Brocialism and Manarchism (2013)

From the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Late October saw a few incidents which ‘feminists’ criticised. The Anarchist Bookfair in London saw a transwoman abused and an outdoor Catholic (not a religion known for being pro-women) called Ciaran O’Reilly heckled by ‘feminists’ (Sam Ambreen) shouting “kill all men”. At a meeting about Wikileaks in Liverpool, the same speaker was apparently harassed on account of rape apologism in respect of allegations against Julian Assange. Meanwhile Laurie Penny criticised Russell Brand (2 Nov 2013) for sexism after he wrote his views on revolution in the New Statesman.

The issue of feminism raises many questions. Do women bear the brunt of sexism? Generally, yes. Are women more likely to be victims of rape and domestic violence? Yes. Are allegations made by women less likely to even be investigated when reporting rape? Yes. Some have been surprised to find attitudes of sexism from ‘socialists’ and in the labour movement, (see Women in the Labour Movement statement) and even negative attitudes to disability (see LINK).

Feminists have characterised these problems as ones dismissed by socialists or relegated to the future, accusing sexist men of ‘brocialism’ (a portmanteau of brother and socialism) or manarchism (man and anarchism), but they must be speaking to the wrong so-called ‘socialists’. These observations are not ones dismissed by genuine socialists, as these problems have solutions that genuine socialists want and act to implement now. ‘Socialists’  perpetuating sexism only expose themselves as non-socialists. ‘Intersectionality’ is a modern term for different forms of oppression intersecting – for example, sexism intersecting with class society – but these types of concepts and connections were observations writers like Engels made way back in the nineteenth century.

Our socialism is in a sense  ‘feminist’ (although a better term would be egalitarian) as it is the socialism of the pioneering anti-sexist works of Lewis H. Morgan, Friedrich Engels, August Bebel and Eleanor Marx.

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

Cooking the Books: What is Capitalism Like? (2015)

The Cooking the Books column from the February 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever people think of Russell Brand – and you either like him or you loathe him – he has at least put apologists for capitalism on the defensive. One of these is the owner of a medium-sized business called Ian Baxter who wrote an open letter to Brand in the Times (8 December) under the headline ‘Capitalism is to prosperity what breathing is to life’.

Introducing himself,  he said he was a capitalist: ‘I  invest capital in my business expecting a return. The bigger the better.’ Yes, that is what capitalism is about – investing capital with a view to profit. And a capitalist is someone who lives off profits.

According to Baxter, ‘capitalism is a force for good’. It puts money into the bank accounts of employees. ‘It puts the food on our tables.’  It ‘enabled the world to meet the millennium development goal of halving global poverty by 2015 five years early.’

Capitalist firms do put money into their employees’ bank accounts. But this is not charity. It is payment for something the employees have sold them, namely, their mental and physical energies, their labour-power. It’s not philanthropy either. As Baxter said, firms invest capital ‘expecting a return’. Without the work of employees there would be no returns. In fact, since the only way wealth can be produced is by humans applying their mental and physical energies to materials that originally came from nature, workers create the whole of a firm’s added value, including the return on capital. Their work is the source of profit and that’s why they are employed.

So, you could say that capitalism is to exploitation what breathing is to life.

Capitalism ‘puts the food on our tables’. Presumably he means that, in pursuit of profit, capitalist firms arrange for food to be grown, transported, stored, and sold to us. This is indeed how capitalism works. Food is produced for sale with a view to profit but only to that extent. Capitalism will only put food on your table to the extent that you can pay for it. The more you can afford to pay the more and better the food you will get, and vice versa, the less income you have the less and poorer quality food you will get. And if you’ve no money at all, tough luck. Capitalism will not put any food on your table and you’ll have to starve or rely on charity.

Which brings us to global poverty. We all know that millions of people in the world are starving. After all, we saw all the appeals over Christmas. Less well known is that the world already now produces enough food, if distributed differently, to end starvation, and that the capacity exists to produce much more so that starvation could be ended without needing to take from some to give to others. So, why, if capitalism is so good, are there millions of people who are starving?

The millennium goal of halving world poverty may have been met but if capitalism did this, why did it stop half-way and not end global poverty entirely? We already know the answer:  it is not profitable to grow food, build houses, provide health care or clean water for people who cannot pay for them.

Baxter can’t have it both ways, attributing to capitalism all the good (or non-bad) things that happen under it while ignoring the bad things. In the 20th century capitalism caused two world wars in which millions died, not to mention the lesser wars and slumps.  So, why not ‘capitalism is to war what breathing is to life’? Why not ‘capitalism is to economic crises what breathing is to life’? Why not indeed.

An Open Letter to Russell Brand (2014)

From the December 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

On his book, “Revolution”, Century, 2014

First, how do I come to be reading your book, Revolution? I have spent the past thirty years arguing the point whenever and however I could, that world capitalism has to be ended. Not just in its most excessive manifestations, not just when it is run for private corporations and shareholders as opposed to state bureaucracies, but in every conceivable form it might take. How can you tell if the system in operation is capitalism? With a simple check-list. Employment – the exploitation of employees (French for the ‘used’) by employers (users) via the legalised robbery of the wages system. The market; in other words, the buying and selling of things which could instead now be created in such abundance that they could be taken freely by anyone in the global population, without the need for any system of money, vouchers, tokens, barter or trade of any kind whatsoever. Also, state power: governments, armies, police, who enforce the class rule by a tiny fraction of the population who own and control all productive resources.

