And They Call This Democracy? (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

"It's a truism, but one that needs to be constantly stressed, that capitalism and democracy are ultimately quite incompatible." (Noam Chomsky, Feb.1970 at a talk at the Poetry Centre, New York)

To present a random sample of examples to back up this statement: Received opinion in the so-called 'developed' countries would have one believe that democracy is grounded in the electoral system; that if one can cast a vote periodically then representation of the people is taking place and one can't grumble. However, even at that level the electorate are fooled at best and cheated at worst. Fooled into believing they elected a government of the majority of the electorate, as with Blair and New Labour and cheated – twice – by Bush who effectively stole both of his presidential terms at the expense of thousands of disenfranchised voters. Once in power it's quite simple to strengthen that power. Bush conveniently sacked unfriendly District Attorneys in favour of more right-leaning, cooperative allies during his term but was then surprised and disappointed when one of his international allies against terrorism in Pakistan recently followed his example and sacked his judiciary because they dared question his constitutional right to a further term as president/dictator. On the healthcare issue in the US, specifically the attempt to bring free healthcare to millions of poor children, Bush simply and brazenly said that whatever Congress voted he would veto it – democracy in action.

Deliberate lies and misinformation were promulgated about the use of depleted uranium during the first Gulf war and later in the Balkans conflict. A US army report released six months before the first Gulf war detailing the risks of depleted uranium use was suppressed and only unearthed later by a researcher, revealing that the army failed to follow regulations which obliged them to give medical tests to soldiers exposed to or wounded by DU munitions. When forced into admission that soldiers had been in contact with contaminated equipment they initially owned up to a few dozen individuals and it took activists and the media seven years before the Department of Defense acknowledged the thousands of unnecessary exposures. Similarly in the Balkans, the US and NATO initially denied the use of DU and then refused to reveal where it had been used, resulting in delays in clean-up operations and ongoing exposure for many more citizens. How many servicemen and civilians have been exposed in the most recent conflict in Iraq is undetermined. There is still a veil being drawn over the issue by the 'authorities' and many affected servicemen are still not receiving compensation or allowances whilst a callous indifference is being shown to the number of children being born with horrible deformities in Iraq.

It's interesting how many democracies give great favours to their elected representatives. You'd think that a fat salary, an expense account, numerous junkets around the world and revolving doors into consultancies and directorships would be ample reward, but no, let's throw in immunity from prosecution for crimes whilst in office. Why? There have been no good reasons proffered for this stance and generally citizens – the voting public, those on the receiving end of democracy – are outraged by such overt hypocrisy and elitism. It's recently been announced that Jacques Chirac, former President of France, is to be investigated for alleged corruption while mayor of Paris. In Turkey, whilst MPs have full judicial immunity when in office, the citizenry mustn't criticise the military, the flag nor the founder of the Republic or be seen or heard to be insulting Turkishness, whatever that is. Similar examples around the globe abound. There is an anecdote in Howard Zinn's A Power Governments Cannot Suppress about a question asked of the judge by a juror in the case of a break-in to steal draft records as a protest against the Vietnam war. Zinn had testified for several hours about the Vietnam war not being fought for freedom and democracy but for "tin, rubber, oil as repeatedly specified in internal memoranda of the government" and Samuel Braithwaite, the juror, a veteran of 11 years in the US army, asked "If, when a citizen violates the law he is punished by the government, who does the punishing when the government violates the law?" Good question.

When governments or regimes aren't quite to the liking of the richer democracies then a little help in getting it right doesn't go amiss. Money can be channelled in through lobbyists, media groups and NGOs. Western-leaning candidates can be hailed and promoted and propped up until they run out of uses or worse, transgress the controller's rules at which time, in an Orwellian switch, regime change becomes necessary yet again.

The long-running saga (open sore) of Palestine/Israel continues. The most recent history of these lands shows that democracy is acceptable for some but not for others. Even after the overwhelming victory of Hamas in the internationally acclaimed free and fair elections the big powers couldn't accept this as a suitable democracy. Democracy must fit into strict parameters condoned by the powerful. Funds were withdrawn by the EU, the US backed Israel's withholding of payments, even when Hamas agreed to include members from the losing party Fatah to attempt to make a unity government.

The world's largest democracy, India, has a few pertinent examples of how capitalism and democracy are incompatible. Arundhati Roy (novelist and activist) is a well known critic of the governments there, both local and national and is a defender of people's rights on the issue of big dams. In her book The Cost of Living, on the topic of the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada River, she says that what began 10 years previously as a fight for one river valley eventually "began to raise doubts about an entire political system. What is at issue now is the very nature of our democracy. Who owns this land?" The dam site and adjacent areas were already under the Indian Official Secrets Act when in September 1989 50,000 people from all over India gathered in the valley pledging to fight 'destructive development'. What followed was more democracy in action. The site was "clamped under section 144 which prohibits the gathering of groups of more than 5 people." Local people continued to protest and many pledged to drown rather than move from their homes. The Japanese Friends of the Earth's campaign resulted in getting their government to withdraw 27 billion yen loan to finance the project and more international pressure mounted on the World Bank. The democratic knock-on was more repression in the valley with government policy being described by one minister as to "flood the valley with khaki." At stake were huge contracts involving important and already wealthy people. Never mind that big dams have long been discredited for reasons including devastation of farmlands and forests, sedimentation creating shorter than estimated life spans, salination and waterlogging of land irrigated downstream, etc etc. It's even questionable whether there will be enough water to reach Gujarat's towns at the end of the chain – the original stated purpose from as long ago as the early 1960s. At stake also were the lives and livelihoods ultimately of millions of people, but these people had little or no money so couldn't be part of the equation. They were simply disposable and although supposed to be compensated or given new land this simply isn't happening. Democracy forges ahead, enriching minorities and further impoverishing millions.

