The Rear View: Everything’s for sale (2020)

The Rear View Column from the November 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everything’s for sale

This is the title of a ‘…shocking film on the privatization of American public lands. “We’ve arrived at a moment,” Herring says in the film, “where we are going to decide whether we’re going to keep the birthright and the legacy of our public lands [system] or whether we simply want to unleash the forces of industry and live in a world where everything is for sale.” In other words, the November elections could determine the fate of many of the most iconic and cherished ecosystems in the US, from national forests to wildlife refuges’ (theguardian.com, 25 September). This month’s election in the US has not changed anything: capitalism continues and everything remains for sale. The National Trust’s 2,480 km2 of land – with its 1,300 kilometres of coast, 500+ historic houses, castles, ancient and industrial monuments, gardens, parks and nature reserves — might be seen as inalienable, yet Parliament can override this. If capitalism really wants something then wildlife, natural beauty, peace and quiet, or anything else, will take second place.

50s-era landfill?

There is one for sale in Wilmington, North Carolina.’The Town paid $25 for the land, and used it to house hurricane debris and trash. The only thing that now stands between the Beach and a $1.05 million sale is a snafu involving an N.C. contractor and state regulators, who disagreed on how much it should cost to clean the former landfill’ (portcitydaily.com, 25 September). In fact, capitalism does put a value on a summer’s day. And on a work of art. On a mosque. A social system which works by profit, whose wheels are lubricated by money, must put a price on everything. It bruises many sensitivities in the process, but capitalism can work in only one way.

Recycled condoms?

‘Police in Vietnam have busted a factory that took recycling one step too far. Some 345,000 used condoms were seized from the factory near Ho Chi Minh city, where they had been boiled, reshaped with a wooden phallus, and packaged for resale, Reuters reports. According to state media, the 34-year-old woman who owned the factory said it had received a “monthly input of used condoms from an unknown person.” Health officials said the recycled rubbers posed an “extreme health risk” to users, reports the AP. The factory was raided after a tip from a local resident. Police said the factory owner told them she was paid 17 cents per kilogram of recycled condoms. She has been detained and authorities are seeking other people involved in the operation’ (newser.com, 25 September).

Escape from Covid-19?

(i) for the gullible 99 percent. According to Dr. Vikas Mishra, ‘People are happily wearing these cards and moving around in crowded places which exposes them to the infection. Believing that any unverified and untested product would save one from the virus is foolishness and also exposes people to the danger of catching the infection…’ (news18.com, 21 September). Apparently, medical ‘. . . stores are earning a handsome amount and owners say these cards are selling like hot cakes.’

(ii) for the 1 percent. ‘Starting an overseas holiday with two weeks quarantine may not sound deeply appealing, but a tour operator says well-heeled clients are prepared to do it. Both National and Act party border control policies would allow foreign tourists to stay in privately managed isolation facilities that met strict rules… The package, including two weeks in an isolation facility, would cost $15,000 to $20,000 per person, and she said if up to 700 people were allowed in over the coming summer, they would generate $10m to $15m in tourism income…’ (stuff.co.nz, 22 September).

Eternal life?

‘The super-rich are already living the best lives. Now they’re trying to make those lives last forever with a wide array of weird and wonderful ideas from the fringes of science… Ambrosia is one of three outfits looking at experimental “vampire” blood transfusions that put the blood of young people into the veins of oldies. According to commercial finance experts ABC Finance, the cost of the trials currently ranges from £6,000 to about £215,000. The technique has worked well in mice, although as yet there are no positive results from human trials’ (dailystar.co.uk, 19 September). Such developments come as no surprise to socialists who have long understood capitalism’s voracious nature and how it seeks ever new ways to drain what it can out of the working class. Marx noted: ‘Capital is dead labour which, vampire like, lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’ (Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 10). Capitalism causes pollution, war and want, but for the system to continue it must avoid eradicating its source of unpaid surplus value. Indeed, the introduction of basic healthcare, welfare payments and even parks is primarily in the interest of the parasite, not the host.

Moneyless moonshine?

‘Work with us. Do not believe those who tell you any political party, or any “reformers” or any special legislation, can do away with crimes that are only the result of our whole system of society to-day. If you would do away with these crimes, you must do away with their cause. Help us. Help us to save not only yourselves, men and women; not only your little children. Help us also to save the very criminals, who now “drain your sweat and drink your blood.” Come to us. Join hands with us; and hand in hand, heart to heart with us, labour in this great cause. Never forget that when once the people will there is no gainsaying them. Once you rise “in unvanquishable number,” you are many, they — your enemies — “are few” ‘ (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, The Commonweal, August 1885).

The Rear View: KISS (2020)

The Rear View Column from the October 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

KISS

‘The traditional class war has been waged between wage-earners (who sell their labor) and their employers (owners of capital and the means of production). These classes have been assigned various names (proletariat, bourgeoisie, capitalists, etc.) but these broad class definitions don’t describe all the class conflicts emerging in the modern U.S. economy…. Six years ago I took a stab at defining America’s Nine Classes: The New Class Hierarchy (April 29, 2014), to which I would now add a tenth class, gig economy precariat, …’ (charleshughsmith.blogspot.com, 27 August). 

We should clarify that workers sell labour power, and capitalists extract surplus value. Smith’s ten ‘classes’ – the Deep State, Oligarchs, New Nobility, Upper Caste, State Nomenklatura, Middle Class, Working Poor, State Dependents, Mobile Creatives and Gig Economy Precariat – add further confusion. All people are either workers or they are capitalists and if they are in the former class they are robbed and they are relatively poor and they have a world to win, if they are in the latter class they are exploiters and they are relatively rich and the world is theirs, literally: ‘Study Shows Richest 0.00025% Owns More Wealth Than Bottom 150 Million Americans’ (Common Dreams, 10 February, 2019) and every 38 seconds a US citizen dies of poverty and poverty-related social conditions. Warren Buffett, whose 82 billion dollar fortune makes him the 6th richest person on Earth, once stated: ‘there’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.’ Winning worldwide.

Pie in the sky

‘…Anna Howard Shaw, an American Methodist pastor and suffragette, became the first clergywoman to preach in Sweden. That was in 1911, at an international women’s suffrage conference, and long before women could be ordained in the Church of Sweden, in 1958’ (yahoo.com, 23 August). Today female priests there outnumber men, but earn less: ‘…around 2,200 kronor (213 euros, $253) less a month than their male counterparts…’ It should not be imagined that the mundane campaign for equal pay is new – it was , for example, commented on in The Socialist Standard of December 1904. And according to a report from 2017, women will have to wait 217 years for wage equality! Yet believers are in conflict over the status quo. Consider, ‘Christian fundamentalist Stacey Shiflett insisted that Trump was sent by God himself to govern the U.S..’ (alternet.org, October 21, 2019) v. ‘Right now, in America with this movement there is love and truth and justice breathing, the American people are resisting the suffocation and resisting the death. And thank God it is happening’ (alternet.org, June 19). Neither campaigns for wage equality or to abolish religion will end exploitation. The supreme aim of the workers must be their emancipation from wage-slavery, and the fight against superstition is but one phase of this great fight. But it must never be forgotten that since religion is always used as a weapon by the ruling class against the workers, no socialist in the struggle for working class emancipation can honestly avoid the religious conflict.

