Letter: Airbrushed (2014)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Airbrushed

Dear Editors

On 12th July at Sheffield Anarchist Bookfair the Communist Workers Organisation (CWO) held a meeting titled ‘The only war which is worth fighting is the class war’. The subject was the First World War and at 8 minutes 21 seconds in, the speaker representing the CWO stated ‘I won’t go into the various British ones today but the only group – and it was a group rather than an organisation – that can claim to have had any real anti-war policy completely was the Socialist Labour Party’.

In Revolutionary Perspectives issue 4 (Journal of the CWO) dated Summer 2014, the article ‘Social Democracy, the First World War and the Working-class in Britain’ starting on page 14 discusses ‘The Response of Socialists in Britain’ even discussing the Socialist Labour Party (De Leonist) on page 18.

For all the CWO airbrushing of consistent SPGB opposition to the First World War, it is ironic the same CWO speaker once debated the SPGB accusing the SPGB of being ‘schooled in Stalinism’.

Jon D. White 

(by email)

Reply:

Strange indeed, and for two reasons. The first being the clear and principled opposition to the war from the SPGB (on the basis that it was a capitalist war and not in the slightest about the interests of the working class).  Second, the SLP was split into two factions, one pro-war, the other anti-war (with articles in their paper The Socialist reflecting this division at the start of the conflict). It was only some months into the war that the anti-war faction won out and the SLP clearly stated its opposition to the slaughter. We know that the CWO as ‘left communists’ venerate the SLP because after the conflict the majority of its membership left to join the pro-Bolshevik Communist Party of Great Britain at its foundation, but the SLP’s attitude to the war has been well documented and there is no excuse for such shoddy historical revisionism. – Editors.

Mixed Media: Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern

There was a major retrospective of the work of Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern in 2014. He is acknowledged as the inventor of 'Pop Art' which he described as 'popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business.'

The exhibition reconstructs his installation Fun House, originally shown as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1956 show This Is Tomorrow. It incorporates film, music, distorted architecture, op art and Hollywood film imagery and pin-ups such as Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, and Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet. It is an homage to 'Americana', as well as a celebration of the new youth and 'pop' culture of 1950s capitalism.

In his 1956 collage Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Hamilton has a muscle-man provocatively holding a lolly with the word POP and a woman with bare breasts wearing a lampshade hat, surrounded by emblems of the affluence of 1950s capitalism from a vacuum cleaner to a large canned ham. Capitalism is portrayed as 'cool', it was riding high in its 'golden age' of the post-war economic boom, the reformists believed capitalism could work in the interests of the working class, and Macmillan proclaimed 'people have never had it so good.' Hamilton particularly admired the German electrical company Braun and its Chief Design Officer Dieter Rams whose 'consumer products came to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézannes', and in 1964 he began to base works on Braun's marketing images.

After the failure of Keynesian capitalism in the 1970s, Hamilton was horrified by the 1980s capitalist restructuring under Thatcher, and the reintroduction of unfettered free market capitalism. His 1984 installation Treatment Room is inspired by the bleak, clinical style of the capitalist state reflected in the DHSS office or NHS hospital waiting room. A TV monitor where the X-ray machine would be repeats footage of Thatcher from the 1983 Tory Party Conference. His War Games (1991-92) used TV news footage of the 1991 Gulf War which portrayed the war as a sport for viewers and reminds us of the BBC Newsnight coverage with Peter Snow's sandpit and models. Later Hamilton portrays 'war criminal' Tony Blair as a gun-toting cowboy against a backdrop of military inferno in Shock and Awe (2010).

The Hamilton retrospective has some salutary lessons: you cannot 'reform' capitalism to work in the interests of the working class, and war is endemic to capitalism due to competition between capitalist groups for raw materials such as oil in the Middle East.

Steve Clayton

Mixed Media: ‘Kill Your Darlings’ (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the September 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kill Your Darlings by Austin Bunn

Director John Krokidas and writer Austin Bunn’s 2013 film Kill Your Darlings draws on Jack Kerouac’s novel Vanity of Duluoz, portraying the early years (1943-44) of the ‘Beat Generation’ in New York City of Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe), William Burroughs (Ben Foster), Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston) and Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan).

We meet Allen Ginsberg at home in New Jersey with his poet father Louis and his mother Naomi. Louis was a socialist, his parents had been active in the Yiddish Arbeiter Circle, and he went with his father to lectures by Eugene Debs, IWW founder and Socialist Party of America Presidential candidate. Louis named his first son after Debs: ‘He was magnificent. All the ironies of the capitalist system came blazing forth. He was a brilliant man.’ Allen’s mother was a member of the Communist Party.

Allen goes to Columbia University studying to be a Labor Lawyer, meets Lucien Carr (‘blond, eighteen, of fantastic male beauty’ (Vanity of Duluoz), William Burroughs (Harvard educated St Louis patrician), and Jack Kerouac, ‘the stocky Breton with blue eyes and coal black hair’ (Gerald Nicosia, 1983), football player, poet, Merchant Marine, and originator of ‘First Thought Best Thought.’ Jack and Lucien liked to sing together folk songs, Leadbelly’s country blues, communist work songs, and with Ginsberg and Burroughs ‘they would have Dostoyevskian confrontations, endure horrors out of Kafka’ (Nicosia). Their artistic endeavours are inspired by Yeats, Whitman, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, the pleasures and wild sensations of marijuana, alcohol, Benzedrine and the Bebop Jazz music revolution of Charlie Parker (Bird).

Kerouac was a ‘Canuck’, a French-Canadian from the textile manufacturing mill-town of Lowell in Massachusetts, 13 miles north of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Ann Charters described Lowell as ‘poor, dirty and rundown, both working-class and obstinately bourgeois, belligerently provincial.’ In the 1920s and 1930s Lowell entered economic decline when companies relocated to the South where labour was cheaper, and in 1931 Harpers Magazine called it a ‘depressed industrial desert.’

Kerouac’s first language was ‘joual’ the French of the ‘Canucks’, a dialect of working-class Quebec French, and he would overcome the handicaps of his working-class ‘Canuck’ origins to become the greatest writer since James Joyce, ‘not even 72 hours a week of underpaid mill work could keep these people in their place’ wrote Nicosia. Ginsberg overcame being a ‘spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses’ (Vanity of Duluoz) to become the poetical heir to William Blake, a 1960s Counter-Cultural guru and New Left icon. As Dave Kammerer says in the film ‘under the right circumstances he might change the world.’

