SPGB Snippets: Keep out of the water (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

July 30, 2026

You might expect that a walking trail called the Severn Way would largely be alongside the river from which it takes its name. But in fact most of the section between Shrewsbury and Telford is not along the river at all.

This is just one illustration of the extent to which there is a lack of public access to river banks in England. In almost three quarters of cases, there is no right of way within a hundred metres of the river, with most reservoirs and lakes also being off-limits.

Private ownership of land drastically restricts people’s ability to enjoy the countryside (not just rivers) and seek some relief from the recent heatwaves.

SPGB Snippets: Water balls-up (2026)

From the Socialist Party of Great Britain website

May 27, 2026

Anyone looking to cool off this summer with a swim in England’s river bathing sites had better check it hasn’t rained recently, because the river could be full of E.coli from sewage overflows. Of the 14 inland river sites tested last year by the Environment Agency, 12 are still rated poor, with advice being not to swim.

People understandably get steamed up when water companies use profits to pay shareholders instead of repairing leaky infrastructure. Meanwhile we get filthy rivers and lakes, and hosepipe bans. Many would like to see water renationalised, but cash-strapped government doesn’t want the maintenance burden – they have jets and missiles to pay for.

Water falls out of the sky for free. Trust capitalism to ruin even that.

The Doughnut revisited (2025)

From the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In last month’s Socialist Standard we discussed Kate Raworth’s book Doughnut Economics. As it happens, on 1 October Raworth and co-author Andrew Fanning published an online paper ‘Doughnut of social and planetary boundaries monitors a world out of balance’ in the journal Nature. This updates and widens the scope of previous work in this framework.

Things have not improved since the original work was done: ‘Billions of people are falling short of meeting their most essential needs, whereas humanity’s ecological imprint on the living planet is now overshooting at least six of the nine planetary boundaries’. Previously four of the boundaries had been crossed, ecological limits which it was essential to keep within.

The boundaries are measured in terms of indicators, with more than one indicator for some boundaries. Ozone-layer depletion has been stable since the early 2000s, but the other indicators for which information over time is available show a worsening of conditions. For instance, four indicators have more than doubled the extent to which they exceed acceptable limits: CO2 concentration and radiative forcing (both of which relate to the climate change boundary), and hazardous chemicals and phosphorus (relating to chemical and nutrient pollution).

The inner ring of the Doughnut deals with meeting people’s needs. Here two indicators have deteriorated significantly, food insecurity and the existence of autocratic regimes. Others have improved, but only slightly, with 10 percent of the world’s population being undernourished in 2021–2, compared to 13 percent in 2000-1. A rapid improvement would be needed to eliminate this problem by 2030. The proportion lacking access to safely managed drinking water only went down from 39 percent to 37 percent over the same period.

Has there been progress overall? Global GDP doubled between 2000 and 2022, but ‘only modest improvements were achieved in reducing social shortfalls worldwide, whereas ecological overshoot increased rapidly, disrupting the critical planetary processes on which all life depends’.

So the Doughnut’s method of examining whether society is coping with meeting everyone’s needs while keeping the planet in a sustainable condition shows very clearly that the present system, capitalism, is unable to meet either goal. A system based on profit cannot solve these problems, and only a change to a world based on production for use will be able to do so.

Paul Bennett

The Drought Peril (1935)

From the August 1935 issue of the Socialist Standard

The contradictions of capitalism and its disservice to the community are vividly shown in the method of handling the water shortage. Under a national system of society the available water could easily be stored and directed to the points where it is needed. Under capitalism, however, the god of private property is all-powerful, and so we read in the News-Chronicle of June 12th, 1935: Many local authorities are handicapped by the unwillingness of owners of land with water sources to sell the water rights at a reasonable price. At present there are no powers to acquire such land compulsorily at an arbitration figure.

R. M.

Famine in India (1946)

From the June 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

” . . . If this country does not get 4,000,000 tons of grain quickly, anything between 5,000,000 and 10,000,000 people are going to die. They will not get that much help, so they will, in fact, starve.” You remember the Bengal famine. This will be worse. Not so spectacular, perhaps, but worse. In this queer land where the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingly poor, the poor are going to be thinned out this year by something like the population of London. . . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

One of Lord Beaverbrook’s team of high-pressure journalists, James Cameron, writing from Madras, makes this prophecy of what is going to happen in India this year, and there seems to be no reason to doubt his words.

Large numbers of Indians have, of course, died every year through starvation or semi-starvation, but the figure this year promises to be so staggering that even the Daily Express cannot tuck the news away in some odd corner, or ignore it entirely. The Daily Express not only records the facts, but on the same page as Cameron’s article tells us the cause. It says :—-

“The world famine has little to do with the war. Real cause, drought; drought last year in Australia, the Argentine, Canada and the United States; drought which brought total supplies in those four wheat-producing countries down to 68,500,000 tons this year from 90,000,000 tons in 1942-43 . . .”

But Mother Nature seems to have been in a selective mood in withholding her bounties in India, for Mr. Cameron notes that it is the “unbelievably, grindingly poor” who are going to starve.

The Daily Express’s ready-made explanation may comfort the complacent, but it fails to deceive those who know that wide-spread famine is one of the perpetually recurring horrors of the present system of society. Millions are going to starve in India this year for the same reason that millions have starved there and in other parts of the world for many years past in peace and war whether the crops have failed or not. They starved during the boom years as well as during the great industrial depression between the wars, when crops were being destroyed in an effort to maintain prices. Millions will starve in the future as long as “the few are fantastically rich and the many are unbelievably, grindingly poor.” A million and a half died of starvation in Bengal in 1943, and the report issued by the Famine Inquiry Commission (reported in Forward, 19/5/45) said: —

“After considering all the circumstances, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it lay in the power of the Government of Bengal, by bold, resolute and well-conceived measures at the right time, to have largely prevented the tragedy of the famine as it actually took place. . . . Enormous profits were made out of the calamity and, in the circumstances, profits for some meant death for others. A large part of the community lived in plenty while others starved, and there was much indifference in the face of suffering. . . .”

But starvation is not just an Eastern problem. Sir J. B. Orr’s investigations (“Food, Health and Income,” 1936) showed that no fewer than four and a half million persons in this country existed on a food expenditure of 4s. per week, and there was no suggestion that these went hungry for any other reason than that they were poor. This is the one thing common to all these tales of hunger. The hungry ones are always the poor.

Mr. Cameron savs: —

” …. It has been said that the great expanse of India’s soil, if properly worked, could feed the world. Instead, the world is called on to feed India. The answer, of course, is water. These are not the richly irrigated lands of the Punjab. Here it all must come from the sky, and it has not …. But there again it is not wholly the fault of the drought. Arable land in the South of India has been worked and worked for centuries, till it is worked out . . .” (Daily Express, 23/4/46.)

Why were the fields not irrigated and why has the land been worked out? It must be because there was no profit in vast irrigation schemes and a properly balanced agriculture. It cannot be beyond the powers of industry and science, which produced Mulberry harbours and imprisoned atomic energy, to carry the water of India to the places where it is needed, or restore the fertility of an exhausted soil.

Who cares about the starving Indian poor? Certainly not those, coloured and white, who have built colossal fortunes by the impoverishment of the Indian masses, whose main diet at the best, according to Cameron, consists of “a strange, malleable, doughy lump, in almost every way resembling putty . . . ,” made from seeds seen in England only in a parrot’s tray. He says that these people are unable to digest any other form of food, but we shall examine this extraordinary statement a little more closely if it can be shown that the “fantastically rich” also possess peculiar digestions like these.

