Letter: What about overpopulation? (2020)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

What about overpopulation?

A reader has asked us about overpopulation, commenting that socialism ‘might be easier with a reduced population’.

It is true that socialism would be a lot easier to implement and operate with less people to provide for. But if wishes were horses, all beggars would ride, as the old saying goes.

The reality is that globally the population is growing and the question is, can it be reduced? The stark answer is no – even if fertility rates were lowered. The number of people in a country continues to rise for years after people stop having children– a phenomenon known as population momentum.

Thus, the projection is that global population will go from approaching 8 billion today to about 11 billion in around year 2100 then plateauing and then finally begin to drop back to about what it is today.

So socialists fully expect and are required to plan for an increased number of people, something that we cannot avoid regardless of any family planning which is already being increasingly adopted without any compulsion by better educated and more empowered women, even in patriarchal dominated cultures.

Our argument is that with rational allocation of resources that should not be a problem and that free access can still be accomplished. We do have the capability of comfortably coping and still create a sustainable steady-state zero-growth economy eventually.

This is not to say that it will not be a critical crisis for capitalism and is in fact another reason why for the sake of humanity it must be done away with.

Along with a population rise we also have the related issues that will arise in the future.

Firstly, the demographic problem of higher numbers of elderly with less adults of working-age to support them. China’s one-child policy resulted in what was called the 1 – 2 – 4 paradox. One active worker supporting retired parents and because of better health prospects his or her grand-parents. Such family support is essential in countries lacking social safety-nets for the old and frail.

We also have the situation of urbanisation and over-crowding in slums and shanty towns of some major cities as the industrialised plantation-type cash-crop farming leads to the end of the small-farmers. (To be exacerbated by climate change in many areas of the world)

And thirdly, we have the nationalist prejudice against the movement and migration of people. We witness this right now. The youth of Africa thwarted by lack of prospects seek opportunities in Europe where there is already a declining work-force that requires an influx of newcomers. But rather than be welcomed, they are being excluded.

Socialists cannot deny these conditions result in suffering and misery for as long as we live under capitalism. But we challenge the view that solutions cannot be achieved with the establishment of a cooperative society. In fact, only socialism can overcome them.

ALJO

Material World: Venezuela – a year on (2025)

The Material World column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The article on Venezuela published in last June’s Socialist Standard referred to the upcoming presidential election there as ‘unlikely to be free and fair’ and likely, whatever the real outcome, to result in Nicolás Maduro declaring himself ‘the winner’. And that’s exactly what happened. Maduro’s opponent, Edmundo González, produced figures to show that he had won around 67 percent of the votes compared to Maduro’s 29 percent. But this did not prevent Maduro from shamelessly declaring victory though not providing any supporting data as no official results were ever published. Previously he had banned his chief opponent, María Corona Machado, from standing, blocked her proposed replacement, and then adopted various other tactics to manipulate the vote.

Repression

Maduro responded with brutal repression against the thousands who took to the streets to protest, calling it a ‘fascist outbreak’. Since then Human Rights Watch has documented widespread violence against opponents by the Venezuelan authorities and by pro-Maduro armed groups known as ‘colectivos’, including killing of protestors and bystanders, ‘disappearances’ of opposition party members, arbitrary detentions and torture and ill-treatment of detainees. Protestors are often charged with broadly defined offences such as ‘incitement to hatred’, ‘resistance to authority’, and ‘terrorism’, with possible penalties of up to 30 years. Before the election, close to 8 million people had left Venezuela, an exodus constituting one of Latin America’s largest mass population movements in history. Since then, many more have fled, including elected officials, local authority workers, polling station workers, human rights advocates and journalists, and it is being projected that 2 to 3 million more will leave in the foreseeable future. This is being driven not just by the existence of a full-blown authoritarian regime, where the last shred of popular legitimacy – properly democratic elections – has vanished, but also by dire economic conditions including reliably reported frequent power failures, lack of basic foodstuffs, and sky-high crime rates partly associated with gang warfare and drug trafficking.

The intolerance of opposition was confirmed during the period of Maduro’s official ‘self-inauguration’ in January of this year when, things having ‘gone quiet’ in the outside world and with little media attention on the country, he announced plans for constitutional changes to further consolidate his power. He declared the beginning of what would be a more entrenched phase of authoritarian rule based on a strong alliance between civilian authorities, military forces, the police and the intelligence apparatus. On the day of the inauguration itself, widespread and ultra-expensive precautions were taken to counter the possibility being mooted that the opposition could somehow carry out its declared intention to return its president-elect, González, to the country from exile in Spain and hold a parallel counter-inauguration.

USA sabotage?

Outside Venezuela, Maduro enjoys the backing of some other authoritarian states – for example Cuba and Nicaragua in the Americas, and Russia, China and Iraq beyond. The USA is Maduro’s chief opponent having put up a reward of 25 million dollars for information leading to his arrest. This gives Maduro and his supporters both inside and outside Venezuela ammunition to attribute to American actions (eg, economic sanctions and CIA sabotage activity) the decline in the country’s economy, the poor state of its health care and education systems and its inability to feed large numbers of its people. This also gives Maduro the opportunity to portray the country as a beleaguered socialist enclave oppressed by, but standing up to, a bullying capitalist power. Not that this has prevented him from cooperating with Donald Trump in agreeing to accept back into Venezuela thousands of the desperate refugees who had left for the USA and who Trump is now having deported.

Predictably, the parliamentary and local elections held in May of this year again saw Maduro declaring overwhelming victory, this time with a claimed 82.68% of the votes cast and governorships in 23 out of the country’s 24 states. On this occasion, however, it seems likely that he did have a genuine majority given that the main opposition parties boycotted the elections and urged voters to do so on the grounds that they could not be free and fair. The turnout was said to be as low as 25 percent.

Not socialist

A recent report on the deportations in the Washington Post, while correctly describing Venezuela as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘repressive’, also referred to it as ‘Marxist’ and ‘Socialist’, neither of which labels is correct. While it’s true that both these terms are much debated, they are often abused and there is absolutely no warrant in Marx for the form of state-run capitalism that exists in Venezuela to be called ‘socialism’. In fact, the system there, based as it is on the market and buying and selling, is the very antithesis of socialism, which is a world society of common ownership and democratic control. Maduro’s regime may pose as ‘socialist’, but it is no more socialist than those other state capitalist regimes such as China and Cuba that support it. Yet the fraudulent use and circulation of the term allows those on the political right of the capitalist spectrum to point to the ‘failure of socialism’ for the poverty, tyranny, population flight and legalised violence that are its salient features. At the same time left-wing supporters of the Maduro regime blame the USA for stifling a valiant ‘socialist’ experiment by starving the country of resources and fomenting discontent among its population. The essence of a socialist society is a moneyless, stateless system with free access to all goods and services and based on voluntary cooperation and economic equality. Nothing of this is even close to existing in Venezuela or any of the countries that support it.

The future?

So what is the future for Venezuela? Maduro’s regime has been described as ‘a criminal mafia gang with the trappings of governmental power’. Can he hold on to power indefinitely, despite the minority support he has among the population and an economy that continues to be run into the ground, leaving most people struggling just to survive? For now Maduro seems to have the loyalty of the military, with its high-ranking officials being generously rewarded and the support of special police units, militias and intelligence facilities backed by Cuba’s secret service. But will this patronage allow him to survive, especially in the face of what still seems to be a widely supported opposition, peaceful yet determined?

If Venezuela proves capable of moving to the kind of liberal democracy that capitalism can offer, limited as that is, then this will create an environment where genuine socialist ideas will have a better chance of being put forward, and hopefully spreading.

