Who’s a rogue state? (2003)

Book Review from the April 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower’. By William Blum. (Zed Books, 2002)

The name William Blum will not be familiar to many readers in Britain and the majority of those in the USA who learn about him will probably despise him as a traitor. He was intending to make a career in the State Department but found that he could not accept America’s policy in the Vietnam war and left the service. True-blue Americans might have let this “weakness” pass by condemning him as a “wimp”, but he then committed the unpardonable sin of starting to disclose the truth about the shadier actions of their glorious government . He wrote about the members of the CIA and followed that up by an on-the-spot exposure of their involvement in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile. Soon afterwards he extended his searches to CIA staff and activities in Europe.

The recent up-date of his book Rogue State, first published in 2000, collects together not only his wide and carefully researched exposure of CIA tricks and misdeeds worldwide. It also looks in devastating detail at a whole range of US government actions and policies and at the totally amoral and illegal methods used to carry them out. Lying, murder, criminal interference in elections and other affairs of nations across the globe, covert and overt terrorism, corruption of the UN, continuous brainwashing of its own electorate… The list is almost endless; and all this carried out under the most cynical worldwide propaganda umbrella of “developing democracy” and spreading the “noblest civilised values”.

Many of us will already know, or suspect, some of what Blum has to say, but the sheer power of his detailed exposures makes his book , if not a “must”, a very fine source of ammunition against the present leader of world capitalism, in fact of the world. His listing (with comments) of US global interventions since 1945 and his detailing of little-known US voting at the UN General Assembly over a period of about ten years; these alone are worth the cost of the book.

The slight weakness from a socialist viewpoint is his failure to make a strong enough connection between his many trenchant criticisms and their direct link with the capitalist drive for control and profit. He is quite clear about America’s fifty-year long imperialist expansion and all the accompanying hoodwinking of the American people with endless “wicked enemy” propaganda. He has no illusions about 11 September (“after the attack it was Christmas every day for the security establishment and its corporate cohorts”) : and he knows that the US destruction of Afghanistan was carried out to safeguard its proposed oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. All this is excellent; it’s just a pity that Blum does not add the clincher argument for socialism that, to those who can see, is so implicit in all his facts.

Cyril Oldfield

Blogger's Note:

An earlier edition of this book was reviewed in the September 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Boom and bust (2009)

Book Review from the November 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Trouble with Capitalism.  By Harry Shutt, Zed books.

  It is easy to see why the publishers have re-issued this book that first came out in 1998 – in it Shutt argued that a devaluation of capital assets could not be avoided for ever and that when it eventually did happen it would take the form of a big crash.

  Mat Little, who interviewed Shutt for Red Pepper this January, summarised what Shutt sees as the contradiction of capitalism that leads to recurring business cycles of boom and bust:

“According to Marx, capitalism is a system of accumulation. Profits are made but can’t all be consumed by owners. Extra profits need to be recycled through the market. ‘The only way you can successfully recycle them is to either expand your existing business or diversify into another business,’ says Shutt. ‘It all depends on the ultimate consumer, consuming more and more. It has to grow, growth is built in.’ The problem is that as profits are invested into the market, generating more profits that in turn have to be reinvested, production expands until it reaches a level that can no longer be absorbed by consumers. The market is glutted, and recession results. But the destruction of capital and jobs creates pent-up demand for the whole process to begin again in time. That, in brief, is the business cycle.” (www.redpepper.org.uk/Prophet-of-doom)

Although Shutt does not write as a Marxist, this is one of the explanations of the capitalist business cycle put forward by some in the Marxist tradition. It implies that all capitalist crises are caused by the overexpansion (in relation to paying demand) of the sector producing consumer goods. But while the crash of 1929 can be explained in this way, the history of capitalism shows that the overexpansion of any key sector or industry can provoke a contraction of production through a knock-on effect on the rest of the economy.

  Shutt explains the 25-year period of expansion after the end of WW2 in terms of the satisfaction of the market for affordable consumer durables and the end of this post-war boom as a result of the slowing down of this market. Capitalist enterprises were thus, he says, left with a ‘mountain of cash’, profits which could not be re-invested in expanding production, which he also describes as a ‘capital glut’ in the sense of an oversupply of  investible funds.

  What would normally happen in  such a situation is that, in accordance with the law of supply and demand, capital would be devalued; which a crisis would bring about, so restoring the rate of profit (because this is calculated as profit divided by the value of capital). Only, according to Shutt, this did not happen on any large scale in 1974 because the authorities (governments and central banks) took steps to try to stop this, by facilitating the channelling of the surplus of investible funds into non-productive activities such as lending to consumers or speculation on the stock exchange or in property:

“This massive flow of funds – which is not being allowed, as would be dictated by traditional capitalist rationale, to self-destruct through the natural operation of the business cycle – has to find an outlet in more or less speculative forms of investment.” (p. 179)

Writing in 1998 Shutt saw the various financial crises till then – the stock market crash of 1987, the Mexican debt crisis of 1994-95, the financial problems of the Asian ‘tiger economies’ in 1997 – as signs that this was not sustainable and as harbingers of  the Big Crash to come. Now, with the bursting of the dotcom bubble in between, he sees the Crash of 2008 as the expected big one:

“What the prolonged amassing of this huge surplus of capital cum fraud-driven credit bubble, means, according to Shutt, is the inevitable crash – the inexorable end of the business cycle – is going to be far more severe that it would otherwise have been. ‘I think we are looking at negative growth, for an absolute minimum of two or three years and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s five or ten. That would be a depression,’ he says.” (Red Pepper interview).

Since our failure to foresee the post-war boom with our prediction that WW2 would most likely be followed by a slump, just as after WW1, we have tended to be wary of making such predictions ourselves. So, we will just record this as the opinion of one person who has studied the matter.

Adam Buick

Working together (2010)

Book Review from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Social Economy. Ash Amin, ed: Zed Books £19.99.