We shall not forget this latent crime of capitalism. We know that even if Messrs. Jinnah, Nehru, Ghandi, Cripps and the rest can decide who is to have the privilege of presiding over the miseries of the Indian poor, they will not then proceed to remove the yoke from their necks. Can we, the wage workers in Britain, do anything to help capitalism’s victims in India? Yes, by building up the revolutionary movement of socialism, nationally and internationally, until it is strong enough to take over the powers of government to establish a system of society based on the common ownership of the means, of production and distribution. There is no other road that the world’s workers can take to free themselves from hunger and misery.

GEE.

Proper Gander: The maxim of maximising (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The Prophets of Profit, a five-part documentary on Radio 4, the BBC’s Business Editor Simon Jack ‘tracks how a simple idea became so powerful and why it shapes all of our lives today’. This idea is a common approach to running companies, and its ‘prophets’ are economist Milton Friedman and his successors. Being a radio programme, there aren’t any visual distractions to the words spoken by Jack’s interviewees or his explanations of the technicalities of commerce, which are more detailed than most documentaries bother with. However, this makes it harder to discern that buried underneath the talk of ‘maximising shareholder value’, ‘creative destruction’ and ‘equity-based compensation’ are the practicalities of goods being made and used by people.

The series takes 1970 as its starting point, when Milton Friedman’s article ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits’ was published in the New York Times. Clear from the title, Friedman’s ‘simple idea’ is that the main aim of corporate executives is to encourage profits, and any responsibilities a company has to wider society are covered by the wealth it generates. The documentary describes his influence through economists such as Michael C Jensen and Bill Meckling, who went from ‘disciples of Friedman to preachers for a new muscular brand of shareholder supremacy’, according to Jack. They, and those they inspired such as ‘corporate finance specialist’ Don Chew, believe that businesses have been held back by legislation and placing too much emphasis on cultural and environmental concerns or perks for staff such as pension schemes.

Chew quotes the view that ‘we’ve reached the point where every corporate interest is represented except for shareholders in the corporate boardroom’. To ‘correct’ this, executives should focus on directly maximising the value of shares, and this would lead to a better return on capital for shareholders than investment in wider issues. A sympathetic government would support this approach by minimising tax rates, regulation and legislation. Techniques to enhance share value which became popular through the 1970s and 80s included firms borrowing more to finance targeted growth, and ‘using cash generated by the business to buy back shares from existing shareholders so they can go and invest the proceeds in new industries’. Chew brags that Americans in particular have become adept at squeezing money out of failing organisations and in to growing industries, so the loss of one company means a boost to others. This is one application of ‘creative destruction’, a concept popularised by political economist Joseph Schumpeter, but which was earlier critiqued by Karl Marx. Those with an optimistic view of capitalism would say that overall this can lead to economic equilibrium, ignoring the hardships workers face when on the wrong end of ‘creative destruction’.

Maximising shareholder value also supposedly creates an equilibrium by being the most effective discipline to mould a well-run company for all, generating taxes for governments to spend while making innovative, decent products and happy workers. With this view, we’re expected to believe that wealth will trickle down to where it deserves to be. The series covers some of the actual consequences of the drive to raise shareholder value. Michael Jensen advocated ‘equity-based compensation’: executives being paid in shares to give them additional motivation to improve the company’s coffers. He didn’t foresee that many would be paid with salaries and bonuses as well, leading to a massive gulf between their income and that of most workers, nor that firms involved in scandals during the 2008 financial crash tended to have executives motivated by ‘equity-based compensation’. And as explained by economist Sir John Kay, a short-term focus on generating wealth can have disastrous effects, such as when crashes of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft were blamed on prioritising profits over investing sufficiently in safeguards.

The series uses the late-80s privatisation of the water industry as an example of Friedman’s ideas being put into practice in the UK. Michael Howard, the Tory Minister who oversaw this says that when owned by the state, the water industry had to compete for funding with other institutions such as the NHS. He claims that since privatisation, investment in the sector has always been higher than it was beforehand. However, in the ten years that Macquarie Group Limited owned Thames Water, it didn’t invest any of its own money in the business, which was sold off when in debt, with prices to customers subsequently raised. Sharon Graham, the General Secretary of Unite, is in favour of renationalisation, saying that water privatisation has led to poorly run services while shareholders have taken £72billion. As illustrated by Howard, though, being state-owned doesn’t mean that industries will be adequately resourced, or effectively managed either.

The impetus to maximise shareholder value has also led to ‘wasteful’ exercises such as American vehicle manufacturers buying steel from China rather than from more expensive local producers. This led to a decline in the American steel industry, which President Trump has said he’ll address by imposing tariffs on metal imports (presumably leading to ‘creative destruction’ elsewhere). Another example of Trump contributing to a change in what methods are seen as enhancing shareholder value is his dislike of ‘wokeness’ enabling companies such as Meta, Amazon, Walmart and McDonald’s to ditch their ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ programmes.

The Prophets of Profit is timely in being broadcast during a shift back to the directions preferred by Friedman and his followers, especially in the USA. Much of episode four is an interview with Paul Polman, who took the opposing stance when he was Chief Executive of Unilever during the 2010s. Investing in staff and green programmes didn’t prevent Unilever’s returns to shareholders quadrupling in value during the decade Polman was in post. Maximising shareholder value was still the priority, though. This doesn’t really change, even if the most profitable approaches to achieve it alter over the years. The resurgence of Friedman-esque policies is a reminder that supposedly responsible business practices such as safeguards, regulation and workers’ rights can be lost as soon as they stop being compatible with the interests of the capitalist class.

Mike Foster

Life and Times: Veganuaries – do they work? (2025)

The Life and Times column from the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is veganism weird? That’s the question the organisation behind Veganuary asked recently on their website as they urged people to go vegan for January and then, if possible, to carry on with it forever. Of course, their answer was no, it isn’t weird. In fact, they said, it’s ‘part of something huge’. And they had various celebrities on their site backing them, eg Joaquin Phoenix, Billy Eilish, Chris Packham, Sarah Pascoe. Their statement of intent was: ‘Our vision is simple; we want a vegan world. A world without animal farms and slaughterhouses. A world where food production does not decimate forest, pollute rivers and oceans, exacerbate climate change, and drive wild animal populations to extinctions’.

Animal welfare

This took me back many years to when I was a student and anything but a vegan or even vegetarian. I remembered being openly (and immaturely) contemptuous of a fellow student who was vegetarian. Little did I know that many years later I myself would decide to go vegetarian and then a long time after that – fairly recently in fact – vegan.

How did that happen? Well, I became a vegetarian when I found the idea of eating the flesh of another sentient being too difficult. Later – much later – when a vegan friend suggested I attend an online talk by a leading advocate of plant-based eating, the suffering dairy farming brought to animals was also brought home to me and I saw no alternative but to go the whole hog and move to veganism. The speaker, Dr Klaper, described as ‘an internationally recognized clinician, teacher and speaker on diet and health’, told us he had himself grown up on a dairy farm in the USA and that seemed to make his talk on ‘The Most Powerful Strategy for Healing People and the Planet’ all the more authentic. I also found it impressive in that he avoided being openly proselytising, simply sticking to simple facts in three key areas: animal cruelty, human health, and the environment. While the animal cruelty area was the one of most immediate interest to me, I also appreciated the case he put forward in the other two, even if I could think of some counter-arguments from opponents.

Veganism effective?

