Rear View: On the road to nowhere (2017)

The Rear View Column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the road to nowhere

Two academics list some actual and proposed responses to the ‘refugee and migrant crisis’, which include international summits – seven in 2016 alone – and an island between Italy and Tunisia, before advancing their own: ‘a set of loosely-connected self-governing units we call “Refugia”, brought into being mainly by refugees and displaced people themselves, with some support from sympathisers’ (theconversation.com, 7 August). They see Refugia as ‘a utopian solution to the crisis of mass displacement’. The Oxford dons are correct about one thing – their proposal is Utopian, but not a solution: creating more countries in a world where competition between them can result in war (one reason for the ‘crisis’ in the first place) and leaving the real culprit, capitalism, intact will fail. In a socialist world of production for use not profit, there will be no more refugees seeking escape from war and want. The only borders will be natural ones and citizens will be free to migrate where they want.

October 1968 

Another dead end

The actor Mark Rylance asks ‘who can remember the dreadful battles of the First World War commemorated recently without remembering that World War One was meant to be the end of war?’ and wonders ‘when will we stop this madness?’ before imploring us to join Stop the War. STW was formed following the September 11 attacks of 2001. The sponsors involved include some past Labour MPs and Jeremy Corbyn plus the dead hand of the Socialist Workers Party. Left wing groups are selective about the wars they oppose and have come out in favour of dictatorships e.g. North Vietnam if such are under attack from the West. By contrast, the Socialist Party has the unique record of opposing both world wars, in fact all wars other than the class war since its formation in 1904. Wars are not fought in our interest and are not worth the shedding of a single drop of working class blood. We make our opposition to capitalism, its wars and other attendant ‘problems’ clear. Here is one example from the front cover of the October 1968 edition of our Journal: VIETCONG, NO! MAO, NO! CHE, NO! SOCIALISM, YES!

Silk roads

‘”If the Chinese gain control of the Donglang region, they will hold a commanding position in the Chumbi Valley and would gain the ability to essentially cut off India’s access to the north-eastern states in case of a conflict,” says The Diplomat. Border skirmishes were once a common occurrence along the 2,520-mile frontier zone, the most notable of which was the month-long Sino-Indian War of 1962 (theweek.co.uk, 7 August). The ongoing tension between these countries is of no surprise to socialists. The expanding sphere of influence of capitalist China started before 1962 and spread to Korea, Mongolia, Vietnam, Laos and Tibet. These days, Chinese capitalist interests extend into Eurasian and African regions through the Belt and Road Initiative. Other competing Asian states such as India and Japan seek similar expansion of their interests and for the time being are working together on an alternative Silk Road.

Streets paved with gold?

‘Could gold finally have a purpose? New research says it could help in the fight against cancer’ (cnbc.com, 7 August). Sultan Erdogan has, it is rumoured, gold-plated toilet seats in his gigantic 1,150 room palace. Tens of thousands of tonnes of it collect dust in vaults throughout the world. But we do not need to turn to Thomas More’s Utopia, where bathroom fixtures are made of gold, to find other uses for this metal. Contrary to what the article suggests, there are various, established medicinal uses for gold and the metal is also employed in other fields including electronics, dentistry and photography The vast stockpiles of gold in a socialist world would likely mean an end to its extraction through mining and, consequently, associated pollution and fatalities.

Revolutionary road

This road is unique in that you cannot be lead there. Should a majority of us come to understand and desire socialism we will be able to explain to the next generation, any visiting aliens or cryogenically unfrozen humans – probably capitalists – that ‘People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We’ve eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We’ve grown out of our infancy.’ Actually, that is what Captain Picard says in the year 2364. A socialist world of free access and production for use has been possible since the last century. Let us not wait until the 24th.

Proper Gander: From The UN To Anarchism (2017)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In recent years, the BBC has developed an interesting sideline in polemics: broadcasters like Adam Curtis, Dominic Sandbrook and Simon Amstell have appeared on our screens presenting their original interpretations of society’s changing cultural and economic trends. Refreshing as it is to see thoughtful critiques of capitalism on the telly, alternatives are rarely discussed. So, it’s a nice surprise to see an anarchist get an hour of screen time to make his case, in Accidental Anarchist: Life Without Government, part of BBC4’s Storyville strand, as well as in one of Newsnight’s video podcasts.

Why this particular anarchist has been able to get his views on the Beeb is the career path which led to his viewpoint. Carne Ross began work in the government’s Foreign Office in 1989, with the optimism that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Between 1998 and 2002 he was the UK state’s expert on Iraq at the UN Security Council, where he negotiated on issues such as weapons inspections and sanctions, and took pride in being a ‘ferocious negotiator’. Ross says that the effect the economic sanctions on Iraq had on the Iraqi people was just ‘paper suffering’ to the UN because of its distance from those affected. Noticing the divide between governments and the majority led him to doubt the whole system’s effectiveness. His trust in the state was finally lost after the death of Dr David Kelly, the expert on biological warfare and UN weapons inspector who, according to Ross ‘was driven to suicide by the disgraceful campaign of vilification by [Tony] Blair’s officials after he was revealed as the source of a BBC story that the Number Ten ‘dossier’ alleging the threat from Iraq had been considerably exaggerated’ (www.carneross.com). Ross resigned his job in the Foreign Office in 2004 after giving then-secret evidence to the inquiry into the Iraq war. He told it that at no time did the government judge that Iraq held ‘weapons of mass destruction’ which posed a threat to the UK, despite what we were told. He says that the public was lied to over the reasons for going to war, and this is ‘the worst thing any government can possibly do’. He now feels ashamed of how he acted in his previous life.

Ross’ journey to anarchism is unexpected because he’s managed to change his mindset away from the acceptance of the system which is encouraged and needed by those working at that level for the state. His role allowed him to see first-hand how governments act, so in a way he was better placed than many to see the system’s faults. Far from being the ‘accidental’ anarchist of the show’s title, he has thought about what he’s experienced and reached a perfectly reasonable interpretation.

Ross tells us that he grew up to believe the economy works like a machine, complicated but understandable, and now believes that society is too complex to fully comprehend, let alone control. He even finds a government minister – Rory Stewart OBE – who admits that politicians don’t have nearly as much power over our economic and political system as most people assume. Because of this, Ross argues, our framework of leadership isn’t tenable. Instead, he says, ‘No-one should have power over another. People should govern themselves’ (LINK).

As proof that self-organisation can work better for everyone, Ross gives some examples of where people have worked together in a more equitable and effective way. Members of Occupy New York used their experience in planning and organising to co-ordinate aid for victims of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy more efficiently than the government’s efforts. And in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, the community arranged support for survivors quicker than the state. It shouldn’t take a disaster to make people come together, although other attempts at greater co-operation and self-organisation have developed in difficult circumstances. Rojava, an area of northern Syria, is run according to the political ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, a leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who was inspired by anarchist Murray Bookchin. While hierarchies still exist there, people living in Rojava are able to directly contribute to decisions affecting their community, and there is more gender equality and less sectarianism than elsewhere in the region.

