Voice From The Back: Coal, steel and blood (2002)

The Voice From The Back Column from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Coal, steel and blood

For generations apologists for capitalism have churned out the lie that modern war is caused by different ideologies. We have been told that the First World War was a war against militarism and the Second was a war for democracy against fascism. The socialist view is that war is the logical outcome of economic rivalry and now one of the pillars of capitalism confirms our view, inadvertently while he discourses on another subject. As Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, the Italian economist who is now a major influence at the European Central Bank, has written: “It can hardly be denied that establishing joint supra-national management of coal and steel – the two fundamental natural resources of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, over which France, Germany and the rest of Europe fought cruel wars was a highly political project.” Observer (9 December).

The cause of poverty

For almost a hundred years the Labour Party have argued that poverty can be abolished inside capitalism. Socialists have always argued that capitalism with its class divisions and production for profit is the cause of poverty. The latest figures on Labour’s failure to deal with poverty inside capitalism illustrate our point. “More families are classified as very poor now than under the last full year of Conservative government, according to new research. The number of people living in households with less than 40 per cent of the average income in 1999-2000 was 8.3 million, 100,000 more than in 1996-97, a study published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says.” Times (10 December).

Terror thugs and terrorist teachers

Under the heading “Terror thugs groom future suicide killers” The New York Post (11 December) reported that kids between 4 and 8 years of age were being taught how to be suicidal terrorists by the Palestine terrorist group Hamas. What they didn’t report is that the US government are also guilty of “robbing kids of their childhood”. “On another front, the Pentagon has succeeded in establishing its first Military Institute, as a public middle school in Oakland, CA. The school’s 1,200 cadets, whose average age is twelve, wear uniforms, perform military drills, and are instructed by military approved teachers.” (WWW.CITIZEN-SOLDIER.ORG).

Who needs the brain scan?

One of Labour’s election boasts was that it would improve the NHS, but what is the reality? “A medical scanner costing millions of pounds is being used to treat pets at an NHS hospital which does not have enough nurses to treat its patients . . . News of the animal treatment scheme comes as the Bedford Hospital Trust has warned it will have to close an operating theatre to avoid a £3 million deficit by the end of the financial year.” Observer (23 December). It is good news for well-heeled pet owners though. A London divorce lawyer was delighted that her 13-year-old poodle had a brain scan and prompt medical treatment at the hospital. This must be a great consolation to workers waiting for treatment on Labour’s new, “improved” NHS.

Inappropriate tears

After the horrendous events at the Twin Towers the outgoing Mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani talked about the site being devoted to a memorial to those killed. The new mayor Mike Bloomberg would now like to distance himself from such foolish, unelectable sentiments. “Mr Bloomberg all but ruled out using the whole site for a memorial. He said that the value of the 16 acre property and the demands of the area for jobs and businesses meant that it would be inappropriate to devote the whole of the space to a single monument.” Times (5 January). Sympathy, condolences and sentiment are all very well, but inside capitalism profit is the driving force, so let us not have inappropriate tears. Although as human beings, they are the only ones we’ve got. Nearly 3,000 human beings died that morning. We still cry, inappropriately, of course, at the madness of capitalism.

Scandal? What scandal?

Under the headline “Scandal of NHS beds auction” (Observer, 6 January) reported that more than 10,000 private patients were treated last year in the UK’s NHS hospitals. That these patients jumped the queue for treatment and cited the case of NHS patients having to wait six months to a year for a heart by-pass operation while for a fee of £15,000 “they can be operated on almost immediately by a surgeon of their choice”. So where is the scandal? Inside capitalism if you are poor you can be homeless, if you are rich you can live in a beautiful house. If poor you will probably get a sub-standard education, if rich you can get the best that money can buy. That is the way capitalism operates – if you can afford it you can buy the best medical treatment, if not get to the back of the queue.

This is progress?

All the slaughter, maiming and terror of the recent Afghanistan conflict was justified according to the Western press by the wonderful improvements in human rights in that country. A report in the Brussels newspaper (Le Soir, 19 December) would seem to indicate that this is far from the truth. “Public executions, stonings and amputations are going to continue in Afghanistan in accordance with the Sharia law, a top Afghan magistrate has stated, while promising more fairness and clemency than during the time of the Taliban. “For example, the Taliban used to hang the bodies of victims in public for four days”, the judge Ullah Zarif explained, “we will only expose them for a short time, say 15 minutes”. As for those guilty of adultery, they will certainly be stoned ‘but we will use smaller stones’, judge Zarif said.”