But what about Veganuary? It’s certainly possible that, if it does result in more people going vegan or vegetarian on a permanent basis or at least eating less meat or fish, it might lead to a reduction in the cruelty suffered by animals. But would it do much to lessen the hold of animal agriculture over the world’s food supply and reduce the raising and slaughtering of vast number of animals almost everywhere An argument often heard that says it wouldn’t, because the relative monopoly over food production held by a small number of big producers means that, even if they respond to a ‘market’ need to produce vegan ‘alternatives’ (as some of them are in fact doing), the effect of this will just be to increase their profits and investment power, so allowing them to produce meat and milk products more cheaply and more enticingly than before and thereby potentially increase animal suffering and exploitation.

And would an increase in veganism do much to solve the climate and environmental problems that the current system’s unbridled quest for ‘growth’ and profit has brought about? Some of the effects of what is happening were outlined in a recent article for the Earth/Food/Life project by Vicky Bond, animal welfare scientist and president of the US-based Humane League. She wrote:

‘Factory farming touches every aspect of our planet, from emitting massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to contaminating the groundwater, rivers, lakes, and streams we rely on for fresh water. Factory farms house animals in crowded and often filthy conditions, subjecting millions of cows, chickens, and pigs to the worst forms of abuse for the entirety of their short lives. Driven by the demand for cheap eggs, meat, and dairy, the animal agriculture industry has disastrous consequences for the planet’.

She went on to reveal that in 2024 animal agriculture accounted for almost a third of fresh water used globally and that, every day in the US, it withdrew 2 billion gallons of water from freshwater resources. One of the reasons she gave for this was the large quantities of water used by slaughterhouses both in electrified stun baths and in scalding tanks for feathering chickens. She went on: ‘Because this method of slaughter is so terrifying for chickens, they also use vast amounts of water to clean feces and vomit from the chickens’ bodies afterwards’ (tinyurl.com/5yz7crxf).

Feeding the beast

Yet it is clear that, even if there were a significant reduction in meat-eating and so in animal agriculture, as Bond would like, the environment would continue to be polluted and the climate would keep on warming owing to the demands of the economic system we live under, that untameable ‘beast’ of production for profit. Faced with the system’s need to feed the beast, our food choices would do little to contribute to stopping or reversing ecological deterioration or global warming.

It is decades too late now for me to apologise to that fellow student for ridiculing his choice of vegetarianism. Of course, I would if I could, since I feel that in a sense that we are ‘on the same side’. But, having said that, nothing in the Socialist Party’s case for a moneyless, marketless society of free access and voluntary cooperation demands adherence to any particular kind of diet. That is, and will always be, a matter of personal choice. But the fact is that, choice of diet apart, the Earth has sufficient resources to feed (and house and clothe) all its inhabitants to a highly comfortable level a number of times over, once we, the human species, decide to put our natural capacity for cooperation and collaboration to full use and apply those resources to make sure that all – whether they choose to be vegan, vegetarian or anything else – have enough healthy food to eat and the certainty of a decent, secure life. Failing this, under the existing worldwide system of production for profit and buying and selling, those who do not have money to buy will go hungry, very many more will lead insecure and highly stressed existences, human health will not be well safeguarded, and the ecosystem will continue to be in imminent danger of collapse.

Howard Moss

The threat to the Great Lakes (1985-6)

From the Winter 1985-6 issue of the World Socialist

In recent months there has been antagonism between various Canadian and American politicians concerning access to, and the use of, water from the Great Lakes, with each going to bat for the respective needs of the big-business interests they represent. A conference held in Toronto in June, 1984, solved nothing, though some ideas were voiced that could, in a sane society, be workable.

As far as we know, Samuel de Champlain was the first white man to reach the shores of the Great Lakes in 1615. Though he could not have known it, he had stumbled on to the greatest lake system in the world. Though the lakes could not have known it either, it was the portent of dreadful things to come.

Now, less than 400 years later, its watershed is home to 50 million thirsty folk, with another 100 million even thirstier people casting envious eyes northward. The fact that some US political errand boys, such  as  Governor  Scott Matheson  of Utah,  seem sincere  in  their intentions to quench this rather large thirst, can be explained by the simple word — votes. There are, however, more than Scott's electors who need it and intend by foul means or fouler, to get it; such as farmers in the mid-west who want it for increasing their profits through irrigation. Then there are western coal producers who want to take it out to use for coal slurry pipelines.

These would be new uses for the lakes which for years have been very useful to large companies in other ways — such as a dumping ground for industrial pollution. This is the way Lake Erie was killed; not killed meaning dead of course. It was alive, but with plenty of the wrong things.

It's typical that the effects of capitalism create a problem for its everyday abnormal functioning, then you have its apologists running around panicking because they have a problem.

Wasting what's not renewable

The lakes are immense, covering an area the size of Michigan, Indiana and Ohio combined. In some places, they go to the depth of 1,000 feet. They are, however, fragile, chemical-wise, and must be treated carefully. They were created after the last ice age and are not renewable; only the annual fall of rain and snow is.

Many reports have been presented to the various interested parties, but most stress the qualitative aspect not the quantitative. There is, however, a mean level that must be maintained at all times. If it isn't, shipping, the tourist industry and power generation are affected. That critical level cannot be sustained if more water is taken out than put in.

In   many  areas  of North  America,   man's  withdrawal  from  the watershed and acquirers exceeds nature's deposits. Wells are drying up, river flows are declining, yet businesses waste water continuously. Seeking to solve the problem within capitalism, they are searching for ways to recapture the finite amounts flowing through the water cycle. If they tackle this problem with the same degree of success they've had curbing pollution, the day will come when one will be able to drive from one end of the system to the other on the bed of the lake.

America uses 250 billions of gallons of fresh water a day, over half of it for irrigation, and the US General Accounting Office says that half the water used for irrigation is wasted. Yet, the working Joe wastes very little, 25 percent he drinks, the other 75 percent is used in the bathroom (baths, showers, flushing the toilet).

Of all the world's water, less than 1 per cent is available in North America. It's in the rivers, streams and underground aquifiers. The rest is salty or frozen in polar ice caps. Twenty-five percent of this 1 percent is in the Great Lakes, providing water for 200 towns and cities on its shores and other parts of the continent, keeping large factories going, providing hydro power and supporting a tourism industry generating $50 billion a year.

It seems strange (and it is) to be as concerned, as some conservationists and other sundry do-gooders are, because farm land is being gobbled up for shopping centres and condos, while underneath the water slips beyond their grasp.

A quarter of a million square miles of land above the Ogallala Aquifier, which is the world's largest reservoir of ground water, produces 25 percent of American cotton, 38 percent of the grain sorghum, 16 percent of the wheat and 15 percent of the corn. Forty percent of America's grain-fed beef is fattened and watered here. At the present rate of usage, the Ogallala Aquifier will be dry in 2024. A ten million year old resource wiped out in a few decades.

Conflicts of capitalist interest

The Chicago diversion plan is typical of the anarchy of capitalism. The Great Lakes are used for water supplies, for sewage disposal, for power generation and for navigation. Since these waters are shared by the US and Canada, it is inevitable that given the profit-oriented nature of capitalism, clashes between the ruling class in both countries will occur.

As Lake Michigan is wholly within the US, Ontario and bordering states are dependant on US Supreme Court decrees to control its outflow and as the Chicago diversion would affect levels in the entire system, the future (if any) of the system could well be decided in American courts and not by the International Joint Commission set up under the International Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909, which is made up of officials from both countries and supposedly oversees the use of the Great Lakes system.

This plan would seriously affect water levels in the Great Lakes and the Ontario government is concerned about it, particularly because severe lowering of lake levels would kill a multi-billion dollar shipping industry, and has made it clear that it will not support diversion of waters direct or indirect.

