Thought and Contradiction (2026)

Book Review from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mao: Power and Contradiction. By Kerry Brown. Reaktion Books £20.

This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong, and for over a quarter of a century before then he had been the ruler of China. Here Kerry Brown presents an account of his life, with a great deal of background information on developments in China, including since his death.

Born in 1893, Mao was one of fifteen people who attended the founding meeting of the Chinese ‘Communist’ Party (CCP) in 1921. This was a time when few of Marx’s writings were available in Chinese. The CCP’s first manifesto stated that one of its aims was to eradicate the capitalist system, even though the vast majority of China’s inhabitants were peasants, and capitalism was just getting off the ground. Mao argued that the peasantry would play a crucial role in bringing the CCP to power, though he also accepted the Leninist idea of a centralist, vanguard party. He had very little understanding of capitalism, and sometimes saw class as something that was inherited.

Mao gradually rose to the top of the CCP during its and the Red Army’s fight against the Nationalists, but his life at this time was not easy. In 1927 he narrowly avoided being executed by the Nationalists, and in 1930 his second wife Yang Kaihui was tortured and executed by the provincial government. On the Long March of 1934–5 his two children by his third wife were given up soon after birth to local families, but could not be traced later.

The CCP took power in 1949, after driving out the Nationalists. Brown points out that Chinese society at that time was in a dire condition, after two decades of civil war and Japanese occupation. Average life expectancy was just 35, and the country was worse off economically than it had been in 1820. Land reform and the expansion of state-owned enterprises led over time to much-improved living conditions, but movements such as the Great Leap Forward were the cause of maybe as many as fifty million deaths, by famine and persecution (it is not clear how much Mao knew about the consequences of his policies, or how hard he tried to find out). The Cultural Revolution from 1966 was a power struggle within the ruling class, with Mao turning on anyone he saw as an enemy.

Since Mao’s death China has become the world’s second largest economy, rivalling the US, and a major manufacturing base, also now a hub of technological development. There has been nothing in China like de-Stalinisation in Russia, and Mao is officially viewed in China as a great man who made mistakes. The term Mao Zedong Thought is used, rather than Maoism, and Brown seems to see his ideas as some odd mix of Marxism and Daoism, though this may mean little more than a supposed emphasis on contradiction. There is no recognition here that Mao’s views had little to do with those of Marx, and that he contributed to the spread of capitalism in China: not abolishing the wages system but forcing it on far more of the country’s population.

Paul Bennett

Trespass and Roaming (2026)

Book Review from the February 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Contested Commons: a History of Protest and Public Space in England. By Katrina Navickas. Reaktion Books £20.

In 1908 the Socialist Party asked Manchester Corporation for permission to hold a weekly meeting in Alexandra Park in the south of the city. The response was that only two meetings could be booked at a time.

This is an example of the situation concerning the use of various kinds of public spaces, which is surveyed here. There is a brief mention of Alexandra Park, and several references to the Social-Democratic Federation (SDF), the organisation from which the founders of the SPGB split. It is stated that an ex-anarchist became a member of ‘the Socialist Party’, but this should be the British Socialist Party, a later name of the SDF.

Besides parks, other forms of public space are dealt with, including pavements, squares, grass verges, footpaths and different kinds of ‘common’. Common lands are not really owned by ‘the people’, and their boundaries frequently change. There is no general right of assembly or right to roam in England, and it took the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass of 1932 for many customary ‘rights of way’ to be legally recognised as such. Regulating the commons was a form of enclosure, and this was not just a matter of the many parliamentary acts enforcing enclosure but ‘an ongoing process of accumulation of property through dispossession’. The 1899 Commons Act empowered local authorities to regulate the commons so as to stop ‘nuisances’, which could include marginalised communities such as Roma, and also workers holding demonstrations or just enjoying the open air.

Some Liberal politicians saw open spaces as a way to reduce the supposed threat from urban workers to the social order, but on the whole the elite wanted to limit workers’ access. It was also a matter of the ‘four Gs’: gathering grounds (space for reservoirs, canals and so on), grouse moors, golf courses and guns (military training areas). In all these cases, ‘waste’ land was requisitioned for ruling class purposes by excluding the public. Thus the ‘upland landscapes of northern England were transformed during the nineteenth century’.

As suggested above, parks were important places for political propaganda, with the SDF and SPGB among many organisations that held regular meetings there. Yet even Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park was not a true commons but part of the Crown Estate and so subject to definite rules. Trafalgar Square was from its construction a major site of protest, but the violent police response on Bloody Sunday in 1887 showed how the establishment could constrain political activity there if it wished. In the 1930s the police brutally put down demonstrations by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, but did not intervene so much in fascist rallies.

In more recent years, press and television coverage have sometimes exposed police responses to demos, and CCTV has been used to monitor events. A new Public Order Act was passed in 1986, and trespass in public spaces became known as ‘aggravated trespass’. There was some opening up of the right to public spaces, such as the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000, but since then much legislation has restricted the freedom to protest. Navickas’ book provides a comprehensive account of public space in England, plus attempts to expand and to restrict it.

Paul Bennett

Paid to Kill (2024)

Book Review from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wagner Group: Inside Russia’s Mercenary Army. By Jack Margolin. Reaktion Books £15.99.

Mercenaries have existed through much of history, at least since Ancient Greek times. A well-known recent example was the US firm Blackwater, which has since undergone a number of name changes after some of its employees killed seventeen Iraqi civilians in 2007 (the killers were imprisoned, but later pardoned by Trump). The term ‘private military contractor’ is sometimes used as supposedly sounding less nasty. Here Jack Margolin recounts the history of the Wagner organisation; his work is diligently researched, though quite a lot remains unclear.

The boss of Wagner was Evgeniy Prigozhin, a thug who had spent nine years in prison for theft but later became a business-owner. After the collapse of the USSR, private military companies began to flourish, often doing the dirty work that state security services preferred to steer clear of. Wagner seems to have originated in eastern Ukraine in 2014, as pro-Russia separatists endeavoured to set up regimes not linked to Kyiv, and it may even have been created by the Russian state.

In 2015-6 Wagner soldiers fought in Syria, defending the Assad government on behalf of Russia but also making a profit from Syrian oil. Many front companies were put in place then and later, and an agreement was signed with the Syrian regime that entitled Wagner to up to a quarter of the revenue from oil extracted at sites they had ‘liberated’. Attention was then turned to Africa, fighting and making profits in Sudan and then the Central African Republic with its sizeable mineral resources. Wagner established a regional hub in Libya and in 2022 its fighters were responsible for a massacre at Moura in Mali, where at least five hundred people were killed and women and girls were raped. It is not possible to put a figure on Wagner’s income from government payments (including the Russian state) and its profiting from resource exploitation.

Wagner probably became most notorious for its part in the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2022, though it took a few weeks for it to play any role. It was allowed to recruit from prisons, promising amnesty to those who ‘volunteered’. They had perhaps five thousand fighting in Ukraine, most of them convicts, which helped the Putin regime to avoid introducing conscription. Deserters were killed, often with a sledgehammer, which became a kind of symbol of Wagner.