Steve Clayton

Material World: Pacific but not peaceful (2014)

The Material World Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year the California-based Oakland Institute revealed the escalation of land grabs in Papua New Guinea (PNG) over the past decade, amounting to 5.5 million hectares, or 12 percent of the country, due to fraudulent manipulation of Special Agriculture and Business Leases (SABLs), government administered schemes whereby customary owners lease their land to the state for a title which can be used for leasing to a third party. SABLs have been exploited by international logging companies, aided by corrupt state offi cials, resulting in rising deforestation, and many customary owners losing control of their traditional lands. Offi cial catch-phrases of ‘freeing up land for development’, have masked ‘daylight robbery, the betrayal of people’s constitutional protections and the loss of heritage and land for millions of Papua New Guineans’ says the institute’s report, On Our Land.

Customary tenure applies to 80-90 percent of land in Pacific Island states. Unwritten customary law determines land and inheritance rights for members of clans or extended families. Traditional tenure plays a vital role in the Southwest Pacific countries where the formal sector provides as little as 15 percent of employment, and most people are reliant on subsistence and small-holder agriculture for livelihoods and income. Evidence suggests that, in PNG, small-holder fresh food producers can earn more substantial incomes than people in formal employment. A 2008 study of women roadside sellers in Madang province concluded that 50 percent earned more than three times the minimum wage.

Joel Simo of the Melanesian Indigenous Land Defence Alliance (MILDA) in Vanuatu claims that customary tenure is a ‘system of sharing’ that ‘caters for everyone’s needs.’ he said. ‘Land in most Pacific countries is for public access for survival and not fenced off by the legal system.’ MILDA’s commitment to protect Melanesian values, which promote long-term sustainable land use, includes opposition to customary land registration or leasing, perceived as serving the interests of foreign and local elite. ‘People can register their land and still remain poor,’ Simo said.

However, in the 21st Century land is subject to increasing global economic pressures, the greater dependence of islanders on the cash economy, rapid population growth and urbanisation. Many Pacific Island states are grappling with identifying effective land dispute resolution mechanisms. Reconciling tenure security under informal customary law and modern judicial legal systems presents ongoing challenges. Proliferating disputes between customary groups, and with external parties, over rightful land ownership, development benefits and environmental damage remain a factor in continued rural impoverishment.

Maria Linibi, president of the PNG Women in Agriculture Development Foundation, agrees that better land administration is required, but rejects easier options for foreign investors or the state to acquire customary land. ‘Customary land ownership to our livelihoods, income and food security is very important because without it we would not survive,’ Linibi declared.

Factors in landowner distrust of state land reform include state corruption and failure of large export oriented projects to raise human development or living standards for the majority of Pacific Islanders.

‘The prevalence of fraud and corruption within the land administration system [of PNG] means that titles can be easily issued, tampered with or destroyed,’ Aidwatch reported in 2010. Their report added that formal land titles were ‘a recipe for failure’ in countries where local landowners are not empowered with education and legal knowledge. Thus, in PNG, where rural illiteracy is as high as 85 percent, ‘top-down’ land leasing programmes have the potential to exacerbate inequality.

This problem of land-grabbing, of course, is not unique to the Pacific but is taking place in many parts of the world: in Africa, Asia and South America. It is a process that Marxists call primitive capital accumulation (the economist David Harvey opts to use the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’ because he finds it odd to call an ongoing process ‘primitive’) and which in English history is known as the Enclosures – common land being either privatised or nationalised. Primitive accumulation is a historical process whereby a separation is created between producers and their means of production or subsistence, i.e. their land. Subsequently, the producers without means of production are left with little choice but to join the industrial army working in urban factories while, freeing up the land and resources for commodity production and capital accumulation.

Land acquisition is increasingly occurring across the globe over the last few years as capitalism further integrates the peasant economy more fully into its world-system. Development banks have identified large sections of sub-Saharan African countries as unused and ‘reserved’ for investment. Yet, as investors acquired the land they met resistance from peasants that were already using such land for their livelihoods. Communal land is being turned into capital and indigenous peoples transformed into wage labour: 

‘In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short force, play the greatest part … As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic’ (Marx, Capital Vol 1)

ALJO

Sourced from:

Pacific Islands At Sea Over Land Rights

Marx, Co-operatives and Capitalism (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent failure of the co-operative bank and its rescue by hedge funds seems an apt time to review Richard Wolff’s latest book, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Haymarket Books), which advocates co-operatives as the way towards economic democracy for the working class.   Wolff rejects the label ‘co-operative’, perhaps because of its historical baggage, and chooses another term, ‘workers self-directed enterprises’ (WSDEs), to describe what he advocates.  In practice, though, what Wolff advocates is indistinguishable from the historical aims of the co-operative movement to re-distribute profit amongst its members.  Wolff is also an open advocate for long-established co-operative projects such as Mondragon in Spain.  Wolff’s aims, though, run deeper than support for extending the popularity of co-operatives as presently understood.  What Wolff seeks to do in Democracy at Work is to redefine working-class co-operative production as socialism in action:

  ‘ . . . in a socialist economy, workers – who produce the surplus – themselves appropriate and distribute the surplus . . .  socialism and communism are differentiated from capitalism in terms of being non-exploitative, since the producers of surpluses also appropriate and distribute them.’ (p.105)

The case against regarding co-operatives as a definition of, or even a route to, socialism is best dealt with by quoting from Wolff’s recent book where he sets out how his workers self-directed firms may co-exist with other capitalist firms:

  ‘WSDEs and capitalist enterprises will . . .  manage their challenges and disappointments differently. Consider a WSDE troubled by the problem of falling revenues (because of lack of demand, technological backwardness, or shortage of inputs). That WSDE could well decide to lower individual wages and salaries and thereby enlarge the surplus available to solve the problem (via advertising, installing advanced equipment, securing new input sources, and so on). The workers who collectively lowered their individual wages would be the same workers who received and the used the enlarged surplus to solve the problem.  In contrast, workers in a capitalist enterprise would more likely resist such a solution since other people – the capitalists who exploit them – would receive and decide what to do with any extra surplus realized by lowering individual wages.  Distrust accumulated from conflicts and struggles between capitalists and workers would contribute to such a result.  Thus WSDEs and capitalist enterprises would likely find and implement different responses to similar enterprise problems.’

Wolff is, of course, describing the actions not of two different types of social organisation (one allegedly socialist and one capitalist) but of two models of capitalist firm.  The solutions to the problems faced by the different types of firm are not different solutions but the same solution.  The difference is that one in scenario the solution (cutting wages, increasing intensity of labour and mechanisation) is enforced by the workers as a collective employer on themselves and in the other scenario enforced by a single employer owner or board of directors.  

