Voice From The Back: Recruiting Sergeant (2007)

The Voice From The Back Column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recruiting Sergeant

“Bored with life on his family’s South Carolina horse farm, Willard McCormick decided that military service was the right plan for his future. And when the Army dangled its new, $20,000 recruiting bonus in front of him, the decision got a lot easier. ‘I wasn’t going to go right away, but I heard about the bonus and decided to jump on it,’ McCormick, 19, said a couple of days after signing up. … Since the bonus was unveiled in July, more than 6,200 recruits have signed up to begin basic training before Oct. 1, a move that boosts end-of-fiscal year recruiting numbers, Army officials said. ‘People are calling here saying $20,000 is more than they’ve made in the past two years,’ said Staff Sgt. Brent Feltner, 27, commander of a strip-mall recruiting station in this central South Carolina town . . .The Army’s offer stands out to many in a state where the unemployment level is fourth highest in the country, at 5.9 percent in July, up from 5.5 percent in June. It was 6.2 percent in July a year ago.” (Yahoo News, 1 September) Poverty is still capitalism’s most successful recruiting agent.

Ain’t Science Wonderful? 

“Benefit claimants and job seekers could be forced to take lie detector tests as early as next year after an early review of a pilot scheme exposed 126 benefit cheats in just three months, saving one local authority £110,000 . . . The technology is being tested on people claiming housing or council tax benefit but will be extended at Harrow Job centre for other benefits this year . . . Experts in America, where the most comprehensive scrutiny of the technology has taken place, warn that the technology is far from failsafe. David Ashe, chief deputy of the Virginia Board for Professional and Occupational Regulation, said, ‘The experience of being tested, or of claiming a benefit and being told that your voice is being checked for lies, is inherently stressful. Lie detector tests have a tendency to pass people for whom deception is a way of life and fail those who are scrupulously honest.’” (Observer, 2 September) We wonder if it would be possible to ask members of the capitalist class if they think they deserve their immense wealth while others starve, but what would be the point as the expert said there is a tendency to pass those “for whom deception is a way of life”.

Bitter Medicine

A recent review of the business world and ethics was somewhat critical of the pharmaceutical industry. “There has been a number of scandals including the disastrous ‘Elephant Men’ trial for new drug TGN 1412, which caused massive immune reactions in six healthy volunteers. TeGenero, the firm that developed the drug, went bust after the catastrophe. GlaxoSmithKline has been embroiled in a scandal over anti-depressant Seroxat: it has been accused of hiding critical data showing the drug is linked to suicide in teenagers. GSK has also seen millions of sales wiped out after its Avandia diabetes treatment was linked to increased risk of heart attack and strokes.” (Observer, 2 September) The truth is of course that capitalist business practice has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with profits.

Class Divided Britain

Anyone with any doubts about the class division in Britain today should look at the following. “Britain may appear to be a richer country than a decade ago but the gap between the rich and poor has reached levels not seen for more than 40 years. The highest earners are being dubbed ‘the new Victorians’ as they take an ever-greater slice of the wealth pie, leaving mere employees and white-collar workers sharing the crumbs. Government statistics show that the richest 10 per cent of the population control more than half the wealth (53 per cent) of the country, with the 1 per cent jet-set elite controlling no less than 21 per cent.” (Independent, 2 September)

Expert Wants Revolution

“A revolution of society on a scale never witnessed in peacetime is needed if climate change is to be tackled successfully, the head of a major business grouping has warned. Bjorn Stigson, the head of the Geneva-based World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), predicted governments would be unable to reach agreement on a framework for reducing carbon emissions at either a US-sponsored meeting in Washington later this month or at a United Nations climate summit in Indonesia in December.” (Financial Times, 7 September) Mr Stigson may be on to something important here. Because capitalism pollutes and destroys the planet maybe we need a revolution – a complete transformation of society.

Debt-Laden Workers

Behind all the advertiser’s glib spiels about the consumer satisfaction of buy, buy, buy lurks the nasty reality that many workers find themselves in a nightmare of debt. “Record numbers are visiting the Citizens Advice Bureau because their finances have spiralled out of control. Debt is the most common reason for attending a CAB, overtaking benefit problems. The charity said it had seen a 20 per cent rise in those struggling with borrowing, handling 1.7 million cases last year. Debt accounts for one in three of inquiries at the CAB, with advisers in England and Wales dealing with more than 6,6000 such problems every working day.” (Daily Telegraph, 12 September)

Loads Of Money

Millions of workers survive on less than $5 a day. What a contrast with these parasites: “What price exclusivity? If you ask Lamborghini, one million euros ($1.4 million) should do it — before tax, of course. In a bid to add more prestige to what it already has, the Italian maker of super luxury sports car unveiled the Reventon at Frankfurt’s international auto-show, a very limited edition car that looks more like an arrow than anything on four wheels. With the six-figure price tag, it is the most expensive car that it has ever built. Needless to say, Lamborghini has already sold the 20 cars that it plans to build. ‘As soon as the word got out, we sold out in four days,’ Chief Executive Stephan Winkelmann told Reuters, adding that they could have easily sold another 20.” (Yahoo News, 12 September)

Editorial: Moral panic in the U.K. (2007)

Editorial from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

This summer has seen a moral panic grip the UK media. The death in Liverpool of Rhys Jones, the 11-year old boy killed by a bullet from a teenage gang was preceded by a number of gang-related murders, and resulted in much circulation-driven hyperbole about “what sort of society we live in”.

Why people behave the way they do is of course a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject. World socialists don’t lay claim to any specialist understanding in this respect, suffice to say that how people behave is usually down to what they have learnt, be that formally or informally. This learning may be psychological (e.g. secure emotional attachment and nurturing with a parent in the first few years of life), or it may be material, in terms of (for example) the physical environment, or nutrition during childhood.

Much has been made of the fact that gang-members dripping with “bling” (an average teenager on the street may wear close to one thousand pounds-worth of digital accessories) don’t appear to fit the traditional image of impoverished and desperate members of the working class.

However, in a world that increasingly only looks at the price tag, the outward display of some sort of wealth masks perhaps a desperate cry for some sort of recognition. For the market system a pair of training shoes accords status and belonging. This skewed perspective is a measure of just how warped capitalism is. But in any case, world socialists have never just viewed poverty as being about the absence of things, such as cars or money. Increasingly in the older capitalist nations at least, poverty may owe more to an absence of less concrete – but no less critical – human needs such as self-esteem, a sense of belonging or a purposeful, creative and productive life.

It is likely then, that membership of a gang provides its members with some of the things that this society denies them outright. However warped or misplaced, a gang may provide some sort of shared experience and common purpose, a little excitement and a lot of status. After all, the apparent cause of most of these gang murders is not usually down to drug-related battles, but appears to be summed up in one word: respect.

The market system allows us only limited access to wealth. At the same time it bombards us with images and messages of what we could be having. It pressures us into valuing ourselves against everyone else, then offers an arbitrary set of rules to be followed to access wealth.

Certainly it would be churlish to ignore that a lot of the gangs are commercially-focussed, profit-driven drugs operations. According to Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, head of the specialist crime directorate, this is an expanding economy. “It is a huge growth industry and it has not peaked. The challenge is when you do a big operation there are people, gangs, ready to replace and replace and replace”.

Predictably, less media attention was given to the death – only a few weeks after the killing of Rhys Jones – of 18-year old Ben Ford, who was the youngest soldier to die in Afghanistan. Perhaps if we want to genuinely try and understand what sort of society we are bringing our children into we could start by asking why a youth with a gun in his hand defending “his” turf in Moss Side or Brixton is viewed so very differently from the uniformed youth in Afghanistan or Iraq with an Army issue rifle.