But as the invasion wore on, Wagner and Prigozhin began to distrust Russia’s military leadership, a feeling that was mutual. In June 2023 it was decreed that private military companies would have to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence. This would put Wagner and others in a subordinate role, Prigozhin refused to accept it, and a mutiny or putsch took place. A convoy of Wagner vehicles and fighters occupied the city of Rostov, in the hope that Russian army soldiers would join them. A march towards Moscow started, but this was abandoned after an intervention from Aleksandr Lukashenko, president of Belarus (though it is not clear precisely what happened). Wagner forces were evicted from Russia and moved to Belarus. Then in August a plane carrying Prigozhin and other Wagner leaders crashed north of Moscow, killing all those on board. According to Margolin, it is pretty likely, though not absolutely certain, that it was Putin who ordered Prigozhin’s assassination, just as other rivals and critical journalists have been killed.

Margolin suggests that embattled governments may well continue to make use of private military forces, as will rebels too, with the state not having an absolute monopoly on violence. But whoever does the fighting, it will be in the interest of rulers or would-be rulers of one kind and another, and it will be ordinary people who will suffer and be killed.

Paul Bennett

Endgame? (2024)

Book Review from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Endgame. Economic Nationalism and Global Decline. By Jamie Merchant. Reaktion Books. 2004.

Is globalisation coming to an end and capitalism returning to a period like that between the two world wars of the last century when economic nationalism and beggar-thy-neighbour policies were the norm? Merchant makes out a case for this, starting from basically Marxian premises.

He describes how, from the point of view of actual production, the world is one system involving workers everywhere:

‘Pick a typical product of contemporary globalization — say a laptop computer. The laptop is sold for money by the company that owns it only as the end result of a transnational sequence of extraction, processing, manufacturing, assembly, transportation, and distribution, involving thousands of laborers doing different kinds of work for a range of contractors across dozens of countries’ (pp. 125-6).

In the course of such ‘planetary assemblages’ the world working class, as a class, produce a pool of surplus value from which firms and states compete to draw a share as profits. The profits of capitalist firms do not depend on how much surplus value its workers might be said to produce; in fact some firms, as those in the inflated financial sector, don’t produce any but are very successful in capturing some. The profits a firm makes depends on how well it is organised to draw profits from the world pool of surplus. In this, firms are helped by states.

‘National competition,’ Merchant writes, ‘is competition over the global surplus product. Monetary policies, tax laws, corporate subsidies and trade agreements are some of the measures states take to assist their national corporations in raising profitability, that is, in capturing more of this global surplus’ (p. 98).

He defines ‘globalisation’ as the period when global production, and so the pool of global surplus value, was expanding. The governments of the leading capitalist states favoured the liberalisation of world trade by abolishing or lowering tariff barriers as they believed that this would lead to world trade expanding even more.

Merchant’s basic thesis is that this period is coming to an end because the continuing mechanisation imposed by competition has led to a fall in the rate of profit, resulting in ‘the global pool of surplus value available for redistribution as profits shrink[ing] relative to total capital invested worldwide’ (pp. 153-4).

Competition to capture profits has become more intense — more of a zero-sum game — and states are being compelled to intervene more actively to try to steer profits to enterprises within their boundaries. ‘Global productivity growth’, he writes, ‘appears to be over for the foreseeable future. The result is likely to be a kind of stasis state in which national governments must take ever more extreme measures to compensate for the paralysis of private capitalism’ (p.134). Hence the rise of economic nationalism and of parties advocating ‘national sovereignty’.

Slow productivity growth and slower expansion of world production are plausible explanations for the observable move away from globalisation, as so-called ‘neo-liberalism’ on a world scale, and towards economic nationalism (from governments subsidising selected enterprises as supposed engines of growth to the rise of nationalist and nativist political parties). Whether this is the endgame for capitalism is another matter.

In the final chapter Merchant seems to envisage capitalism being overthrown and the wages system abolished by spontaneous mass rioting. That’s another matter too.

Adam Buick

Mail Bomb (2024)

Book Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Murder by Mail: A Global History of the Letter Bomb. By Mitchel P. Roth and Mahmut Cengiz. Reaktion Books. 2024.

It’s not often we get to review true crime in the pages of the Socialist Standard. However, this book isn’t your industry-standard sensationalist pulp about Charles Manson or Jeffrey Dahmer. Instead, it’s a well-researched, exhaustive compendium of the history of the mail bomb, or ‘Infernal Machine’ as the authors point out was its original nom de guerre. This device has been used not only by political zealots, religious extremists, and anarchist assassins but also by hot-tempered lovers, family feuders, and jealous friends.

The history of the mail bomb is as rich as you would expect from such a unique device. But beyond the contraption itself, what really makes a mail bomber tick? Unfortunately, the scope of this subject is so wide and the history so varied that the authors don’t have much room for the psychology behind the minds behind the bombs. However, each case does receive a few lines about the individuals (or groups or governments) involved, the situations they were in, and the goals they aimed to achieve. We learn that ‘while the IRA is often credited with introducing terror to the British Isles, the first terrorist bomb to explode in Ireland in the 20th century was planted by suffragettes’.

The cases span from the American bomber who wanted to plot out a giant smiley face across the map of North America in recent history to the anarchist Mayday mail bombing campaign at the beginning of the 20th century, which aimed to assassinate J.P. Morgan and almost 20 other enemies of the working class, including the Minister of Labor, in one postal sweep.

What can we as a party take away from all this? We already know why we reject violence as a means and support democratic revolution. But let’s separate out the mail bomb as a firearm and cast a scientific eye over it. This is a suitable analogy as the earliest documented infernal device was a gun rigged up inside a hat box.

Theodore Kaczynski, aka the Unabomber, is a case in point. From the outside, ‘Uncle Ted’ appeared to be a genius frustrated with the ‘techno-industrial’ system, blaming not just capitalism but anything in human development after agriculture. His manifesto mainly critiqued left-wing parties and used (specious) logic to justify his personal campaign of violence and murder.

However, once you dig past the internet memes and media characterizations, Ted is just another mentally ill man with a grudge and zero social intelligence. If Ted were to start his campaign today, he would have more in common with alt-right Incels than anyone on the left.

Early signs of his mental illness expressed themselves in joke bombs of firecrackers mailed to love interests, and he was fired by his own brother for writing hundreds of harassing notes (poetry and jokes) to a former lover who had spurned him after their first date. Other red flags included breaking into his neighbour’s house and defecating on the floor and other antisocial behaviour a good ten years before he mailed his first infernal devices.

Although the authors don’t delve much into the psychology of the political groups conducting bombings, those we do learn about, and those not motivated by politics, share a common thread. The most disenfranchised, desperate, and mentally ill people resort to mail bombs. Despite all their work and planning, they needn’t bother, as 80 percent of devices don’t even ignite or trigger the main explosive. As the authors point out, you are ‘more likely to get hit by lightning than die by a letter bomb’. Ted himself struggled for around ten years before he was satisfied with the level of violence his bombs were causing. In fact, he kept detailed diaries where he showed no regret in targetting students, shopkeepers, or receptionists but was only upset that his bombs were failing to kill anyone.

The majority of letter bombs won’t reach their target but instead kill postal workers or secretaries, with very few making it beyond the sorting office. So, aside from the discussion of violence as a tactic, the infernal machine is objectively not a very effective way of killing people. In the 1980s and 90s, there seemed to be a shift to postal explosives deliberately made not to kill but designed as a scare tactic. However, this too has become redundant as the media no longer picks up stories about such campaigns because the use of improvised devices has become so common in the United States that their impact is no longer of interest.