The concept of social economy is a rather vague one, and is not helped by the use of other terminology (such as ‘solidarity economy’ or ‘third sector’) to refer to the same or similar notions. Broadly, though, it describes the provision of goods and services by organisations which are neither profit-making and privately-owned nor run by the state, whether national governments or local authorities. It covers, then, at least workers’ co-operatives and various voluntary groups.

Amin argues that the present recession is an opportune time to consider alternatives to the profit system. With case studies from Italy, Poland, the Philippines, the US, Canada, Argentina and Brazil, this volume presents a spectrum of different examples, from workers taking over bankrupt companies to housing co-ops and small farmers getting together to market their own produce. The question which arises, though, is the extent to which what is described here really does constitute a ‘third way’.

It is a widespread finding that wages are lower in social enterprises than in others. A survey from Italy, however, suggests that employees in the social economy are on the whole more satisfied with their work than other workers, largely because of the importance they assign to social usefulness and helping disadvantaged people. On the other hand, social enterprises have to behave like ordinary capitalist concerns in many ways: there is still wage labour, those who arrive late for work can have their pay deducted, and enterprises may close if trading conditions are not favourable.

But many social enterprises do show that workers can organise themselves and run production without bosses and employers telling them what to do and ordering them around. It must be acknowledged, though, that this does not mean leaving capitalism behind, since they function within the capitalist economy and indeed are often supported by governments. The editor writes of ‘making money, markets and the productive system work for human development, ecological preservation, spatial equality and collective fellowship’. Noble goals, but only achievable without money and markets.

Paul Bennett

Watching over us (2009)

Book Review from the May 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spies, Lies and the War on Terror.  by Paul Todd, Jonathan Bloch and Patrick Fitzgerald: Zed Books £14.99.

The ‘Cold War’ has been replaced by the ‘War on Terror’ as a means of defending the interests of Western capitalism. The identification of a new enemy has paralleled an enormous increase in the amount of snooping that goes on, with governments spying ever more closely on their own citizens. These are the kinds of developments chronicled in this volume.

For the United States in particular, the gathering of intelligence has come to serve the purpose of pre-emptive war, aimed at stopping any perceived threat to the power of the capitalist class before it can be put into action. This may involve ‘creative destruction’ in the Middle East (a term coined by an American neo-con, not by the authors). The idea of a US military presence in the Middle East became a long-term goal, eventually realised in Iraq. In fact, intelligence is sometimes massaged (as with Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction) or deliberately ignored. Consequently much US policy backfires, as when Iran has benefited from the elimination of regional rivals (the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam).

At the same time, and as state and corporate intelligence functions increasingly merge, domestic spying is becoming more and more pervasive. The National Security Agency in the US, for instance, has been monitoring all phone calls made to overseas, and the president has powers to authorise surveillance without a warrant. Sometimes the information recorded is laughable, with Quaker meetings logged as ‘suspicious incidents’, but the spread of government intrusion into people’s lives is no laughing matter.

Similar developments have been taking place in the UK, with increased powers for the police and much so-called anti-terrorist legislation. There have been arrests of people (as in a supposed bomb plot in Manchester in 2004 and one in East London in 2006), accompanied by lurid press speculation and much disinformation from police sources; in neither case was any evidence found, and the arrested were released without charge. Lengthy detention was introduced for those who had not done anything, just supposedly threatened to undertake some action designed to advance a political cause.

The War on Terror, then, not only results in killings on a massive scale in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on, in the interests of Western, specifically American, power. It also leads to the creation and expansion of databases containing enormous amounts of information on people, information that we cannot access, let alone challenge, even if we know it’s there. This book gives a detailed and frightening account of how and why this is happening.

Paul Bennett

Capitalism fails again (1999)

Book Review from January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tigers in Trouble. Ed. Jomo K.S. Zed Books. £14.95.

The current crisis in Asia is usually said to have begun with the forced devaluation of Thailand’s currency, the baht, in July 1997. It then spread to the other countries of the region, in particular Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea which also had to devalue their currencies as outside banks and financial institutions stampeded to withdraw their money.

It would, however, be a mistake to see this as just a financial crisis. As most of the contributors to this book make clear, the financial crisis was a reflection of the situation that had arisen in the real economy where, spurred on by rising export sales which they expected to continue, private capitalist firms had expanded productive capacity beyond what could profitably be sold on world markets. As various different contributors put it:

  “In Japan the post-Plaza recovery [i.e. after 1985] was based on a very strong investment boom, but only to result in excess capacity subsequently. Again, the current difficulties in East Asia are traced back to excessive investment in the region since the beginning of the decade” (p. 42). 

  “Alternatively, it may be termed an over-investment crisis which, in a way similar to Japan, has caused massive over-investment and over-capacity which will produce downward pressure on the prices of traded goods and thus deteriorate the terms of trade of these countries” (p. 57). 

  “Insofar as it is possible to isolate the original sin in this particular Asian drama it must lie in the deceleration of export growth experienced by the entire region from about the middle of 1995” (p. 66). 

  “[In Korea] Lack of investment co-ordination led to overcapacity, which resulted in falling export prices, falling profitability due to low capacity utilisation, and the accumulation of non-performing loans in a number of leading industries, including semi-conductors, automobiles, petrochemicals and shipbuilding” (p. 228).

This became a financial and currency crisis because much of the investment in productive capacity that proved to be excessive in relation to markets had been financed by loans from local banks which in turn had borrowed the money from financial institutions in the industrialised world (US, Europe, Japan) where interest rates were.

Contrary to what some claim, banks do not make profits by “creating credit” by the stroke of a pen but are, as this crisis has again confirmed, intermediaries who make profits—or not—out of the difference between the rate at which they lend out money and the rate they pay those they themselves borrow the money from.

When exports began to slow down some of these loans became “non-performing”, i.e. the interest on them was not being paid. Which meant that the local banks were not going to be able to pay interest to those they had borrowed from. When these international lenders got wind off this they decided to get out. This put pressure on the dollar exchange rate of the local currencies which eventually collapsed, so making the situation of local banks worse as they had in effect borrowed in dollars which now became more expensive. This “credit crunch” meant that they were unable to lend so much to local businesses, even those which were still profitable, so obliging them too to cut back on production and lay off workers.