Your book is disarmingly honest about your past, your faults, your flaws, thought processes, previous ambitions and resulting disillusion, the sources of your unhappiness, your latest hopes and desires, your continuing self-doubt, your determination to continue speaking and writing uncompromisingly and unashamedly what you believe to be true, and your refusal to give in to the pressure from snobs and hypocrites. These are people who have often attempted to silence your expression by mocking almost everything about you from your accent to your origins, your supposed lack of education, your poverty, your wealth, your hair, your profession – and, when all else fails, by misquoting, misrepresenting and distorting the ideas you express.

I hope it will make a refreshing change to have it suggested that, far from advocating the impossible or going beyond the thinkable, rather that you need to go one step further by demanding the so-called ‘impossible’. Your book is a brave step in promoting discussion of revolution to end the capitalist system we have throughout the world today. You make several cogent and absolutely essential points which are not only true, they cry out to be endorsed and adopted by the thousands who have already read your book – and the millions of others who would relate to so much of it. Points such as:

1. Do not vote – IF there is nothing worth voting for. Do not feel obliged to give moral and practical consent to the status quo by endorsing it, through voting into power one of several parties, each of which are openly pledged to defending, running and upholding that status quo in one form or another. Most of your opponents in the wake of that Paxman interview conveniently ignored the second half of this proposition, pretending that you had some kind of bizarre antipathy to the concept of voting, under any circumstances. More heinous still was their subtle exclusion of even the possibility of allowing a different way of running society: ‘you have Labour, Tory, Liberals. Lots of ways of running Capitalism. What more do you want? Now get out there and vote for one of those! And be damn grateful for having this wonderful choice once every five years!’ runs their mantra.

2.  Global society is currently organised in a way which is designed purely to benefit a tiny (even less than one percent) minority, who have unfathomable wealth and power, who own and control the Earth and its resources – and who in doing so are depriving the 99 percent of access to the riches and comforts those resources have to offer us all. This is an insane, anti-social, irrational, illogical, unacceptable premise and starting point on which to found our global society. It is therefore urgently in our interests as that majority to end that regime completely and utterly, now. Another word for such a huge and urgent change in the way society is run is revolution, so clearly the fact that this is needed is beyond dispute.

3. There are many ways in which the present organisation of society like a vast prison camp (disguised as a holiday camp) causes unhappiness, suffering and distress – way beyond the crudely economic aspects of poverty, crucial and painful though those are too. Terms like alienation, epidemics like addiction are easy to dismiss as in the first case abstract waffle and in the second a poor choice made by (millions of) individuals. However, these are in fact very real, almost universal side-effects of the global social system we have. Indeed, for many people in the huge cities of the more ’developed’ parts of the world – like London or New York – these are some of the most powerful prompts which drive many of us to question the way society is currently structured. The one percent are devoted to maximising the surplus they extract from the work of the rest of us, and this in turn depends on them maintaining a certain social landscape, the consumer culture, the stifling of true dissent, the separation of people from one another and from themselves.

As your book progresses, you draw on input from a variety of activists and social thinkers. Some are more credible than others. One of the more compelling is Naomi Klein, with her brilliant expose of the stark choice now forced on us, between saving capitalism and saving the planet as a viable ecosystem or human habitat, and she shows incontrovertibly how incompatible the two are.

In eventually sketching a plurality of ‘alternatives’ , however, you may be unwittingly over-complicating the situation. There are not ‘loads’ of alternatives; the one key issue causing all significant social problems is the way we organise society – the system of minority ownership and production for profit. The solution, the one solution, to this is therefore common ownership and production for use. That means no money, banks, finance  – and no ‘co-operatives’ selling goods in the market. Free access to all, for all! From each according to ability, to each according to need  – one worldwide co-operative society, no buying and selling.

Some notes you quote about the virtues of co-ops mention ‘raising capital’, ‘job opportunities’ and making agreements with governments. But the revolution to get rid of capitalism has to mean getting rid of capital, government, finance, money, ‘jobs’ – all parts of the capitalist way of running world society. Of course, on paper, the idea of having thousands of autonomous co-operatives, each run democratically within itself, and engaging fairly with all the other units sounds a lot more just and pleasant than the current control of the world, its resources and its population by a tiny, powerful minority of less than one percent of the population. But if we are talking about ending that, then let’s end it. All these models and reforms are variations on the market system which, if ever pursued, would inevitably lead us eventually back to where we started. The solution is for us to withdraw our consent from capitalism, as you say – but to create instead a society without ownership, in which the whole world and all its resources becomes the common heritage of all humanity.

Of course, this necessitates all of the democratic aspects of administration which you touch on, local, regional and continental, but the key point is that these are ways for the world’s population to run a planet no longer divided into owners and non-owners. In the model of separate co-ops which you settle on at the end of the journey in your book, you do not go far enough – after all, if each co-op autonomously owns its resources then those outside that co-op are still alienated from the resources in it. You still then have money, trade, competition, separation  – and the certainty of corruption, accumulation and minority power again flourishing.

