Anti-capitalist (2021)

Book Review from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles by David Harvey Pluto Press, 2020

This is more a collection of short essays than a comprehensive book. Harvey remains impressive as ever when explaining the basic ideas of Karl Marx succinctly and effectively, including such things as the operation of the rate of profit and how it relates to technological change.

The intent of the book is to give print form to Harvey’s regular podcast output, and the editors suggest it is a good accessible gateway into Harvey’s work and thoughts.

The chapters are thus short, and slightly repetitive, using the same examples (eg. that China has used more cement in two or three years than the US has done in the past 100). But that reflects the bite sized nature of the chapters, the book can be picked up and put down.

The focus across chapters is on the difference between mass and rate. Harvey notes that we should be more concerned about the mass of carbon dioxide we have already put into the atmosphere, rather than think about the rate at which we are adding more carbon. Likewise, he notes the importance of examining the mass of profit rather than just the rate of profit when examining the operations of the capitalist system (and he also gently uses that to criticise the Marxist writers who see the fall in the rate of profit as the key feature of capitalism).

As a geographer, he has useful insights into the geopolitical goals of China, and particularly notes how the brutal treatment of the Uighur may be connected with their attempts to control central Asia and thus cement a position as the predominant power on Earth. This is also joined by useful comments on the ‘second nature’ of the urban environment, as well as a useful discussion of his notion of accumulation through dispossession.

There is also a useful discussion on the place of the concept of alienation in Marxian thought, which includes a light sketch in how the notion has been examined in the second half of the twentieth century and the usefulness of continuing to apply it as a tool of analysis today. Particularly, there is an interesting discussion of how the notion of alienation might be used to examine the rise of Donald Trump as a symptom of the disaffection of the deindustrialised areas of the United States (he goes into dispiriting detail of the betrayal involved in the closure of a Detroit car plant).

Disappointingly, Harvey sees modern capitalism as too complex and interrelated to be changed wholesale, and instead looks to micro-changes and warm words. The book is thus long on analysis of capitalism but short on actual concrete anti-capitalism.

As a pedagogue, Harvey includes a selection of discussion questions for each chapter and further reading at the end of the book. These are actually good questions, and going through them might be a useful exercise and worth the price of the book.

Pik Smeet

Far From Wealth (2018)

Book Review from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict’. By Phil A. Neel. (Reaktion Books. £14.95)

The hinterland is the area of the US outside the wealthy cities, ‘the growing desert beyond the palace walls’. It can be divided into the ‘near’ parts, the mainly suburban areas outside the central parts of cities, and the ‘far’ parts, primarily the rural areas but also including urban wastelands where much housing has been demolished. Even the far hinterland, however, has a great deal of industrial space, from factory farms to logistics complexes and mines, and is dominated by the informal economy of the black market and production of illegal drugs.

Neel records here some of his travels around this hinterland, beginning in northern Nevada, where the far right have begun a resurgence. They are less tied to the militia than used to be the case, and often reject white nationalist ideas. Some adopt so-called Third Positionist politics, claiming to be neither left nor right, while Patriot groups emphasise self-reliance rather than use of declining government services. Small capitalists, who often work in their mines or mills themselves, are the backbone of the Patriot movement. The election of Trump is likely to have a dampening effect, especially on the extremes of the far right.

On the California–Oregon border, wildland firefighters do extremely dangerous work. They usually earn less than $1,000 a week, and work for only a few months of the year. Neel refers to one firefighter in Idaho who was working to pay for chemo for his six-year-old daughter, who had leukaemia. As many as forty percent of firefighters are prisoners paid a pittance.

The near hinterland, Neel suggests, will be ‘the central theater in the coming class war’, as so many who have become surplus to the economy live there. Unfortunately, there is very little here on how the classes in this war are to be characterised, what it will involve or what the outcome might be. The book as a whole contains some useful material but rather little by way of concrete suggestions or conclusions.  