The slump in production which always follows over-investment and overproduction set in, with countries which had enjoyed in the decade 1985-1995 sustained annual growth rates of over 7 percent returning negative figures and seeing unemployment more than double.

In time—after the excess capacity in relation to the market has been destroyed (capitalism’s solution to the problem of poverty amidst potential plenty)—growth will resume but two contributors (Chandrasekhar and Ghosh) doubt that this will be at the same rate as previously. These countries’ growth has been based on “export-oriented industrialisation”, but “the fundamental problem of insufficient world markets for very rapidly increasing exports still remains” (p. 82). Another, Kregel, is even more pessimistic. He thinks this situation could lead to a rise in protectionism which “is precisely the scenario which was the prelude to the global crisis of the 1930s” (p. 66). We shall see.

Adam Buick

Greek Myth (2015)

Book Review from the August 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Global Minotaur. America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy’, by Yanis Varoufakis. Zed Books. 2015.

It will only be because the author later become Greek Finance Minister for a while that this book, that originally came out in 2011, has been republished (with a new introduction and an added chapter, plus a preface by Paul Mason). It’s an account and attempted explanation for the course of the world economy since the end of WW2 and up to the crash of 2008.

Varoufakis agrees with Marx’s basic analysis of how the capitalist economy works: that it is driven by capitalist corporations in pursuit of profit and that consumer demand and the demand for bank loans are dependent on this. Even though he places ‘financialization’ at the heart of modern capitalism, he doesn’t fall for the illusion that banks get their profits by creating money out of nothing but knows they do it by borrowing at one rate of interest and lending it at a higher rate, even the notorious CDOs and CDSs (don’t ask) that flourished in the run-up to the crash.

He also accepts Marx’s view that capitalist crises are cyclical and self-correcting in that slump conditions eventually create those for a recovery (e.g. by purging unprofitable firms) but, he adds, from time to time a big one with a capital C comes along from which, despite what Marx held, capitalism won’t spontaneously recover. 1929 was one. So, he says, was 2008.

His explanation for the crash of 2008 was the fatal wounding of what he calls ‘the Global Minotaur.’ The Minotaur was a monstrous half-man, half bull in Greek mythology which demanded that young men and women from the areas subject to Crete be sent to fight and be killed by it, reflecting as Yaroufakis points out the domination of the Greek-speaking world by Crete at one time.

The US – of course – is the new Crete and the Minotaur its financial system, based on the dollar being the currency in which other states and multinationals hold their reserves. This allows the US to run both a trade and a budget deficit. According to Varoufakis, this way of balancing world capital and trade flows broke down in 2008 and the world economy won’t recover until another one to replace it emerges. He favours what Keynes had proposed at the conference at Bretton Woods in 1945 to work out a new international payments system: ‘to create an International Currency Union (ICU), a single currency (which he even named the bancor) for the whole capitalist world.’

So, although he is a critic of some aspects of capitalism, he still thinks that it is in principle capable of reform to work in a different way from how it currently does. Since Keynes’s type of reform was not on the agenda, he must have felt in his discussions (when Greek Finance Minister) with his counterparts in the EU and Eurozone, that all they were discussing was tinkering with a broken system. It will be interesting to see what he writes about these in his memoirs which, judging by this book, should be readable and even amusing.

Adam Buick

After Tsarism (2018)

Book Review from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Experiment: Georgia’s Forgotten Revolution 1918-1921’. By Eric Lee. (Zed Books, 2017)

Georgia is a country located south of the Caucasus mountains and between Russia and Turkey. A hundred years ago this May, Georgia declared itself independent as did a number of other former Russian territories. Eric Lee’s book, looks at the short-lived ‘democratic socialist’republic and its wider context, including its smaller scale predecessor the ‘Gurian Republic’.

Lee writes: ‘Between the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, there were only two examples of socialists seizing political power and attempting to realise their vision of a new society. One was the Paris Commune of 1871 . . . the other was the Gurian Republic of 1902-6, widely known at the time but largely forgotten today.’

Georgia was a remote outpost of the Russian empire, and the vast majority of its inhabitants lived in poor rural communities. Guria was a desperately poor district in Western Georgia. What happened in Guria foreshadowed the later triumph of ‘democratic socialists’throughout Georgia.

‘The Gurian Republic, led by an orthodox Marxist party, instead of a few weeks, lasted for several years.’ ‘The Gurians helped to solve the land problem by redistributing land directly to the peasants, and curtailed the power of the tsarist state and the church. They instituted a kind of direct democracy in their villages. These were no small accomplishments –most happened, before 1905, when Tsarism was strong.’

Perhaps this was why Georgia returned Mensheviks by a landslide in 1905 elections to the Russian Duma. Although ‘Social Democrats’in Russia had split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks—from then on ‘Social Democrats’ in Georgia meant Menshevism and the author uses the two terms interchangeably. Heads of the Social Democratic faction in the Duma, Noe Zhordania followed by Irakli Tsereteli, were both from Georgia. The Social Democrats were the only mass party in Georgia. When Soviets were formed across Russia in 1917, Social Democrats dominated the Soviets in Georgia too, so the Bolshevik slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’ made no sense. The Georgian Bolsheviks remained a tiny and ineffectual force.

Lee explains that no  party claiming to be Marxist had yet come to power anywhere in the world, but by the summer of 1914, it seemed like that day was not far off. The Social Democrats  were the largest party in the German parliament, and the second largest party in France, even in the United States, so they seemed on the cusp of making a breakthrough.

When Tsarism collapsed, Georgian Social Democrats had no intention of seceding from Russia; independence was not on the agenda. It was only after the ‘October revolution’(the Bolshevik coup) in Russia, that Georgia took matters into its own hands. Georgian military forces raided the arsenal in the capital Tiflis, Russian soldiers stationed there surrendered and Lenin was reportedly extremely displeased.