You emphasise your belief in God. Connecting with our true selves and connecting with one another are positive parts of the revolutionary ending of property-based society. Belief in an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent force outside of ourselves is significantly less helpful in creating the freedom from oppression to which we aspire. On this I would be more inclined toward the healthy cynicism of the late, great American comedian George Carlin:

‘I've begun worshipping the Sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the Sun. It's there for me every day. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There's no mystery, no one asks for money, I don't have to dress up, and there's no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to God are all answered at about the same 50-percent rate.’

You rightly describe as mere ‘pipsqueak reformism’ the Swedish workers’ shares schemes (which in fact are a means of co-opting the impoverished majority into supervising our own exploitation). In one of your final chapters, you then make a list of demands which includes, for example, ‘State power to dissolve wherever possible to empower autonomous, democratic communities.’ Wherever possible? Although I have no doubt of your sincerity in sketching possibilities for what we construct in place of the wretched system we currently have, I would strongly urge you to reconsider the wisdom of listing multiple ‘realistic’ steps as the culmination of a book so rich in its often poetic damning of current social relations. The biggest tragedy in history, already played out myriad times, is this lowering of expectations as the first slippery slope back to cynicism and misery.

I recognise the courage and honesty with which you have put yourself on the line, derided your own celebrity status, taken on Paxman and others and often left them in gibbering defensiveness. Your regular podcasts, “The Trews” are a welcome window into reality without the twisting and obfuscation, the bullshit mediation of the media. In many ways it has been a breath of fresh air to see those hilarious and perceptive insights into the madness of capitalism viewed regularly by hundreds of thousands of people.

Let’s now take the next logical step and build a majority movement committed to the complete ending of capitalism, in all of its forms, with all of its trappings, and nothing less. On page 297 of your book you slightly misquote Marx in a way which could be significant. You say ‘From each according to his means, to each according to his needs’. On Twitter last year, however, you correctly quoted it as ‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs’. It was never about redistributing money, but abolishing it – and Marx’s slogan is even more relevant today than it was 150 years ago.

Clifford Slapper

What Do We Mean By Revolution? (2014)

From the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever else you might think of Russell Brand at least he has re-introduced the word ‘revolution’ into the political vocabulary. But what is a ‘revolution’?

One good definition was given by the Victorian era socialist, William Morris, in a talk he gave in 1884 later published as the pamphlet How We Live and How We Might Live:

‘The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people's ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a change made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize on the executive power for the moment. Even when we explain that we use the word revolution in its etymological sense, and mean by it a change in the basis of society, people are scared at the idea of such a vast change, and beg that you will speak of reform and not revolution.’

A revolution, then, is ‘a change in the basis of society’, whether or not this is accompanied by violence (Morris in fact thought it would be), a change that has to be fairly rapid, involving a clear break with the existing society.

The change in the basis of society which socialists envisage is a change from what exists today, where society is based on the ownership and control of the means of wealth production – the means by which society survives – by a tiny minority of rich individuals, corporations and states. We want to change from that to a situation where the means of production have become the common heritage of all to be used, under democratic control, for the benefit of all. A change from a class society to a classless society. A change from capitalism to socialism.

Why a revolution?

But why is a revolution against capitalism needed? Could it not be gradually reformed out of existence? No, basically because capitalism cannot be reformed so as to work in the interest of the majority. For a start, it is based on their economic exploitation. Because most people are deprived of access to means of production they have to sell their working abilities for a wage or salary to those who do have access. But employers are not philanthropists. They only employ people if there is something in it for them – a profit. If there isn’t, they won’t employ people or else they make people redundant. This happens all the time.

Since the only way that wealth can be produced is by humans applying their physical and mental energies to materials that originally came from nature, the source of a non-work income like profit can only be the work of those who work. It’s workers, not their employers, who are the ‘wealth producers’.

Profit is the difference between the value of what wage and salary workers produce and the value of what they are paid as wages and salaries. The extraction and accumulation of profit is the aim of production under capitalism.

A good alternative name for capitalism is the profit system. Because that’s what it is. It’s a system whose economic aim is the accumulation of more and more capital out of profits. It’s a profit-making system in which profit always has to come before meeting people’s needs. If a profit is not made, economic activity slows down, stops or declines. One of the basic economic laws of capitalism is ‘no profit, no production’.

This has various consequences. An obvious one is that production is geared only to what people can pay for, not what they need. The rich get their whims met while the poor have to go without heating. Luxury flats are built while many live in unfit accommodation. In fact, while technologically there could be plenty for all, the profit system means that production stops well below that point.

The struggle for profits is a competitive one, with every business trying to maximise its profits. In this ‘battle of competition’ the main weapon is reducing costs by installing new more productive machinery and methods of production. This, too, has consequences. It leads to speed-up and stress at work. And to pollution and the neglect and destruction of the environment.

All these problems – housing, stress, pollution, and many others – are interconnected. They are not just isolated problems that can be dealt with one by one. They all have the same root cause in the capitalist system of production for profit and are unavoidable consequences, inevitable effects, of it.