Letter: Socialist MPs and reforms (2007)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors

I was interested by Steve Shannon’s letter on reformism and the editorial reply in the September Socialist Standard. I’ve believed for some time that the Party’s principled opposition to reformism is one of its truly distinctive features. Search long enough and you’ll find other political organisations which mouth off once a decade about free access or the abolition of the wages system, but you’ll search a lot longer before you find any which never align themselves with some attempt to rearrange capitalism.

This opposition to reformism is well grounded because reforms are by their nature divisive and therefore work against the vital condition of working class unity. For example, within capitalism, raising miners’ pay will be good for miners but not necessarily for other workers. The only interest guaranteed to be shared by all is an interest in ending their position as wage slaves. Voting for reforms which ‘could benefit the working class as a whole’ would be an empty task if this means benefiting all members. (And what else could it mean?) That leaves the problem pinpointed by Steve Shannon, and reference to the party’s position being ‘long-established’ is no answer.

But there is a way out of this. The editors rightly speak of socialist ‘delegates’ facing the problem of whether to vote for reforms. Who decides how they vote? Not them, but the membership of the Socialist Party. This would have two advantages. It would act as a check on whether the membership had reached the political maturity necessary for bringing about a socialist society. (If they vote for reforms they haven’t.) It would also begin the important process of allowing the electors, and not those they have elected, to have control over what happens.

Still, no hurry in resolving these issues. Looks like there won’t be a minority of socialists in parliament any time soon.

Keith Graham (by email)

Reply:

We can’t accept that all “reforms are by their nature divisive”. Many may indeed benefit just a section of the working class, but surely a reform removing restrictions on free speech or the freedom to organise would benefit all workers (and the socialist movement too)?

By the way, we define a reform as a politically-implemented measure and so don’t include wage increases as a “reform”, or wages struggles as “reformist”, even if these are still changes within capitalism. We are all in favour of workers struggling to get the best deal they can for the sale of their labour power to employers, even though we don’t of course seek support on this basis either. 

Editors.

Cooking the Books: Why they like a bit of inflation (2007)

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

“We have succeeded in tackling inflation”, declared Gordon Brown (Times, 31 August). Why, then, are prices still rising?

These days “inflation” has come to be another word for “rising prices” whereas, originally and logically, the two were not the same: a rise in the general price level was the effect of an inflation (over-issue) of the currency, not inflation as such.

In any event, the original question – why, if inflation has been tackled, are prices still rising? – remains valid. The answer is that when Brown speaks of inflation being “tackled” he doesn’t mean that it has been ended, but merely that it has been brought under control. Governments everywhere pursue a policy of controlled inflation, over-issuing the currency by an amount calculated to lead only to a given modest rise in prices. In Britain the target the Bank of England has been set is to keep the rise in the general price level to 2 percent a year.

But why this policy? Writing in the Financial Times Magazine (25/26 September) Tom Harford suggested:

“One reason is that relative prices need to change frequently to reflect changes in the economy: this year, British peas will be expensive because the crop was ruined by floods. But clothes have been getting cheaper for years, thanks to low-cost manufacturers in China. And yet the evidence suggests that it is usually easier to raise nominal prices than to lower them. So a little bit of inflation which ensures the typical price change is up rather than down, means that these relative prices adjustments can happen more quickly and easily”.

This doesn’t sound all that plausible as why is it easier to raise rather than lower the price of an individual product? It is true that, with no inflation and so a stable price level, price reductions would be more frequent as the price of most manufactured goods would tend to fall due to increasing productivity.

It is not only the price of clothes that has fallen in recent years. So has that of electronic goods, but the manufacturers have had no difficulty in doing this; in fact being able to reduce their prices gives them an edge over their competitors. And a stable price level would eliminate many accounting problems.

But this is to forget the working class and the effect on what they have to sell – their working skills – and its price (wages and salaries). With a stable price level and increasing productivity, the cost of living – the main element in wages and salaries – would tend to fall. So, therefore, would money wages.

Keynes, the discredited 1930s economist, argued that

“a movement by employers to revise money-wages downward will be much more strongly resisted than a gradual and automatic lowering of real wages as a result of rising prices” (General Theory, chapter 19).

Since it is the labour of wage and salary workers that is the source of capitalist profit, there is a permanent tendency for employers to seek to restrain wages. If workers can be tricked into not resisting these downward pressures as much if they take the form of other prices rising faster than wages, that means more for profits. An added bonus is that, despite a rising price level being a deliberate government policy, workers can be blamed for it for being greedy and asking for too big wage increases.

Northern Clay (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Currency cranks claim – echoed in some badly edited economics textbooks – that banks have the power to “create credit” by a mere “stroke of a pen”: that if someone deposits, say, £100 in a bank, then the bank can lend out many times this amount, effectively creating new purchasing power at will. But this is not the case – banks are essentially financial intermediaries making a profit from borrowing money (typically from depositors) and then lending it out at a higher rate of interest to others; they do not create something effectively out of thin air.

This is obvious in the case of other financial institutions such as a building society or a credit union. A building society accepts deposits from savers, which is lends out to others to buy a house (originally it was only to its members, the savers, a principle still maintained in credit unions). Without these deposits they cannot function – building societies generally make a surplus (which in theory belongs to their members) by charging house-buyers a higher rate of interest than they pay their depositors. Which is why when interest rates go up and they have to pay more to depositors, they also have to charge house-buyers more and mortgage rates go up too.

Northern Rock, currently the focus of one of the most serious financial debacles in modern British history, used to be a building society, but in 1997 they “demutualised” and became a bank that is listed on the London Stock Exchange. From then on the surplus it made from charging borrowers more than it paid depositors became “profit” which belonged to its shareholders and the explicit aim became to maximise this. This essentially legal change did not change its economic function as a financial intermediary nor free it from the financial limitations common to other banks – and it certainly didn’t acquire any right to create credit by the stroke of a pen. But it did allow it access to a wider range of sources from which to obtain money to lend. Instead of being restricted to savers it could now borrow money on the “money market” where short term debts that can easily be converted into cash are traded. It was still a financial intermediary borrowing at one rate and lending at a higher one, only it now had a wider range of sources to borrow from.

Northern Rock seems to have based its entire banking strategy on taking advantage of the relatively low rates of interest available on the money market in recent years. The papers are reporting that while its loans and assets are worth £113 billion, only £24 billion of this has been covered by depositors. The rest – over three-quarters – has come from money borrowed on the money market.

This use of the money markets to underpin long-term lending such as for mortgage loans is what is sometimes known as ‘borrowing short and lending long’, and is traditionally considered bad banking practice. Although all banks have done it at the margins of their operations to smooth-over short-term fluctuations in deposits and loans, it is only in comparatively recent times that some banks have developed entire strategies based around it and Northern Rock appears to be one of the more extreme examples of it.

The main problem that has now developed is that since the beginning of August the money market, like other financial markets, has been in turmoil. Banks and other financial institutions have been reluctant to lend money on it because of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, so institutions such as Northern Rock who have been relying on it to borrow cheaply have been in trouble. So much trouble in the case of Northern Rock, that it has had to go cap in hand to the Bank of England, which, as the “lender of last resort” to banks has loaned them the money – or rather opened a credit line for them – so that the bank can survive its current problems. The Bank of England is reportedly charging them an interest rate at around one percentage point above the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (‘Libor’, the rate at which the banks lend to one another). This amounts to what has been described as a ‘penal’ rate of around 8 per cent in total.