Howard Moss

Does socialism exist in Venezuela? (2024)

From the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Commentators on both the right and left of capitalist politics claim that socialism exists in Venezuela. The right gratefully accepts the Maduro regime’s claim to be socialist, pointing to its crackdown on opponents, its increasingly poor economic position and the large numbers of people fleeing to other countries to try and escape poverty and violence. These critics attribute this to the way in which ‘socialist’ countries are run and see the material hardship and lack of democracy as an inevitable consequence of this. Many on the left also see Venezuela as ‘socialist’ but regard this as a reason to rejoice, attributing its troubles not to the way it’s governed but to the fact that the capitalist world outside, in particular the United States, has used all means possible to bring it down, starving it of resources and fomenting discontent among its population.

Where does the truth lie? Well, it’s common for the political right to use ‘socialist’ as a swear word for governments that exercise direct state control over the economy, especially if those governments are intolerant of opposition or call themselves ‘socialist’ or ‘Marxist’. Obvious examples of this are China and Cuba and, in former times, the Soviet Union. As for the left, they are frequently favourable to such regimes on the grounds that their ownership of wealth is not monopolised by a very small number of individuals or companies, as in the openly capitalist West. This is the case even though a small number of powerful people – the political leaders – control the economy and often everything else, and most people remain relatively poor in a kind of ‘equality of poverty’.

From Chavez to Maduro

But what about Venezuela? In 1999 Hugo Chavez, the predecessor to the current president Nicolas Maduro, initiated a policy, which he called the Bolivarian Revolution, of controlling the key elements of the economy, in particular the country’s vast oil resources, and bringing in social reforms, all of which had the effect of making the average worker in the country better off and more content with their lot – very much like the nationalising Labour government in Britain after the Second World War and Allende in Chile before he was deposed in 1973. The measures Chavez brought in, which also included state expropriation of a number of private corporations and trade agreements with various countries such as China and Cuba, were considered by his supporters to be socialism taking over from capitalism, so-called Socialism of the XXI Century, even if what they were in the real world was private capitalism (or at least some of it) being replaced by state capitalism.

But even before Chavez died in 2013 the Venezuelan economy had begun to take a downturn, owing to a drop in the world oil price and US embargos and sanctions and to the fact that, whatever name was given to the system in Venezuela, production there still remained geared to the market, as it is in state capitalism as well as private capitalism. Things then only got worse when Maduro, who had been Chavez’s vice-president, took over, and since then the economy has contracted by around 70 percent. As the crisis escalated, the US sought to re-establish the strong influence it had had in pre-Chavez Venezuela by strengthening economic sanctions, blocking Venezuela’s oil exports, and encouraging opposition forces in the country. But Maduro’s real problem was the same one faced by all governments that attempt to keep the buying and selling system of capitalism on an even keel – the fact that the system has a mind of its own. Governments cannot control the crises that periodically and naturally accompany it. Maduro’s attempts to deal with this consisted of practices like increasing the money supply (thereby causing inflation) and cracking down, often severely, on those who opposed his way of running things. Many of those who have criticised or opposed him have been killed, tortured or abducted, with around 300 currently detained, according to Amnesty International, for supposed political crimes.

Fair elections?

All this has brought both fear and severe economic hardship to many of those who had previously supported Chavez. The acute shortages of basic goods in particular have caused Maduro’s support to plummet and as many as 7 million workers (in a population of around 30 million) to leave the country in the simple hope of finding a living – or just food and drink – elsewhere, mainly Columbia and Peru, or if they can get in, the United States. This constitutes the largest migrant crisis in the world at this moment with the number of refugees greater than from Syria or Ukraine.

Venezuelans who have remained and have dared to protest are treated harshly as a matter of routine and there are even signs that Maduro no longer has the full support of his military and has turned to mafia-type groups to shore up his position. Unsurprisingly in the circumstances, despite the country still having the political trappings of democracy, its upcoming election, scheduled to take place next month (28 July), is unlikely to be ‘free and fair’. Already the previous 2018 election was a manifestly rigged affair with two of the most popular candidates prevented from running. And things are certainly no more ‘democratic’ now. In January of this year, the leader of the opposition and a clear favourite in the polls, María Corina Machada, was banned from holding office for 15 years. In February, a prominent lawyer known for exposing corruption in the army, Rocio San Miguel, was arrested and charged with ‘treason, conspiracy and terrorism’ for her alleged role in a supposed plot to assassinate Maduro. The following month, Ronald Ojeda, a former lieutenant in Venezuela’s military who had protested against the Maduro government on social media was found dead in Chile ten days after he had gone missing. He had previously been seen on social media wearing a t-shirt with ‘freedom’ written on the collar and prison bars drawn on the map of Venezuela.

Not socialism

So, given the desperate measures Maduro is taking, he will probably be the ‘winner’ in next month’s election. But, given the piteous state of the country, the question will be how long he can hold on after that. As one commentator has pointed out, the sort of ‘elected dictator’ Maduro is can, even if highly unpopular, be difficult to dislodge. But whether Maduro hangs on or not, what happens in Venezuela will not be socialism or anything to do with the real meaning or content of the word. That is clearly the case, since socialism is a moneyless, stateless system of society with free access to all goods and services based on voluntary cooperation and economic equality. And it will come through an immense majority of workers in all the industrialised countries developing socialist understanding and organising to win and control political power.

In the modern world, anything other than that is a form of capitalism, whether presided over by an all-powerful state or with the market having free rein. In the case of Venezuela, if Maduro continues to prevail there, it will continue to have the repressive state capitalist regime of the kind that often poses as socialism but does so fraudulently and has as its hallmark the poverty and inequality that make it easy for the political right to say that socialism is an abject failure and for left-wing supporters of Venezuela to blame the US for stifling a valiant socialist experiment.

If Maduro finally goes, what we will have, though it could be something less repressive, is by no means certain to be a lot better in terms of improving the lot of the majority of the Venezuelan people. The country may become what other neighbouring states already are, so-called ‘mixed’ economies with part-state ownership and control and part-private ownership. But, as elsewhere in Latin America and the rest of the world at present, it will be a population divided into two classes, a small minority who own and control the vast majority of the wealth and do not need to work for their comfortable and often luxurious existence, and a vast majority who have to work for a wage or salary to survive, have limited freedom of choice and lack of control over their lives, continuing to be at the mercy of the regular crises and ups and downs of the system – war, recession and constant reorganisation. This is an inevitable consequence of capitalism’s never-ending quest to produce more and to produce more cheaply and more profitably. Whether this takes place in Venezuela, or any other part of the world, it has nothing to do with socialism. None of it will change either until Venezuelans and working people everywhere have ceased to put their faith in governments and charismatic politicians, whatever claims and promises they make.

Howard Moss

Zionism: myth and reality (2006)

Book Review from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Zionism misled many Jewish workers with its promise of a “homeland for Jews”. A recent book examines the fate of the million or so non-Jews in the state Zionism established.

In 1999 when Susan Nathan went to live in Israel under the Law of Return her head was “full of romantic notions of Zionism and the Jewish state.” Some three years later she moved from Tel Aviv to live, as the only Jew, in the Arab town of Tamra in the Galilee. Her book, The Other Side of Israel (published by Harper Collins last year), tells the story of her “journey across the Jewish-Arab divide”, and gives a rare insight into the Jewish state from the perspective of the Palestinians who are Israeli citizens.