Revolution not Reform

This is why capitalism cannot be reformed to work in the interest of the majority by putting ‘people before profit’. Any government that tried to do this would provoke an economic slowdown, even an economic crisis, and would sooner or later have to give up and accept, and even apply, the economic law of ‘profits first’.

There have been governments in the past – Labour governments – which could be said to have genuinely and sincerely tried to put people before profits. They have always failed in the end. Not necessarily because they weren’t sincere or were sell-outs or not resolute enough, but because they had set themselves an impossible task – to make capitalism work other than as a profit-making system in which making profits has to be given priority.

The Labour Party has learned this lesson and has long since given up being other than an alternative management team of British Capitalism plc to the Tories. But some of those on and to its left have not learned this and still imagine that they can impose other priorities on capitalism than profit-making and turn it into something else. The new Left Unity party, formed in November last year, is a case in point, as are the various Trotskyist groups who campaign and contest elections on such platforms as tax the rich to pay for better schools, homes, transport and the like. If tried, by reducing profits, it would probably provoke an economic crisis.

It is surprising how widespread this belief is that governments can change the way capitalism works, when they obviously can’t. This is why we say that socialists should direct their energies to ending capitalism not to mending it, to abolishing it, not managing it. In other words, ‘Revolution not Reform’. That’s our policy and that’s what we advocate.

What kind of revolution?

But what sort of revolution do we need? Going back to William Morris it ‘cannot mean a change made mechanistically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have managed to seize on the executive power for the moment.’ Speaking in 1884, Morris probably had in mind the French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui and his followers who were forever plotting an insurrection to take over the Town Hall in Paris. They never succeeded and Blanqui spent most of his life in jail.

His ideas, however, were inherited by Lenin and the Bolsheviks and propagated by their followers in the 20^th century. And still are by the Trotskyist groups. It is true that they are not so crude as Blanqui but realise that they need some degree of popular support before staging their uprising. But this support is to be won not for replacing capitalism with socialism but from people discontented for any sort of reason. The end result is the same: a group of people – a minority – find themselves in control of ‘the executive power’ but without majority support for socialism.

What they can do in these circumstances is as limited as Labour and other reformists who have got control of executive power on a non-socialist basis, in their case with non-socialist votes. The revolutionary minority, too, have no alternative but to manage capitalism in one way or another.

Lenin eventually realised this and had the honesty to admit it and say that the only way forward for Russia was state capitalism, which is what really happened, though both Stalin and Trotsky refused to recognise this. Stalin called it ‘socialism’ while Trotsky regarded it as some sort of ‘workers’ state’ till his dying day, which was when he was murdered by an agent of his supposed ‘workers’ state’.

Democratic, majority revolution

So, by ‘revolution’ we don’t envisage the type of revolution advocated by Leninists of a conscious minority leading a mass of discontented but non-socialist workers and others.

What we envisage, rather, is a majority revolution in which the majority want and understand socialism and participate in bringing it about. For us, this revolution must be democratic in both senses of the term. It must have majority support and it must be carried out by democratic means.

In a politically and economically advanced capitalist country like Britain and most of Europe, a socialist majority can win control of the ‘executive power’ via elections. That’s our view, as argued in detail in our pamphlet What’s Wrong With Using Parliament?

Of course, establishing socialism is not just a question of voting for a socialist candidate and waiting for a majority of socialist MPs to vote it in (much as people do today who vote for a party which promises some reform of capitalism). People have to have organised themselves outside parliament into a mass democratic socialist party, into trade unions and other workplace organisations, into neighbourhood councils and the like. The socialist MPs would be merely the delegates – the messenger boys and girls – of the organised socialist majority outside parliament.

So, we have in mind a democratic, majority political revolution which begins with the winning of political power via the ballot box by a socialist-minded majority. The majority  then uses this control of political power to dispossess the capitalist class, declaring all property titles, all stocks and shares, all bills and bonds, all limited liability companies and corporations null and void. This means that the means of production become the common heritage of all. The socialist majority can also co-ordinate the physical take-over of the means of production by people outside parliament, organised and ready to do this and keep production going.

This done, production can be re-orientated towards meeting people’s needs instead of for sale on a market with a view to profit as at present under capitalism. Goods and services can be made freely available in accordance with the principle ‘from each their ability, to each their needs’. This social revolution will then have been accomplished and socialism will have been established.

Adam Buick

Greasy Pole: Doing the Hokey Cokey (2013)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

If that's what you want there is some Good News: in spite of his past, Nick Clegg now thinks that '...politics is not perfect'. But then the Bad News is he also thinks '...if you want to improve something, get stuck in and get your hands dirty'. These comments were a response to Jeremy Paxman when he recently hinted at some sympathy with Russell Brand over his disillusionment with politics and his refusal to join in what he sees as '...a political hokey cokey where every four years we get to choose what colour tie the liar who leads us wears'.