These arguments are redundant for us socialists as we oppose terrorist tactics. However, much like the many types of men (they are mostly men) documented in this book, the world’s poorest are being stretched to their limits. This book serves as a handy device to show that this path has been trodden and the means didn’t justify the ends. A compelling read, well-researched, and, despite the grim subject, humorous in places.

A. T.

Propaganda of the deed (2024)

Book Review from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Devilish Kind of Courage. By Andrew Whitehead. Reaktion Books. 320 pages.

Andrew Whitehead recounts here the events and background to the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ in the East End of London in January 1911 in which two Latvian revolutionaries, wanted for the killing of three policeman in a botched attempt to rob a jewellery shop the previous month, were cornered. After a shoot-out the two were burned to death when the house they were holed up in caught (or was set on) fire and no attempt to extinguish it made. The supposed ringleader, dubbed ‘Peter the Painter’ by the police, became a legend but was never found.

It was a sensation at the time and led to an (unsuccessful) campaign to stop the immigration of ‘aliens’ from Tsarist Russia. This was often openly anti-semitic, even though those involved were Latvians. The Russian revolution of 1905, after an initial success in extracting concessions from the Tsarist regime, was brutally suppressed. Some of the revolutionaries turned to bank robberies to obtain money to finance revolutionary organisation and activity (and survive). Exiled to Western Europe some continued this, including those involved in the attempt to rob a jewellery shop in December 1910 and a wages robbery in Tottenham in January 1909. They were described as ‘anarchists’ and were certainly acquainted with anarchist ideas. The three most well-known anarchists living in Britain at the time — Kropotkin, Malatesta and Rocker — repudiated their tactics. However, ‘propaganda of the deed’ was advocated and practised, in the form of assassinations and robberies, by other anarchists at the time.

Whitehead examines the milieu in which exiles and immigrants from Tsarist Russia in the East End of London moved, mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews but also others including Latvians from the Baltic region. He also identifies who Peter the Painter most likely was. His well-researched and detailed book looks like being the definitive study of what the Socialist Standard of the time described as ‘the recent world-stirring East End melodrama’ (as well giving a socialist analysis of it and its repercussions).

Adam Buick

Polls apart? (2022)

Book Review from the December 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Polling Unpacked. By Mark Pack. Reaktion Books. 2022.

This is written by the founder of PollBase and traces the history of opinion polls from various ‘straw polls’ in the nineteenth century that were conducted to test public opinion, to the development of what we now know as modern opinion polling. This was pioneered by the US Literary Digest in the early twentieth century, before the game-changing entrance of George Gallup into the sphere, who recognized that the total number of people polled was far less important than how representative these people were.

Opinion polls – as developed over recent decades – have a somewhat mixed reputation, though tend to be more accurate than people often think, at least when the margin for error (typically +/- 3 percent) is taken into account. And of course, sometimes voting systems – especially First Past The Post (FPTP) – throw up vagaries of their own. Trump won the US presidency in 2016 even though he lost the popular vote by a very similar margin to that predicted by the polls, as in 1951 and February 1974 the party with the most votes in the UK did not get the most seats and form the government, which means that even when voting intention polls are broadly right they can sometimes appear ‘wrong’.

But some polling does genuinely go awry, including when Cameron secured a narrow overall Tory majority in 2015 when the polls had predicted a dead heat with Labour and then with the underestimation of the Labour vote in 2017. There are a number of reasons for polling errors and they can be complex, including the wording of key questions, which can provide startlingly differing results based on the smallest nuances (polling on single issues rather than overall voting intention is notoriously problematic for this reason alone). Arguably the most common voting intention issue, however, is the difficulty of getting accurate, weighted national samples when the demographics of society are changing fast. There are also significant allied issues like some types of voters becoming more inclined to turn out (or not) than others, some being disproportionately reluctant to give their real voting intention to pollsters saying ‘don’t know’ or ‘won’t say’ instead, differential willingness among particular party supporters to even participate in polls in the first place, and people being sampled in polls who are not actually on the electoral register for various reasons. Significant polling errors are usually caused not by one factor like this, but by more than one of them working in concert to skew the result.

A new type of polling has recently arisen to address some of these issues for FPTP elections called Multi-level Regression with Poststratification (MRP). This aims to generate constituency-by-constituency predictions from a national poll sample that normally wouldn’t be considered large enough for these purposes. It is based on demographic information in particular seats being used as the basis for projecting a result informed by what the national sample has been indicating about certain types of voters and their probability of voting in particular ways (eg, white men over 65, having say, a 55 percent probability of voting Conservative). Its track record so far – both in 2017 and 2019 in the UK – has been pretty good, including YouGov’s detailed MRP prediction of parts of the Red Wall going Blue, but it is early days.

Pack is clearly an expert and does a good job at unpacking all this (pun intended). How useful polls are is another issue of course, and Pack looks at this too. Echo chambers can have a particular but limited use and many argue that polling is given far too much prominence. There can also be a commercial aspect and a distorting element to polling, especially in the United States where skewed ‘paid for’ polling by political parties and groups is more common. In some countries, polling is banned completely during election campaigns lest it be deemed to influence the result.

Will opinion polling have a use of sorts in socialism? Possibly, though direct democracy and decision-making is likely to feature much more heavily and so the need for polls may well lessen. And hopefully, to paraphrase the late Tony Benn, we will be busy creating signposts rather than following proverbial weather vanes.

Dave Perrin

Why are prices always rising? (2023)

Book Review from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

In The Return of Inflation (just published by Reaktion Books) Paul Mattick (the son, not the father) gives a potted history (there are only 146 pages of text) of inflation. The word dates from the middle of the 19th century. He cites an American book of 1855 complaining that an ‘inflation of the currency makes prices rise’ and comments ‘here it is the quantity of paper currency that is inflated; later the term settled into its present-day meaning of an increase in prices’. True, but the word still retained its first meaning for a further eighty or so years. The change of meaning from describing a cause to describing its effect doesn’t help, especially as a rise in the general price level can result from other reasons such as supply not being able to keep up with demand in a boom or a fall in the value of the money-commodity (when there was one).

He provides a useful section in which he explains how ‘inflation’ (as it has come to be defined) is measured by a rise in a consumer price index based on the prices of a changing basket of goods and services that consumers typically buy and discusses the limitations of this. In fact, today ‘inflation’ means a rise in some index of consumer prices, but this can come about for other reasons than an over-issue of the currency; from an increase in the price of something that enters into the cost of production of all consumer goods, energy for instance.

At the end of chapter 4, after explaining that, due to increasing productivity, you would expect prices to fall and noting that in the 19th century this did tend to happen and that even in the 1920s and 1930s prices fell during the slump stage of the business cycle, Mattick poses the question of why this has not happened since WW2. On the contrary, the general price level has continuously increased. In Britain prices today are more than 50 times higher than what they were in 1939 and are still rising. It is similar in other countries. Certainly something that needs explaining.

The Quantity Theory of Money

This monetary theory, referred to by Mattick simply as the Quantity Theory, keeps cropping up throughout the book. It says that the general price level is determined by the amount of money in circulation, so that if the amount of money is increased this will lead to a rise in prices. It was originally put forward when ‘money’ meant gold (or silver) and paper notes convertible into it at a fixed rate. Its proponents, known in Britain as the Currency School, based their case on what had happened there when, during the Napoleonic Wars, paper notes were not convertible into gold, and so many of them were issued that prices rose.