Indeed, Northern Rock is probably not just worried about its depositors withdrawing their money (and at the time of writing the government has taken the unusual step of guaranteeing all deposits to stop the ‘bank run’ that had been developing across the country). The underlying issue is more about its inability to continue borrowing money from the money market at a lowish rate of interest – since in many respects it is from the difference between this rate and the rate it charges house-buyers that it makes its profit. Already it is forecasting lower profits for the current year and because its share price has fallen – due to some of its shareholders bailing out too – it is liable to be taken over by some rival. In fact, this is what the papers are predicting and it is probably the only way to save it now that its credibility has been shattered.

One thing that won’t happen – because it can’t – is that Northern Rock’s beleaguered chief executive, Adam Applegarth, will take out his pen and simply create the missing credit. Indeed, what has happened to Northern Rock is further proof that banks cannot create multiples of credit from a given deposit base. If they could do this, Northern Rock would never have had to go cap in hand to the money markets to finance its lending operations in the first place.

Poverty and famines (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why do famines occur? Because there’s not enough food or because people haven’t enough money to buy it?

To many people famines are caused by not enough food being available. This seems reasonable enough: why would people have to starve if there was enough food to feed them? It’s a good question, but it assumes that today food is produced to feed people whereas in fact this is not the case. It should be, but it isn’t. And it isn’t, because we are living in a capitalist society where food is not produced simply to satisfy people’s need for it but – like everything else – to be sold on a market with a view to making a profit. Food is a commodity which, like all commodities, can only be acquired if you have money (or something else) to exchange for it. If you don’t, then you starve. It’s as simple as that.

In 1981 the International Labour Organisation in Geneva published a study on famines by Amartya Sen, an Indian academic working in England, entitled Poverty and Famines. An Essay in Entitlement and Deprivation. Sen studied five famines: the Great Bengal famine of 1943, the Ethiopian famines of 1973 and 1974, the Bangladesh famine of 1974, and the Sahel famines of the 1970s.

His conclusion was that the widespread “food availability decline” theory of famines was mistaken. In its stead he proposed that they should be explained on the basis of a failure or a decline in some people’s “entitlement” to food, i.e., in the end, on their not being able to acquire enough money to buy it or enough of it:

“Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat”. (p. 1, his emphasis).

“Starvation . . . is a function of entitlements and not of food availability as such” (p. 7).

Sen went on to win the so-called 1998  Nobel Prize for Economics (actually a prize awarded by the Bank of Sweden, not the Nobel Prize Committee) for  his work on famines, welfare economics and political liberalism.

Socialists recognised that Sen, in saying that famines were not caused by there not being enough food or by there being too many people, was saying something very near to what we had always said. Modern-day famines arose in the  context of the capitalist profit system under which people had to buy what they needed to live and to do this they had to have first acquired money, either by selling their ability to work for a wage or a salary or by growing and selling some cash crop. When, for whatever reason, some people find themselves unable to acquire money, they would not be able to acquire food. If this was widespread, as periodically happened in different parts of the world, then there would be a “famine”, irrespective not only of the capacity to produce enough food but even in the presence of adequate supplies of food.

Sen, however, was not a socialist, but a left liberal supporter of the capitalist market economy. Hence his solution was not to abolish a system where people’s “entitlement” to food (and everything else) depended on their having money; it was to increase such entitlements by arranging for them to have more money or at least a regular supply of money. He wanted to reform the money system not abolish it.

Socialists have no quarrel with Sen’s definition of famine, but they do challenge his definition of “poverty”. Sen defines poverty in terms of lack of access to means of consumption, to not having enough to live at some minimum level of nutrition or comfort or decency. This means that he and others who think like him have to try to fix what this minimum level is. Inevitably, the result is a more or less arbitrary definition that only applies to a minority of the population; most people not being considered poor because their income is above this low level. The “poor”, in other words, are defined in such a way that they will only ever be a minority of the population. The Christian bible may say that “the poor ye shall always have with you” – but, according to Sen and other economists, this will be only as a minority.

Marxists define poverty in terms of lack of access to means of production.  Anybody in this position is obliged to obtain their living by selling the only thing they do possess – their ability to work – to some employer. They are poor in terms of not owning means of production. Some, indeed most, may be able to obtain a monetary income above the “poverty line” defined by economists such as Sen but, being deprived of means of production, they still suffer from poverty.

It is true that, under capitalism, where “entitlement” to food, clothing, housing, etc depends on having money, there will always be some people who (through, illness, incapacity, old age, etc) can’t sell their ability to work or, because of its low quality, can’t sell it for a high enough price to cover their basic needs and so, without hand-outs from the State, would be destitute. This – destitution – is the proper term to describe their situation, not “poverty”. In the Victorian England of Marx’s day it was called “pauperism”. It is true that only a minority of the working class find themselves in this situation. But this does not mean that the rest — those in regular work — cannot be described as suffering from poverty, deprivation. In the wider, Marxian sense, if you don’t own sufficient means of production to live without having to work to obtain money then you are deprived, or poor. Which is the situation of the vast majority of people under capitalism.

As to solutions, as a self-confessed left-wing Keynesian and “welfare economist”, Sen sees the solution to “poverty and famines” as lying in increasing the “entitlement” of “the poor” by giving them or allowing them to acquire more money. It is not difficult show why, on theoretical grounds, this would not and could not work as it goes against the whole logic of the capitalist system.

Capitalism operates by extracting surplus value — which the employing capitalist hopes to turn into money — from the working class. The monetary expression of surplus value — profit — is the lifeblood of capitalism and any attempt to tax it away risks clogging up the whole economic mechanism, thereby provoking an economic slump. Attempts to transfer money from the rich to the poor by various left-wing governments (whether Labour, Social Democratic or “Communist”) have always failed, with the leftwing government either being voted out of office or accommodating itself to having to give priority to profit-making over meeting people’s needs. The capitalist system simply cannot be made to work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary workers. It runs on profits – extracted from the working class – and can only ever work in the interest of the profit-taking, capitalist class. The sort of reformism advocated by Sen is futile.

Under capitalism, the working class are not entitled to – have no “right” to – anything. They are only allowed to work if some employer thinks they can make a profit out of selling what they produce and, if unable to work, are only maintained by the State (out of the surplus value produced by the working class) at a level sufficient to stop them rioting or turning to crime. The solution lies not in trying to transfer money from the rich to the poor but in abolishing the money system altogether on the basis of the common ownership by the whole people of the means of production.

This would end the poverty of the working class as well as the destitution of the minority dependent, if lucky, on State hand-outs or charity. “Entitlement” to food and all the rest would not then depend on having a source of money, but simply on being human, a member of society. Everybody, not matter how little they might be able to contribute, would still be entitled to live and live as well as society can afford. In other words, “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”. Common ownership not class ownership. Production solely for use not production for profit. That is the only way to abolish “poverty and famines” from the face of the Earth for ever.

Adam Buick

Cooking the Books: Back to the Iron Age? (2007)

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

“They eat food from skips, wear discarded clothes and want to topple capitalism”, wrote Brian O’Connell in an article headed “Masters of free lunch” in the Irish Times  (4 September). He was describing the activities of a group of people who call themselves “freegans” – “a combination of the words free and vegan, whose aim is to live as non-commercially as possible”. They “don’t believe in working for money”, nor in paying for the things they need to live.