The journey began when she was a patient in the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, where she was surprised to find Israelis and Palestinians sharing the same ward, and Palestinians who were Israeli citizens: Israeli Arabs. The real shock came when an Orthodox woman was visited by her husband who had “a pistol on one hip and a rifle slung casually over his shoulder” – no one else seemed surprised by the presence of an armed civilian. He told Susan Nathan in a strong American accent that he had requisitioned an Arab home in East Jerusalem and never left home without a weapon. The reply to her suggestion that he would be better off in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City was “All of East Jerusalem belongs to the Jews.”

More questioning came a few months later when she was invited to help with a student organisation – Mahapach, in connection with their work for disadvantaged communities in Israel, “particularly the indigenous Arab population and the community of Jews of Middle Eastern descent . . . the Mizrahim.” She knew of the latter but where did the Arabs live? Why had they been invisible to her during her first two years in Israel?

She was to learn that one million Arabs share the state, and that about a quarter of them are internal refugees. She was “profoundly shaken” by her first visit to an Arab area – the town of Tamra, made as part of the research for Mahapach. It was strikingly different from any Jewish area she had seen, with obvious, chronic overcrowding.

At the home of Dr Asad Ghanem (head of politics at Haifa University) she heard about the discrimination exercised against the Arab population “in all spheres of Israeli life.” In Arab communities there are thousands of homes judged illegal by the state and under the threat of demolition: in Tamra there are 150 such homes. The authorities’ version is that the widespread illegal building is the act of law breakers, people squatting on land or not wanting to pay for a licence. So the police bring bulldozers “at crack of dawn” to destroy illegal homes. 500 hundred Arab homes were destroyed in 2003.

Arab families are forced to build illegally because the state refuses to issue them with a building permit. Even when, as in Dr Ghanem’s case, the home is built on land owned by his family for generations the permit is still refused: he pays regular heavy fines to ward off demolition. He asked Susan Nathan if she had made Aliyah, and it was difficult to answer. Her privileges as a Jewish immigrant were at the expense of his people, “sitting in his home the reality finally hit me. The intoxicating power trip had come to an abrupt halt.” And the task of becoming informed had begun: the unlearning of her “lifelong Zionist training.”

The Zionist myth is that the “Jews had reclaimed an empty, barren land – ‘a land without people for a people without land’- we had made the desert bloom, we had filled an uninhabited piece of the Middle East with Kibbutzim, the collective farms that were the pioneering backbone of the state in its early years.” Prior to 1948 there had been aggressive colonising of the land by Jewish immigrants, and a campaign of land purchases funded by the Jewish National Fund, but only 7 percent of Palestine had been purchased.

The other side of Israeli Independence in 1948 is for the Palestinians the Nakba (the catastrophe) the loss of their homeland to the Jewish state. 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes and country. A map in the book marks the position of the 400 villages which were emptied and then destroyed by the army. The Kibbutzim were built on the land of destroyed villages. Around a hundred villages survived, as did Tamra because it was not on the main route of the Israeli army and was a small community providing “a useful pool of cheap labour in the area.” The original village had a population of 2,000 the number was swelled by refugees cleared from other villages. Photographs exist from 1948 which show “a sea of Red Cross tents” in which the refugees were housed for some years. One third of the present inhabitants of Tamra are internal refugees. A sizeable number of the 150,000 Palestinians who remained in the country and became Israeli citizens (“by accident rather than design”), were classified as “present absentees”, and had their homes, land and bank accounts appropriated by the Custodian of  Absentee Property. There is no instance of any property being restored to former Arab owners or compensation paid.

Apartheid

Dispossession still continues in various ways. Planning laws restrict Arab communities both in number – to the 123 listed in 1965 – and in area, even though the population has increased. Israel is an apartheid state which enforces policies of ethnic segregation. Dr Uri Davies a Jew who, like Susan Nathan, lives in an Arab town is quoted as applying the term apartheid in a specific sense to mean “the regulation and enforcement of racism and xenophobia in law.” He defines the core element of an apartheid state as “the structure of laws that allows the colonising population to exploit the resources of the state – mainly land – to the disadvantage of the native population.”

Though it is not publicly admitted “racist employment practices and the exclusion of Arabs from wealth generating sectors of the economy are the bedrock of state planning policies.” Most computer systems do not list Arab communities. Arabic is the second official language, yet people are not allowed to use it at work – a woman was sacked from McDonalds for doing so.

There are two separate school systems, with much less money spent on Arab children. There is intensive surveillance of the Arab education system, teachers are effectively “banned from teaching about the Nakba  . . . or about their people’s connection to Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza” and the refugee camps in other countries. In Haifa the Arab Parents’ Forum failed in an attempt to register their children at Jewish schools for 2004: Arab pupils are in a separate registration area.

Susan Nathan believes that what happened in the 1948 war is at the root of conflict in the Middle East. The price of creating a homeland was to inflict the “Jewish story of dispossession and wandering on another people – the Palestinians.” She makes a distinction between making a comparison, quantitative judgements about the degree of suffering, and drawing a parallel which suggests “one set of events can echo another.” Zionist organisations, she says, like the Jewish National Fund and the Jewish Agency should be disbanded and the apartheid system ended; there should be equality between all citizens.

An old man told her of the time when it was possible to travel by train from the Galilee to all of the region’s biggest cities “when the borders existed as no more than the lines on maps produced by the area’s British and French rulers.” Socialists never supported Zionism but opposed it as yet another nationalist delusion as what we aspire to is a world without national frontiers in which free movement is possible and where all people live together as equals.

Pat Deutz

Migration – what is the problem? (2023)

From the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

There has been migration for as long as there have been people. Firstly moving from Africa and spreading over the entire world. Not that it is a peculiarly human trait. Come autumn or spring, some birds migrate considerable distances. There are herd animals with a tendency to move en masse.

However, anyone thinking migration is a novel phenomenon and a recent political problem could be forgiven considering how it’s being portrayed by sensationalist media and desperate politicians. A veritable armada of small boats swarming across the English Channel, or so it would seem.

‘Johnny Foreigner’ is single-mindedly intent on accessing public services having never paid a penny towards them, expecting to be housed and receive benefits. That is when not undertaking devious criminal schemes, or bringing extensive extended families to join them in enjoying such largesse.

With a general election pending both Tory and Labour Parties have identified this emotive issue as a major potential vote winner, or loser. Each vies with the other to demonstrate how they alone can tackle this problem. There is the nub of the issue. Migrants are not people with problems, they are deemed to be the problem. And problems must have solutions, though it is doubtful if either party would claim to have the final solution. Although there is a discomforting resonance whenever politicians specifically identify a particular group of people as being alien.

Capitalism has used this sense of the lesser other from its outset. Taking early advantage of that notion led to brutal forced migration from Africa in the slave trade, with enterprising traders shipping involuntary human cargo to the money-making plantations of the ‘New World’. A deliberate movement of people to generate profits, the capital that financially fuelled the industrial revolution.

It might be objected that slaves are not the same as migrants in that they were transported against their will. But how many people become migrants undertaking the perilous, and too often fatal, sea journeys from choice? War, abject poverty and famine are drivers of people who are uprooted with little or no control over their journey.

Those early days of capitalist industry in Britain saw the enclosure of rural land creating a mass migration from the countryside to the new industrial urban centres, where labour was required. There was no consultative process, just the financial imperative. Undoubtedly, in the initial stages there were men who had to leave their families in the village while they went to the towns.

Eventually those men would send for their families to join them. Such movement would have been no simple task in the absence of organised transportation. Later, many descendants of those families would relocate to the Americas and the antipodes, driven again by desperation. Some went against their will as transported criminals.