In the free world, in the long-established democracies, in the newly fledged wannabe democracies, the virus of the anti-terrorism crusade is spreading fast bringing tighter laws and increased controls, reining in freedoms with world-wide use of police and/or troops against civil protest, laws akin to those foretold by Orwell and Huxley – too weird to be thought true by many. Take care of being suspected of even thinking about committing a subversive act. This really brings to life one of Joseph Heller's characters of some 40 years ago who "was jeopardising his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them." Complacent populations allow it to happen. Uninformed, ignorant populations allow it to happen. People have accepted the one-sided terms and conditions with little or no question, without signing a contract. There is no contract, just a one-way edict. It's commonly said that everyone has an equal chance in life, something that, to anyone with a working brain bigger than a peanut, is patently not true. A system so stacked in favour of a few over many can't be seen as just. How has this crumbling edifice called democracy managed to stand for so long? "Nothing's perfect," people say. No, but how long do you wait before you pull a rotten tooth? Are these governments and their democracies relevant to their populaces? Are they credible?

This has all been said before, in other ways, in other places, by other people but it seems not loudly enough yet, not often enough yet, not yet by enough people. "Is it monstrous to think about how to create the possibility of human relationships based on equality, on social justice and on solidarity and relationships from which the use of violence, terrorism and war is excluded by common accord?" wrote Gino Strada, an Italian war surgeon for ten or so years, in his book Green Parrots.

Enough people speaking out and acting in accord with their conscience, not cowed down, refusing to be brainwashed, not suffering from the comfort of amnesia or the ostrich syndrome can bring about social change. Howard Zinn stresses that "our most deadly enemies may not be hiding in caves and compounds abroad but in the corporate boardrooms and government offices where decisions are made that consign millions to death and misery – not deliberately but as collateral damage of the lust for power and profit."

When and where, if ever, was a population last asked how they would define democracy? We, the people, in countries large and small, are told that we have democracy. We are told this by leaders who say we should trust them, who keep information from us because that's in our best interest, who deliberately lie to us, who can have us stopped and searched in the interest of national security, who have us watched night and day in our town centres, who listen in to telephone conversations, who have access to more and more of our personal information, bank details etc., who can put blocks on our access to the internet, who have centralised computer records to use, (or lose) as they choose, who can rein us in and let us out with special measures, who decide whether we can show dissent. And they call this democracy. And people buy it.

Nearly 40 years on from Chomsky's talk at the New York Poetry Centre what can be said about the incompatibility of capital and democracy? That capital continues to widen the rifts between people, between sections of community, between countries; that capitalism is enabling a tiny minority to own an ever-increasing share of the world's wealth to the detriment of billions of people; that capitalism turns a blind eye to democracy, preferring simple acquisition.

Democracy needs no self-aggrandizing leaders with big egos to polish, no experts and specialists with projects linked to big business and personal gain as motivation. Democracy needs no rallying cries causing flag-waving nationalism. Democracy, in essence, is simple and easily understood. Democracy speaks the whole truth (without an oath), reveals all the evidence, enables informed discussion and decisions and requires inclusion for all in dialogue. Democracy means common ownership and control of the world's assets for the benefit of and in the interests of all. Democracy's responsibility is to every member of the world community.

Janet Surman

Classic Reprint: What they did to Thomas Hardy (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The writer Thomas Hardy died, eighty years ago, in January 1928. Here's what we said at the time.

Primarily this journal is an organ of political propaganda. As such, any attempt to appraise the work of the late Thomas Hardy would be somewhat out of place. But there is one feature connected with his death which needs underlining and emphasising. We refer to the attitude of that old enemy of mankind, the Church. Here was a man who throughout most of a long and thoughtful life, had no use for the Church and its teaching whatever. Although at one time an orthodox Churchman, he has since confessed he found no happiness therein. As an artist in life, he truthfully portrayed the part played by the Church in rural conditions. He recognised its utility to certain primitive, immature minds. But, as a man, he had no need of it. He saw men and women as the puppets of circumstance. He saw life as a

"Chequerboard of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays."

And to Destiny he imputed an almost impish irony. Throughout his works, like a theme, there runs this thread of cynical frustration.

But it seems there are heights of irony of which even Hardy never dreamed. For hardly had he breathed his last, before the Church, whose teachings he had repulsed in life, claimed his corpse for her own. Apart from the fact that he was a known Agnostic, Hardy had specifically recorded in the opening sentence of his will, his desire to be buried with his own folk at Stinsford. No matter, he was a great man, too great for the Church to attempt to belittle, so they annexed him. There was a further difficulty : Hardy was known to have opposed cremation, and cremation is necessary before burial in the Abbey. The way out of that dilemma was easy. Ignore it. Hardy was dead anyway. What of his relatives, his friends? Yes! they were opposed to the old man's last wishes being trampled on. The Daily News correspondent interviewed his brother Henry, his sister Kate, and a cousin, Teresa Hardy. He records :—"They were all very emphatic in declaring their disappointment at Hardy being taken away from them. . . . Teresa Hardy, when I asked her if she did not appreciate the honour done to her cousin, said : 'There is nothing in honour. He wanted to be buried in Stinsford Churchyard, and I think it is cruel not to do as he wished.' " Even the Mayor of Dorchester, Mr. W. F. Hodges, said the proposed Abbey burial would leave a sore feeling in the town.