According to Ross, the peak of anarchism was in 1930s Spain, before it was crushed by Stalin’s forces and Franco’s fascists won the Spanish Civil War. He says that anarchist ideals live on there now, such as in the town of Marinaleda in Andalucia, where the populace occupied land and buildings and established a farming co-operative with many municipal tasks organised together. Of course, these and any other examples have to work within capitalism. Ross doesn’t seem to see this as much of a setback, and cites ‘worker owned co-operatives like John Lewis’ (ibid) and the Brazilian city of Porto Allegre, where the population has had input into funding decisions which improved public services, as examples of where ideals of self-organisation have flourished. While he’s surely overstating how radical John Lewis and the other examples are, he’s more on the ball when he adds wryly that the shabbier a group’s assembly room is, the more democratic it will be.

Ross favours a ‘gentle revolution [which] should begin with direct democracy’ (ibid) in workplaces and the community. This would involve worker-run groups, which could then join up to manage larger-scale projects. He suggests that these groups would be more legitimate than politicians, and therefore would replace them. Whether governments would allow themselves to be shunted out in this way isn’t considered here. As Ross worked within the state, he should realise it won’t just offer to relinquish its power. The same applies to corporations: how realistic is it for co-operatives to out-perform them without adopting more cut-throat strategies to remain competitive? Unfortunately, the programme doesn’t go into detail about how far Ross thinks his examples of self-organisation can go towards replacing capitalism itself. However, they demonstrate that people can work together co-operatively and equally, and this is certainly a step towards revolution.

Mike Foster

Are You Happy With the Way Things Are? (2017)

From the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

With austerity, inequality, war, environmental problems, the rise of so-called populism? But are you also struggling to find some response that will do more than just repeat the efforts of previous decades, which have led to this mess?

We think there is an effective response to the current situation. One that doesn’t just deal with small changes to the present system, so leaving the underlying causes untouched. One that really gets to the root of what is wrong, that truly addresses inequality, poverty, war and the rest.

In a sense, what is needed is very simple: make the resources of the planet the common property of the world’s people. Ensure that they are controlled democratically and used to meet human need. Let people have free access to what has been produced. Enable people to have proper control over their lives. Avoid all the waste of resources that goes with the money system (banks, insurance, credit cards and so on). Grow food and build houses because people want them, not in order to make a profit.

In the Socialist Party we call such a set-up socialism. This means a classless society where there is no division between the rich and powerful on one hand and the great majority of the population on the other. It means a society with no state or government, since these exist to defend the interest of the rulers. It means a world with no countries or borders. It means a world where people work together for the common good, not for the interests of a small class of owners.

Socialism is in complete contrast to all forms of capitalism, which necessarily involve class ownership, production for profit, the wages system, and varying degrees of poverty and insecurity. Capitalism cannot be made to work in the interests of the vast majority, which is why socialists do not advocate reforms of the present system.

Don’t be misled by labels. What we stand for has no connection with what the Labour Party and the Left advocate; state ownership is state capitalism, not socialism. Nor does it have any connection with the system that existed or exists in the USSR, North Korea and so on; these are particularly authoritarian versions of state capitalism.

The only solution is a revolution in the economic basis of society carried out by an overwhelming majority, who want and understand socialism. If this idea interests you, get in touch with the Socialist Party and learn more about our ideas.

Crime and Capital (2017)

From the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Any community has to have an agreed set of principles concerning the behaviour of its members. As a social species we depend on each other to exist. Our interaction, therefore, provides the cohesion necessary for our survival. Historically these rational principles of behaviour have been subverted by the powerful to serve their needs. In a class-divided society these principles are used to rationalise the wealth and power of the minority. Socialists recognise this and exhibit the relevant contempt for the implicit hypocrisy in trying to rationalise rules that enforce inequality and the social injustice that it represents.

Rational rules of behaviour have been replaced by laws that are enforced by the state. But there still have to be definitions of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour within any community and, given the anachronistic political structures of capitalism, how should a socialist approach this anarchy of social rights and duties? We have to live within this sick culture but should we respect and internalise any of its laws and rules; do we have the right to reject them all as merely exercises in bourgeois hypocrisy?

It may be claimed that since the state has the power to enforce the law and its constraints upon socialists that it is of no importance how they feel about it. Socialists are realists and, unlike liberals, we do not loudly articulate a sense of personal injustice when it is our time to suffer the consequences of a system that speaks of justice whilst imposing its antithesis. What is important to us is that when the great majority individually encounter the ‘justice system’ and its failures, inadequacies and hypocrisies that they should understand the manifest underlying political realities which this represents rather than simply rely on accusations of corruption or incompetence regarding individual members of this system.

Some attempt to legitimise ‘The Law’ in terms of democracy. They claim that our ‘representatives’ in parliament only legislate in the name of their voters and if this is rejected by the wider community then they will be removed in the next election. What is ignored within this idealistic portrayal of the contemporary political structure is the obvious fact that it is the system itself (of which parliament is a vital component) that is the cause of the very injustices it attempts to legislate against. Happily socialists do not have to resort to the silly quasi-religious theories of a violent and greedy ‘human nature’ to understand crime; we know that where institutionalised inequality, and the consequent innumerable injustices this maintains, exists so will individual ‘immorality’ and criminality. That we can subvert parliament by sending socialists there as delegates of mass consciousness to destroy it will represent one of the greatest moments in political history.

It may come as quite a surprise to many that the ‘justice system’ represents injustice to socialists. In the hope of deterring the usual dismissal of this perspective, which typically involves references to our so-called utopian dream of a ‘perfect society’ or, as mentioned earlier, some half-baked theory of a destructive element within ‘human nature’, let us take a cold hard look at some of the realities of the symbiotic nature of the relationship between the justice system and the criminals it persecutes. Without criminal activity there would be little or no need for today’s lawyers, judges, court functionaries, silly wig makers, police, police cars, forensic scientists, prisons, police dogs, cell cleaners, justice software, police radio technology, specialist helicopters… the list is endless. That the state finances a great percentage of all this is testament to how desperate the ruling class is to hold onto their wealth and power. It is a grotesque spectacle to perceive how the state feeds parasitically on the criminals it creates.

And what are some of the laws that all of this effort and expense go into imposing; arbitrary and irrational prohibition of some stimulants, strike breaking, enforcing homelessness (evictions), prosecuting the poor for illegal benefit claims, persecuting ‘illegal immigrants’, breaking up demonstrations, enforcing traffic violations, curtailing rights of access, arresting the hungry for ‘shoplifting’ and the weary and dispossessed for ‘vagrancy’. But, I hear you ask, what of the violent bullies of organised crime and the fear and corruption they create? Can no one take moral responsibility for their own actions? If we accept the stupidity and injustice of the activities of the state listed above can we allow it some credibility for opposing so-called organised crime? We might be able to understand violent crime in its capitalist cultural context but can we ever accept that its perpetrators are not morally culpable?

At this point some readers will become aware that we are entering the philosophical realm; specifically the timeless debate between the proponents of determinism and those who believe in ‘free will’. Philosophy has the ability to both inspire and intimidate; we read the works of the great minds that have pondered on such questions with a mixture of awe and frustration. Frustration because there seems to be no definitive answer; we may reach personal conclusions but these cannot be subjected to scientific experiments which will decide which hypothesis is correct. Socialists are committed materialists and this implies a belief in a level of determinism. As already described we think that criminality exists primarily because of the capitalist culture of institutionalised social injustice – in short, it is because of the way society is organised.

