A tale of two futures (2006)

From Issue 20 of the World Socialist Review

As the name implies, socialism is based on what is social. More particularly, it is based on democratic social interaction of people collectively creating the kind of world they envision. It is the antithesis of the anti-social economic system of capitalism based solely on the cold acquisition of profits. Social needs that are met under capitalism are either highly profitable or incidental byproducts. Unfortunately, the quest for the almighty dollar knows no bounds and is seriously taxing our ecological systems. Capitalism puts the cart before the horse, making everything subservient to profit acquisition. With respect to our community green-space, from an aesthetic as well as a biological perspective, this has taken on absurdly rapacious proportions.

Silt, Spaniards & Mosquitoes

The Texas Gulf Coast, where I grew up, does not rest on the continental shelf along with about half of the state itself. Rather, the land mass is the result of billions of years of oceanic inundations of silt. When the Spaniards first explored the Texas Gulf Coast, it was inhabited by the Karankawa Indians, who were known to be semi-cannibalistic and to smear their bodies down with alligator brains as a method of mosquito repellant. Anyone who has ever spent the night in Galveston during one of those rare times when there was no wind would wholly understand the Karankawa’s resort to such drastic mosquito repellants.

I grew up in Houston, but spent a considerable part of my youth as a beach bum in Galveston, Freeport, and Matagorda. Texas beaches have always held a special charm for this writer. They have a special uniqueness in comparison to other beaches I’ve visited. As a hippie youth in the 70s, a group of us would frequently camp out all night on the coast, build bonfires at night and enjoy the wind, sun, and warm surf during the day. The few trinket shops, stores, and eating establishments were ancient Mom ’n Pop businesses or seafood restaurants with historical associations.

The beaches remained fairly free of commercialization. As well, the drive between Houston and Galveston’s beautiful skyline was once a trek fairly bereft of commercial clutter or palpable habitation of any sort, save the wildlife in the region.

Texas Chain Store Massacre

Sadly, this is no longer so. Most of the once pristine and free beaches are now filled with chain stores and commercial establishments, beaches that require payment for use, and the ever-present police. In short, the beaches have become commodified and regulated, no longer the free-access areas they once were. If driving between Houston and Galveston was once a trip through the country, it is now barely discernible where Houston ends and Galveston begins. Endless miles of asphalt, strip-malls, service stations and Wal-Marts make for monotonous eye-space. In other parts of Texas, capitalist developers have ruined age-old parks and community spaces, including many of the wooded areas near Austin. Expensive condos and housing subdivisions are now commonplace. Even within cities such as Houston where old neighborhoods once had beautiful old houses at modest rent rates, and huge oak trees canopied the streets, now stand only monstrous condominiums. Obliterated are the unique old homes, the ancient live oaks and the tangible charm of the neighborhood: all sacrificed to the profit initiative.

From an aesthetic standpoint, this trend sucks blatantly. Add to this the impact on biological species other than our own. Growing up on the outskirts of Houston, there were still cow pastures, huge open fields in which we flew kites and played ball. There was a ubiquitous species of frog that was found nowhere in the world except that part of Texas. Now, due to mindless capitalist expansion, few open fields or cow-pastures exist. Even sadder, the species of frog indigenous to that region is almost extinct. I recall seeing hundreds of them hopping around after a fresh rain.

It saddens this writer to know such wonders are falling to the unfeeling blade of profiteering. To ruin a beautiful patch of land, that took billions of years of oceanic inundations to create, with the construction of a Wal-Mart or a McDonald’s is symptomatic of Capitalist values. No reverence is paid to nature’s wonders: the magic of a sunrise on the beach, the sound of the wind and the waves, nor the discovery of sand dollars and starfish strewn along the shores. Its vision is limited to the quest for profit.

Only the social organization of the world based on true human values can protect and preserve these ecological treasures. Capitalism can never preserve the natural state of the earth when doing so would stand in the way of profit. We must create a social system that will stem the capitalist trajectory toward ecocide. The establishment of socialism is the only solution to this critical problem.

— KG

World View: Summit else capitalism cannot solve (1996)

From the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the year 2000, or so the projection runs, 2.75 billion people, or half the world's entire population will be living, or rather existing, in urban centres. At present 250 cities around the world have populations exceeding one million and this figure is expected to double by the year 2015. Already, one billion people have no access to a sewerage system and clean water and over 600 million are homeless.

In the vast majority of these cities crime, drug abuse, alcoholism, terrorism, poverty, disease and malnutrition are reaching epidemic proportions. Such is the situation, in fact, that an international conference was called by the UN in June— the Habitat II Summit—to look at the problem.

Head of the conference, Wally N’Dow, said: “The overwhelming speed at which the world is urbanising leaves little time to adapt. We are witnessing daily urban catastrophes . . . We risk a complete breakdown in cities. People feel alienated" (Guardian, 1 June).

Said Franz Vanderschueren: "The process of urbanisation goes hand in hand with a growth of violence . . . the product of a society characterised by inequality and social exclusion.” He goes on to blame a “social environment dominated by consumerism, competition and by the mass media which propagate and legitimise violence" (Ibid.).

Before the conference had even begun it was forecast that only a few heads of state would show interest and attend—revealing, undoubtedly, ministerial awareness of the problem and acceptance of capitalism's inability to solve problems rooted in its own contradictions.

The UN are fond of holding such summits—arms summits, peace summits. Earth summits, in fact, summits on just about every problem facing humanity, and all, of course, proof that capitalism can’t be made to work in our interests. UN summits, though, are supposed to conclude with some joint plan of action to tackle the problem in question, and this is where they run into difficulty.

The problems such summits are set up to confront are social problems, not natural ones. They stem from the way our society is at present organised for production. We have no real problems, only those we create ourselves.

As far back as 1859 Karl Marx put it like this:

"Mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; since looking at the matter more clearly, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation” (Preface to Critique of Political Economy).

Hence, the millions who starve every year could be fed with the mountains of food that are destroyed or with the fruit and vegetables that landowners are paid vast sums for not producing. Tens of millions sleep rough on the streets of the world's cities, whilst there is no shortage of vacant buildings or stockpiled bricks and mortar and idle craftsmen. Factories remain closed and countless tons of machinery rusts, yet there is no shortage of people looking for the opportunity to utilise them.

In spite of the technological advances we have made in recent years, and the possibility to produce an abundance of the necessities of life, we find the UN Summit in Istanbul hinting at declining resources and food and water shortages. This, in spite of the fact that the surface of our planet is covered in water quite capable of being desalinised and cleansed, and the fact that 7.5 acres of arable land could be provided for every person in the world.

One thing is sure. No one at the Habitat II Summit will have suggested putting an end to the money and wages system and establishing a world where production is geared solely to meeting social needs, instead of providing a profit for a minority.

It is because of purely economic reasons—the drive to make profit—that production, employment and consequently housing is centralised in cities or constricted areas. And it is inevitable that people are compelled to live in concentrated commercial and industrial areas so that they can sell their physical and mental abilities in order to live. Inevitably, insecurity and competition for jobs will follow, resulting in crime and poverty, alienation, stress, frustration and tension. Is it any wonder that social conflict is always on the horizon? If the capitalist system treats people as brutes, seeing only in them a quick return on invested capital, is it any wonder they act as such?

Anyone hoping for a UN Summit on the feasibility of Socialism will have a long wait. If we want a qualitatively different society in which we can solve such social problems as overcrowding the moment they appear, then we have to organise to get it. The choice is simple—production for social use or profit? —the peace, stability and the potential to produce an abundance of the necessaries of life in Socialism, or the stark rat-race that is capitalism. The choice is stark, but simple.