Socialists don’t either, but in the context of a society based on the common ownership of the means of life where there’d be no need for money or buying and selling, not as a lifestyle choice within capitalism. No doubt it is theoretically possible to live within capitalism without using money, but to what end? Not even 5 percent of the population (and that’s probably an exaggeration), let alone a majority, could live like that. Not that skip diving for food and other things needed to survive is ever likely to appeal to more than a tiny handful of people.

So, we are talking about an inevitably very marginal activity, and one that depends on most other people working for wages and producing the wealth of society, including the thrown-away products the freegans gather and consume. As everything produced under capitalism is the result of exploitation, they are carrying to its logical extreme the practice of those who refrain from buying certain products on ethical grounds. They see themselves as the ultimate “ethical consumers”, even if they are doing through voluntary choice what a number of others are obliged to do through economic necessity.

But how is such a lifestyle going to “topple capitalism”? We can’t deny that they are against capitalism or what one of them is quoted as calling “a profit-driven commodities economy”. The trouble is that that’s not all they are against. They also denounce “industrialism” and “globalism”. They want to renounce the real and potential benefits of industrial production and go back to living a simple agricultural life with an Iron Age technology but without using animals.

According to O’Connell:

“Freeganism has its roots in traditional activities such as gleaning, or historical collectives such as the Diggers, a group of agrarian communists who flourished in mid-17th-century England . . . [T]he first official use of the word ‘freegan’ appeared in 2000 and began to gain popularity through a website, Freegan.info, set up in New York by Adam Weissman and Wendy Sher in 2003”.

Hang on a minute! Website? Doesn’t that assume the existence of “industrialism” and in fact a highly developed technology? And is not the internet one of the more prominent aspects of “globalism”?

The freegans are right, however, to want to recreate the social relationships of early human society, which were co-operative and sharing and based on giving and taking rather than buying and selling. Socialists want this too, but we say this can be done without having to renounce the advances in sanitation, medicine and comfort that modern science and technology have brought, including the ability to find ecologically-acceptable techniques of energy generation and industrial production. We want to restore the original common ownership of the Earth’s resources – for the Earth to become, as the Diggers put it, “a common Treasury for All” –  and the social relationships that went with it, while retaining both industrialism and globalism.

Life of Cobbett (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Life and Adventures of William Cobbett’. By Richard Ingrams. (Harper Perennial £8.99)

As a former editor of Private Eye, Richard Ingrams knows a thing or two about being sued for libel and so is well-placed to write a biography of William Cobbett. Cobbett (1763–1835) was a journalist and political agitator. His first brush with the law came when, after a spell in the army, he tried to expose corruption among the officers in his regiment. In response, he was effectively threatened with being tried for treason and so fled to France and then the US. The Establishment were able to use comparable threats against Cobbett and others many times in order to persecute and clamp down on ‘radicals’.

After returning to Britain, Cobbett became an advocate of political, especially parliamentary, reform, a cause he pushed in his remarkable paper the Political Register. In 1810 he was charged with criminal libel following articles he had printed about an alleged army mutiny. It’s astonishing to learn that it was no defence to such a charge to show the truth of what had been written. Cobbett was sentenced to two years in prison.

In 1817 he upped sticks to America again, following the suspension of habeas corpus and worries for his safety. He came back after two years and in 1820 stood as a parliamentary candidate for Coventry in the general election that followed the death of George III. He lost, unsurprisingly given the smear campaign against him and the physical intimidation of potential voters for him.

Cobbett had started his working life as an unpaid labourer on his father’s farm. In 1830 widespread rural hunger led to rick-burning and other actions, in the so-called Swing riots. Cobbett was accused of stirring up the unrest and charged with seditious libel, but this time the jury could not agree and he was acquitted. He was elected MP for Oldham in 1832, after the passage of the Reform Act, but was able to achieve little in this role.

Richard Ingrams brings out many other aspects of Cobbett’s life: his enormous popularity, his love of the countryside, his detestation of Thomas Malthus and William Wilberforce. He has produced a very readable biography that fills in much of the political background and also has the merit of including many quotations from Cobbett’s own writings.

Paul Bennett

50 Years Ago: Sinn Fein policy is futile (2007)

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

Speaking against the internment and the “jailing of Irishmen” by the authorities at Curragh, Mr. Seamus South “appealed to the people to join Sinn Fein, which, he said, was a lawfully constituted organisation… Their aim was the re-unification of Ireland as a thirty-two county republic and the re-establishment of an All-Ireland Parliament. They had been accused of wanting to create a civil war, but they did not want that.” (Mr. South was speaking at a Sinn Fein meeting at Listowel, and was reported in The Kerryman (24/8/57).

Whether Sinn Fein achieved their aim of re-uniting Ireland and re-establishing an All-Ireland Parliament, they would not solve the problems facing the Irish people—the problems of poverty and general insecurity.

The mass of the people suffer from these problems because they own little or no property in the means of life. They are either propertyless industrial or farm workers—when they are not unemployed—or their farms are too small to enable them to make sufficient money to live a comfortable life.

Only when Irish workers and poverty-stricken small farmers unite together to make the land and the other means of life the common property of all, together with the workers of other lands, will they be able to solve their problems. Emigration is not the solution—only Socialism is!

(From article by Peter E. Newell, Socialist Standard, October, 1957)

Greasy Pole: Gordon Brown – At Last (2007)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

To be fair to Gordon Brown, after waiting all that time he did move quickly to correct any mistaken expectations about the style in which he intended to do the job of Prime Minister. This was important, because any change of government or leadership is liable to mislead a lot of people that thenceforward things will be significantly different. Remember the relief with which the voters booted out the Callaghan government in 1979, apparently assuming that a few years under the Iron Lady would make Britain, and thereby themselves, Great again? Think back, then, to 2 May 1997 when a relieved electorate said good-bye to the rule of Thatcher and Major, to Tory sleaze, the likes of mad John Redwood and Peter Lilley, the vaporising of large swathes of industry and all. And then most recently there was the removal of the saviour of 1997, Tony Blair with the cowboy swagger which (along with a few other things like war in the Gulf) he had so diligently copied from George Bush, with his attention to the rich and powerful like Levy and Murdoch, with scandals like Cash for Honours and the bribery at BAE – all covered, when in difficulty, with that vacant, intensely irritating gaping grin. In contrast to all that Gordon Brown – solid as Ben Nevis in form and voice, as averse to glamour as to a baboon, stood in welcome contrast. Surely, desperately, from now on the lives of all the everyday, exploited people who work and argue and vote would be different? Better than before?

But didn’t Brown himself have something to do with this? Did not his drastic refashioning of the  government make it seem that there had been a general election and not just a reshuffle of the same tired ministerial crew by a tired new prime minister? What about the appointment of Ed Balls, with the looks of an eager, energetic primary school kid, as head of a brand new Ministry for Children, Schools and Families? The motherly Jacqui Smith as Minister of Justice, whose frequent appearances on TV stood in such ameliorative contrast to the vengeful rasping of John Reid? Of course Brown did have some luck; politicians sometimes do. The first outbreak of foot and mouth disease could have been a disaster for him but as it turned out it gave him the opportunity to rush back from a brief holiday in homely Dorset (Blair, it was muttered, would have been immovably under the sun at some millionaire mate’s freebie Caribbean mansion) to oversee the control of the disease and keep the slaughter to the minimum. Such was the warmth of Brown’s honeymoon with voters that they seemingly forgave him that, in spite of his well-publicised attachment to the rigours of Presbyterianism, he was unable to switch off the rain and so save all those acres of England from their immersion in the summer floods.