But can we really just shake our heads with sadness when the likes of Hitler and Stalin are put on trial by history? We all need the guilty to be made to recognise their responsibility for the cruelty and subsequent suffering that they have been complicit in creating. Not to punish in the name of revenge but to impose consequences for acts that the community deplores. We know that the two individuals mentioned could not have committed the crimes they did without the complicity of thousands, sometimes millions of others. We are also aware that such mass complicity is a product of a terribly sick human political culture but we need to insist on individual moral culpability. Why? Because the answer: ‘I did what I did because I was ordered to’ cannot excuse the individual of responsibility. No healthy human community can function with such an immature moral vacuum at its heart. Does this imply that by imposing moral values on society we are forced to live an illusion? This is an uncomfortable situation for socialists because we pride ourselves on our realism; but not to grant individuals a level of moral integrity seems to dehumanise them. It’s hard to retain compassion for others (and yourself) if you regard our species as merely deterministic machines.

Will socialism be able to resolve or ‘bring to a synthesis’ (as we Marxists would say) this profound social contradiction? It is an intriguing possibility; but don’t wait until that inevitable day comes when you or someone you love finds themselves a victim of crime before you contemplate these questions. Such things are not just esoteric philosophical distractions; they are at the heart of who you are and what kind of society you wish to live within. Join us in our revolutionary activity which alone can transform justice from an intellectual aspiration into a political reality.

Wez

The Real Project Fear (2017)

From the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supporters of Brexit use the expression ‘Project Fear’ to describe the views of those who wanted, and perhaps still want, Britain to remain in the European Union. The Remainers, it is suggested, used scaremongering to claim that leaving the EU would be a step into the unknown, where nobody knew what awaited. Putting fear into people’s minds was supposedly not a valid political or economic argument.

But in fact a much wider situation involving fear can be identified. For capitalism makes great use of fear among the vast majority of people: fear of unemployment, losing one’s home, insecurity, and so on. In some cases the word ‘fear’ may be an overstatement, so in what follows we will mostly speak of worry or anxiety, but all too often there truly will be fear in workers’ minds.

Firstly, people may worry about not finding a job at all, or not finding one that pays enough for them to live on or that makes appropriate use of their abilities and qualifications. If they have a job, they may be anxious about keeping it or being put on short time or, alternatively, having their hours extended without extra pay. If they are on a zero-hours contract or working elsewhere in the gig economy, they may worry about having enough work or being treated reasonably by their employer. Standing up for their interests at work may lead to victimisation. Even those in relatively prestigious occupations such as university lecturers are increasingly being faced with the threat of redundancy or being placed in an ‘at-risk pool’.

With the housing situation becoming more and more problematic, many people do fear being unable to find somewhere adequate and affordable and within suitable travelling distance of their place of work. They may worry about being unable to keep up with their mortgage or paying their rent. They know they may be evicted if they complain to the landlord about damp in their flat, say, or be concerned about what will happen if they have another child. Losing a job or suffering long-term illness may make keeping a roof over your head difficult, and these and other considerations all add to the fear of being homeless.

For many people their wages are barely enough to live on, resulting in constant concern about paying for food and heating. Being unable to afford a holiday or Christmas presents for the kids can be extremely stressful, and anxiety about surviving on a pension is also commonplace. Concern about being unable to repay a student loan can be worrying, too.

Those who are struggling to make ends meet may well have recourse to pay-day lenders or buying household goods from shops that charge sky-high interest rates. Even borrowing on a credit card can create difficulties. Being unable to repay the right amount at the right time can lead to enormous problems as debts mount up and what is owed comes to have little connection to the sum originally borrowed. Fear of being in this kind of situation can really take over a person’s life, and even lead to them committing suicide.

Living on state benefits of one kind or another can also be extremely worrying. Quite apart from the fact that the money received in this way is rarely truly adequate, and the continual pressure to demonstrate that you genuinely are looking for a job, there is the constant fear of having the benefit taken away, of being declared fit to work as a result of some arbitrary medical test or losing housing benefit through having ‘too many rooms’.

We do not want to exaggerate and say that all workers live in constant fear of losing their job or their home, but the possibility is always there, and people are often reminded of it by what happens to a relative, neighbour, colleague or friend. Nor are we saying that this is some kind of deliberate plot to frighten and harass workers, just that it is a genuine situation. Real Fear has nothing to do with the EU but is an intrinsic part of working-class life under capitalism. 

Paul Bennett

Material World: It’s Not Overpopulation, it’s the System (2017)

The Material World Column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

 ‘We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave  labour  that is available from the natives of the colonies…’– Cecil Rhodes

People need to wake up and learn that the world is not what much of the media would like us to believe it is. We are frequently told that Africa suffers from too many people. Yet  Africa is blessed with a rich bounty of natural resources and  has the potential  to support its rising population well into the foreseeable future. The continent holds around 30% of the world’s known mineral reserves. These include cobalt, uranium, diamonds, and gold, as well as significant oil and gas reserves.  The Pambazuka website reminds us that  Ethiopia is five times the size of the UK yet the UK’s population of 66 million is just over three-quarters that of Ethiopia’s at 83 million. Uganda’s land-area is comparable to the UK’s, yet with a population of only 33 million. Ghana is approximately equal to the size of the UK, however, Ghana is populated by only 25 million people, far less than one-half the UK’s population.    Somalia is 2.6 times the size of the UK but has a population of only 9 million. Professor William Moseley of Macalester College explained that “There’s  about 13 Somalis per square kilometre, which is much lower density than what we’re seeing in our own drought-stricken state of Oklahoma. Yet we tend to focus on the population issue.” Africa is still one of the world’s least densely populated  regions.

Africa presently does not grow enough food to feed its own population but it certainly has the ability to grow enough food to feed itself plus some. Many African countries have the advantages of fertile soil and the possibility of year-round farming and more than one harvest per year. About a quarter of the   potential   arable land of Africa is being cultivated presently. For example, well over 50 per cent of Uganda’s arable land, some of the richest in Africa, remains uncultivated. Even here, an increasingly high proportion of the cultivated area is assigned to cash-crops (cocoa, coffee, tea, groundnuts, sisal, cut flowers, etc.) for export. Uganda could expand its current food production significantly and not only be completely self-sufficient but help to feed neighbouring countries. This vast acreage of rich farmlands across the continent has the capacity to support the food needs of future generations of Africans.

Of course, it would be foolish to deny that Africa’s population is not rising. Of the countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in Sub-Saharan Africa, which now accounts for 12 percent of the world’s population and will account for more than a third by 2100. The population of Niger is projected to increase by 274 percent during the next 35 years. In Niger, women have on average more than seven children, and men consider their ideal to be more than twelve. But with land divided among so many sons, the size of a typical family plot has fallen by more than a third since 2005, meaning there is little long-term hope for feeding children.