John Bissett

The Machine in Agriculture. by L. H. Roblin (1906)

From the September 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Machine in Agriculture. By L. H. Roblin, Deputé de la Nièvre

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The formidable crisis which accompanied the introduction of machinery into industry at the beginning of last century is well known. From day to day thousands of workmen were thrown out of work upon the pavement of the towns, without money and without bread. As the factory chimneys rose, as the progress resulting from the slow elaboration of ages, and produced by the successive efforts of past generations, replaced the less docile, less rapid and more costly hand of man in the daily labour by the brutal strength of steam and electricity, cries of poverty and anguish came from the breasts of the workmen violently expropriated from their living, hunted from the workshops by the discoveries of science by the onward march of mankind. It is remembered to what extremities misery forced the crowds of famished men, who threw themselves upon and broke into pieces the machines which had been substituted for them.

The same events which happened nearly a hundred years ago in industry are being repeated to-day in agriculture. Machinery is being introduced everywhere in our fields. The consequence of this new state of things, if it does not end as formerly in violence of the worst kind, is nevertheless most important and most dangerous to social life.

It is not only from to-day, however, that the machine has made its appearance in agriculture : twenty-five or thirty years ago the use of the steam threshing machine became general and replaced (by the aid of the traction engine which takes it from farm to farm) the antiquated threshing with the flail on the barn floor which occupied an entire staff of workers on all important farms during the whole of the winter. This transformation, however, was hardly felt because it occurred at a time when agriculture was at the height of its prosperity, when cultivators had not yet passed that crisis which has weighed upon them for so long a time and has caused them to modify more or less completely their old manner of life and ancient customs.

During the agricultural crisis the landowners and farmers have been led to cut down expenses, and they have sought to restrict in particular that item which costs most the labourer. Wherever possible they have abandoned the culture of cereals in favour of meadow and pasture for which practically no labour is required. It is indeed to be remarked that cattle raising has never suffered so much from market depreciation as the production of wheat, oats or rye. In many districts to-day only sufficient corn is sown to provide the straw necessary for wintering the cattle.

Cultivation, which was the great occupation of the rural population in former times, is much restricted to-day. Enforced idleness exists during a considerable portion of the year ; indeed, scarcely, except at the times of haymaking and harvesting, is the agricultural labourer sure of finding work. During these two periods of hard labour, the peasants, in several countries, have sought to earn more than in the past in order to compensate by a temporary but suitable wage for the long days of unemployment that they suffer during the winter and autumn. Conflicts, declared or veiled, have arisen recently between farmers and labourers, and they become each day more and more numerous. In order to oppose the demands of the labourers the masters shake before them the spectre of the machine. “If you create difficulties for us,” they say, “we will purchase machines. Then you will have no more work and you will earn nothing. It is preferable for you that you accept what we propose, even though you find it insufficient.”

A large number of farmers have passed from threats to acts. With the openly avowed aim of undermining the least manifestation of energy and combination among the agricultural labourers, they have purchased mowers, patent rakes and self binders, which enable them with an extremely reduced staff to take in their crops in a few days.

The development of machinery in our fields became generally noticeable four or five years ago, and it grows more and more in importance as rural knowledge becomes awakened. It is the direct reply of the exploiters to the demands of the exploited. It must also be remembered that the employers have been helped by recent improvements in agricultural machinery. Formerly the machines consisted only of a few parts, and when one of these was put out of action during operations (by the shock of a stone for instance) it was necessary to stop work and wait a considerable time for an urgent repair. At the present time, however, the new American machines are composed of many interchangeable parts, and when one of them is put out of truth or broken it is only necessary to unscrew a bolt and replace the part on the spot. The interruption of work is scarcely noticeable.

These various reasons are the cause that, this year in particular, complete train loads of harvesting machinery were to be met with in the stations of all agricultural districts. Everywhere, from every side, the agricultural labourer saw hitherto unknown machines arrive in the fields to displace him, and a dark anger takes possession of him as he sees these machines progressing and working by means of which it is designed to starve him into submission.

There have as yet been no acts of violence or grave and general disorders; nevertheless it sometimes happens, in the shadow of the hedge and under cover of night, that a machine left in the fields is destroyed.

As immediate consequence, the advent of machinery will hasten still more the exodus of the inhabitants of our hamlets and villages toward the towns. The periods of unemployment already so terrible will become intolerable, and the able-bodied of our country proletariat will be compelled to fly toward other destinies, to go into the great centres of population to find again the same poverty that they will have left behind in their cottages.

It is always said that “agriculture is short of hands.” No. It is agriculture that no longer employs the hands which are at its disposal. The rural proletariat in the literal sense of the word is no longer able to live. The advent of machinery has given it the final blow ; so true is it that, under capitalism, the most useful discoveries, the most remarkable inventions, every progress of science, if they profit a few, are nevertheless for the others—the victims—a cause of poverty and ruin.

—L’Action. (Translated by F.C.Watts)

Tomorrow’s World? (2023)

Book Review from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tomorrow’s People: the Future of Humanity in Ten Numbers. By Paul Morland. Picador £9.99.

In September we reviewed Hamish McRae’s The World in 2050, which, inter alia, makes some useful points about likely demographic changes, with ageing populations in many parts of the world but more youthful populations in Africa and India. Here Paul Morland discusses some similar issues, so we will focus on comments which differ from those made by McRae.

Improved education and literacy, particularly of women, have played a major role in reducing fertility rates. An extreme case is Singapore, where on average each woman has just one child. Many countries are becoming more like Denmark, with low fertility, very low infant mortality and long life expectancy. In the US there is a significant correlation between conservatism and high fertility, while in Israel the fertility rate is almost three children per woman. Deaths in childbirth in the US are over three times as high among black women as among white women.

Government policies can often restrict the number of children who are born, but it is much harder to achieve increased fertility rates. In China the one-child policy was relaxed in 2015 to a two-child policy, but the rate now is barely above 1.5 children per mother. It is likely that by 2050 one person in twelve in China will be over 80. The ageing population and correspondingly smaller workforce in Japan may well be behind the low rate of economic growth, and an ageing population in Russia may have contributed to its economic decline.

Migration is one way of maintaining population and reducing the impact of ageing. In Western Europe for instance, immigrants are often younger than ‘locals’, and their fertility rate comes to more or less match that of those already living in the country. Younger people are supposedly more rebellious than their elders and more likely to protest, as they are more impulsive and have fewer responsibilities.

One ongoing change relates to urbanisation, with the proportion of town dwellers in the world having passed one half a few a years ago, and likely to be around two-thirds by 2050. Urban food production can increase, with hydroponics enabling food to be grown indoors, ‘with a regulated environment and perfectly measured inputs, including LED light’. This would mean fewer herbicides and pesticides than conventional agriculture, and less need to transport food over long distances.

As an illustration of the pace of recent changes, Morland records what a taxi-driver in Indonesia said to him: ‘My dad and grandpa spent their lives crouching in the rice paddies. Driving a cab is much better than that, and now my son works in an air-conditioned office’. But what about his female relatives?

All in all, an informative and thought-provoking look at likely and possible futures, albeit without going beyond the current socio-economic system.

Paul Bennett

Town and Country: Marxism’s Answer to the Problems (1973)

From the September 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx and Engels are the most contemporary of writers. Reading their work of a century ago, one is struck again and again by its potent applicability to today. The recently-published Grundrisse should be thrust in the hands of every sociologist playing handy-pandy in foam and backwaters: here is the social ocean itself expounded. The problems of the present are continually anticipated — and the only tenable conclusions drawn by relating them to the economic foundation on which the complex of human organization is built.

We think of civilization as towns, and modern man as urban man, for obvious reasons. Nevertheless, between the towns is country and one-fifth of man in Britain remains rural man. What about the country? The environmentalists have brought attention to the problems suffusing it today: the long-term effects of agriculture’s chemical-propelled drive for short-term gains, the damage done by improvements and the car. Apart from gloomy prophecies of the ultimate from these developments, the question to be asked is what is the countryside’s future. Has it still an organic function in society or, as the present tendency appears, is it to become simply a townsmen’s recreation ground?