Whether Clegg can properly claim that during his time as Deputy Prime Minister he has actually 'improved' anything – other than perhaps the colour of his tie – is very much in dispute. Whether he himself is confident on the matter may be judged by the recent appointment, as his Director of Communications, of Emma Gilpin-Jacobs. Anyone responding 'Emma Gilpin-Who?' should be aware that during some twenty years she has acquired what one observer noted as a 'stellar' reputation in the rituals which lurk behind such arcana as 'Brand Communications', 'Corporate Reputations', 'Public Profiling...' If these activities caused her to get her hands dirty it will have been through working to reconcile those who are obsessively known as 'ordinary people' to their position on the scale of social poverty. Now she is committed to cleansing the blemished reputation of the LibDem Party– which will test the reward, after her spell as Global Communications Director at the Financial Times, of a place among the ranks of the Power Mums.

Controversy

Another woman in Russell Brand's hokey cokey, of a similar age to Gilpin-Jacobs but with a record in a different sector of the 'communications' business is Esther McVey, Conservative MP for Wirral West. She made her name as a producer/presenter for Children's TV and programmes such as Nothing But The Truth, The Heaven And Earth Show. At another level there was also an appearance at the Liverpool Empire Theatre in The Vagina Monologues. And during 1999 a flood of publicity photographs – the work of an anonymous cameraman who remembered her as 'charm personified' – drawing attention to parts of her anatomy which are not usually considered essential for exposure on TV. A career change seemed to be advisable and in the 2005 election McVey, now robed more suitably for a constituency such as West Wirral, was narrowly beaten by Labour's Stephen Hesford but she did better in 2010, winning by 2436 votes. From the beginning she was, apart from those other matters, a subject of controversy; she had to pay Hesford￡6500 in damages and costs after her team had copied a blog about him going on a 'junket' test match tour in Australia and New Zealand. After a couple of early scrabbles up the Greasy Pole she got lucky in one of Cameron's re-shuffles, finding herself as Minister for Welfare at the Department of Work and Pensions under Iain Duncan Smith (IDS).

Tears

This was an intriguing combination. A long-standing rumour has it that in 2002, when he was in opposition, IDS was reduced to tears by what he saw of the ghastly decay in the Easterhouse estate in Glasgow. So much so that he accepted an invitation to address Labour's 2005 conference and told the delegates that their treatment for poverty was inadequate because 'everyone should have enough money to live properly in their community' (he did not discuss how this applied to the Cameron family in their 'community' at Chipping Norton). But since then IDS has had to undergo a change of heart, as an important minister in a government devoted to imposing cuts which ensure that thousands of families have barely 'enough' of that money to get by.

One of the government's measures is the 'bedroom tax', so called because it is imposed on those living in social housing which has more rooms than they strictly need. This has led to many people having problems paying their rent; in a recent debate on the issue Labour MP Steve Pound told of his brother who is threatened with eviction because he has a 'spare' room which is used to accommodate his dialysis equipment. In October McVey was unwise enough to propose that the homes in question should be modified to reduce the number of rooms – a 'solution' which was greeted with a mixture of bewilderment and scorn.

Chaos

Presumably because she is a practised TV operator, McVey was put up to defend the plans for Universal Credit, which IDS introduced to the 2010 Tory conference as a 'vital reform' which would simplify the benefits system and reduce its cost by merging six of the available benefits. The situation at present is that the measure is a hugely expensive chaos showing little prospect of changing anything let alone making it cheaper. The Commons Public Accounts Committee has said that much of the £425 million spent so far may have to be written off. McVey's 'defence' was little more than empty assurances that all was well with the scheme, which was working within the time scale as planned. It was not a convincing performance among the 'considerable challenges' facing the scheme – not to mention for those whose everyday life is so crucially dependent on those 'benefits' and how they are allowed to 'claim' them.

Liars

Jacobs and McVey each had a long and detailed training in their chosen sphere, followed by years of experience, which provided them with an opportunity to show how effective it had all been. In the event they have qualified for nothing more noteworthy than a place in that hokey-cokey where at the closing of a ballroom dance revellers are too far gone to continue with the rituals of waltz, quickstep...But as applied by Russell Brand the words could have some relevance for voters hesitating at the door of the polling booth. Which is not to argue that anyone with such insight should refuse to vote. To express our anger and contempt for those liars on that same ballot paper can be the start of something big.

Ivan

Russell Brand Attacks Capitalism (2013)

From the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

... and its ideological guard dogs come running

When Russell Brand was invited to guest edit the New Statesman at the end of October, he took the opportunity to write a long feature article on a subject which he deemed important enough to devote his whole piece to. He did not choose to write about his work as a comedian or actor, or his current worldwide live tour which had already almost sold out. He did not write about his sexual reputation as a ladies’ man, or about which toothpaste he uses. He wrote with passion about how the world is organised and how all main stream politics serves the same global economic elite. He made a great number of insightful, thought-provoking observations.

A few days later he further elaborated on several of these points when interviewed by Jeremy Paxman on BBC TV’s Newsnight. He certainly succeeded in stimulating debate, and since then there has been a frequently heated exchange of views, both with and about Brand himself, but also further afield, with the You Tube video of that interview having had millions of hits even by early November.

What Did Brand Actually Write?

There was a lot of distorting of the things that Brand actually wrote and said, so let’s start by setting out clearly and accurately what he actually expressed. The feature article, ‘We no longer have the luxury of tradition. But before we change the world, we need to change the way we think’ (New Statesman, 25-31 October), started out with one statement which was later seized on in particular by many of his opponents as a terrible sacrilege:

‘I have never voted. Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites.’