There are also mounting problems with increased  urbanisation and its effects. In 1950, no city in sub-Saharan Africa had a population greater than one million. It is now estimated that over 50 cities have a resident population of over one million people and by 2025, more than 80 cities in sub-Saharan Africa will acquire populations of over one million. By 2050, about 56 percent of Africans will probably live in urban areas.   In a couple of   decades   Nigeria will reach a population about as big as that of the present-day United States in a country roughly the size of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. A typical apartment block is known as a “Face Me, Face You” because whole families squeeze into 7-by-11-foot rooms   along  a narrow corridor with up to 50 people sharing a kitchen, toilet, and sink.

Africa seems to be the embodiment of all the social ills of capitalist exploitation  and it has been systematically plundered for its raw materials and human   labour.  Conditions for our fellow-workers in Africa has revealed capitalism in all its naked brutality with its extremities of misery and suffering. A peasant gets peanuts for growing peanuts because that is the going rate for peanuts on the world market. If the price of peanuts is raised, the local exploiter will gain at the expense of the importer, and the peasant still gets peanuts. It is now no utopian fantasy but a practical proposition to suggest we can live in a world without waste or want or war, in which each person has free access to the benefits of   civilisation. We certainly have the knowledge and the technology. All that is missing is the will and desire for change that can make that next evolutionary advance possible; a belief in ourselves as masters of our own destiny. And how soon this happens depends on us all – each and every one of us.

ALJO

Letters: Workplace Democracy (2017)

Letters to the Editors from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workplace Democracy

Dear Editors

The essence of socialism is democracy within the workplace. That’s each employee having an equal say in the production and distribution of products, sourcing of raw materials, and everything else relevant to the business. Equating socialism with the former Soviet Union and countries with centrally-planned economies is just asinine and deliberately misleading. It’s the old chestnut of ‘Socialism has been tried and it has failed.’ What country ever had a majority of businesses where there was a democratic say for all the employees? It’s not about storming the Winter Palace either. The state will always prevail over those sort of tactics. Transitioning from our present economic system run by private tyrannies to one where democracy was extended into the workplace would be a real revolution. What we think of revolution is really a ‘meet the new boss, same as the old boss’ type of conjuring trick. Democracy within the workplace is what the establishment fears most and for good reason.

Louis Shawcross, 

Hillsborough, Northern Ireland

Reply:

You make some goods points but the use of the word ’employee’ is misleading. Workplaces in socialism will be democratically organised, but those working there will no longer be ’employee’, i.e., will no longer be working for wages for an ’employer’. It sounds as if you might be advocating worker control of ‘businesses’ producing for sale on a market with a view to profit; which wouldn’t be socialism – Editors

************************************************************

Deglobalization?

Dear Comrades

I read Stefan’s article ‘Deglobalization: Is globalization going in reverse?’ (Socialist Standard, May). Stefan’s treatment of this extremely complex phenomenon is thought-provoking.

Despite a weakening of intergovernmental institutions, are there not deeper structures of globalization – not necessarily in the political sphere – that remain intact?

There is an inherent carrot versus stick relationship introduced into the arena of international business by existing treaties on trade: ‘Profit’ v ‘Regulation’ however mild. The abandonment of international trade treaties would perhaps result in a more laissez-faire, colonial frontier type freedom of exploitation and expropriation. Down this turnpike the destination could be the hell of war.

At this juncture it would perhaps be unwise to rule out a come-back of globalization in the fairly near future or to assume that we are on the threshold of a long period of deglobalization.

Joe R. Hopkins, 

Florida, USA.

Reply:

Good point – in particular about ‘deep structures’. The crucial deep structure is that of capital itself, because a relentless drive to expand is intrinsic to capital as self-expanding value. Even protectionist governments are under constant pressure to accommodate this drive.

As Marx put it in Grundrisse: 

‘Capital is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier. Every boundary is and has to be a barrier for it. Else it would cease to be capital – money as self-reproductive’ (Notebook III/IV).

And again:

‘Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier… Capital must strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market’ (Notebook V). 

Nor is there any reason to expect capital to halt at the limits of the planet of its birth. – Editors

50 Years Ago: Aberfan (2017)

The 50 Years Ago column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Aberfan Tribunal promised that there would be no whitewashing. They produced a report full of memorable phrases (“bungling ineptitude”; “subterfuge and arrogance by the National Coal Board”; “eight years of folly and neglect”) and they laid the blame for the disaster on the National Coal Board, its headquarters, its divisional board, and four of its officials.

In this, the tribunal followed the accepted pattern of all enquiries into disasters. Somewhere, somebody—a railway signalman, an airline pilot, a ship’s captain—makes a mistake or breaks a rule. It is all too easy, afterwards, to point the finger.

Very few people care to wonder about the context in which the ‘mistakes’ are made, the rules ‘broken’.

Only in passing, for example, did the Aberfan tribunal deal with the basic cause of the disaster, which was the very existence of the slag heaps, up on the mountain above the doomed village. Tipping waste from coal mines is, after all, the simplest and cheapest way of disposing of it. In South Wales, the valleys cannot be used for the tips because that is where the pit heads and the houses must be built. So that the stuff is dumped onto the mountains, where it is a continual eyesore and menace.

Of course they could stop tipping but, as the tribunal said on this very point “. . . the reflection that to stop tipping could bring about the closure of the Merthyr Vale Colliery may well have led to the quick suppression of those doubts . . .”

Of course they could deposit the stuff underground but this, said the tribunal, was neither “technically feasible now nor economically practicable” (The Times estimated the cost of removing the tip complex alone at £3 million).

Thus the tribunal accepted the economic confine within which capitalism’s industry operates. It accepted that anything which is not economically practicable must be rejected, it accepted that people must live in the constant need to work for their living. It accepted that, although a certain amount must be done to mitigate the hardships of this social set-up, in the end we must make the best of it.

The economic practicabilities of capitalism have a lot to answer for, in coal mining more than in most other industries. Aberfan was only the latest, if one of the most unusual, of the disasters caused by the ‘economic’ production of coal.

[Socialist Standard, September 1967]

Pathfinders: The Activism Gap (2017)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Given that women are not especially rare in the general UK population, why are there not more of them in the Socialist Party? Is this a specific failing on our part, or more of a general trend? If it’s a trend, what other trends are there, and what changes are taking place?

There are, to be sure, various ‘activism gaps’. Young people are in general less politically engaged than older people, black and minority ethnic (BME) groups less than whites, and indeed the party spectrum itself divides somewhat along income and education lines, from high-end active association with the Tories, Lib Dems and Greens to low-end activity (or former activity) in Ukip, with Labour pertly straddling the higher and middle strata.

A recent House of Commons research paper looking at UK political party membership sets all this in sobering context. Overall, levels of engagement in any kind of activism are low. Around 26 percent are involved in some kind of sporting or cultural activity, 12 percent in religious or volunteering pursuits, and just one percent in any form of politics (House of Commons Briefing Paper Number SN05125, 28 March 2017).

