoth’s work is its phoney radicalism. Morgoth’s philosophical touchstones are the fascist favourites Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler and Martin Heidegger. But he is canny enough to acknowledge some leftist thinkers, too. In one video (YouTube, ‘My Trip Down South’) he alludes to Jacques (sic) Deleuze and he often refers to the leftist philosopher Mark Fisher. For example, to support his own critique of cultural decline under neo-liberalism, he draws on Fisher’s concept of the ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ – the interesting claim that cultural innovation has stagnated since the 1990s and that popular culture today is merely recycling the themes and styles of earlier periods.

In fact, like so many fascist writings, Morgoth’s musings often appear to be consistent with socialist understandings. For example, he attacks the commodification of human life that capitalism produces (although he contradicts himself by warning white women to be mindful of their declining ‘sexual market value’, which sounds pretty commodifying to us). He is also critical of contemporary liberal catchwords such as ‘white privilege’ – as are socialists, since such notions tend to undermine working-class solidarity. Morgoth’s critique of Extinction Rebellion (YouTube, ‘Extinction Rebellion: Worst Controlled Opposition EVER!’), meanwhile, also has a superficial affinity with socialist arguments. Morgoth makes the point that XR are not a truly radical group and that their demands essentially amount to a call for working-class austerity; again, socialists would be inclined to agree. But Morgoth predictably blames the environmental crisis on overpopulation and ignores the fundamental role of capitalist production and over-production in generating global heating and other environmental threats. In fact, it’s not clear whether he even accepts the reality of human-made global heating, as he seems to reject the notion of scientific consensus; when it comes to understanding the coronavirus pandemic, for instance, he places his faith in the mumbo jumbo of the discredited scientific crank Dolores Cahill (YouTube, ‘A Letter From The NHS’). As always, the fascist mind rejects the scientific, materialist analyses of social phenomena in favour of scapegoating and irrational conspiracy-mongering.

As already noted, Morgoth is far from the only racial nationalist at work on the internet today and regular debates among nationalists of various stripes sometimes attract thousands of viewers. And while these men sometimes trade in outright lies and misrepresentations – for example, Morgoth suggests in one video that Marx and Engels might have been funded by the Rothschild banking family (YouTube, ‘The People vs The Gammon’) – their ideas are often couched in radical-sounding language, providing critiques of capitalism, ‘neo-liberalism’, consumerism and commodification. This is, of course, the socialism of fools. But what gives far-right ideas their traction and plausibility – at least among some white working-class people – is that they identify and seem to provide an explanation for real problems affecting our class, such as declining living standards and the lack of stable, full-time jobs and affordable housing.

How much of a political threat the far right pose today is another question. On the one hand, as we know, fascism is always over-diagnosed by left-wing commentators. While recent years have seen the establishment of neo-Nazi political organisations in Britain such as Patriotic Alternative, such groups often have a relatively short shelf-life – for example, the English Defence League, which sprang to life in 2009, has been relatively inactive for the last ten years – and some more recent groups, like National Action, have been banned by the state and forced underground. On the other hand, right-wing, authoritarian and often explicitly racist governments have come to power in recent years in several countries around the world. Then there is the question of far-right violence. Across the world, far-right terrorist attacks have become more common in recent years and are notoriously hard to predict, because their perpetrators have often been ‘radicalised’ online and are not part of any monitored group.

In recent years, the far right have largely been purged from mainstream tech platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. But it’s not clear how effective the censorship of far-right ideologues has really been: it has arguably only pushed them towards the more loosely-regulated ‘alt-tech’ platforms and handed them a propaganda advantage by allowing them to pose as victims. What we can say for sure is that, from the socialist point of view, far-right arguments need to be combated with better ones. Like all reactionaries, Morgoth is disdainful towards the academic subject of Media Studies (YouTube, ‘Clapping for Stalin and The Burnley Banner’); but the popularity of his ideas suggests a need for robust media literacy and political clarity.

Racial nationalism needs to be exposed for the nonsense it is and anybody attracted to it should know that whatever they may claim, Morgoth and his fellow Aryans don’t represent the interests of workers in Britain or anywhere else. They claim to be ‘traditionalists’, but their right-wing brand of identity politics is completely at odds with the working-class traditions of mutual aid and solidarity and with the history of working-class struggle against wage slavery. They also describe themselves as politically incorrect ‘dissidents’ or the ‘dissident right’, but in fact they are defenders of the status quo. They reproduce the dominant ideology, dividing humanity along national and racial lines and obscuring what almost all of us have in common: our membership of the exploited class.