He says those who ‘fought in two world wars’ to protect the right to vote ‘were conned’, adding that ‘total revolution of consciousness and our entire social, political and economic system is what interests me, but that’s not on the ballot.’ But rather than the focus on voting, his main and far more important theme was the fundamental inability of our present social system to meet the needs of the majority of people.

His written piece claimed, first, that the majority of (‘non-rich’) people have become disaffected from the whole political process and lost all interest in politics, as the main parties and politicians are virtually indistinguishable from one another. They are all dishonest and self-serving and all stand to represent and run a system in which human needs always take second place to the further accumulation of financial surpluses by a tiny minority who already have huge wealth and power. The apathy of the oppressed majority is an understandable reflection of the apathy of the social order about meeting our needs. But for society’s problems to be solved, this apathy must first be challenged and replaced with a passion for real change. All these points were argued in detail and eloquently by Brand in his article.

The Goal: A Co-operative Society

He rightly takes the Left to task for being so po-faced and urges a spirit of fun and excitement in the movement for social change. He thoughtfully bemoans the way in which defenders of capitalism have taken the ideological advantage by tying their cause to the selfish instinct for individual survival. But, as he explains very clearly, we have now reached a stage in human history where our success and survival as individuals is more connected than ever before to ensuring our survival as a whole community or species:

‘Fear and desire are the twin engines of human survival, but with most of our basic needs met these instincts are being engaged to imprison us in an obsolete fragment of our consciousness.’

At this point Brand departs momentarily from this rational extrapolation of the social, political and economic roots of human suffering, to argue that the solution is ‘part spiritual and part political’. He defines spiritual as ‘the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised’. He then states very clearly his goal, paraphrasing Buckminster Fuller: ‘to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity...through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone’.

Brand does not mention it, but in fact there is one precondition for this rational and democratic use of the world’s resources to serve the needs of all. The ‘one percent’ who monopolise all the natural resources and productive machinery of society have to be legitimately dispossessed, so that the world and all that is in it can become at last the common heritage of all. Without doing that, we do not even have access to the resources we seek to co-operatively manage. And for this we do indeed have to organise political and democratic action, including voting, which will be a lot more exciting and far-reaching than the mere choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee just twice each decade.

The Contradictions of Capitalism

Those of us who complain about there being a small class of billionaires and multi-millionaires for whom, directly or indirectly, the rest of us work as waged or salaried servants of capital, do not do so out of some hate-filled jealousy. Like Brand, we recognise that this is a global system which has outlived its usefulness. That the problem is systemic and not merely a question of attitude or of clearing away just the worst excesses of greed. In the words of William Morris, ‘there are rich and there are poor, and the rich are rich because they rob the poor’. Yes we do begrudge the fact that shareholders (or bureaucrats, in the misnamed ‘socialist’ countries which run state capitalism) own and control the productive resources of the world, because that is what stops the other 99 percent of us from accessing those resources and turning them over to production for need rather than profit. There is a profusion of research reports from the World Health Organisation and others, showing that without the artificial limits placed on production by the billionaires’ need to be sure of a market before production is permitted, then the actual global resources would be sufficient to feed, clothe and house several times the current world population.

Meanwhile, in the social system which currently exists throughout the planet, in Brand’s words,

‘The price of privilege is poverty. David Cameron said in his conference speech that profit is “not a dirty word”. Profit is the most profane word we have. In its pursuit we have forgotten that while individual interests are being met, we as a whole are being annihilated. The reality, when not fragmented through the corrupting lens of elitism, is we are all on one planet.’

A ‘Total Social Shift’

Brand condemns the ways in which scapegoats are constructed and people turned against each other, so that ‘the wrath is directed to the symptom, not the problem’. He describes revolution as not violent rioting or misdirected fury, but a dignified and complete withdrawal of consent, a mass refusal to accept the current social relationships of production and ownership, which are inherently exploitative. Whilst not denying that human behaviour has elements of greed or insecurity as well as co-operation and common interest, he asks why should we continue to base our entire social fabric on the worst traits rather than the best aspirations of humanity?

’My optimism comes entirely from the knowledge that this total social shift is actually the shared responsibility of six billion individuals who ultimately have the same interests. Self-preservation and the survival of the planet. This is a better idea than the sustenance of an elite.’

He writes that he does not have a precise or perfect blueprint for the future, but seeks nevertheless to emphasise that ‘the only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity’. By this measure, clearly, capitalism in all its forms must be ended. ‘We cannot afford...old-fashioned notions like nation, capitalism and consumerism simply because it’s convenient for the tiny, greedy, myopic sliver of the population that those outmoded ideas serve.’

At this point his prescription for change does become slightly vague and somewhat romantic, advocating that we meditate, love indiscriminately, reserve our condemnation exclusively for those with power, and revolt spontaneously in whatever way we want; though he is careful to specify ‘without harming anyone’. He calls for a revival of the old values of the working class movement typified by the Tolpuddle martyrs, so that today’s young people might realise that there is ‘a culture, a strong, broad, union, that they can belong to, that is potent, virile and alive’. He makes a final call for a ‘revolution of consciousness’ and makes the optimistic observation that we are far from impotent, as proved by the huge twin efforts of propaganda and repression which have to be used to contain dissent around the world, the ‘institutions that have to be fastidiously kept in place to maintain this duplicitous order’.