Even economic migration within national boundaries led, on occasion to conflict. For example, in 1832 a strike by miners at Friars Goose in Gateshead was met with the eviction of the miners and their families from their colliery tied cottages. This was to accommodate lead miners, who’d been impoverished by their declining industry, who were migrating to the expanding coalfields. Because it suited the mine owners, this migration was welcomed by them, while the locals were forced aside by use of the local militia from Newcastle.

It requires a little genealogical research for those who identify their families as belonging to a particular former industrial area in the north of England, for example, to find antecedents, going back only a few generations, who came from the then rural south. The growing interest in genealogy has led to many taking DNA tests to establish their familial origins. It is common enough to meet people claiming blood-ties to Scandinavia, Northern Germany, Ireland and Wales, often with unexpected influences from much further afield.

It seems we are all descendants of foreigners, not that those Viking and Saxon forebears would have thought of themselves in such terms. Movement of people was commonplace and there were no nations to identify with.

All too frequently there are news reports of another small boat foundering in the Channel during an attempt to cross over from France that ends in disaster. For a brief moment the drowned become men, women and children, rather than simply migrants. There may be a momentary reduction in belligerence towards those promoted to victims, while the antagonism is refocused on villainous people-smugglers making money out of human misery.

Asylum traders, like slave traders before them, are of course simply motivated by money. As are the manufacturers of the wholly unsuitable inflatables used as makeshift ferries. As, also, are the politicians of various stripes who soon return to ranting on about the unacceptable cost of migrants coming to ‘our’ country.

The accommodation of migrants, it is insisted, must be as basic and unwelcoming as possible to act as a deterrent to others. This begs the question as to how dreadful must accommodation become to be a more effective deterrent than the prospect of being launched in an overcrowded rubber dinghy into the world’s busiest and turbulent shipping lane with the very real possibility of drowning?

Politicians continue to trade their quack solutions to the ever-present migrant situation. Repurpose army camps? Use hotels, a nice little earner for hoteliers? Or perhaps take an idea from history and anchor a few prison hulks, sorry barges, around the coast.

If migrants are so ungrateful as to object, they can always take the reported advice of Lee Anderson, deputy Tory chair: ‘If they don’t like the barges, they can fuck off back to France.’

What if the small boats were luxury yachts carrying super-rich traders in the wealth created for them by workers? These economic migrants, in the sense of being wealthy enough to sail from country to country as they will, would certainly be welcomed.

However, those referred to pejoratively as economic migrants are classed as being even less worthy of acceptance than those fleeing war and political repression. Yet, the common cause of their distress is capitalism. War is the most belligerent expression of that fundamental characteristic of capitalism, competition. Politics, whether totalitarian or democratic, ultimately serves capitalists’ interests, the need to ensure profitability.

Meanwhile those workers who cannot serve the ceaseless pursuit of profit of their home country’s capitalist class, become economically surplus. Migration in search of the wherewithal to live then becomes the driving necessity.

The ‘migration problem’ has a solution; abolish capitalism. Then everyone can make a valued contribution to society, local, regional and internationally. And in return their self-defined needs will be met.In socialism people can travel freely and safely, as and when they choose. Or stay put around where they are born if they wish. The choice is straightforward, continue ad infinitum to have migrants fleeing war, famine, repression and poverty, all of which will persist as long as capitalism is allowed to persist. Alternatively, sink capitalism and promote socialism as the world’s common destination.

Dave Alton

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

Voice From The Back: Bad Day, good day (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the March 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bad Day, good day

It was 1 February when the news broke. Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steel giant, announced that there would be more than 6,000 redundancies at five main sites across the country. An example of how devastating this could be is summed up by Vernon Lewis who worked in Ebbw Vale steel plant for 22 years: “Corus hasn’t just ripped the heart out of a steel works, it has ripped the heart out of [the] community.” Times, 2 February. So widespread gloom throughout the country? Well, no, not quite: “Meanwhile, the city was happy at events with shares in Corus shooting ahead on news of the restructuring. By midday, shares had jumped 10 percent, up 7.75p at 82.5p before closing at 82 percent, Herald, 2 February.

Blairing a new tune

Four years ago our TV screens were filled with a smiling Tony Blair being worshipped by devout Labour supporters to the accompaniment of loudspeakers blaring, “Things Can Only Get Better.” But that was four years ago. Elderly people are waiting for up to 25 hours on trolleys in hospital accident and emergency departments, according to the soon-to-be-abolished Community Health Councils. Nigel Crisp, NHS chief executive, admitted that there was still a “problem” with waiting times. Times, 1 February.

Breakthroughs and heartbreaks

“The principle was accepted last November that insurers would be able to make use of some kinds of genetic testing information. If such tests become more widespread and insurers are given greater access to the results, a lot of the insurance market could disappear altogether in the long run. If building insurers jack up premiums in houses on floodplains, you can bet the same will happen to vulnerable people’s medical cover, permanent health insurance, critical illness, life cover and long-term care plans.” Observer, 21 January. Inside capitalism even scientific breakthroughs turn out nasty for the poor and vulnerable.

Business as usual

Their followers may hate each other and shout about 1690 and 1916, but the leaders of the Unionists and SDLP are co-operative when it comes to the really important issues to Irish capitalism—business and profits. “David Trimble and his Catholic counterpart, SDLP leader Seamus Mallon, are flying into Paris this morning in a bid to drum up investment by French firms in Northern Ireland. They will meet Medef, the French employers’ association, and then head off to the Elysée Palace to see Jacques Chirac, the President.” Times, 31 January.

Drowning not waving

“Government scientists from 99 countries, including major oil producers, have agreed that the earth’s atmosphere is warming faster than expected. In an unprecedented display of unanimity, their evidence points to human activity as the culprit. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) now projects the earth’s average surface temperature will rise 1.4 to 5.8 degrees Celsius between 1990 and 2100, higher than its 1995 estimate of a one to 3.5 degree rise . . . Sea levels are predicted to rise between nine and 88 cm (3.54 and 36.64 inches) from 1990 to 2100, potentially displacing tens of millions of people in low-lying areas such as the Pearl River Delta, Bangladesh and Egypt.” Herald, 23 January. Capitalism in its drive for profits is ruining the planet. Only socialism with production solely for use can save it.

Economy Class Syndrome

“Even though the Observer first warned of the dangers of economy class syndrome two years ago, airlines have refused to act. Now fresh research to be published in the British Medical Journal reveals that a tenth of blood clots treated at one London hospital were caused by sitting immobile on flights. If these figures were represented nationally it would point to 3,000 cases a year and 300 deaths, making death from a blood clot a greater risk than a plane crash.” Observer, 21 January. In their efforts to increase profits airlines are cramming as many people as possible into their aeroplanes. If that means reduced leg room leading to fatal risk—tough.

Material World: One World, One People (2022)

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

‘Ubi bene, ibi patria’ 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALJO

Refugees: No safe place (2022)

From the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

To be a worker in capitalist society is to be deprived of any form of ownership of the means of living and therefore of having any real control of your own life. Being forced to sell your labour-power to an employer can lead to a precarious existence where you may end up becoming unemployed or even homeless. If you are unlucky enough to live in a war zone, you may be forced to flee your home and attempt to seek a new life elsewhere. You would then fall prey to ruthless smuggling gangs and come up against the brutality of state forces ranged against you. Sadly, this was the fate of 27 refugees who drowned while trying to make the treacherous crossing over the Channel on 24 November. This tragedy was not unforeseen, in fact it was one waiting to happen given the heavy traffic in the Channel. These were not the first deaths arising from these crossings nor will they be the last. Like the unemployed and the homeless, refugees and migrants are vilified as scroungers and ne’er-do-wells.

