Editorial: A Millennium To Win! (2000)

Editorial from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Well, at least the Millennium is over. All we have gained is the world’s third largest hangar (the Dome) and possibly the world’s largest hangover. But, looking through bleary eyes onto yet another morning of wage slavery, do we have anything to look forward to?

We do. Bear in mind that the “Millennium celebrations” are an attempt to dislocate our genuine hopes for the future onto a Dome and a date. Our excitement for the marvels of our technology and self-understanding, and the changes in life that they would permit, is transmuted into an expensive symbolisation of these wishes, and a hangover. But the fact that the “powers that be” felt the urgent need to provide the Dome, to pander to our aspirations even as they are denied in reality, is a clear and present demonstration that THOSE ASPIRATIONS ARE THERE. It might be worth going to see the Dome, just to see how scared the ruling class has become of our imaginations.

The new century sees a dichotomy in needs between the West and the Third World. Whereas, in world historical terms, the Third World is at about the point we were in 1900 at best, needing socialism as an end to hunger and material deprivation of all kinds, the Western working class now suffers from a more general malaise. The irony of starvation on the one hand, and obesity on the other, merely demonstrates that the root cause of all our problems lies not just in the deprivation of material goods, but the deprivation of human life in general. “I am nothing, and should be everything!” is Marx’s revolutionary slogan. The Left merely insisted that we were nothing, and should be fed.

So, where to from here? The answer is already emerging. The demise of the Left is allowing genuine revolutionary sentiment for the OVERTHROW OF CAPITALISM AS A SYSTEM to re-emerge: demonstrations over the last year, however imperfect, are signs of this. Our problem, if any, is that the world is overripe for change! But we need always to remember that when Marx referred to socialism as a NEW MODE of production, he meant a new mode of social life, not some equalisation of the capitalist work process. We have to realise that socialism is not utopia, but better than utopia, a different way of life revealed by the poverty of this one; invest our hearts and minds in this our real future; and fight for it single-mindedly. We have nothing to lose but our chains: we have a world to win.

Voice From The Back: Suicides rise as yen falls (1998)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Suicides rise as yen falls

As the Japanese economy enters recession with record unemployment since the war, the Japanese National Police Agency reports that suicides related to economic failure leaped by 18 percent last year. “Among the 3,556 who took their lives were three business partners who committed suicide together in a Tokyo hotel because of debt” Guardian, 13 June.

Controlling lives

Workfare, and welfare reform in general, offer a way to “break the culture of poverty and dependence” as Bill Clinton said during the 1992 presidential campaign. The idea is not merely to give those on welfare the dignity of earning their way. The hope is that once work is required, those not on welfare will avoid making the decisions – like having children out of wedlock – that might put them on welfare. New York Times, 5 May.

The alchemists

A fortnight ago, consultants acting for Monsanto, the biotechnology company whose recent merger will make it one of the largest corporations on earth, wrote to some of Africa’s most prominent academics and politicians, inviting them to sign a stirring public statement called “Let the Harvest Begin” . . . 

Monsanto’s suggestion that the continent’s freedom from famine depends upon its technologies would be hilarious if it were not so sinister. For Monsanto’s operations can now be numbered among the hungry continent’s greatest threats. The leading edge of Monsanto’s new work is not the production of food, but the production of feed; crops, in other words, grown not for humans but for animals. Last month the company announced a joint venture with the gigantic multinational grain merchant Cargill, to produce and market the seeds of genetically engineered fodder plants, particularly maize . . . Feed production is a growing component of Third World agriculture, supplying the ever-increasing consumption of meat, eggs and dairy produce in the First World. It is also one of the engines of African Famine, as land previously devoted to meeting local people’s necessities has been expropriated to supply the rich worlds luxuries … But this is the least of the ways in which Monsanto threatens Africa. Three months ago, American Delta and Pine Land Company patented a remarkable technology. Its “Terminator” gene ensures that the plants which contain it produce only sterile seeds: farmers planting these crops, in other words, will be forced to buy new stock every year. The new technology’s “primary targets” are, according to the original patent holders, “Second and Third World” countries. Four weeks ago, Monsanto bought the company… Monsanto, in other words, threatens to become the hunger merchant of the third millennium. Guardian, 4 June.