They argued that the same thing would happen when convertibility was restored, and framed legislation to restrict the amount of bank notes that could be issued without being backed by gold. They were opposed by the Banking School, whose main proponent, Thomas Tooke, produced evidence, as Mattick notes, that showed that this had not happened after convertibility was restored and could not have happened; if too many notes were issued (if their number was inflated) what would happen would be that gold coins would drop out of circulation and be turned into bullion (demonetised into gold bars) leaving the price level unchanged. In other words, it was the amount of prices to be realised that determined the quantity of money (gold and paper notes together) in circulation, the exact opposite of what the Quantity Theory posited. Marx, Mattick adds, accepted Tooke’s findings and rejected the Quantity Theory. He regarded banking legislation based on it as mistaken, such as the 1844 Bank Act which gave a monopoly in the issue of bank notes to the Bank of England and restricted the amount it could issue to not much more than the amount of gold it had in its vaults.

Inconvertible paper money

By the end of the 1930s in most countries gold coins had ceased to circulate and the currency was composed entirely of bank notes issued by a central bank together with lesser denomination token coins. This situation, where the currency was just inconvertible paper notes, was discussed by Marx who accepted that in this circumstance the Quantity Theory could apply: if more such notes were issued than the prices to be realised of goods and services in the economy required, the result would be a depreciation of the underlying value of the notes and a consequent rise in the general price level, i.e £1 would buy less than it did. Mattick mentions this but only in passing, even though it must clearly be of some relevance in any explanation of the continuous rise in the general price level since 1939.

An inconvertible paper currency in itself does not have to lead to a rise in the general price level but does place the onus of getting right the amount to issue on those responsible for issuing the notes. If they get it broadly right there won’t be a persistent rise in prices. But the temptation is always there to use their position to issue money to fund government spending, or to passively make it available to commercial banks in a way that still leads to an excess issue.

Keynesianism fails

Another change in usage that has occurred since the 19th century, but which Mattick does not mention, is a change in the meaning of ‘money’. Since the 1930s it has commonly been extended to include commercial bank loans.

Keynes went along with this and taught that controlling the amount of the currency (which only the state can do) was relatively unimportant and that the monetary authority could safely make available what was needed including by the government. He argued that the way out of a slump was government intervention to encourage spending, as by transferring money from the rich to the rest and by the government itself spending on infrastructure projects (or even digging holes in the ground and filling them up again). This appeared to work for nearly three decades after WW2 in the sense that no big slump occurred even if a rise in the general price level did. However, put to the test when the post-war boom came to an end in the mid 70s, Keynesianism led to ‘stagflation’; prices continued to rise despite slump conditions whereas before the war they would have fallen due to declines in production and trade.

As in his previous writings Mattick is good on why Keynesianism was mistaken:

‘From the Keynesian point of view, government spending is just an expansion of demand, or an additional investment in future production (…) Once we remember that the goal of capitalist production is the earning of a return on investment, however, things look different (…) Capital is not produced but consumed by governments; state spending does not solve the problem of insufficient profitability. It is an expense of the capitalist economy’ (p.110).

Monetarism too

Following the failure of Keynesianism in the 1970s, the monetary authorities heeded instead the theories of ‘Monetarism’ as propounded by Milton Friedman. This was an attempt to revive the Quantity Theory of Money but since in the meantime the definition of ‘money’ had typically expanded to include bank loans it was, rather, more a Quantity Theory of Bank Loans: that bank loans play a key role in determining the price level. (Already in the 1920s this had been dubbed the ‘Bank Deposit Theory of Prices’ by the Classical economist Edwin Cannan). This was clearly a different theory to the classical formulation but its application in the 1980s arguably did bring the rate of rising prices down even if inflation continued, though it certainly didn’t end the slump; in fact unemployment rose to record post-war levels. As Mattick notes, ‘the money supply turned out to be difficult to control, swelling and shrinking in response to the needs of businessmen and bankers’ (p.67).

The objections to the original Quantity Theory of convertible paper currency were seen to apply to Friedman’s quantity theory of bank loans. Bank lending depends on the state of the economy. It goes up in a boom and down in a slump. Neither the state of the economy nor the level of prices is intrinsically controlled by the level of bank lending. It’s effectively the other way around. Governments have tried and are still trying to control bank lending by varying short-term rates of interest (the government can’t control long-term rates); after the crash of 2008 keeping them low in an unsuccessful bid to encourage expansion and, currently, increasing them in the hope that this will reduce the rate at which prices are rising,

Inflation or recession

Mattick’s explanation of the continuous rise in the general price level since 1940 is that ‘inflation ha taken the place of recession’ (p. 123), that ‘all this extra money has provided an alternative to the deflationary depressions of the past’ (p. 120). He is not the only student of Marxian economics to take this position. His argument is that in a slump the price level would normally fall because of reduced overall demand for goods and services (as it did up to the end of the 1930s) but that governments’ monetary policy has prevented this, in his view initially to avoid a workers’ revolt and, later, to keep them happy with jobs, pensions and other payments.

He says the extra cost of providing education, health services, unemployment and sick pay — all needed to maintain a trained and fit profit-producing workforce— will have had something do with the continuous post-war rising prices because governments chose to partly finance this by issuing more money. This is sometimes called ‘printing’ more money but the process is not so simple as that, as Mattick explains in regard to what happens in the US (it’s essentially the same in other countries):

‘The Federal Reserve puts money into the economic system when it purchases treasury bonds (and other securities) in what is called “open market” operations (it withdraws money from the system by selling Treasuries). It pays for them with Federal Reserve notes — “liabilities” in accounting talk, IOUs against Federal securities which can always be sold. It is these notes — government debt — that circulate throughout the economy’ (p. 66).

Central bank notes are a part of the government’s debt but only a very small part of it. Although the initiative to create new money comes from the central bank the whole banking system is involved. This gives rise to the illusion that it is the commercial banks that create new money whereas in fact they are only circulating what the central bank created. Unfortunately, Mattick seems to accept that commercial banks can create new money. He writes, for instance, of what a bank can do when an amount of money is deposited with it:

‘The money can be loaned as a note — another form of IOU — or in the form of a new deposit, in the borrower’s name, in the loaning bank; thus the original money lent to the bank can appear in two or more different deposits, each of which can be used to make payments by banknote. In this way … banks can enlarge the supply of money’ (pp.22-3).

But this can’t be. If $1,000 is deposited in a bank, the bank can lend most of this, say $900, in the form of a bank account which the borrower can draw on. There will be now be two bank deposits, one of $1,000 and the other of $900, totalling $1,900, but one is an asset (the initial deposit) and the other a liability (a loan to the borrower). It should be clear that no more than the initial amount of $1,000 can be spent. If together the amount withdrawn by both deposit holders comes to more than this, the bank wouldn’t be able to honour the excess. Banking is in fact based on the fact that the initial depositor is not going to withdraw more than $100. What banks do is increase spending by lending already existing money that might otherwise lie idle – in essence, commercial banks circulate money but don’t invent it out of nothing.

Despite this error, Mattick provides a good description of how capitalism works:

‘The goal of production in this mode of social organization is not actually “growth” — the enlarged production of consumable goods — but enterprises’ competitive accumulation of control over social resources in the form of money: capital accumulation’ (p.145).