Divided and Distorted

Marx and Engels considered the past, present and future of the country. “The first great division of labour in society,” wrote Engels in Anti-Dühring, “is the separation of town and country.” In The Origin of the Family, he wrote:

“Also characteristic of civilization is the establishment of a permanent opposition between town and country as basis of the whole social division of labour.” (p.201)

Elsewhere, both he and Marx spoke of “the antithesis” and “the antagonism” between the two spheres. It is, says Marx,

“. . . the most crass expression of the subjection of the individual under the division of labour, under a definite activity forced upon him — a subjection which makes one man into a restricted town-animal, the other into a restricted country-animal, and daily creates anew the conflict between their interests.” (The German Ideology, p.44)

What is being said is that town and country labour create two types of man practically in opposition in their conditioned requirements from society. If you like, two kinds of human nature; and underlying them, and their conditioning, is the division of labour which is produced by and intensified under property society. Marx observes that it begins to exist “from the moment when a division of material and mental labour appears”, and goes on:

“For as soon as labour is distributed, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood.” (The German Ideology, pp. 20 & 22)

And for the final effect of specialist division of labour on man: “It converts the labourer into a crippled monstrosity.” (Capital, Vol. I, p. 396)

Is Migration a Factor?

Thus, the countryman sees the town-dweller as an overpaid smart-alec with unhealthy lungs, and the reciprocal view is of a cretin with straw in his hair. Underlying the townie concept is acceptance, conscious or otherwise, of the theory of migratory selection: the more dynamic move, the less able stay put. Despite attractive examples like the Parsees and the Jews, the theory does not hold water. It cannot be applied to the gypsies, for instance; and, obviously, with different working and living conditions it would be the “fitter” who stayed and the “weaker” who emigrated.

The matter therefore comes back to the division of labour. The real difference — the two kinds of human nature — was expounded by Engels in Anti-Dühring:

“The town artisans, it is true, had to produce for exchange from the very beginning.”(p.300)

“The first great division of labour . . . condemned the rural population to thousands of years of degradation, and the people of the towns to subjection to each one’s individual trade. It destroyed the basis of the intellectual development of the former and the physical development of the latter”. (p.320)

A great deal is covered by this. It includes the fact that the townsman’s idea of the countryman as simple and uncomplicated is the opposite of true. “Development” means rural workers’ difficulty in organizing because of their scattered situation, which reinforces their apparent backwardness and lack of ability to improve their conditions compared with industrial workers. It should be considered also that from the Middle Ages until very recently large numbers of country people were employed in servile non-productive work as domestics, gardeners, retainers and so on.

About Pollution

Yet the techniques of industry have, inevitably, penetrated the country. The brisk expert of today can tell us that agriculture has become an industry. Marx told us so a hundred and twenty years ago.

“But e.g. if agriculture itself rests on scientific activities — if it requires machinery, chemical fertilizer acquired through exchange, seeds from distant countries, etc., and if rural patriarchal manufacture has already vanished — which is already implied in the presupposition — then the machine-making factory, external trade, crafts etc. appear as needs for agriculture.” (Grundrisse, p.527)

Engels speaks of capitalist industry going outside the town concentrations and “bringing new large towns into being” in the countryside. This is not breaching the town-country division of labour, but in the same context Engels makes some startlingly prescient points. His comments on pollution would gratify any present-day ecologist:

“The factory town, however, transforms all water into stinking ditch water . . . The present poisoning of the air, water and land can only be put an end to by the fusion of town and country; and only this fusion will change the situation of the masses now languishing in the towns, and enable their excrement to be used for the production of plants instead of for the production of disease.” (Anti-Dühring, pp.324-5).

Whatever may have been in Engels’s mind at the end of that passage, it applies now to the “sludge de-watering” plant which reduces sewage to clear water and a biscuit usable as low-grade fertilizer. It can serve only populations of 20,000 or less and could not deal with the amount of sheer litter that accompanies city sewage; but those considerations only support Engels’s case for a society of small communities.

Planned Spread

At the same time as attacking pollution, Engels points to the actual possibilities for decentralizing industry:

“Large-scale industry which has taught us to convert the movement of molecules, which is more or less universally realisable, into the movement of masses for technical purposes, has thereby to a considerable extent freed production from the restrictions of place. Water-power was local; steam-power is free … It is the capitalist mode of its utilisation which concentrates it mainly in the towns and changes factory villages into factory towns.”

(ibid., p.324)

For steam, electric power must now largely be substituted; but Engels’s remarks remain true. The economics of capitalism have led to even greater concentration of industry in and around major towns, and government attempts to have it re-located have been conspicuously unsuccessful. There are some examples whore decentralization has suited companies (such as Pye’s small electronics factories in villages), but they are exceptional.

Engels saw that capitalism had, in his own day, made the break-up of town agglomerations possible but impractical for its own purposes. To bring it to actuality, and end the innumerable existing problems, society must be reorganized:

“Once more, only the abolition of the capitalist character of modern industry can do away with this new vicious circle, this contradiction in modern industry, which is constantly reproducing itself. Only a society which makes possible the harmonious co-operation of its productive forces on the basis of one single vast plan can allow industry to settle in whatever form of distribution over the whole country is best adapted to its own development and the maintenance of development of the other elements of production.”

Greater Competence

What is specially important about these passages is that they present the dispersal of industry and the big city, and the ending of pollution, not as a simple-life dream but as a theory of social organization — based on the achievements of capitalism itself. “The technical basis of modern industry is revolutionary”, said Engels. In the same light, the abolition of the division of labour is not simply a cry for humanity but a leap to an immensely more competent organization of society. Marx put it:

“Modern industry, by its very nature, therefore necessitates variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer . . . We have seen how this absolute contradiction . . . vents its rage in the incessant human sacrifices from among the working class, in the most reckless squandering of labour power and in the devastation caused by social anarchy.” (Capital, Vol. 1, p.460)

With the ending of the division of labour, the “opposition” between town and country gives place to their fusion. The two human natures become the one, Marx’s “mere fragment of a man” replaced by his “fully developed individual … to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers”.

Villages of the Future

Engels went on to suggest, from his own analysis and from the projections made by Fourier and Owen (both of whom were conscious of the effects of the division of labour), how life and labour would be in Socialism. He approved their idea of social groups of between 1,600 and 3,000 people — good-sized villages. The closest thing to a town would be four or five of these situated near one another. Every person would work in both agriculture and industry, and young people would be given all-round training so as to incorporate “the greatest possible variety of occupation for each individual”. The country would become an integral part of everyone’s activity — not as a playground and a different place, but as a productive force and a source of pleasure simultaneously.

This was both practical and urgently necessary to Marx and Engels. The problems of the present day are not new, but were considered by them in their view of society. The country’s dilemmas are also the town’s; in The Housing Problem Engels shows how the town-country antithesis blocks attempts to deal with that chronic social misery. The solutions he and Marx gave remain the only workable ones — and needed all the more urgently today.

Robert Barltrop

London's Government (1967)

From the May 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1888 Parliament created the ‘new’ County of London out of the existing counties of Middlesex, Essex, Kent and Surrey. At the same time it also created administrative counties throughout the rest of the country. The old Board of Works which had been set up in 1855 was abolished and a new London County Council, with increased powers, took its place. This has been heralded as the beginning of effective London Government, but this is not so. London Government goes back to a time before the Roman invasion of Britain. The Romans used the Thames as their access route in their penetration of southern Britain; the geographical site of London was the farthest inland point at which the Thames was easily navigable by sea-going vessels. With their flair for organisation and engineering, the Romans developed the community they found on this site into a port, and made this the focal centre for their fine network of roads from the Kent coast into eastern and northern areas beyond. They were to occupy London for the next four centuries.

At the time the Romans evacuated, London had become a walled and fortified town—something the Romans did after the disastrous raids by the Iceni under the leadership of Queen Boadicea, during the latter part of the Roman occupation. The area of this walled community was to remain almost static down the years until the great Fire in 1666.