SH

SPGB Summer School: The Class Divide (2022)

Party News from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The richest 10% of people own more than 80% of global wealth, and the 10 richest men have six times more wealth than that of the poorest 3.1 billion people combined.

These vast inequalities in wealth reflect how society is split into two classes: the capitalist class who get their wealth through owning industries and corporations, and the working class who rely on wages or benefits to buy what is needed.

The Socialist Party’s weekend of talks and discussion looks at why capitalism is divided into classes and how the antagonism between them impacts on the way we live. What is ‘class consciousness’ and how does it develop? To what extent is it meaningful to say that there is a middle class? What classes were there before capitalism, in previous stages of history? And what could a future classless society be like?

Full residential cost (including accommodation and meals Friday evening to Sunday afternoon) is £100; the concessionary rate is £50. Book here or send a cheque (payable to the Socialist Party of Great Britain) with your contact details to Summer School, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London, SW4 7UN. Day visitors are welcome, but please book by e-mail in advance.

E-mail enquiries to spgbschool@yahoo.co.uk.

A Modern Money Tree? (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The New Economics: A Manifesto by Steve Keen (Polity, 2022, 200 pages)

In the last part of the nineteenth century pro-capitalist economists, worried by the use Marx and others had made of the Classical Economist David Ricardo’s labour theory of value, sought to change the whole theoretical basis of economics. They also objected to the Classical Economists’ analysing society as divided into social classes (landlords, capitalists and workers) with conflicting interests.

What they came up with was that it was the utility to consumers that determined the exchange value of goods and services, not labour cost. Consumers were assumed to spend their income in such a way that the ‘marginal utility’ of each different item they bought (i.e ., the added satisfaction they get from one more unit of a good) was equal; the price of goods was the result of consumers all doing this and so would typically decline with every additional unit of consumption as consumers were willing to pay less for it. Similarly, labour and capital were considered as each contributing to production and being rewarded according to their ‘marginal productivity’, the theory being that workers will be hired up to the point when the marginal revenue of production is equal to the wage rate. The reward to capital was profits.

This ‘marginalist revolution’ ushered in Neoclassical Economics and became the dominant view amongst economists and is still taught in schools and universities all over the world. It is against this theory that Steve Keen’s The New Economics: A Manifesto (Polity, 2022, 200 pages), aimed at students about to study economics, is directed. Like all manifestos, it is a call to arms. Keen denounces neoclassical economics as a ‘disease’ and calls for its complete eradication.

Money creationism

But what does he propose to put in its place? As an advocate of so-called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), his main criticism is aimed at the Neoclassicals’ theory of money and banking. As it happens this is something they inherited from the Classical Economists – that banks are essentially financial intermediaries, borrowing money at one (or no) rate of interest and relending it at a higher rate; that banks do not ‘create’ money but merely redistribute it. Keen defends the contrary view that banks can and do create money.

This is partly a question of semantics about what is meant by ‘creating money’. Even Neoclassical textbooks define bank lending as doing this. So, when a bank makes a loan by definition it ‘creates’ money. The justification for this claim is that when a bank makes a loan it doesn’t hand over the cash but deposits money in the borrower’s account. But this is different from when a customer deposits money in their account, which is a liability of the bank to them (the bank owes it to them). A deposit made by a bank into a borrower’s account is the reverse (the borrower owes it to the bank). It is misleading to treat these two kinds of deposit as the same and to assimilate the second to the first.

Supporters of the view that banks have the power to create new money also point to the fact that a bank doesn’t necessarily have to have the money available at the time it makes a loan. This is true. However, when the borrowers actually spend the money it has to be covered. This may be from inbound income, but if there is a shortfall at the end of a trading day when banks settle up with each other, to cover this the bank has to borrow money on the money market from other banks or from the central bank.

Another confusion arises from the fact that governments, which do have the power to create money, don’t normally do this directly. They do so via the banking system, so creating the illusion that it is the banks rather than the government’s central bank that has created new money or, rather, new money-tokens.