Wolff’s incredible suggestion is that capitalism run by the workers would avoid the conflict between an employing class and an employed class – the problem is cured, the conflict resolved, by the workers becoming their own employer.  It will be quite clear to anyone with a cursory acquaintance with the with the work of Karl Marx that Wolff’s cure for capitalism is quite different from anything that Marx worked for or that could reasonably be derived from his writings.  However, this is precisely what Wolff claims for his WSDEs – that they are derived from Marxian economic theory:

  ‘The alternative economic system that begins to emerge in Marx’s writings differs from capitalism in how it organises the production and distribution of the surplus. . . . [In WSDEs] it is the workers –and not a separate, small group of persons, as in capitalism – who play the key roles of appropriating and distributing the surpluses they generate in production. The producers and appropriators of the surplus are then identical…’ (p.105)

Here we must beware of  a Wolff in Marxian clothing as Wolff’s ‘surplus theory’ supplants Marxian analysis.  To prove the point let’s take a quick look at what Marx actually said about co-operatives in his own lifetime.  Marx was enthusiastic about the emergence of co-operatives and what they portended for capitalism.  Writing for the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) in 1864, he wrote:

   ‘The value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated. By deed instead of by argument, they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands . . .’

Again for the IWMA in 1866:

  ’We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.’ 

In Volume 3 of Capital Marx argued of co-operatives that ‘the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour.’

However, in each case Marx also described the limitations of co-operatives:

  ‘ . . . however . . .  excellent in principle and however useful in practice, co-operative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries. . . .  To save the industrious masses, co-operative labour ought to be developed to national dimensions, and, consequently, to be fostered by national means. Yet the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour. . . . To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes.’ (IWMA 1864) 

  ‘Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. To convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.’ (IWMA 1866) 

  ‘The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system’ (Capital, Vol.3)

So Marx was saying that workers taking control of their own productive work processes, of organising co-operatively in firms, appeared to be a positive reaction on the part of workers to private capitalism.  As such it was a source of growing confidence for the working class, proof that the historically progressive role of private capitalists had come to an end:

  ‘Co-operative factories furnish proof that the capitalist has become no less redundant as a functionary in production as he himself, looking down from his high perch, finds the big landowner redundant.’ (Capital, Vol. 3)

Of itself, though, co-operatives represented an accommodation of workers to capitalism and not a social transformation.  Through the experience of engaging in co-operative enterprises Marx believed that workers would come to realise their limitations as a force for social change and grasp the need for political action in order to socialise production generally.  From Marx’s viewpoint in the middle of the second half of the nineteenth-century this was probably a reasonable, if optimistic, assessment.  By the early twentieth-century, however, it was far clearer that co-operatives were not evolving into a revolutionary response to capitalism.  Instead they were being seen by some ex-Marxian socialists such as Eduard Bernstein as proof that capitalism was slowly evolving towards socialism from within, that revolutionary political action was not required. 

A hundred years ago these arguments took place around the debate in the labour movement as to whether reform or revolution was the way towards socialism.  Today we face similar arguments from Richard Wolff but from a different direction.  Between the early Marxian socialist movement and today occurred the state capitalist revolutions in Russia, China, Cuba and so on.  In rightly rejecting these state capitalist political models, radicals such as Wolff (influenced by post-modernism) have unfortunately felt the need to dispense with the materialist conception of history, arguing it to be irrevocably determinist.  However, rather than leaving Marx behind Wolff engages in the mystifying process of appropriating Marxian clothing for his co-operative strategy for social change.  If there is little enough merit in Wolff’s arguments in Democracy at Work for co-operatives as a route to meaningful economic democracy, they also lacks integrity in attempting to associate WSDEs with Marxian economics.

Colin Skelly

Satanic Mills (2014)

Book Review from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spindleopolis: Oldham in 1913. Alan Fowler and Terry Wyke, Oldham Council and Manchester Metropolitan University £3.95.

A century ago Oldham, with a population of 150,000, was the world’s leading town for the spinning of cotton, with 10 percent of all the cotton spindles in existence. There were also thousands of looms for weaving, and large factories that produced textile machinery, such as Platt Brothers. The townscape was dominated by smoke from the chimneys of the coal-fired mills, though the more recent ones were powered by electricity.

The mills were very profitable, most paying an annual dividend of eight percent. The mill-owners, of course, lived in more scenic surroundings away from the noise and smoke and the pavements made dangerous and unpleasant from the habit of public spitting. Oldham apparently had a reputation as a prosperous town (which can only mean in comparative terms). Children worked full-time from 14 years, and from 12 they split their time between work and school. Many married women worked in the mills, and it was only the combined wages of parents and children that kept workers’ heads above water.

Housing was often expensive and overcrowded, but home-ownership was surprisingly widespread, with about one house in three owned or being bought by its occupants. An enlightening aside is that workers’ houses were increasingly being built with front doors that contained letter boxes. Holidays were mainly the annual ‘wakes week’, usually featuring a stay in Blackpool.

Workers organised themselves in unions such as the Oldham Spinners. Politically, the town veered between supporting Liberals and Conservatives (Winston Churchill was MP 1900-06). Sadly, the major event of 1913 for many residents was the visit of the king and queen in July.

The First World War disrupted the cotton trade, and enabled Japan and other countries to take over the markets once served by Oldham and other Lancashire towns. The cotton industry gradually declined, mills were closed, and Fred Dibnah found a kind of fame demolishing their chimneys on TV.

This booklet was prepared to accompany an exhibition ‘When Cotton was King’ at Gallery Oldham. It includes some superb contemporary cartoons by Sam Fitton from the Cotton Factory Times. 

Paul Bennett

Material World: Myth of Peaceful Buddhism (2014)

The Material World Column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many have a soft spot for Buddhism as a religion and it frequently escapes criticism. After all, it is a religion where the belief in gods is not a necessary pre-requisite. The popular conception is that all Buddhists are peaceful, simply by virtue of the fact that they call themselves Buddhists. Nothing could be further from the truth. States where Buddhism is the dominant tradition have engaged in many wars and other conflicts over the past centuries. And Buddhist monks have a long tradition of supporting kings and warlords in their conflicts. Particularly in south-east Asia, Buddhism has been the religion allegedly followed by many feudal rulers, in the form of an hierarchical organised religion. Buddhism holds a certain amount of political influence in Myanmar (Burma), Thailand and Sri Lanka.

Buddhists are just like people of other faiths: subject to desire, anger, and ignorance. Buddhism differs only in that it offers the promise of freedom from desire, anger and ignorance to those who seriously practise. Many so-called Buddhists do not engage in serious practice. The thing about these ‘peaceful religions’ is often a product of the Western imagination, the idea of these far-off people living these incredibly peaceful and wise lives.

Buddhism certainly has much within its precepts about pacifism but as with the Christian crusaders or Islamist militants violence has been justified in the name of a higher good. Buddhist rulers and monks have been no exception. Any religion sooner or later enters into a pact with state power. Buddhist monks looked to kings for support, patronage and order and kings looked to monks to provide the popular legitimacy that only they confer. When Buddhism has become an established religion and a theocracy you have as brutal a feudal despotism as any other, for instance, the monastic version of Buddhism practiced in Tibet, Lamaism. Until recently the Dalai Lama was in effect head of state, not simply a religious leader. This often led to political rather than theological disputes with other leading religious Lamas.