The Romans gave London its name and its status as a port and a centre of communications. The Anglo-Saxons provided many of London's present day governmental institutions, that were not to acquire their full importance until more than a thousand years had passed, and the 1888 Act became law.

London, in common with the other Roman communities, was not reoccupied immediately by the Germanic invaders who, being accustomed to building only with timber, were unable to repair the crumbling stone buildings that were left behind. But London’s geographical site was too attractive to lie idle for any significant period, so that during the latter Saxon era the small fortified town began once again to come alive and re-assert itself as the leading community in Southern Britain, in time enjoying a high degree of autonomy in the administration of two key aspects of local affairs—markets and money.

Threatened by continued raids by Danish invaders, the several Saxon 'kings' established a “burghal” system of fortified communities in an effort to continue an ordered life. London, by virtue of its position, became one of the key centres of fortification when Alfred the Great established his chain of protected towns throughout Southern England. London was further strengthened, during the Saxon period, by the creation and establishment of eight mints, as against six in Winchester (the capital of Wessex) and four in Canterbury.

The burghal system served to shape the development of English local government, setting into motion at this very early date the basis for the semi-autonomous boroughs and fusing into English political thought a strong "localist" tradition which served as a potent force throughout the feudalist period. The early Saxon precedents established the concept of the "Royal Charter" as the machinery to be used in conferring a degree of administrative autonomy upon local communities.

After their conquest in 1066, the Norman French were reluctant to permit the newly conquered English communities to continue to exercise any great degree of local self-government. Instead the new rulers, fearful of potential revolt by a restive population, set about the creation of a strong centralised system of government under the direct control of the crown. But the Norman rulers needed money to administer the affairs of their newly conquered island, so they accepted the practice of selling off Royal Charters to the wealthier cities, and London took full advantage of William’s offer. Sometime between 1068-1075 London received its full charter which, while not conferring any new powers, did ratify the citizens' rights and privileges already in existence, which they had enjoyed under Saxon rule. By a long succession of Charters, purchased and renewed, London maintained its importance, so much so that at the time of Magna Carta, a clause was inserted which assured the City of all its ancient rights, privileges and free customs and granted the practice of the annual election of a Mayor and other local officials.

As the population of London grew, so also did its economic importance. During the Middle Ages societies and guilds began to grow up, organised at first on a friendly basis, to assist the aged, sick and needy. But these organisations soon were to take on a greater importance, as they became amalgamated with various craft and merchant groups. In time they became the powerful City guilds, controlling not only their particular interests in trade, but controlling the City's administration. The guilds had learnt the lesson of the City, the power that could be attained with the purchase of Royal Charters of incorporation, which gave them the right to elect their own Wardens and their members onto the Common Council of the City, which in turn elected the Mayor—plus the Members of Parliament for London. The guilds continued to exercise a complete stranglehold over London Government right up to the passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832. Today remnants of the original London guilds remain in the form of 82 livery companies.

The exodus from the City into the surrounding countryside had begun in the Elizabethan period, when groups of tradesmen and workers in several crafts sought to escape the stranglehold of the guilds. But the great exodus took place in the mid-seventeenth century, as a direct result of two tragic events which followed each other —the Plague and the Fire.

Upwards of eighty thousand people fled from the fire, and six years later fewer than one in four were to return. The significance of this was not immediately noticed, because large numbers of workers came into the City and its surrounding areas, attracted by the developing industrial communities springing up along the line of the Thames. This growth and urban sprawl continued for the next two hundred years, determining which people moved in which direction. Eastwards the drift continued with the settlement of vast armies of labouring poor, attracted to the growing port extensions that were now under construction. Thousands of rows of humble dwellings were hastily run up by speculative builders to house the growing numbers that were now settling in what was to become the East End and later to develop into terrible slums, heavily overcrowded. Westward from the City drifted the wealthier. Vast ornate estates of fine houses and villas were provided at great cost and skill, so that today, in Belgravia and adjacent areas, we can see and admire the skill and taste which the wealthy enjoyed and still enjoy. In east, south and parts of north London, there still remain areas of slum property run up to house the poor.

The development of railways, tubes, tramways and other forms of transportation throughout the Victorian period extended the further sprawl of urban communities. The slums of the East now extended onto the South bank and continued to spread.

During the whole of this growth, the City still continued its dominance over its one square mile, and attempted to control some of the administrative functions of its neighbours. But the City Corporation had no interest in extending its historic boundaries. So instead, within the several and varied communities outside the City's control, there grew up a patchwork system of local administration, which was neither powerful enough nor comprehensive in its geographical scale to provide order in the government of the growing suburbia.

As the nineteenth century dawned, a greater degree of restlessness began to manifest itself; the chaos and confusion at attempts to localise and control administration became legion. Strong movements began to organise for local political, economic and electoral reform, ugly riots broke out and for a time London came under the control of the mobs. This all goaded Parliament into facing the vast problem of municipal reform. As a result of the mob riots, they passed in 1829 the London Police Act, which represented the first coherent attempt to deal with Greater London as a geographical unity, by establishing a Metropolitan Police district extending in a 15 mile radius from Charing Cross. But the City received special treatment, being allowed to establish and administer its own police force, which is still in existence.

By 1834-35, Parliament began to tackle some of the broader issues of local reform, commencing with the Poor Law Amendment Act, designed to break the power of privileged property classes over local government control by substituting elected local Boards of Guardians to administer relief for the poor. The Municipal Reform Act in 1835 went a step further by creating conditions for elective councils to govern the affairs of all boroughs in England. But the City was again singled out, and excluded entirely from the provisions of the 1835 Act. It was not until 1855 that Greater London's needs were finally considered with the setting up by Parliament of a special body to be known as the Metropolitan Board of Works, thus abolishing all the little local bodies and creating instead larger bodies under the title of "administrative vestry” elected by local inhabitants. The smaller parishes were grouped into districts and given an elected District Board. In all 41 vestries and boards were set up under the control of the Board of Works.

The Metropolitan Board of Works set into motion the construction of 82 miles of sewers, it controlled the construction of the Victoria and Albert embankments, created several parks and open spaces, constructed several major road improvements and developed a centralised London Fire Brigade. But it was not careful with its accounts, and much scandal became attached to its handling of its funds. Moreover its members were appointed by each other—which put the Board outside the control of any administrative authority.

After the passing of the 1888 Act and the creation of the London County Council the Board became defunct. In 1889 the London parishes and districts were re-grouped and formed into 28 Metropolitan Boroughs. They continued like this until with the passing of the London Government Act in 1963 they were re-grouped and the administrative areas enlarged, this time encompassing the whole of the County of Middlesex, large sections of metropolitan Essex, Kent and Surrey. This re-organisation made 32 larger boroughs with control vested in the Greater London Council, which replaced the L.C.C.

Some disagreement exists over the question of when the national political parties made their first inroads into local governments, and who was responsible for this development. The Labour Party claim that the Conservatives and the Liberals bear the responsibility, and point to the history of the Whigs and Tories during the reform era to back up this assertion. Certainly the London County Council was intensely political from its inception in 1888, with two opposing groups calling themselves ‘Progressives’ and ‘Moderates’. In 1907 it became a clear battle between the Liberals (Progressives) and the Conservatives then calling themselves Municipal Reformers, who retained political control for 27 years, until in 1934 the long reign of the Labour Party began, ending last month with the election of the Conservatives.

V. W. Phillips

Foulness: A pretence that all is well (1971)

From the June 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The government named Foulness as the place for the airport, and everybody lived happily ever after. The people of Stansted, Nuthampstead and Cublington were relieved; the airlines dreamed of expansion; the Secretary for the Environment was photographed in front of a traffic jam and spoke about “a country fit to live in”.