We all agree—don’t we

SAN DIEGO—A high-school sophomore who objects to reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is fighting for the right to sit quietly during the daily exercise in patriotism. “Until a few months ago, I stood and faced the flag with my hands over my heart and mechanically said the Pledge of Allegiance” Mary Kait Durkee said Friday. “But I thought about what the pledge actually meant and I disagreed with its message,” She said she doesn’t believe in God, thinks the US government is corrupt and that American society is too violent, so she shouldn’t have to show respect for a country that has so many problems. For the ensuing three weeks, Durkee sat silently in her seat during the pledge. On April 25, she was notified she had to serve four hours of detention and stand during the salute. Seattle Times, 3 I May.

With a whimper

With only 562 days to go until the millennium, fearful Americans are heading for the hills armed with the four Gs of survival – God, guns, gold and groceries . . Gary North, a Christian economist [!] and Y2K preacher, predicts martial law will be declared by 15 january 2000. “I think there will be a collapse of Western civilisation if the power grid goes down.” Observer, l4 june.

What took you so long?

Early this summer, I enjoyed a weekend at the Long Island home of a college friend – a highly intelligent and levelheaded Englishman whose career has taken him (by way of the upper echelons of the British Civil Service and a financial firm in the City of London) to a big Wall Street investment bank. There he has spent the last few years organizing stock issues and helping his firm milk the strongest market in living memory. Between dips in his pool, we discussed the economy and speculated about how long the current financial boom would last.To my surprise, he brought up Karl Marx. “The longer I spend on Wall Street, the more I am convinced that Marx was right” he said. I assumed he was joking. “There is a Nobel Prize waiting for the economist who resurrects Marx and puts it all together in a coherent model” he continued quite seriously. “I am absolutely convinced that Marx’s approach is the best way to look at capitalism.” New Yorker, October 1997.

Greasy Pole: Nothing New Millennium (2000)

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

If there was a sense of relief when the twenty-first century finally dawned it must have been partly because we would no longer have to endure those comments about society which unfailingly began with the words: “With the approach of the Millennium”. It seemed that any plans to do anything about the crisis in the NHS, or about making rail travel safer, or reducing pollution, were given an added urgency because we were approaching a new century. By the year 2000 we had to get it right.

This was irritating enough, especially as those making the comments were usually trying to impress us with the historical sweep of their intellects. It might have been hoped, that the first of January would have brought some relief, the nonsense would have stopped and we would be back in what is called normality, when social problems and deficiencies are described in more commonplace terms, without any added significance by the turning of another page in the calendar. But it was not to be. The celebratory fireworks had hardly died away when we were being assailed with comments which began with such words as “Now that we have entered the new Millennium . . .”

Perhaps enough people were deceived by this into thinking that the arbitrary process of passing from one year to another—or in this case one century to another—would really affect how the world is organised so that the new millennium would bring evidence that people were becoming safer, healthier, more optimistic about their future. If so, they were critically deluded. They would have forgotten that we are treated to the same kind of nonsense every December, when the first seconds of a new year are a time to assume that the next twelve months will be better than the last when reality encourages the conclusion that if anything they will be worse.

Harold Wilson 

We have been here before. As the year 1969 drew to a close the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made several references to the approach of the 1970s, rather in the same style as all those hopes and plans for the 21st century. The Seventies, Wilson assured us, would be better than the previous decade. He was, in fact, in difficulties because by then his government, which had been elected on the promise to oversee the blossoming of a great new age in which technological advance and planning would solve problems like poverty, disease and poor education, had been largely discredited. Such was the disillusion among his supporters that at one stage it was reasonable to speculate on whether the Labour Party was about to disintegrate. Wilson was desperate; by encouraging us to look forward to a new decade of the Seventies he hoped to deter us from inconvenient memories of the Sixties.