The report notes the late increase in political interest among young people, from 32 percent in 2015 to 48 percent in 2016, underscoring a similar rise among the general white population from 51 to 60 percent, while observing that interest among BME groups has remained static at 35 percent. But there’s a big difference between labour-intensive political activism and instant, cost-free political voting, and here’s where the activism gap becomes obvious: “The largest disparity between the social make up of party members and electors is for gender. While 50.1% of electors were male, 67.2% of party members were men.”

This echoes the findings of an April 2004 Electoral Commission (EC) report which stated: ‘Women are significantly less likely than men to participate in campaign-orientated activities, such as contacting a politician and donating money to, working for, or being a member of, a political party. Women are also less likely than men to join voluntary organisations. Overall, a statistically significant activism gap by gender exists in the UK’ 123235687 (123235687 tinyurl.com/orjweuu123235687 ).

While today the female vote is roughly proportional to the male vote it wasn’t always so, and studies in the 1920s when women were able to vote showed that in practice they often chose not to. A 1960s study found that 'In all societies for which we have data, sex is related to political activity; men are more active than women’ (EC 2004).

It would be remiss not to ask the awkward question whether some form of historical or biological determinism is at work. First, could it be that the historical subjection of the female sex through recorded history has left an indelible mark whereby women now collude in their own political exclusion? To some extent expectations play a part. The Electoral Commission suggests that ‘women have a weaker sense of political efficacy than men; they have lower confidence that they can influence the political process’. But expectations change. Given the speed at which recent history has put up or taken down regimes and behaviours in just a few years or even weeks, it’s hard to picture women in liberal democracies wallowing in a continued sense of impotence just because it was historically so.

History is in any case not written into the genes, but what about prehistory? Could there be a deeper genetic legacy from the earliest times when pre-humans first invented the sexual division of labour (SDL) for purposes of mutual convenience? The classical argument is that women, having far greater investment and risk in child breeding, would choose to exert their social control there, while men, being largely untaxed by the process and anyway uncertain of their paternal credentials, would have looked elsewhere for theirs. This ‘classical SDL’ theory, once favoured by Engels and popular among socialists including William Morris, maintained that SDL was cooperative and not intrinsically oppressive or unequal until the arrival of property society made it so. However SDL is now thought to be modern, not ancient. Kuhn and Stiner, 2006, suggest that SDL emerged as late as the Mid-Palaeolithic, from 250-30,000 years ago, giving homo sapiens a survival advantage over the (probably) non-specialising Neanderthals then dominating Eurasia, and moreover this would have happened mostly in the ecologically-diverse tropics rather than in northerly latitudes. In some tribes, females hunted and men gathered (LINK). So the thinking in anthropology circles has moved away from ‘men and women are different, and that’s ok’ to ‘men and women are the same, and that’s ok!’

But still, discounting deterministic causes, women are not standing up for political change as much as men, and this remains a mystery. The self-disabling ‘too busy at home’ argument is largely a myth today, with 40 percent of women in the workplace and outnumbering men in unions. The Electoral Commission report identifies other factors, like ‘self-relevance’ and gender representation. Asked whether they agreed with the statement ‘Government benefits people like me’, women with a local female MP agreed more than men (49 percent to 38), and the reverse was true for seats with a male MP. Some studies in the US support this finding, others flatly contradict it. A 2011 review argues that knowledge is key: “At lower levels of political knowledge, women’s lower political knowledge depresses their participation in politics. The participation gap disappears at higher levels. These findings complement existing scholarship that finds women hold themselves to a higher standard before engaging in political activities such as running for elected office (Social Science Quarterly, 26 July 2011). In other words, men rush in where women fear to tread.

What could we do to address this activism gap? The EC report suggests ‘support systems’, while some on the left advocate ‘special mechanisms’ (e.g. Lindsey German, 1981, LINK). Such notions of positive discrimination run the risk of patronisingly perpetuating what they set out to solve. But we could do more ourselves, first to emphasise female ‘efficacy’ in our uniquely open democracy, and by offering more members something to do at the outset. Members could write more articles geared towards women and BME groups. Considering that a quarter of the population likes cultural activities, we could provide more social events. And we could construct a ‘Teach Yourself Socialism’ A-Z Wiki on our website to systematise what is currently a rather random DIY approach to learning. Such efforts may not close the gap, but they could help to narrow it.

Paddy Shannon

Heyday, Mayday (2017)

Book Review from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Heyday: the 1850s and the Dawn of the Global Age', by Ben Wilson. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £8.99)

This history covers the period from 1851 to 1862, from the Great Exhibition in London to the early part of the American Civil War. Britain was at the height of its power at this time, producing 70 percent of the world’s steel in 1851, for instance, and the book’s original hardback edition was subtitled ‘Britain and the making of the modern world’. But there were challenges to this pre-eminence, mainly from Germany and the USA.

One of the themes is technological progress, from the development of the telegraph to the growth of railways, and how this related to the expansion of production, the emergence of a global market and the rapid dissemination of news and other information. The discovery of gold, in California and Australia, resulted in massive population movements, appalling consequences for native peoples and enormous riches (though usually not for those who dug the gold). The gold rush also led to the development of faster ships and an international market for grain and other goods, as there was little agriculture in the areas where the gold was to be found.

Behind all this, however, was slavery, and the dependence of much of the industrialised world on cotton grown in the American south. Over a billion pounds of raw cotton was shipped from ports such as New Orleans to the mills of Lancashire, and arguments over the future of slavery and the possible secession of the slave states resulted in much uncertainty. When the Civil War cut off supplies, the production of cotton on a mass scale spread to countries such as Egypt and India, where the price of cotton rose so much that local manufacturers could no longer afford to purchase it as a raw material.

The other commodity that exerted a global influence was opium, which Wilson claims ‘dictated geopolitics’. Britain had already gone to war with China to enforce its own terms on the opium trade, and this continued with the shelling of Guangzhou in 1856 and the military occupation of Beijing in 1860. Hong Kong had become ‘one of the key hubs of global trade and finance’. Lord Palmerston won a big parliamentary majority in the so-called Chinese Election of 1857, as British electors backed his bellicose policies in the Far East. ‘Free’trade was one of the rallying cries of nineteenth-century capitalism, but it was generally imposed and maintained at the point of a gun.

The 1840s had been a period of economic depression and food shortages, but the 1850s were seen as a decade of boom. Yet in 1857 there was a global financial crash, with bumper grain harvests leading to a big drop in prices, and a realisation that plenty of bank loans would not be repaid. A New York-based bank failed, and many businesses collapsed.

Wilson gives a vivid picture of all these developments and more, including the Crimean War, Russian expansion in the Far East, the Indian Rebellion, and events in Japan. Capitalism expanded on the way to becoming a truly global system, but hundreds of millions of people suffered from poverty and war while this was happening.  

Paul Bennett

A World Without Commodities (2017)

From the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

In explaining the conditions under which commodity production and money exist, Marx helps us understand the characteristics of a new society in which they would no longer exist. 

A new society without commodity production, money, and markets? A society where production is carried out solely to meet our human needs, with all the social wealth held in common. Why is this idea still so widely ridiculed as a utopian daydream, even by those who are deeply dissatisfied with the ‘status quo’? ‘That sounds nice but it’ll never work’—is the predictable response we hear. 