Priests, police and politicians

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, quoted above in opposition to the Trump-supporting Christian, is president and senior lecturer of Repairers of the Breach and co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call For Moral Revival. With regard to the killing of George Floyd, he ‘…experienced a range of feelings. Derek Chauvin, that white police officer, the way he posed was something I have seen a hundred times — it was how people pose over dead animals’ (op. cit.). Barber blames the President: ‘Trump is fundamentally against the things that would help all Americans. Trump may have started talking about Latinos and Mexicans being rapists, but he will not even protect the country from COVID-19 which is killing everybody.’ If Trump is removed next month, it will be business as usual: the capitalist system which robs, slaughters and degrades will continue. To be clear, police are workers. They, like the vast majority of society, need to work in order to live. Yes, they have been used to break strikes but some have used the strike weapon themselves. The nature of their work does not exclude them from other members of their class. This is also true of those who form the vast bulk of the military. Should they leave, these workers need to find employment elsewhere, in order to support themselves, one of many problems not experienced by the 1 percent.

The chutzpah of philanthropy

 ‘Li Lu says he walked into a lecture Buffett was giving years ago at Columbia University and “…was instantaneously taken by him. What he basically taught me in that course was that somebody with high moral principles and integrity can make a lot of money off the market by being wise and smart and moral,” Lu says. …Says author Miles: “He’s transformed my life personally, more than anyone else in terms of modeling good behavior and having fun. He’s made me a better person, made me rethink my own philanthropy, in terms of helping those who through no fault of their own were born on the wrong side of the track” (finance.yahoo.com, 29 August). The capitalist class is charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, and makes a deal with the poor saying: ‘If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary!’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844). Such chutzpah – the capitalists suck out our very life-blood and then place themselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when they give back to us a mere fraction of the wealth generated by our class.

The Rear View: Iran – a capitalist, theocratic dictatorship (2020)

The Rear View Column from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Iran – a capitalist, theocratic dictatorship

Apparently, ‘The Islamic Republic of Iran’s blending of religion and Marxist negation of private property means that beneath its veneer of turbans, veils, mosques and prayers, it is a totalitarianism that shares much with Communist and Socialist states like the Soviet Union or current day Venezuela: Orwellian exploitation of workers in the name of the worker, repression of all basic rights, severe loss of livelihood, a kleptocratic class that maintains regime survival, and all manner of lies to sustain the myth of a just, egalitarian society battling the evil, capitalist West. Like in other anti-capitalist states, workers in Iran are prohibited from organizing. The assumption is that a Godly, Marxist state has elevated the “mostazafin,” or the downtrodden in whose name the revolution was waged, and is always and already providing for all. The regime pummels propaganda to maintain the myth of economic liberation but the truth is that Iranian workers are routinely denied wages, lack benefits, are forced into exploitative contracts and suffer from dangerous work conditions’ (nationalinterest.org, 27 June). This, save for the undoubted class division and mass suffering, is the kind of arrant nonsense which socialists encounter all too frequently in a propaganda version of Wack-A-Mole, and have challenged relentlessly for over one hundred years. Going back in time, ‘A Joker’s Conception of Socialism’ (Socialist Standard, December 1918) concerned drivel spouted on the subject by Winston Churchill.

 We in the World Socialist Movement are not dogmatic masochists: we stick to our principles and the original meaning of socialism – common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use – because our socialist theory consistently provides an insightful analysis of the contradictions of capitalism, because of the repeated failure of the alternatives put into practice, and because the prospect of socialism as the meeting of our real needs provides the motivation. Occasionally, however, we find articles written by non-socialists which directly or otherwise support our case, such as those below.

One human race

‘Medical science has long been used for the consolidation of power rather than for solidarity with the oppressed. We see how Black mothers are blamed for their own mortality in childbirth and how starkly high rates of COVID death in Black communities are preposterously misattributed to differences in hormone receptors or clotting factors; all the while letting racism off the hook. We wish to remind fellow physicians that medical science has never been objective. It has never existed in a vacuum; there have and will always be social, political and legal ramifications of our work. Our assessments may be employed in criminal justice cases; our toxicology screens may have profound effects on the livelihood of patients; our diagnoses may perpetuate sexist and racist stereotypes. Our lack of ill intent cannot be our alibi—we must be accountable for not just our work but also how it is used, lest our medicine becomes the very weapon that harms. Medicine requires inclusion of the social context of disease in order to uphold its sacred oath of doing no harm. If we focus only on molecular pathways and neglect to articulate the role of structural inequities—of racism—in our country, our reports on the causes of death and injury in our patients will erase the roles of their oppressors’ (blogs.scientificamerican.com, 6 June). Here we can only quibble with Dr Ann Crawford-Roberts’ use of the phrase ‘our country’. Workers have no country: ‘Study Shows Richest 0.00025% Owns More Wealth Than Bottom 150 Million Americans’ (Common Dreams, 10 February, 2019).

Capitalism is THE pandemic

‘Once again, the U.S. is undergoing a media-driven COVID-19 scare after a “spike” in infections. But as we noted earlier this week, the number of cases depends on the amount of testing. The key gauge to watch is deaths. They’ve been falling since April, and there’s strong reason to believe they’re lower than the official count suggests. The dreaded Wuhan virus is no doubt a nasty bug, worthy of our vigilance and ongoing concern. That said, its virulence, as measured by the daily number of deaths, appears to be waning, as the chart with this piece, courtesy of the COVID-19 Tracking Project of the Atlantic, clearly shows. The average number of daily COVID-19 deaths on a weekly basis has fallen from a peak of just over 2,000 to 700 or so. That’s a roughly 65% decline’ (issuesinsights.com 25 June). The phrase lies, damned lies and statistics springs to mind here, but perhaps Dr Marx’s favourite – doubt everything – is more apposite, particularly where mainstream media is concerned.

Rear View: Capitalism is the disease (2021)

The Rear View Column from the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism is the disease

Socialists have long argued that war, poverty and much pestilence are caused by capitalism. ‘It has led to the deaths of millions of people, sickened hundreds of millions and dramatically changed the lives of almost every person on the planet’ (dailymail.co.uk, 30 October). Indeed, but Matt Ridley’s article concerns the origin of Covid-19 rather than the urgent need to establish a post-capitalist world. More than a year after the latest pandemic began, PETA Asia investigators visited live-animal markets in China, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Laos, and Sri Lanka. Everything is for sale, dead or alive: bats, monkeys, civet cats, and other animals are sold as food or to be used in traditional medicine, in entertainment, or in other ways. ‘Carcasses were displayed on blood-streaked countertops, and both live animals and raw flesh were handled without gloves. These markets are cesspools of filth… Most scientists are convinced that the coronavirus originated in a live-animal market in China, where animals of a wide range of species are sold alongside dead animals and produce’ (PETAUK, 13 April). Ridley provides a note of caution: ‘…despite testing markets, farms and no fewer than 80,000 animal samples spanning dozens of species across China, no evidence has emerged for a similar chain of early ‘zoonotic’ infections — transmitted from animals to humans — in SARS-CoV-2. Hundreds of samples taken from animal carcasses at the market have all tested negative for any trace of the virus’, and he concludes ‘we can but hope the truth will — one day — come out.’ Nearly 5 million deaths due to Covid-19 have been confirmed worldwide. Given that the knowledge and resources exist to reduce the number of epidemics and minimise the possibility of them becoming pandemics, the vast majority of these deaths can be considered premature. The author of Animal Farm, George Orwell, commenting on the genesis of this work, stated: ‘I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.’ This is the truth workers across the world should focus on.

Charity begins at work

The dreadful scenes at Kabul airport in early August would not have looked out of place in the horror film World War Z. Now, months after then-President Ashraf Ghani fled, there is a war between the zombies of the Taliban and the zombies of Islamic State. Whoever wins, we lose. ‘Afghanistan’s Taliban government is pressing for the release of billions of dollars of central bank reserves as the drought-stricken nation faces a cash crunch, mass starvation and a new migration crisis’ (reuters.com, 29 October). Every 17 hours a billionaire is created, and every 17 hours 17,000 people die from hunger. World Food Programme executive director David Beasley is calling upon US billionaires to give just 0.36 percent of the increase in their collective wealth since the start of the pandemic to help prevent 42 million people from starving to death. The capitalist class is ‘…charitable out of self-interest; it gives nothing outright, but regards its gifts as a business matter, and makes a deal with the poor saying: “If I spend this much upon benevolent institutions, I thereby purchase the right not to be troubled any further, and you are bound thereby to stay in your dusky holes and not to irritate my tender nerves by exposing your misery. You shall despair as before, but you shall despair unseen, this I require, this I purchase with my subscription of twenty pounds for the infirmary! ”’ (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844). Such chutzpah – the capitalists exploit us and then place themselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when they give back a mere fraction of the wealth generated by our class.