In the Russian Constituent Assembly elections in November 1917, Georgia again returned representatives who were overwhelmingly Mensheviks. This did not translate into a Menshevik majority in the Russian Constituent Assembly where the ‘Socialist-Revolutionary’ party won a comfortable majority over the second-placed Bolsheviks with Mensheviks a distant fourth. It was this result that prompted the Bolsheviks to dissolve the assembly by force

On May 26 1918, Georgia proclaimed its independence. Elections in 1919 (where suffrage was universal, equal and secret), returned even bigger landslides for Social Democrats, even under proportional representation. Trotsky railed, falsely portraying a powerful Georgian Bolshevik party ready at any moment. Kautsky countered this, and the archives bear out Kautsky. Trotsky and other Bolshevik propagandists then tried portraying Georgia as colluding with Anton Denikin’s White Army. Again, this is contradicted—this time by British dismay that the Georgians were repelling Denikin contrary to British orders.

Lee writes the most important action was their agrarian reform, selling state land to peasants. In this they were following Plekhanov’s municipalisation of land model and rejecting Lenin’s nationalisation of land which was thought to  lead to back to ‘a semi-Asiatic order’.

Georgia was developing a strong civil society with trade unions at its core, it enshrined the right for trade unions to strike long before most countries even legalised the right to join a trade union.

In Chapter 9 on co-operatives Lee describes the French Social Democrat leader Jules Guesde’s politics as purist and fanatical ultra-leftism. He writes that Guesde gave an example of his Marxist fundamentalism in July 1910, it is impossible to attach any socialist value to co-operation in itself. Anyone who suggested otherwise, he considered utopian.・ This is unfair to Guesde who wasn’t arguing that cooperatives were useless, only that on their own (‘in itself’) there was nothing socialist about them, as their subsequent history has shown. His views can be found here.

In 1920, three participants from the Second International, Kautsky and two Belgian Social Democrats, Vandervelde and Huysmans,visited what they saw as ‘the most perfect Socialism in Europe’–not Russia under Lenin, but the provincial backwater known as the Georgian Social Democratic Republic.

The British Labour Party delegation drew just as stark comparisons between the countries; Ethel Snowden’s criticisms of Bolshevik Russia were later published in a book Through Bolshevik Russia (to the annoyance of the Left in Britain), and Labour Party leader Ramsay Macdonald claimed the Georgian republic shared the aims of the Independent Labour Party.

Georgia was undoubtedly, as Lee says, ‘a vision of a new society radically different from the one Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin were creating’. It was a pluralist, multi-party democracy of free elections, where the constitution guaranteed universal suffrage, a free press, separation of church and state and abolished the death penalty.

The Mensheviks correctly observed that impoverished, backward societies cannot skip historical stages and proceed to create socialism. Bolsheviks wrongly claimed they had done otherwise in Russia.

Russian Bolsheviks (re)conquered Georgia in 1921 despite fierce resistance and rebellions (the biggest of which was suppressed and whitewashed by German Communist leader Clara Zetkin). Heartening though was the reception Stalin’s return to Georgia got, on addressing a crowd of 5,000 workers. He congratulated them on ‘overthrowing the Menshevik yoke’, whereupon audience members heckled ‘Lies! There was no Menshevik yoke here! There was no Communist [Bolshevik] revolution in Georgia! Your troops have removed our freedom!’.

DJW

Not Half (2017)

Book Review from the July 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Why the Dalai Lama Is a Socialist: Buddhism and the Compassionate Society'. By Terry Gibbs, (Zed Books £12.99)

He isn’t, of course, but that does not mean this book is without value. The eye-catching title aside, there is relatively little here about the Dalai Lama, and the book is really about how some forms of Buddhism (which is often described as a philosophy rather than a religion) make similar-seeming claims to Marxism.

The Dalai Lama has in fact described himself as ‘half-Marxist, half-Buddhist’, but all the ‘Marxist’ part of this seems to mean is being concerned with equality and the condition of the majority. Some Buddhist views, it is claimed, deal with topics such as alienation and ideology that are important topics within Marxism too. Buddhism argues that people experience themselves as alienated and see nature and other people as things to be manipulated. Alienation, Gibbs suggests, is an inevitable result of living in a class society and, among other things, it motivates people’s consumption habits, such as always wanting the best and latest version of some gadget. Workers are deluded, in Buddhist terms, and have a false consciousness in Marxist terms (though Gibbs seems unaware that Marx never used the term ‘false consciousness’). But it is not clear that the Buddhist perspective adds anything, or that Marxism and Buddhism are really that similar, other than superficially.

There is a brief acknowledgement that Buddhist movements have contributed to suffering, but no reference to, for instance, the slaughter of muslim Rohingyas in Burma. A useful discussion deals with coltan, a mineral found in smartphones, which is produced in appalling conditions in Central Africa.

As for the kind of society that should replace capitalism, Gibbs is not at all clear, though a reference to ‘socialist Cuba’ is hardly reassuring. She also advocates a sustainable social system: ‘Such a global society would be marked by democratic processes that affirm mutuality, horizontality and respect as well as recognize our interdependence as the various cultures, races, religions, species and ecosystems sharing this planet.’ A guiding principle of this system would be ‘big C compassion’, which seems to mean being engaged with other humans, non-human animals and the rest of nature; perhaps this is what described also as a ‘sense of universal responsibility’.

As this last point suggests, this book is all a bit vague, and it is clear that Buddhism involves a number of different versions, many of them extremely mystical. Moreover, there is more to creating a truly democratic and sustainable society than showing compassion, whether with a big or little ‘c’.     