Paul Bennett

The British Road to Perestroika (1989)

From the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

As a response to the triumphant rise of Thatcherism in the last decade and to what it sees as the failure of the Labour Movement to mount any effective challenge to it, the Communist Party has just released a discussion document Manifesto for New Times. Billed as a “new strategy for the 1990s", it attempts to develop a framework within which “progressive forces" can mount a campaign against Thatcherism which it describes as "the most immediate obstacle blocking the way to progressive change in society”.

At the heart of the document lies the assumption that “Thatcherism" has been able to respond to the idea that the operation of capitalism in modern Britain is vastly different to what it once was. For the Communist Party, Thatcherism is a response to the "new times" where there is a drift in industry towards production based on information technology and micro-electronics and where the traditional bases for trade union organisation are declining; this structural change in the economy, labelled “post-Fordism", has led to a growth in the service sector with a subsequent increase in the number of part-time compared to full-time jobs. The Communist Party also argues that this trend has led to the creation of what it describes as “a two-thirds/one-third society" where the poorest third are reliant on state benefits and part-time employment. Manifesto for New Times says that while Thatcher and the Conservatives have accommodated themselves to these changing conditions the Left has not; so the aim of the Left now has to be to develop a coherent political theory to challenge the dominance of the reactionary Thatcher government.

All Progressives Now
The Communist Party argues that the victory of "progressive forces" is a necessary precondition for socialism:

  Socialism will be created by myriad movements through a long, uneven struggle to change society . . . already they are beginning to find common purpose. Socialist and communist ideas and struggles share much with the green movement, feminists, community groups, internationalists. radical liberals and religious groups.

However, what role religious groups can play in the establishment of socialism is not stated, and it is probably just as well. Just how many trendy vicars and radical archbishops the Communist Party knows of who favour the abolition of capitalism and production for profit and the establishment of common ownership and production for use is again not stated. But we suspect that you could fit them all into a telephone box and still have enough room to swing an incense burner about.

Religion is one of the many forces which divides, mystifies and subjugates the working class. It is for this reason that socialists are opposed to it. Whereas religion means working class subservience to a mythical deity and a pie in the sky ideal, socialism is the real emancipation of the working class here on Earth. Yet such is the Communist Party's desperation that they are prepared to work with virtually anybody who is opposed to the Thatcher government no matter how unscientific and anti-Marxist their views.

Market-based Society
Not only does the Communist Party believe that the likes of liberals and religionists can play a role in the movement for socialism, but they are hopelessly confused as to the nature of both socialism and capitalism. Indeed so confused are they that apparently, like their friends the Labour Party, they cannot see the difference between the two. They think, for instance, that both capitalism and socialism are systems which are based on the market mechanism. Most left-wing organisations tend to put the equally erroneous view that socialism has something to do with state regulation of markets. The Communist Party itself used to put this argument in defence of state capitalist Russia, but now its infatuation with free market forces is clear for everyone to see:

  The market is useful as a tool to co-ordinate lots of decentralised economic decisions. Markets can provide incentives and discipline, and promote innovation, flexibility and diversity.

The Communist Party concedes that markets are not without their deficiencies and puts the view that some strategic state intervention in the economy and industry can be desirable: “many of the most successful capitalist economies in recent years—Japan. Sweden, South Korea— use planning. But they use it in conjunction with the market". So the Communist Party's strategy for socialist renewal aims at the same sort of capitalism that exists in socialist havens like South Korea. Yes, it's all becoming clear now...

Confusion about Class
No less unclear is their conception of class. Manifesto for New Times variously talks of ruling classes, private sector middle classes, working classes, the two-thirds/one-third division and many others besides. It makes statements such as "class remains central to British politics" without showing the faintest understanding of what class is in the first place. Its idea that the working class consists largely of manual workers who are employed in factories based on mass production is completely arbitrary and owes more to confused academic sociology than Marxist analysis.