Political pawns

The response of the political leaders to the refugee crisis in Calais reveals the paucity of thinking that characterises modern capitalist politics. The rational course of action would have been for the UK and French governments to co-operate to find a solution to this problem. However, Boris Johnson’s government came to power on the basis of ‘Get Brexit Done’ and ‘to take back control of the UK’s borders’. To keep his more xenophobic supporters on board a little bit of Euro bashing did not go amiss. Emmanuel Macron, with his eye on next April’s presidential election and the need to play the patriotic card to see off his rivals on the far right, Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, was more than eager to pick up the gauntlet. Boris Johnson sent Macron an open letter outlining proposals he knew that he would not accept, such as joint patrols by both British and French forces on the French coast. Macron’s response was to withdraw an invitation for the British Home Secretary to attend a meeting to discuss the movement between people in the sea between France and the UK. The refugees in Calais had become pawns in this game of tit for tat.

The UK government has used demeaning terms such as ‘economic migrants’ to refer to refugees and when they do arrive on British shores they are classified as illegal immigrants. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, had the not too bright idea of the British Border patrol to push back the refugee boats to France. Any ramming by ships of these overloaded dinghies would likely cause them to capsize and their occupants drown. It is unlikely that many skippers would want to stand trial for murder or manslaughter. The forthcoming Nationalities and Borders bill will further tighten restrictions. One clause seeks to deport refugees if it is found that they passed through a ‘safe’ country.

Boris Johnson’s government shed crocodile tears over the drownings and offered their condolences to the victims’ families. Both the French and UK governments diverted attention from their own culpability by blaming the people smugglers, which ignored the fact that closing off the legal routes for refugees to come to the UK had gifted opportunities to the smugglers to make profits out of people’s miseries.

Demonisation

This tragedy has not ended the demonisation of refugees. In this op-ed piece for RT dated 25 November: ‘The four star hotels, the free healthcare and the generous benefits system have, according to French Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin, made the UK an ‘El Dorado’ for would-be migrants. I hate to say it, but I agree with him’ (‘I predicted a migrant tragedy months ago. Why didn’t the UK and France prevent it?’, former UKIP leader Paul Nuttall).

Kevin Hurley, a retired British police officer, in another op-ed piece about the situation in Calais, seems to suggest that the local people find many of the refugees menacing: ‘Yes, I saw some tragic Kurdish families, but they were few and far between compared to the hordes of young men loitering about or just staring. I found it frightening (‘As an ex-cop, I know how hard it is to stop the flow of illegal migrants into Britain’, RT, 30 November).

If you read the press and listen to the politicians all you will learn is that the refugees want to come here to help themselves to our goodies and what measures can we take to stop them. What you do not hear so much of is what drives them to risk their lives to come to the West.

Forced to migrate

It is no surprise to find that most of the refugees come from these countries – Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Syria. Three of them have been embroiled in wars of various kinds. Two of them were occupied by the US and the UK. However, it is not just the military warfare that is driving some of the workers in these countries to seek a better life abroad, but the economic warfare waged mainly by the Western powers. Since the first Gulf war, the US and Britain have imposed economic sanctions on the Iraqi regime. Sanctions were also imposed on Syria and Iran. The economic cost weighed most heavily on the workers, with the political leaders remaining relatively unaffected. Many of the 27 who drowned were Kurds from northern Iraq. That many of the refugees are Kurds from Iraq, Syria and Iran is no accident. They are oppressed minorities in these countries. In Iraq and Syria Kurdish forces fought with western forces against Isis. When they were no longer of use to the West, they were abandoned to their fate (‘The West has played its part in driving migrants from home’, Patrick Cockburn, i weekend, 27/28 November 2021).

The liberal left talk about how refugees should be treated more humanely and that more legal channels should be opened up for them to come to the UK and make their claims. This, they argue, would reduce the risk of deaths. The SWP blames the Tory government for the deaths in the Channel. They claim ‘Anti-racists have to demand open borders and a welcome for refugees’ (Socialist Worker, 24 November). However, even the SWP acknowledges that the Labour Party is also in favour of taking action to stop Channel crossings.

More political pawns

Sadly, it is not just Calais that is a flashpoint in the refugee crisis. We have witnessed violent confrontations between refugees and border guards on the border between Poland and Belarus. Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, cynically encouraged refugees to come into Belarus and attempt to cross the Polish border, where they have met fierce resistance from the Polish border patrols. As we have seen with the situation in Calais, the refugees are being used as pawns in a dispute between two capitalist powers. Lukashenko wishes to put pressure on the EU to remove the sanctions that they imposed on his regime following his rigged election last year. It appears that Russia is backing him and may have their own interests in this game.

This conflict affords an opportunity for the Polish capitalist leaders to gain political kudos from the EU, with which they have been in dispute over their judicial reforms, by appearing to be defending the EU border against outsiders. The EU’s high-minded ideals of freedom of movement and respect for human dignity do not seem to apply to these refugees. They are hell-bent on keeping them out and there was even talk of building a wall (sounds familiar). Erdoğan, the Turkish president, also used the refugees as bargaining chips when he threatened to unleash them on the Greek border. The Moroccan government also made similar threats of doing the same at the Spanish border.

World-wide

As with every crisis in capitalist society – unemployment, homelessness and workers relying on food banks – the refugee crisis has become ‘normalised’, yet there is nothing normal about it.

The refugee crisis spans the globe. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees there are more than 20 million refugees worldwide. As we have seen, war is a major driver for migration, but it is not the only one. Climate change is another which is rendering large parts of the globe, particularly the poorer parts, uninhabitable. And there is large-scale poverty.

The response of the major capitalist powers has been to tighten up their borders. Workers in these countries are encouraged to view immigrants and refugees as the other. Rather than see them as fellow workers with common interests, they regard them as competitors for jobs, welfare and health services. In the US, under Trump, a wall on the border with Mexico was partially built and migrant children were locked in cages. In the UK, a hostile environment towards immigrants was created which led to the Windrush scandal. The worldwide refugee crisis lays bare the utter brutality and cynicism of capitalism.

The leftist demands to create legal processes that treat migrants more humanely and calls for the sacking of right-wing governments can only scratch the surface. The fundamental problem is capitalism itself. In its drive for profits and division of the world into competing nation states, it creates the conditions that give rise to the wars, climate disasters and poverty that compel workers to leave their homes and seek sanctuary in safer places. What the world working class needs to do is combine democratically to obtain political power on a world scale to abolish capitalism and replace it with world socialism. National frontiers will be abolished and there will be one world community where everyone will be able to participate equally. There will be no wars or poverty and no need for people to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere.

Oliver Bond

Material World: Climate Refugees (2021)

The Material World Column from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Climate change is reshaping our planet. Coastlines are encroaching further inland, deserts are expanding, the range of plant and animal species are declining. The climatic change that is making parts of the world unliveable is another example of people in poorer parts of the world paying the price for capitalism.

Scientists forewarned that the effects of global warming would result in massive migrations of peoples. No nation is immune from the consequences of climate change but it is the poorest and most vulnerable communities – those least culpable for the environmental crisis – who are being the hardest hit. We are already witnessing the number of climate refugees rise.