Only zombies need leaders

‘Mr Lobanov says the KPRF [Communist Party of the Russian Federation] has been trapped by Kremlin design into a predetermined place within the existing system and, unless it moves more decisively into the streets to stage more convincing forms of peaceful resistance – as happened when millions of Russians protested against election fraud a decade ago – it will lose relevance with Russian voters. In fact, within the KPRF some members have lamented a too-passive reaction by leader Gennady Zyuganov to the results, and are pushing against their leaders’ “business as usual” relations with authorities’ (ca.news.yahoo.com, 26 October). Zyuganov, KPRF leader since 1993, said in a radio interview with the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid, that ‘the main slogan of communism – “He who does not work shall not eat” – is written in the Apostle Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians found in the New Testament. “We need to study the Bible,” Zyuganov concluded’ (Moscow Times, 2 September). ‘He who does not work shall not eat.’ Compare this biblically-inspired Leninist distortion with the real thing: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha programme, 1875). Also, the vanguardist Lenin again: ‘If socialism can only be realised when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see socialism for at least five hundred years’ (from a speech in November 1918 quoted by John Reed in Ten Days that Shook the World), compared with early socialist Flora Tristan: ‘the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself’.

The Rear View: Same the whole world over (2021)

The Rear View Column from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Same the whole world over

‘The Green Party, the Socialist Left and the Marxist-inspired Reds – all pro-environmental – are all expected to make gains and will seek to influence the next government, as will the rural Centre Party. Climate, wealth gap in focus as Norway go to polls’ (yahoo.com, 9 September). A similar Red-Green Coalition ruled 2005-2013 with Labour Party leader Jens Stoltenburg as Prime Minister. He has since become NATO’s General Secretary. The party’s current leader is the capitalist Jonas Gahr Støre. Once upon a time, Labour was considered ‘radical’: in 1919 it joined the Third International which had its headquarters in Moscow. Similarly, the Green Party was once concerned with alternative economics (who remembers BD Brochmann?), alternatives to military service, alternative energy, partial opposition to whaling (whale meat is still for sale) as well as going some distance towards the decriminalisation of certain drugs. The Socialist Left, formed in 1975, has its origins in a group which left the Labour Party over NATO membership. Interestingly, they were predictably against the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq but the Party leadership favoured NATO air strikes against Serbia over that country’s role in Kosovo (killing thousands and causing as many as 1.5 million people to flee as refugees). The ‘Marxist inspired’ Reds are, as history shows, anything but. The Red Electoral Alliance was formed in 1973 as an electoral front organisation for the Workers’ Communist Party. Much can be said about the WCP, but the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten’s headline from 28 August 2005 probably cannot be bettered: ‘They worshipped Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot’. And one Vidkun Quisling was a Minister in government for the populist Centre Party’s earlier incarnation as the Farmer’s Party. He later led Nazi-occupied Norway. Eugene Debs’ WW1 remark remains apposite: ‘Yes, a change is certainly needed, not merely a change of party but a change of system, a change from slavery to freedom and from despotism to democracy, wide as the world’.

A Better World is Possible

This is the title of an essay by Dr. Cesar Chelala, which concludes: ‘We have the resources. What we need is a new look at life and its wondrous possibilities. I may be called naïve. But those who are not naïve are the ones that have led us into these wars. We can create a better world, if we truly want it’ (counterpunch.org, 3 September). Indeed. This call echoes others made in the past:

1859: ‘There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery…’ (Marx in the New York Daily Tribune, 16 September). He observed that the ‘Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage’ (Capital, Vol. 1, ch. 25).

1898: ‘Hence it has happened that the development of steam navigation, of railroads and telegraphs, of mechanical and chemical science, and the growth of the population, while enormously increasing productive power and the amount of material products—that is, of real wealth—at least ten times faster than the growth of the population, has given that enormous increase almost wholly to one class, comprising the landlords and capitalists, leaving the actual producers of it—the industrial workers and inventors—little, if any, better off than before’ (Alfred Russel Wallace, The Demon of Greed).

1923: ‘Such a great [socialist] production is already possible, with the knowledge already possessed by mankind’ (Sylvia Pankhurst).

1948: ‘A world of peace and friendship, a world with the plenty which modern science had made possible was a great ideal. But those in power had no patience with such an ideal. They said it was not practical politics’ (John Boyd Orr, former director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation).

1951: ‘It is time for mankind to ensure itself of material abundance by establishing a free, self-managed world society of productive labour, thereby freeing its mental powers for perfecting its knowledge of nature and the universe’ (Anton Pannekoek, A History of Astronomy).

All that is missing from achieving this is ‘the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat’ (Rosa Luxemburg).

Comrade Speaker?

‘You cannot have a system where the success of some springs from the exploitation of the workers and springs from the exploitation of the environment and the rest, and we have to correct that’ (yahoo.com, 17 September). Indeed, but our fellow socialists in the WSP(US) do not expect Nancy Pelosi to join them anytime soon as she makes clear elsewhere that she wishes to reform capitalism, not replace it. Other, sadly long-dead Democrats stated: ‘ All men are brethren. We denounce all political and hereditary inequalities and distinctions of castes… We believe the earth, with all its natural productions, to be the common property of all… We believe that the present state of society, which permits its idlers and schemers to monopolise the fruits of the earth and, the production of industry, and compels the working class to labour for inadequate rewards, and even condemns them to social slavery, destitution, and degradation, to be essentially unjust… We condemn national hatreds which have hitherto divided mankind… Convinced that national prejudices have been, at all ages, taken advantage of by the people’s oppressors to set them tearing the throats of each other when they should have been working together for their common good, this society repudiates the term ‘foreigner.’ We recognise our fellow-men, without regard to country, as members of one family, the human race, and citizens of one commonwealth, the world’ (Manifesto of the Fraternal Democrats, 1845).

Rear View: From Keir I to Keir II (2021)

The Rear View Column from the October 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Keir I to Keir II

The evolution of the Labour Party over 115 years from Keir I to Keir II is a practical confirmation of the theoretical case against reformism. The Labour Party, instead of gradually transforming capitalism in the interests of the workers, has itself been gradually transformed from a trade union pressure group into an instrument of capitalist rule.

Which of these three statements about Keir Hardie is correct?

1.  ‘.. Labour Parties association with Marxism and a little understanding of the Labour Party’s roots, after all its founder Keir Hardie was a Marxist’ (Labour Heartlands, 13 August).
2. ‘A pacifist, Hardie was appalled by the First World War ..’ (en.wikipedia.org, accessed 1 September).
3. ‘.. his efforts to reform society were driven by a deep faith in Jesus and a commitment to the principles set out in the Sermon on the Mount’ (evangelicalfocus.com, 26 August).