Well of course it did not work out as he had hoped. The Labour government staggered from one crisis to the next. Soon after the dawn of the new decade they were ousted from power, then a few years later returned in the wake of Heath’s calamitous three-day week. By then the much vaunted technological revolution had faded into the disreputable history of politicians’ promises. It was replaced by Labour’s assurance that its special relationship with the unions could smooth the way for their policy of forcing down our living standards which, by some mysterious process, would make us all better off. A few of the party’s more deranged supporters believed this but a lot of them did not—particularly those trade unionists who got fed up with the constant struggle to prevent their standards declining and defended themselves with the strikes which were later damned as the Winter of Discontent. This was followed by glorious spring for the Tories, as Thatcher romped into power, consigning the Labour Party and all its blather about a new decade into the wilderness for almost twenty years.

NHS

And what about now, with a New Labour government and its promises of a new society with new values, new priorities, new achievements . . .? Well there is nothing new about the NHS being in crisis, with nurses and doctors worked into the ground and sick people having to wait for months just to be examined so that they can be allowed onto another waiting list. There is nothing new about this deplorable experience existing at the same time as the rapid and effective treatment available to anyone who has the kind of money needed to pay for a team of the best doctors and a stay in the most exclusive hospitals. There is nothing new in the situation recently summarised by Alistair Darling, whose job as Social Services Secretary is supposed to make him responsible for alleviating poverty: “. . . a child can still be born poor, live poor, die poor”. He did not also say that a child in another class will be born rich, live rich, die rich.

What about other ministers? How are they grappling with the problems of the new millennium? Well Home Secretary Jack Straw plans to prove how tough he is on crime by threatening the legal rights of people charged with minor thefts while he protects the welfare of General Pinochet, who is not one of those youths washing your windscreen at traffic lights without you asking for it but a man who, as dictator of Chile, oversaw the murder of thousands of people there. Straw has bent the rules on admissible immigrants to allow Mike Tyson into this country although he should be disqualified by reason of his prison sentences for rape and assault. The reason for Straw’s generosity was clear: Tyson was due to fight here and if anything was allowed to stop that happening a lot of money would be lost, particularly by the fight promoters and the owners of the TV rights, who are such close buddies of Tony Blair.

Sheffield Wednesday

And as Straw was engaged in grabbing the headlines for his battles for his version of a better life for us all in the 21st century he was in competition with Sheffield’s Labour MPs, among them Education Secretary David Blunkett. Since his days as leader of Sheffield City Council Blunkett has undergone something of a change. He is no longer the challenging left-winger but a man who wants to hound out teachers who display any human frailty in overcoming the difficulties of teaching kids whose extreme impoverishment has extended into their conduct in the classroom. Blunkett has begun the new century by showing that his zeal for sacking people will not stop at schools. With the other MPs, he has demanded the head of the manager of Sheffield Wednesday because the team are stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. Blunkett is pitiless to the idea that, after all, some team has to come last and it does not seem to have occurred to him, that campaigning against a football manager is hardly revolutionary activity for an ex-firebrand of the left.

Nothing new about poverty then, nor about avoidable sickness. Nothing new about class-related degrees of access to wealth. Nothing new about capitalism and how it degrades and represses the very people who are useful and productive while it nurtures its parasites. Nothing new about Labour ministers trying to hide their impotence in smoke screens of deceit.

Ivan

Voice From The Back: Don’t tell it like it is (1999)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Don’t tell it like it is

Freedom of the press is regularly made a mockery of in Turkey, with the connivance of the authorities, states the journalists’ defence organisation, Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), in a report made public Thursday October 22. “Between January and August 1998 two journalists have been killed as a result of police operations, five have been tortured, fifty-eight attacked, menaced or harassed, and forty-five others have been interrogated” states the report, which adds: “At least six journalists were in prison for press offences at the end of September 1998.” Le Monde, 24 October.