Being a migrant involves risks and costs yet the media’s attention is centred upon the effects upon the host nation rather than the harrowing experiences of the migrants themselves and, worryingly, because of the absence of focus upon the reasons families uproot themselves from familiar surroundings, sympathy and understanding is lacking. Instead of welcoming the opportunity to help fellow human beings, hostility is shown towards newcomers, particularly if they are of a different colour or religion. The World Socialist Movement explains that we are one planet, one people, a human family, and as brothers and sisters we must look out for one another.

In 2014, there was a rise in migration from Central America due to drought and the spread of crop disease. The mass exodus has continued unabated with the USA militarising its southern border to halt the desperate fleeing the intensification of climate change upon what is termed the ‘Dry Corridor.’ In Africa there has been an escalating conflict between the contending cultures of herders and farmers as they competed for dwindling resources.

The problem has become worse as drought conditions persisted and many of the Sahel nations are now engaged in civil wars.

If it is not drought and crop failures that force large numbers of people to flee, it will be rising sea levels.

In Bangladesh, we have seen frequent typhoons and flooding of the country’s low-lying coastal districts. National Geographic describes the reason for the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi from their homes to the cities as driven by climate change and experts expect that figure to rise to millions as water levels rise (on.natgeo.com/2Q3p5hy).

Likewise, high tides will submerge much of Vietnam’s Mekong Delta, now home to 18 million people, by the latter half of the century.

The climate refugee emergency is here and capitalism’s system of nation-states is incapable of addressing the crisis of climate refugees, sadly a status not legally acknowledged by governments or the UN, preferring to describe those fleeing the impact of environmental destruction as economic migrants.

Accepting that models of future migration are based upon educated guesswork and informed assumptions, full of possible pitfalls, the only way to efficiently mitigate the detrimental effects of mass migration is to prepare for the worst.

Breaches of their national borders may be what the developed countries fear the most, requiring them to fortify their frontiers, but the problem begins when people abandon their farms for the city. Most people don’t want to leave their homes so initially they relocate to larger towns and cities. Mega-cities are multiplying in number and urban services have broken down. When that strategy fails, they then take hazardous journeys to re-settle in a foreign land where they are treated as economic parasites and pariahs by the locals.

In 2018, the World Bank estimated that three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-east Asia) will generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. A worst-case scenario by the Institute for Economics and Peace thinktank suggests that perhaps a billion people by 2050 will be subjected to the pressure of global warming to relocate even if not all will act upon it. The pessimistic predictions of some scientists predict that heatwaves and humidity will become so extreme in various parts of the world that people without air conditioning will simply die.

A report based on interviews with senior US military experts concludes that climate change will create far more refugees than have fled the Syrian civil war.

‘What we are talking about here is an existential threat to our civilisation in the longer term,’ Brigadier General Stephen A. Cheney observed. ‘In the short term, it carries all sorts of risks as well and it requires a human response on a scale that has never been achieved before. If Europe thinks they have a problem with migration today, wait 20 years and see what happens when climate change drives people out of Africa – the Sahel especially’ (bit.ly/3heX3uF).

The need for socialist ideas is greater than ever, and we can only urge people to look deeply into the problems of capitalist society, deeper than the slogans on their banners. Socialists combine two remarkable human capacities, the emotional and the rational, in order to take things into our own hands and run our own world, in the interest of all humanity. Peoples’ histories may be different but we all share our future in common.

ALJO

Forty Million Refugees (1960)

Book Review from the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are no less than forty million refugees in the world today. Forty million people living in misery and hopelessness. Such is the appalling truth revealed in a little book recently published—Refugees 1960 (Penguin Books. 2s. 6d.).

It is written by Kaye Webb with sketches by Ronald Searle, and covers forty-eight pages. In no sense, therefore, can it be described as an exhaustive work, but in the available space, the authors at least leave us in no doubt about the plight of these our fellow humans, condemned to rot away their pathetic lives in squalor and degradation. Disused army barracks, decaying hotels and (grimly ironical) even former concentration camps—in fact, any old building the authorities can lay hands on have been pressed into use to accommodate these poor souls. Ill-fed, ill-clothed and ill-housed, it is small wonder that the health of many of them suffers, and with it their chance of escape.

For it is the lucky few only who manage to break through the mass of regulations and restrictions which the various powers insist on observing before they will allow a refugee to settle within their boundaries. For instance, they must not be too old or too young. They must not be ill. They must not be “immoral,” nor illegitimate children. These are just some of the obstacles to overcome before the unfortunate person can gain entry into one of the major capitalist states.

Generally, the fairly young and healthy are the ones who manage to get away, because as the book tells us, they represent an economic gain to the state which accepts them. In other words, they can be employed profitably and the majority of those who remain, cannot. Socialists find this hardly surprising. Human considerations take a back seat in an inhuman world, where our whole lives are dominated by the profit motive.

The smallest camp in Greece has fifty-seven families of Assyrians who came from Mesopotamia forty years ago, and whose youngsters recently refused to emigrate rather than leave their sick and aged relatives behind. This is a reminder that, like many of capitalism's evils, the refugee problem is not new. It is still with us, only more so than before, having been greatly accentuated by the last great war and the carve-up which followed. Many more were then “displaced” and will probably never be able to return to their former homes. And as we have seen, the chances of making a new home for themselves elsewhere are pretty slim.

Yet, despite this, the authors fondly hope that in this world refugee year, the camps can be emptied and the conscience of the capitalist world stirred so deeply that every man, woman and child will be resettled. Just listen to this:

  Every country with room to spare should ease open its bureaucratic door and undertake to accept without “ifs" or "buts" a percentage of the sick or economically useless human beings, to balance what they have gained from the young, healthy immigrants who will be benefiting their economy without any cost to them in education or training.

A tall order indeed. It is hopeless to appeal to the conscience of a society which has been directly responsible for such a monstrosity. Far better to have a world where man can be free to travel over its surface without the futile restrictions of nationality, and where he can satisfy his needs from a sufficiency of wealth that only Socialism can make available.

But when all this has been said. It is still worthwhile to read Refugees 1960. Mainly, it is a plain, straightforward statement of very unpalatable facts, and no attempt has been made to grind a political axe. Yet by its very simplicity of style and presentation, this book shouts a condemnation of capitalist society from every page.

Eddie Critchfield

The Passing Show: The last days of Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen (1956)

The Passing Show Column from the June 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last days of Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen

The village of Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen lies in a valley among the peaceful hills of South Wales. It runs no risks from volcanoes or other forces of nature. And yet, if the National Coal Board carries out its declared intention, Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen will be destroyed as surely as Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii.

The National Coal Board, like any other Capitalist board of directors, thirsts after profit. But it took over coalmines which private Capitalism had bled white; much investment must be made before the mines can become profitable again. In the meantime, some pits, because of such geological conditions as faulting in the seams, lose more money than others. And because of such geological conditions, there are more disputes between masters and men at such pits over proper rates of pay. Strikes occur, men are dismissed because the management say they are employing “go-slow” tactics, bitterness increases; and this in its turn leads to more disputes.

Among such pits are the East and Steer pits at Gwaun-Cae-Gurwenn. Over a thousand men from the village work there. There is no alternative employment nearer than Margam steelworks, 20 miles away. Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen lives because it works at the two collieries.

And on May 11th last the National Coal Board gave 14 days' notice to all the miners at the two pits. It intends to close both of them because "continued restrictions of effort, lack of co-operation by the workmen, and low productivity” have resulted in serious financial losses. (The Times, 12/5/56).

Those who extol the merits of the British ruling class say that in Britain no one is punished without a fair trial and conviction. But here is. punishment—and what punishment is more severe than deprivation of livelihood? —without trial, without even individual accusation; it is group punishment, for which the British ruling class condemned the German rulers in the last war—making all suffer for the supposed faults of some.