Neither Marxist nor pacifist

Hardie stated in his 1892 election manifesto that he was ‘…in agreement with the present programme of the Liberal Party.’ Biographer Kenneth Morgan elaborates: ‘I found him a man who was not only an idealistic crusader, but a pragmatist, anxious to work with radical Liberals whose ideology he largely shared, subtle in building up the Labour alliance with the trade unions and the other socialist bodies, and supremely flexible in his political philosophy, a very generalised socialism based on a secularised Christianity rather than Marxism… He was no economist and was ill-informed on many issues, but he had uniquely the charisma and vision that any radical movement needs.’ Hardie’s ‘supreme flexibilility’ may explain why he is often portrayed as a pacifist, yet told his electorate in Merthyr: ‘May I once again revert for the moment to the ILP pamphlets? None of them clamour for immediately stopping the war. That would be foolish in the extreme, until at least the Germans have been driven back across their own frontier, a consummation which, I fear, carries us forward through a long and dismal vista… I have never said or written anything to dissuade our young men from enlisting; I know too well all there is at stake… If I can get the recruiting figures for Merthyr week by week, which I find a very difficult job, I hope by another week to be able to prove that whereas our Rink meeting gave a stimulus to recruiting, those meetings at the Drill Hall at which the Liberal member or the Liberal candidate spoke, had the exactly opposite effect’ (Merthyr Pioneer, 28th November 1914).

Labour’s dismal record

Labour has supported all major wars, including WWI, initiated the British atomic bomb, sent troops to smash strikes, established the vicious Special Patrol Group, passed racist immigration laws, imposed ‘monetarist’ expenditure cuts leading to the closure of hospitals and other vitally needed services… In the light of such evidence, how can anyone claim that Labour is anything other than a Party seeking to reform capitalism rather than end it through majoritarian social revolution? Not Philip Snowden, Labour MP: ‘The British Labour Party is certainly not Socialist in the sense in which Socialism is understood upon the Continent. It is not based upon the recognition of the class struggle; it does not accept the teaching of Marx…’ (Manchester Guardian Reconstruction Supplement, 26 October 1922). Nor Arthur Greenwood, Labour’s Lord Privy Seal: ‘I look around my colleagues and I see landlords, capitalists and lawyers. We are a cross section of the national life, and this is something that has never happened before’ (Hansard, 17 August 1945). Labour MP Douglas Houghton was impressed by his Party’s achievements : ‘Never has any previous government done so much in so short a time to make modern capitalism work’ (Times, 25 April 1967). Tony Benn, in a candid confession to the Independent (17 May 1989), wrote: ‘Past Labour governments have always worked within the limits set by market forces (as when the cabinet capitulated to the International Monetary Fund in 1976); have always supported nuclear weapons (as when Callaghan authorised the Chevaline without telling parliament); and have regularly confronted trade unionism (as with rigid wage policies)… We must add… a clear recognition that the Labour Party is not — and probably never was — a socialist party, and its individual members do not decide its policy, nor are its election pledges apparently meant to be taken seriously.’

The rich man in his castle

Did Hardie read Emma Goldman’s The Failure of Christianity, published two years before his death in 1915? Where she wrote: ‘The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the teachings of Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this virtue by reward and punishment…” Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery, inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from it. Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments have used to force man into dependency, into his slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the “redeemer” of the people…’

Marxian socialism aims at taking from the masters the power they wield and the wealth they have stolen. Its object is to raise the workers from slaves to freemen. It is therefore opposed to Christianity.

Rear View: It’s not rocket science (2021)

The Rear View Column from the September 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s not rocket science

Following his trip to the edge of space, billionaire Branson asked us to ‘Imagine a world where people of all ages, all backgrounds from anywhere, of any gender, or any ethnicity, have equal access to space’ (free-media.info, 18 July). Indeed. Iain M Banks’s Culture series is a highly recommended imagining of such a post-capitalist/scarcity society. But to get there, we need to abolish capitalism on Earth. We could make a start by understanding where one-time Democratic Party Ohio State Senator, Assistant Professor Nina Turner, errs. She recently criticised billionaire Bezos who, following his first rocket trip, said ‘I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.’ But the ‘Blessed By God! Wife, Mother, Sister, Host of Hello Somebody Podcast, Ohio State Senator, Professor’ @ninaturner (20 July) disagrees: ‘Correction: employees didn’t pay for this — their wages were stolen to pay for a billionaire’s space vacation. Jeff Bezos can thank his workers by treating them with dignity and paying them fair wages….and he can thank us all by paying his damn taxes.’ Oh no, not again – a call for ‘fair’ wages and taxation! There is nothing fair about wage slavery. We work, they take and do their best to avoid paying taxes which serve to maintain this system of legalised robbery. On 25 July Turner tweeted to remind us that the Federal minimum wage of $7.25 has remained unchanged since 2009. An earlier re-tweet proclaims, correctly, another world is possible. She, unlike Marx, fails to join the dots. He wanted us to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon us, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’ we ought to inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword: ‘Abolition of the wages system’.

A Professor of the dismal science

‘If the Socialist Party of Great Britain is an authority on such things, it is official: in light of recent anti-communist protests and civil unrest, Cuba has been demoted to “Not Real Socialism” and reclassified, along with the USSR and other failed socialist experiments, as “actually state capitalism”’ (independent.org, 20 July). The author of this ahistorical drivel is Art Carden, an Associate Professor of Economics at Samford University. For the record, in the December 1906 edition of the Socialist Standard we stated: ‘We are not concerned with State capitalism. We are concerned with Socialism. Socialism is the negation of capitalism. Consequently State capitalism cannot be the ideal of any Socialist. Ergo those who preach State capitalism or collective exploitation are not Socialists.’ Further, we said Russia had state capitalism in 1920 and similarly Cuba in 1968. Ironically, the island’s present dictator made a speech recently (liberationnews.org, 11 July) that was surprisingly succinct and free from mention of communism or socialism! This did not deter the loony left, eg. workers.org, from proclaining ‘U.S. HANDS OFF CUBA! END THE BLOCKADE! DEFEND SOCIALIST CUBA!’ or the rabid right from declaring ‘Cuba is a tragic case, but it is not our problem…. Except for China and North Korea, after the fall of the Soviet Union communist regimes have all ultimately collapsed ‘(vdare.com, 19 July). Even the moribund middle contributed: e.g. ‘Biden Says Communism Is A ‘Universally Failed System,’ And Socialism Is No ‘Useful Substitute’” (dailycaller.com, 15 July).

Doctor in need of a second opinion

Another professor, Jody Rawles, M.D., writes: ‘Homelesssness is complex… Anybody claiming to have a plan to fix this problem with only one remedy is like a mechanic claiming to be able to overhaul your engine with only one tool — it won’t work’ (yahoo.com, 20 July). Yes, homelessness is a complex issue. For every homeless person there is a raft of interrelated reasons why they may be in that situation. Some are simple: loss of housing through relationship breakdowns, inability to pay for housing, drink, drugs, mental health issues, abuse and domestic violence. For some, all they really need is a house or flat. For others, more complex social help is required from specialists perhaps in drink and drug rehabilitation, or social workers to support individuals through crises. The US-based professor of psychiatry and human behaviour recognizes that individual human needs can be complex as well as unique, but he is clearly igmorant that we are existing in a sick social system which responds only to market rather than human needs. Consider, there are on any given night over 500,000 homeless in the US alongside over 17 million vacant homes. The Ending Homelessness Act of 2019 which provides additional funding for, and otherwise addresses, assistance to homeless individuals and families will fail. There is in fact a housing shortage for those most in need. Nearly 150 years ago Frederick Engels wrote: ‘This shortage is not something peculiar to the present; it is not even one of the sufferings peculiar to the modern proletariat in contradistinction to all earlier oppressed classes. On the contrary, all oppressed classes in all periods suffered more or less uniformly from it.’ Engels saw that there was no possibility of a rational approach to housing within capitalism. ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question, 1872).