For Marxists, class is defined in terms of the relationship members of society have to the means of production and distribution. It has nothing to do with whether you work in an office or not, what type of car you drive or whether you own a video recorder. Office workers who work for salaries are just as much a part of the working class as wage workers in factories as they too have to sell their mental and physical energies to their employers in order to live. Even the "better off" sections of office workers are reminded of their true class position from time to time as the following report from the Daily Telegraph (1 July) shows:

   A leading City stockbroker announced job losses yesterday. James Capel made 110 support staff redundant in 30 departments. Mr Peter Quinner, chief executive, said 'we are trading profitably, but we want to trade as profitably as we can, which means keeping a tighter control of our costs'.

So much for Britain's cosy middle classes.

Basic Programme of Reforms
Periodically though, the Communist Party's muddle is tinged with opportunism. Apparently, one of the major avenues now open to “progressive forces" is Europe and the Single Market. Manifesto for New Times argues that “we need to give the meaning of Europeanism a wider and more democratic content". This all fits in with the Communist Party's market-oriented approach, though they actually hit the nail on the head for once when they state that “the EC is the means through which Western European capital is restructuring, creating a single market and setting up an area of exchange rate stability". But, of course, instead of criticising this as something which is only in the interests of certain sections of the capitalist class and which will be used to further the exploitation of workers, the Communist Party is fully in favour of it!

The single European market is seen as a great challenge for Britain and a chance to expose Thatcherism for its narrow nationalism. Furthermore we are told that "a range of alliances can be formed with continental forces of both left and right" in order to pursue a basic programme of reforms. In this new spirit of political co-operation with all shades of opinion, the Communist Party is even prepared to discard that favourite sacred cow and voter-loser of the Left, unilateral nuclear disarmament. Almost thankfully they state;

The foundations for traditional left-right positions on defence and disarmament are being uproooted . . . unilateralism has been made real by Gorbachev's own moves. But he has also lent a new respectability to multilateralism and bilateralism by proving that meaningful disarmament can proceed through negotiation.

By confusing the necessary restructuring of Russia’s armed capabilities with "meaningful disarmament" the Communist Party again shows its lack of understanding of the capitalist system. This restructuring has largely been brought about by the economic weakness of the state capitalist USSR and it will not lead to a nuclear-free world. Capitalist competition over markets, trade routes, sources of raw materials and the strategic positions needed to defend them means that all states need to keep a strong military capability—and where affordable that means nuclear weapons. Only the abolition of the modern cause of war—capitalism—and the introduction of socialism can ensure peace and disarmament.

A Republic—But Not Yet

The Communist Party is not of course interested in socialism. The two most “progressive" measures it advocates are the abolition of the House of Lords and the abolition of the monarchy. In other words, the Communist Party aims to remove the last vestiges of past feudal structures and institutions from the British state in order to make Britain a modern capitalist republic like France or the United States. Even the abolition of the monarchy, though, is not free from the double standards and political expediency that are the party's hallmark:

  In the long run we assert our commitment to republicanism. In the short term there should be a limitation of its [the monarchy's] powers.

So no-one's going to get the Alexander II treatment for the moment. Indeed, it is possible that they see the Queen as part of the "progressive forces" that are out to defeat Thatcherism (after all, they include virtually everyone else in this). Perhaps they should offer her a free trial subscription to Marxism Today.

There can be little doubt that the Communist Party of Great Britain is in a very sorry state. It is committed to a market-based society, further integration between British and European capital, and the dead-duck of Keynesian demand management to “bolster" the economy. This, coupled with support for constitutional reform of the British state and electoral system. amounts to a British glasnost and perestroika, a restructuring of British capital in order to arrest its relative economic decline in the post-war period.

Nine years ago a political party was founded in this country with precisely this aim. Like the Communist Party it is now on its way to the dustbin of history. Its name? The Social Democratic Party.

Dave Perrin

The demands of global capitalism (1996)

Book Review from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The End of Work. The decline of the global labour force and the dawn of the post-market era by Jeremy Rifkin (G.P. Putnam. New York, 1995)

Rifkin argues that: " . . . for the first time, human labour is being systematically eliminated from the production process. Within less than a century,'mass' work in the market sector is likely to be phased out in virtually all the industrial nations of the world".