Wasted Effort

But apart from that, how clearly the action of the N.C.B. demonstrates the position of the workers under Capitalism, Private or State. The worker is employed by the kind consent of the Capitalist; when the Capitalist no longer wants him, he casts him out; and the worker must crawl away until he finds some other property-owner who will make a profit out of employing him. In such a case as Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen, the worker must cut his family ties, and perhaps leave the village where he was born, before he can find other work.

What a tragedy is here! Troy was taken and wiped out by enemy soldiers, hiding in a wooden horse which the enemies of Troy had built. But Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen is to be destroyed by the National Coal Board, for the creation of which no one worked harder, or sacrificed himself more eagerly, than the South Wales miner. Capitalism, whatever it is called, does not change its nature; the National Coal Board is preparing to offer up Gwaun-Cae-Gurwen as a tribute to the great god Profit with as little compunction as private Capitalists could have shown.

Gambling—selective criticism

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church of England, the Congregational Assembly—all join in condemning Mr. MacMillan's new premium bond scheme. The scheme, they say roundly, constitutes government encouragement of the practice of gambling. But not a word from the reverend archbishop, or from the august assemblies, about the great gamble which is the Stock Exchange. Which is not surprising. The Church of England is doing very well from its speculations upon the Stock Exchange; and all churches realize, consciously or sub-consciously, that their function in present-day society is to allay any discontent among the masses by promising a rosy future in the sky; and to draw attention to the activities of the ruling class, upon the Stock Exchange and elsewhere, is not the best way to perform that task. So while the churches criticise some forms of gambling, they keep quiet about other and more serious, kinds.

Mass deportation

At the conferences among the victorious war-chiefs at the end of the second world war it was agreed that eastern Germany, beyond the Oder and the Neisse, should be given to Poland to compensate her for territories she had to give up to Russia? As was foreseen, Poland deported the millions of Germans living in this part of Germany, and repopulated the territory with displaced Poles. As the knowledge of this atrocity—surely one of the most gigantic "War-crimes” committed by either side—spread, the western allies tried, by undignified squirming, to put all the blame on Russia. Russia, of course, must bear her share of the blame, but not all of it.

But not all of our "leaders” have abandoned mass deportation as an answer to the problems of Capitalism. Step forward, Mr. R. T. Paget, Q.C., M.P. Mr. Paget believes that mass deportation of the Cypriots to Greece would solve the Cyprus problem. He wrote to The Times on April 27th:

   "Whenever an act of terrorism takes place and no information is forthcoming from the locality, then compulsory purchase orders should be served on all Greek property owners in that locality and the inhabitants should be deported to Greece. . . . The ships that deported the Greeks would return with Turks who would purchase and settle in the property we had acquired from the Greeks."

“This process,” Mr. Paget writes blandly, “would continue until there was a Turkish majority or until terrorism stopped.” Mr. Paget, as becomes a leading supporter of Capitalism, leaves out of the reckoning any question of the human suffering this would entail, the merits of punishing all for the faults of some, and the justice—even by Capitalist standards—of deporting people from an island where they and their forbears have lived for hundreds of years. It only remains to add that Mr. Paget is a prominent member of the Labour Party, which claims to be devoted to increasing the sum of human happiness.

Queensbury Rules

Another Labourite, and former M.P., Tom Driberg, also has some comments to offer upon the Cyprus situation. Unlike Mr. Paget, Mr. Driberg believes that “when government degenerates into tyranny... violent resistance is legitimate ” (Reynolds News, 13-5-56). He goes on:

  "Violent resistance, however, should have its code of decency. Attacks should be directed primarily against enemy installations—camps, airfields, stores of weapons, radio-stations. It is wrong to throw bombs into married quarters, to shoot soldiers off duty, shopping with their families."

The code which Mr. Driberg offers for the guidance of the EOKA resistance in Cyprus is not the code which the British forces pursued in the last war, with no protest from Mr. Driberg. Bombs were not only thrown but dropped in large quantities into every kind of quarters; British soldiers and airmen did not stop to enquire whether the Germans they killed were soldiers off duty, or indeed whether they were soldiers at all. If Mr. Driberg thinks so much of his code, he should have offered it to the public earlier, during the last war, when he was in Parliament.

As for Socialists, they have nothing to do either with bomb-throwing Cypriots or schoolboy-flogging Britons. The issue being fought out in Cyprus is this: are the Cypriot workers, Greek and Turkish, to be exploited by a British ruling class or a Greek ruling class? The Socialist attitude to Cyprus is the same as the Socialist attitude to every other part of the world; abolish Capitalism, which subsists on exploitation and leads to bloodshed and establish Socialism

Alwyn Edgar

Armenia: the Background to Events (1988)

From the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

The following is an abridged text of a contribution from a supporter to a recent Socialist Party meeting on the theme of “Ethnic Unrest in the Russian State Capitalist Empire”. It provides a background for understanding the current territorial dispute in the Caucasus.

Who are the Armenians?

As a major crossroads, a land rich in natural resources, and an excellent base for military operations against rival powers in the surrounding lowlands, Armenia has been coveted by powerful empires. Often its possession was the key to supremacy over much of Western Asia. From the West came the armies of the Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine empires; from the East, the armies of the Persian, Turkic and Mongol empires; from the South those of the Seleucid, Arab and Mameluk empires, and from the North the Russian empire. All the wars were similar in that they brought people suffering, destruction and death; what changed were the names of the foreign and “native” rulers.

The resulting insecurity of life ruined the country economically and culturally and prompted thousands of Armenians to flee. Colonies were established in Poland, Crimea, India, Constantinople, as well as commercial and cultural centres in Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, Moscow and elsewhere. It was in these colonies that, centuries later, the first stirrings of the Armenian emancipatory notion took form, such as the demand for Armenian independence on the principle of constitutional rule.

In historical Armenia itself, Moslem settlements rose on the sites of former Armenian cities or adjacent to still existing Armenian villages. The process of ethnic transmutation gradually led to Turkic Moslem dominance. Of those Armenians who remained, most eventually lost their lands to the military feudal states that embraced the region. Accompanying loss of government, ethnic alteration and economic regression was intellectual, cultural and moral decline. Karl Marx mentions “the invasion of the Turks into Asia Minor as one of the direst calamities of the Middle Ages”.

The Eastern Question

Russian expansion into the Caucasus occurred when Modem Western capitalism was becoming the most pervasive force in international relations, and when technologically-backward states such as the Ottoman and Persian realms were being integrated into the world market system. What once were issues of local significance acquired implications for major power relations, and decisions taken in Europe affected the lives of peoples in remote areas of the globe.

The gradual decline of Turkish rule in the Balkans was to offer a vast field for Russian expansionism. The ultimate fate of these territories constituted the Eastern Question and particularly concerned two of the major powers, Great Britain and Austria.

For British capitalism the principal aim was to ensure that the Russian Black Sea fleet could not enter the eastern Mediterranean. So, Britain supported Turkey against Russian advancement. But when the emergence of the German Empire in 1871 was followed by the gradual succumbing of Turkey to German influence, Britain was to swing round to friendship and eventually wartime alliance with Russia, to whom by 1915 she was even ready to offer the control of the straits of Dardanelle.

For Austria, any kind of change in the Balkans was bound to be for the worse. The Hapsburgs naturally objected to further Russian expansion, and the carving of independent states out of Turkey-in-Europe would become a focal point for the Slav nationalist groups within the Hapsburg dominions.