To solve the problem of the Ogallala Aquifier being used for irrigation faster than rainfall can replenish it, it has been suggested by some mid-west Senators to pipe water from Lake Superior, 600 miles to the Missouri River Basin. This is not merely opposed by Canadians involved, but also some Americans. Ex-governor Milliken of Michigan said he would give anyone proposing such ideas a "good drenching." Milliken himself, when in office, was vociferous in his support of conservation. One wonders if the support of Milliken by the 500,000 strong Michigan Conservation Club, had any bearing on it.

Another dilemma is how to ship coal from the western minefields to the industrial areas in the mid-west where it's needed for power. It has been suggested that it be crushed, mixed with water piped from Lake Michigan and pumped through a slurry pipeline to mid-west states.

Recently, there was also talk of increasing the water flow to improve local water quality and to lower Great Lake levels, reducing erosion and flooding damage. A recent study shows that increasing the water flow to 10,000 cubic feet a second would yield "benefits" worth $3.25 million. It also found that the resulting power and navigation losses would total $40 million annually. So, the "experts" are considering an increase to 6,600 cubic feet per second instead.

In each case, the so-called solution is to use Great Lakes water with no care for the consequences. The benefits, meaning profits for businesses, would be short-term and who knows what later; but then, that is the way capitalism must function.

Whatever happens, one thing's for sure, soon big business in the US will need more water, particularly if they wish to continue wasting it at the present rate. Also, the ruling class realize the working class need it in order to continue to be in a fit state to be exploited. Some observers think that the US may start leaning on Canada to buy Canadian water by the turn of the century. It all boils down to whether or not the predicted shortage will reach beyond toilet flushing and showers to such a trickle that it threatens all human survival — capitalist as well as worker.

No concern for the future

If much of the above seems to the reader to be irresponsible to the point of folly, that's because capitalism, through the profit motive, its very death blood, can function in no other way. Profits must be acquired and quickly for a business to survive, regardless of what long-term disasters may do to those businesses in the future. Also, the need of competing sections of the capitalist class for materials for its specific requirements, which in this case means a source of power to run industry, as well as profits concerning the sale of drink, must inevitably bring them into clashes with each other, clashes the working class has no stake in.

In a socialist society, with the abolition of the profit motive, no such screwball situations could exist. Whereas water, and anything else people need, would be moved from one place to another, this would not mean lowering the levels of lakes if it's thought that would create problems. Mankind would use the technology and technical know-how available to find where water is and transport it wherever it's needed without plundering and wasting the resources on which continuing human life on this planet depends.

Ray Rawlings

(Canada)

Pathfinders: A walk in the woods (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the few free pleasures workers in more rural parts of the UK can get is a walk through ancient woodland. There are three springtime features which you can normally expect to see in ancient woodland: bluebells, Lords and Ladies (a type of arum), and wild garlic.

What you wouldn’t expect to see is 30,000 tonnes of illegally dumped and sulphurous waste, tens of feet deep, full of rubble, plastics and sanitary products. But such is the case at Hoads Wood in Kent, a protected Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and an area of outstanding natural beauty. Or at least it was until the dumpers started showing up in their wagons.

Much understandable local outrage, and politicians falling over themselves to look tough on illegal dumping and ‘bring the perpetrators to justice’. The local police declared that the pollution was ‘shocking and totally irresponsible’, which suggested that the dumpers somehow failed to understand what they were doing when they trucked up to the site, thirty times a day.

Of course they knew exactly what they were doing. They’d been paid – as many dodgy skip-hire firms are – to dispose of other people’s waste, and didn’t fancy paying commercial rates to dump it at municipal tips. It was simply cheaper to dump it where they thought nobody was looking.

TV naturalist Chris Packham took a stern line, calling it ‘a mafia operation’, perhaps something of an overstatement in the UK, though such mafia practices are notorious in the US. It’s not so much mafia as market forces, where profit is what counts, and externalities are somebody else’s problem. The UK Environment Agency provides a handy spreadsheet of all illegal dumping incidents between 2015 and 2023, ranging from private cars to tipper trucks, for construction waste, white goods, tyres, toxic chemicals, asbestos, animal carcasses and domestic black bag waste, dumped on agricultural land, footpaths and bridleways, highways, riverbanks and watercourses. There are well over 2,000 entries and for almost all of them, nothing is entered in the ‘Final Action Taken’ field. No doubt the Environment Agency is underfunded, understaffed and unable to pursue illegal tippers, despite concerns over the health implications of illegal dumping, as described for example in a 2015 paper on the so-called ‘Triangle of death’ region of Campania, near Naples in Italy.

But it’s not just cowboy contractors. UK water companies are currently under fire for massive and repeated polluting of rivers. In one example last month, according to the BBC, United Utilities pumped raw sewage into Windermere, in the UK’s Lake District, at the rate of 500 litres a second for 6 hours, and didn’t report it for thirteen hours. Water companies are only allowed to do this if excessive rainfall overwhelms their pumping stations. But on very many occasions this is not the case, and the dumps are illegal. The company in this case protested that it was ‘an unexpected fault in the telecommunications network in the area, which United Utilities was not notified about’, however an identical incident occurred in November 2022. Nor were local activists impressed, saying ‘Time and time again the same thing keeps happening here in Windermere: United Utilities pollutes the lake and the Environment Agency turns a blind eye to it’.

Then more outrage in Devon when locals were told they’d have to boil drinking water because the local water company had failed to prevent the cryptosporidium parasite getting into the water supply and causing vomiting and diarrhoea.

Even so, this is minor stuff compared to air pollution. Globally, this causes around 6 million premature deaths each year. According to the World Health Organization, just 0.001 percent of the world’s population are breathing safe, non-toxic air. And then there are ‘forever chemicals’, synthetic polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) which never break down, and are found in everything from tea bags to non-stick pans, bottled water to butter. These are now known to cause multiple types of cancer, and class-action lawsuits have already forced giant payouts by DuPont, 3M and other manufacturers, but international efforts to ban PFAS production are grindingly slow.

A PFAS ban might be achievable. Capitalism is not incapable of reacting to obvious environmental dangers, as long as legislation is across the board, meaning that individual manufacturers and states don’t suffer comparative disadvantage. It did this with ozone-destroying CFCs starting in the 1970s, though a global ban did not come into effect until 2010. Even then it couldn’t be globally enforced, with China being pinpointed as the source of a 50 percent increase in CFC output in 2019.

The capitalist system of production is today’s ideological sacred cow. It is supposed to be the best and only way to improve the standard of living for all humanity, yet because its prime imperative is only to make money by any means necessary, the reality never lives up to the hype. With the cow come the cowboys. If we abolish money and markets, along with the political and wealthy elites who protect them, we could then develop a transparent production and recycled waste system that actually worked in humanity’s interest, where no palms would be greased and no blind eyes turned. We need to dump capitalism instead of letting capitalism dump on us. Then people could enjoy an unspoilt walk in the woods and a wild swim in the local lake, without worrying what they might catch in the process.

Paddy Shannon

Socialist Sonnet No. 149: Water’s Utility (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Water’s Utility

‘Water, water, everywhere, nor any

Drop to drink.’ Rain falls freely to earth,

Yet water is not free; so what is it worth?

A fortune to a water company,

Feeling free to pollute rivers and lakes

With sewage in all its variety,

Product of our effluent society.

Consumers pay the bill, while capital takes

The dividends. So, what nature provides

Becomes a commodity by and by,

To profit those who’ll control the supply

As long as capitalism abides.

‘Nor any drop to drink’ safe to say

Unless the drinker can afford to pay.