The saga of the Third London Airport is indeed a mass of make-believe. It began in 1965 when the government — Labour then — announced the airport and Stansted, Essex, as its site. Protests and objections made a national issue over the implied annihilation of beautiful rural surroundings. A crowd of Labour MPs were to be rebels against the proposal, until the Party Whip was applied and they almost all trotted through the lobby to vote in favour after all; a note of imitative deference to grazing flocks, at any rate. Then an Enquiry, a Commission, and other thoughts as to the site. The Isle of Sheppey, Nuthampstead, Cublington were named in turn. For each, the Stansted protests were repeated in kind and intensity. Eventually opinion settled on Foulness, helped by a commercial proposition for reclaiming its marshlands, and the final decision was the one believed-in. The whole affair is seen as some kind of triumph: for the protesters, for democracy, for concern over the quality of life.

The fact is that an accessible site for a modern airport cannot be found without destruction and making life intolerable over a large area. The town or village named is almost insignificant in the bone-shaped contour twenty-five miles long which is the pattern of activity round an airport such as the one proposed. Stansted is in itself no beauty-spot or haven: an uninteresting place on a trunk road, suburbanized by a mass of spec-built estates. Its surroundings, however, are miles of arable farm land sprinkled with villages and hamlets. (At an early stage in the Stansted row the government amiably agreed to re-align the intended runways in case jet-roar cracked the spire of Thaxted church, ten miles away.)

In the past, because the problem was smaller, there was no trouble over this kind of thing. Industry made noise, smoke, smells which rendered life dismal and disgusting. The automatic answer, however, was to place industry on the sides of cities where the proles could endure it without disturbing the well-to-do; or create areas where the same principle applied. An airport is too large to make such distinctions, though there are echoes of them in the satisfaction over Foulness — it is, after all, in the estuary below muckiest London, the nearby conurbations an East Enders’ seaside resort and a new town of Council blocks. True, there were airports before the war. But those were the days of small, less noisy planes which represented romance and trips for the rich, and there was even a certain social prestige in living near an aerodrome.

The voice of the objectors at Stansted and the other country places was predominantly the voice of the well-to-do and the socially satisfied: landowners, professional people, commuting executives, and those who had gone out of cities for a bit of peace and quiet. There is nothing discreditable in that — cities are nerve-wearing places, and a home away from them is many people’s dream. Nevertheless, there was another view of which little was heard. Had a plebiscite been taken in the area to be affected by Stansted, or any of the other rural sites, it would almost certainly have produced a strong majority in favour of the airport. For the world of leafy lanes, thatched cottages and golden cornfields is also the world of bread-and-scrape wages — farm and road labourers taking home eleven pounds a week, and their wives doing charring for their betters to try to make ends meet. For such people, the transformation of rural life appeared no tragedy. The tragedy is, indeed, that their hopes would have been disappointed: the well-paid jobs would not have materialized for them, the hoeing and ditching exchangeable only for shovelling cement on runways.

All the same, there was a certain instructiveness in the militancy of the anti-airport protesters. Respectable Citizens who condemn strikes and disparage political demonstrations talked of non-co-operation. At Cublington there was something about home-made weapons for a siege. One may see this as what people will do to protect their property or their stakes, but it is also a lesson on a political theme: the capacity to agitate, obstruct and paint slogans on walls isn’t after all exclusive to industrial workers.

What was taken for granted from the outset was that a Third London Airport was necessary. The aim of the objectors in each place was simply to direct it elsewhere — self-interest fostered by the government’s condition that opponents of Stansted at the Public Enquiry must put up an alternative site: a version of Divide and Rule. This exemplifies one of the great inescapable dilemmas of capitalism. Commerce is pre-eminent, making the life of society dependent on the flow of commodities. Their production and consumption are compulsive; yet the by-products and consequences are endless social problems which are treated as if they can somehow be separated from their cause. Thus, society wants a proliferation of cars without a traffic problem; industrial benefits without pollution; chicken on Sundays but not factory-farming; air travel without the effects which gigantic airports have on life.

The problem is exacerbated by the shape of cities, where interests and rights and expedients cross one another in a tangle from which there is no extrication. As soon as the Foulness decision was announced, plans and speculations and hopes for the airport and its influence on the near environment were laid down. The first plan, official, is for what would anyway be an obvious consequence — a new conurbation of a million people in south-east Essex, virtually completing the extension of London to the coast. The hopes were expressed in an article in the Sunday Times (2 May) by Professor Colin Buchanan: for this extension, the whole corridor from Foulness “to the gates of the City of London” to become an area of magnificent buildings and high-quality living.

The simple answers to Professor Buchanan’s hopes are in two other articles on the same day. In the first — in the same issue of the Sunday Times, in fact — three aviation writers summarize practical prospects for the airport. Almost their last word is:

  But in the end it is the airlines and their demands for the future that should dictate the shape of Foulness. They will, after all, be the most important financial ingredient in the scheme.

Of course that is so. And in that connection it is worth noting that though the big scheme has gone elsewhere, commercial airlines have developed the existing Stansted airport since 1965 and are quite likely to want to continue doing so.

Still more to the ultimate point are remarks made in an interview in The Observer by Peter Walker, Secretary for the Environment. Amid much piety over preservation, pollution and the need to be “much more positive and professional” about traffic problems, he says:

  If suddenly we find in a National Park the world’s greatest platinum mine, which will transform our balance of payments and enable me to get a massive amount more money from the Treasury for all sorts of new projects, I couldn’t say now I would refuse permission . . . If I decide against mineral development, to some extent I’m making a judgement against the national prosperity of the country.

Professor Buchanan’s observations are put in perspective by qualifications like these; but they also show remarkable insensitivity to what life is like for most people. He speaks, for instance, of great benefits Heathrow has brought to the west side of London — “new industries attracted, a vigorous, indeed over- vigorous housing market created, the higher paid executives of firms and airlines settling and spending their money in towns and villages in a 20-mile arc thrown west of Heathrow, and new hotels cramming themselves in near the West London Air Terminal”; and urges that Foulness should bring eastern London “a chance to get some of these goodies”.

“Goodies” — really? Does Professor Buchanan seriously argue that life in the crowded, traffic-harassed region of Heathrow airport is highly desirable? Extraordinarily, he makes no mention whatever of noise. The Observer editorial on Foulness utters similar hopes to his, but with a less enchanted view of Heathrow: “It may seem illogical that an airport should bring such benefits to the east of London when its presence to the west is rightly held to do such harm. But London puts its best face to the west, where the noise hazard is becoming intolerable.” It has been said, and illustrated, often enough that ordinary conversation is barely possible in houses in some areas round Heathrow because of aircraft noise.

The piece about “higher paid executives” settling twenty miles from Heathrow is a remarkable piece of misdirection, so ingenuous as to border insolence. The higher-paid do this, indeed: twenty miles is probably the minimum, the distance being in direct proportion to their means to get as far as possible from delectable Heathrow. Some of the bitterness at Stansted and Cublington came from employers and executives who had chosen — because they could afford — to live in pleasant surroundings a long way from what their workers had to put up with. One can be sure that the higher-paid will live as far from Foulness, too, as they can. Modern enterprises do, of course, lead to better working-class housing, but the point here touched-upon is vital. Working people are disabled over housing not only by its common inadequacy, but also in regard to mobility. Only the better-off can choose where they live.

Air travel is, on the whole, a luxury today. Some of its necessity as passenger transport may be questionable. There is a prestige element in it; and, as with other mechanized forms, an accelerated central process tends to disguise long preliminary and after-processes which often reduce what is actually gained in time. Nevertheless, it remains essential for humane and informative purpose at least. The principal problem today is not airports as such, but the size of aircraft — and this is a subject of international competition, bigger meaning better in commercial advantage.

There is no sense in saying society can do without the aeroplane. It is perfectly possible, however, to envisage and plan cities or regions incorporating airports which do not make life insufferable for everyone round them. Perhaps every airport should be a coastal one, and every plane a smaller one; perhaps a forgotten version like the flying boat offers an answer; certainly technology already knows answers to many of the problems. The possibilities are numerous enough, but their condition is a different motivation of society. The criteria for airports and air travel now, and all the things one thinks are amenities, are cost and commercial efficiency. Given the continuation of those as social measures, the airports will blight life round them. Foulness will be Heathrow again.