Russian policy, in fact, did not aim at immediate acquisition. Given the imperialist rivalries, Russia’s plans were based rather on a gradual extension of influence under the guise of a protectorate over all orthodox Christians.

The emergence of Armenian national consciousness lagged behind that of the Balkan peoples, so that by the time the Armenians had formulated their programme for reform, self-rule and even political autonomy, the Ottoman Empire was entrenched in a period of reaction. To the Turkish government, threatened with the final partition of their dominions. Armenian demands were separatist, disloyal and dangerous.

But neither the British proposals for reform, nor the increase in the number of European consuls on the plateau, nor the subsequent notes of protest and warning from the six European powers against the deteriorating situation there improved things in Turkish Armenia. In fact, Abdul Hamid the ruler of the Ottoman Empire’s response to European meddling was the massacre of more than 200,000 Armenians during 1895-6.

The Armenian nationalist movement

The Ottoman constitutional reform movement and Armenian liberalism had both failed. Revolutionary political parties then emerged, organised primarily by elements from the peasants, artisans and radicalised segments of the intelligentsia.

The first Armenian political party, the Hunchak party, was founded in Geneva in 1887 by Eastern (or Russian) Armenians. The founders had all been born in the Russian Empire and had been members of Narodnik groups. They had a conceptual framework which related the particular Armenian experience to larger, universal historical forces and were committed to the cause of the common people. The Hunchak party claimed in fact to be socialist but wanted to keep the two struggles, national and class, apart. Thus national independence was seen as the first priority and the establishment of a socialist order the ultimate goal, to be established after the achievement of national independence.

The second Armenian political party was the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) founded in 1890 in Tbilisi, in Russian Georgia.

Until 1900 Russian Armenians generally filled the role of suppliers and supporters of the struggle in Ottoman Armenia. But the Tsarist government’s edict ordering the expropriation of Armenian church properties and the Armano-Tartar conflict at the time of the 1905 Russian revolution brought to the surface the question of political and economic oppression in Russian Armenia.

The fourth General Congress of the ARF, in Vienna in 1907, drew the conclusion from this new development that in essence Armenians on both sides of the border were engaged in a single revolution since in both sectors the struggle was against political despotism, national oppression and economic exploitation; the differences in the levels of economic and political development between the two empires required a different emphasis of activities rather than a different struggle or organisation in each.

The programme adopted further stated that socialism strives toward the elimination of an barriers and discrimination among nations and toward the creation of a single harmonious humanity that would replace today’s divided and antagonistic contradictory world; but that socialism does not require the total assimilation of national entities which, through the inherited peculiarities of their history will enrich the future socialist humanity.

However, events beyond the control of the political parties of the Armenian people during and after the first world war overtook the theories, thwarting the national programme and pre-empting the socialist ideal.

”Who recalls the Armenian massacres nowadays?”

The Sultan’s rule had become unbearable for some Turkish patriotic groups who saw clearly the decline and destruction of their empire. Turkish leaders like Ahmed Riza believed that only the institution of efficient just government could save the Ottoman Empire from dissolution.

The Armenian parties, especially the ARF, found cause here to renew their hopes for reforms in the Ottoman Empire and its eastern provinces. They consulted, negotiated and co-operated with prominent Young Turks and in 1908 when the Young Turks took control of the Ottoman government and proclaimed a Constitution, jubilant Armenians welcomed the dawn of a new era; Armenian guerrillas laid down their arms.

The era of Armeno-Turkish co-operation did not last long. The more liberal-democratic elements in the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress lost control and a new ruling clique gravitated towards extreme nationalism. The Committee of Union and Progress embraced the policy of Pan-Turkism and Pan-Islamism and began to entertain ideas of expansion towards the East. The first setback of the constitutional movement in 1909 was accompanied by the massacre of 30,000 Armenians.

In 1914 the European powers began their war for a re-division of the world market. An agreement had already been concluded between Germany and Turkey. The Turkish government sought to give the war a religious aspect and one pamphlet prepared with German help urged Moslems to slaughter Christians (except Germans and Austrians). The extermination of the Armenians was agreed upon and the means of carrying it out were devised.

The genocide started as early as January 1915. Three-and-a-half million Armenians lived in Western Armenia before the genocide and over two million were massacred, while those who miraculously remained alive fled abroad. The Turkish authorities hoped that, after the inevitable initial wave of international indignation, the massacres would soon be forgotten. They weren’t mistaken: twenty-five years later another assassin by the name of Adolf Hitler relied on the same “forgetfulness” when sending his SS butchers to invade Poland, urging them to be brutal and merciless with the remark “who recalls the Armenian massacres nowadays?”

The Armenian republic and Soviet rule

The collapse of Tsarism in 1917 led to the disintegration of its Empire in the Caucasus as elsewhere. In May 1918 following a brief and unsuccessful attempt at federation, the three major groups, the Georgians, the Azeris (Turkish-speaking Moslems) and the Armenians all declared their independence.

The Armenian Republic began its existence on about 12,000 square kilometres of bleak, rugged terrain, crammed with refugees, devoid of the bare essentials of life and surrounded by hostile forces. Famine and epidemics killed more than 200,000.

The defeat of the Central Powers in the war transformed Armenia’s disadvantages into seeming advantages. From the Allied point of view Georgia and Azerbaijan had collaborated with the defeated enemy powers whereas battered Armenia stood as the loyal martyred nation.

While the Allied Powers drew up plans to partition the Ottoman Empire without facing up to the fact that the terms would have to be enforced by military means in Turkish Armenia, Mustafa Kemal and other Turkish resistance leaders sought Soviet support in the struggle against their common enemies. The Soviet leaders, in their turn, recognised the potential aid that Turkish influence could play in stirring up the Muslim colonial world against the Western powers, thereby saving the Bolshevik government and the Soviet state.

On 2 December 1920 Armenia became a “Soviet Socialist Republic” and Soviet Russia acknowledged as indisputable parts of that state all lands that had been under the jurisdiction of the Armenian Independent Republic. But on the international level Soviet Russia sacrificed the Armenian question to cement the Turkish alliance. In 1921 it ceded Karabagh and Nakhidgevan to Soviet Azerbaidjani rule while the provinces of Kara and Ardahan, which were a part of Russian Armenia from 1878 to 1917, were ceded to Turkey. The European Powers too closed the Armenian question. It was bitterly ironic for the Armenians that of the several defeated Central Powers Turkey alone expanded beyond its pre-1914 boundaries and this only on the Armenian border.

Sovietisation has been acclaimed as the salvation of the Armenian people and the best defence available against Turkish expansion, which in 1920 could have resulted in the uprooting of the Russian Armenian population as had happened in Turkey. But Sovietisation has not prevented Armenian nationalist agitation. In 1965 the official commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Genocide was interrupted by violent outbursts by young demonstrators in Yerevan demanding action “to recover lost lands”, in particular Karabagh. In the early 1970s Soviet courts tried, convicted and imprisoned a number of activists who had joined together as a “National Union Party”.

Consistent charges have been made against Soviet Azerbaidjan of a continued policy of cultural oppression, economic discrimination and ethnic disadvantages against the Armenians of Karabagh. In 1975 many Armenians were ousted from the Communist Party in Karabagh or imprisoned and charged with nationalist agitation. Since the coming to power of Gorbachev the demand for the transfer of Karabagh from Azerbaidjan to Armenia has been renewed with even more force, culminating in mass demonstrations in the streets of Yerevan of recent months.

Vahe Stephanian