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sofia Whitcombe began her day with the startling realization that she might not be exactly who she thought she was. “My whole life, I thought I was a Capricorn,” the 25-year-old New York publicist said. “Now I’m a Sagittarius? I don’t feel like a Sagittarius!” Countless people were astonished by the “news” in Monday’s Star Tribune in which Minneapolis astronomy instructor Parke Kunkle affirmed that the Earth’s “wobble” has shifted the zodiac signs.

The buzz has raced across the Web like a shooting star. Some people seemed angry. “I believe it’s a zodiac scam,” said Jose Arce, 38, from Fort Lee, N.J., who runs a body shop. “I’ve known myself to be a Sagittarius, I believe, since I was born. So to come up now with some new sign? It’s unacceptable!”

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A bluefin tuna fetched a record 32.49m yen (£254,000) today at the first auction of the year at Tsukiji market in Tokyo, but the fish’s growing popularity across Asia has raised fears it will soon be fished into commercial extinction. The 342kg tuna easily beat the previous record, set exactly 10 years ago when a 202kg fish fetched 20.2m yen. Market officials are accustomed to seeing prices rise during the new year auction at Tsukiji, the world’s biggest fish market, but today’s winning bid was unexpected:

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Catholics who receive communion at Sunday mass believe the sacred wafer they swallow contains the body of Christ. New York health officials have warned the parishioners of a Long Island church that the wafers they received on Christmas Day may have also contained hepatitis:

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Everyone curses the taxman, but Romanian witches angry about having to pay up for the first time are planning to use cat excrement and dead dogs to cast spells on the president and government today. Also among Romania’s newest taxpayers are fortune tellers – but they probably should have seen it coming:

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Men and women have been banned from shaking hands in a district of Somalia controlled by the Islamist group al-Shabab. Under the ban imposed in the southern town of Jowhar, men and women who are not related are also barred from walking together or chatting in public. The BBC’s Mohamed Moalimuu in Mogadishu says the penalty would probably be a public flogging:

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Using an expanded definition of poverty, the U.S. Census Bureau said it determined that 15.7 percent of Americans — 47.8 million — live in poverty:

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Tiny Tips (2012)

The Tiny Tips column from the January 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Saudi authorities have executed a woman convicted of practicing magic and sorcery:

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In Indonesia the province of Aceh adheres to the strict precepts of Sharia law. If caught by the religious police, residents face public flogging and prison. Still, the rich have ways around it:

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A shoulder-mounted laser that emits a blinding wall of light capable of repelling rioters is to be trialled by police under preparations to prevent a repeat of this summer’s looting and arson:

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Rather than asking how the financiers would make a living if we forbade interest, we should be asking, “why have financiers at all?” We are the only species on the planet that uses money. Why must we pay to live on the planet we’re born on?

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It’s an old dream among anthropologists — one that goes back to Rousseau. In 1968, Graeber’s own teacher, Marshall Sahlins, wrote an essay, “The Original Affluent Society,” which maintained that the hunters and gatherers of the Paleolithic period rejected the “Neolithic Great Leap Forward” because they correctly saw that the advancements it promised in tool-making and agriculture would reduce their leisure time. Graeber approves. He thinks it’s a mistake when unions ask for higher wages when they should go back to picketing for fewer working hours:

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The results of an experiment in which rats opened a door to free trapped cage-mates astonished scientists. No reward was needed and not even the lure of chocolate distracted the rescuing rats. ‘’This is the first evidence of helping behaviour triggered by empathy in rats,’’ said US study leader Professor Jean Decety:

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According to current estimates, Indian men outnumber women by nearly 40 million. That startling gender gap, activists say, is the result of gendercide. Nearly 50,000 female fetuses are aborted every month and untold numbers of baby girls are abandoned or murdered. “It’s the obliteration of a whole class, race, of human beings. It’s half the population of India,” said women’s rights activist Ruchira Gupta of Apne Aap Women Worldwide. Part of the reason is money. Girls are a financial burden to their parents, who must pay expensive dowries to marry them off:

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Every now and again, one reads an editorial that stops the reader in his tracks. On 8 December, with the headline “War Inevitable To Tackle Indian Water Aggression,” Pakistan’s Urdu-language Nawa-e Waqt, issued such a screed. Nawa-e Waqt bluntly commented on India’s Kashmiri water polices and Islamabad’s failure up to now to stop New Delhi’s efforts to construct hydroelectric dams in Kashmir, “India should be forcibly prevented from constructing these dams. If it fails to constrain itself, we should not hesitate in launching nuclear war because there is no solution except this.”

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Deadly prayers, twisted knickers and motorcycles (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the February 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Saudi Labor minister faces “Deadly Prayers” from angry clerics’ ran the headline on the Al Arabiya News website (26 December 2012). When you read an opening paragraph like that you just know, don’t you, that the more you read, the more bizarre it’s going to get?

‘A group of religious figures in Saudi Arabia have threatened to strike the labor minister who seeks to create jobs for women with “deadly prayers” ’, ran the story. ‘They threatened to pray that he gets cancer like his predecessor Ghazi al-Gosaibi, who died of the disease in 2010’. And to prove that he meant business, one of them assured reporters: ‘I supplicated against a senior official at the ministry and he received the (cancer) disease and he died’.

They don’t mess about with their prayers in Saudi Arabia, do they? And while, as threats from Islamic extremists go, having the ‘deadly prayers’ of a group of deranged clerics unleashed at you probably isn’t on the same level as a fatwa, it probably is extremely noisy and inconvenient, and God knows what the neighbours must think.

To a non-believer the most disturbing thing about being threatened with ‘deadly prayers’ by 200 odd clerics (well, very odd clerics in this case) must be that they assume that everyone else is as ignorant and gullible as they are. But what was it that got them so wound up?

The cause of the problem was the obviously unsuitable nature of the work that was being proposed for women to do. It was a ‘Westernisation plan,’ the Minister, Adel Fakeih, was told. ‘Your ministry has thrown our daughters in places that don’t suit their values’.

The unsuitable work for women that the Minister was proposing, believe it or not, and that the clerics were getting their religious knickers in a twist about, was the plan to allow women to work in lingerie shops instead of men.

Meanwhile in the Indonesian province of Aceh where strict sharia law is observed the Mayor, Suaidi Yahya, says he intends to save women’s ‘morals and behaviours’ and has ordered them not to straddle motorbikes behind male drivers.

Under new regulations women motorcycle passengers are only allowed to ride side-saddle because straddling the bike seat violates Islamic values. ‘When you see a woman straddle, she looks like a man’ he said. ‘But if she sits side-saddle, she looks like a woman’. And he added, helpfully, that women sitting side-saddle only rarely fell off.

But ‘how to ride a motorbike is not regulated in Sharia’ protested one local. ‘There is no mention of it in the Koran’. And it does seem that the new regulation has not been fully thought through. What if the woman is driving the motorcycle? Should her crash helmet be worn over or under the burka? What position should she adopt when riding a push bike? What about two women on a tandem? Which side should she face when riding side-saddle?

Well the answer to the last one is obvious. – Whichever side faces Mecca. Although care will be needed to face the proper direction when turning corners.

NW

Religion and Conflict in Africa (2014)

From the April 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Utter disgust with the repetitive global political and economic crises, as well as the complete failure of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ as a political alternative to capitalism, has made many ordinary people in Africa embrace Christianity or Islam.

In Africa the word ‘socialism’ has been associated with single-party political dictatorships and as such remains resented. But this is a matter of Lenin’s misunderstanding the political and intellectual designation of scientific socialism.

Many ordinary people in Africa still believe that the economic underdevelopment of Africa is a product of neo-colonialism, meaning that it is a deliberate political and economic strangulation of Africans by the developed nations.

The legacy of the slave trade has a negative impact upon the racial and political prejudices of Africans. Ideas like gender equality and same-sex marriage seem to be alien from an African cultural and traditional perspective. Thus religions portraying  God as an all-powerful and knowing authority above the conventional political systems do find fertile ground in African communities today.