The government money tree

MMT makes an additional claim that distinguishes it from other money-creationists. They are ‘Chartalists’ who hold that money did not evolve spontaneously out of trading but that it has always been the creation of a state. This runs contrary to the Classical view that money originated in commodity exchange when one commodity emerged as the ‘general equivalent’, ie, one that could be exchanged for all other commodities. This was Marx’s view too. Coins are issued by states and are (or were supposed to be) a guarantee of the weight of the money-commodity. Coins are indeed the creation of states but the money-commodity is not. Some coins did weigh the stated amount but others were, or came to be, tokens for this, as are all notes and, even more obviously, electronic money.

MMT argues that, because the state can create money-tokens at will, it does not need to tax or borrow to fund its spending. When it wants to spend it can simply arrange for new money-tokens to be created (or ‘printed’, as it is sometimes anachronistically put) and then spend this; this increases money in the hands of the general public, so stimulating the economy; some of this money can even come back to the state as taxes (if there still are any). Conclusion: the budget doesn’t need to be balanced and can be run at a permanent deficit.

There is nothing ‘modern’ about this theory. People have always wondered why, if something needs to be done, the government doesn’t simply create the money to do it. It is not as simple as that as new money-tokens are not new wealth but additional claims on existing wealth, so that if a government were to do this the result would be inflation causing a rise in all prices; even below the level of the full employment of resources the result, after an initial short-lived stimulation of economic activity, would be stagflation. No wonder some people think that MMT stands for Magic Money Tree.

MMT’s crisis theory

MMT is not quite that crude and Keen offers a theory of crises based on banks supposedly creating too much money by making too many loans and fuelling speculative bubbles, a purely monetary theory of crises. ‘Banks, debt and money’, he claims, are ‘the main factors that drive economic performance and also cause economic crises’ (p. 56). He quotes (p. 84) fellow-economist Hyman Minsky: ‘The tendency to transform doing well into a speculative investment boom is the basic instability in a capitalist economy.’ There is some truth in this; bank lending does expand in a boom but this is in response to the increased demand for loans from firms wanting to make hay while there is an expanding market, a view banks go along with as they, too, expect more profits to be made of which they will get a share as interest.

Contrary to what MMT teaches, increased bank lending comes from the demand side, not from the banks themselves. Despite Keen’s claim, banks seeking more interest from more lending is not what ‘drives economic performance’; what does is capitalist firms seeking profits. What causes a boom to bust is overproduction, in relation to its market, in some key industry, which means that the anticipated profits cannot be realised because not all that has been produced can be sold. Production is curtailed and this has a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy, including the banking sector.

Keen does not think that capitalism’s unstable path can be entirely eliminated, only that it can be dampened down considerably:

‘While financial instability cannot be wholly eliminated from capitalism…… the most egregious elements of irresponsible bank lending can be addressed by limitations on what banks can be allowed to lend’ (p.70).

What he proposes, to remedy this, is some reform to banking law and regulations that would ‘constrain or eliminate’ banks from ‘lending that finances asset price bubbles’ (plus a few pet reforms of his own which no government is likely to adopt).

This, he suggests, would be enough to allow another ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’, as from 1950 to 1973 when there was near full employment, low interest rates and only minor recessions.

Keen’s class analysis

That is not to say that Keen is presenting himself, as most bank reformers do, as a conservative out to save the capitalist system. He writes that ‘to acknowledge that capitalism is a class system is simply acknowledging a fact’ and that ‘with a class-based analysis, the consequences for different social classes of different economic policies must be confronted.’ (p. 142)

Earlier he had given an example of what he had in mind by class-based analysis when he described how a computer model of the business cycle he had devised worked. His model assumes that normally the share of profits in GDP is 12.9 percent, leaving ’87.1 per cent of GDP to be divided between workers and bankers, and it doesn’t matter to capitalists how that is allocated between them’ (p. 87). So he is positing a three-class system – capitalists, workers and bankers. Here is how his model presents the business cycle starting from the boom stage:

‘… [R]ising wage and interest costs ultimately mean that the profits expected by capitalists when the boom began are not realized. The increased share of output going to workers and bankers leaves less than capitalists had expected as profits. Investment falls, the rate of growth of the economy falters, and the boom gives way to a slump. The slump reverses the dynamic that the boom set in motion, but doesn’t quite reverse the impact of the boom on private debt… The recovery from the crisis thus leaves a residue of unpaid debt. The profit share of output ultimately returns to a level that once again sets off another period of euphoric expectations and high debt-financed investment, but this starts from a higher level of debt relative to GDP than before. With a higher level of debt, the larger share of income leaves a lower share for workers. So the workers pay the price for the higher debt in terms of a lower wages share of GDP…’ ( pp 87-8).