The alternative is to change society so as to make human choice and need the measures for innovation. Our environment is not a government department: it is the world in which we live, and technology offers us means for it to be a good world. It is not because it is still capitalism’s world. The first step to changing it is to reject the make-believe with which monster airports and squalid lives are supposed to be made acceptable, and see that the choices offered by capitalism are no choices at all.

Robert Barltrop

When Profit Is All (2019)

From the June 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Urban-Rural Imbalance?

Current global facts and figures on the urban-rural divide reveal disturbing numbers of people in both urban and rural locations living in desperate situations. The capitalist agenda is to profit from whatever scheme is dreamed up and implemented without regard for the externalities which, in this case, are people. There are plans being implemented around the world to remove millions of individuals from millions of acres of productive farmland, to empty the land of people in favour of huge agribusiness projects which can reap significant profits for corporations from mono-crops using vastly reduced labour numbers and, therefore, costs.

The typical plan is to move those uprooted into, or more often to the edge of, ever-expanding towns and cities as cheap labour. The plan may work well for the owners, the companies and their shareholders, but what of the disenfranchised, the millions uprooted and forced into unknown environments where they have no useful skills, how well does it work for them? They are being forced there ostensibly to work in construction, manufacturing and the service sector but it has become obvious that there is a huge insufficiency of employment available for the massive numbers and consequently millions of those displaced live in abject poverty.

This is exactly what the World Bank had directed India to do in 1996. It wanted India to move 400 million people from rural to urban areas by 2015. These are ‘agricultural refugees’ swarming into the cities looking for menial jobs. It is primarily through this decision that over the years, in addition to more or less static farm incomes, public sector investments in agriculture were also kept low, hovering between 0.3 to 0.5 percent of GDP during the period 2011 to 2017. Total investments, both public and private, have also been declining steadily – from 3.1 percent of GDP in 2011-12 to 2.2 percent in 2016-17. Compare this with the tax concessions being given to industry, which is in the region of 5 percent of GDP. Agriculture, which employs 50 percent of the country’s population, has simply been starved of public sector investments in order to achieve the desired results.

The Indian Congress has now admitted that direct income support is urgently required to lift the poorest of the poor from abject poverty, these poorest being a large proportion of small and marginal farmers. The Economic Survey 2016 revealed the average income of farming families in 17 states of India, approximately half the country, is about £220 per annum, less than £20 per month (for perspective this is similar to the amount granted to defence service employees and also to officers of the Supreme Court as their laundry allowance). For some international comparison, average domestic support per farmer, country by country: US $60,586, Canada $16,562, Japan $10,149, EU $6,762, China $863, Brazil $345, India $227.

With regard to India as one example, a quote from a British colonial administrator, Lord Metcalfe, in 1830, is illustrative: ‘Dynasty after dynasty tumbles down but the village community remains the same. It is in a high degree conducive to their happiness, and to the enjoyment of a great portion of freedom and independence’. His idea was that to control India the British would need to undermine this independence of the rural majority – which they did. And following independence India’s subsequent leaders continued on this path of control and subservience through several generations to the present. The current Prime Minister Modi has announced that India is one of the most ‘business friendly’ countries in the world (India is now in compliance with World Bank directives on ‘Ease of Doing Business’ and ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’). When we see terms like these we are looking at capitalist-framed initiatives and minimal research shows that both of these directives promote environment-destroying policies, have little regard for local populations, and are based on global free market principles.

Many environmentalists from around the world will be aware of the horrifying numbers of farmers’ deaths in India from suicide, something in the region of 400,000 over the recent 20 years – 20,000 every year. The most significant reason being overwhelming debt. And, in fact, the government declined to publish the number of deaths for the last two years.

In addition to the numbers of farmers being displaced, in April of this year international environmental organisations appealed to India’s Supreme Court and UN organisations to prevent forced evictions of millions of Indian’s forest dwellers from their traditional, ancestral lands.

Health or Wealth?

Farming worldwide has, especially in the last four decades, become more and more of a burden for individual farmers around the globe, who are always under pressure for reasons out of their control. Studies on the harm done to the environment and the contamination of water, earth and consequently food – are these to be ignored too because profit comes first?

As new studies continue to point to a direct link between the widely-used glyphosate herbicide and various forms of cancer, the agribusiness lobby fights relentlessly to ignore or discredit evidence of damage to humans and other entities. Bayer AG, which now owns Monsanto, is currently facing something in the order of 11,000 cases in US courts brought by individuals claiming serious health effects from exposure to the chemical glyphosate found in the herbicide Roundup. Several recent cases have found in favour of the plaintiffs who have been awarded millions and even billions of dollars in compensation.

In a long-term animal study several years ago by a French team headed by Eric Seralini it was demonstrated that even ultra-low levels of glyphosate herbicides cause non-alcoholic liver disease. The levels rats were exposed to, per kg of body weight, were far lower than what is allowed in the US food supply. According to the Mayo Clinic currently, after four decades or more of pervasive use of glyphosate, 100 million – one in three Americans – now have liver disease. These diagnoses are in some individuals as young as 8 years old.

“The jury saw for themselves internal company documents demonstrating that, from day one, Monsanto has never had any interest in finding out whether Roundup is safe,” an attorney for the couple, R. Brent Wisner, said in a statement sent to CBS News. “Instead of investing in sound science, they invested millions in attacking science that threatened their business agenda.” Source: CBS News link

While most attention is understandably drawn to the human effects of exposure to glyphosate, the most widely-used agriculture chemical in the world today, independent scientists are beginning to look at another alarming effect of the agrochemical– its effect on essential soil nutrients. In a study of the health of soils in the EU, the online journal Politico.eu found that the effects of spraying glyphosate on the major crops in European agriculture is having disastrous consequences on soil health.

Scientists at Austria’s University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna showed that casting activity of earthworms had nearly disappeared from the surface of farmland within three weeks of glyphosate application. Casting, being the process of worms pushing fertile soils to the surface as they burrow, is vital for healthy soil and plant nutrition. A study at Holland’s Wageningen University of topsoil samples from more than 300 soil sites across the EU found that 83 percent of the soils contained one or more pesticide residues. Evidence of soil experts is increasingly revealing clear links between the use of pesticides such as glyphosate and dramatic drops in soil fertility and the collapse of microbe systems essential to healthy soil. Worms are one of the most essential. It’s well-established that earthworms play a vital role in healthy soil nutrients. Soils lacking these are soils that deprive us of the essentials we need for healthy diets. This is a pandemic problem of soil depletion emerging globally over the past four decades, notably the same time frame that use of pesticides and herbicides has exploded worldwide. Earthworms are beneficial as they enhance soil nutrient cycling and enhance other beneficial soil micro-organisms, and the concentration of large quantities of nutrients easily assimilated by plants. In addition to its effects on earthworms it has also been established that glyphosate can kill specific fungi and bacteria that plants need to suck up nutrients.

While average yields of major grains such as rice, wheat and maize have more than doubled since 1960, the use of glyphosate-based herbicides has risen 15-20 fold. Glyphosate is the base chemical component for some 750 different brands of herbicide worldwide in addition to Monsanto-Bayer’s Roundup. Glyphosate residues have been found in tap water, orange juice, children’s urine, breast milk, snacks, beer, wine, cereals, eggs, oatmeal, wheat products, and most conventional foods tested. Since the Monsanto Roundup patent expired it is clear that regulatory bodies in the US, EU and China (which now produces more glyphosate than Monsanto) among others, are ignoring the various dangers which have been proved.