His book is thought-provoking and discusses an issue that many economists avoid - that we have entered an era when the traditional work patterns have changed. The consequences that technological unemployment brings reverberate in every aspect of society. Rifkin estimates that in the USA, 90 million workers out of a total 124 million could potentially lose their jobs. Capitalism breeds the alienation in the young who turn to crime and the bleak futures faced by older workers, who in their economic insecurity have fears such as house repossession.

The book can be divided in two. indicated by the subtitle, ‘the decline of the global labour force and the dawn of the post-market era'. The first four parts (fourteen chapters) deal with the background and the decline of the global labour force - the strongest sections of the book. Rifkin’s strength is that the book is historically situated. It has its parallels in Volume I of Capital, where Marx analyses the historical tendency of automation to eliminate labour-power (chapter 15 - Machinery and Modern Industry). The book is well-researched, and although Rifkin is not saying much new, it is presented in an engaging manner.

In chapter I, Rifkin argues that workers are unprepared to meet the demands of global capitalism:

"The idea of a society not based on work is utterly alien to any notion we have about how to organise large numbers of people into a social whole, that we are faced with the prospect of having to rethink the very basis of the social contract."

As a liberal, Rifkin does not give up hope of workers benefitting through piecemeal reforms that would increase pay and improve working conditions, but he has grave doubts:

"The new economic realities of the coming century make it far less likely that either the marketplace or public sector will once again be able to rescue the economy from increasing technological unemployment and weakened consumer demand."

Although not the solution that socialists support. Rifkin proposes what he terms the “social economy", which is discussed in the chapters on “the dawn of the post-market era".

Rifkin proposes two courses of action to make the transition to "the post-market era". Firstly, productivity gains to be shared among workers so as to bring about an equitable re-distribution for an equitable share of the fruits of technological progress. Secondly, that the shrinking of mass employment in the formal market economy and cuts in public expenditure bring a need to focus on the third economy - the social economy - which would, argues Rifkin, meet the needs that are not met by the market and public sectors.

His strategies for dealing with technologically displaced labour are nothing new and include reducing the working week, spreading employment amongst a greater number of workers without sacrificing productivity, an index-linked minimum wage and compensatory welfare payments. What Rifkin argues here has become common in political circles especially among the communitarian movement in America and the "stakeholder society" of Blair's New Labour.

Rifkin, like many who call for what Diane Elson terms the “socialisation of the market" places emphasis on unpaid voluntary work to regenerate the community. The only positive aspect of this for 

socialists is that volunteering shows that there is no need for the capitalist system of buying and selling. However, the reforms that Rifkin proposes would not in the long term be of much benefit to workers. If a Social Democratic “consensus" government was to begin to implement these reforms it would only cut into profits and future investment, thus meeting resistance from the capitalists.

Rifkin ends the book with a warning. "The end of work could spell a death sentence for civilization as we have come to know it. The end of work could also signal the beginning of a great transformation, a rebirth of the human spirit. The future lies in our hands." Indeed it does, and we don't want our futures to go to waste under capitalism. 

Rob Smith

Towards Post-Industrial Capitalism? (1998)

From the December 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1973 Daniel Bell's seminal work, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, was published. Its impact on the emerging discipline of socio-economic forecasting—or "futurology"—was considerable. But what exactly does a "post-industrial society" mean?

Robert L. Heilbroner in his Business Civilisation in Decline defined its core features as: the growing predominance of the tertiary (services) sector over the primary (agriculture and mining) and secondary (manufacturing) sectors of the economy; increasing emphasis on the role of knowledge-based inputs and education; and, finally, a decrease in the highly polarised class conflict of traditional (industrial) capitalism with the emergence of less hierarchical; organisational structures more suited to the socio-economic environment of the late 20th century.