Thatcher

Unable to organise divine interference with the weather, Brown had to resort to more usual, human, methods of impressing the voters, which meant that he had to disseminate confusion in the shape of contradiction. He was, he suddenly announced, about to launch “a new type of politics” – which sounded an alarmingly original idea until he elaborated: “I believe Britain needs a new type of politics which embraces everyone in the nation, not just a few. A politics built on consensus, not division”. Hardly had the nation wherein everyone was to be embraced in politics digested this astounding declaration than Brown remorselessly drove on, giving an example of a favourite politician: “I think Lady Thatcher saw the need for change and I also admire the fact she is a conviction politician. I am a conviction politician like her”. (He did not mention other conviction politicians like the dictators whose convictions encouraged them to organise genocidal slaughters).Thatcher may have been amused or irritated that, after all those years striving to be every Tory’s ideal of a confrontational politician, she should be admired by someone who claimed to be in favour of operating the consensus. In any case she bore it well; she was, said an aide, “delighted to have such flattery” – although it’s not clear whether she felt the same about Tory MPs like John Bercow and Patrick Mercer (last heard of as he was sacked by David Cameron from the Front Bench for making racist comments about black soldiers) who were impressed enough by Brown’s drive for consensus politics to be recruited into his flourishing regiment of “advisory” committees.

Perhaps to restrain himself from trying to lasso the entire Tory front Bench, Brown decided it would be prudent to return to the more normal, divisive type of politics – such as he became familiar with during his time growing up in the Scottish Labour Party. And again his luck was in because on 4 September the rail union RMT called a brief strike which shut down much of the London Tube system. As a result thousands of Londoners had to endure an intensity of crowding in underground trains which impressed even them, accustomed as they were to everyday cattle truck conditions. The strike arose because of the workers’ anxiety about the stability of their pensions following the bankruptcy of Metronet, the firm responsible for two thirds of the Tubes under the ill-fated Private/Public Partnership favoured by Brown and Blair.

Inflation

This might have been Brown’s chance to eradicate any lurking remnants of guilt about his part in promoting PPP by embracing the Tube workers into the comforts of his consensual politics. But clearly he is not just an admirer, but also an imitator, of Thatcher. He attacked the strikers for the inconvenience which their action had caused to the travelling workers of London and complained that by trying to protect their meagre pensions they were aggravating “inflation”, which must surely bring the country to its knees. He did not dwell on the unhappy fact that a strike has to cause problems; there would be no point in it otherwise and the fact that the withdrawal of the Tube workers was so disruptive is a measure of their importance. After all, City traders who make fortunes shifting money around could stop work tomorrow and life would go on much as usual. A few days later at the TUC, confronted with a well mannered demonstration by civil servants waving banners audaciously suggesting Fair Pay For Public Servants (according to the Office for National Statistics the growth in pay in the public sector, far from running riot, is at its lowest for a decade) Brown went into one of his familiar rants: “let me be straightforward with you – pay discipline is essential to prevent inflation, to maintain growth and create more jobs.” We are accustomed by now to the persistent misuse of the word inflation and the assumption that a rise in wages must lead to higher prices when the fact is that workers are not the cause of what Brown calls “inflation” but  in many cases its victims.

Brown had a long wait to get the job he had coveted, against all Blair’s manoeuvring and treachery, so it may have been with some relief that he could promise, immediately on his arrival at Number Ten, to bring in a new age of politics. How many times had we heard that before, from how many subsequently discredited Prime Ministers? It is no surprise that Brown offered nothing better than those who went before. When he is eventually winkled out of Downing Street and his time at the top of the greasy pole is evaluated the question will be – was it worth waiting for? 

Ivan

Vanity Blair (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Blair Years – Extracts From the Alastair Campbell Diaries, edited by Alastair Campbell and Richard Stott. Hutchinson. £25 hardback.

Alastair Campbell, former Press Secretary to Tony Blair, has produced a volume of over 700 pages of his diary scribblings that most of the mainstream press has been expectantly salivating over for some time. In approach a hybrid of Richard Crossman’s Diaries and those of Campbell’s long-time friend Alan Clark (while certainly being nearer the latter in tone) it is rarely a dull read, even if there is plenty that has been kept back for fuller, later editions. Whether it met the expectations of the press is a matter for them, though many have been quick to point out that some of the most potentially damaging revelations have been edited out by Campbell for fear of embarrassing the present government, especially particular revelations related to some of the more serious disputes between Blair and Gordon Brown.

Campbell was a man feared by many both inside and outside government, and in truth not all the punches are pulled by any means. Campbell uses his journalistic training to good effect and manages to paint quite detailed personal portraits of the main figures in the UK government over the last ten years and more in a way that has never been done previously. A recovering alcoholic with at least one serious ‘psychotic episode’ as he calls it in his past, Campbell is an emotional man and this makes his diaries all the more readable – and very far removed in most respects from the standard fare usually served up by those deemed to be at the ‘heart of government’.

Apart from the sheer vanity of great numbers of those Blair surrounded himself with over the years (mirroring the vanity of Blair himself), there are at least three other things worthy of comment. First, the way in which an unelected official like Campbell clearly had more authority and power within the government than many – if not most – of the elected politicians, often to the annoyance of both the latter and the civil service. Second, the lack of clarity about how policy decisions sometimes emerged (the discussions and negotiations over Northern Ireland are the most interesting and detailed while the underlying reasons for the Iraq war seem to take poor second place to the military machinations). And third – frivolously if amusingly – the way in which so many of those featured in the diaries appear either partly or fully naked at various points (including Blair himself, Mo Mowlam and several other government officials). Campbell is a former writer of soft-core sex stories, which must have come in handy if you’re recounting heated late night discussions in Downing Street with a Prime Minister sat completely starkers in his office with nothing more than a mug of tea to cover his modesty.

In these edited extracts there were clearly limits to even this though – at no point, for instance, does Gordon Brown ever appear without so much as a tie.

Dave Perrin

Gun and knife crime (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent spate of gun and knife crime has been taken as evidence that the country is descending into a chaos of uncontrolled violence

There are lies, damn lies and statistics. And beyond that  there are the criminal statistics, which are supposed to tell us how much of which crimes have been committed during whatever period but which are so beset by misreporting, faulty mathematics and at times political manipulation as to be pretty well worthless. For example, some offences are not reported because the victim sees no point in doing so; ask someone who leaves home in the morning to find their car has been broken into whether they will tell the police and you are likely to be treated to the kind of pitying smile usually bestowed on the stupefyingly naive. Or ask the same question of someone who has picked up a black eye in a Saturday night fight at the pub and prepare for the scorn at such a slur on their resilient stoicism. Examples like these are drawn together in some of the statistics; between 1995 and 2005 reported serious wounding incidents in England and Wales rose by 50 per cent but some 70 per cent of that type of offence are not reported.

The recent spate of gun and knife crime – including high profile murders such as that of the 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool, apparently by another young person – has been taken as evidence that the country is descending into a chaos of uncontrolled violence, overwhelmingly the work of gangs of young feral psychopaths hiding their faces under hoods and escaping on mountain bikes while their victim dies on the street – or, in some cases, in their own home. “There is no doubt” said Enver Soloman, Deputy Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies recently, “there are more kids carrying knives, but it’s not clear why”. In the first eight months of 2007 no less than 17 teenagers were shot dead in London alone, six of them between February and August.  The response has been predictable, from the tabloids and from opposition politicians: the government must shake themselves out of their apathy about crime, employ more police officers and encourage courts to send more people to prison for longer terms (a suggestion which the courts have eagerly taken up). In fact New Labour can hardly be accused of complacency about crime; since they came to power in 1997, energised by Blair’s promise to be tough on crime they have added some 3000 offences to the statute book – which means that behaviour which was recently legal will now land you in trouble with the law. At the same time the choice of sentences available to the courts has been extended, for example there is the Indeterminate Sentence which in theory can result in someone doing life for an offence which once attracted a term of imprisonment of only months. And as a result the prisons are crammed and inmates are forced to spend time in emergency cells in police stations and court houses.