Rear View: Chinese Capitalist Party (2021)

The Rear View Column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chinese Capitalist Party

‘China is now an integral and irreplaceable part of global capitalism’ (consortiumnews, 28 July 2020). More recently, the Financial Times had this to say:

‘The very first line of the Chinese Communist Party’s constitution declares it is “the vanguard of the Chinese working class”. In reality, the last ruling Communist party of a major country has morphed into a conservative reactionary party bent on preserving the power of state capitalist elites and advancing a distinctly 19th century form of ethno-nationalist imperialism. None of this will be allowed to spoil the festivities as the CCP celebrates the centennial of its founding next month’ (ft.com, 16 June).

There was nothing to celebrate, and the event merited no mention in last month’s Socialist Standard. The FT’s largely correct analysis in a piece titled ’How Xi’s China came to resemble Tsarist Russia’ provoked numerous rebukes, including one from Zeng Rong of the Chinese Embassy in London, who described it as ‘. . . ideologically biased and full of smearing, defaming and groundless accusations against the Communist Party of China and China’s political system. It smacks of political prejudice and is a long way from the standard of journalism and professional ethics of the FT as an influential international newspaper. The leadership of the Communist party is a choice of the people…’ She could not be more Rong!

One nation under Xi

‘One party has ruled China for 72 years, without a mandate from voters. That is not a world record. Lenin and his dismal heirs held power in Moscow for slightly longer, as has the Workers’ Party in North Korea. But no other dictatorship has been able to transform itself from a famine-racked disaster, as China was under Mao Zedong, into the world’s second-largest economy, whose cutting-edge technology and infrastructure put America’s creaking roads and railways to shame. China’s Communists are the world’s most successful authoritarians’ (economist.com, 16 June).

The history of Leninism and Maoism in power shows that allowing elites to rule on behalf of the working class is always disastrous — for us. Working class self-emancipation necessarily precludes the role of political leadership. So, for its anti-democratic elitism and its advocacy of an irrelevant transitional society misnamed ‘socialism’, in theory and in practice, vanguardism deserves the hostility of workers everywhere. And there are signs in China and slsewhere of resistance: ‘Zhang is a Chinese millennial who has joined the ranks of a social movement called tang ping – the “lying flat movement.” It’s a mindset, a lifestyle, and a personal choice for some disillusioned Chinese youth who have given up on the rat race and are staging a quiet rebellion against the trials of 9-9-6 [9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, plus overtime] work culture’ (insider.com, 8 June).

Arbeit macht frei

‘The Chinese government remains in opposition to the “lying flat” movement. It promotes working hard — as Chinese President Xi Jinping said during a 2018 televised address — as the “most honorable, noblest, greatest, and most beautiful virtue.”‘ Emperor Xi wants his wage slaves to continue working hard: ‘The number of US dollar millionaires in China will increase by 92.7 percent to 10.17 million by 2025, compared with a 27.8 percent rise in the US to 28.06 million US dollar millionaires over the same period, according to a projection by the Swiss lender’ (scmp.com, 22 June).

Wealth is the product of human labour, acting upon nature-given materials, that is capable of satisfying needs. We work, they take and pass on. Paul Lafargue reminds us: ‘The Greeks in their era of greatness had only contempt for work: their slaves alone were permitted to labour: the free man knew only exercises for the body and mind… The philosophers of antiquity taught contempt for work, that degradation of the free man, the poets sang of idleness…’ (The Right to Be Lazy, 1883). The Ju/’hoansi people work only 15 hours a week and ‘they hate inequality or showing off, and shun formal leadership institutions. It’s what made them part of the most successful, sustainable civilisation in human history’ (theguardian.com, 29 October 2017).

Ministry of Truth

‘Xi Jinping‘s new history of Chinese communism has little room for criticism of Mao Zedong. In February Mr. Xi issued a revised version of “A Brief History of the Communist Party of China,” the official party history, in preparation for next month’s commemoration of the party’s 100th anniversary. This edition plays down Mao’s atrocities, in particular softening the party’s historic 1981 condemnation of the Cultural Revolution. That places Mr. Xi in the dubious company of dictators for whom “yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree”—a power George Orwell attributed in 1942 to Franco, Stalin and Hitler’ (wsj.com, 20 June).

But it was another journalist, Julian Harvey, writing a century earlier who came much closer than Orwell to describing the democratic (i.e., leaderless) revolution socialists work for and regard as essential if we are to establish a post-capitalist world of production for use and allocation according to self-defined need: ‘It is not any amelioration of the conditions of the most miserable that will satisfy us; it is justice to all that we demand. It is not the mere improvement of the social life of our class that we seek; but the abolition of classes and the destruction of those wicked distinctions which have divided the human race into princes and paupers, landlords and labourers, masters and slaves. It is not any patching and cobbling of the present system we aspire to accomplish; but the annihilation of the system and the substitution, in its stead, of an order of things in which all shall labour and all shall enjoy, and the happiness of each guarantee the welfare of the entire community’ (The Red Republican, October 12, 1850).

Rear View: We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill (2021)

The Rear View Column from the April 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

We Come in Peace, Shoot to Kill

‘Despite the damage coronavirus lockdowns did to the world’s economy, 2020 marked a record high in global military spending, according to a new report. As always, the US was in the lead, accounting for 40.3 percent of the world’s military expenditures at $738 billion. The report, released by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), says total military expenditures added up to $1.83 trillion in 2020, a 3.9 percent increase from 2019 (news.antiwar.com, 25 February). This news comes as no surprise to socialists: we have said for over a century that war is endemic to capitalism. We recall that the Obama–Biden Administration promised to do away with nuclear arms once and for all, but instead committed $1 trillion to building the nuclear stockpile and modernising nuclear production facilities. Commenting on an earlier admininistration, the late Carl Sagan, a visionary and humanitarian scientist, observed: ‘For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock’.

What about life on Earth?

Another (probably) lifeless rock has been invaded by a swarm of robots. Of multiple attempted Mars landings by robotic, unmanned spacecraft, ten have to date been classsed as succesful. Did any science fiction writer envisage a race to Mars? There is, indeed, kudos to all the thousands of workers across the world – these mulitiple landings are collectively an achievement on a par with the launching of Sputnik 1 just forty years after the fall of the Czars. Returning to the present, we are informed: ‘Internet sleuths claim to have decoded a hidden message displayed on the parachute that helped Nasa’s Perseverance Rover land safely on Mars…. They claim that the phrase “Dare mighty things” – used as a motto by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory – was encoded on the parachute using a pattern representing letters as binary computer code’ (theguardian.com, 23 February). The phrase is used in an 1899 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in which he said: ‘Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.’ Oscar Wilde described us ‘poor spirits’ more accurately and succiently when he said : ‘To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all’.

War without end?

‘Humanity is waging a “senseless and suicidal” war on nature that is causing human suffering and enormous economic losses while accelerating the destruction of life on Earth, the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, has said. Guterres’s starkest warning to date came at the launch of a UN report setting out the triple emergency the world is in: the climate crisis, the devastation of wildlife and nature, and the pollution that causes many millions of early deaths every year’ (theguardian.com, 18 February). Such news would not have surprised the astronomer and Marxist Antonie Pannekoek. Writing in 1909 he observed: ‘Natural resources are exploited as if reserves were infinite and inexhaustible. The harmful consequences of deforestation for agriculture and the destruction of useful animals and plants expose the finite character of available reserves and the failure of this type of economy. Roosevelt recognises this failure when he wants to call an international conference to review the state of still available natural resources and to take measures to stop them being wasted. Of course the plan itself is humbug. The state could do much to stop the pitiless extermination of rare species. But the capitalist state is in the end a poor representative of the good of humanity. It must halt in face of the essential interests of capital’.