No matter! The Church must have its poppy-show. An ingenious expedient was suggested. As they could not have Hardy's body buried with his ancestors, the local Rector suggested they might have a piece of him, and it was hurriedly arranged that poor old Hardy's heart should be cut out and buried at Stinsford. As all the world knows, this was done. What Hardy would have thought of the whole proceeding, one can imagine. It is difficult to conceive anything more repulsive and disgusting, in an age which so constantly claims to be "enlightened," and the comments of posterity should be worth reading. Sentiment still plays an important part in human affairs, and possibly will so continue for many years to come. But it is hard to imagine the sentimental majority of people viewing the barbaric mutilation of gentle old Hardy's body with any feelings other than loathing.

W.T. Hopley

The 1982 ’Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made’ Lecture Series

Links to the all the talks in one handy post:

Bronterre O'Brien and Working Class Radicalism

Joseph Dietzgen and Dialectical Thought

Plekhanov and the Materialist Conception of History

Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Critique of Religion

Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

William Morris's Vision of Socialism

Julius Martov and the Anti-Bolshevik Approach To Revolution

Pathfinders: Why the minus 16.3 percent happy face? (2008)

The Pathfinders column from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

In today's science lesson, boys and girls, we are going to discover that if you put a Mentos mint into a large plastic bottle of cola, you get a huge explosion that sends a geyser rocketing into the sky. Then, when you have wiped fizzy rain off your school blazers, we're going to debate whether the Mentos mint company are using this curious fact in their school programme, Put the Fizz Back into Science, in order to advance scientific interest among you little ones because none of you like science anymore (New Scientist, Dec 1) or whether they are shamelessly marketing their sugary sweets through the school back-door, under the disguise of education (The commercialisation of our classrooms, BBC Online, Dec 9). And don't you listen to silly old NUT teachers who got the government to ban junk food ads on children's hour TV last year. We don't want to spoil all your fun, that's why we left in a 'spike' of alcohol ads between 4pm and 6pm instead, because we know that one in five of you little darlings under 15 regularly gets drunk.

Our science head believes in telling you the facts of life, which are that advertisers spend 300 million pounds a year targeting the classroom, because they know you clever little boys and girls will recognize 400 brands before you are 10, and that brand loyalty starts young (Adverts impact on children, BBC Online, Dec 9). In fact, you young 'uns are so foxy and grown-up that ASDA have been naughtily selling black and pink lace lingerie for children and Tesco have been saucily selling pole-dancing kits in their toy section (BBC Online, April 6).

But it's not all pants, poles and paedophilia, children. Next we're going to show you some serious programmes from the BBC Learning Zone which tell you all about how wonderful and safe nuclear power is and how much money you can earn if you work for the industry when you grow up. Don't pay any attention to grumpy old independent nuclear consultant John Large when he says "It's a blatant piece of propaganda, that's not an educational tool." What does he know? And don't worry if the BBC say it was a mistake and they didn't mean to do it. Well honestly, they put the programme out twice, didn't they?! (BBC Online, Dec 9).

Oh look, and now poor Ann-Marie is crying big wet tears because she just failed her SATS, the little loser. Well, children, science can do anything now. So let's have some fun and measure how sad she is!

If you want to see a picture of the world of tomorrow, look at a child of today, and you're looking at an ideological war zone. Leave aside all that has been written about child poverty across the globe, and the UNICEF estimate that 9.7 million children under 5 die every year because of completely preventable causes, half of them related to hunger (Link). Leave aside armed children in wars, and child prostitution, and child slavery. Leave aside child abuse and torture. Leave aside even underperforming poor black children in richer countries. Just how happy is the modern, 'western', well-adjusted child of an advanced capitalist country, the focus of all well-meaning social endeavour, of state laws of protection, of cultural and social sanctity, and increasingly, the target of ruthless commercialism, of Christian or Islamist fundamentalist brainwashing, and of pressurised vocational harassment? And while you're asking that, is it possible to measure it scientifically?

A hint of an answer to the first of these questions can be glimpsed from a report by the Institute of Public Policy Research in Nov 2006, which stated that the UK, one of five countries in western Europe with a trillion dollar economy, hosts the worst-behaved youth in Europe, and concludes: "Commentators fear that British youth is on the verge of mental breakdown, at risk from anti-social behaviour, self-harm, drug and alcohol abuse" (BBC Online, Nov 2, 2006).