Onward Christian brokers

Christian workers have always felt out of step reconciling their beliefs with the “hard sell” and “bonus envy” culture of the City. But now, according to the Centre for Marketplace Theology, an independent Christian initiative to bring the principles of God to the Square Mile, more Christian and non-Christian traders, bankers accountants and lawyers are looking for an alternative to the City’s prevailing ethos of greed . . . Malcolm Matson, an entrepreneur . . . says, “It only takes a couple of institutions to fail for people to start to take stock . . .” But Matson is well aware of the City’s resistance to a Christian message. In 1993 he was elected as a City alderman on a platform of Christian reform but was “blackballed” by the Corporation of London. “I ended up in the courts where I won a judgement to show they were acting illegally.” Independent on Sunday, 1 November.

Give that man a prize

“If food were distributed equally, the aggregate food availability would indeed determine how much food each person could get. But obviously this does not happen in any actual society. To decide whether a person will in fact be able to acquire enough food, we have to see what he owns, what he can produce with what he owns, what he can get in exchange, and so on. Starvation will result if a person is not able to establish ownership through these means. Starvation is a social outcome reflecting an entitlement failure. Availability of food is only one influence among many affecting that outcome.” So stated Amartya Sen in a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 21 March 1989, expressing a view that famines are not caused by a collapse in food production but by a collapse in (some) people’s legal access to food, whether through money to buy it or through direct access to land to grow it, which he had already expressed in his 1982 book Poverty and Deprivation: An Essay in Economic Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen has just been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. So, for once, the prize has gone to someone who has had something relevant—and—true—to say.

EU-phemism

It’s official! We no longer have any unemployed people in the EU. This, at least, appeared to be the conclusion of a commission report on employment rates published last week. According to the document, the Union’s 18 million jobless are not out of work, unemployed or even on the dole. They are merely “Unused labour stock”. So now you know. European Voice, 22-28 October 1998. Marx had a more expressive phrase: “industrial reserve army”.

Body snatchers

Kidnap is the big concern for large companies, says Paul Slaughter, managing director of London-based Task International, which provides bodyguards for big businesses. “Ransom demands worth millions of pounds go through Lloyd’s insurance market every year,” he says, “but it is not common knowledge because companies and insurers do not want to admit there is kidnap and extortion.” During the last two years there have been more than 12,500 known kidnaps. The average ransom demand is about $1 million (£600,000). Financial Mail on Sunday, 1 November 1998.

What a gas!

"The controversial police use of CS gas spray has come under fresh attack after a detective had a heart attack in training . . . The detective constable, who is in his early forties and has not been named was last night in a critical but stable condition in hospital after the incident on Thursday. He had voluntarily walked through a cloud of CS gas to experience its effects as part of a one-day training programme which all police are require to take". Mail on Sunday, 25 October 1998.

Fin de capitalisme?

Pre-millennial tension is not, as is commonly thought, a fear of the unknown. Instead, it’s a fear of the known—the dreadful, sinking suspicion that the alien invasion won’t come. This idea—that nothing will change—is as potent and horrendous as any fin de siècle fantasy of cultural implosion. It means we’ll be marooned in the nineties. Imagine that! An eternity of pointless, non-committal cultural air-kissing . . . We long for something to happen so badly that we don’t care what it is. Guardian, 19 November 1998.

Bugged by mill-ennui – From Dark Ages to Grey Ages (1999)

From the December 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the time you are reading this, you will know whether there has been a Wall Street Crash. If the world is lucky, the bubble won’t burst, it’ll just deflate. But nobody’s been feeling lucky for quite some time. Capitalism has made pessimists of us all.