 D. A.

Cooking the Books: Uninvestible (2024)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

That was the word used by Chris Weston, the CEO of Thames Water, to describe how the business was regarded by its shareholders in the absence of the water companies’ regulator, Ofwat, allowing an increase in the price charged to customers (Times, 29 March).

It’s an odd word, not to be confused with ‘uninvestable’ (with an a) which refers to some item of value that cannot be invested because it cannot be money-capital. ‘Uninvestible’ (with an i) refers to a project which those with money-capital won’t invest in.

Last year the US Commerce Secretary said that businesses had told her that China had become ‘uninvestible’ because it was too risky due to interference from the government there. In the case of Thames Water it is simply a euphemism for ‘not profitable enough’:

‘Thames Water Plc said its £18.7 billion ($22.7 billion) plan to strengthen its finances won’t get funding from investors unless the regulator changes the rules to allow fatter returns. The UK’s largest water company said delivering on its full business plan, published belatedly on Thursday, rests on getting £2.5 billion additional equity from shareholders for 2025 to 2030. However, it warned that investors can get better returns in UK gilts and investment grade corporate bonds. It called on the Water Services Regulation Authority, Ofwat, to make significant changes to the rate of returns allowed for regulated water companies. (…) Thames Water called for a “material move up in the allowed rate of return” set by Ofwat in its initial guidance’ (Bloomberg).

There is little sympathy from other capitalists for the shareholders (one of which is, ironically, the Chinese sovereign wealth fund). Jacob Rees-Mogg, a capitalist as well as an MP, tweeted:

‘Thames Water ought to be allowed to go bankrupt. It would continue to be run by an administrator, the shareholders would lose their equity but they took too much cash out so deserve no sympathy and the bond holders would face a partial loss. This is capitalism, it won’t affect the water supply.’

Monopolies such as the essential utilities —there can only be one national grid for electricity, gas or water — present capitalism with a problem. If left in private hands, the capitalists who own the distribution system are in a position to hold the rest of the capitalist class to ransom by charging a monopoly price. The way the other capitalists found round this has been either nationalisation, where the state runs the industry keeping prices down, or regulation, where the state imposes a limit on the amount of profit that the privately owned utilities can make.

Historically, the US chose regulation while Britain chose nationalisation until, that is, the Thatcher government in the 1980s switched to regulation. One reason for this switch was to attract outside capital to invest in them, which made the change as much ‘internationalisation’ as privatisation. This part worked, as illustrated by the fact that, besides China, another of the owners of Thames Water is a Canadian pensions fund.

With regulation, the private owners are not in a completely weak position as they can, if they are not allowed to make enough profits, simply walk away, as the owners of Thames Water are threatening to do.

There is a lesson here for the future Labour government whose plan for growth relies on offering private capitalist enterprises an incentive to invest in some project by the state part-financing it. These enterprises, too, will be in a position to put pressure on the government by dubbing some project uninvestible unless they are allowed ‘fat returns’.

Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A bottle of Scotch whisky billed as ‘the most sought-after’ in the world sold Saturday for almost 2.2 million pounds ($2.7 million), an auction record for a bottle of wine or spirits.

[Link.]

We often assume that religious beliefs are no different in kind from ordinary factual beliefs—that believing in the existence of God or of supernatural entities that hear our prayers is akin to believing that May comes before June. Neil Van Leeuwen shows that, in fact, these two forms of belief are strikingly different. Our brains do not process religious beliefs like they do beliefs concerning mundane reality; instead, empirical findings show that religious beliefs function like the imaginings that guide make-believe play.

[Link.]

Margot Friedländer, the 102-year-old Holocaust survivor, recently offered a few important words during an appearance on one of Germany’s most-watched political talk shows. ‘There is no Christian blood, no Muslim blood, no Jewish blood,’ she said. ‘”It is all human blood. We are all equal.’ And further: ‘I believe there is something good in every person. Take the good and forget the bad. It’s so easy to be human.’ Perhaps Greta Thunberg should have a sit-down with Friedländer. It might be a good start for getting back on the right track.

[Link.]

‘Queers for Palestine’ attempts to meld LGBT advocacy with Palestinian liberation, a juxtaposition that has precipitated a whirlwind of criticism and ridicule, since LGBT rights scarcely exist within the Muslim world; and the Palestinian territories are no exception. The slogan has been widely satirized. Variations like ‘Chickens for KFC’ and ‘Blacks for the KKK’” highlight its proponents’ basic lack of awareness of just how incompatible the values of the Western left are with those of the Islamic right they so readily champion.

[Link.]

They Survived Hell – but for Some, They’re Only a Means of Production

We were shocked to discover that mere days after being rescued, the migrant workers were pressured to return to work, including through threats to withhold their passports and their salaries. In some cases, they were required to return to work in the Gaza Envelope – near the killing fields they had just escaped.

[Link.]

The Pacific Institute, which regularly updates its Water Conflict Chronology, reported that at least 228 water conflicts were recorded in 2022—an 87 percent increase over 2021—driven in large part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Russian forces attacked water pipelines and supply systems in a number of Ukrainian cities after invading in February 2022, targeting water resources a total of 56 times since the war began .

[Link.]

A majority of American adults (72 percent) would not be willing to serve in the military were the U.S. to enter a major war, polling from Echelon Insights found, while public confidence in the armed forces also appears to be waning. It comes as all branches of the armed forces have struggled to meet their recruitment targets. Since 1987, the number of active-duty personnel has fallen by 39 percent.

[Link.]

A Non-starter (2003)

Book Review from the November 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

War No More: Eliminating Conflict in the Nuclear Age by Robert Hinde and Joseph Rotblat: Pluto Press £10.99.

World military expenditure for the year was estimated in 1999 at $850 billion, the kind of figure that just boggles the mind. Hardly anyone will disagree with what this book says about the evils and waste of war and the need to get rid of it. Unfortunately, while the authors’ hearts are in the right place, not much of their thinking is.

Any movement to do away with war must begin by examining the causes of war, so Hinde and Rotblat ask what makes wars happen. It is not human nature, they say: people are not naturally aggressive, and rather than aggressiveness causing war, it is warfare that makes people behave aggressively. Instead, they argue, there is no single cause of war, for wars occur when multiple factors come together. They accept that competition over resources is one possible contributing factor, and they discuss oil and other raw materials. Water, in particular, is likely to be an increasing cause of contention, e.g. in Southern Africa, though there has been no ‘Water War’ as yet.

It is argued that capitalism does not need war, but the emphasis on multiple causes of war is really a cop-out. This is because it downplays the ways that capitalist states need—not war itself exactly—but control over resources and the denial of such control to their rivals, and will be prepared to go to war if other avenues to achieve their aims fail. The part played by capitalist rivalry in causing war is not given sufficient attention. Instead it is suggested that “the maintenance of stability over the whole world is in the interests of businesses everywhere”. This is at best a half-truth, though, as the stability found in the status quo may be very much against the interests of some groups of capitalists.

Hinde and Rotblat then look at how to eliminate war, proposing a number of ideas. For instance, nationalist ideas (i.e. denigrating other countries and cultures) should not be tolerated, while patriotism (pride in one’s own culture) is fine. More interestingly, they advocate “a loyalty to humanity”, but have little beyond pious notions to offer as to how it can be brought about. They conclude by emphasising the need for “an equitable global community, to which we all belong as world citizens”. This might not be a bad way of describing Socialism, but that clearly isn’t what they have in mind. What they want instead is a nicer kind of capitalism, with the worst poverty removed, the role of the United Nations enhanced, and no national military forces, which is just a utopian vision. As a way of eliminating conflict, this is a non-starter.