The Paxman interview

A few days later, he was interviewed on Newsnight, and Paxman lost no time in trying to ridicule and belittle all of this radicalism. He set the tone for other critics to follow, by arguing quite illogically that, because Brand declines to choose between the virtually indistinguishable brands of capitalism which we are offered to vote for once every five years, that therefore he has no ‘right’ to voice any opinion about how human society should be organised in the world. Brand dealt with this admirably, arguing right from the start that we can at least state what human society should not do: ‘Shouldn’t destroy the planet. Shouldn’t create massive economic disparity. Shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.’

He explained that he does not set himself up as a political or technological expert, and that he defers to others who are more equipped than he is to fill in the gaps as to how we can best use our planetary resources to feed, clothe and house our several billion members of this human community. What he needed to point out, however, is that the current global system of minority ownership and control of resources cannot ever do that. But he did make the excellent point to Paxman that it is those who do defend the present social order who must be called on to answer for it. ‘The burden of proof is on the people with power.’ The system we have is indeed indefensible. The debate then is not whether to have a complete change of social system, but how best to quickly enact this urgent and obvious need, before capitalism causes even more carnage both socially and climatically.

When pressurised by Paxman to come up with a specific plan of how the alternative would work, Brand suggests:

‘A socialist egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, [with] heavy taxation of corporations...I think the very concept of profit should be hugely reduced...I say profit is a filthy word, because wherever there is a profit there is also a deficit.’

He goes on to say that there would have to be a democratic central administration rather than a government. When pressed further, he urges Paxman not to ask him to ‘sit here and devise a global utopian system...I am calling for change’. And he was absolutely right to say this. No great social change has ever come from constructing an ideal ‘doll’s house’ society, with a rule-book full of minutiae, and imposing it on the future. We need urgently and democratically to replace minority ownership with common ownership, and production for profit with production for needs.

This will not involve the ‘redistribution of wealth’, however, as that implies there would still be owners and non-owners. The only alternative to capitalism is to have common ownership of all productive resources, across the world community. All of those billionaire shareholders, plus the stony-faced bureaucrats of the state-capitalist regimes, have to be legitimately dispossessed by a conscious, determined, educated, peaceful majority. Then and only then can we start to produce for need, not profit. And this also has nothing to do with ‘heavy taxation’, as taxation is a levy on profits and therefore is a mechanism only relevant to capitalism itself.

Brand then explains what it would take for him to want to vote, telling Paxman that people are bored with politics because what’s on offer is not a radical enough change, hence the frequent eruption of rioting and civil unrest. But ‘when there is a genuine alternative...then, vote for that...but until then, why be complicit in this ridiculous illusion?’. He praises the Occupy movement for at least introducing into the popular lexicon the idea of the one percent versus the ninety-nine per cent, and making large numbers of people aware of vast economic corporate exploitation. He also turns the argument around on to Paxman, pointing out that he of all people must see through the charade of politics, since he has spent thirty years in interviews berating politicians of all parties for their lies and their failed promises.

How was all this received?

The responses to Brand’s comments were replete with distortion, misrepresentation and personal attack, showing just how much venom is often trained against the merest whisper of dissent from the assumptions of the present world order. In the Guardian’s weekly politics podcast on 31 October, associate editor Michael White unleashed a torrent of venomous, spluttering, reactionary bile against Brand, without even having read or heard what he had said:

‘I listen to him and I think, what a turd he is. I have made it the two principles of my working life not to read the Sun or watch Newsnight, they’re both up themselves too far, so I didn’t see this interview, but I know what he’s like...’

White went on to accuse Brand of ‘proto-fascism’ and of wanting to have a revolution ‘in which probably he can do a lot of screwing around, because that seems to be one of his more important priorities. Pass the sick bag’. White has revealed more about himself than anything else in this misinformed and vindictive response. Reporter Shiv Malik on the same podcast, again with breathtaking disregard for the most fundamental journalistic principle of reporting what people say rather than what you would like them to have said, asserted that ‘[in his article] Brand dropped in ‘non-violent’; but really I think he meant ‘violent’, and just go out and riot’!

Other reactions also came thick and fast. Simon Kellner acknowledged in the Independent on 24 October that ‘Russell Brand is far from trivial. On Newsnight, he made Paxman look ridiculous. This was the old guard against the new, and the new came out on top.’ Paxman himself had the decency and intellectual honesty a few days later to concede that Brand had been right about ‘the whole green-bench pantomime in Westminster’. Writing in the Radio Times he agreed that people are disgusted by the ‘tawdry pretences’ of politics, and even admitted that he had himself not voted in a recent election, as the choice of candidates was ‘so unappetizing’. Nick Clegg responded to this on LBC Radio, setting himself up as a sitting duck by whining illogically that Paxman was ‘sneering about politics’ despite making a good living from Westminster, and that he treated all politicians as ‘rogues and charlatans’. With Clegg’s party holding the dubious honour of being amongst the biggest liars in recent political history (student fee rises ring a bell, Nick?), one has to ask, what else should Paxman treat them as.