Paul Bennett

'Marxism and the Muslim World' (2016)

Book Review from the January 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Marxism and the Muslim World', by Maxime Rodinson, (foreword by Gilbert Achcar). Zed Books. 2015. ISBN 9781783603367

This book is a collection of essays by the French Marxist scholar of Islam and the Middle East, Maxim Rodinson. The essays originate from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and so are showing their age, but have a certain value in demonstrating concerns and debates within the left at the time. They are also a demonstration of an independent Marxist thinker’s work who is worth reading, even to disagree with.

The central thrust of the essays is the course of de-colonisation in the Middle East from the 1940s onwards. One essay looks back at the twists and turns of the Communist Parties as they followed the instructions of Moscow in the 1930s, shifting and turning on their approach to nationalism and national independence in the Middle East – with an historically interesting note on how this lead to a generally anti-Israeli orientation that prevails among much of the left to this day.

As part of this, much of the work is about an analysis of ideology, which (refreshingly) Rodinson views in practical terms. Ideologies for him are about mobilising and motivating movements, and they include a mythological/utopian element as well as immediate programmatic implications. Significantly, he objects to the term ‘historical materialism’ seeing Marx and Engels’ works as, rather, a rejection of ‘historical idealism’, and this, perhaps, allows him to escape dogmatism and the schematism seen in the French academic Marxism of the period.

He sees in Marxism not so much an idea that will liberate humanity (indeed, he maintains that despite its ‘ideological’ proclamations, Marxist sociology shows us that there will never be a final liberation and a conflict-free harmonious society) but an opening to scientific sociology that will allow us to examine society and better weigh ideologies and their potential effects. ‘Every society and every group, every “class”, even any individual, needs to find an answer to the truly important questions: what is Man in the Universe?' It is the series of chosen answers to that question and the range of choices it throws up that, for Rodinson, defines an ideology.

Chiefly, he sees nationalism as the chief organising feature of society during the period he was writing, although he notes the inherent dangers of limited nationalism in an interconnected world. When he comes to prescriptions, however, as a leftist, he does suggest that Marxism needs to appropriate the mobilising idea of nationalism and development in the de-colonising world.

In assessing the similarities between Marxism as a mobilising idea, and Islam, he sees them both as movements to realise their own image of a just society. His premise is that ‘we can move away from the idealist conception of religion as a set of ideas floating above earthly realities and constantly animating the spirit and actions of all its followers. We can assume, on the contrary, that all religious ideologies, like all ideologies, have a concrete and real basis in the constantly competing human groups who share out the planet between themselves or form the different strata of society.’ It would be a useful idea for many contemporary politicians to absorb, as they continue to talk about ‘poisonous ideologies’ and seem to suggest they just fall from the sky on susceptible heads.

He notes that there is no constant Islamic culture, and the character of the Middle Eastern region comes from the persistence of human civilisation there, rather than from any Islamic doctrine, indeed, noting that things such as face veils were an accommodation of Islam to existing practices. He notes, ‘there is no such thing as Homo Islamicus. The history of the Muslim world is specific, it has its own style and colour, it is an incomparable part of human diversity.’ He demonstrates how, for examples, Islamic states have permitted lending and borrowing at interest, with barely a murmur from their populations. Indeed, he writes:

‘Hostility towards much-hated innovators, especially foreign ones, often appear in the guise of religious misoneism. I remember a case of a Muslim cemetery in Beirut during the French Mandate; the Beirut Muslims invoked religion in their fierce opposition to and redevelopment of the land. Once independence was achieved, however, the cemetery was soon disposed of and the plot used to build a cinema or some such other building.’

He notes, that although there is a consistent core to Islam, it has changed and adapted throughout the ages, and there is no reason to suppose that it could not cope with the state ownership of the means of production he supported. This core of Islamic values, includes precepts over charitable giving and inheritance that suggests that ultimately, as an idea, Islam must support the idea of private property, and be opposed to socialism as we understand it; but then, the resilience of ideas suggests that it and other religions could, in the end, mutate to accommodate some version of themselves surviving in a world with a socialist majority. Rodinson takes this anti-idealist viewpoint to the extent that he states ‘I have often said that, under present circumstances, purely religious ideology cannot stand in as a mobilizatory ideology.’

Given the rise of the religious Islamic parties in the Middle East, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda and its offsprings, and of course, Islamic State, has his analysis been invalidated?

Of course, just as with the Muslim cemetery Rodinson described, these movements contain distinct elements of nationalism, and anti-colonialism. Al-Qaeda is directed against American hegemony, just as much as it is against the ruling elites of the region.

Rodinson has a refreshing approach to imperialism, rejecting any idea of it as an abstract self-motivating force, preferring to look instead to the direct interests and needs of states, classes and strata who benefit from military expansion, just as he rejects a similar role for any self-motivating abstract Islam. Behind all civilisations, ideologies and movements are people, living daily lives and creating their circumstances. The members of ISIS have brains that are practically identical to that of every other human being. It is their circumstances and the way their lives and minds are created and recreated that leads them to think that the expressed creed of ISIS and its brutality, torture, rape and atrocity is a good idea. Whilst, as Rodinson suggests, Islam (and religion) are not the purely mobilising factor in the Middle East, it’s clear that it has managed to take the role of being at the forefront of the nationalism that he envisaged some form of state capitalism taking.

The important thing that socialists can take from this book is that opening up movements and ideas to close analysis helps sweep away the distortions that led to both talk of ‘war of civilisations’ and its inverse of denying that ISIS have any connexion to a ‘true’ Islam. There is no ‘true’ Islam, there is just the endless variety of ways humans try to interpret their world in order to act in it.

The materialist understanding that changing the way we live will change the ideas is liberating, and it brings to the fore the very idea that the resolution to the conflicts of the Middle East lies in the humans behind the ideas finding a new way to live. Rodinson was incorrect to see some sort nationalism as the answer, instead we need to look to a genuine worldwide movement that offers the prospect of establishing a genuine global community through common ownership of the wealth of the world. He is right in that this will not end all disagreement and conflict. What it will do is enable us to turn any conflicts into democratic arguments among equals, instead of pawns in the service of the owners and shifters of mobile wealth.