This concept of a post-industrial society rests on the assumption that social development is essentially driven by technological change. The invention of the first programmable digital computer during the Second World War—to decode military messages—is seen as marking the start of what Alvin Toffler called the Third Industrial Revolution. Based on the application of ever more sophisticated information technologies, this revolution is now seen as gathering pace, precipitating a "general crisis of industrialism" and heralding what is exponents claim is a new kind of society.

It is tempting to draw parallels here with a Marxist scenario of social change. For Marx, it was development of the "productive forces"—roughly speaking, technology—that is the driving force of history. As these productive forces develop, they come into conflict with, and are increasingly held back by, the existing "relations of production"—the system of property relationships that define a particular mode of production. This ushers in a period of social revolution, of growing class struggle, in which the political victory of the ascendant class over the old ruling class establishes a new system of property relations more compatible with the developing productive forces, as exemplified by the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

However, there are significant differences between this and the theoretical model espoused by the exponents of post-industrialism.

Technological determinism

Firstly, the Marxist model gives primacy to the concept of the "mode of production". It is the mode of production which essentially defines the kind of society we live in and by this is meant the combination of relations and forces of production. Technological determinists, on the other hand, tend to focus on the "forces of production" but why did they downplay the importance of property relations?

One reason is the theory of "convergence" which gained currency among social scientists during the Cold War. According to this, industrial development would cause the Russian bloc countries and the advanced western economies to increasingly resemble one another in social structure and outlook. How then could one account for such similarities if—as it was assumed—the "communist camp" and "capitalist camp" represented two different modes of production? This led commentators to infer that the concept of the mode of production had little explanatory value.

By contrast, Marxists pointed out that the world was not divided into two opposing social systems each rooted in distinctive mode of production. There was instead a single world system based on a capitalist mode of production with so-called communist countries representing a variant of this mode of production—namely, capitalism run by the state, or "state capitalism".

Another reason has to do with the oft-stated claim that there has been a decisive shift in power from the capitalist class to a technocratic or managerial elite. Prominent advocates of this view include Burnham (The Managerial Revolution) and J.K. Galbraith (The New Industrial State). Toffler put it this way:

"Left-wingers are so obsessed with the idea of property—ownership—that they are often blinded to the actual facts of the matter. The very concept of property is turning itself inside out. The people who dominate advanced 'capitalist' countries are not necessarily those who 'own the means of production'. Increasingly, the people who dominate do so because they control the means of integration—they are the managers. In the US, which is supposed to be the heart of world capitalism, property has been losing its significance for a generation. Basic decisions about the future of our society in the United States have been, and are being, made by business executives who often have no ownership of capital or of machines, whatever" (Previews and Premises 1984, p. 101).

In a world in which the ten richest individuals own as much wealth between them as the combined national incomes of the 48 poorest countries put together, according to last year's UN Human Development report, such observations seem grotesquely inapt. But even if "basic decisions about the future of our society" are being made by individuals who may not themselves possess enough capital to qualify as capitalists, that is not the issue. What matters is the context in which, and in whose interests, such decisions are made. It is not the motivation of individual capitalists that concerns us but the logic of capital accumulation itself with its manifold consequences for the rest of us.

A second major distinction between Marxism and technological determinism concerns the relationship between technology and society. For Marxism, technological progress is not an autonomous process impacting upon and altering the nature of society from without; rather it both conditions, and is conditioned by, society. As Marshall McLuhan put it rather well, "we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us".

As Kortunov adds in his The Battle of Ideas in the Modern World, that while the "apologists for technological determinism" appear to borrow Marx's idea that the "development of the productive forces is the basis of historical development", they, in fact, "completely distort this idea inasmuch as they separate the productive forces from the relations of production and discuss them apart from their connection with (the) socio-political formation".