"The true measure of a nation's standing is how well it attends to its children – their health and safety, their material security, their education and socialization, and their sense of being loved, valued, and included in the families and societies into which they are born." With these words, UNICEF prefaces its new report entitled Child poverty in perspective: An overview of child well-being in rich countries 2007 (http://...com/3yvz8b). It is a statistical survey, an approach explained in the introduction: 'To improve something, first measure it.' 40 indicators are spread across six categories, namely: material well-being, family and peer relationships, health and safety, behaviour and risks, and children's own sense of well-being (educational and subjective). Surprisingly, or perhaps not, the UK finds itself overall bottom of the league, at number 21 out of 21 countries. The UK and the USA find themselves in the bottom third of the rankings for five out of the six categories.
UNICEF concludes: 'There is no obvious relationship between levels of child well-being and GDP per capita' (p.5)' And indeed, looking at the figures, no such relationship stands out. Moreover, taking into account surveys of children themselves, contained in the report, one might think material conditions had nothing to do with it: "Material goods and leisure activities were not, in general, seen as top priority by children. Relationships with family were seen as the most important determinant of well-being, followed by friends, school and pets" although children's understandable lack of grasp of certain hard realities was indicated in the next phrase: "the fact that 'health and safety' did not feature highly in children's priorities shows that there is still a place for adult input in the selection of indicators." (P.43)

The theme emerging from the UNICEF report is that, essentially, money can't buy your child happiness. Interestingly, this rather anti-materialist theme has been echoed by various other statistical studies based around the new 'science' of measuring happiness. For example, the 178-nation 'Happy Planet Index' lists the south Pacific island of Vanuatu as the happiest nation on the planet, while the UK is ranked 108th. This survey, compiled by think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF), notes that Vanuatu is ranked 207th out of 233 economies when measured against Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and suggests that 'people can live long, happy lives without consuming large amounts of the Earth's resources' (BBC Online, July 12, 2006). Scientifically speaking, the NEF survey is probably worthless, given that Vanuatu has a population of just 209,000, which means that to get an equivalent rating the UK has to produce 300 happy Brits to every one happy Vanuatuan, a statistically unlikely achievement. If Vanuatu had a king, for example, Britain would have to find 300 kings.

Scientifically speaking, in fact, these surveys aren't very scientific at all. They involve the following in-depth analytical procedure: "It may sound silly but we ask people 'How happy are you?'" And in case this doesn't sound very clever, Ed Diener, Professor of Psychology at Illinois University, defends the approach thus: "The measures are not perfect yet I think they are in many ways as good as the measures economists use" (http://...com/ftkaw). To socialists, this is no recommendation at all, given that capitalist economics has roughly the same predictive power as astrology.

What further undermines the effort to make a science out of the pleasure principle is the fact that there is no agreement over categories or parameters, so that numerous surveys come up with different and sometimes contradictory results. The World Values Survey of 2005 cites Iceland as happiest country, at 94 percent happy, followed by most of Northern Europe, deteriorating the further south or east one goes, ending with Bulgaria at 'minus 24 percent happy' (http://...com/39awdb). If one feels minus a percent or two happy about this result, one could perhaps turn to the survey by the University of Leicester in 2006, in which Denmark emerges as happiest country despite having the second worst suicide rate in Europe (Independent, Aug 1, 2006).

Obviously nobody is suggesting that if wealth doesn't make you happy, try poverty. But the correlation of wealth and well-being ceases beyond a certain point. As Professor Daniel Kahneman of the University of Princeton puts it: "Standard of living has increased dramatically and happiness has increased not at all, and in some cases has diminished slightly. There is a lot of evidence that being richer... isn't making us happier."

Yet another survey in the UK found that 81% of the UK population agreed that the Government's primary objective should be the creation of happiness rather than wealth, although this looks suspiciously like a weighted response to a loaded question. Other studies have shown that the most reliable happiness indicators are friendship, marriage, life-meaning, and life-goals. But so as not to drift too close to common sense, pseudo-science must interject again. One economist, Professor Oswald at Warwick University, worked out a formula to calculate how much extra cash someone would need to compensate for not having friends. The answer was, apparently, 50,000 pounds (http://...com/2tafc9). The money would be tempting. Friends aside, most workers have to sell themselves for much less.

Children and adults are not all that different. As the various surveys show, extreme deprivation aside, they all want the same kinds of 'soft' reinforcements, not the 'hard' currencies of materialism. But capitalist culture inflicts a ruthless and reckless propaganda war on its people, aiming its sharpest spears at the young and defenceless. Then, in an effort to show that it cares, it invokes a parody of science, counting tears, measuring trauma, like a psychoanalyst with a pocket calculator. Governments don't mind if you cry, so long as you buy. If one hundred percent of children, and adults, reported being one hundred percent 'minus happy' with capitalism, it would not change anything. What will change things is when those people stop being statistics, and start being statistically significant, by showing one hundred percent minus cooperation with their tormentors.

Paddy Shannon

Poverty in the USA

From the Class Warfare blog:

The US Conference of Mayors' 23-city Hunger and Homelessness Survey, released in late December shows that the number of homeless and hungry people in the US rose again in 2007 (pdf available here).

This report documents the problem of hunger and homelessness during the period of November 1, 2006 through October 31, 2007 based on information provided by the following U.S. cities: Boston, MA; Charleston, SC; Charlotte, SC; Chicago, IL; Cleveland, OH; Denver, CO; Des Moines, IA; Detroit, MI; Kansas City, MO; Los Angeles, CA; Louisville, KY; Miami, FL; Nashville, TN; Philadelphia, PA; Phoenix, AZ; Portland, OR; Providence, RI; Salt Lake City, UT; San Francisco, CA; Santa Monica, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Paul, MN; and Trenton, NJ

Notably, the report cites high housing costs and the lack of affordable housing as a chief cause of homelessness in households with children, as well as a major cause of hunger. The survey also notes the recent spike in foreclosures, the increased cost of living in general and the increased cost of food as major causes of hunger in America. In other words – as in the US, as elsewhere on the planet, the golden rule applies can't pay, can't have. If you're poor then you don't constitute a market.