Pik Smeet

Brutal and violent means (1996)

Book Review from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy Since 1945. by Mark Curtis (Zed Books, London & New Jersey, 250pp. Paperback 14.95.)

This is an important book. It is a well-documented and researched critique of post-World War II British foreign policy, based mainly on formerly secret  government documents and independent sources, showing how all British governments, Conservative and Labour, have been concerned not with promoting democracy and human rights but with defending capitalist profits and spheres of future investments, often using the most brutal and violent means, mainly in what has been termed the Third World. Moreover, Britain has also largely acted as the willing partner of United States imperialism.

Following the War, the Labour government fought a long and vicious war, in an attempt to retain control of Malaya and, of course, the country's rubber plantations. Later, this time a Conservative government, fought to defend white minority rule in Kenya. When a democratically-elected government of British Guyana came to power, it was first suspended and, later, with assistance from the American CIA, was overthrown. And, during the 1950s, Britain, again in co-operation with the CIA, overthrew the Iranian government of Dr Mussadiq, this time on behalf of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in which the British government was a part-time owner.

In 1956, Britain, in an alliance with France and Israel, invaded Egypt because that country had nationalised the Suez Canal; and in 1957, British forces came to the support of the barbaric regime of the Sultan of Oman. In this instance, Shell owned 85 percent in Omani Oil. Much the same occurred in Kuwait in 1961, in which British Petroleum owned 50 percent of the Kuwaiti Oil Company, again in co-operation with Shell. As later, in 1990, the villain of the piece was Iraq.

In 1966, Britain signed a defence deal with the United States, leasing the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to the US for 50 years, on the condition that the people living on the island be removed. They were then forcibly sent to Mauritius where they were left to exist in extreme poverty.

And so it continued.

Curtis shows how Britain has supported such terrorist movements as RENAMO and UNITA, in co-operation with South Africa, in Mozambique and Angola; and has often given active or passive support to the United States in Chile, Guatemala, Grenada and Nicaragua. He also gives detailed evidence regarding both the suppression of news, and propaganda on behalf of British intervention by such as the Times, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph. The Guardian generally escapes such criticism.

Peter E, Newell  

Worker take-overs (2015)

Book Review from the June 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy', Edited by Dario Azzellini. Zed Books. 2015

This is a collection of articles describing – and advocating – ‘workers control’ at various points in history and in various places, particularly Latin America, today. The authors see workers spontaneously taking over workplaces as the way to a new society without private or state capitalists.

In times of economic and political chaos when factory owners lose control or abandon their factories, workers do not just sit back and do nothing. They take over the factories and try to keep production going.  This shows, as Azzellini points out in his introduction, that ‘workers do not need bosses to organize production’. But this has never lasted for any length of time.

Sooner or later ‘order’ has been restored, either by the old ruling class re-establishing control or by a new ruling class taking over, and ‘bosses’ have come back, whether the old private ones or new state ones. In some cases, however, the ’recuperated’ factories  have been given a legal basis as cooperatives producing for the market. But this is no solution.  Cooperatives, Azzelini writes in the section of his introduction ‘Limits and contradictions of the cooperative model’, ‘tend to operate within the capitalist logic of productivity and profitability … the pressure on them to a adopt a capitalist business logic is immense … cooperatives are embedded in the framework of the capitalist economy and compete on the capitalist market following the logic of profit-making … ‘

This is a better fate than being forcibly suppressed but is still a dead end. Which is why Azzelini favours a revolution in which there is a general movement of workers to ‘take and hold’ the means of production (to use the terminology of the old IWW, which surprisingly doesn’t get a mention).

A revolution led by workers’ councils would certainly be better than one led by a vanguard party but still underestimates the degree of understanding of those involved as to where they are going and ignores the need to win control of political power to permit this and/or to back it up.

Adam Buick

Capital as power (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The 1% and the Rest of Us - A Political Economy of Dominant Ownership', by Tim Di Muzio. Zed Books.

This is a curate’s egg.  The historical parts are good as is the definition of ‘the 1%’ as the dominant owners of income-yielding assets. Even ‘capital as power’, as an alternative to the concepts of capital as physical instruments of production (orthodox economics) and of capital as accumulated surplus value (Marx), has some descriptive merit.  Capitalist firms can be seen as trying ‘to redistribute more money to themselves than their counterparts, who are trying to do the same thing.’  Which means that all capitalist firms are in effect competing against each other for profits not against just those in the same branch of activity.

But the bad part is really bad. Di Muzio has swallowed hook, line and sinker the view that banks literally create money ‘out of thin air’, a phrase he repeatedly uses.  We are asked to believe that, when banks make a loan it is not out of money they have or can acquire, they just create it out of nothing and then charge interest on it. He offers this as an explanation as to why prices keep rising since, according to him, when a business has taken out a loan from a bank it has to increase the price of what it is selling to cover the interest it has to pay the bank. He also thinks that because ‘there is not enough money in the economy for workers to purchase goods and services they produce, there is a constant demand for interest-bearing credit’. But, as we always point out when confronted with such ‘underconsumptionist’ views, what the workers can’t buy the capitalists can or could.

This is the purest currency crankism in its crudest form, which not even Positive Money (who he mentions favourably) subscribes to. He even proudly boasts that this is what he teaches his students at the University of Wollongong in Australia who start their course thinking (correctly, in fact) that banks can’t lend more than they have or can acquire. His only saving grace on this is a passage in which he writes that ‘it is unclear whether Marx understood’ that banks create money out of thin air. Well, for the record, Marx did not make that mistake.

Logically with his views, Di Muzio lists as the most important demand that ‘the party of the 99%’ he envisages (not a bad idea in itself) is ‘monetary reform’ to replace ‘money as debt’ by a government bank simply printing money as ‘democratically decided’ is needed.  An unnecessary and worthless reform as well as a harmful diversion from what such a party should really aim at: the expropriation of the 1% and the rest of the owning class by making the Earth’s resources the common heritage of all humanity.