Don’t Panic

Commenting on billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s Starship project which may someday send humans to Mars, Shannon Stirone, in an article titled ‘Mars Is a Hellhole: Colonising the red planet is a ridiculous way to help humanity’ (theatlantic.com, 26 February), writes: ‘Legitimate reasons exist to feel concerned for long-term human survival. But I question anyone among the richest people in the world who sells a story of caring so much for human survival that he must send rockets into space.’ Neither misleaders nor multi-millionaires can save us. Sagan says : ‘Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate.’ Yet more positively he also stated: ‘Humans have evolved gregariously. We delight in each other’s company; we care for one another. Altruism is built into us. We have brilliantly deciphered some of the patterns of Nature. We have sufficient motivation to work together and the ability to figure out how to do it. If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies?’ (Cosmos, Futura, 1987, p. 358). Pannekoek, who died in 1960 just as humanity entered the space age, would concur: ‘It is time for mankind to ensure itself of material abundance by establishing a free, self-managed world-society of productive labor, thereby freeing its mental powers for perfecting its knowledge of nature and the universe’ (A History of Astronomy, 1951).

Rear View: Dirty (2021)

The Rear View Column from the February 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dirty

Writing of manual scavenging – ‘the age-old unfortunate practice of cleaning, carrying, and disposing human excreta from dry latrines or sewers into the disposal sites’ – in India (countercurrents.org, 24 December), Ashish Joshi notes that ‘. . . despite prohibitive legislations in place, a government survey from 2019, carried out across 170 districts, found that over 54,000 people actively engage in the practice. In 2019 alone, 110 people died while cleaning septic tanks and sewers. For a job that has been outlawed for years, the manual practice continues without providing even the essential safety equipment that must be provided to the people engaging in this dangerous job. It is regrettable for a country that has been to Mars and back that we still have not eradicated this sordid practice from our societal fabric’. Eclipsing the Mars mission in terms of speed and potential is the development of vaccines against a pandemic that daily kills 10,000 people. Mainstream media, however, largely ignores the 25,000 who die every day from unnecessary starvation, the 3,000 children who die every day from preventable malaria, and the 10,000 people who die every day because they are denied healthcare. Neglected tropical diseases are common in 149 countries, and affect more than 1.4 billion people (including over 500 million children). Their eradication is possible but not profitable.

Rotten

‘There must be something rotten in the very core of a social system which increases its wealth without diminishing its misery . . .’ This comment is as valid today, quite possibly more so, than when it first appeared as part of the introductory sentence to an article penned by Marx in the New York Daily Tribune of 16 September 1859. He observed that the ‘Irish famine of 1846 killed more than 1,000,000 people, but it killed poor devils only. To the wealth of the country it did not the slightest damage’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p.658). Fast forward 175 years and we learn that despite the misery of millions, the ‘net worth of US billionaires has soared by $1 trillion to total of $4 trillion since pandemic began’ (americansfortaxfairness.org, 9 December 2020). ‘Their pandemic profits are so immense that America’s billionaires could pay for a major Covid relief bill and still not lose a dime of their pre-virus riches. Their wealth growth is so great that they alone could provide a $3,000 stimulus payment to every man, woman and child in the country, and still be richer than they were nine months ago.’ The journalist A R MacLeod tweeted (21 December): ‘The word “missile” appears 19 times in the COVID Relief Bill. “Aircraft” appears 208 times. “Munition” 46 times. “weapon” 46 times. “Healthcare” = 24. “doctor”/”nurse” = 5. “masks” = 0.’ And asked: ‘Who and what exactly is this bill really for?’ Indeed.

System

Comparing Boris Johnson’s ‘incompetence’ with that of WWI General Haig, Patrick Cockburn (counterpunch.org, 22 December) writes: ‘The estimate for excess deaths in Britain caused by government failings during the first and second waves of the epidemic now total about 50,000 people, adding together the estimates from Sir David King and the Sunday Times report, a number that will inevitably increase in the coming months.’ Johnson’s failings are really those of capitalism at work and are found worldwide. Mexico’s excess deaths passed 250,000 in December, and ‘Overall, a lower survival from COVID-19 was evident in the poorest population groups. Therefore, combating extreme poverty deserves to be a central prophylactic strategy’ (mdlinx.com, 24 December 2020). Mexico is just one of many countries where our class has a worse survival rate because of poverty. Band-aids, whether plasters or pop stars, offer no solution. Neither do platitudes from Oxfam: ‘No one should be blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine because of the country they live in or the amount of money in their pocket. But unless something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 for years to come’ (medicalnewstoday.com, 18 December). Dr. Rosa Luxemburg offered us a prescription in 1918: ‘During the four years of the imperialist slaughter of peoples streams and rivers of blood have flowed. Now we must cherish every drop of this precious juice as in a crystal glass. The most sweeping revolutionary action and the most profound humanity—that is the true spirit of socialism. A whole world is to be changed. But every tear that is shed, when it could have been staunched, accuses us’.

System change 

Professor Riccardo Petrella in an article titled Health for all? (wsimag.com, 21 December 2020) writes: ‘The fight against impoverishment remains a policy of aid, of charity, not a fight to eradicate the structural factors that cause impoverishment; the countries that signed the Treaty of Paris undertook to allocate 100 billion a year from 2020 to the fight against climate disaster. Well, none of the powerful dare to say where the 100 billion is; we know, however, by whom and where the trillion and 800 billion were spent in 2019 on armaments, 25 percent of which would be enough to cover all the above-mentioned financial needs. Finally, we know that military spending will not decrease in 2020.’ John Boyd Orr, former director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, was candid in stating: ‘a world of peace and friendship, a world with the plenty which modern science had made possible was a great ideal. But those in power had no patience with such an ideal. They said it was not practical politics’ (Daily Herald, 29 July 1948). A post-capitalist world of peace and plenty has long been possible. Let us make it so.

Rear View: Tarred with the same brush (2021)

The Rear View Column from the January 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tarred with the same brush

In an essay titled ‘Karl Marx was a racist misogynist – do not discuss’ we are told: ‘When it comes to neo-Marxist inspired cancel culture, rationality and reason fly out of the window to be replaced by politically correct ideology and cant . . . This latest campaign to rid the British Library of what is condemned as structural racism and white supremacism is part of a larger strategy associated with the death of George Floyd… ‘ (conservativewoman.co.uk, 26 November). Socialists are always keen to debate — anything, anytime, anyplace, anywhere could be our motto! — but those identified as ‘neo-Marxists’ and, it has to be said, Conservatives less so. Marx opposed racism and always insisted that ‘the emancipation of the productive class is that of all human beings without distinction of sex and race’ (1880 Preamble drafted by Marx to the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier). There is no doubt that black and ethnic minority workers overall have it tougher when it comes to police brutality and lack of opportunities in employment, education and housing. However, it does not follow from this that racism should be treated as an issue that is separate from capitalism and its class divisions. All racists and some feminists divide workers from each other. Along with reformists, they delay the day when, in the words of Oscar Wilde, one of the famous writers castigated for having links to slavery, ‘Socialism, Communism, or whatever, one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and ensure the material well-being of each member of the community’ (The Soul of Man under Socialism, 1891).

‘It’s about bloody time!’

‘Scotland becomes the first country in the world to pass landmark legislation offering free period products to anyone who needs them’ (dailymail.co.uk, 24 November). This is undoubtedly a positive step, particularly for members of our class experiencing period poverty, yet Scotland is just one of 195 countries in the world and the pace of reform is very slow and uncertain. We are informed that ‘ …70% of women in India… say their family cannot afford to buy sanitary pads. In fact… only 2 to 3 percent of women in rural India are estimated to use sanitary napkins as per 2016 data. This results in women resorting to unhygienic practices during their menstrual cycle, such as filling up old socks with sand and tying them around waists to absorb menstrual blood, or taking up old pieces of cloth and using them to absorb blood. Such methods increase chances of infection and hinder the day-to-day task of a woman on her period’ (countercurrents.org 28 October). Affordability, culture, distribution, and paucity of clean water all complicate matters as does the safe, environmentally friendly disposal of used pads. The author fails to address the obvious alternative of medically approved methods of menstrual suppression, where the need for pads, etc., is reduced or eliminated. Such alternatives are not free and do not register on the reformist radar.