Buddhist nation states have historically sought to use Buddhist doctrine to justify war. The links between Zen Buddhism and samurai warrior culture were partly responsible for the collusion of Zen and Japanese militarism in the 1930s and 1940s. For several years Japanese jingoism seized Zen, and its teachings were twisted and corrupted to excuse killing. Zen institutions not only supported Japanese military aggression but raised money to manufacture war planes and weapons.

Tamils are Hindus and they constitute a majority in Northern Sri Lanka. The Sinhalese are Buddhist and have been perfectly willing to exercise ruthless violence against Tamils. In the Sri Lankan civil war hard-line monks were at the vanguard of Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism, which viewed the Hindu Tamils and Sri Lanka’s smaller Muslim population as outsiders. They joined the government with their own party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya or National Heritage Party. The monks used their new power to argue vociferously against any self-determination for the Tamils in the north, opposing even the more limited measure of autonomy. In religious terms they justified the suppression of the Tamils on the grounds that a fracture in the nation state is a tear in the sacred fabric of a land which represents the well-spring of their belief. Roads have been renamed after Buddhist monks. While many Hindu temples and Christian churches were destroyed in the war, new Buddhist stupas and statues are being built.

In Rakhine State, Myanmar there has been civil strife between Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims whom the Burmese government views not as citizens but as illegal immigrants and therefore affords little protection,  and this has led to a refugee crisis as the Rohingya flee from pogroms inspired and led by Buddhist monks. Dr. Muang Zarni, a Burmese human rights activist and research fellow at the London School of Economics has described the 969 movement as a neo-Nazi Buddhist organisation. 969 stands for three things: the 9 stands for the special attributes of Buddha, the founder of the religion; the 6 stands for attributes of his teachings of dharma; and finally, the last 9 stands for special characteristics or attributes of the clergy (LINK.).

Buddhism can easily be used to support reactionary politics. The conflict between Buddhists and Muslims is often over land and nationalism. Buddhism is neither better nor worse than any other organised religions in its role as an agent of social control.

ALJO

50 Years Ago: Death of a President (2014)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who would have dreamt, on the morning of that fateful November day, that within a matter of hours, the thirty-fifth U.S. President, John F. Kennedy, would be dead, as well as his assassin and a Texas policeman? Yet this was the news which burst upon an astounded world, and sent all the capitalist politicians into huddles.

Kennedy’s death was a tragedy for his family and friends, but at times like these it is as well to get the whole business into some sort of perspective and try to dispel some of the concentrated nonsense to which we have been subjected since the event. It was The Observer for December 1st which said that the shot which killed Kennedy ‘. . . must change the course of the world.’ But this is really just another repetition of the ‘great men make history’ theory, and has precious little evidence to support it.

The more sensible remark was that overheard between two young men in a London street the following morning. ‘Assassinations don’t really make a lot of difference,’ said one. ‘Things go on pretty much the same as before.’ Probably he was not a Socialist, but he certainly hit the nail on the head, for this is precisely what the newspapers were hastening to tell us a few days later. President Johnson would continue the Kennedy policies, said Richard Scott in The Guardian of November 28th. He could have added (but of course he didn’t) that these would as usual be a reflection of the needs of contemporary American capitalism. They were ably expounded by the new President thus:

‘. . . the unswerving support of the United Nations . . . the honourable and determined execution of our commitments to our allies . . . the maintenance of military strength second to none . . . the defence of the strength and stability of the dollar . . . the expansion of our foreign trade . . . our programme of assistance and cooperation in Asia and Africa. . . ’

There have been two Democrats and one Republican at the White House since Roosevelt and any one of them could have uttered those words. For American capitalism has become a giant in world affairs; its days of isolationism are well and truly over.

(from The Passing Show, Socialist Standard, January 1964)

Tribal Politics in Africa (2014)

From the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Africa every political leader that comes into power starts to consolidate himself  through stamping out political turncoats and the opposition. This easily gives rise to ethnic suspicions. Thus politicians take advantage of ethnic and tribal prejudices in order to win a political following. This is what took place in Kenya when Odinga lost the  elections to Uhuru Kenyatta. The Luos and Kikuyu tribes started to butcher each other.

This also took place in Zimbabwe when Joshua Nkomo lost to Robert Mugabe in 1979 –  Nkomo invited the Ndebeli to rise against the Shona – there was violence in Matebeleland and hundreds of civilians were killed.

Under the leadership of Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, the slogan ‘Zambia One Nation’ came to emphasise unity between tribes. Political reputations based on tribal loyalties did not exist under UNIP. Dr. Kaunda preached tribal balancing by appointing cabinet ministers from majority tribes – there was always a Lozi and Tonga as prime minister.

If there was any semblance to tribalism in Zambia under UNIP it only came from the Lozi royal establishment that had grievances with the Barotse government of 1964. The British Crown had given the protectorate to Barotseland in 1889 – but that lapsed when the governor of Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland Sir Evelyn Horn handed over self government to Dr. Kaunda in 1964.

Kaunda emulated the ‘communist’ bloc and played a part in sponsoring the political rebels agitating for political independence in Zimbabwe, Angola, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa. The incidence of military coups in West Africa – in Ghana and Nigeria both civilian governments were overthrown – made Kaunda promulgate a one-party state in 1973. He became commander-in-chief of the Zambian armed forces, and virtual dictator.

Kaunda threw himself wholeheartedly into the liberation struggle taking place in southern Africa and on this count alone his political reputation rests. The onset of a trade inflation in Western and Eastern countries from 1980 onwards posed economic problems in African countries – in Zambia queues for essential commodities and fuel became a recurring feature.

The promulgation of Perestroika by Gorbachev in Russia led to the fall of ‘communism’ (state capitalism) in eastern Europe and Africa. This gave rise to demands for political pluralism in Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It took the intervention of Tanzanian soldiers to evict the dictator Idi Amin from Uganda. President Mobutu was made to flee Kinshasa when the Rwandan army used the Banyamulenge to attack his army. Kaunda himself was voted out of office in 1991.

The one-party states there were ended but replaced by tribal-based politics.

Kephas Mulenga

Keeping the Faith (2014)

The Halo Halo! column from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

A large dose of gullibility and desperation must be needed before reasonable adults become hooked on the opium of the people. But once they are, a regular diet of religious hogwash is also required it seems, to keep them in a state of faith-fuelled stupor.

One website that doles this out by the bucketful is The Christian Post. Typical articles currently on offer complain of an ‘attack’ by the media when they dare to ask questions like ‘Can we trust the bible?’ or make programmes questioning ‘the true story of Christmas’ etc. This is exactly what the media ought to be doing you may think, but the true believer disagrees. After all, if God had intended us to think for ourselves he wouldn’t have sent Jesus would he?