So, the class conflict in his analysis is between workers and bankers. But the loss to workers is built into his model because it assumes a constant share of profits in GDP. Since the bankers’ income (interest) has to come out of profits, the more interest capitalist firms pay on loans the less the capitalists retain as profits. It would perhaps have been more realistic to have assumed a constant share of wages in GDP. That would bring out that what would change throughout the business cycle would be the shares of the capitalists and the bankers, which would be irrelevant to workers as it doesn’t matter to them how that is allocated between them, especially as both interest and profits are just a division of the surplus value produced by the workers.

Keen’s model is a specious attempt to show that workers have an interest in reducing the income of bankers whereas doing that would benefit only the capitalists. He is in effect asking workers to take the side of the capitalists against the bankers. But why should they as both productive capitalists and bankers are just two sections of the same capitalist class?

Adam Buick

Material World: One World, One People (2022)

The Material World column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Ubi bene, ibi patria’ 

‘Where it goes well with me, there is my country’

Millions of vulnerable and damaged people are making perilous, life-threatening journeys to seek a safe refuge.

It was only a matter of a few months ago that some countries were constructing razor-wire fences along their borders to keep out foreigners hoping to reach sanctuary in Europe. Refugees were dying on the frontier from exposure and hypothermia from extreme winter conditions. Many people showed little understanding or support for those asylum seekers and did not want to accept outsiders. Growing xenophobic attitudes have given rise to far-right populism. When the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, Nigel Farage spoke of an impending flood of its refugees: ‘You can now see a wave of people leaving Afghanistan, and we already have numbers we quite simply can’t cope with.’

Now, how different is the reception that desperate and vulnerable men, women and children are now receiving. Europe generously embraces Ukrainian refugees fleeing the Russian invasion. Many humanitarian-minded individuals have rushed to do what they can to help Ukrainians, yet, forgetting or ignoring that refugees from elsewhere are still being pushed back or caged in detention camps.

Socialists share the sentiments of the environmentalist movement, Fridays For Future, when it explained, ‘While Ukrainians deserve immediate peace and all our support, so do the people from Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and all war-torn regions. Empathy, justice, and compassion should be for everyone. Refugees should not have to be white to be heard and seen.’ Fridays for Future went on to say ‘People only desire to live and exist safely. Let it become a door-opening moment where we demand justice for everyone independent of their nationality and skin colour.’

Millions of Ukrainians have joined the 84 million other people in need of security around the world (2021 UNHCR data). If they were all to form their own country, it would be the 17th largest on Earth, slightly bigger than Germany. If we were to add to those figures migrants forced by dire economic conditions to cross borders, the number is well over one billion people.

The population of the forcibly displaced is now more than double the number of Europeans driven from their homes by World War Two, six times the number of those displaced by the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, 100-fold more than the number of Vietnamese Boat People following the Vietnam War.

To put it another way, about one in every 95 people on this planet is involuntarily on the move. Add in those driven by economic imperatives and one out of every 30 people on Earth is now a refugee or a migrant.

In contrast to media perceptions it has not been the wealthy developed countries hosting refugees. In 2014, about nine million of the world’s displaced lived in low-income countries. Today, that number stands at an estimated 36 million and is forecast, by the Danish Refugee Council, to increase to 40 million by the end of 2023. The displacement crisis ‘disproportionally affects poorer countries and areas that already have enough on their plate,’ said the Council’s Charlotte Slente.

There are currently 5.7 million registered Syrian refugees stranded in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, 1.2 million Rohingya in the camps at Cox’s Bazaar in Bangladesh, 2.2 million Afghan refugees still in Iran and Pakistan, 2 million South Sudanese, 4 million displaced in Yemen while Honduras has 937,000 displaced people, the highest number in Central America.

Since 2015, a fifth of Venezuela’s population has left, one of the largest displacements in the world. On average, 2,000 Venezuelans crossed into Colombia every day in 2021 which now hosts 1.8 million Venezuelans.