He points out that taxation is not ultimately a burden on the workforce:

‘Wages are also taxed, but if we think of wages as the amount of national income that the class of wage-earners accept in return for their work, it is clear that the amount taken as tax could just as well have been retained by their employers’ (pp 89-90).

Mattick is neither a professional nor an academic economist; which is probably why his book is written in simple English and easy to follow, though the last chapter in which he argues that capitalism has become ‘a sort of Ponzi scheme’ differs in this respect from the rest. All in all, though, with some minor caveats it can be recommended for those seeking to learn more about ‘inflation’.

Adam Buick

Inside the System (2023)

Book Review from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

States of Incarceration: Rebellion, Reform, and America’s Punishment System. Jarrod Shanahan and Zhandarka Kurti. Reaktion Books, £15.95.

The US is characterised here as a carceral state (where ‘carceral’ is connected to words such as ‘incarcerate’ and means ‘related to prison’). More specifically, it is ‘a particular form of capitalist social order managed by a state which prioritizes punishment and repressive social control to safeguard and reproduce itself.’ The US prison system is the largest on the planet, mass incarceration having increased massively since the 1970s (as it has in other countries too). This is not a response to any increase in crime rates, and it is mostly aimed at young black men. It is not just a matter of imprisonment but also covers probation, house arrest, mandatory drug treatment and so on.

Of the many killings by police officers in the US, the best known is the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. This and other deaths led to what the authors refer to as the George Floyd Rebellion, which involved attacking and burning police stations and police cars. It was, they say, not just an attack on the carceral state but ‘the proactive rejection of an entire way of life’, as the carceral state ‘is inextricable from the capitalist division of labor’. The Rebellion died out, partly because of violent state response, but also, it is suggested here, because it became co-opted into ‘the framework of liberal democratic participation’ (though the claims on this point are not very clear).

There have been various attempts to reform the US criminal ‘justice’ system, though many of these just involve making mass incarceration cheaper. In addition there have been moves that the authors regard as more revolutionary, such as defunding or abolishing the police. One activist is quoted as saying, ‘You’re not going to be able to end policing without ending capitalism’, while another argues that defunding campaigns point towards a post-capitalist society, and another refers to the abolition of class society. Sadly, such remarks do not give rise to fuller discussion.

The book’s conclusion points to the alleged advantages of combining abolitionism’s critique of the carceral state with the militant tactics of the George Floyd Rebellion. But it is not clear how setting fire to police stations makes any kind of contribution to the establishment of a democratic world based on co-operation. This volume gives an informative and depressing account of the vicious punishment system in the US but, apart from a few passing references, says little about how to put an end to it.

Paul Bennett

Why do people believe strange things? (2022)

Book Review from the October 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hope and Fear. Modern Myths, Conspiracy Theories and Pseudo-History. By Ronald H. Fritze. Reaktion Books. 2022. 271pp.

It is an idea frequently expressed that people need myth to make sense of their own lives and the world around them. Otherwise why would we have worship of non-existent gods, devotion to human leaders sometimes considered divine themselves, or the idea that one’s accidental country of birth somehow makes that place superior to others? In Hope and Fear Ronald Fritze investigates such myths, such ‘invented knowledge’, as he calls it, and does so in a way that manages to be both massively scholarly in its detailed and comprehensive analysis of the phenomena in question, exhilarating, and indeed often entertaining in the reflections and observations it throws off.

On the one hand, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, the author asks questions like: ‘Is a secret and corrupt Illuminati conspiring to control world affairs and bring about a New World Order? Was Donald Trump a victim of massive voter fraud? Is Queen Elizabeth II a shape-shifting reptilian alien? Who is doing all this plotting?’ On the other hand, the depth of his knowledge and serious analysis of fringe ideas and conspiracies throughout history is little short of breathtaking in its detail and profundity. His study ranges from enduring earlier myths such as the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, the Knights Templar and the ‘Red Jews’ to later myths of race and nation such as the rise of ‘national sovereignty’ as ‘a source of pride and comfort’ for citizens of newly established states and the continuing belief among some in the anti-Semitic and entirely discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In the 20th century, he examines, among much else, the Nazis’ pseudo-science of Aryanism, and persistent fascination with the so-called alien landings at Roswell in New Mexico. And over most recent times he considers theories of 9/11 as an ‘inside job’, Obama’s supposed ‘foreign’ birth, the contortions of QAnon, ‘Covid hoax’ notions and Alex Jones’s outrageous fictions. He concludes that when such ‘junk knowledge’ spreads, ‘facts, reality and truth fall by the wayside’ and what people come to believe ‘bears little or no resemblance to scientific or historical reality’. So, for example, belief in anti-Trump voter fraud, though conclusively and incontrovertibly debunked, continues to survive against all the evidence via a process the author calls ‘belief perseverance’ which persists even in the face of solid contradictory information and facts.

What to make of all this? Clearly belief in myth, conspiracies and pseudo-history has a long record in human affairs and seems to occur especially at times of tumult and social upheaval, perhaps an expression of despair by people who feel impotent to influence events or their own lives. People engage in ‘confirmation bias’. They cherry-pick the evidence to support their beliefs in wonder, domination conspiracies or the supernatural, or they simply engage in wishful thinking, and fevered imagination takes precedence over any rational thought leading in some cases to what the author, in his chapter on the rise and ideology of Nazism, calls ‘a road to perdition’.

It is true, as history has shown and this book ably illustrates, that this can lead to whole societies going down such roads. And this may seem depressing. But perhaps a gleam of light is to be found in the fact that, in the most socially and economically advanced parts of the world, the kind of myths, conspiracy theories and pseudo-history portrayed here are rarely shared by whole populations as often as they were in the past. What happens now rather is that they tend to exist among a certain segment of the population, usually a particularly downtrodden one, who find their own existences particularly confusing, stressful and alienating and so seek consolation in conspiracy theories often coupled with retrograde political beliefs, which, as the author points out, tend to have an affinity for each other. So maybe we should see just a little progress here in terms of social development providing at least the ground for progress of the wholly different, non-conflictual and cooperative way of organising human affairs that socialists advocate and look forward to.

Howard Moss

They Caused It (2021)

Book Review from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

I Know Who Caused COVID-19’: Pandemics and Xenophobia. By Zhou Xun and Sander L. Gilman (Reaktion Books £16.)

Many pandemics have been blamed on minority groups. Jews, for instance, were widely held responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century. Here Zhou and Gilman look at a number of examples of ‘outgroups’ (or just ‘them’) being blamed for Covid or its spread, with xenophobia a common response to public health problems.

China was the source of the coronavirus, and recent responses have been similar to nineteenth-century views of Chinese immigrants bringing plague and other diseases to North America from the ‘sick man of Asia’. The source appears to have been a market in Wuhan, a mega-city where many rural migrants have congregated, where the health system has struggled to keep up, and which is located in an area where previous diseases have been transmitted from animals to humans. The Chinese government’s reaction has included attaching blame to Africans and Muslims, who supposedly previously brought swine flu and AIDS to China.

In the US and Israel, the ultra-orthodox Jews, the Haredim, were accused of spreading coronavirus. They often objected to vaccination, the wearing of face masks and the forced closing of synagogues. Their communities in Israel had very high levels of infection and even accused the government, when it tried to enforce measures, of being Nazis. On 6 January, there were Haredim among those who stormed the Capitol, and also anti-semites who wore T-shirts stating 6MWE (for ‘Six Million Wasn’t Enough’)! In the UK, vaccination was sometimes compared to the medical experiments carried out by the Nazis.