Cameron

This is the kind of mess likely to cost some politicians a lot of votes and to win lots for others. Hoping to be among the latter is Tory leader David Cameron. It is only just over a year ago - in July 2006 - that, in his efforts to establish himself as a new breed of boss of the nasty party, he drew on the insight into the struggles of working class life instilled in him by an Eton education and a posh address in Notting Hill to declare that everyone else had misunderstood the problem of youth crime and that we have to show a lot more love to the people who commit it: “ hoodies are more defensive than offensive. They’re a way of staying invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, don’t stand out. For some, the hoodie represents all that’s wrong about youth culture in Britain today. For me, adult society’s response to the hoodie shows how far we are from finding the long-term answers to put things right. So when you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement – think what brought that child to that moment ”. Having spent the last year or so reflecting on this slice of wisdom and spurred on by the latest news of violent youth crime, Cameron has decided that a different approach would be more voter-attractive: no longer in favour of understanding hoodies, on 22 August  he lashed out at what he called the rising tide of youth violence and anti-social behaviour: “Common sense suggests that with young  people you need to hit them where it hurts most: in their life style and their aspirations” was how he revealed his conversion to a more traditional style of vote chasing with a proposal that young offenders, apart from any other penalty imposed on them, be disqualified from applying for a driving licence. He is apparently under the impression that seasoned practitioners of anti-social behaviour would be impressed enough by such a restriction to persuade them to do as the court and a Tory leader wanted.

Apart from its other defects, Cameron’s suggestion does not have even the merit of being original; in fact it has been in the law since 2004. The same is true about his other proposal, that magistrates courts be able to impose a maximum of twelve months imprisonment instead of six as they are at present. His other views are also stale and impotent, such as his ranting about “moral decline” and a “broken society”, but we must excuse him on the grounds that he also needs a lot more love as a politician desperate to keep his fragile control of his party, knowing that an election defeat would probably see him go the same way as Hague and Howard. The assumption that tougher laws must reduce crime is based on confusion between punishment and an orderly, controlled society, as if putting a new law on the statute book will discourage some types of behaviour and stimulate others – which is not supported by what has been happening over gun and knife crime. There is no doubt that this is a serious problem, which makes life in some places even uglier than it is at present. But apart from the bogus, unhelpful media outrage the reality is that children and young people are the human product of the society they are born into; when so many of them behave so destructively  there must be questions about the nature of that society, why it works as it does and the effect on its people.

Poverty

What is the attraction for young people in gangs (according to the police there are 18 in London alone)? In numerous interviews with reporters and others it has emerged that the gang offers safety, a sense of belonging, of rank and of inviolability – which are obviously missing in the lives of many who are facing the prospect of growing up in a class society where they must reconcile their own denial with the privileges of the other class. A police schools officer operating in the territory of two Liverpool gangs put it: “A lot of them see that life has just left them by+Most of them can’t even read or write+” So far none of the interviewers has pointed out that the values of the gang – loyalty and invulnerability maintained with aggression against those outside – are invaluable requirements in the armed forces, for example among the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan or wherever they are at arms in the defence of the interests of the ruling, privileged class. The analysts, commentators and experts probe for presentable stratagems to repair what they define as gaps in social morality but they pay little useful attention to some of the real hard facts about violent crime.

When, as has happened recently, there is an incident of a gun or a knife being used to kill in a place like Letchworth or Bishop’s Stortford the shock and anger is mixed with bewilderment that something like that can happen in places with a reputation for being green and tranquil. That was a response to the fact that such offences flourish in areas like the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Liverpool and London  - where the population is concentrated and the pressures of urban capitalism are especially acute. Within London, for example, the boroughs with the highest levels of gun and knife crime include Hackney, Lambeth and Newham and those with the lowest include Bromley, Sutton and Richmond on Thames. A Council report (Mind The Gap — Strategy To Reduce Inequalities And Poverty 2005) from Hackney, which is about the poorest borough in the United Kingdom, described high rates of infant mortality, cancer, heart disease and mental illness. A Public Health Report from Newham Council for 2006 said the borough has the lowest male life expectancy in England, that 64 per cent of the children there were officially in poverty and 41 per cent of the population were “economically inactive”. Lambeth’s Economic Development Strategy for 2006/10 described it as “among the most socially and economically deprived local authority districts in the country” and set out the link between such conditions and youth crime: “The social and economic pressures faced by young people in a world city can create tensions in some local communities where high levels of crime exist alongside a growing informal economy”.

Chindamo

Does all this matter? Can’t people simply drag themselves up from the deeper levels of poverty, go to evening classes, get a degree, end up as Chairman of one of the Big Five banks? Take the case of Learco Chindamo, who as a 15-year-old gang leader killed head teacher Philip Lawrence outside his school in Maida Vale, when Lawrence was defending 13 year old William Njoh from attack by Chindamo’s gang. There was a great deal of unhelpful media froth about the crime and more recently when the government was legally prevented from deporting Chindamo at the end of his sentence, which obscured the fact that, when he killed Lawrence, Chindamo was unable to read or write and all that was known about his absent father, a hardened and ruthless criminal, was that he was either in prison or on the run from Interpol. The intended victim of the attack, Njoh, subsequently dropped out of school and committed crimes such as robbery and possession of a pistol and ammunition, which brought him long custodial sentences. It is evident that the background to Chindamo’s offence was one of widespread poverty, hopelessness and alienation – and that Philip Lawrence paid for it with his life.

Challenging the popular notion that, in face of the evidence of an increasing incidence of knife-related robberies there is a policing or punishment solution, Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, insisted that the problem will require an approach which recognises that  “the social antagonisms caused by poverty and inequality are the key”. This a valid comment but it needs to be taken further. The key to social antagonism, poverty and inequality is in the fundamentals of this social system, in the class monopoly which secures and enriches a minority and impoverishes the majority. Politicians who are preoccupied with their next vote will take care not to emphasise that reality – it is more advantageous to stimulate and exploit the latest hysteria. And as long as such a superficial attitude is allowed the problem will endure and there will continue to be blood on the streets.

Ivan.

Pathfinders: Socialism in the Space Age (2007)

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

Anyone over the age of forty-five will remember very clearly two things from their school days. One was the moon landings. The other was the clear and certain knowledge that whatever it was that killed off the dinosaurs would remain eternally one of life’s unanswerable mysteries.

When in 1980 the geologists Luis and Walter Alvarez discovered a thin layer of iridium stretching from Italy to Colorado, dated to a period corresponding to the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 65 million years ago, they knew something pretty severe must have happened. Iridium lies deep in the core of the Earth, and is only found on the surface as a result of asteroid strikes. This one, they reasoned, must have been a humdinger, but where was the crater? Something that big couldn’t just erode away. Eventually, it was found, under the sea, off the coast of Mexico, a hole so big it must have taken a meteorite roughly the size of Brighton to create it, about 23 square miles.