There are also handy hints such as ‘How to overcome Impulsive Behaviours’. But instead of the righteous ‘plenty of fresh air, cold baths and healthy exercise’ advice you might expect, the Christian Post assures such sufferers that God ‘takes our sin and gives us his righteousness’, but ‘we have to study the word and spend time with God so he can do this work in our soul’.

‘How does God juggle so many prayers?’ asks another, apparently serious, article to dispel any lingering doubts its followers may have. ‘God has millions of prayers coming before him at any given moment’ it assures us. ‘How in the world does he hear each one and answer them all?’

Well, ignoring the fact that if even a single prayer were answered it would be hailed as a miracle, how indeed? This question must have crossed the mind and been worked out by most reasonably bright nine year-olds. The answer though for Christian Post readers, who are apparently not bright nine year-olds, is ‘Allow this fact to blow your mind: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day’.

These efforts to justify the big religious lie are not just childish stories or unscientific mythology; they are totally meaningless garbage, and an insult to adult intelligence. ‘Religion with the drains blocked’ as someone once put it.

It’s not just Christianity that has to come up with a constant flow of hogwash to keep the faithful in awe of course, and no list of religious absurdities would be complete without something from Islam. Here’s a few uncovered by a Cairo university committee, set up to study the fatwas issued by the Muslim Brotherhood and reported in India Today (28 Nov 2013).

When a woman goes swimming, as the word for sea is masculine, when the water touches the woman’s private parts, she becomes an ‘adulteress’ and should be punished.

Another prohibited women from eating certain vegetables or even touching cucumbers or bananas.

One directed women to turn off the air conditioning at home in the absence of their husbands as it could indicate to a neighbour that the woman was at home alone, allowing them to commit adultery with her.

And another decreed that a couple’s marriage would be annulled if they had sex with no clothes on.

Allah makes other religions look almost sensible doesn’t he?

NW

Letter: Russell Brand (2014)

"Did someone say my name?"

Letter to the Editors from the January 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Let me declare an interest right away . . . I don’t like Russell Brand.  I was switched off his style of humour (?) when he publicly aimed it at Andrew Sachs on live radio!   That aside, I read your article about his views on socialism with some interest, although I confess not as much interest as I would have if it had been written by Frank, the mechanic in my local garage.

Why is Russell Brand’s opinion so important that it warrants a four page spread in the Socialist Standard?  Is it not because he is a ‘celebrity’?  And what is a celebrity if not a product of the very system Brand rails against? I agree with his railing …but I find it hard to take advice on changing to a socialist society from a celebrity who makes a great deal of money by acting and conning the rest of the world that he is important.  It’s a bit like Bono and Bob Geldof telling us all that we have to ‘live more simply so that others might simply live’, while they swan around the world in jet planes living the ‘life of Reilly’!

Sorry, I don’t buy Russell Brand sniping from the sidelines while taking full advantage of the very system he is decrying.   I’d sooner take a lesson from Frank my local mechanic.  He’s no celebrity, but he certainly knows a thing or two about life for a real worker.

Russell Brand is famous for being controversial in order to maintain his position in the public spotlight, and I think his conversion to the cause of socialism is just another stunt aimed at bolstering his public persona.

Ian McRae, 

Dundee

Reply:

Surely the main point is that Brand is (despite what people may think of him otherwise) using his celebrity to question the system, and that’s why we’ve highlighted it. Unlike perhaps the cases of Bono, Sting, etc who didn’t really challenge the system at all, but became friends with the politicians instead – Editors

The Cost of Living Crisis (2014)

From the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Party politicians at national and local level are going around talking about a ‘cost of living crisis’. Presumably their spin-doctors have told them that this could be a vote-winner. They could be right as it’s true that over the past few years the cost of living has being rising faster than wages and welfare benefits (except the state pension). But what can Labour do about this? Basically, nothing. They are not even promising to do much. It’s just a ploy to give the impression that they care about people’s concerns.

The cost of living is the cost of buying the things people need to keep themselves fit to work or, in the case of welfare recipients, to maintain a minimum standard of living. It goes up all the time these days as maintaining a 2 percent rate of currency inflation is deliberate government policy. But, with inflation, wages, which are also a price, go up too. As long as they go up at the same rate or more than the price of the things wage and salary workers need to buy then there is no extra problem,  no ’cost of living crisis’. There’s still the problem, of course, that they are never enough for a decent standard of living and that employers reap a profit from their work.

Wages at least keeping up with prices is what normally happens in the upswing phase of the capitalist business cycle, due to the law of supply and demand and trade union pressure. During the downturn phase, on the other hand, the increased unemployment exerts a downward pressure on wages which the unions are not always able to counter, and wages rise less than other prices. In this case, there is an additional ‘cost of living crisis’. Which is the situation today and which the Labour Party is trying to exploit for vote-catching purposes.

In theory there are two ways of dealing with this: either increase money wages more or freeze prices. In the dim and distant past the Labour Party would have promised to increase people’s incomes as the way-out. But not today. Experience of being the government has taught them that under capitalism priority has to be given to profits and profit-making as this is what makes the system go round. Increasing wages at the expense of profits is a non-starter.

As to increasing benefits, there’s absolutely no question of them doing this since they are anxious to get rid of their once attractive image as ‘the welfare party’. Their spin-doctors have told them that, so successful has been the media campaign to present welfare recipients as ‘scroungers,’ this is now a vote-loser.

So, price control is the only option left. But, even here, they are not being serious. All they are promising is a two-year freeze on gas and electricity prices. But what about all the other bills for everyday living expenses? These are not going to be frozen as Labour know, once again from the experience of being the government under capitalism, that price controls don’t work, at least not for any length of time and not without causing other economic problems. And they’re nothing to do with Marxism as the Daily Mail claims. That’s about getting rid of prices  – and wages and profits –altogether.

The promise to freeze energy prices for a while is just a gesture designed to give the impression that they care. Unfortunately enough people seem to have been taken in to put Labour ahead in the opinion polls. To counter this, and give the impression that they too care, the Tories have floated the idea of an increase in the minimum wage. In real terms this is 10 percent lower than it was before the slump broke in 2008. The ulterior motive here is clear. It’s a move to save on government spending as it will reduce the amount paid out as ‘tax credits’, the subsidy to low-paying employers introduced by the last Labour government. Those on the minimum wage would get an increase in what their employer pays them, but a decrease in what the government does.