Two steps forward, two steps back

Marx wrote, in a letter to Ludwig Kugelmann, dated 12 December 1868: ‘Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included)’.

‘Covid has resulted in a 20 percent increase in domestic violence and surprisingly misogyny is not a hate crime’ (thenorthernecho, co.uk, 24 November).

‘There were 1,575 individual women and girls who had an attendance where FGM was identified in the period between July 2020 and September 2020’ (digital.nhs.uk, 26 November).

‘Multiple private UK clinics selling intrusive ‘virginity tests’ and offering ‘hymen-repair’ surgery’ (inews.co.uk, 27 November).

‘Trans-women in police custody already suffered sexual harassment and abuse. Then came Covid-19’ (theguardian.com, 17 November).

‘Female LAPD Officer Details Sexual Harassment, Toxic Work Environment in Lawsuit’ (nbclosangeles.com, 9 November).

‘One in five men in the UK don’t believe that gender inequality is still a reality in society today… ‘ (independent.co.uk, 10 November).

Finland, under new (female) management

‘A year will soon have passed since Finland’s new coalition government headed by five women started work. It has dealt efficiently with the coronavirus pandemic, while drafting an ambitious Equality Programme – a programme that states, among other things, that everyone has the right to determine their own gender identity’ (bbc.com, 25 November). This is a reminder that women are just as capable of running society as men. Yet under capitalism, women have developed their potential for being every bit as destructive as men; they have become active participants in military carnage, fervent spouters of fake news and ‘alternative facts’ or superstitious nonsense and avid proponents of reactionary politics. In other words, the female of this species is becoming as brutalised as the male. Socialists know, however, without the support of a majority of women the establishment of a post-capitalist society is impossible. All wage slaves are members of the same class regardless of colour, gender and sexuality. We are a global class with identical class interests in all the 195 countries in the world. Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, born in Cuba to French and Creole parents, provides this quotation: ‘The modern means of production can no longer be controlled except by society, and for that control to be established, they must first become social property; then only will they cease to engender social inequalities, to give wealth to the parasites and inflict miseries on the wage-working producers… ‘ (Social and Philosophical Studies, 1906).

Rear View: Status quo (2021)

The Rear View Column from the July 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Status quo

‘To Beat Covid, Beat HIV, & Beat Inequality, Find the Money’. This is the title of a recent opinion piece by Winnie Byanyima and published on the Inter Press Service News Agency (ipsnews.net, 27 May). Other articles by her include ‘Overcoming COVID-19: World Leaders Must Finance a More Equal World to Beat Pandemics’, as well as ‘Coronavirus Proves Need for Free Healthcare for All – Now‘ and ‘The Next UN Secretary General Should Be a Woman – and Must Be a Feminist’. Such naïvety is echoed by many other writers found on this news site, alas, but at least, unlike the BBC, it is a safe refuge from non-stop coverage of royal funerals, births or other non-events. However, IPS whilst being a useful source of news not covered by mainstream media outlets such as the BBC, suffers from a relentlessly reformist, sometimes even rose-tinted perspective; which can lead to glaringly obvious blindspots. ‘Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave‘, said Frederick Douglass. We should fill in the blanks, be alert for media lies, distortions and half-truths, as well as conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts‘. We should remember Marx’s favourite motto – doubt everything! – and this from his German Ideology (1845): ‘the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production’. The BBC and IPS in their different ways support the status quo.

None so blind

Sania Farooqui, author of ‘Women Leading Somalia’s Health System’ (ipsnews.net, 17 May) says ‘one of the doctors leading healthcare and currently involved in the fight against COVID-19 in Somalia is Dr. Deqo Aden Mohamed, an obstetrician-gynecologist… ‘ The doctor explains ‘the government runs only three hospitals here, so imagine in Mogadishu we have 4 million people and just three hospitals. The second wave of COVID-19 was much harder than last year. What we lost in one year’s time, we lost in one month in 2021’. Farooqui adds: ‘currently the country is grappling with the triple threat of drought, COVID-19 and insecurity in Mogadishu which is driving severe humanitarian needs in Somalia. Somalia has already seen a 48% increase in deaths from COVID-19, doubling of cases from 6,687 to 13,812 cases in just 59 days’. Grim reading, but this is only a partial account of suffering. An article in the Guardian last year (19 May) reported that Somalia’s coronavirus lockdown led to a huge increase in female genital mutilation. According to Plan International, circumcisers went door to door offering to cut girls stuck at home during the pandemic. Somalia has the world’s highest FGM rate with about 98 percent of women having been cut. Sadia Allan of Plan International commented: ‘We’ve seen a massive increase in recent weeks. We want the government to ensure FGM is included in all Covid responses‘. Dr. Deqo Mohamed has apparently made no comment on this matter.

Selective science

‘Mauritius’ First Female President on Why We Need Science Diplomacy to Address Major Challenges’ by Stella Paul (ipsnews.net, 20 May) begins: ‘If we want to address the great challenges this world is facing, we have to factor science into all our narratives, according to Dr. Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, the first woman president of Mauritius’. This is a refreshing change from a malady of misleaders promoting ‘alternative facts‘, conspiracy theories and non-evidence based medicine, yet it should be remembered that Margaret Thatcher, FRS, Prime Minister of the UK for eleven years from 1979, the first with a science degree, graduated from Oxford University as a Bachelor of Science in chemistry. The new president does not mention Thatcher but acknowledges that ‘for the past few years, there has been an anti-science sentiment voiced by major leaders on this planet. And this undesigned sentiment has weighed very heavily again when it comes to addressing issues like climate science, for example, climate change and biodiversity. They have weighed in as well in terms of handling this pandemic that we are currently living in. So, I think if you want to address the great challenge that this world is facing, we have to factor in science into all our narratives’. All narratives? What, then, is the scientific basis for male homosexuality continuing to be a crime in Mauritius?

Truth telling

‘In The Socialist Party of Great Britain we are all members of the working class, and cannot hope that our articles will always be finely phrased, but we shall at least endeavour to lay before you on every occasion a sane and sound pronouncement on all matters affecting the welfare of the working class. What we lack in refinement of style we shall make good by the depth of our sincerity and by the truth of our principles.’ This statement taken from the first edition of the Socialist Standard in September 1904 remains true today, as does a quote attributed to Orwell: ‘during times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act’.‘ We are not alone. Other groups and individuals reveal truths too, at least some of the time. ‘Neither Israel, Nor Palestine: No War but the Class War ‘ (libcom.org, 22 May). ‘For too long our politicians, leaders & corporations have fed us the SAME lies, the SAME broken promises, the SAME too-little-too-late solutions, the SAME destructive fossil fuels ‘ (Jayathma Wickramanayake, @UNYouthEnvoy, 20 May).

Rear View: Bin capitalism (2021)

The Rear View Column from the June 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Bin capitalism

The rock band Garbage have a new album out this month. The title No Gods, No Masters will likely bring a smile or nod of agreement from socialists regardless of their musical tastes and is attributed to Louis Blanqui, a contemporary of Marx and Engels, and described by the latter as ‘…essentially a political revolutionist. He is a socialist only through sentiment, through his sympathy with the sufferings of the people, but he has neither a socialist theory nor any definite practical suggestions for social remedies. In his political activity he was mainly a “man of action”, believing that a small and well organised minority, who would attempt a political stroke of force at the opportune moment, could carry the mass of the people with them by a few successes at the start and thus make a victorious revolution’ (The Programme of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune, 1874). Shirley Manson, the band’s vocalist, when she was 12 or so told her Sunday-school-teacher father ‘religion’s a sham and I’m not going to church anymore, it’s just bullshit’. Speaking recently (spin.com, 30 March) of the album she declared: ‘It was our way of trying to make sense of how fucking nuts the world is and the astounding chaos we find ourselves in’. Further, it is ‘a critique of the rise of capitalist short-sightedness, racism, sexism and misogyny across the world.’ Evidence of which abounds.