Recently on a socialist discussion list, someone referred to the ‘failed experiment’ that was the dinosaurs. Failed perhaps in the sense that they are dead and we are not, but let homo sapiens survive and prosper as a race eight hundred times longer than we have so far managed before we can claim to equal their success. And the chances are, on current performance, we won’t get anywhere near.

The power-elites in capitalism are as keenly aware as benighted commoners just how vulnerable the Earth is to a giant meteor strike, and while the next close pass by a large lump of rock is still thirty years away, are even now debating what to do about it. For, even if the impossible happened and the capitalists worked out some ingenious way to stop destroying the planet themselves, there’s no accounting for the vagaries of chance in outer space.

October 4 2007 marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik 1, the first venture of humanity into space. A few more efforts, a dead dog, some nasty accidents and a few dead astronauts later, the world was dazzled by the budget-busting glory of the Kennedy administration in putting a man on the moon, putting one over on the Russians, and fixing the global gaze skyward instead of at Vietnam. Previous generations had lived through the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the steam age and the Tupperware age, but anybody alive in 1968 and watching the silver men on screen pogoing in slo-mo on the surface of the moon would have sworn they were living in the space age. The future was bright. Humanity was on the threshold of the stars.

But what a disappointment it all turned out to be. For once, the geometric acceleration of science seemed to falter. After the Apollo missions, there was no more. The moon was forgotten. Mars remained beyond reach. The engineers all retired, and took their knowledge with them. The stars seemed further away then ever, twinkling in cold amusement at humanity’s punctured hubris.

Sure, the world sent out a lot of probes, some of which didn’t crash, malfunction or get lost, and many fascinating pictures and much interesting knowledge was gained. But the two Big Questions remained unanswered. First: Is there anybody out there? And second: Even if there isn’t, can we get off this rock before it blows?

Capitalism invests in space research the same way it gambles on the rest of science, by backing every horse in the race, sure at least that one of them will come in eventually, bringing with it untold new knowledge and wisdom (aka big bucks and even bigger bucks). It isn’t really interested in existential anxieties about being alone in the universe, but when it comes to advanced communications and especially the military capability of peering into everybody else’s back yard, then filling the orbital paths with beeping space junk seems a superb notion. More ambitiously, the possibility of colonising other planets offers an unparalleled alibi for recklessly destroying your own. Space Capitalism: a sort of galactic venereal disease.

Meanwhile, George Bush’s Kennedy-like attempt to swivel the eyes of America away from Iraq and up to Mars is unlikely to outlive his incumbency. The cost of a manned mission is just too ludicrous, the risk (in lives but, more to the point, in credibility) not worth the gamble, and the scientific returns probably insignificant, given no conclusive sign so far of any organic material on that almost certainly dead planet.

Some scientists, playing a dubious numbers game, have famously calculated that the probability of there not being intelligent life out there, given the billions of galaxies, is virtually zero. Others have responded by calculating the probability of us ever having contact with any of these lifeforms, given the brain-shreddingly large space-time distances involved, as being also virtually zero. Capitalist Earth, being uncontrollably in the grip of a mindless and suicidal orgy of self-destruction, would love to find some comfort and company out there, feeling as it does that the prospects of life down here are diminishing like sand through an hourglass.

But what of a socialist Earth? Suppose that humanity has a moment of sanity and takes its affairs in order by abolishing capitalism before it’s too late, what then? Obviously expeditions to Enceladus would be somewhat down the priority list at first, as issues like food, water and shelter took the lead. But would a socialist world eventually develop a space programme? Perhaps so, if by then the depradations of capitalism had reduced the planet to an unsalvageable toxic tar-pit from which we had no choice but to escape. Hopefully though, we will have taken control of our common abode and our common responsibility much earlier than that. Then, living as free custodians of a newly green and pleasant planet, we may not feel such anxieties about our cosmic isolation, but in fact bask pleasurably in our unique biological identities and our uniquely fulfilling way of life. Children, though, will always gaze at the stars and wonder what is out there. Socialists may debate whether they could or should ever ‘export’ socialism to the cosmos. They might also, perhaps more pertinently, wonder when some of the cosmos is likely to pay a visit here. Among its other priorities, socialist Earth would be wise to remember what happened to the dinosaurs, and make contingency plans for the next Brighton rock.

Paddy Shannon

After Socialism. Reconstructing Critical Social Thought (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Socialism. Reconstructing Critical Social Thought. By Gabriel Kolko. Routledge

Kolko writes as a critic of capitalism, but as one who has no time for Marxism, or rather for what he thinks is Marxism. His two chapters on this are irritating as he paints Marx as a crude economic determinist who saw working class action to establish socialism as a mere inevitable reflex action to capitalist conditions. But if this was the case, why was he a revolutionary agitator in the 1840s and again in the 1860s and 1870s? True, he got it wrong in that, contrary to what must have been his expectation, the working class has still not acted to establish socialism. And this has meant that we socialists today are a lot less confident than earlier generations in speaking in terms of socialism being inevitable.

Kolko also criticises Marx for not having much to say on imperialism, war and state intervention. This is true too, but then these only became big issues after his death in 1883, and those in the Marxist tradition (including ourselves but also the likes of Hilferding and Bukharin) did address these questions.

Kolko's real argument is with the two attempts in the 20th century to ostensibly challenge capitalism – Social Democracy and "Communism". The former was led by ambitious parliamentary politicians who ended up merely administering the status quo, and the latter by those who cynically installed themselves in power as a new elite and then paved the way for later members of this elite to transform themselves into ordinary capitalists. According to him (and we can concur) both these have been utter failures and any radical movement against capitalism has to start all over again on a quite different basis. For him, "socialism" is dead and cannot be resurrected. Hence the book's title.

The two chapters in which he describes "capitalist realities" - a world dominated by capitalist corporations run by greedy and self-seeking executives and by governments which do their bidding when not lining their own pockets – are the best.

As to his solution, he proposes a new radical Left party which will be more democratic and more principled than the old Social Democratic parties. But, because he has rejected the sort of overall view that Marxism has of capitalism as a system governed by economic laws, he thinks that problems such as the threat of nuclear war, inequality and poverty can be dealt with piecemeal. In other words, another version of the same old, failed reformism.

Kolko is a historian who has specialised in analysing wars and he thinks that history demonstrates that the best chance of a mass working class movement to overthrow capitalism will be after some war that the ruling class will have foolishly embarked on. He could be right. But let's hope he's not.

Adam Buick

Hitler and Stalin (2007)

Book Review from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia. By Richard Overy. Penguin

If you've been thinking that books on the two most renowned political dictators, Hitler and Stalin, have been done to death forget it and read this book. Whereas books such as Alan Bullock's Parallel Lives, Alan Kershaw's Hitler and Simon Sebag Montefiore's Court of the Red Czar (reviewed in the March 2006 Socialist Standard) concentrate on personality, Richard Overy investigates issues far more important to the working class. He raises such questions as how dictatorships could happen, how did they manage to hold on to power and impose their will on a sometimes-uncooperative working class. For answers to questions such as these this book is excellent.

Overy finds many similarities in the methods adopted by the dictators but also some important differences, lying mainly in the varying levels of economic development existing in the two countries. Germany, emerging from its history as a collection of loosely federated states was already a capitalist nation. It had a native capitalist class, trade unions, a democratic political constitution in the Weimar Republic. Russia had none of these. Eighty percent of its population were peasants, its homegrown capitalist class were almost non-existent, or at any rate very weak. There were trade unions (in fact it was largely trade union action which had toppled the Czar) they had not yet reached the same level of development as those in Germany. There had never been even the semblance of political democracy in Russia.