Paul Bennett

Material World: The world of commodity trading (2023)

The Material World Column from the October 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clicking through to the commodities news section on the internet (such as reuters) is like taking a glimpse into the future. The stories there detail the raw stuff of life and the struggles to come to secure access and control over those things. Headlines such as ‘Gold eases as US dollar bumps higher before Powell’s speech’, ‘China’s biggest salt maker urges public not to panic buy after Fukushima discharge’ or ‘India’s food price surge forces government measures to improve supplies’ (to take just one day’s offering) prefigure the social and political events to come.

While we would normally understand a commodity, in Marx’ words as any ‘object outside us, … that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another’ produced for sale, when discussing commodity markets journalists and traders understand them as ‘a market that trades in the primary economic sector rather than manufactured products, such as cocoa,’. So, that is food cereals, oil, metals and the like. The firms that trade in these goods are, as Blas and Farchy relate in their book The World for Sale, an ‘international clearing house for essential goods.’ As they explain:

‘Commodity traders are arbitragers par excellence, trying to exploit a series of differences in prices. Because they’re doing deals to buy and sell all the time, they are often indifferent to whether commodity prices overall go up or down. What matters to them is the price disparity. By exploiting these price differences, they help make the markets more efficient, directing resources to their highest value in response to price signals.’

Or, put another way, they make use of information disparities to make their money, making use of networks of knowledge and connexions in industries to predict and find price disparities to target. The advent of the internet and modern computer communications technology has revolutionised the industry, removing some of the advantages some of the older trading houses had.

Trading water

Such trading is oblivious to human need, and is contrary to the quoted section above, only driven by effective demand. So, news reports that: ‘Water has joined gold, oil and other commodities that are traded on Wall Street, as worries about the uncertainty of its availability in the future rises. The US’s water trade market, the first of its kind, launched on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange with $1.1 billion in contracts tied to California water prices’ (earth.org/water-trade/) is alarming. This will enable spot markets and futures markets over the price of water.

There have been instances of commodities firms cornering the supply of a commodity (such as aluminium) in order to maximise their profits. Commodities markets put social power into the hands of the commodity traders, and give capital power over society. Further, the traders seek to take control of the supply chain, seeking competitive advantage by integrating all the stages of bringing the commodity to market.

In this way, they are recreating the way industrial capitalism emerged, as Jairus Banaji notes in his A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism:

‘Next to monopoly of the raw materials (wool of different qualities, dyestuffs, alum), integration of control over all these separate processes was the true basis of the merchant’s dominance in capitalistically organized domestic industries. (…) By compressing the chain of circulation … vertical integration increased its velocity and re-appropriated a part of the surplus-value that accrued to middlemen.’

Banaji also observes generally through his text how the physical presence of the merchants, and their contacts with political and military power, secure and control their markets, hence the movements and reports about commodities markets ripple out into the political and international realms, driving the actions of governments. This had led to many corruption scandals among the commodity trading world, as they slosh money around to their contacts to secure favourable terms. But, also, they are able to make quick agreements, accepting commodities in lieu of cash, as well as the converse of supplying cash when other financial bodies will not.

For example, in the 1980’s, Marc Rich & Co. was able to cut a deal to supply Jamaica with $10 million worth of oil (without even a formally signed contract). In return his firm secured favoured access to Jamaica’s bauxite and alumina. Further, the firm was able, through creative accounting, to bypass international financial institutions such as the IMF. The flip side of this was when local politicians started to suspect the traders were taking advantage of them, the traders were able to bring to bear international pressure to deter investigation. Similarly, the commodity traders were interested in profits, and would work with (and prop up) regimes of any stripe as long as they could get access to the goods.

Such manoeuvring allowed a relatively small circle of firms, such as Vitol, Phillip Brothers, Cargill, Trafigure and Glencore (who, for example, made $3,408 million net profit in 2018), to dominate many commodities markets.

For the billions, not the billionaires

These firms do provide a useful role in worldwide production in bringing agents in the productive process together, but they make their profits, essentially, from taking advantage of gaps in information. Opening up the information of stocks, orders and production would enable a co-operative community to carry out its own production. As we say in our pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative:

‘On the smallest local scale, information centres could monitor the position of stocks and productive capacity to meet local needs. By collating these statistics, regional information centres would be in a position to know the complete picture throughout the region. This could be achieved by also monitoring the position of stocks, productive capacity and needs among regional production units.

A world information centre could collate regional statistics in a similar manner. This would be a connected but decentralised world information system providing any combination of information that people required.’.

The commodities news – as it is – is a record of the minority rule of billionaires. It could become the means of self-control for the lives of billions.

Pik Smeet

After Hezbollah, war with Iran? (2006)

From the September 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Was Israel’s attack on Hezbollah part of preparations for a coming US attack on Iran?

As we go to press, a serious and already escalating crisis can be expected to go into overdrive the instant the Iranian government, at the moment under a UN deadline to stop uranium enrichment by 31 August, tells the UN what it can do with its resolution.

Sanctions will no doubt be announced, but to what effect and with what response from Iran remains to be seen. Iran has already intimated it would spark a global oil price crisis in response to UN sanctions, and it is unclear whether China and Russia – each with vested oil interests in Iran – will go along with any sanctions. The worst-case scenario is that the US will express feigned frustration at Iran’s unwillingness to cooperate and use the rejected resolution as a chequered flag to attack Iran militarily.

It is against this backdrop that we can begin to set the present Middle East crisis in context, particularly the recent Israeli attack upon Lebanon. This latest act of Israeli aggression was not about capturing back the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped on 14 July but was rather, it would seem, about oil and the securing of other resources and about preparing for any wider conflict against Syria and Iran.

Planned in advance

There are numerous claims that the war in Lebanon had been planned in advance by Israel. Reporting from Tel Aviv for the San Francisco Chronicle (21 July), Matthew Kalman wrote: “More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to US and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail.”

Speaking to CNN, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh said: “July was a pretext for a major offensive that had been in the works for a long time. Israel’s attack was going to be a model for the attack they really want to do. They really want to go after Iran.” (Guardian, 14 August).

In bombarding Lebanon and the Gaza strip (Gaza is still being bombed) the objective was to neutralise two opponents of Israel – and the US – Hezbollah and Hamas. Hezbollah’s fire power and missile capabilities needed to be tested. Israel was unsure of the number of rockets in the hands of Hezbollah (some said 20,000) or indeed their range. Now they know. The Israeli bombardment of key roads and bridges and passage to Syria can serve no other function than to cut of the weapons supply route to Hezbollah. By striking pre-emptively Israel seems to have planned to destroy as many Hezbollah weapons as possible in advance of any rocket attack on Israel resulting from any US-allied bombardment of Iran.

Oil and water

Widely unreported in the Western popular media and brought to a wider audience by Michel Chossudovsky, a Canadian economics professor, on the Global Research website was the inauguration of the Ceyhan-Tblisi-Baku (BTC) oil pipeline. This links the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Mediterranean, and was opened one day before Hezbollah’s kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers that ostensibly started the recent war in Lebanon.The BTC pipeline is anticipated to carry a million barrels of oil a day to Western markets. In attendance at the inauguration ceremony were BP’s CEO Lord Browne and senior officials from the UK and USA, along with Israel’s Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Binyamin Ben Eliezer, accompanied by a delegation of top Israeli oil officials.

The BP-dominated pipeline skirts the Russian Federation, cutting through new pro-US states Georgia and Azerbaijan, countries allied with NATO and with a standing military pact with Israel. Israel already gets 20 percent of its oil from Azeri oil fields and this new pipeline is set to increase Israeli imports from the Caspian basin. Israel is now tipped to be a key player in the East Mediterranean oil transport protection racket.