Capitalism’s Miseries

In January the Oakland Institute sounded the alarm on the latest attack by the World Bank on poor and indigenous people around the world. The World Bank’s Scheme to Privatize the Commons details how the Bank’s prescribed reforms, via a new land indicator in the Enabling the Business of Agriculture (EBA) project, promotes large-scale land acquisitions and the expansion of agribusinesses in the developing world. This new indicator is now a key element of the larger EBA project, which dictates pro-business reforms that governments should conduct in the agricultural sector. Initiated as a pilot in 38 countries in 2017, the land indicator is expected to be expanded to 80 countries in 2019. The project is funded by US and UK governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The EBA’s main recommendations to governments include formalising private property rights, easing the sale and lease of land for commercial use, systematising the sale of public land by auction to the highest bidder, and improving procedures for expropriation. Countries are scored on how well they implement the Bank’s policy advice. The scores then help determine the volume of aid money and foreign investment they receive.

Amidst flaws detailed in the report is the Bank’s prescription to developing countries’ governments, particularly in Africa, to transfer public lands with ‘potential economic value’ to private, commercial use, so that the land can be put to its supposed ‘best use’. Claiming that low-income countries do not manage public land in an effective manner, the Bank pushes for the privatization of public land as the way forward. This ignores the fact that millions of rural poor live and work on these lands, which are essential for their livelihoods while representing ancestral assets with deep social and cultural significance. It also ignores the basic fact that these small farmers have more than fulfilled the needs of the population for generations and it is the principles of capitalism that is being upset by them.

French think tank Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI) has shown that agro-ecological farming alone has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe by 47 per cent and thereby keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees. Another important factor revealed shows that a transition from intensive farming to agro-ecological farming will bring down pesticides consumption by 380,000 tonnes per year in Europe alone. What could that figure be globally?

Most climate mitigation studies point to more crop intensification which means a hyper-intensive farming system leading to more toxic soils, more water mining resulting in more empty aquifers, and more contamination of the food chain. This methodology was behind the launch of the ‘New Vision for Agriculture’ at the World Economic Forum 2009 aiming at increasing food production by 20 percent, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent, and reducing rural poverty by 20 percent every decade. The list of companies ready to initiate the ‘New Vision for Agriculture’ clearly shows that this ‘new vision’ is simply another version of the ‘old vision’ – capitalist necessity for profit. Included in the list are Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), BASF, Bunge Limited, Cargill, Coca-Cola, DuPont, General Mills, Kraft Foods, Metro AG, Monsanto, Nestlé, PepsiCo, SABMiller, Syngenta, Unilever, Wal-Mart, and Yara International.

Chemical or Ecological?

The UN-sponsored TEEB initiative – The Economics of Ecosystems and  Biodiversity – for agriculture and food, has in its latest study warned of a significant contribution to greenhouse gas emissions emanating from farming practices, from cutting down forests to make land available for cultivation to food waste dumped in landfills, accounting for between 47 to 51 percent of global gas emissions. Contrary to the ‘New Vision for Agriculture’ the IDDRI study mentioned above addresses these problems with the aim of eliminating them.

Returning to India new studies investigating the relationship between intensive agriculture and organic farming with regard to climate change and crop yield have revealed some interesting truths, contrary to many earlier claims by transnational corporations. A major initiative was launched when village elders in Punnukula village in Khamam district of Andhra Pradesh came together more than 15 years ago to stop the use of chemical pesticides. This local initiative led to the introduction of Non-Pesticides Management (NPM) under the Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA) expanding to 3.6 million acres without the use of pesticides.

Following local enthusiasm and acceptance by the state, Andhra Pradesh launched Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) aiming to bring non-chemical agriculture to its nearly 6 million farmers by the end of the year 2024. Just one year after the introduction of Zero Budget Natural Farming a study by Azim Premji University showed that crop yields in fact had gone up from 11 to 79 percent – 11 percent in rice and the highest, 79 percent, in aubergine.

The challenges both facing and threatening the vast majority of the global population stem from the totally encompassing capitalist system. The questions to be asked are crucial for the well-being of the planet, from plankton to human. How shall we approach the challenges of global warming? Should populations be forced to move from their homes? Can we accept being poisoned by what we eat and drink? These and other issues all require answers. We have a single answer to them all – the solution is socialism.

Janet Surman

A disaster waiting to happen (2000)

From the February 2000 of the Socialist Standard 

When the global economic crisis hit, first, the Pacific Rim countries and, later, Latin America and elsewhere, just over a couple of years ago, Venezuela was, as we noted (Socialist Standard, October 1998), particularly vulnerable. It had been economically and politically unstable for at least two decades, and corruption was rife (see Socialist Standard, September 1999).

In February last year, Hugo Chavez, the former paratrooper who had led a failed military coup d’état seven years previously, was elected president; and in August, he and his left-wing coalition won an overwhelming victory (but on a 53 percent turnout) in the elections to the National Assembly. He had proposed a complete rewriting of the constitution, the draft of which went before the new assembly, and was passed on 16 December.

According to his mainly right-wing critics, President Chavez has become a virtual dictator. He has increased, against the general trend worldwide, state intervention and control of the economy, reduced civilian control of the armed forces, and has probably secured the presidency for himself until 2012. He says that he needs such powers in order to “root out corruption” which, of course, he blames on previous governments. And, said Chavez, he would solve Venezuela’s economic ills. Nevertheless, between February last year, when he became president, and the beginning of December, unemployment had increased by a massive 700,000.

On polling day, last August, there was heavy rainfall throughout much of Venezuela, causing a number of landslides, 37 deaths, and the destruction of up to 2,000 homes. But worse was to come.

Beginning around 10 December, almost a year’s average rain fell, outside the usual rainy season, in five days. Torrential rain continued for another five days. The worse affected area was the tiny Vargas state bordering the Caribbean Sea in the north-west of Venezuela. Much of the country is flat; but there are hills and mountains, such as Mount Avila, inland and parallel to the coast, from Guacara in the west to the east of Caracas, the capital.

By 15 December, huge amounts of mud as well as large rocks and boulders began to slide down towards the coast. The soils, have, moreover, suffered constant erosion over the years; and when the natural dykes broke rivers formed, sending floods of muddy water onto the low-lying areas. Large swathes of the northern coast were swept into the sea. One of the towns to be worse hit was Carmen de Uria. It only had dirt roads; and it straddled what had been a small river, which had no proper embankment. After 10 days of rain, the river overflowed, cascading through many homes. Shortly after, Carmen de Uria was entirely buried under mud.

Floods like these claimed 100,000 lives in Venezuela

“It was,” said Piero Feliziani, an Italian geologists, “a holocaust waiting to happen.” But it need not have caused so much death, destruction and misery, even if it was a “natural” disaster. (The Archbishop of Caracas said that the rains “were divine retribution” for President Chavez’s radical policies!)

The basic cause, however, was the rapid development of a commodity-producing, capitalist, market economy from the early 1950s. According to Michael McCaughan in the Observer:

  “Venezuela, like neighbouring Colombia and Peru, was a largely rural society with strong family community ties until the fifties, when civil unrest and depressed crop prices forced millions into misery belts around the cities, where they piled high in precarious dwellings” (26 December).

For decades, there has been rapid, uncontrolled, unregulated immigration from the rural areas of extreme poverty to, and around, Caracas and other cities seeking employment, first, in the expanding oil industry and, then, in tourism. Indeed Venezuela’s weak economy depends almost entirely on oil and tourism for its foreign revenue. Vargas state has 500,000 workers who service the tourist industry, or commute each day to Caracas from the shanty towns and ranchos in the hills surrounding the capital. “Corrupt politicians and planners” turned a blind eye to such developments, where up to 350,000 workers existed, often without electricity, running water or main drainage.

This urban overpopulation is, according to Luisa Romero, an investment broker based in New York, “one more effect of the globalised economy”. It has also resulted in the death, disappearance and loss of habitation of hundreds of thousands of workers. Indeed, at the time of writing these lines, the numbers are not known, and may never be known, but have been estimated at more than 450,000, then times the number killed in Venezuela’s previous catastrophe, the earthquake of 1812.