Unlike past reports, this year's report contains individual profiles of hunger and homelessness for each city that participated in the 2007 survey, as well as contact information for service providers in those cities. Overall, cities reported that they are not able to meet the need for providing shelter for homeless persons. Indeed, twelve cities (52 percent) stated that they turn people away some or all of the time. And this in a land where there are millions of acres of vacant office space and hundreds of thousands of empty homes.

Additionally, cities reported a limited ability to meet the need for emergency food assistance. Across the survey cities, 17 percent of all people in need of food assistance and 15 percent of households with children are not receiving it. Nineteen cities expect demand for food assistance to increase in 2008. Again, this in a land that pays farmers to take land out of production and pays others to grow crops for bio-fuel production.

Meanwhile, Information Clearing House today carries a story entitled Welcome to Third World USA.

The piece commences with a quote Paul Krugman that appeared in the New York Times, Feb. 27, 2006:

"What we're seeing (in the U.S.) isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: Income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite ... It's time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates."

Say the writers, commenting on the USA's poor ranking in the last UN Human Development Index, which positions countries in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living

"…the U.S. today has many more features in common with Third World status than Canada ever did back in the mid-1990s.

"What is usually meant by a Third World economy? A half-century ago, the term was associated with the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania. The common characteristics of these Third World countries were high levels of poverty, income inequality, high birth rates and an economic dependence upon the advanced countries. Third World countries were simply not as industrialized or technologically advanced as Western countries.

"But what are some of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary Third World countries? They go beyond these nations' fiscal position or undue concentration on natural resource exports.

"The glaring features today include poverty, lack of democratic institutions, controlling oligarchies and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. In other words, the few enjoy a rich lifestyle while the many share subpar incomes and poverty.

"Another characteristic of Third World countries is that a major portion of their fiscal expenditures is allocated to the military. In many Third World countries, the military is controlled by an elite or a small collection of the wealthy.

"Finally, in many Third World countries one finds that leadership is passed from one generation to the next, often via a close relative."

The sad fact is that if such findings, as listed above, were reported on every TV and in every paper in the US, come election time the workers would still be arguing over the merits of voting for the democrats or the repukes, failing to acknowledge that whichever party gets into power their first duty is to the master class, to ensure the profits keep rolling.

The 'American dream' exists alright, unfortunately for many it means the right to dream about not being on the streets or knowing where your next meal is coming from.

John Bissett

A joke about anarchists and marxists

Via Mitchell Cohen's pamphlet, 'How to Spot a Vanguardist at Twenty Yards'

"An incorrigible anarchist was on her deathbed when she'd announced that she'd become a marxist. Her affinity group was shocked! They spraypainted slogans all over her room, threw rocks through the windows, slamdanced to blasting MDC, and paraded around her bed with a black flag. Finally, one of her lovers asked: "After all these years and all we've been through, how could you become a marxist?"

"Well," said the turncoat, "my time is up. So I says to myself, if anyone's going to die, let it be one of them marxist bastards."

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (27)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 27th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1132 friends!

Recent blogs:

The nature of human nature

Martov V Lenin

Robert Tressell and the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

This week's top quote:

"Superstitions die hard. The absoluteness of the individual ethically, apparently still finds supporters is quarters where the absoluteness of the individual economically has been given up. Socialism proclaims the regeneration of the individual in and through a regenerate society. For Socialism there is no effective moralising or raising of the individual that is not the result of changed economic and social conditions."E. Belfort Bax, The Ethics of Socialism, 1889.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers


Socialist Party of Great Britain

The thoughts of Premier Brown (thirty years ago) (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1975 Gordon Brown edited The Red Paper on Scotland, a collection of articles by leftwing Labour activists. He wrote the introduction (“The Socialist Challenge”) from which the passages below are taken.

“[T]he basic questions which face the Scotland of the nineteen-eighties remain unasked as well as unanswered: who shall exercise power and control the lives of our people? How can we harness our material resources and social energies to meet the needs of five million people and more? What social structure can guarantee to people the maximum control and self management over the decisions which affect their lives, allowing the planned co-ordination of the use and distribution of resources, in a co-operative community of equals?”

“It is argued that what appear to be contradictory features of Scottish life today—militancy and apathy, cynicism and a thirst for change—can best be understood as working people's frustration with and refusal to accept powerlessness and lack of control over blind social forces which determine their lives. It is a disenchantment which underlines an untapped potential for co-operative action upon which we must build.”

“[T]he discontent is a measure of the failure of both Scottish and British socialists to advance far and fast enough in shifting the balance of wealth and power to working people and in raising people's awareness—especially outside the central belt of Scotland in areas where inequalities are greater—about the co-operative possibilities for modern society.”

“[T]he question is not one of structures not of territorial influence, but of democracy — how working people in Scotland can increase the control they have over the decisions which shape their lives and the wealth they alone produce — and in doing so aid the struggle for a shift of power to working people elsewhere.”

“If the prospects for the least fortunate are to be as great as they can be, then they must have the final say—and that requires a massive and irreversible shift of power to working people, a framework of free universal welfare services controlled by the people who use them.”

“But socialism will have to be won also at the point of production—the production of needs, ideas and particularly of goods and services. And that demands ending the power of a minority through ownership and control to direct the energies of all other members of our society.”