Officially, the BTC pipeline will be channelling oil to Western markets. What is not admitted, however, is that some of this oil will be redirected towards Israel via a proposed underwater pipeline from Ceyhan in Turkey to the Israeli port of Ashkelon, and from there via a pipeline system to the Red Sea. The plan not only seems to serve Israeli oil consumption needs, but also plays a part in the US’s wider game of global-politics.

Oil channelled from Ashkelon to the Red Sea will then be re-exported from the Red Sea port of Eilat to Asian markets. This will help undermine the inter-Asian energy market eventually weakening the position of Russia in Central Asia and cutting off China from Central Asia’s oil reserves. In April of this year Ankara and Tel Aviv publicised their intention to create four pipelines which would bypass Syrian and Lebanese territory. As the Jerusalem Post (11 May) reported:

”Turkey and Israel are negotiating the construction of a multi-million-dollar energy and water project that will transport water, electricity, natural gas and oil by pipelines to Israel, with the oil to be sent onward from Israel to the Far East.”

The scheme further envisages a pipeline to carry water to Israel from upstream Anatolian rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Not only is this plan catered for in the recently-announced military pact between Israel and Ankara, its implementation will be devastating for Syria and Iraq. The execution of this joint Israeli-Turkish venture requires that land and sea routes between the Ceyhan border, through Syria and Lebanon, and to the Lebanese-Israeli border, be militarised.

Michel Chossudovsky asks in his article ‘The war on Lebanon and the battle for oil:’

“Is this not one of the hidden objectives of the war on Lebanon? Open up a space which enables Israel to control a vast territory extending from the Lebanese border through Syria to Turkey.”

Israel is keen to play a more dominant role in the Middle East and seeks to achieve a degree of economic autonomy by becoming a key player in oil politics. Its military programme is increasingly looking like being tailored to the region’s strategic oil pipelines and by the Western oil companies commanding the pipeline passages. Of course to punch above its weight it needs outside help, hence alliances with the US and more recently with Turkey and NATO.

Chossudovsky’s oft-cited piece “Triple Alliance”: The US, Turkey, Israel and the War on Lebanon details the alliances and agreements which apparently underpin the war with Hezbollah.

“We are not dealing with a limited conflict between the Israeli Armed Forces and Hezbollah as conveyed by the Western media. The Lebanese War Theatre is part of a broader US military agenda, which encompasses a region extending from the Eastern Mediterranean into the heartland of Central Asia. The war on Lebanon must be viewed as ‘a stage’ in this broader ‘military road map’.”

Significant, for Chossudovsky, is the Turkey-Israel alliance which involves military and intelligence sharing on Iraq, Iran and Syria, as well as joint military exercises and training.

Pepe Escobar, writing for Asia Times, stresses Israel’s water needs as partly behind the recent war in Lebanon. : “There’s also the all-important matter of the waters of the Litani River in southern Lebanon. Israel might as well prepare the terrain now for the eventual annexation of the Litani. Beyond Lebanon, Israel is mostly interested also in Syria. The motive: the all-important pipeline route from Kirkuk, in Iraqi Kurdistan, to Haifa. Enter Israel as a major player in Pipelineistan. So Israel wants to grab water (and territory) from Palestine, water (and territory) from Lebanon and oil from Iraq. This all has to do with the inevitable – the 21st-century energy wars.”( Link.)

Seeking greater independence and an enhanced role in the Middle East, the smell of profits all around, Israeli aggression now becomes more understandable.

Long war

Tel Aviv recently announced it was in for a “long war” – clearly not with Hezbollah. It has been stockpiling weapons for several years and was re-supplied throughout the war with Hezbollah by the US. On top of its arsenal of 200 nuclear warheads it has in excess of 500 bunker-busting bombs, only a few, by all accounts, used recently in Lebanon. Clearly Israel is preparing for a widening and intense conflict. Speaking of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said: “We need to make clear to Syria and Iran that there is a choice: come into the international community and play by the same rules as the rest of us, or be confronted.”

Can this hypocritical statement be interpreted as anything other than a serious threat ofviolence to those Middle Eastern countriesthat would stand in the way of profit-hungry masters of war and their ambitions for global domination of the planet’s vital resources?

Seymour Hersh has repeatedly asserted that President Bush ordered all-out war against Iran shortly after his re-election in 2004. Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative, amongst other sources, sides with Hersh in arguing that vice-president Dick Cheney has drawn up a war plan for Iran inclusive of the possible use of nuclear weapons.

US Defence Secretary Don Rumsfeld has placed US forces on alert and Lieutenant-Colonel Bruce Carlson, commander of the 8th Air Force acknowledges: “We’re now at the point where we are essentially on alert. We have the capacity to plan and execute global strikes in half a day or less.”

Dan Plesch (Guardian, 8 August) suggests President Bush has at his disposal: “200 strategic bombers (B52-B1-B2- F117A) and US Navy Tomahawk cruise missiles. One B2 bomber dropped 80,500lb bombs on separate targets in 22 seconds in a test flight. Using just half the available force, 10,000 targets could be attacked almost simultaneously. This strike power alone is sufficient to destroy all major Iranian political, military, economic and transport capabilities.”

Dangerous times

We live at a dangerous stage of human history, in which the greatest crime a country can commit is to have more than its fair share of resources in a world in which the leading superpower is seeking full-spectrum dominance. Iran’s real and unforgivable crime – leaving aside its refusal to halt its uranium enrichment programme – is to have enviable oil and gas reserves, to control access to the Persian Gulf , which is a vital oil and gas transhipment route to Europe, Japan, and the rest of the world, and to have contemplated oil deals with a serious rival for US supremacy, China. With China expected to have oil demands similar to US levels within 20 years, already consuming vast resources of coal, iron and steel, not to mention almost 70 percent of the world’s cement supplies on a single dam project, the panic button has clearly been pressed.

As Socialists we are naturally fearful as we watch events unfold; fearful for our class, our fellows throughout the world and for whom we hold no ill feelings. As always, we refuse to take sides in conflict, seeing all war as rooted in the desire to make profit, and viewing workers, wherever they are, united as one class with the same basic needs and common interest, diametrically opposed to the interests of those who would urge them to kill each other.

 Before the slaughter begins again, we once more take the opportunity to declare our heartfelt solidarity with the workers of all countries, and their true common cause. We appeal to workers to organise consciously and politically and to use the power at their disposal to head off the threatening bloodshed, and secure the space we need in order to build a world of peace and stability. As ever, we appeal to the workers of all lands to join with us in campaigning for a system of society where there are no leaders, no classes, no states or governments, no borders, no force or coercion; a world where the earth’s natural and industrial resources are commonly owned and democratically controlled and where production is freed from the artificial constraints of profit and used for the benefit of all; a world of free access to the necessaries of life. A world without waste, or want, or war.

John Bissett

Forward Thinking (2023)

Book Review from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

The World in 2050: How to Think About the Future. By Hamish McRae. Bloomsbury £12.99.

In 1996 McRae published The World in 2020, in which he referred to the likelihood of Brexit. Now he has again looked a generation ahead, to examine what the future might hold. Of course he accepts the continuation of capitalism, with competing countries and political conflicts, but he has some interesting points to make about environmental issues, demographic changes and the impact of technology.

The global population is ageing, with people living longer and birth rates falling (the latter quite drastically so in Japan and South Korea, but less markedly in much of Europe). Younger workers are apparently more productive than older ones, but seven retirees for every ten people employed (as may happen in Japan by 2045) will put a strain on healthcare and so on. For instance, the Health Foundation recently claimed that by 2040 one person in five in England (nine million people) will be living with a serious illness. Other parts of the world are different, though, with India and Africa having youthful populations. By 2100 Africa may have 40 per cent of the global population: ‘It will be young; most of the rest of the world will be old’. Nigeria may well have a population of 400 million (at present 224 million). The Anglosphere, as a ‘community’ of English speakers, is likely to be very powerful.