Fellow comedian Robert Webb patronizingly took Brand to task via an ‘open letter’ in the following issue of the New Statesman, in which he sings the praises of the last Labour Party government (how short is his memory?) compared with the current Coalition, and bemoans Brand’s call for social revolution, since ‘We tried that again and again, and we know that it ends in death camps, gulags, repression and murder...please read some fucking Orwell.’ Brand in turn responded to this in a long interview with the Huffington Post:

‘Just for the record, in case anyone else from Peep Show is worried, I'm definitely against death camps...definitely no killing. I'm against that; I'm a vegetarian, I think we're all equal. I'm not saying smash people's stuff up, and definitely no killing.’

Most of the criticisms blatantly ignored all of Brand’s points about present day society and what is wrong with it, and focussed purely on the supposed ‘crime’ of refusing to vote in elections. But in this respect, he is hardly alone. In recent UK elections, well over a third of voters could not find the motivation to go and choose between the options on offer. And what of the sham elections conducted by dictatorial regimes elsewhere, do these critics condemn those brave enough to abstain? The voting process is important, and socialists have long had a policy of writing ‘world socialism’ across their ballot paper in the absence of any genuine socialist candidate. Again, this is something which Brand has also mentioned. In a follow-up piece for the Guardian (5 November) he mentions his friend’s 15-year-old son who, he says, prefers the idea of spoiling ballots rather than not voting, ‘to show we care’, and Brand adds, ‘maybe he’s right, I don’t know’.

In the same piece he also writes movingly of an encounter whilst on tour with his show, at Watford, with some soldiers and some Muslim women. It led to thoughts about the insanity and legalised murder of warfare and the hugely important recognition that: ‘The reality is we have more in common with the people we’re bombing than the people we’re bombing them for.’

He does go on to propose that the billions being used to bail out banks, or the unpaid tax of tycoons like Sir Philip Green, should be used to ‘create one million jobs at fifty grand a year’. However, this would not be a lasting solution since it would leave intact the same root cause which has led to all of this in the first place: the existence of capitalism. We must go further and end the institution of working for wages or salaries itself as it is this, the wages/profits system, which is causing all of the social contradictions from which we suffer.

Let us all take up Russell Brand’s proposition. The need to get rid of capitalism is urgent. We do need to think outside of the constraints of the profit system. The solution is very clear. Common ownership of all productive resources. Democratic control of society. Production for need, not profit. This needs to happen now, and the only remaining missing ingredient is a conscious and well-informed majority determined to take democratic action to make it happen.

Brand acknowledges movements like Occupy for putting on the public agenda the idea of the power of the one per cent which prevents the freedom of the ninety-nine per cent. We owe Russell Brand some thanks now for helping to put the idea of revolution back into public discussion too, at a time when a complete change of social system is more urgent than ever.

Clifford Slapper

Editorial: Revolution (2013)

Editorial from the December 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

The word revolution means different things to different people. There’s the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution. It is even used by advertisers to give an impression of something new and different. This is a clue to its use in society, history and politics – to describe the complete replacement of the previously existing system. There is also the implication that this occurs fairly rapidly; otherwise it’s evolution.

Some people, influenced by the perception of the French Revolution cultivated by those who didn’t and don’t like it, associate the word with violence. A social or political revolution can involve violence and many have. A revolution certainly involves force – this has to be the lever bringing about the change – as the beneficiaries of the old system have to be forced to give up their power and privileges, but this can take other forms than outright violence. It can take the form of mass popular pressure or of the use of the ‘legitimate’ force of the state machine.

When Russell Brand called, in his interview with Jeremy Paxman, for a revolution he clearly meant it in the sense of getting completely rid of the present system of elite rule and neglect of people’s needs. Some interpreted him as calling for a repeat of the riots and looting of the summer of 2011 on a wider scale, but he himself later insisted that the revolution he envisaged should be non-violent.

The socialist of the Victorian era, William Morris, opens his pamphlet  How We Live and How We Might Live with these words:

‘The word Revolution, which we Socialists are so often forced to use, has a terrible sound in most people's ears, even when we have explained to them that it does not necessarily mean a change accompanied by riot and all kinds of violence, and cannot mean a change made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize on the executive power for the moment.’

Socialists, he went on, mean by it ‘a change in the basis of society’.

This is the sense in which we too have always used the word. The revolution we envisage is a change in the basis of society from the present minority class ownership of the means of production to their common ownership and democratic control by all the people in their own interest.

We wholeheartedly endorse Morris’s view that this change cannot be ‘made mechanically and in the teeth of opinion by a group of men who have somehow managed to seize the executive power for the moment’, as some 19th and 20th century self-styled revolutionaries have maintained.

For us, the social revolution from capitalism to socialism has to be carried out democratically, both in the sense of having majority support and in the sense of employing democratic means. This latter means organising without leaders. In the developed capitalist parts of the world this democratic self-organisation can – and we say should – also involve organising to win control of political power via the ballot box and parliament. In other words, forming a political party to challenge those Brand said he has (rightly) never voted for and never would. We shouldn’t let them have a clear run or allow them to claim to be the’ legitimately elected representatives of the people’.