It seems to our critics that we socialists are offering nothing more than wishful thinking. But the notion that commodities, money, profit, private property, wages, etc. would no longer exist in a socialist world is actually premised on understanding why such things exist under capitalism in the first place. Once we have understood the why (and how) of such economic forms, it becomes possible to imagine the social conditions in which they would no longer have any room to exist.

This crucial relationship between understanding the fundamentals of capitalism and grasping the essence of socialism as its alternative points to the continued importance of Karl Marx’s Capital, particularly its first volume, which was first published 150 years ago. Even though Marx—as many have pointed out—does not provide a ‘blueprint’ for socialism in his book, his critique of capitalism brings the characteristics of that new society into view by clarifying the fundamental boundaries and limitations of capitalism as one historical ‘mode of production’ among others that had existed or might exist in the future.

A short article like this cannot cover all the ways that Capital traces the boundaries of capitalism beyond which lies a new and unprecedented society, so here we will limit ourselves to the crucial first chapter in which Marx analyses the commodity, which he describes as the ‘elementary form’ of wealth under the capitalist mode of production.

Use-value and exchange-value

Today the terms ‘commodity’ and ‘product’ have become almost synonymous because we are so accustomed to the reality of production for the market, but Marx clearly distinguishes between the two. He uses the term ‘commodity’ to indicate products that are produced for exchange, so that they not only have a ‘use-value’ that meets a particular human need (as any product does), but also an ‘exchange-value’ on the market.

Under capitalism, the vast majority of products take the commodity form, as Marx notes in the opening sentence of Capital: ‘The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”’.

There is ‘wealth’ in any mode of production, which is to say material products that meet human needs, but only when capitalism has taken hold of a society do the vast majority of those products take the form of ‘commodities’ bought and sold on the market. Although commodity production existed under some of the pre-capitalist modes of production, it was subordinate to the dominant production relations in which the products of human labour did not take the form of commodities.

And even under capitalism we can see some examples of products of labour that do not take the commodity form. The tomatoes grown in a family’s garden for its members’ own consumption, for instance, would have the use-value of satisfying their hunger, but no exchange-value under those circumstances.

At the end of the first section of Chapter 1, Marx sums up the distinction between product and commodity, noting that to produce commodities one must not only produce use-values, but use-values for others or social use-values, and that these useful things must not only be produced for others but also transferred to them by means of exchange. He notes, in contrast, how the ‘quit-rent-corn’ and ‘tithe-corn’ produced by the mediaeval peasant for the feudal lord and parson, respectively, are not commodities, even though produced for others, because there is no exchange between the two sides.

The distinction between product and commodity (and between use-value and exchange-value) is not at all difficult to grasp, but it has great significance to the case for socialism: it reminds us that there is nothing eternal about production for the market, which has, in fact, been the exception, not the rule, over the course of human history.

‘Social relations between things’

Marx explains the conditions under which products take the commodity form, writing that, ‘as a general rule, articles of utility become commodities, only because they are products of the labour of private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on their work independently of each other’; adding that these ‘producers do not come into social contact with each other until they exchange their products’. Since these private individuals or groups operate apart from each other, with an eye only to the market, it is only in the act of exchange that the ‘specific social character of each producer’s labour . . . show[s] itself’.

This state of affairs is quite different from the examples raised earlier of the gardening family or the medieval peasant. In such cases, the social relations between those involved in production and distribution are clear from the outset, rather than being established by means of exchange. The family members already form a unit, just as the (subordinate) relationship between peasant and feudal lord is clear to begin with, and the products of labour produced under those conditions are then distributed in line with those specific relations

Instead of ‘direct social relations between individuals at work’, what we have under capitalism, as a system of generalised commodity production, are ‘material relations between persons and social relations between things’. This creates what Marx calls the ‘fetishism of commodities’, where ‘definite social relations between men’ assume ‘in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things’.

An overriding characteristic of capitalism as a society of generalised commodity production is the roundabout way in which production is carried out. Instead of the members of society directly producing useful things to meet their own individual and common needs, we have production carried out for the market. And only those goods that are successfully sold can meet those human needs and constitute a part of the aggregate social labour. This is an almost ridiculously complex way to organise production.

Yet those who take this system for granted dismiss a more straightforward and transparent approach to production and distribution as infeasible. Part of the reason is the notion that without the ‘invisible hand’ of the market to regulate production and exchange, a society would bog down in hopeless inefficiency or descend into the despotism of a select group dictating production and consumption. But really it is the capitalist system itself, as a system of commodity production, that is mired in inefficiency and inequality.

As already noted, objects of utility can only meet human needs under this system if they are successfully sold—otherwise they will rot or rust on the shelf. On top of this, society is unequally divided between a small minority of those who own and operate the means of production (whether as individuals, corporate directors, or state bureaucrats), on the one hand, and the overwhelming majority of workers obliged to sell their labour-power to those owners in return for a wage.

But even the ruling class under capitalism is not the master of the market economy. Marx explains in chapter one that the exchange of commodities is fundamentally determined by the labour time socially necessary to produce them, rather than being under the conscious control of human beings. In this way, the economy manifests itself as a force of nature, whose behaviour is far more difficult to anticipate than the weather. We live in a social world that is beyond human control, even though production is carried out by human beings.

Getting along without commodities

Near the end of chapter one, Marx contrasts the absurdly complex and roundabout system of capitalist commodity production with other ways to organise production, where products would not take the commodity form. These are some of the most illuminating passages in all of Capital regarding the possibility of a new society beyond capitalism.

Marx begins, tongue-in-cheek, by looking at the fictional case of Robinson Crusoe, who is producing for his own needs, using the resources available on his island. He must do a ‘little useful work of various sorts’ to satisfy his wants, but he knows that ‘his labour, whatever its form, is but different modes of human labour’. ‘All the relations of Robinson and the objects that form this wealth of his own creation are here so simple and clear as to be intelligible without exertion.' None of the objects of utility that Robinson creates would confront him as commodities, since there would be no need for any sort of exchange.

The second example Marx raises is production in Europe in the Middle Ages. What ‘characterises the social relations of production’ here is ‘personal dependence’. That is, ‘instead of independent man, we find everyone dependent, serfs and lords, vassals and suzerains, laymen and clergy’. But precisely because these social relations of personal dependence exist from the outset and form the ‘ground-work of society’, Marx explains, ‘there is no necessity for labour and its products to assume a fantastic form different from their reality’; rather ‘they take the shape . . . of services in kind and payments in kind’. The social relations between the individuals engaged in production ‘are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour’.

In his next example, Marx looks at production in the case of ‘labour in common or directly associated labour’, taking as his example the ‘patriarchal industries of a peasant family’ that produces some articles for their home use’. ‘The labour-power of each individual . . . operates in this case merely as a definite portion of the whole labour-power of the family’, much like the example raised above of a family growing tomatoes in its garden. The aim of production is to meet the needs of the family members, rather than supply the market, so once again we are dealing with simple products or objects of utility—not commodities.

If we expand the case of Robinson or the family to a social scale, we have in essence the production relations in a new socialist world. This is what Marx sketches in his next example, where he describes an ‘association of free men’ who are ‘carrying on their work with the means of production in common’ so that the ‘labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community’.