“[T]he experience of the sixties shows that the market can no longer be seen as the efficient allocator of resources and indeed that the productive forces within our economy have outstripped the capacity of the market.”

“The more automation there is, the greater is the need to deal with the social consequences by increased public expenditure; yet the more the government raises in taxation, the more urgent is the need for more automation. Thus, increasingly, the private control of industry has become a hindrance to the further unfolding of the social forces of production. Consequently, Michael Barratt Brown has convincingly argued that increased state intervention in social and economic affairs implies that it is no longer realistic to envisage a socialist commodity exchange market in a transition from capitalism to socialism . . .”

“Workers’ Power”

“What has often been cited as an irresoluble clash in socialist theory between regulating material production according to human needs and the principle of eliminating the exploitative domination of man over man can only be met through producers controlling the organisation of the production process.”

“Gramsci's relevance to Scotland today is in his emphasis that in a society which is both mature and complex, where the total social and economic processes are geared to maintaining the production of goods and services (and the reproduction of the conditions of production), then the transition to socialism must be made by the majority of people themselves and a socialist society must be created within the womb of existing society and prefigured in the movements for democracy at the grass roots. Socialists must neither place their faith in an Armageddon of capitalist collapse nor in nationalisation alone. For if the Jacobin notion of a vanguard making revolution on behalf of working people relates to a backward society (and prefigures an authoritarian and bureaucratic state), then the complexity of modern society requires a far reaching movement of people and ideas, acting as a stimulus for people to see beyond the immediacy and fragmentation of their existing conditions and as a co-ordinator for the assertion of social priorities by people at a community level and control by producers at an industrial level. In such a way political power will become a synthesis of—not a substitute for—community and industrial life. This requires from the Labour Movement in Scotland today a positive commitment to creating a socialist society, a coherent strategy with rhythm and modality to each reform to cancel the logic of capitalism and a programme of immediate aims which leads out of one social order into another. Such a social reorganization—a phased extension of public control under workers' self-management and the prioritising of social needs set by the communities themselves—if sustained and enlarged, would in E.P. Thompson's words lead to ‘a crisis not of despair and disintegration but a crisis in which the necessity for a peaceful revolutionary transition to an alternative socialist logic became daily more evident.’”

Pretty radical-sounding stuff. We can’t go so far to say that he was a socialist, but he did employ the language of socialism, talking in terms of “ending the power of a minority through ownership and control to direct the energies of all the other members of our society”, of “eliminating the exploitative domination of man by man”, of “the producers controlling the organisation of the production process”, of “the wealth that they [working people] alone produce”, of “workers’ power”, and that “the market can no longer be seen as the efficient allocator of resources” as well as the solution as lying in the establishment of “a co-operative community of equals”.

His present views, as Chief Executive Officer of British Capitalism PLC, are far, far from those expressed here. But the question is: is this is a personal failing of an individual who has betrayed their earlier views or a predictable consequence of the views outlined in the last extract?

In that extract Brown outlined a gradualist strategy for getting from capitalism to what he called socialism, a series of reforms “to cancel the logic of capitalism” and “a programme of immediate aims which lead out of one social order into another”. That was the original aim, many years ago, of those in the Labour Party who wanted to do more than just trying to tackle immediate problems as they arise, as any government has to. But instead of the various Labour governments – since the first one under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 until the last but one under Callaghan voted out in 1979 – taking measures to cancel the logic of capitalism, they were obliged by economic and political circumstances to apply the logic of capitalism. Which involved giving priority to profits and profit-making and taking various anti-worker measures in pursuit of this aim (wage freezes, strike-breaking, anti-union laws, benefit cuts). Having no mandate to do anything else but govern capitalism, they had do this, inevitably on capitalism’s terms. Gradualism didn’t, doesn’t and can’t work.

In the end the Labour Party itself came to embrace the logic of capitalism and to drop all pretence of trying to replace capitalism with some other social arrangement. Under Blair, and with the full support of Gordon Brown, Labour became the open supporter of the market economy and capitalist economic system that everyone today can see it is.

There will also have been an element of opportunism involved. The Labour Party is a party of professional politicians, and one thing professional politicians want is to be able to enjoy the fruits of government office from time to time. Some time after Labour lost the 1992 election Brown must have decided that Labour was unelectable with the sort of programme he had embraced in the 1970s and 80s and that any such talk had to be abandoned if he was ever to become a Minister of the Crown. Which he duly did, but his past is still there to haunt him.

Adam Buick

Film and the Anarchist Imagination

Book Review from issue 54 of Organise, theoretical journal of the Anarchist Federation

Film and the anarchist imagination by Richard Porton (Verso 1999)

It's quite rare to come across an academic work with anarchism as its subject matter. It is rarer still to find an academic work that exhibits any in-depth understanding of the authentic history and developing theory of anarchism. Most academics don't get past calling the IWW the International Workers of the World. Those who do are usually happy to repeat the lies of the ruling class and to maintain the 'anarchist' caricatures that serve to maintain a false image of what we actually are.

This book, however, written by a teacher of cinema studies at the College of Staten Island in New York, exhibits an unusually deep understanding and wide knowledge of the historic movement and the political arguments within anarchism. The author in fact sets out to consciously deconstruct the stereotypes of anarchism and anarchists that have appeared in both mainstream and 'alternative' cinema.