By 2050 the world will be able to feed a projected ten billion people, but water shortages may well be a major problem, at least in some places. Flooding of coastal areas will become increasingly likely, while some cities will run short of water, and two-thirds of people will probably live in cities. China will be short of water, arable land and sources of energy. Indonesia is at particular risk from climate change, with rising waters a real problem. Australia will have to cope with a warmer and drier climate. Global warming may well lead to large-scale migration, well beyond what currently takes place.

The last fifty years have seen little improvement for most people in ‘developed’ countries: ‘Median earnings in the US have barely risen in real terms since the 1970s, while in Europe the picture is more varied, but certainly since 2007 they have at best been flat.’ Workers’ share of GDP has been falling since the 1960s. By 2050 there will supposedly be a ‘middle-class world’, which presumably means that at least two-thirds of the population will be comfortably off, though not much justification is given for this view. Productivity has been increasing over the decades, but it is easier to achieve this in manufacturing than in services, which is where consumption may become concentrated. The absence of any discussion here of degrowth is a major shortcoming, though.

But the world in 2050 might be very different, without rival countries or trade or inequality. That would be a much better situation to combat climate change and water shortages.

Paul Bennett

Watering down socialism (2007)

Pamphlet Review from the August 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

We won’t pay! By Gary Mulcahy. Published by ‘Socialist Party’. £3.

This pamphlet somewhat tediously sets out in detail the arguments offered by those – probably the great majority across the social spectrum in Northern Ireland – who are opposed to the proposed introduction of water charges.

Despite the generality of this opposition, it is the fragmented Left that have made the issue their current hobby-horse. Indeed, given the strength of opposition to water charges, it should prove a unifying element among those who support the notion that the capitalist leopard can have its spots removed one at a time. The pamphlet is aimed at the creation of a united Left front to the charges; however in lengthy and vigorous excoriation of their political kindred, it shows that while there is agreement on purpose within the Left there is acrid diversity regarding the means of achieving that purpose.

These verbal punch-ups are endemic within the Left; inevitable political afterthoughts nourished in the fecund soil of failure and disillusion brought about by the belief that they can control or seriously influence capitalism without the overwhelming authority of a socialist-conscious working class.

These ‘vanguard cadres’ don’t view the democratic process as a means of achieving the revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism. They aim at ‘improvement’, at making capitalism better for its wage slaves which is akin to suggesting that the slaughter house should be made better for the cattle.

Against the Marxian view that the achievement of socialism must be the work of the working class this so-called ‘Socialist Party’ (a reincarnation of Militant) adheres to the absurdly arrogant Leninist thesis that workers are incapable of emancipating themselves and must be led to political salvation by a political elite.

The pioneers of the socialist movement held to the view that since capitalism was based on the exploitation of the working class it could not function in the interests of that class. Understanding this essential truth they urged workers to organise to end capitalism. As Marx put it, workers should abandon the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’ and, instead, to inscribe on their banner ‘Abolition of the wages system’.

However well-intentioned Left reformists might be it is a fact that by distorting the essential meaning of the terms socialism and communism (which Marx and Engels used interchangeably) they have seriously set back the growth of socialist consciousness.

A gross example of this distortion appears on page 47 of the pamphlet under the heading ‘The Need For a Socialist Alternative’. The author recites a few of the greater obscenities of recent capitalist plunder and cites the need for a mass socialist party to – no! not to abolish capitalism; not to use our unified power to end its iniquitous wages and money system; not to dump commodity production into the dustbin of history – but to retain what is patently now a harmful social anachronism but under the aegis of the state. Probably they would argue that unlike Lenin and the totalitarian empire he endorsed when his ‘vanguard’ established state capitalism in Russia, their vanguard would be more socially virtuous.

Richard Montague

Voice From The Back: The Price Of Oil (2006)

The Voice From The Back Column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Price Of Oil

Away back in September 2003 two workers were suffocated to death in a huge gas leak on Shell’s Brent Bravo oil platform in the North Sea. “Bill Campbell, a former senior manager with the oil giants, says vital maintenance work was ignored and lies told to allow platforms to carry on producing oil at all times” (Daily Record, 14 June). The company were fined £900,000 for safety breaches. An amount that is completely derisory when compared with their billions in profits every year. Bill Campbell who worked in the North Sea for 25 years went on BBC Scotland TV to denounce the company, but they did not send a spokesperson to deny the charges. They were probably too busy counting their profits to consider the deaths of two expendable workers.

Lazy Workers?

“Avoiding work is a full-time job and seems to be getting harder, at least in America where Workaholics Anonymous now has self-help branches in 35 cities. New figures suggest that employees are working three hours a week more than their parents did, the equivalent to nearly four extra weeks a year” (Times, 21 June). Socialists used to be told that socialism was impractical because the working class were too lazy. That argument certainly doesn’t apply here.

A Tale Of Three Virgins

Three sisters in Inverness featured in a bizarre insurance policy. They insured themselves against having a virgin birth. The insurance company only cancelled the policy because of religious pressure. “The Catholic Church was not happy about what we have been doing” (The Herald, 23 June). What was their objection we wonder? They don’t believe in virgin births? They could not accept the notion that the next Jesus might be a Jock? A second coming could lead to mass unemployment in the Vatican?.

Science And Profits

Sir Ian Chalmers writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine states that the scientific record of clinical trials is being distorted by drug companies in order to protect sales. “Patients’ lives are being put at risk because drug companies cannot be trusted to publish unbiased clinical research, according to a leading scientist” (Times, 29 June). We are dealing with capitalism, we are dealing with a multibillion dollar industry, why shouldn’t we have distortion? After all that is how capitalism operates.

Not Newsworthy?

Every evening editors of The Sun, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Mail have to make a decision about what to splash on their front pages the next day. Shall it be Pop Star Sniffs Cocaine, Soap Star Visits Brothel or maybe Politician’s Gay Secret? The senior policy officer for Water Aid, Henry Northover is hardly likely to make the tabloid’s headlines with the following. “Imagine 20 Jumbo jets filled with children – that’s the number who die every day owing to lack of clean water and sanitation” (Observer, 2 July). We are trying to imagine 20 Jumbo jets full of children crashing every day, and frankly it makes us ill, but of course it is not newsworthy in this mad society.

For The Good Times

The end of the World Cup has left many social observers scratching their heads in disbelief. No violence, no hooliganism and no mindless madness? Can this be the working class that the Daily Mail are always warning us about? Tens of thousands of working men and women from all over the world, enjoying each others’ company, laughing, joking, dancing and who knows what else. It would almost makes you believe that world socialism is possible, unless you read the Daily Mail of course.

And The Bad Times

Because of the proliferation of TV channels advertisers are concerned about their “lack of penetration”into profit-making areas. Even worse is the advent of VCR recorders, where people watch shows and delete the ads. The answers for these hucksters is to sponsor sports events. Unlike soaps, that workers can look at later, sports events are watched. While they occur. This explains why the TV rights for NFL (American football) is $3.7 billion, the World Cup $1.1 billion and why you had to watch those silly Budwieser ads. Worse is to follow. “Images like a giant Coca-Cola bottle emerging from the centre circle, can be projected onto the pitch” (Observer, 9 July). Perhaps they could arrange a penalty shoot between Pepsi and Coca Cola? Capitalism distorts everything, even our leisure time . . .