The only difference in the characteristics of labour in this society with the example of Robinson on his island, Marx explains, is that now everything is social instead of individual. One portion of what is produced would be ‘consumed by the members as means of subsistence’, while another portion would serve as ‘fresh means of production’ and thus remain social.

There is no need in this society for its members to confront each other as individual commodity producers or to first come into a relationship via exchange because they are already in a relationship from the outset as the common holders of the wealth and resources of society, much like the ties between family members in Marx’s earlier example. In socialism, therefore, the ‘social relations of the individual producers’ are ‘perfectly simple and intelligible’ and there is no need for commodities or money to exist.

Here we have only scratched the surface of how Marx’s analysis of capitalism can stimulate an understanding of the characteristics of socialism as a commodity- and money-free world. The better we understand the essential characteristics of capitalism and how they determine the social problems we face, the clearer will be our image of socialism as a realistic alternative and means to overcoming those problems. 

Michael Schauerte

Cooking the Books: Another One Bites the Dust (2017)

The Cooking the Books column from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Venezuela. Another country to add to the long list of failed attempts to make capitalism work in the interest of the excluded majority of wage and salary workers.

It began well enough with the election of the populist army officer, Hugo Chavez, as president in 1999. His government diverted oil revenues (Venezuela has more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia) from luxuries for the rich to provide better housing, health care and education and subsidised food for the poor.

He proclaimed himself a socialist and that his government was implementing '21st century socialism'. North American and West European Trotskyists beat the drum for him. Some moved to Venezuela to help build 'socialism' there. For them, this was it. But it didn't last.

With the world-wide slump that followed on from the crash of 2008, the demand for oil fell and so too did its price. The Venezuelan government resorted to printing money to maintain its social reforms and then to price controls to try to prevent the inevitable rise in prices this led to. A black market developed. The currency depreciated and import controls were introduced. Venezuela ended up with a siege economy.

Chavez died in 2013 and his successor, Nicolas Maduro, was left to pick up the pieces and face the growing discontent of the better-paid workers.

For apologists for ordinary capitalism, Venezuela represents another failure of socialism. According to the obnoxious Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, writing in the Sun (3 August), 'Venezuela isn't remote from socialism. It's a textbook example. Chavez and Maduro set out to replace the market with a system of state production and distribution.'

Actually, they wanted to regulate the market using state intervention to make it work to benefit people especially the poor, not to replace it (not that socialism is a system of state production and distribution, though it will replace the market). Hannan had earlier inadvertently let slip the correct characterisation of the economic system in Venezuela when he quoted Noam Chomsky:

'I never described Chavez's state capitalist government as “socialist” or even hinted at such an absurdity. It was quite remote from socialism.'

Incidentally, this must be the first time that Sun readers have been introduced to the concept of state capitalism. Chomsky, however, was being a bit disingenuous as he is on record as expressing support for what the Venezuelan government was doing. Hannan quotes him as having previously talked of a 'better world' being created there. Taking both of Chomsky’s statements together, they imply that he thinks that a policy of state capitalism can create a better world.

Well, it can't. The most it can do – and did do to an extent in Venezuela – is to bring about a temporary improvement in the living conditions of some workers. The point is that this can't last, because capitalism cannot be made to work to meet people's needs. Pursued over a long period – and the Chavists have been in power for 18 years now – such a policy will fail, creating the sort of economic and political conditions that now exist in Venezuela.

Venezuela represents a failure not of socialism but of government-financed reformism. Yet another.

The Slump (2017)

Book Review from the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Long Depression'. By Michael Roberts. (Haymarket Books. 2016)

There is a tendency within some flavours of Marxism that has been said to have correctly predicted 6 of the last 3 recessions. The temptation to rely on inevitable crisis and the collapse of capitalism has a silvery allure for some. This book does not join that chorus, but it does seek to make crises of capitalism subject to (at least theoretically) predictable laws.

Roberts positions himself as a heterodox within the already heterodox school of Marxian economists. He sees Marx’s examination of the tendency for the rate of profit to decline as the root cause of recessions and depressions (he defines a depression as: 'countries growing at well below their previous rate of output . . . and below their long term average' and he notes the usual definition of a recession is: “two consecutive quarters in real GDP”).

He sees a potential explanation for Kondratiev long waves in his model:

'Depressions…appear when there is a conjunction of downward phases in cycles of capitalism. Every depression has come when the cycle in clusters of innovation have matured and become “saturated”; when world production and commodity prices enter a downward phase, namely, that inflation is slowing and turns into deflation; and above all, when the cycle of profitability is in its downward phase. The conjunction of these different cycles only happens every sixty to seventy years.'

Following Marx, he defines the rate of profit as the surplus value (S) divided by variable capital, wages (V) plus constant capital, the value of machines, tools and ingredients (C). He notes that the tendency is for the organic composition of capital (the ratio of C/V) to increase: that is for machinery and tools to replace human labour, as capitalists compete to improve the productivity of the labour they employ. This then reduces surplus value, leading to a withdrawal of investment.

'The continual process of an upward cycle in profitability –as the rate of surplus value rises faster than the organic composition, in turn replaced by a downward cycle as the law as such gains ascendancy –explains the cyclical nature of capitalist accumulation'.

The problem with this approach is that it lacks explanatory power for why crises involve stranded capital. In his chapter on the rate of profit, Marx discusses how the falling rate of profit is compatible with ongoing growth in the mass of profits (due to expansion, investment, etc.) This is before he identifies the counteracting tendencies (increasing intensity of exploitation; depressing wages below the value of labour power; cheapening elements of constant capital; relative overpopulation; foreign trade; and the increase of stock capital). Roberts does address these counteracting tendencies, but sees crisis arising out of them temporarily being overwhelmed by the rising organic composition of capital.

If it were a falling rate of profit alone, merger and expansion would be sufficient to escape and renew growth for a while longer.

The Socialist Party has tended towards the view that it is disproportionate investment and expansion of production that causes crises and slumps. There are strict conditions to enable capital expansion, accumulation and reproduction going on, requiring all the different branches of industry to broadly grow together. Since each capital is seeking to grow at the fastest possible pace, driven largely by the expectation of profit, it becomes inevitable that one sector over-invests and has its reproduction choked by relative under-investment either in consumption or in key components.

This view of crisis means they are not governed by an underlying regular process, but by an ever increasingly likelihood of accident and happenstance. Even a state-run economy could not overcome these tendencies, since even if it were possible to plan every commodity exchange in such a way as to provide growth: accidents, happenstance and misjudgement would still mean inevitable crises.

Roberts provides a wealth of empirical data showing long run trends towards a declining general rate of profit. He has debated with Paul Mattick Jr. whether official statistics can meaningfully be mapped onto Marx's categories ( Link -- this is worth reading in itself). We agree that they cannot least because of the level of misrepresentation and manipulation that goes into formulating them.

At the least though, if the measures show distinct trends, that is useful for trying to read the developments of the economy. His tables showing all the US recessions since the mid 19th century provide a salutary reminder of how frequent and endemic they are: indeed, we would agree that they are not just inevitable, but essential to capitalism’s ongoing existence, as they are followed by the clearing of bad investments and creation of new room for growth in the economy.