Black people in both the US and UK have suffered high levels of infection and morbidity, but the reasons for this are complex. They have poorer health in general than the population as a whole, understandably lack trust in government pronouncements, and were initially reluctant to be vaccinated, though this resistance lessened over time. In the US black people were often unable to get jabbed because vaccination sites were pretty inaccessible, requiring a car to travel to them.

Black Trump supporters were anti-vaxxers, and more generally Trump fans saw themselves as victims of the medical and governmental establishment. Masks were viewed as a sign of weakness, and became for many on the extreme right and other populists a symbol of what was supposedly wrong in the US, with people no longer being able to choose for themselves.

Unlike wars, pandemics do not leave tangible physical reminders behind, but they can result in many different kinds of loss. Setting people against each other is one unfortunate effect.

Paul Bennett

Capitalism and Automation: Progress Perverted (2021)

Book Reviews from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We discuss two recent books on the effects of automation under capitalism.

Aaron Benanav’s Automation and the Future of Work (Verso) is one of a significant number of books published in recent years offering serious critiques of modern capitalism that tend to have one thing in common. While usually describing themselves as ‘anti-capitalist’, in the solutions to the problems they point to in the capitalist system they almost always end up with recommendations not on how to end the system but on how to improve it, how to make it run more ‘caringly’, more ‘fairly’, more ‘equitably’. Lacking a vision of a wholly different kind of world than the current one based on buying and selling, money and wages, and profit, these books advocate action to achieve various reforms, for example – in the most recent popular thinking among authors and activists – what is usually called Universal Basic Income. This idea has been discussed in this journal on a number of occasions and rejected for its inability to bring about any qualitative change in social organisation and for constituting at best a way of redistributing poverty and at worst a sure-fire way of exerting downward pressure on wages and salaries.

Now, however, we have a book that does something different. Not only does it offer an original and thoroughgoing critique of the current social system, but to the never-ending problems it throws up it proposes a truly radical solution: the abolition of the wages system and a ‘post-scarcity’ society of abundance. Readers of this journal will of course know that this is the very non-market-based remedy advocated by socialists such as Marx and William Morris towards the end of the 19th century and which the Socialist Standard has kept alive uninterruptedly since 1904. The author of this book recognises this idea’s pedigree in stating that the ‘vision of post-scarcity was what “socialism” and “communism” had come to mean before later identification with Stalinist central planning and breakneck industrialisation’, and, in his final chapter, entitled ‘Necessity and Freedom’, he describes it variously as, ‘the abolition of private property and monetary exchange in favor of planned cooperation’, ‘a world of fully capacitated individuals … in which every single person could look forward to developing their interests and abilities with full social support’, ‘a world in which democratic associations of women and men replaced the rule of the market with competitive production – and taking advantage of capitalist technologies – reduced the common labors of necessity to expand a realm of individual freedom’, ‘a new form of life that does not organize itself around wage work and monetary exchange’, a society in which ‘everyone can go to the social storehouses and service centers to get what they need’, and finally ‘for most people (…) the first time in their lives that they could enter truly voluntary agreements – without the gun to their heads of a pervasive material insecurity’. In such a society ‘dis-alienating community life – by taking that life under democratic control and collective care – becomes the way to ensure that individual freedom is shared by all’.

While consistently advocating just such arrangements, the Socialist Party has never sought to put forward detailed plans of how the new society of free access will be organised, since we would not seek to dictate now to the majority of socialist-minded workers at the time how to put into practice the plans they will have previously worked out about how to organise production and distribution cooperatively and democratically. Benanav, while not proposing detailed plans either, does, however, have some interesting insights as to how this could be organised or, as he puts it, ‘how the pieces of this defunct world can be reassembled into a new mode of social existence’. For example: ‘We would divide up responsibilities while taking into account individual aptitudes and proclivities. Some tasks would need to be performed locally, but many could be planned on a regional or global scale, using advanced computer technologies.’ Further: ‘The realm of freedom would be the one giving rise to all manner of dynamism: that is where human beings would invent new tools, instruments, and methods of accounting, as well as new games and gadgets, rapidly reallocating resources over time and space to suit changing human tastes (…). The world would then be composed of overlapping partial plans, with interrelated necessary and free activities, rather than a single central plan.’ He concludes, nevertheless, in a way that echoes closely the approach the Socialist Standard has taken in dealing with this subject over the years, by saying: ‘But these issues, as well as the related question of what counts as necessity and what as freedom, would be matters for a free humanity to resolve for itself, politically.’

Much of this follows from the ‘Future of Work’ element in the book’s title. Benanav’s argument about work in capitalism is that the ‘rise of the robots’ discourse common to those he terms ‘automation theorists’ is overblown and that the reason why workers of all kinds, whether in countries of advanced capitalist production or in less developed ones, are seeing increasing pressure on pay, job security and work conditions is not principally that the work is being done by automation (so-called ‘long-run technological unemployment’) but that capitalism in recent decades has experienced ‘deindustrialisation’, that is the number of jobs in the service sector consistently outstripping those in manufacturing side by side with global industrial over-capacity, ongoing wage stagnation, rising inequality and a proliferation of ‘bad jobs’. He sees this, together with the ‘angry ethnonationalisms’ it tends to bring with it, as an inevitable feature of the system’s trajectory leading to increasingly worse conditions for workers at all levels, incapable of remedy by vogue ideas such as Universal Basic Income and only capable of resolution by a movement of new social consciousness uniting ‘around a new emancipatory social project’ to bring in the kind of non-market post-scarcity society outlined above.

Theories of capitalist decay are of course debatable. Capitalism in its history has gone through numerous phases and crises and on the whole has managed, even if in an extremely uneven and irregular way, to improve living standards and conditions for large numbers of its wage slaves. What is not debatable, however, is that, under the current system, as the author puts it, ‘even in the richest countries most people are so atomized, materially insecure and alienated from their collective capacities that their horizons are stunted’ and that the kind of society he recommends to replace capitalism would be far superior to anything that has so far existed or that capitalism could promise in the future. In addition, though it would be, unlike capitalism and as socialists have always maintained, a society of abundance, it would not be – and would not need to be – a society of super-abundance, and this is something that Benanav captures effectively by stating that ‘a literal cornucopia is not required’. He goes on to explain that ‘it is only necessary that scarcity and its accompanying mentality be overcome’ and how ‘abundance is not a technological threshold to be crossed’ but ‘a social relationship, based on the principle that the means of one’s existence will never be at stake in any of one’s relationships’.

The sources drawn upon by Benanav in writing this book are wide and diverse with a good number of charts, graphs and tables and almost 40 pages of extensive documentation. Yet none of this weighs heavily on the reader, since both the thrust and the details of his arguments are laid out in a clear, engaging fashion making them easy, indeed pleasurable, to follow and take in, and causing the whole to hang together in a way that makes it a highly satisfying and persuasive read both for socialists and for anyone open to radical ideas about social development.

Howard Moss

Why no abundance or more free time?

One thing that has puzzled academic economists is why, given the spread in recent years of IT, AI and automation generally, productivity has hardly gone up. In Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation (Reaktion Books) Jason E. Smith offers an explanation which also challenges those like Paul Mason who see a society of abundance and leisure as in the process of gradually evolving.