Faced with these cynical vote-catching ploys, most people won’t really think it makes much difference which party or parties form the government. They are right. Whatever the politicians say to get elected, governments have virtually no control over the relationship between wages and other prices. This depends on which phase of its business cycle capitalism is in. Governments have not much choice other than to go along with what capitalism throws at them. That’s why they are always betraying their promises. Not because they are necessarily dishonest, but because in promising measures to make capitalism work in the interest of wage and salary workers they are promising the impossible.

For socialists there is also a wider question. Why is there a ‘cost of living’? Why do we have to pay for the things we need to live and enjoy life? Given the level of productivity achieved today, we could go over to a socialist society, based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, where people could have free access to what they need in accordance with the principle ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs’. Then nobody would have to worry about where the money to pay the next bill is to come from as they wouldn’t be charged for access to essentials such as heating and lighting.

Adam Buick

Mixed Media: The Threepenny Opera' (2014)

The Mixed Media column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Threepenny Opera
Last year there was a semi-staging by director Ted Huffman of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera) at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank. This performance was sung in German with English subtitles and had a linking narration specially written by Brecht for concert performances such as this.

The Threepenny Opera is an adaptation of John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera The Beggar’s Opera which is a satire on the corruption of the Walpole government in the aftermath of the financial crash of the South Sea Company. John Gay had a relish for low life, an affinity shared with Brecht who set The Threepenny Opera in a Soho of the lumpenproletariat of thieves, beggars, and whores.

Max Hopp as the Narrator sang Die Moritat von Mackie Messer (The Ballad of Mack the Knife). Max Hopp recently had a leading role in the William S Burroughs-Tom Waits ‘musical fable’ The Black Rider at the Theater Basel.

Low-Dive Jenny performed by Meow Meow sang Seeräuberjenny (Pirate Jenny): ‘you toss me a penny, and I’m always quick to thank/Even though you see my rags/And fifty canons/Will fire at the shore/My Sirs, there your laughter will stop/Because the walls will fall/And the city will be level with the ground.’

Mark Padmore as Macheath and Nicholas Folwell as ‘Tiger’ Brown, the corrupt police chief duet on the Kanonen-Song (Cannon Song): ‘young men’s blood goes on being red/And the army goes on recruiting.’

Macheath and Jenny duet on the materialist II Dreigroschenfinale, Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? (Second Threepenny Opera Finale, What Keeps Mankind Alive); ‘Food is the first thing: morals follow on/You gentlemen who think you have a mission/to purge us from the seven deadly sins/ Should first sort out the basic food position.’

The Threepenny Opera is notable for Weill’s music which was scored for a jazz dance band drawing on the rhythms and idioms of the dance music of the time. Weill’s music is a reaction to the bourgeois genre of operetta. He emulates John Gay in his use of vernacular musical styles.

Brecht aims his satire at the corruption, hypocrisy, greed, self-satisfaction of the capitalist class, the venality of aspirations to bourgeois respectability and what the bourgeoisie had in common with ruthless criminals. Macheath says ‘What is the burgling of a bank to the founding of a bank?’

Theodore Adorno judged it the most important event since Berg’s Wozzeck and Brecht later wrote ‘young proletarians suddenly came to the theatre, in some cases for the first time, and then quite often came back.’

Steve Clayton

Pathfinders: Dirty Secrets (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The post-Savile paedophilia purge is continuing to create headlines not seen in the UK since the year 2000, and this time without the poison stirring spoon of Rebekah Brooks and the News of the World.  Experience then showed that it didn’t take much to whip up a lynch mob, and lo and behold, vigilante groups are now operating on the streets of Britain. In September last year one such group, called Letzgo Hunting, lured a Leicester man into a meeting and then publicly branded him a paedophile, after which the man hanged himself. In October it was reported in Bristol that a disabled gardener, attempting to photograph youths attacking his plants, was denounced as a kiddy-fiddler and promptly battered and burned to death in the street. This is significant, as burning is what you do to witches. Significant also that the newspapers universally described him as ‘innocent’ of the charge of paedophilia, the implication being that the murder would have been excusable otherwise.

The wave of moral outrage has been further fuelled by the appalling case of singer Ian Watkins, who described his 13 child sex charges, including an attempt to rape a one year old baby, as ‘mega lolz’. Meanwhile one after another crumbling octogenarian is manhandled out of the grave and into the dock to answer charges committed half a century ago in a swinging sexist society that did everything to encourage such behaviour.

On the modern assumption that all men are potentially paedophiles, schools have turned into fortresses. The intended effect is that paedophiles no longer have easy access to children, but instead covert child sex trafficking has become big business. So too has online child porn, a fact not lost on many Filipino families who, it was reported last month, have been hiring out their children for online pay-per-view sex and rape sessions.

Last November an online sting involving a 10-year old Filipino girl called ‘Sweetie’, who supposedly engaged in sex acts with adults while online viewers paid a fee, helped to collar over 1,000 paedophiles around the world who flocked to the alluring Sweetie like moths to a flame. What was clever about this sting was that it was created in a Dutch computer laboratory. ‘Sweetie’ was a computer graphics construct, not a real child. What was stupid about the paedophiles is that they didn’t even try to cover their tracks, which makes one wonder how many smart paedophiles remain undiscovered. Watkins’ computer porn, for example, was so deeply hidden that the police had to call in GCHQ to decrypt it.

With the witch-hunting mania in full spate reason is cowed into reticence and constructive debate hardly seems likely. What should socialists say, if asked about this problem?

Paedophilia is defined as adult sexual attraction to prepubescent children up to the age of 11. Sex with a person under 16 in the UK is defined as statutory rape, for which the offender is placed on the sex offenders register. In the popular press this makes them a paedophile and a rapist by definition.

The problem with this is that the age of consent is an arbitrary line in the sand. A recent proposal to lower this to 15 had David Cameron running away in shivers, yet Europe-wide the statutory age varies from 13 in Spain and 14 in Italy and Germany through to 18 in Turkey (in 19th century Britain it was 12, in some American states 10, in Delaware 7).

Another problem is that capitalism has no qualms about sexualising childhood in order to sell products to young wage and pocket money earners. Remember the Peek-a-Boo Stripper Pole Dancing kit (age 6+) sold in Tesco’s toy section? And let’s not forget the push-up bra (age 7), the Playboy Bunny school merchandise or Bratz Hooker Babies (age 9), dolls made up as prostitutes with high heels and leather thongs.

Notwithstanding any of this, what society wants is not to accommodate or contain or neutralise or even understand paedophilia but to destroy it root and branch, as it once did (and still does elsewhere in the world) with homosexuality. Whether that’s possible, medically speaking, is an open question. The scientific research into paedophilia is not as extensive as public concern would seem to demand. Various causes are identified and various treatments proposed including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), hormone treatment, and physical castration. Such treatments are limited because much child abuse is not caused by sexual impulses but by other motivators such as anger or a desire to control. In addition, it is the opinion of some doctors that a cure has not been found because scientists aren’t really looking. In capitalist terms, the market isn’t there. Nobody wants to cure witches, as the disabled Bristol gardener found out.