For me, the summer of 1998 was the most depressing I can ever remember. While it was nothing but a polite winter in Britain, elsewhere, from Texas to China, countries seemed to be having catastrophic droughts, heatwaves or floods, suggesting that a huge environmental payback was imminent. An air of doom pervaded the rest of the year as people expected a global slump to follow the Asian crisis, while and India and Pakistan squaring off a nuclear war seemed more likely than ever. The news, and my friends, seemed full of foreboding about what fate had in store, and 1999 advanced upon us like footsteps ringing down a corridor on Death Row.

Many sensible people were inclined to believe the Nostradamus prediction that the world would end in 1999, but even the prospect of Armageddon could not shake us out of apathetic resignation. The end of the century. The end of a millennium. The end. Here, Britain has suffered a kind of bleak fin de siècle despair, a leaden “mill-ennui” that has produced the worst electoral voting figures on record and the most crushing sense of apathetic defeat in modern times.

In line with this mill-ennui, some people have been talking about the end of capitalism. What they mean is the end of civilisation, a dread abyss, the destruction of everything and the rule of chaos. On the 70th anniversary of the Wall Street Crash, analysts observed uncanny parallels between then and now, and a huge stock-market crash was expected by many. If history repeats itself, the consequences of global depression, unemployment and protectionism could lead to the rise of fascism, invasion and global war. The destruction incurred would then give capitalism a new lease of life for the 21st century. Faced with this doomsday scenario, prospects for socialism and even survival could look extremely bleak. In that sense one can only hope the optimists of a “managed downturn” know what they’re talking about. But when they assure us that “the fundamentals are sound”, J K Galbraith for one experiences “a slight feeling of unease” (Money Programme, BBC2, 24 October).

The real Third Way
It’s bad enough already for the people in eastern Europe. Under the old system it was secret police, propaganda and bread queues. Now it’s mafia, unemployment and bread queues. The Albanians thought pyramid schemes were what capitalism was all about, and lost everything to the first swindlers that chanced through their area. Many east Europeans, judging by the phoenix-like rise of the old “communist” parties, are contemplating a return to square one, the devil they know, but that prospect appals. The rest of them blanch at rebuilding Lenin’s statues, and must really be looking for a Third Way, never mind Tony Blur’s idiotic soundbites.

That there really is a “Third Way” of doing things is what this journal, and this organisation, are in existence to argue. The picture we represent of a peaceful, co-operative human culture based on a society of abundant resources is pleasant and reasonable but, unfortunately, so far removed from the selective reality of the news bulletins that people, by and large, just don’t believe it’s possible. For many people it’s not a matter of reasoning, it’s a matter of faith, and people don’t have any faith in themselves, let alone each other. According to the sociologists, all the old idols, the so-called “grand paradigms” of Fascism, Sovietism and Capitalism, have been historically discredited, but they continue to prowl in the dark, like the Undead.

Nobody feels liberated, just lost. Many will embark on a faddish search for “alternatives”, racing frantically but uncritically round a large dreary circle of other people’s abandoned cults until they arrive back where they started. For those with money, comfort-buying consumerism is all that’s left. The media advertising cry has become a ceaseless scream in our ears. Everybody’s claim seems equally just. We don’t know who to believe or what to believe in, baffled by the multiplicity of values and viewpoints in this inert postmodernist swamp we call a culture.

The only common hard ground in this swamp appears to be the prejudice that human nature is basically bad, or at best unreliable. It follows from this that any society made up of humans must be bad, or at best unreliable. Anything else is a Utopia. The future will be just more of the same, or worse. If Nostradamus had predicted that in 1999 we’d all have millennial misery then he’d have got one right at least. Thanks partly to an odd love affair that we humans have with wailing Cassandras who predict dire things, but thanks mainly to ourselves for doing those dire things anyway, we arrive at this most significant date believing that the sky is about to fall on our heads and there’s nothing we can do about it except smile wanly and pass the anti-depressants.