Productivity should mean physical output divided by the amount of labour-time required to produce it. Thus, if output increases while the amount of labour-time remain the same or if output remains the same while the amount of labour-time falls, then productivity goes up. This works for a particular factory or industry producing the same product but can’t work for the economy as a whole because what is produced is so different. To get round this, economists measure productivity by dividing the money value of total production by the total number of hours worked. For them, productivity at this level is GDP divided by the hours worked by all workers; which is a pretty meaningless figure, not least because it does not distinguish between hours worked to produce the output and hours worked by workers paid out of the output. It is, however, how ‘productivity’ is defined in this context.

Smith’s explanation as to why the increase in productivity in this sense has been so sluggish in recent decades is that, while productivity has gone up in the sector of the economy producing material goods, it has not gone up by anything like the same amount in the service sector which now accounts for as much as 80 percent of economic activity in the advanced capitalist parts of the world. Most services are labour-intensive and involve personal attention and inter-personal skills that can’t be replicated by machines. In addition, many of these jobs are low-paid, which reduces the incentive for employers to automate them.

Automation since the 1960s, or ‘cybernation’ as it was called, led neither to the mass unemployment nor to the leisure society that was variously predicted but, says Smith, to the growth of the service sector, many of whose jobs are unskilled and low-paid. Smith expects this to continue to be the trend despite all the hype about AI.

That increased productivity in the sense of physical output per hours of productive labour worked should result in the growth of low-paid service jobs is a perverse outcome. Marx had already noted this in the 1860s as, in a passage, Smith quotes from chapter 15 of Volume I of Capital:

  ‘[T]he extraordinary increase in the productivity of large-scale industry, accompanied as it is by both a more intensive and a more extensive exploitation of labour-power in all other spheres of productions, permits a larger and larger part of the working class to be employed unproductively. Hence it is possible to reproduce the ancient domestic slaves, on a constantly extending scale, under the name of a servant class’.

Today the ‘servant class’ is composed not of domestic servants (these still exists and their number is growing) but of those employed by the state – the appropriately called ‘civil servants’ and others – some of whom are engaged in very socially useful work such as teaching and health care but who are nevertheless still paid out of taxes levied on the output of the productive sector of the economy.

Taking less and less time to produce material things and the means to produce them does open up the possibility of a world of plenty, better and more extensive public services and amenities, and free time for people to develop their talents or pursue what interests them. However, this is not achievable on the basis of the present-day class ownership of the means of life and their use to produce wealth for sale with a view to profit. It requires what Smith calls ‘a non- or post-capitalist society’ (and we call ‘socialism’) in which production is directly geared to satisfying people’s needs on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of society’s productive resources.

Adam Buick

Woman in a man’s world (2021)

Book Review from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critical Lives: Rosa Luxemburg. By Dana Mills. Reaktion Books. 200 pages.

In her introduction Mills says that hers is a feminist biography, as one that concentrates on Luxemburg’s life as a woman in a man’s world, not just generally but also within the Social Democratic movement in which she was active all her adult life until her murder in 1919 at the age of 47. Hence, a couple of references to ‘patriarchal capitalism’ (even though not a term that Luxemburg would have accepted) and to Luxemburg as a ‘Jewess’ (often a term of abuse but one which feminists might be expected to want to rehabilitate).

The book is about both Luxemburg’s personal life and her political and economic ideas. These latter are explained accurately enough. There is, however, an odd passage in Mills’s account of Luxemburg’s Accumulation of Capital where Mills writes:

 ‘Marx took ideas from Malthus (without referencing him), claiming that there was a tendency towards deficiency of demand in the market for commodities that capitalists produce to create surplus value. The question arises: who has the purchasing power to buy those commodities?’

A footnote refers to pages 93-4 of David Harvey’s A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Harvey is not always reliable on Marx, but here Mills has misread him. Harvey was not saying that Marx ‘took ideas from Malthus’ but merely that he was discussing them (without, apparently, giving their source). In fact Marx never claimed that there was ‘a tendency to deficiency of demand’ under capitalism and rejected both Malthus’s view that there was and his proposed solution (consumption by aristocratic landowners, sinecure holders and other non-producers). Luxemburg didn’t think much of Malthus’s solution either but she did accept that, among others, he had identified a problem. This set her off on the wrong track as there is no built-in shortage of purchasing power under capitalism; she was seeking a solution to a non-problem.

In her personal life Luxemburg had man friends without getting married; her tastes in music, literature and art were conventional even bourgeois; she had a cat and, as her letters written while in prison for opposing the First World Slaughter showed, a love of nature. A lot of people do but it is rather weak to say that this meant she stood for ‘environmental justice’ (whatever that is). She was rather more radical than that. She was a socialist.

All in all, the book is an interesting and informative read. 

Adam Buick

Home and Away (2020)

Book Review from the April 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

No Home For You Here: a Memoir of Class and Culture by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch (Reaktion Books £14.95.)

Rensch was born in rural Ohio in 1984 and spent much of his childhood in a mobile home that had been moved from a trailer park after his family were evicted for not paying rent in protest at conditions there. He became a university student, and much of the book, which includes both personal and more general accounts, deals with the conflict between being a ‘white-trash kid’ and a ‘liberal intellectual’. His family did not have much money but they did have fun, his mother tells him, while Rensch came to owe $160,000 in student loans.

Rather than a characterisation in terms of physical or mental labour, he is keen to offer a material definition of class, based on ownership of resources: the capitalists control and allocate economic resources, while the working class have to sell their labour power in order to live. Even so, there are some unclear references to the middle class, which seems to consist of small-scale capitalists. Working-class life in the US has become increasingly pressurised: the minimum wage has nowhere near kept up with inflation, leading to widespread poverty. In 2016, around 30 percent of wage-earners had an annual income of less than $15,000. Credit cards are used to fund spending, resulting in total household debt exceeding total disposable income.

Some of Rensch’s friends died young, one through suicide at 33, one of a heroin overdose at 34. His father died after a fall, aged just 46: an unemployed widower with ‘nothing to his name but time’, who drank and gradually became less liberal in his politics (‘between losing his job to the economy and his [second] wife to cancer, my father had become a reactionary’). The difference between failure and (relative) success is often just due to luck.

In rural areas, there is very little rented accommodation available, hence the need to buy a house and the extent of predatory lending to enable house purchase; hence, too, the ubiquity of subprime lending and the resulting crash of 2008. It is hard for people to leave the rural US, as doing so requires considerable time and money, including having a reliable car so you can look for a job. In small towns, churches ‘provided a crucial sense of belonging’.

The book offers a well-told account of inequality and the lack of social mobility. Rensch acknowledges that he does not have an easy solution, though he does refer to ending the tyranny of wage labour. And ponder this: ‘admiring the beauty of poverty and despair is easier than trying to change it’.

Paul Bennett

Marx (2012)

Book Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Karl Marx. By Paul Thomas, Reaktion Books, 2012

This is a concise, though not always easy to read, exploration of Marx’s life and writing. It can be usefully compared and contrasted with Francis Wheen’s best-seller Karl Marx (1999), which is more accessible but less reliable. Biographies of Marx these days have to declare where they stand on Marx’s alleged illegitimate son. The sole source for this allegation is a typewritten letter supposedly written by the estranged wife of Karl Kautsky. It is claimed that it was written in 1898 but was only made public, in mysterious circumstances, in 1962. Wheen is in no doubt that the allegation is true because, he says, the circumstantial evidence supports it. Thomas on the other hand, after weighing up the evidence, concludes that the allegation sits somewhere between ‘strains credibility’ and ‘stinks to high heaven’.