Behind these numbers are people with personal stories of tragic loss and pain, all hoping for a chance at a better future. They think it is worth risking their lives if it leads to an opportunity of a decent life for them and their families.

However, we also witness a UK government passing draconian new nationality and borders legislation to restrict the rights of refugees and for those who endeavour to enter the country ‘unlawfully’, and they will be criminally prosecuted to add to all the other miseries that have already been inflicted upon them.

The UK government has now announced it intends to deport – or should that be ‘transport’? – those accused of ‘illegally’ arriving to claim asylum to Rwanda, in the middle of Africa, 4,500 miles away. How different from the humanitarian welcome being offered to Ukrainians fleeing war in what is now effectively becoming an unequal two-tier refugee policy.

Socialists do not hold with making a ‘league table’ of suffering and to differentiate between the more deserving or the less deserving for our charity and compassion. There should be no competition or contests for our concern. But in today’s world, such a conflict of interests exists when it comes to attitudes and policies in regard to refugees.

The World Socialist Movement’s position is that we are all equal worthy members of the human family and when it comes to looking after ‘our own’, none should be excluded and rejected, no exceptions nor special cases. Humanity is One. We are indivisible.

ALJO

How did we get stuck? (2022)

Book Review from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dawn of Everything. A New History of Humanity. By David Graeber and David Wengrow. Penguin. 2022. 720 pages.

This is the last book written by the anthropologist David Graeber, in conjunction with the archaeologist David Wengrow. It aims to set out a new theory for the pre-history of humanity, and in particular, takes aim at theories of the ‘origin of inequality’. The authors claim to be bringing together facts and ideas that have been coming out of their respective disciplines, and bringing them together to see what the new picture is.

They take aim at unidirectional ideas of social evolution: such as band to tribe to kingdom to empire. They also claim to rebut any notion that scale and social complexity inevitably lead to domination. The central strand of their narrative is that the idea of a lapsarian fall from original equality itself stems from attempts to rebut critiques of European civilisation made by North Americans, for example, the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia, who are reported as saying of the French in 1608: ‘you are always fighting and quarrelling among yourselves; we live peacefully. You are envious and all the time slandering each other; you are thieves and deceivers; you are covetous, and are neither generous nor kind; as for us, if we have a morsel of bread we share it with our neighbour.’ The authors argue it was through debates with American interlocutors that Europeans began to grapple with the notion of inequality in the first place.

Their argument runs that these critiques stung, to the extent that, by the mid 18th century, European writers had to recuperate them, and the strategy was to invent the idea of the noble savage: that free and equal societies were a sign of inferiority, where everyone is equally poor. The evolution of society and social complexity brings forth the differentiation and inequality, inevitably.

This book argues that, in fact, there is no basis for such an assumption. The authors cite the emerging archaeology from Ukraine and its environs to show how millennia before the first cities known to history, regular mega sites can be identified where thousands of humans would gather, and build together. They conjecture that these may have been seasonal gatherings (such as the evidence suggests happened at Stonehenge), bringing together people from vast areas.

The argument runs that people could cycle through different political structures, depending on the time of year, gathering in winter, in conditions where some would hold authority, to scatter in the summer to looser organisations. The authors present evidence within recorded history of some groups doing something like this, up to the point where people took up different names and identities within each season. They suggest that these ‘hospitality zones’ would have been the probable pre-condition for the emergence of the first cities

They note the absence of indicators of status and authority in Neolithic city formations (and the fact that it seems that the neighbouring tribes, in fact, developed aristocratic traits before the cities). They examine the notion of schismogenesis (something which people on the left would be quite familiar with) wherein groups of people define themselves in opposition to other groups. They note, for example, in North West America, some groups of foragers value wasteful and spectacular consumption, whereas their neighbours consciously espouse frugality.

They argue, that despite a similar mode of production, their cultures are different, because they oppose each other, although it is arguable that if one of those groups is using slaves, then that constitutes a different mode of production: but then, their central point stands that in that case it is still a conscious choice of the other tribe to not adopt slave taking as a way of living.

Likewise, they note that the invention agriculture, which in some people’s arguments leads to social stratification does not in fact seem to have in fact done so. They note that the agricultural revolution itself took thousands of years, with societies ‘play farming’: cultivating crops as part of a broader strategy of hunting and foraging, without becoming entirely dependent on their crops for survival. Agriculture remained a choice, and the relative social arrangements around it likewise for millennia. Agriculturalists and non-agriculturalists lived side by side in that time.