Lean production

In his historical survey of changing production techniques in chapter 7 of his The End of Work, Jeremy Rifkin describes how in craft production highly skilled workers using hand tools crafted their products to the design specifications of individual buyers, the essential characteristics of this form of producing being its high degree of flexible but low level of output. With industrial production, based on the moving assembly line, the very opposite is true: high volume production alongside an inflexible technology. The "American method", as Rifkin dubs it, really began in Henry Ford's automobile factories in the early 20th century. The design function was effectively separated from actual production with the worker being reduced to the status of an unskilled appendage to the machine, routinely assembling standardised products for the mass market. The need to maintain continuous production to justify investment in such costly machinery necessitated a hierarchical system of management characterised by a pyramidal command structure through which information flowed up and decisions flowed down.

Then in the early post-war years a new system emerged, called "lean production". Originating in Toyota's factories in Japan, this differed from both craft production and industrial production in its ability to combine the flexibility of the former with the high volume output of the latter. Underpinning this new approach was the increasing application of information technology, such as automated robots, and the "flattening out" of the traditional management structure. Hierarchical decision-making was largely replaced by multi-skilled teams with groups of workers collaborating at every stage, from design to quality control, with each team member contributing to a process of continual improvement ("Kazen") while simultaneously being allowed access to all computerised information generated within the company.

From a socialist perspective, this development is an interesting one, presaging the "polytechnic worker" Marx saw as the mainstay of a socialist system of production. It also confirms our belief in the link between motivational commitment and a more egalitarian approach to decision-making. However, it would be naive to separate such a development from its capitalist context. Its internal repercussions for the enterprises concerned are a sharp contraction in the number of workers employed, significantly longer hours spent working, and increasing levels of stress arising from the pressure to conform to work schedules dictated by the team; externally, it has meant an increasing emphasis on "out-sourcing"—contracting out work to often poorly paid, part-time or temporary workers in the interests of "greater flexibility".

This shift from craft production to industrial production and finally "lean production" today cannot simply be viewed as an autonomous technological development; at every stage it was driven by the need to accumulate greater profits by driving down unit costs. This meant employers searching for more effective ways to exploit their workforce. The current trend is away from the kind of heavy-handed coercion associated with traditional management towards a system of "management by stress" which simultaneously allows firms to better utilise the "knowledge assets" of their workers. Hence the growing emphasis placed on education by governments.

Initially, when the more traditional kind of enterprises began to invest heavily in information technology the results proved rather disappointing. However, as Rifkin points out, by the early 1990s, this picture began to change with many major corporations in America registering sharp increases in productivity. What made that possible was precisely the "re-engineering" of corporate structures, enabling such corporations to make more profitable use of the technology at their disposal.

This process along with its associated "downsizing" of the workforce is now sweeping through every sector of the economy. Unlike in the past, when job displacement in the primary and secondary sectors was largely cushioned by the growth of the service sector, that sector is now itself succumbing to structural unemployment brought on by automation. According to Rifkin, with no new sector on the horizon capable of generating more jobs we face the prospect of steadily growing unemployment, albeit masked by the growth of part-time work.

With ever fewer opportunities for formal employment and with governments increasingly constrained by market pressures to curtail their welfare budgets, how, it might be asked are increasing numbers of workers to obtain a livelihood? The oft-mooted concept of a universal "social income" does not really address this problem since what is being proposed is little more than a glorified form of social welfare which governments could not afford and which moreover would tend to undermine the capitalist work ethic now being reinforced by the system of "lean production".

The dilemmas that this scenario presents have led commentators like Rifkin to talk tentatively of the "Dawn of the Post-Market Era" and the growth of voluntarism as an alternative to paid employment, all of which is music to the ears of socialists. But we would be neglectful if we did not add a word of caution: capitalism is not going to disappear of its own accord. Not that such commentators envisage its complete disappearance, but if that is what we desire then this has of necessity to be the work of a politically conscious socialist majority.

This brings us finally to a third major distinction between Marxism and technological determinism: the notion of human agency. Whereas Marxism sees human beings as the makers of history, technological determinism sees history as the outcome of a technological imperative. Whether or not that imperative will lead to the dramatic decline of the "global labour force" now being prophesied, bringing us to the very threshold of a post-market society, it is for human beings themselves to finally cross that threshold. Insofar as we have that choice, our future has not already been decided.

Robin Cox