In Thomas’s book there is picture of the philosopher Hegel, whom Marx, the accompanying caption claims, ‘stood on his head’. Marx actually claimed that he found Hegel’s philosophy to be already standing on its head and that he stood him ‘right side up’. In Hegel’s philosophy the real world results from the unfolding of ideas, whereas for Marx ideas arise from and interact within a specific material context. There is no discussion of Marx’s dialectic in the book, from which we must assume it is of no importance. Wheen, by contrast, repeats the common misconception that Marx’s dialectic is a form of logical syllogism: thesis, antithesis and synthesis. But this is precisely the kind of idealism which Marx had rejected after he had stood the Hegelian philosophy of his youth ‘right side up’. It is the understanding of material circumstances, particularly the economics of capitalism, which provides the ‘guiding thread’ for comprehending the world around us.

Both Thomas and Wheen argue that Marx’s legacy is still relevant today. It can also be argued that Marx’s ideas have never been put into practice, and an example of this is suggested by Thomas’s book. At the end of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1871, the Paris Commune was formed. The Commune was an improvised organisation of Parisian workers set up to run and defend Paris. The French army brutally suppressed the Commune and slaughtered at least 20,000 of the Communards. Marx had no input into the creation or running of the Commune and the Commune took nothing from Marx. Afterwards he did write The Civil War in France in defence of the Commune, and from this the press claimed (mistakenly) that Marx was the mastermind or strategist behind the Commune, conferring on him the title ‘red terror Doctor’. Marx for the first time became notorious – but for an event which owed absolutely nothing to him. So apart from the evidence of his own writings, there are historical grounds for arguing that Marx’s legacy has been misunderstood and unrealised.

Lew Higgins

Greek lesson (2019)

Book Review from the April 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A Happy Future Is A Thing Of The Past: the Greek crisis and other disasters’. By Pavlos Roufos (Reaktion Books)

The mordant title of this book encapsulates the outcome of the collapse of the Greek economy, and the ultimate defeat of the popular protests against the austerity drive forced through by successive governments and driven by the international institutions of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the ECB (European Central Bank).

It begins with an account of the development of the Greek economy, unpicking the ideological image created during the crisis of a corrupt state where no-one pays taxes and the government lies to fund a generous welfare state at the expense of industrious North Europeans.

It traces the history of the Greek economy back to the ruins of World War II. By Roufos’s account, the Greek state had collapsed after its collaboration with the Nazi occupation. This led to a civil war which lasted until 1949, with a right-wing victory supported militarily and financially by the British state. This left a repressive regime, intent on suppressing the left, in charge of reconstruction funds from the US. The key point is that this repression led to a large informal economy, where people relied on family structures to off-set wages that were being held down. ‘Wages were seen as a cost, and not an investment,’ Roufos notes, and a fully developed labour market did not emerge.

This repression eventually led to the dictatorship of the Greek Colonels, as workers began to resist their poverty. The Greek economy continued to be a low wage economy, dominated by exports. For this reason, Greece was keen to join the European Union at its inception. Greece was thus caught up in the tides of the world economy, battered by storms such as the end of the Bretton Woods agreement. Particularly, Roufos notes that private capital often had little incentive to invest in developing Greek industry. Further, he notes that the German economy had a vested interest in drawing Greece and Italy into the Euro to prevent competitive devaluations.

The culmination of this was that Greece tended to be dependent on EU development funds, and cheap credit. Politicians mediating the needs of capital responded by holding down wages and cutting corporate taxes whilst also reducing controls on borrowing and financial movements. The seeds of the narrative of Greeks ‘living beyond their means’ (a statistically disprovable lie) were sown at this time.

When the Great Crash of 2008 came, Greece bore the brunt, and its over-extended banks went bankrupt, threatening the investments of German and French banks. Greece’s economy went into freefall, and the Government was required by the rules of the EU and the European Central Bank to take drastic measures to rein in its budgets: the narrative of the bloated public sector workers’ salaries and pensions was trumpeted to aid this cause. Roufos notes how this was also used as an opportunity to further liberalise the Greek economy.

Swingeing public spending cuts were put in place, leading to widespread protests and general strikes – most famously at Syntagma Square where the Greek arm of the Occupy movement fought running battles with riot police who knew only violence as a way to preserve the dominant order. Roufos discusses how the Syntagma movement sought to remain a leaderless open movement, refusing interference by organised leftists (even banning flags from the square). He also notes, however, the devolution of the movement into a series of monologues as the voices in the square talked on and on. The only positive he sees, indeed, is in the violence against the police, as the formal movement turned into practical opposition to state attempts to crush it. The text discusses how the organised left and unions seek and fail to mediate the conflict between workers and capitalists.

This is an important point: the fall in living standards experienced in Greece is dramatic, and anyone who has ever expected a crisis to turn into a revolution would surely expect this level of collapse to lead to revolution. Instead there is a series of disappointments. Disappointment in existing state institutions. Disappointment in protest. Disappointment in strikes, and ultimately, the disappointment of the radical election of Syriza, the leftist party now in power. As Roufos notes, each disappointment contributes to the sense that there is no alternative.

Syriza came to power promising to mitigate and reverse austerity (as the author notes, the small print was if their debt restructuring demands were accepted by the IMF/ECB). Yanis Varoufakis is criticised for taking the logic of the academic seminar room into the world of international power politics, and expecting a rational response. The end result of Syriza’s attempt to negotiate, despite the Greek population’s resounding ‘Ochi’, was the final hammer blow to any resistance. Syriza became a party of austerity and capitalist orthodoxy, eventually to be praised for guiding Greece through internal devaluation and out of special measures.

Finally, the book ends on a dismal note: there was no emergence of a sense of international working class solidarity. Indeed, the dominant leftist response is similar to the national restructuring of that of the Corbyn movement, retrenching behind national barriers. Greece has been left where it was in the world economy, after over a decade of suffering.

This tract is worth reading and digesting because the Greek lesson must be learnt.

Pik Smeet

Hagiography (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Leon Trotsky’, by Paul Le Blanc. Reaktion Books. 2015

Yet another hagiography but what’s the point? Only Trotskyists are interested in Trotsky these days and they know his life by heart.

Trotsky was a political failure and left a dubious political legacy. Apart from scores of squabbling Trotskyist sects, there’s the justification for reformist practice called ‘transitional demands’.  His History of the Russian Revolution is worth a read as written by somehow who played a prominent part in it. As is The Revolution Betrayed which, though mistakenly identifying Russia as a ‘degenerate workers state’ with an economy superior to capitalism because of its nationalisation and planning, at least initiated discussions on ‘the nature of the USSR’ which led to some of his followers realising that it was a class-ruled society and even state capitalism, even if he himself never did.

Le Blanc, a Trotskyist himself, is one of those who have been trying to paint Lenin as an orthodox left-wing Marxist operating in the specific conditions of Tsarist Russia rather than as the originator of a quite different theory and practice, Leninism. He claims the same for Trotsky but says virtually nothing in his book of Trotsky’s ideas and activities up to 1917 before he became a Bolshevik and which might have given some plausibility to this view.

Adam Buick