The authors discuss the operation of a ”baseline communism’ which applies in all societies; a feeling that if another person’s needs are great enough […] and the cost of meeting them is modest enough […] then of course any decent person would comply’. This baseline is moveable, and they note, for example, the rights and hospitality of the ‘baseline communism’ of North American tribes, compared to that of French colonists which formed part of the debates mentioned above. Human societies for millennia have thus oscillated around those freedoms and baseline levels of communism, producing many and varied social forms, not ‘in conditions of their own choosing’, without being stuck with them.

The question for Graeber and Wengrow is, then, how did we end up stuck in one of them? They analyse three forms of domination: control of information, violence and charisma. They present evidence from ancient cultures which demonstrates that early domination was usually a combination of two of these three factors, and it was only later that elites could combine all three. They note evidence of some tribes, for instance, where the king was known to be highly dangerous, and could order anyone put to death, but pretty much only if they were in the same room as him, and a few miles away he could be safely ignored.

They note that there have been many discoveries of palaeolithic burials with highly valuable grave goods inside, with the bodies posed. They note, however, many of those bodies exhibited unusual physical characteristics (being unusually tall, or short, or deformed). These individuals were in the first place seen as unusual within the tribe. They describe how in known societies, such as that of the Nuer, highly eccentric characters were tolerated and respected within the tribe, “when calamities or unprecedented events occurred […] it was among this penumbra [of unusual people] that everyone looked for a charismatic leader appropriate to the occasion’. Prominent people could emerge without becoming a permanent part of the social logic of those early cultures.

They look for the process of getting stuck in the notion of care surrounding these unique individuals. They note that chiefs had a duty of care for the sick, the orphaned, the widowed or anyone else who had no-one to look after them. They could ‘take refuge in the chief’s residence’, this would form the nucleus of a paternalistic relationship, also providing the chief with henchmen and people outside the normal social structures to do their will. They note the culmination, which seems to be ubiquitous in societies with monumental kingship, of a point at which all of those expected to care for a king are entombed with him: slaughtered at his death.

They have an entire chapter dedicated to claiming ‘the state has no origins’, in which they argue that many different forms of human society can exist, with differing degrees and modes of domination, and it is just as futile to look for an origin of the state as for the origin of inequality. They expressly argue that humans have the political skills and wisdom to imagine their own societies, and not simply react to their circumstances. They suggest a sort of ‘play kingship’ might well have prefigured the emergence of the real thing.

They note that signs of bureaucracy actually predate the existence of cities, and record keeping (in the form of clay tablets and seals) may in fact have been part of an active attempt to prevent new emerging technologies from creating social hierarchies. As with the principle of care, above, this system was ripe for subverting, and the abstraction and equalisation involved became a powerful tool for later rulers to subvert the village organisation and subsume it into an empire.

The overall thrust of this book is hopeful, it allows us to think about how vast cities of humans could have been run without a state or a ruling bureaucracy. They note that human communities in America, during the Hopewell civilization, were able to live without any signs of warfare: ‘for a period of about five centuries or more, human remains across the whole of Eastern North America display remarkably little evidence of traumatic injuries, scalping or other forms of interpersonal violence’. That such evidence exists both before and after this period shows how humans at that time were capable of abolishing war.

Likewise, as they note: ‘slavery was most likely abolished multiple times in history in multiple places’. The whole thrust of the book is that the unexplored myth that there was some fall from grace, that size complexity leads to domination are simply ideological presuppositions that rob ancient humanity of agency, and create a straightjacket around trying to think of new ways of running our world today.

Pik Smeet

Letter: Are we anti Latin American? (2022)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are we anti Latin American?

Dear Editors

In your last issue, reviewing ‘The Truth About Trotsky’, you state ‘In 1937 Leon Trotsky, from his exile in Central America…’. Well, he was not exiled in Central America, he was exiled in Mexico. Unless of course you did that intentionally placing Mexico outside North America, thus implying that only the two English speaking countries, USA and Canada belong to North America, therefore Mexico as a Spanish speaking should be in Central America.

