Tiny Tips (2024)

The Tiny Tips column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard 

… a tiny minority of about 0.6 percent of the population, own 45 percent of the country’s total wealth. For workers… the situation in Germany, is becoming increasingly precarious. 

(WSWS)

… support for Hezbollah — as well as opposition to it — still fall primarily along sectarian lines. Polling by The Washington Institute late last year found that 34% of Sunni Muslims and 29% of Christians expressed a positive view of Hezbollah, while 93% of Shias said they approved of the group. 

(NBC)

As he watches the world go by each day from the shade of his porch in southern Havana, Ramone Monteagudo, 72, a retired history teacher, has a front-row seat for the wreckage… Now flies swarm over a sea of rubbish in the sticky heat. He watches some of his poorer neighbors — who until a few years ago had enough to eat — pick leftover food out of the rot. ‘When it comes to food and medicine, we’re living through an extraordinarily difficult situation’. 

(Truthdig)

It was done for the Viet Cong in numerous countries during the US involvement in Vietnam. It was done for the African National Congress (ANC). It was done for the Irish Revolutionary (sic) Army (IRA). Across the United States, Europe and Australasia, all three organisations, demonised as terrorist outfits, received tacit, symbolic support from protestors. In some cases, support was genuine and pecuniary. Now, the Lebanese Shia militant and political group Hezbollah, designated a terrorist organisation in a number of Western states, has inspired flag holders to appear at protests against the expanding conflict in Gaza and Lebanon.

(Dissident Voice)

Saudi Arabia has executed 213 people so far in 2024, more than it has in any other calendar year on record, as the kingdom competes for a seat at the UN Human Rights Council. 

(Middle East Eye)

‘. . . The ratepayers’ association and the ANC led municipality are working together to evict poor black people, to destroy our homes and communities. They say that our presence reduces the value of the land, as if value is just a question of the price of the land and has nothing to do with the value of land for the human beings who live on it. They say that we must be removed because we are a health hazard as we must use the bush to relieve ourselves whereas the obvious solution to the lack of sanitation is to provide sanitation. They say that we are ‘chasing tourists away’. The strong element of racism driving all this is often openly displayed on the social media used by the white residents of the gated communities. The black elites who live in the gated communities are silent about this racism”.

(Dissident Voice)

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Cooking the Books: Marx Right About What? (2015)

The Cooking the Books Column from the July 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Marx was Right’ was the title of the text of the opening speech at a conference of left-wingers in New York in May. This is certainly a welcome change from the usual ‘Marx was Wrong’ found in economics textbooks. But there was a problem: the speaker, Chris Hedges, was wrong about what he thought Marx got right.

Marx, he claimed, ‘saw that there would come a day when capitalism would exhaust its potential and collapse’. Marx certainly didn’t think that capitalism would last for ever as he saw it as a passing phase in the history of humanity. Hedges, however, commits Marx to the view that capitalism will one day collapse economically (actually he thinks it’s already happening):

  ‘… as Marx warned, there is a limit to an economy built on scaffolding of debt expansion. There comes a moment, Marx knew, when there would be no new markets available and no new pools of people who could take on more debt. (…) The hoarding of wealth by a tiny capitalist elite, Marx foresaw, along with the exploitation of workers, meant that the masses could no longer buy the products that propelled capitalism forward.’

This suggests that capitalism will eventually collapse through a lack of market demand on the part of ‘the masses’ whether from their pay or from what they have borrowed. The trouble with this theory is that it doesn’t explain why capitalism hasn’t already collapsed, long ago, since the market demand of ‘the masses’ has always been limited because a part of what is produced goes to the exploiting capitalist class as profits. In fact, what they can’t buy, the capitalists can. They don’t always do, but that only causes the periodic economic slumps that are a feature of capitalism not the collapse of the whole system.

To attribute such an incoherent view to Marx is not doing him a favour. It also assumes that the aim of production under capitalism is to meet the needs that people can pay for, that capitalism is an economic system geared to meeting paying consumer demand. Marx, on the other hand, analysed capitalism as being geared to making profits, where money is invested in production with a view to profit, most of which is then reinvested as further capital.

For Marx, what ‘propels capitalism forward’ is capitalist firms seeking profits, not what non-capitalists buy. So, if capitalism were going to collapse it would have to be from a lack of profits rather than a lack of markets. But Marx didn’t hold that view either.

In his main work, Volume I of Capital, Marx does set out (at the end of Chapter 32 on ‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’) how he thought capitalism would eventually come to an end. Economics was still involved, but it was neither a lack of markets nor a lack of profits. It was the concentration and centralisation of the means of production operated co-operatively by a collective labour force. This would come into conflict with the continuing class ownership of the means of production, a contradiction that would express itself in a ‘revolt of the working class’. It would be resolved when ‘the expropriators are expropriated’ by the workers transforming ‘capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property’, ushering in a society based ‘on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.’

In short, capitalism would have to be collapsed not collapse. It would not self-destruct, but would have to be purposefully replaced by a new society.