Extremely readable, the text rarely uses pretentious-git-speak to intentionally, or otherwise, obscure the core meanings of the arguments. The introduction gives a good historical background to the development to anarchist ideas during "¼ more than a hundred years of labour agitation and revolutionary struggles" (p2), and offers the reader who has not come across anarchism before an informative background to the subject matter of the book. It is obvious from the beginning that the author actually knows what he's talking about!

There are five sections: Anarchism and Cinema: Representation and Self-Representation; Cinema, Anarchism, and Revolution: Heroes, Martyrs, and Utopian Moments; Anarcho-syndicalism versus the 'Revolt against Work'; Film and Anarchist Pedagogy and The Elusive Anarchist Aesthetic. Each section can be read independently which makes it a great book to dip in and out of.

This reviewer must admit to not having heard of, never mind having seen, many of the films mentioned and it is fascinating to learn that Malatesta, for example, has been the subject of a highly sympathetic movie (Peter Lilienthal's Malatesta, 1971) or that Alexander Berkman unsuccessfully hawked a 'swashbuckling' screenplay based upon Nestor Makhno's life around Hollywood! It's also interesting to see how some film makers who consider themselves 'sympathetic' to anarchism have played a role in reinforcing the stereotype of the anarchist as irrational and impulsive, if not slightly mad (Wertmuller's Love and Anarchy, 1973 for example).

But far from merely being an encyclopaedia of anarchists in the cinema, the book discusses the contradictions within anarchist film-making and anarchists/anarchism as subject matter. Few perspectives aren't tackled intelligently and the research is exhaustive. Critics might suggest that this is a simply an academic exercise and that the cinema is Spectacular representation at its worst. However, to have such a clued-up and sympathetic text in circulation which may bring revolutionary ideas into areas where they don't usually see the light of day, can only be useful.

Try and get it into your local public or college library.

Food to make you fast (2008)

Book Review from the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chew on This. By Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson (Penguin £6.99)

Schlosser is the author of Fast Food Nation (reviewed in the Socialist Standard for November 2002), and this book covers some of the same ground as the earlier one. That's to say, it looks at the power of fast food companies, especially McDonald's, and the nature of the food they serve.

McDonald's is the largest purchaser of beef in the United States, and this position has enabled them and the other big meat-packing companies to drive down the price paid to ranchers, many of whom have gone out of business. The raising and slaughtering of pigs, cattle and chicken has been aimed squarely at making profits, with little regard for the conditions of the animals or the workers. Chicken, for instance, will live barely six weeks and never see a blade of grass. They die increasingly of heart attacks, caused by a thick layer of fat around the heart.

Of course the fast food companies don't want their customers to think about where the food comes from and how it's made. They'd rather you didn't reflect on the manufactured flavours that are added, or the fact that food for children is made as sweet as possible. Massive amounts of advertising are aimed at kids, who are naturally very susceptible and can influence where their parents take them to eat. Further, the advertising isn't confined to food, as giving away or selling toys is another means to get the kids in.

The employees are often not much older than children, given the fast food industry's reliance on teenage labour. Teenagers are simply cheaper and easier to control. They mostly earn the minimum wage, which in the US is worth less in real terms than it was fifty years ago. There is a large turnover of staff, and the derogatory label 'McJob' sums things up well.

It may even be a McWorld that is developing, as the fast food chains expand outside the US and Europe. The first Burger King opened in Baghdad just nine weeks after the US-led invasion in 2003. The UK has long been part of the McDonald's empire, with 2.5 million people eating there every day.
Capitalist-style fast food treats appallingly the animals that it raises and kills. It's also bad for the workers it employs and bad for the consumers who eat it.

Paul Bennett

Editorial: Why the Green Party is wrong (2008)

Editorial from the forthcoming January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

People are right to be concerned about what is happening to the environment. Materials taken from nature are being transformed by human activity into substances which nature either can't decompose or can't decompose fast enough. The result is pollution and global threats such as the hole in the ozone layer and global warming.

There really is a serious environmental crisis. The issue is not whether it exists but what to do about it. The Green Party has one view. We have another.

The Green Party sees itself as the political arm of the wider environmental movement, arguing that it is not enough to be a pressure group, however militant, like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Greens, it says, should organise as well to contest elections with the eventual aim of forming a Green government that could pass laws and impose taxes to protect the environment.

We say that no government can protect the environment.

Governments exist to run the political side of the profit system. And the profit system can only work by giving priority to making profits over all other considerations. So to protect the environment we must end production for profit.

Pollution and environmental degradation result from the inappropriate ways in which materials from nature are transformed into products for human use. But what causes inappropriate productive methods to be used? Is it ignorance or greed, as some Greens claim? No, it is the way production is organised today and the forces to which it responds.

Production today is in the hands of business enterprises, all competing to sell their products at a profit. All of them—and it doesn't matter whether they are privately owned or state-owned—aim to maximise their profits. This is an economic necessity imposed by the forces of the market. If a business does not make a profit it goes out of business. "Make a profit or die" is the jungle economics that prevails today.
Under the competitive pressures of the market businesses only take into account their own narrow financial interest, ignoring wider social or ecological considerations. All they look to is their own balance sheet and in particular the bottom line which shows whether or not they are making a profit.