These historical conditions were important in the way the dictators came to power and held on to it. One thing Overy makes abundantly clear is that neither dictator was "imposed" or brought about by force against an unwilling or resisting populace. Hitler used the electoral process to gain power and, although no one in Russia ever had the chance of voting against Stalin, he still needed working class support to remain in power.

Hitler maintained his position of supreme ruler by adopting the cult of leadership right from the beginning. Everyone (including, crucially, the army) had to swear allegiance to the Führer. Stalin had to work slowly and behind the scenes to achieve his pre-eminence. But, as Overy makes clear, neither of them could move very far without popular support, and they both went to extraordinary lengths to hold on to a mass following.

This does not mean of course that Stalin and Hitler did not routinely employ force. But by means of propaganda, of general scare alarms - about "wreckers" in the case of Stalin, or "undesirables" in the case of Hitler - they managed to enlist the support of the ordinary citizen. Informers were actively encouraged and many enthusiastically took part in wholesale denunciation of the regime's opponents.

Overy makes a strong case for believing that both dictators believed in their own ideologies - something that can be readily accepted in the case of Hitler with his belief in the existence of "race" and of a "racially pure" Aryan blood. However we find it much more difficult to accept that Stalin really believed that he was building socialism. Overy also suggests that Stalin's purges of Communist Party members had some basis in reality in the sense that they really did threaten his conception of "socialism". After getting rid of Roehm, Hitler was much more loyal to his close circle as he built up his authority on the basis of personal loyalty and did not see them as a threat. His biggest problem lay in the conservative nature of the generals. This explains why he took over the conduct of the war as sole commander, something also attempted by Stalin, who sacked or murdered most of his generals. Overy also appears to have a greater respect for Stalin as a political theoretician than is warranted by the facts.

For anyone who wants to understand how the Holocaust came about and the circumstances building up to it this book is essential reading. From general beginnings as slave labour to its eventual conclusion as mass killing, it makes chilling reading. He also presents some interesting statistics on the Gulags and their role as providers of slave labour in the economy that goes a long way to understand them. In the pursuit of maintaining power both dictators used spectacle. Parades, military processions, torchlight rallies - all were used extensively and served as displays of power and as entertainment. In the days before television this was very effective. Rigid control of the press was also an essential. Any criticism of the establishment was viciously suppressed.

A serious shortcoming of this book lies in the author's conception of socialism. Overy takes the word "socialism" and the concept of "national socialism" as used by Stalin and Hitler at their face value. He never defines the terms and appears to believe that socialism is synonymous with a "command economy" capitalism, regarding which he has some very perceptive things to say. However the lessons implicit in this book are vitally important and it is to be recommended.

Cyril Evans

Do Anything Now? (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party recently debated an organisation called Go Change the World. Here is our speaker’s contribution.

“We want to encourage everyone everywhere to make a difference” says the Go Change the World Welcome’ web page‘.

A linked page encourages readers to “Become an Everyday Activist!” because it means “that you belong to a community of people that are dedicated to taking individual everyday actions to help change the world for the better.”

A further link contains encouraging messages from activists who have pledged themselves to:

“demonstrate to stop the influence of the arms trade on government policies”

“light a candle for the children of Sri Lanka and pray for an end to the killing”

“make the country aware of the Darfur killings”

“pick up ten pieces of litter every day for a week”

“recycle all our waste paper for a week”

“write to Jack Straw to tell him he’s a cretin”

We can agree about one thing - there is something seriously wrong with the world we all live in. But after viewing these web pages we can say with some confidence that an unbridgeable chasm separates us regarding the sorry state of much of the world. In the absence of an analysis of what might be causing these problems Go Change the World and others like them want to apply small sticking plasters in a sort of Band Aid effort to deal with problems. We in the Socialist Party however are organised to remove the causes of those problems and therefore have a different approach.

Tinkering with these poverty problems achieves little if anything. Frances Cairncross, journalist and commentator in the Economist, illustrated in a radio debate on the meaning of the concept of Progress how little had been achieved in recent times by all the efforts at improving the lot of the poor and very poor. “Over the past thirty years the income gap between the richest 20 per cent and the poorest 20 per cent has increased seven fold.”

In order to deal with the problem of poverty it is first necessary to get a clear idea of what the problems are. The first thing to notice is that we live in a World society. The world is at present divided up into some 190 countries or nation states - some large some small - but no matter where you go you will find common features. These features never change:

Everywhere you go most things have a price.

Everywhere you go the vast majority of people will be working for wages or salaries. It’s true that there are a still a few areas which practice a subsistence economy but they are small and getting smaller.

The majority of the world’s population are engaged in the cash economy. In order to live the majority of the world’s population have to sell their ability to work for a wage or a salary.

Conversely everywhere you go there will be a small proportion of the population whose function in society is to buy that ability to work and exploit it. Now they are able to do this because they own and control the means of existence – the land, the mines, the factories and offices, the means of transport, and so on – all the things that human beings have developed and perfected over the past millennia in order to gain a living from nature.

Our proposal involves the taking back of what was in the past ours anyway. We propose a return to shared ownership of the Earth and its resources.

The second thing to note is that private property is a very recent human invention. In their discovery of the wider world from the 15th Century onwards European explorers came across peoples they labelled "primitive" or "uncivilised" because they lacked the concept of yours and mine when it came to land. Land was their only means of life and it was held in common. Indeed the 18th Century philosopher and political thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that civilisation was invented by a man who put a fence around a piece of land saying in effect "This is mine" and who then managed to persuade the rest of humanity that he had exclusive right to dispose of it as he wished. Capitalism has roots in just such a massive historical theft - a theft involving enclosures and land clearances across whole continents and the physical enslavement of millions.

Let us return to our journey. Another common feature you will find is that everywhere you go wealth is produced to be sold. Everywhere the motive behind wealth production is the hope and intention of making a profit. And that in a nutshell is capitalism - class ownership and the profit motive.

Now if you really want to change the world it is that social arrangement that has to be changed.

Class ownership has to be replaced by common ownership. Production for profit has to be replaced by production for use. The world and everything on it and in it has to become the common property of the whole of humanity if we are to solve the problem of poverty.

Make no mistake about it at bottom the problems referred to by Go Change the World and a host of others like them are by and large poverty problems. They are problems that have no solution under capitalism. While we have no doubt that Go Change the World are sincere in their wish to "do something" to remedy the ills of the world it is our belief, based on a Socialist analysis of capitalism, that their efforts are no more than palliatives.

The poor are poor because they are denied full and free access to the means of life. The present owners allow us to operate the means of production only so long as it is profitable to them. We live on their terms. The profit motive has ceased to be a progressive thing - it is now a hindrance. It gets in the way and frustrates the implementation of known solutions to a whole range of pressing social problems. To solve the poverty problem the privileged minority who currently own the world have to be deprived of that ownership so that the means of life can be operated for the benefit of all.

Doing that will require conscious democratic action by the non-owning majority. We have to gain control of the state and the armed forces, which currently exist only to preserve and defend class ownership. Having gained that control we can then convert class ownership into common ownership. In other words we have to take collective political action.

This is the challenge we make to our non-Socialist fellow workers:

Don’t repeat the mistakes of the past.

Don’t fritter away your efforts chasing an impossible goal.

Don’t fall into the easy trap of only treating outcomes. Take up the challenge of organising to remove the causes.

It's not going to be easy but it’s the only way out of the mess we are in. It will entail a great deal of very hard work. We cannot do it for you.

Gwynn Thomas