Might there be paedophiles in socialism? At present the science can’t tell us. Paedophilia is a broad spectrum condition, with biological as well as social factors in play. Whether any of these biological factors have a genetic base remains unestablished, but even if they did, genetic factors never work alone but always interact with a particular set of social conditions.

What we can say with more confidence is that those many forms of sex and child abuse based on obsessions with power would find no nourishment in socialism because the structures of oppression, dominance and impotence would no longer exist.

Be that as it may, if a problem existed socialism would have to deal with it, and the first priority would be to protect children. Studies suggest that many paedophiles have no desire to hurt children but a minority do, and there seems little room for doubt that in socialism dangerous paedophiles would, like any dangerous and out of control individual, have to be kept under restraint for the common good, though not for the purpose of punishment but in order that a successful and humane treatment could be found. For the rest, there would have to be a democratic debate about what was acceptable sexual preference and what was unacceptable medical condition. It could have implications for civil liberties, freedom of movement, sexual licence, levels of supervision of children, equality status of individuals. We can’t say today how it would proceed or how it would turn out, but it would be an informed hunt for solutions, not an inflamed hunt for witches.

Paddy Shannon

Voice From The Back: Another Example Of Exploitation (2014)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another Example Of Exploitation

Capitalism distorts everything it touches. It even distorts the English language. The use of the term ‘earned’ is a case in point. ‘Jonathan Ruffer, the philanthropic fund manager, is believed to have earned close to £12m last year after another bumper performance by his boutique investment firm. Pre-tax profits at Ruffer Management rose 6% to £115m’ (Sunday Times, 22 December). How did Ruffer ‘earn’ a million quid per month? He didn’t of course. He exploited men and women of the working class by that staggering figure. That is the basis of the capitalism system.

Economic Recovery?

A slight fall in the unemployment figures has led to politicians talking about an economic recovery, but for large parts of the British population this is a complete myth. ‘Advisers at the homeless charity Shelter are taking 500 calls a day from distraught people. … The anxiety and emotion that pours into the headsets of crisis advice workers in this crowded fifth-floor Sheffield call centre offers a snapshot of the UK’s worsening homelessness crisis. Advisers at Shelter’s helpline are processing more calls than ever. Last year there was a 15% increase in the volume of calls – a reflection, staff think, of the degree to which people are struggling with rising house prices, soaring rents, cuts to housing benefit and the long shadow of the recession’ (Guardian, 23 December). Perhaps a shift answering these desperate calls to the Shelter helpline would help politicians to get a better picture of the real situation for thousands of homeless workers.

Amassing A Fortune

At a time when millions of people are trying to survive on the equivalent of $2 a day it is worthwhile looking at the immense wealth of the super-rich. ‘Warren Buffett spent most of 2013 amassing fortunes of over £23 million a day through investments into food manufacturing giants like Heinz, which he bought earlier this year. The investor topped the Wealth-X ‘gainers’ list for 2013, having made a staggering £7.7 billion since January to bring his estimated net worth to a cool £36 billion’ (Independent, 25 December). At least the Independent did not insult its readers by claiming he ‘earned’ £23 million a day but used the term ‘amassing’.

Upper Class Arrogance

The arrogance of the owning class knows no bounds. Take the case of Yevgeny Chichvarkin the Russian reputed to have a fortune of £150m, who now lives in London and has opened a wine store in Mayfair for the super-rich called Hedonism. He currently offers a bottle of wine priced at £120,000 and has on offer a bottle of 55-year-old Glenfiddich whiskey at around £123,000. He blithely boasts of his customers. ‘It’s a present for somebody who has seen everything in this world. For some people who have been rich for a long, long time. It is quite hard to make an impression’ (Guardian, 28 December).

Mind That Gap

At a time when many workers are concerned about losing their homes nothing better illustrates the gap between them and the owning class than the housing market. ‘The Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, or ‘Billionaire’s Row’ as it is commonly known, has been named by Lloyd’s Bank as the second most expensive street in England and Wales – the average house price of £6.2 million still, incredibly, putting it below Egerton Crescent in Kensington and Chelsea, where houses sell for an average of £7.4 million’ (Times, 31 December). Not much concern here about the ‘bedroom tax’ or difficulties in meeting the mortgage payments unlike these unfortunates. ‘Rising bills and high costs are pushing many household budgets ‘to breaking point’, with one in 11 people worried they will not be able to afford their rent or mortgage this month, according to research from Shelter’ (Guardian, 3 January).

The Profit System’s Awful Cost

The development of capitalism grows at breakneck speed in China, but at a terrible human cost. ‘Between 350,000 and 500,000 Chinese die prematurely each year because of the country’s disastrous air pollution, says China’s former health minister. The equivalent of the population of Bristol dies each year in China because of lethal air pollution, according to Chen Zhu, who was the country’s Health minister until last year’ (Daily Telegraph, 7 January). In the mindless drive for bigger and bigger profits for the owning class the working class have to pay in ill health and premature death.

Political Vocabularies (2014)

From the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

  ‘How should governments react to winning the lottery? For example, the UK / Norway find oil in the North Sea. Australia finds various minerals and then also gas that they can export. Specialist skills are required to extract the resources. Should the government sit back and let industry do their stuff, whilst skimming off some tax? Should the government take control? Should the people take control?’

This is a question I received from a friend on Facebook a little while ago. It is, perhaps, an example of a political vocabulary which originates in ‘popular’ media sources. A socialist would never use such phrases as ‘Australia finds…’ or ‘Should the government take control’. Not because we agree or disagree with the associated ideas but because these phrases in themselves only serve to obscure political reality. The last part is, of course, the $64,000 question. Sometimes I believe that we socialists get isolated in our own political vocabularies – steeped as we are in the study of politics, history and economics. After several years within a socialist community a specific vocabulary develops; particularly as a response to the same questions we get asked again and again. In any political analysis we always seek to emphasise ‘class’ as a designation of social organisation because, in part, it serves to deconstruct the very words that seek to deny its existence i.e. government, nation, industry and even ‘the people’. Because of this, the use of the word ‘class’ for non-socialists, is deemed as controversial or even anachronistic! In the light of this let’s re-examine the question:

When asked how should the governments of nation states react to the discovery of natural resources within their borders there is only one answer – they will react the way all governments in capitalism must. They will seek to exploit the resource so that the maximum profits will be attained by the parasitic class that they represent. This means the employment of companies who make the best ‘bid’ for the rights to exploit. All kinds of corruptive techniques used by lobby groups will press for different sectors of the capitalist class to acquire this right from the government. Occasionally the state might take natural resources into ‘public ownership’. This is done either to prevent a monopoly which might cause high prices to other sectors of the capitalist class or because the politicians themselves wish to retain ownership and the ensuing wealth. Thus concepts of ‘Norway’ or ‘Australia’ acting in the interests of the majority of the population within those geographic locations is nonsensical.