The whole of production, from the materials used to the methods employed to transform them, is distorted by this drive to make and accumulate profits. The result is an economic system governed by uncontrollable market forces which compel decision-makers, however selected and whatever their personal views or sentiments, to plunder, pollute and waste.

Governments do not have a free hand to do what is sensible or desirable. They can only act within the narrow limits imposed by the profit-driven market system whose rules are "profits first" and "you can't buck the market".

The Green Party is not against the market and is not against profit-making. It imagines that, by firm government action, these can be tamed and prevented from harming the environment. This is an illusion. You can't impose other priorities on the profit system than making profits. That's why a Green government would fail.
The Green Party fails to realise that what those who want a clean and safe environment are up against is a well-entrenched economic and social system based on class privilege and property and governed by the overriding economic law of profits first.
If the environmental crisis is to be solved, this system must go.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (26)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 26th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1127 friends!

Recent blogs:

Modern Technology and Socialism

Religion: dying but not yet dead

Anthropology and politics

This week's top quote:

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.

"You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?" said Scrooge.

"If quite convenient, sir."

"It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"

The clerk smiled faintly.

"And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work."

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning his great-coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning." Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Julius Martov and the Anti-Bolshevik Approach To Revolution

From the Inveresk Street Ingrate blog:

Final talk from the 'Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made' lecture series and, aptly enough, the lecture dates from 25 years to the day.

Socialist meetings on a Boxing Day? Those were the days.

The sound quality of the recording is not the greatest but, remember, when I did originally introduce these old recordings on the blog, I did introduce them as, The SPGB: the basement tapes. The political quality of the recordings has been immeasurable, and I hope that other comrades in the SPGB tradition will look to upload further talks and debates on the Party website and/or their blogs.
Martov was an important socialist thinker and activist from the first two decades of the twentieth century, and I hope that readers will also take the time to check out the links below for further information about Martov and the period under discussion.


First Part
DOWNLOAD LINK: DEAD LINK.
FILE NAME: martov part one.mp3
FILE SIZE: ~67.40 megabytes
LENGTH:1:13:10
UPDATE: NEW LINK.

Second Part
DOWNLOAD LINK: DEAD LINK.
FILE NAME: martov part two.mp3
FILE SIZE: ~27.24 megabytes
LENGTH: 29:34
UPDATE: NEW LINK.

Further Reading on Julius Martov:

Julius Martov on the Marxist Internet Archive

Julius Martov page at Spartacus.Net

The State and the Socialist Revolution by Julius Martov

Review of Martov's 'The State and the Socialist Revolution' (From an issue of the Socialist Standard that dates from 1940.)

Martov: a Russian Social-Democrat (A review of Israel Getzler's biography of Julius Martov that first appeared in the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

The role of the soviets in Russia's bourgeois revolution: the point of view of Julius Martov by Adam Buick (Originally published in the French political journal, Economies et societes, cahiers de l'ISMEA, Paris, serie S, Number 18, April-May 1976 issue.)

Bushville

From the Marx and Coca-Cola blog:

From Reuters:

"Between railroad tracks and beneath the roar of departing planes sits "tent city," a terminus for homeless people....The noisy, dusty camp sprang up in July with 20 residents and now numbers 200 people, including several children, growing as this region east of Los Angeles has been hit by the U.S. housing crisis."

It's not just people who have lost their houses who are facing hardship. The housing crisis has caused a slew of problems for everyone. The abandoned houses have become a magnet for drugs and other crime, lowers property values, and property tax revenue which could force cities to cut spending in areas like policing or fire prevention. And renters could face homelessness themselves due to an increase demand for apartments. Foreclosures are even started to affect public health.

"All those empty swimming pools in California's Inland Empire have become breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which can transmit the sometimes deadly West Nile virus, Riverside County officials say."

Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

From the Inveresk Street Ingrate blog.

Down to the final three talks in the 1982 'Socialist Thinkers – People Who History Made' lecture series. Once again, the speaker/lecturer is Steve Coleman, and this time the socialist thinker under discussion is Ernest Belfort Bax.

Down the years, Bax is someone who has been pretty much written out of the history of the nineteenth century British Socialist Movement.

Whilst Hyndman is always on hand to take on the role of the Victorian villain for the failure of the Marxist Left in Britain for not fully integrating into the wider Labour Movement, and William Morris gets rediscovered every generation via a new biography and/or a new exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bax, who was a comparable heavyweight figure in the Social Democratic Federation in the 1880s and was a major player - alongside Morris, Aveling and Eleanor Marx - in the Socialist League split from the SDF in 1885, if he is known at all, is best known these days for his virulent anti-feminism in the latter years of his political life, and his capitulation to British chauvinism at the outbreak of the First World War.

In recent years, Old Skool Trotskyist, Ted Crawford, (Officer Class), has done sterling work in creating a Bax archive on the Marxist Internet Archive which is comparable to many of the better known socialist writers on the website. And more background on Bax is available via Ted's autobiographical sketch on the Marxist Internet Archive website.

First Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 02 belfort bax and the ethics of socialism part 1.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~59.47 megabytes

LENGTH:1:04:33


Second Part

DOWNLOAD LINK: Belfort Bax and the "Ethics of Socialism"

FILE NAME: 01 belfort bax and the ethics of socialism part 2.mp3

FILE SIZE: ~41.88 megabytes

LENGTH: 56:01

Further Reading on Ernest Belfort Bax:

Bax on the Marxist Internet Archive

From the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard: Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax and "the Woman Question"