Myopic measures

‘On Feb. 21, Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party passed a resolution unequivocally hailing the “visionary leadership of Prime Minister Modi” in turning India into a “victorious nation in the fight against COVID”’ (time.com, April 28). ‘There is a shortage everywhere at the peak of the crisis. This government defines shortages, shortcomings, and short-sightedness’ (nationalheraldindia.com, 23 April). ‘Experts have long raised the alarm about shortages of medical oxygen in India and other poor countries to treat pneumonia, the world’s biggest preventable infectious killer of children under five years of age.

But the government has for years failed to invest enough money in such infrastructure, experts say. Does India produce enough oxygen? The short answer: yes. Experts say the vast nation of 1.3 billion people is producing enough oxygen – a little over 7,000 tonnes a day. Most is for industrial use but can be diverted for medical purposes’ (aljazeera.com, 29 April). Religion thrives alongside such (preventable) suffering: ‘In March 2020, a Hindutva group, the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, held a cow urine drinking party as a means of providing protection against the virus’ (scroll.in, 1 May). Yet, as Marx noted, ‘To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo…’ Atheism alone is another dead end.

Race or class?

‘Nothing has exposed the role of structural and institutional racism as starkly as the disproportionate effects of covid-19 on ethnic minority communities. Public Health England’s report identifies racism and discrimination as key contributors to infection risk, outcomes, and life chance’ (bmj.com, 21 April). ‘Poor British people in 2020 are unhealthier than those born into poverty 100 years ago, a study has found’ (dailymail.co.uk, 20 January 2020). Workers who don’t understand why capitalism condemns them to impoverished lives are all too ready to blame their problems on other workers, from other towns or from other countries or of other ’races’. This is an exercise of blind futility for after all the misconceptions, after all the efforts to reform capitalism into a problem-free system, it is clear that the need is for a radical change; nothing less than the abolition of class society will do. This is perfectly possible but it requires a united resolve among the world’s working class, reflecting the fact that their interests are as one, to establish a society based on common ownership of the means of life. Race has no scientific basis. Racism needs to be rejected as a destructive, anti-social force. There is a better way; we have a world to win and little time to lose.

Dead slow

The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2021: ‘At the current relative pace, gender gaps can potentially be closed in 52.1 years in Western Europe, 61.5 years in North America, and 68.9 years in Latin America and the Caribbean. In all other regions it will take over 100 years to close the gender gap: 121.7 years in Sub-Saharan Africa, 134.7 years in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, 165.1 years in East Asia and the Pacific, 142.4 years in Middle East and North Africa, and 195.4 years in South Asia.’ (weforum.org, 30 March). Socialism will include the liberation of women as part of its project of human emancipation. This will not come about in an automatic or inevitable way. A political organisation whose object is socialism cannot permit sexism within its ranks on the grounds that nothing can be done now and that the problem will be resolved ‘after the revolution’. For a political organisation to be credible, it must embody the attitudes, values and practices that it seeks to institute in society at large. Socialists believe that all people, men and women, are equally worthy of respect. This is enshrined in our Declaration of Principles (1904-present), specifically Clause 4: ‘That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex’.

Rear View: Glenn in Wonderland (2021)

The Rear View Column from the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Glenn in Wonderland

”When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” A similar disdain for language would seem to be shared by Lewis Carroll’s character in Alice Through the Looking-Glass and Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. Glenn ‘… went on to say that he ‘would describe a lot of people on the right as being socialists,’ such as former White House strategist Steve Bannon and ‘the 2016 iteration’ of former President Donald Trump as a candidate, ‘based on what he was saying.’ ‘I consider Tucker Carlson to be a socialist,’ Greenwald said of the Daily Caller co-founder. He then described an instance where Carlson and Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a self-identified socialist, agreed in their mutual opposition to Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo wanting ‘to give tens of millions of dollars to Amazon to bring an office to New York.”(dailycaller.com, 3 March). The word socialism, as originally used by the followers of Robert Owen, appeared for the first time in their Co-operative Magazine of November 1827 and meant common ownership (not nationalisation or state capitalism). The American Marxist Daniel De Leon understood this and saw socialism as a revolutionary change in society. He explained: ‘As a poodle may have his hair cut long or his hair cut short, as he may be trimmed with pink ribbons or with blue ribbons, yet he remains the same old poodle, so capitalism may be trimmed with factory laws, tenement laws, divorce laws and gambling laws, but it remains the same old capitalism. These ‘humanitarian parts’ are only trimming the poodle. Socialism, one and inseparable with its ‘anti-rent and anti-capital parts,’ means to get rid of the poodle’ (Daily People, 2 November, 1908).

Tweedledee and Tweedledum

Helen Keller said of democracy in the US: ‘Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’ Will the Marxist Unity Slate save us? They say: ‘Thousands of DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] members are inspired by Marxist politics, and we want to unite them around a credible vision for an independent socialist movement in the United States. ‘Slate’ refers not to a slate of leadership candidates, but to our three-point lineup of (1) Constitutional amendment and (2) Resolutions. We believe our three-point slate will help DSA develop a strong ‘programmatic unity’: unity based not on theoretical dogma, but on common struggle and a shared political vision. WE NEED 100 SIGNATURES ON EACH ITEM TO PROCEED TO THE NEXT STAGE! With your support and signatures we can begin to build an ecumenical mass socialist party based on Marxist principles’ (undated, marxistunity.com). Wait! Here’s one that genuine socialists made earlier: the World Socialist Party of the United States. Since its formation in 1916 by 42 defecting members of Local Detroit of the Socialist Party of America (SPA), the WSP has consistently advocated a fully democratic society based upon co-operation and production for use, opposed every single war, participated in working-class struggles, and functioned as a democratic and leaderless organisation. Writing that same year, Keller noted: ‘I became an IWW because I found out that the Socialist party was too slow. It is sinking in the political bog. It is almost, if not quite, impossible for the party to keep its revolutionary character so long as it occupies a place under the government and seeks office under it. The government does not stand for interests the Socialist party is supposed to represent’ (from an interview written by Barbara Bindley published in the NewYork Tribune, 16 January, 1916).

The (Mad) Hatter

‘Deng Xiaoping is famous for the saying ‘it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white provided it catches mice.’ As I am an unashamed Dengite in economic theory the equivalent of this is that it is perfectly possible to understand China’s socialist economy in terms of either Western or Marxist economic theory…’ (undated, learningfromchina.net). The author John Ross is a Senior Fellow in Financial Studies at Renmin University, China. The socialism Marx envisaged involved ‘abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production’ (Communist Manifesto). Oh, the irony! In his Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan (1927), Mao admitted that the coming revolution would not be socialist: ‘To overthrow these feudal forces is the real objective of the revolution.’ Writing four years earlier Sylvia Pankhurst stated: ‘Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance. Our desire is not to make poor those who today are rich, in order to put the poor in the place where the rich now are. Our desire is not to pull down the present rulers to put other rulers in their places’ (Socialism, Workers’ Dreadnought, 28 July 1923). Does this sound familar? What follows is almost prophetic: ‘…We do not call for limitation of births…’! Socialism in a post-capitalist world of production for use and allocation according to self-defined need will make finance, including Marxian economics, redundant.

”If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.’

Socialism with Chinese characteristics is another dead end. Alice in Wonderland has been banned in multiple countries including China. ‘We are drawn back to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland because when we read it, we become the heretics, dreamers and rebels who would change the world’ (theconversation.com, 16 February).