The shape of the American continent, from Alaska to Cape Horn, is that of geographical giant with a thin isthmus in the middle linking North from South America. In that sense, even if it burns the writer reviewing the book on Trotsky, Mexico’s place is in the North of the continent.

This brings me to a pattern in your constant depiction of anything political and ideological pertaining Latin America. And is that of a veiled attitude of dismissal every time it is mentioned.

I find this quite offensive – Guzman in Peru ‘was not a Marxist’, ‘Allende in Chile apart from nationalizing the copper, did very little’. AMLO in Mexico, Lula in Brazil, etc, etc.

As a Chilean who came here after being in prison from 1974 to 1976, I cannot help but to think of the typical position of those pseudo Marxists who love criticizing everybody else, without ever themselves doing anything practical for Socialism.

Salvador Allende was the leader of the Popular Unity government 1970-1973 which in itself is an achievement. The first Marxist to be elected by the vote in the Western Hemisphere, he showed that Chile could be transformed. First of all, the nationalization of the banks was the first measure taken by the Popular Unity, copper the second. Many of the big industry, especially textiles, were passed over to the Social Property Area. It created the ‘comandos populares’, which encouraged the participation at the municipal/local level of the working class, the same can be said of the ‘cordones industriales’ where all the big industries surrounding Santiago had been taken or expropriated and were now ran by their workers.

The Agrarian Reform was also a total success. It nationalized the largest privately owned land measuring over 40 hectares. Thus, not only economically benefited the rural workers of the countryside who became syndicalized but also the indigenous population of Southern Chile who for centuries had been reclaiming back their land.

Allende’s government lasted only for three year, but were filled with advances and hopes for most Chileans. In the last local elections before the coup, the Popular Unity had increased their votes supporting the government but, as Kissinger said, the CIA had to push for military intervention before it was too late.

As you can see, this is not an essay or article but a rough letter pointing out that you cannot make swiping statements as you do. I’m planning to continue reading Socialist Standard because it’s worth it.

Nigel de Vere, 

Bromley

Reply:

We take your point that we should not have referred to Mexico as being in Central America. We can assure you that it was an honest mistake – based on a common practice that we should no doubt have questioned – but it was in no way an attempt to belittle any particular country or part of the world.

However, while we apologise for that, we can find no reason to apologise for references in past issues of the Socialist Standard with regard to political events and developments in the Spanish and Portuguese speaking parts of the American continents which you have found offensive. You mention Guzman in Peru, AMLO in Mexico, Lula in Brazil and, in particular, Allende in Chile, and you object to our not considering such people or movements as ‘Marxist’. You are particularly critical of the views we have expressed about Allende’s Chile. While we acknowledge and appreciate your personal opposition to the post-Allende Chilean dictatorship which led to your imprisonment and to your leaving your home country, we cannot accept that the reforms brought in by the Allende government, beneficial as they may have been for many Chileans, had anything to do with Marxism or socialism as we define those terms. They clearly had a lot to do with ‘reformism’, i.e. the attempt by ‘progressive’ governments to run the capitalist system in a more liveable, and often less oppressive, way for workers. And we do not question that this brought with it ‘advances and hopes for most Chileans’. But the kind of reforms you mention, for example nationalisation of banks and industry, in no way amount to the moneyless wageless society without buying and selling based on economic equality and free access for all to all goods and services, which is the basis of Marx’s prescription for a socialist form of society.

Of course nothing prevents those advocating or practising policies of reform from calling themselves Marxist or socialist (or others referring to them in that way, often pejoratively), but our contention is that what they represent is a particular way of running the capitalist system, not a fundamental transformation of that system, which is currently dominant in various forms in all countries. We would contend that nothing in Allende’s policies or practises (though they sadly cost him his life) represented or even pointed the way forward to the wholly democratic society of common ownership and voluntary association that is truly worthy of the name ‘Marxist’ or socialist.

Having outlined our disagreement with you on this point, we nevertheless consider it a credit to your open-mindedness that you say that you will continue to read our journal because ‘it’s worth it’. Needless to say that is something on which we do agree with you.

Editorial Committee.