A glimpse through African political and social history reveals that Christianity and Islam only came to Africa during the period of the slave trade. But this is not to underplay the fact that African diverse tribes had some form of worshipping God or Mwari (Shona word for ‘God).

Islam, or Mohammedanism, was the religion of the slave traders. The European missionaries followed in the wake of European explorers. They built schools and churches and restrained people from practising witchcraft, slave trading, ancestral shrines and so on. Christianity could be said to have had a positive impact on African communities in the sense that it was the missionaries who first brought a formal education to Africa. At the same time Christianity laid a preparation for the colonisation of Africa by European imperialist nations.

Islam originated from an Arabic culture, supposedly by the prophet Mohamed and no-one else. Its teachings are vested in the Koran. Islam is the religion of most Arabs and in Africa, outside the Arabic north, it is also found practised in communities in Kenya, Tanzania and Zanzibar.

Islam has come to characterise itself as a militant and anti-western type of religion in Africa today. It is a fact that Islamic fundamentalists tend to be politically autonomous and this gives rise to conflicts. Militant Islam as a religion in Africa is enmeshed in terrorism, a political and cultural nostalgia against west European political and economic ideals (democracy and Christian values). The practice of Sharia Law in African countries in which Islam is a major religion is a naked and orchestrated reaction against Christian morals and ethics.

Islam today appears as a political rather than a spiritual Jihad. In Egypt the conservative military generals had to overthrow the Muslim Brotherhood of President Morsi because of the spiralling clashes between Muslims and Coptic Christians. In Nigeria the Islamic movement called Boko Haram has increased its attacks on Christian communities, oil installations and government institutions.

So-called Islamic insurgents are on the loose in the African countries where Islam is a major form of religion. In this sense Islam as a religion has brought much pain and suffering upon Africans.

Both Islam and Christianity anticipate the end of capitalism as it currently is and its replacement by a hierarchical structure. Whereas to Christians the spiritual revolution is expected to originate in the consciousness of the individual, Muslims believe that it can only be realised through a political Jihad.

It appears strange to Christians in Africa that church attendance has been on the decline in European countries, where the role of the church has been relegated to the pulpit. It is only in the USA where Christianity is a flourishing religion. There Islam is associated with Islamic terrorism and the two are not separated. Indeed, the American support of Israel in its role in the political conflicts in the Middle East seems to be the major factor that has given impetus to the Islamic political Jihad.

Kephas Mulenga

Religious Police and Women Drivers (2013)

The Halo Halo! column from the November 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Government advice to anyone visiting Saudi Arabia includes the following:

‘Saudi Arabia is an exclusively Islamic (Muslim) kingdom and Islam governs nearly every aspect of life. The public practice of any form of religion other than Islam is prohibited in Saudi Arabia. Severe punishment including imprisonment and deportation can result should such activities come to the attention of the authorities.’ ‘… certain sexual behaviour like adultery or homosexual acts carry the death penalty in Saudi Arabia. So does apostasy (renunciation of the Muslim faith). The death penalty is carried out in public, usually by beheading’ (www.gov.uk/living-in-saudi-arabia).

Yes, in Saudi Arabia Allah doesn’t mess about when making sure his laws are observed. And to keep an eye on what’s going on, according to the Koran, (Surah 82) we each have two angels watching over our shoulders recording everything we do (and yes, some people do take this nonsense seriously).

And, as if that were not enough, in Saudi Arabia Allah also has his own religious police force, the ‘Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice’ to keep an eye on things and enforce Sharia law.

During the recent National Day celebrations for example, when nationwide festivities were planned, they announced a ban on singing and dancing in public and warned that violators would be punished.

In another incident in March 2002, in order to preserve moral values, they prevented schoolgirls from escaping a burning school because the girls were not wearing headscarves, and were not accompanied by a male guardian. Fifteen girls died, and many more were injured as a result.

Exactly what qualities are required for the job is not clear, but claims have been made that they are staffed by ex-convicts whose only qualification is that they memorised the Koran in prison in order to reduce their sentence.