Meanwhile politicians have been acting out a kind of danse macabre with a flaming Earth as their stage. None of them appear to be doing anything apart from striking postures and smiling with photogenic insouciance. In Britain, our capable trendy leader Tony is revealed as Thatcher’s spawn, grinding an already prostrate working class under his designer boot, appearing on platforms with former Tory grandees like Kenneth Clarke and Michael Heseltine, and while airily informing Scottish factory workers that he can’t save their jobs or stop the recession, energetically pretends to be fascinated by the urgent needs of constitutional reform.

This doom and gloom is more than the usual force-of-habit. Owing to an accident of calendars, the West is arguably in an especially reflective mood, contemplating a moment which occurs only once in a thousand years, the dog days of a millennium which started off in the Dark Ages and has ended up, many think, back there. If there is ever a time when society is going to review its history, its future and the meaning of it all it is likely to be at a time like this. But if people have become millennial about political realities for a while, it hasn’t inspired them with revolution, just revulsion. Religion may profit from this, since it feeds on despair like flies feed on cowshit. Fascism, the supposedly dead paradigm, is crawling from its grave once more to prey on the terrified but tethered scapegoats.

Reasons to be cheerful 
But to predict that the 21st century will be an exact replay of the 20th is to take no account of how things have changed in the interim. Without being pollyannas, we can easily find reasons to be more cheerful about the 21st Century than this. You only have to look at how far humanity has come this century in the matter of science and technology. Victorian writers thought of their steam-driven world as a paradise of technology and wrote paeans of praise to this new empire of reason, or else they pointedly lyricised about flowers just to be awkward, but they would have been awed into silence by the discoveries of the following hundred years.

From balloons to space stations, from the Penny Black to the Internet, the speed of change is as startling as it is unprecedented. Our general history looks like a bomb exploding. When this millennium began we were still in the Iron Age. In the thousand years before that, practically the only invention of significance in Europe was the stirrup, a device which turned the cavalry horse into the first tank. But then began a long slow accumulation of critical mass, followed by an accelerated expansion of development so powerful that its effects can now be detected in days and weeks and no longer in decades and centuries. It would be ludicrous to suppose that in the future this acceleration will not continue, just as the fragments of an exploding grenade do not stop suddenly in mid-air and fall to the ground.

Whether we know anything more as people than we used to is debatable. Ignorance is still rife, despite our literacy and sophistication. Our culture has certainly not kept pace with our discoveries. But it is having to change, whether people like it or not. We aren’t cowed by the priests like we used to be. Science made fools of them. We aren’t impressed by politicians any more. They made fools of themselves, and the press did the rest. Few believe in the Queen, or the Pope, as being anything but empty forms left over from bygone times. The rich are not revered, although their wealth is. Even the police are represented in popular TV shows as routinely criminal and corrupt.

Little by little, the ideology that underpins capitalism is being stripped of its pretensions, exposed and embarrassed by the ever increasing intensity of the public glare. The 21st century begins with the advantages of hindsight and experience the 20th never had. The resistance to fascism is huge. Capitalism’s own fear of global war is bigger still. The Internet is changing the face of popular culture and ideology. We are already in the midst of a social revolution that makes a lasting return to parochialism ever less probable. Now, in the face of that revolution, people are starting to describe the 20th century as the Grey Ages.

Post-modernism is the trendy name for nihilism, a belief in nothing, and nihilism is a state of ideological bereavement. Workers have been orphaned by the paternalistic state which now, clearly, cares nothing for them. Yet bereavement is merely a phase, and humans will recover. Post-modernism will pass. History cannot stand still. Lust for life and hunger for truth will return, and the war of ideologies will become more savage and deadly. But whereas ideologies in the past have relied on the severe restriction of information, ideas in the future will have to fight on more even ground and more on their merits.

Unable to prevent good ideas penetrating society, the owning class will face a massacre of its mythology and a wholesale change in the consciousness of the worker. Unless the rich can find a way to prevent it, the “wired” society of the future will open the way towards revolution.

Paddy Shannon

Next month: beginning of a three-part series on the Impact of the Internet.