‘Specialist skills’ are, of course, essential to extract such wealth and it is the socialist contention that it is this labour (intellectual and physical) that gives the oil (in this case) its exchange value. It is not, as many bourgeois economists would have us believe, the rarity of a commodity that gives it value but the labour needed to extract it. There are many rare entities that have no value (whether utility or exchange) at all i.e. four leaved clovers, river pearls, wisdom, rainbows, three legged dogs etc, etc. It is only the difference between the value of the labour (wages) and the products it creates that makes vast profits. Some of these profits are paid as tax which goes toward the payment for infrastructure of the state. Again it is debateable whether this acts in the interest of the majority since wages in the ‘public sector’ are notoriously low and the resources created are of the poorest quality allowed by law (to maintain low tax rates). Now let’s examine the concept of ‘the people taking control’.

Again the question of vocabulary arises. ‘The people’ could refer to all of the humans in the world, the population of a nation state or merely adults with some kind of democratic franchise. Socialists do not use this designation because, we would contend, it does not correspond to a political category. Politics, in the final analysis, is about power. This power is derived from the relationship of a group or individual with the means of production (origin of wealth). In politics we can only define people in this way – as classes. Not to do so would not constitute a political analysis (in any meaningful sense). Any objective economic study reveals that a tiny minority of the population live exclusively on dividends derived from profits while the rest of us are obliged to sell our labour to them to live. This majority or ‘working class’ needs to take control of natural resources and the means of production to rationalise and democratise society. Only when this is done can we speak of ‘the people’. It is the liberation from class society that socialism seeks to achieve. Only when we are liberated from being defined by our relationship with production can we become truly human and justify any culture’s inhabitants with the designation of ‘the people’.

It is usually instructive to analyse the type of language used in any political question before making an attempt to answer it. Experience allows the answerer to frame his response in a language most likely to be easily understood. Invariably this will initially contain a brief deconstruction of the words and concepts used to frame the question – which, in my experience, can frustrate the questioner. To him or her this can sound like prevarication since they usually have no concept of how politically loaded language is. However, this must be attempted because not to do so would mean using the same word with different definitions; rendering communication impossible. If the questioner is unwilling to indulge you in this quest to communicate my advice is to change the subject and attempt a subtle subversion of their language on another topic which, ostensibly, is unconnected with politics. Failing that, get another beer in.

Wez

50 Years Ago: The Coming Election (2014)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

It would be a very dull person indeed who did not notice a certain something in the political air; a flurry of optimistic statements from members of the government, a series of sober suggestions which are supposed to help improve the world from the opposition. The two great political parties resemble nothing so much as a couple of shopkeepers who, anxious to attract the larger share of a spending spree, are frantically decorating their windows with every tawdry piece of tinsel they can find in their lumber rooms.(…)

There is no point in our trying to predict who will win—even if that were possible. But we can confidently forecast what will follow the election, whichever party forms the next government.

The working class will continue to struggle over their wages and other working conditions; in other words there will be more strikes and similar disputes. The government will attempt to hold wages in check and to persuade the working class that any rise they may have should be only a small one, and one related to a more intensive productive effort. There will be more tension on the international field—more clashes at places like Berlin, Cyprus, Borneo. There will be more conferences on how to ease these tensions and how to disarm capitalism. None of them will come to anything.

The working class, afflicted by the usual struggle to live, will become dissatisfied with their new government and may express this dissatisfaction by defeating government candidates in by-elections and replacing them with those of another party pledged to carry on the capitalist social system. This dissatisfaction is an inevitable part of capitalism because the problems which give rise to unrest are also part of the private property system.

The only solution to this calamitous muddle is the establishment of Socialism. It is simply not possible for any leader to make glamorous promises about that because the key to Socialism is the knowledge of the people who will set it up. In the election campaigns of the capitalist parties, knowledge is an alien word. How many people, among the mass who are hypnotised by the tinsel, will stand out by knowing and understanding and voting for Socialism?

(Socialist Standard, February 1964)

For better for worse . . . (2014)

The Halo Halo! column from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the functions of government is to ensure the existence of an adequate supply of the next generation of workers; suitably trained to know their place, and with no aspirations for anything more fulfilling in life than a place on the capitalist machine’s profit production line.

And if a state mis-education alone is not enough to guarantee young workers a job stacking shelves in the local pound shop, politicians assume that regular religious interference in their lives to further confuse and demoralise them will help.

It’s no surprise then that the state takes an interest in the institution of marriage and legislates on where parents of the next generation of workers can get hitched. Register Office weddings are no problem, nor are the mainstream church weddings or those carried out in synagogues or mosques. Some of the premises of the lesser known, and the more bizarre gods however, just don’t come up to scratch, however luxurious or opulent they are.

It shouldn’t really matter these days which god workers are indoctrinated in, you might think. One non-existent god is as good as another, but no, it’s not that simple. The next generation of workers need to be born to parents who, if believers, are only married in the premises of a properly government approved god. At least, this has been the position until now.

In December, however, there was a court case where for some unknown reason a couple decided they wanted to get married in the Church of Scientology. Unfortunately there was a 1970 High Court ruling in the way which said that Scientology services were not ‘acts of worship’.

However after duly reflecting on the nature of the gods and their need to be suitably worshipped, the Supreme Court Justices decided that the 1970 ruling was out of date. It was not the job of the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and Deaths to venture into ‘fine theological or liturgical niceties’ they said. Which is fine as far as it goes. Less state interference in our lives is always welcome.

But, unleashing a can of theological worms they added, ‘Religion should not be confined to religions which recognise a supreme deity’. What’s that? Jesus Christ! The God bothering business is overloaded with self-proclaimed prophets and Holy Joes jumping on the Jesus bandwagon already. Are L Ron Hubbard and his ilk going to be allowed to officially join this con-man’s circus as well?

There may be more to this story than meets the eye. Religious establishments are exempted from paying business rates. Is it possible that this is why the ‘Church’ of Scientology, with its vast property holdings is so keen to conduct marriages? Local Government minister Brandon Lewis said he was ‘very concerned’ about the ruling and its implications for business rates. We bet he was.

Signs that religious mumbo-jumbo is becoming a free for all are appearing in the USA as well. Following the installation of a monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments at the Oklahoma state Capitol, a Satanic group have submitted an application to erect a seven foot tall statue of Satan on a throne complete with horns, wings and a beard. ‘The statue will have a functional purpose as a chair where people of all ages may sit on the lap of Satan for inspiration and contemplation’ they said.

Requests to install a monument have also been made by the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This won’t end well, will it?

NW