Adam Buick

Material World: Mexican Drug Wars (2013)

The Material World Column from the April 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the late 19th and early 20th century opium was imported into Mexico, mainly by Chinese immigrants. But by the 1920s and 1930s Mexicans were growing the poppies. Opium, cocaine, heroin and marijuana crossed the border into the United States with relative ease. With the outlawing of narcotics in the US, exporting became a very profitable line of business for those prepared to take the risks.

During the Cold War, a number of top officials of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) were involved, together with elements of the CIA and the World Anti-Communist League (WACL), in trafficking drugs into the United States. This apparently continued for at least 40 years.

Nevertheless, the Mexican army was used as part of a national campaign to eradicate the drug trade, and the growing of poppies. Much of this was ineffectual as growers bribed officials to leave their crops alone. In some states, such as Guerrero, the army was involved in armed conflict with local peasants. Indeed, when I was in Guerrero in 1979, travelling in a bus between Acapulco and Monelos, we were stopped by a unit of the army and forced to get out. In fact, the army was as much, if not more, concerned with combating ‘subversives’ as drug traffickers.

In Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy (Zed books, 2012) Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda detail what, in 1976, was called Operation Condor, which involved the aerial spraying of opium fields with such chemicals as paraquat. It was a partial success. For a while the volume of drugs entering the United States was halved. But the demand for drugs in the US was, and still is, insatiable.

The Mexican state and drug traffickers have had, as the authors note, ‘a long history of collaboration, and it was generally state actors who supervised the entire business.’ This increased in the 1980s. Interestingly, the actual consumption of drugs including marijuana is and was lower in Mexico than in other Latin American countries and insignificant compared with the United States.

Since the 1980s, however, the poverty of the working class has exacerbated and perpetuated both drug production in Mexico and export to the US. According to Watt and Zepeda:

‘The prevalence of drug production, combined with economic reforms that essentially excluded much of the rural workforce from legitimate commercial activity, meant that it was very difficult to create suitable alternatives within the formal economy.’

By the mid-1980s Colombian drug cartels joined Mexican traffickers in establishing smuggling operations into the United States.

The election of Vincente Fox to the Mexican presidency in 2000, brought with it massive opportunities for the increasing and expanding of business by the narco-traffickers. And it allowed Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán Fuentes, the Capo of the Sinaloa cartel, to become the world’s most powerful and richest trafficker. ‘Perhaps the most significant charge in narcotrafficking as the new millennium began,’ say Watt and Zepeda, ‘was the cartels now started to treat members of the army, police forces, bankers and political officials as their employees,’ a reversal of the old arrangement. The development of a limited, bourgeois democracy in Mexico from the old authoritarian regime actually increased the power of the wealth of the narcotraffickers! As a result, Mexicans now live in a society characterised by ever-rising crime and insecurity.

The authors of Drug War Mexico note that although narcotics have been prevalent in Mexico since the 19th century, the level of illicit drug production and trafficking has now reached unprecedented proportions. For example, 90 per cent of all cocaine consumed in the US is trafficked through Mexico.

Many towns and cities in Mexico are suffering from organised crime. The exact number of deaths related to drug cartel violence is not known. Between 2006 and 2011 it was officially estimated at 39,000. More than 5,000 persons were reported as missing or disappeared, and 9,000 corpses have yet to be identified. My guess is that up to 100,000 Mexicans have died since 2005. More than 500,000 Mexicans are now directly or indirectly involved or employed in organised crime related to drugs. According to Juan Ramóde la Fuente in Foreign Affairs Latinomérica (2009), ‘We are confronted by a brutal and very sophisticated force, which has submarines, helicopters, airplanes, and sophisticated weaponry.’ The anti-drugs activities and efforts of both the Mexican and United States authorities have had little effect to date; although the Mexican army appears to have had more success in combating the so-called Zapatista uprising in Chiapas (the Zapatistas oppose the consumption of both narcotics and alcohol).

Is there a solution or solutions to Mexico’s drug wars, violence and killings, or the trade in drugs? Watt and Zepeda see some hope in legislation and in pressure groups – but not much. The brutal facts are that, within capitalism, in Mexico, the United States and globally, the commodification of drugs will continue as long as there are big profits to be made from their production, sale and trafficking.

Peter E. Newell

Robert Tressell and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (2003)

Book Review from the December 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most readers of the Socialist Standard will have at least heard about The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, by Robert Tressell.

Now there's a book about the book: Tressell, the Real Story of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Dave Harker, just published by Zed Books.

Tressell was the pen-name of Robert Noonan, a member of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in the English South coast town of Hastings before the first world war from 1905 to 1910. His book is the story covering a period of just over a year of a group of painters and decorators, one of whom is a Socialist but who is continually frustrated by the indifference and support for capitalism of his fellow workers. It has appealed to generations of working-class activists, including members of the Socialist Party, but of course people of different political persuasions have read different things into it.

Harker himself writes as a thinly disguised SWPer, though he seems fascinated by the attitude of the old Communist Party towards the book. Basically, they didn't like it too much since, as a member of the SDF (from which the SPGB sprang in 1904), Tressell/Noonan's approach was considered too "sectarian", too "abstract propagandist". This was because he was trying to convince his fellow workers by reasoned argument rather than "giving them a lead" in the trade union struggle or in the struggle for reforms. In short, because he wasn't a Leninist. But they could not dismiss the book entirely as it was genuinely popular amongst workers, especially those who found themselves in the same position and meeting the same response as Owen, the book's Socialist. And Tressell was assumed to be a working man, so that the book could be seen as an example of "proletarian literature" (actually, although he had to work as a painter and decorator and died in poverty, he was not from a working-class background but the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish knight).