Another of their duties is to enforce the ban on women drivers – only men are allowed to hold driving licences in Saudi Arabia. Although the ban is informal (there is no section on driving violations in the Koran) it is strictly enforced. There is, however, a growing campaign to overturn the ban and activists are calling for women to take to the roads in protest.

This, of course, is seen as a threat to public morality by the devout, not to mention being a danger to the women themselves. One cleric, Sheik Saleh al-Lohaidan issued the following warning:

‘If a woman drives a car, not out of pure necessity, that could have negative physiological medical impacts as functional and physiological medical studies show that it automatically affects the ovaries and pushes the pelvis upwards. That is why we find those who regularly drive have children with clinical problems of varying degrees’.

Could this ridiculous situation get any more absurd? Well, yes, it could. Back in 2010, in a completely unrelated controversy, another nutty cleric, Sheik Abdel Mohsen Obeikan announced that to overcome problems caused by the illicit mixing between sexes, women could be alone with, or appear without a veil in front of an unrelated male if he drank her breast milk. This, the good cleric explained, would establish a mother-son bond in Islamic tradition.

A group of women protesters, who until now have had to rely on male drivers in order to get about, are now threatening (if that is the right word?) to breastfeed their drivers if they are not allowed to drive themselves.

And no, this is not a sketch from an old Monty Python show.

NW

Cooking the Books: Capitalism is Sharia-Compliant (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the June 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sharia law bans lending money at interest, denouncing it, as Christianity used to, as ‘usury.’ So how come there can be such a thing as ‘Islamic banking?’

Sharia commercial law emerged as a way of regulating trade in pre-capitalist times in those parts of the world where Islam was the dominant religion. This trade was fairly extensive (think Silk Road) and involved buying goods in one place and transporting them to another where they could be sold at a higher price that would more than cover the expenses. Buying cheap to sell dear. Mohammed himself had been such a merchant.

Sharia commercial law was perfectly happy with a merchant making a money profit and distinguished this from a moneylender’s interest by seeing it as coming from the merchant using goods rather than money. The profit derived from the goods, not money. It is this concept that modern Muslim theologians have built on to get round their religion’s ban on making money out of money; this is all right as long as it involves using goods in the course of making the money.

In fact sharia commercial law developed many of the same practices that later emerged in Christian Europe. For instance, the word ‘cheque’ comes from the Arabic word sakk. The (London) Times Raconteur supplement on ‘Islamic Finance’ (16 April) quoted Harris Irfan, described as ‘a seasoned Islamic finance professional,’ as saying:

‘Trade finance ... fits neatly into the Sharia system because, rather than providing a loan and charging interest on it, the bank effectively buys the asset and then sells it to the end-buyer, with the mark-up being the profit.’

Discounting trade bills was precisely one of the origins of banking in Western Europe. There are ‘Islamic mortgages’ too:

‘Common forms of Islamic mortgages include ijara, in which the homebuyer pays rent until they purchase the property outright by a given period, and diminishing musharaka, which is an equity partnership where the homebuyer and mortgage-provider share ownership of the property until it is bought back in monthly instalments.’

The trick, then, is to make a loan of money appear to be a loan of a non-money asset and the Muslim theologians will declare it sharia-compliant. Property speculation easily passes the test as, like the merchants of old, it involves buying something cheap to sell dear later.

But what about bonds? Surely these, as an arrangement whereby you lend a government or a company money and receive regular fixed payments and get your money back at the end, can’t be sharia-compliant? But no, Islamic financiers have developed a product called ‘sukuk’ which is a bond in all but name.

This gets by the clerics by claiming that the stream of income that provides the regular payments comes from the asset in which the money is invested, not from the money itself. Actually, this is the case. Which means, ironically, that sharia commercial law has a more accurate explanation for banks’ interest than that of most economics textbooks. Despite appearances, money can’t produce more money out of nothing. The source of interest is always in the end, and in however roundabout a way, past or future production; in other words, from the use of non-money assets.

Sharia law condemns the appearance but not the substance; in fact it emphasises the substance. In Marxist terms it condemns M-M but not M-C-M (where M is money and C is commodity). Which is why it had no objection to capitalist production when it developed. Capitalism, Muslim capitalists will be pleased to learn, is sharia-compliant.