Bird’s Eye View: War without end (2022)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

War without end

One hundred years after the war to end all wars (1914-18) started, Russia’s current war against Ukraine began. February’s major escalation has made it the largest war in Europe since the end of WW2. The mass exodus of millions of children, women, and men too old to be conscripted is similarly record breaking. In 1914 we were told that German ‘militarism’ had to be rebuffed and ‘plucky little Belgium’ supported. Today we are told by the US Ambassador to UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, that ‘There can be no fence-sitters in this crisis’ (pl.usembassy.gov, 21 February) and are encouraged to #StopRussia and #StandWithUkraine. But the truth is wars are always and only waged for largely commercial reasons – access to raw materials, markets, trade routes and strategic positions from which to defend them all. ‘Russia’s president knows exactly what he wants, and it’s not eastern Ukraine. His interests are all about oil and gas and supply routes. The rest is smoke and mirrors’ (Daily Beast, 1 March 2015, bit.ly/3M0FAmK). Socialists oppose all capitalist wars, so-called ‘progressive wars’ or struggles for national liberation. Workers have no country. ‘Russia’s 500 Super Rich Wealthier Than Poorest 99.8% ‘ (Moscow Times, 10 June 2021, bit.ly/3M0FAmK). Similarly, ‘in total, the top 100 wealthiest business people in Ukraine control around $44.5 billion, according to Forbes, which accounts for 27% of Ukrainian GDP in September, 2021’ (en.wikipedia.org, bit.ly/3wmpmiz). Indeed elsewhere, ‘since the onset of Covid-19 in early 2020, the combined wealth of the 650 American billionaires has increased by nearly $1 trillion’ (commondreams.org, 30 November 2020, bit.ly/3L4dypj). The overwhelming non-owning majority, those who do the fighting and the dying, effectively get nothing. Would any worker, apprised of this, raise even a paintball gun? Hence the need for Wilfred Owen’s ‘old lie’: ‘it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’.

Class war

‘Would you stay and fight or leave the country? A bare majority, 55 percent, said they would stay and fight, while 38 percent said they would leave. “When confronted with a terrible hypothetical that would put them in the shoes of the Ukrainians, Americans say they would stand and fight rather than seek safety in another country,” said Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy. That’s one way to spin it, I guess. For me, the fact that just under half of my friends and neighbors would hypothetically abandon their homeland and all it stands for in the face of a foreign invader is less than encouraging. Many people don’t even seem to have hypothetical patriotism, let alone fortitude. Further disheartening is that the youngest Americans, those ages 18-34 and most physically capable, were even less likely to stay and fight. Only 45% said they would remain, while 48 percent would flee’ (postbulletin.com, 17 March,).

Less than encouaging? Disheartening? Not at all! We said at the ‘start of WW1 ‘…that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood’ (Socialist Standard, September 1914). Let the capitalists fight it out themselves:

‘SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is offering to fight Russian President Vladimir Putin, saying that if he wins, Putin will have to withdraw his military forces from Ukraine. “I hereby challenge Владимир Путин to single combat,” Musk tweeted, using Cyrillic in an apparent bid to make sure Putin understood him. He added, “Stakes are Україна” — Ukraine’ (dailymail.co.uk, 14 March).

War and want

War is completely unnecessary. We are living in a world that has enough resources to provide plenty for all, to eliminate world poverty, ignorance and disease, to provide an adequate and comfortable life for everyone on the planet. Yet under capitalism resources are squandered on armaments, of individual as well as of mass destruction, and, as now, in actual war. ‘Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Feb 27th proposal to ramp up defense expenditures by tens of billions of euros, spurred by Russia’s war on Ukraine, has defense officials in Berlin scrambling to identify spending opportunities that promise fast results, according to several company officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations’ (yahoo.com, 11 March).

Hypersonic

‘Russia unleashed nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles for the first time ever in combat, obliterating an ammunition depot in western Ukraine, its defense ministry said Saturday, as embattled President Volodymyr Zelensky made an urgent plea for “meaningful and fair” peace talks and the strategic port city of Mariupol was on the precipice of falling to the invaders’ (nypost.com, 19 March).

No WW4

‘”The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ (axios.com, March 14).

Rosa Luxemburg offered us a prescription in 1918: ‘During the four years of the imperialist slaughter of peoples, streams and rivers of blood have flowed. Now we must cherish every drop of this precious juice as in a crystal glass. The most sweeping revolutionary action and the most profound humanity—that is the true spirit of socialism. A whole world is to be changed. But every tear that is shed, when it could have been staunched, accuses us’ (marxists.architexturez.net).