Before WW2 some CP actors did perform a stage version, but changed the book's basic message into a plea for mere trade-unionism. It was not until after the war that the CP decided to fully appropriate the book's heritage, after being instructed by Moscow to present the case for Russian-style state capitalism in national(istic) terms. Tressell was praised for being an English Socialist (as at the same time, and for the same reason, was William Morris). Still, perhaps we shouldn't look a gift-horse in the mouth since one result was the publication of an unexpurgated edition in 1955 (previous editions had been of the severely truncated original 1914 version). Even so, as Harker records, Harry Pollitt, in an article on the new edition, critised Owen as "sectarian", i. e., issued a warning that CP members were not to accept the political views expressed in the book.

Because of the CP's earlier reluctence, the inter-war editions of the book were sponsored by the "Labour Movement", in particular by the building workers' unions. In 1927 an edition appeared with a preface by George Hicks, then General Secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Building Trade Workers and TUC President for that year. Hicks, as Harker reminds readers more than once, had been a member of the SPGB (he had in fact been one of the founder members but left after a few years to pursue a trade union career: he ended up a Labour MP and a junior minister in the war-time coalition government). Another name that frequently crops up in Harker's book is CP full-timer and the party's "proletarian philosopher", TA Jackson, who was in fact more pro the book than most CPers. He was also, as Harker again reminds readers more than once, a former SPGB member. Harker refers to him as "former SPGB General Secretary", as indeed he was if only for a short time and in an acting capacity -- not that the general secretary of the SPGB is anything like the General Secretary of the CP, ie a Leader.

During WW2 Penguins produced a cheap edition for the forces and it is one of the books credited with helping to win over people to vote Labour in 1945. The book itself is not pro-Labour (the Labour Party existed when the book was written but in it Tressel/Noonan talks of sending "revolutionary socialists" not Labourites to parliament). By the 1970s, however, the Labour Party did try to latch on to the book in a serious way. Kinnock wrote a preface to a new edition, but the text itself could not be changed. When converted into a play, however, it could be. One such "adaptation" was made by Stephen Lowe in 1978.

In the book, there is an election in which the two candidates are Sir Graball D'Encloseland (Tory) and Mr Adam Sweater (Liberal); Owen urges his fellow-workers to abstain and vote for neither, just as the SPGB would have done. In the play there is also an election, but this time there is no Liberal candidate only Sir Graball and a possible Labour candidate. Here's how Harker describes the ending of Lowe's play:

"Towards the end he [Harlow] announces: 'We're 'aving that public meeting, now, top o' the hill. 'Cos if we get enough support, London say they may put up a Labour man. There's still time'. Owen demurs: 'It's a dead end'. 'If we go into their game, if we enter the House of Parliament on the back of the Unions, they'll just buy us off. We've got to hold out for the works, not go for the crumbs. Even if we force capitalism to eliminate poverty completely, the cancer will still be in the air. Dog will eat dog. We've got to tear it out by the roots, and build a new world'. Harlow persists: 'Are you coming with us or what?" 'Owen raises the banner, on which is written Workers Unite'. 'They hold the tableau as the light builds to full. Blackout.'"

When members of our West London branch went to see this play (it's not the only stage version) in 1991, we were outraged at this ending, depicting as it did Owen as urging a Labour vote as the lesser evil to the Tories. We couldn't protest at this travesty in the auditorium, but two members ensured that anyone within earshot heard what they, as revolutionary socialists, thought about this as the audience left. Poetic justice was done when Labour didn't win the 1992 election.

Interestingly enough, Noonan's daughter, who was discovered in the mid-1960s to be still alive, stated, Harker records, that "her father's socialism was not that of the Labour Party, or that of Russian communism. 'Neither is the real thing'".

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists was also popular amongst SPGB members and recommended by members to each other. Our criticism of its politics was the opposite to that of the CP: that it was a bit reformist (particularly objected to was the support of the SDF's policy of a Citizen Army). A review of the 1955 edition in the Socialist Standard of December that year commented:

"[Noonan's] Socialism was the hopeful reformism of the Social Democratic Federation. It would, however in this writer's view, at any rate be churlish to make that a major criticism. Here was a man who lived, suffered and was angry, would that there were many, many more."

As befits a member of the SWP, Harker has it in for the SPGB. Commenting on our formation, he says: "In 1904 another 140 dissidents were squeezed out of the SDF, but, sadly, rather than join the SLP they formed the even more sectarian Socialist Party of Great Britain". (Actually, by the SWP's criterion of "sectarian", the SLP was the more sectarian in that it did not allow its members to hold trade union office whereas the SPGB did.)

While he mentions (as noted, more than once) that Hicks and Jackson were ex-SPGBers he appears to be unaware that the Robert Barltrop he accuses of being one of a number of "UK intellectuals" who "patronised" The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, is also an ex-SPGBer, and was in fact a party member at the time he wrote the passage Harker criticises. In his book on Jack London (1978), Barltrop, after describing The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as "the most remarkable of all books about working-class life", had merely commented that Tressell was not a good writer. Hardly enough to merit the insult of being called an "intellectual".

While Harker reproduces all sorts of comments and reviews, he failed to track down the above review in the December 1955 Socialist Standard (by Barltrop in fact) nor an earlier one in November 1953. This is strange, as in an earlier statement announcing his book, Harker had criticised Noonan's policies for being too similar to the SPGB's:

"He drew on real Hastings stories, but left out or marginalized trade unions, radical traditions and socialist organisations—hope, in fact—in order to focus on the key problem, as he saw it, inside workers' heads. Such abstract propagandism was in the SDF, SLP and SPGB traditions if you change the ideas in workers' heads by reasoning, they will (somehow) change the world".

In view of this, he might have been expected to be interested in what the SPGB and SPGB members over the years thought about the book. Apparently not. Instead we are told that Tony Cliff (who probably never read the book) once indicated that he thought it was a useful way of getting to talk (down) to building workers. At one point, he criticises Eric Heffer (who later became a Labour MP) for staying with Labour in 1962--without seeming to realise that Cliff too remained a member of the Labour Party for a further six years (and urged workers to vote Labour until the 1990s).

Having said this, the book, for all its faults, will have to be read by anyone interested in Tressell and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

Adam Buick