Surely, if nothing else, the events and disaster in Venezuela at the end of 1999 demonstrate the need to replace capitalism by a new, democratic society of production, not of profit, but of use and the satisfaction of people’s needs; a socialist society of common ownership of natural resources (including Venezuela’s oil reserves if still required) and the means of production.

Peter E. Newell

Architecture and Politics: The Key to the Radiant City (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Architecture is not fulfilling its mission as long as it has not provided a roof (tectum) for all that should be sheltered. In this sense it should concern itself with collective services, with the agglomerations.

Letter from Paul Otlet to Le Corbusier, 1928

No architect in this century has had more influence through his ideas, buildings, and books than Le Corbusier. So much of modern architecture shows signs of his influence that it is impossible to imagine how different most of the buildings going up around us would have looked had he not existed. In city planning some of the methods he proposed 40 years ago — such as complete separation of cars and pedestrians — have only recently taken root in the minds of a few planning authorities. His ideas on almost every aspect of architectural design — from the free facade and buildings on stilts (pilotis) to 'brute concrete’ and sculptural building form, to name but a few — are still such a potent force and subject of controversy today that it may seem surprising that architects play down his political views (which he expressed no less strongly than his views on design) and even appear to ignore them.

But this is not really so surprising. To most architects and city planners politics is an embarrassment, and although every building programme is at the mercy of political and economic forces they consider these to be outside their professional scope altogether. Le Corbusier was notorious for his unique ‘arrogance’ and ‘outspokenness’. And although his political views were unsystematic, it is very encouraging to find this unique man starting out from the need to provide all his fellow-men with a decent environment and from there working out a programme similar in many respects to Socialism.

He was born in Switzerland in 1887. In 1933 his book The Radiant City (one of many) was published in France. (In a republished edition in 1964, the year before his death, he endorses everything he says in it.) The Radiant City is designed for leisure, sun, greenery, and open sky; large expanses of parkland separate rows of apartments; the playing-fields are right outside the apartments; the roofs are 60-foot-wide sun decks (beaches, in fact); the street no longer exists (except inside the buildings); homes are fully soundproofed and air-conditioned; there are nurseries, swimming-pools, and laundries minutes away, and industry in a separate zone two or three miles away (but minutes by car or bus) . . . Even though many architects disagree with various details of Le Corbusier’s scheme, it is hard to see how anyone can quarrel with the standards and quality he was aiming for. A utopia? Far from it—it was well within our technological and other resources back in 1930. Only the political structure prevented it then and prevents it now. Listen to what Le Corbusier says:

  It is recognised that industry is submerging us with products that are irrelevant to our happiness. We have been propelled by machines into a false adventure, into a misadventure: these machines that can produce ten or 20 times as much as we ourselves ought to enable us to work at least five or ten times less. Modern industry, organised according to the laws of supply has inundated us with useless consumer goods. Wandering down this primrose path, allowing one thing to lead to another, we have finally allowed ourselves to be taken over entirely by what we call free competition, which is to say a form of slavery, which means that any effort is immediately countered by an opposing effort . . . we have become merely a flock of rams, horns locked together . . . The flock’s strength is drained away, yet it is not moving . . .  we can make no progress! Free competition has been forced to invent advertising, the prospectus, the exhibition, product prizes, etc.: all those competing have to summon up all their energy to cancel out the efforts of their competitors. 

  It is indisputable that this frightful competition gives rise to the most violent emulation and effort. 

 But is it also certain that the human spirit is incapable of creative enthusiasm when faced with fruitful tasks? 

  An economy based on demand would put an end to the reign of the travelling salesman and the advertising agent, but it would necessitate a programme . . . for the production of useful consumer goods. Though not a narrow and exclusive one. The mind must always be left enough elbow room to satisfy its deepest purposes: quest for quality, supremacy, straggle and competition — but on the fertile soil of disinterest.  

   Our programme will concern itself with consumer products of a useful nature and with the redirection of industry onto the path towards its true aims; with providing work for all and guaranteeing every man his daily hours of freedom; and with providing physical sites and quarters designed to permit the man of today to enjoy this new freedom without constraint, instead of being hemmed in like a hare in an ever-dwindling square of wheat at harvest time.
(Le Corbusier's own italics etc. throughout all extracts.)

Le Corbusier also underlines the socialist case in his attacks on money —though he doesn't make it too clear whether he would get rid of it altogether or replace it with some ‘purer’ form of exchange.

  Let us measure the full and cruel meaning of our present state: for some time now, we have been working merely for money. 

  A deceptive goal. It stimulates only a few of our qualities and leaves the most precious of them inactive. Worse, it encourages the defects in human nature . . . 

  If society were to reorganise itself, to distribute the fruits of its labour in a new way, then our concern for money could diminish, and our energies, freed in this way, would find the roads opened towards goals set by higher passions.

And of his programme for a new environment he says:

  It means replacing the violent, savage, cruel and ruthless civilisation of money with another based on harmony and collaboration; one in which each member of society will feel himself a vital agent in this enterprise . . .

Le Corbusier realised that his plan for a Radiant City involved the ‘replanning’ of private property (though he did not go so far as to suggest abolishing it). In August 1932 he wrote that until then he had never found it necessary to discuss politics or economics; but through his professional life he had encountered an obstacle: unproductive property. Land which could form part of a wonderful human environment, in which the senses were no longer starved, in which freedom and privacy were possible, and in which work was cut to five hours a day and leisure used to the full, was lying waste — derelict, uncultivated, or misused.

  Today we own land, but without any obligation to work it. In fact, a law which no-one would dream of disputing gives one the right to work it or not, just as one wishes.

And the ‘denaturalisation’ of property, he adds, made impossible the kind of work from which springs collective action. The present form of land tenure is invested with private rights antagonistic to the public right. ‘But if the public right is infringed, then THE INDIVIDUAL SUFFERS.' And in the caption to an aerial view of Alsace, showing plots of farmland endlessly subdivided between heirs for generation after generation: “We live in a machine age, but machines cannot be used here.”

Capitalism forces its workers into the moulds that best suit its ends, regardless of whether these moulds cramp its workers' spirit. Le Corbusier passionately resented this. He poured scorn on football stadiums and other 'arenas’ in which the few are paid to perform while the many — whose need for active sport and whose ability to enjoy it is no less—sit and watch. He lamented the fact that most city-dwellers leave one compartment giving onto a street, (home) for another (work) and in between experience nothing but asphalt or stone under their feet, the ephemera of the daily paper or advertisements in their mini, poisoned air and smoke in their lungs, and barely a tree or a decent-sized stretch of sky, greenery, or water in sight.

But his programme had serious limitations.

Although he believed that architecture and city planning would, one day become extensions of politics, sociology, and ethics, he believed that ‘research into the correct solution for this problem (common ownership of land) is not part of the architect’s professional task.’ More food for the myth that ‘professional politicians' are essential! But in fact Le Corbusier planned to toss the problem to another profession: the law. ‘Let the lawyers find a way!' he exclaims. And:

  It must be the task of our jurists to find a way of initiating the indispensable changes in present land tenure . . .

And although he wants international standardisation for building components, an international technical language, and so on, his thinking is still in national terms. He refers constantly to “mobilisation of the country’s land” (i.e. France’s) and to a national authority. Perhaps it is this acceptance of the nation state that leads him to accept war as inevitable — he points out the great advantages of pilotis for raising buildings above clouds of poison gas, and proposes armour-plated roof-decks to resist aerial bombardment.

Nevertheless, his political awareness is amazingly advanced compared with that of most architects. This is perhaps because his mental scope exceeded theirs. After all, it is terribly difficult to work out a viable political philosophy all on one’s own. There may be millions of people (architects among them) who, on having Socialism explained to them, will say: “That’s just what I’ve believed for a long time—but I could never put it properly into words!” And we believe with Le Corbusier that, despite the scornful laughter of cynics and spokesmen for capitalism, “there is a power for enthusiasm in the human soul that can be made to. explode”.

A.M.B.