Where we would certainly agree with Roberts is that the only way within capitalism, ultimately, to exit a crisis is the destruction of the value of capital; and, further, that capitalism will eventually find new scope to grow (although at what human cost in misery?) unless the working class take a conscious political choice to abolish capitalism: that is the only way in which it will collapse.

Pik Smeet

Analysing an Economic System (2017)

From the September 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

One criticism of Marx’s Capital is that, written 150 years ago, it is describing conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain which have long since disappeared. It does do this, but this is to miss the point. Marx was analysing an economic system, not the particular political, sociological and historical conditions under which it happened to operate in his day. It was written not, or not just, as a criticism of conditions in mid-Victorian Britain but as an analysis of capitalism in general, of the capitalist economic system as such irrespective of the conditions in which it operated.

As Marx was writing in mid-19th century Britain, most of his concrete examples are drawn from the experience of capitalism in and up to that period. Then, the main industry was textiles whose products were exported throughout the world; the main source of energy was burning coal in steam engines; and the dominant form of ownership of means of production was a factory owned and managed by an individual capitalist family.

Marx’s examples are drawn from the 1860s but, even before he died in 1883, things had begun to change. The production of machines was becoming more important than textile production; coal was about to be used to raise steam to drive electricity-generating turbines; the joint stock company with limited liability was becoming the dominant form of capitalist ownership. But these developments did not alter how capitalism worked as an economic system. It continued to operate in the same basic way that Marx had analysed.

Technology and the political and sociological framework are even more changed today but capitalism as an economic system still works in the same way. The fact that Marx never saw a motor car or an aeroplane or radio, television, electronic computers or knew of nuclear power or genetic engineering does not affect his theory.

Political economy

The subtitle of Capital, when it was translated into English in 1887, was ‘A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production’. It was this, but a strict translation of the original German would have been ‘A Critique of Political Economy’, a subtitle used in more modern translations.

‘Political Economy’ was the name applied by David Ricardo, author of The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1821), and others to the study that they were engaged in of the production and distribution of wealth in a market economy. They imagined that they were discovering a natural process just as other scientists were. Marx’s major criticism of them was that in reality they were analysing one historically-evolved, and ultimately passing, way of organising the production and distribution of wealth, which he called ‘the capitalist mode of production’.

Nevertheless, the ‘economic laws’ they posited still acted as if they were natural laws, even though they came into being only under specific social and historical conditions. The Political Economists saw the ‘natural’ way to organise the production and distribution of wealth, and which they regarded as being distorted by political interference, as: factories and other workplaces owned by capitalists; production carried out by wage-workers; and the capitalist owners aiming to make a profit by investing money in production and selling what was produced at prices established by the market.

On the basis of these assumptions (and policy recommendations) they sought to work out how wealth would be distributed between capitalists, wage-workers, and those who owned land and other natural resources. They also sought to work out how the prices of goods produced for sale (which they called ‘commodities’) were determined. They correctly identified this as having something to do with the time taken to produce them.

Marx made his own contribution to this analysis and in particular solved the mystery of how profit could arise if all commodities exchanged at their labour-time values. His solution was to make a distinction between what workers expended in production (‘labour’) and what they sold (their ‘labour power’) and for which they were paid a full price as their wages. He showed that profit arose not in circulation but in production, out of the difference between the value of what wage workers produced, which belonged to their capitalist employer, and the value of what they were paid for the sale of their labour-power, a difference he called ‘surplus value’.

The adepts of political economy didn’t like this any more than they liked being told that what they were studying was not the natural laws of production and distribution. Their successors, realising where a labour theory of value might lead, abandoned this approach and began to analyse the economic system in terms of how businesses experienced it.

Greed is irrelevant

The concept of ‘surplus value’ is key to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an economic system. He saw the driving force behind production under capitalism as being to maximise the amount of surplus value. This was not because capitalists were greedy, but was something imposed on them by the economic laws of capitalism. These laws forced capitalists to re-invest in production as additional capital most of the profits they made.

Capitalists, he argued, were in competition with each other to sell their products and make a profit. To win what he called ‘the battle of competition’ firms had to reduce the unit cost of what they produced so as to be in a position to sell more cheaply than their rivals without impingeing on their own profits. A firm could achieve this by reducing the time needed to produce its product, or, what is the same thing, increasing the productivity of its workforce, but this involved equipping them with more efficient machines, bought out of previously made profits. The first firm to do this would make a temporary ‘super-profit’ but this would disappear as other firms, to stay in the race for profits, also bought more productive machines and the market price for the product fell, restoring profits to their ‘normal’ level.

Capitalist competition thus results in a race to reduce costs by increased productivity, mainly through the installation of more efficient machines. The tendency under capitalism is for most profits to be reinvested in production as further capital, for more and more capital to be accumulated by being invested in expanding the means of production and so both production and employment (though the first at a faster rate than the second). This economic ‘growth’ is built-in to capitalism and is not a free choice of those running capitalist enterprises, so it can’t be reversed. It’s a drive that will last as long as capitalism does.

Forms of enterprise

One consequence of Marx’s analysis of capitalism as an economic system operating according to its own economic laws is that the institutional form in which a capital is embodied and treated as a single unit – whether the individual capitalist owner of Marx’s day, a limited liability company (what in America is called a ‘corporation’), a state-owned enterprise, or even a worker-run cooperative – is incidental. What is decisive is that, whatever the institutional form, commodities are being produced for sale on a market with a view to profit; which means that the enterprises are subject to the economic laws of capitalism and have to keep on re-investing profits in more modern machinery in order to keep costs down and stay in the battle of competition.

Also incidental is the distribution of that part of profits that is not re-invested in production but is used for the consumption of those who manage units of capital. Those who 'personify capital' (Marx's term) can be individual capitalists, company directors, big shareholders, or government officials. They don’t have to be bloated men in top hats smoking a cigar. In the history of capitalism there has also been a wide variety of personal beneficiaries of capitalist production, from individual capitalist owners (an almost distinct breed these days) to top level state officials, civil and/or military. In fact the Britain of Marx's day was itself exceptional in having a landed aristocracy in a position to command a share, in the form of ground-rents and royalties, of the surplus value extracted from the workers by their immediate employers.

That Marx’s analysis of capitalism was not tied to conditions in mid-century Victorian Britain is shown by the fact that the same economic laws, the same economic drive to accumulate capital out of surplus value created by wage-labour, operated also in the former USSR. The institutional framework there – the absence of individual capitalist ownership and the almost total state ownership of the means of production, and the distribution of the consumption part of surplus value amongst various layers of state officials – was quite different from what obtained in the West. Yet capitalism existed there. Even the abolition of private capitalists and capitalist private property rights is compatible with the existence of capitalism.

Marx’s analysis of the way capitalism works is valid wherever there is sectional ownership and control of the means of wealth production and where production is carried out by wage-workers for sale on a market with a view to profit. As this is undoubtedly still the case today, Marx’s Capital remains valid and relevant.

Adam Buick