Is there an alternative? (2010)

Book Review from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Mark Fisher, Zero Books, 2010

Mark Fisher’s very short book is a quick and entertaining read and makes a good companion to David Harvey (see above/last month). Where Harvey focuses mostly on the how and why of the capitalist crisis, exploring its historical, geographical and economic aspects, Fisher instead looks at how recent developments have impacted on the cultural and psychological spheres. It has led us to a situation where, he argues, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”. The deathly legacy of Thatcher’s insistence that “there is no alternative’ lingers on.

Fisher’s insights are drawn partly from the heads of philosophers and partly from his own personal experience. The philosophers he quotes are famous for their obscurity and difficulty, but Fisher does a good job of making their ideas accessible for the general reader. That will put readers in a better position to decide for themselves whether the obscurity is worth penetrating.

Fisher is more interesting and amusing when he turns to his personal experience in Britain’s education system. It’s hard not to sympathise with him as he does his best to inspire dozing teenagers with learned cultural-studies discourses on Doctor Who while they slouch across their desks, plugged into their iPods, snacking on crisps. And that’s the most rewarding part of Fisher’s job. The rest of it is spent filling out forms trying to convince bureaucrats that what he has just done is of some worth in the capitalist market place.

But I’ll counter Fisher’s personal experience with my own. I, too, was once a teenage student, dozing on my desk while a professor tried his best to knock some education into me. But outside of the classroom, I was enjoying and making the most of a period of never-to-be-repeated freedom (from parental control, from capitalist work, from the responsibilities of adult and family life), and pursuing my own interests, including educating myself in socialist politics. Of course I’m not suggesting that all Fisher’s students are doing likewise. But the point is that he doesn’t know what they are doing. At a minimum, you’d have to ask them to find out.

A study of history and the social sciences, particularly anthropology, consistently reveals that things are rarely quite as they seem. Workers are never quite as oppressed and docile as they figure in the imaginations of Marxist professors. Management control is never as total as the managers and bosses dream. We are never as lost in the unrealities of television and the spectacle as French philosophers imagine. There’s always a hidden undercurrent of imaginative engagement and resistance. It’s always much more rewarding when an author has gone to the trouble of finding it and encouraging its development than denying its existence and wallowing in gloom.

Fisher concludes with some political proposals that he dresses up as exciting and new, but is mostly old fare – for example, the reinvigoration of the left, the awakening of a ‘public’ consciousness, more worker control over the labour process, popular control over the state, and so on. But to end on a positive note of agreement, Fisher at least points in vaguely the right direction if you’re after a convincing answer to the question in the subtitle of the book. Yes, there is an alternative, he says, but the working class will have to organise politically if it ever wants to see it.

Stuart Watkins

Pieces Together: World Cup Reality (2010)

From the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

WORLD CUP REALITY

"No nation in the world has a gulf between rich and poor as great as South Africa's. Despite billions of euros in investments related to the 2010 World Cup, last year more than a million South Africans lost their jobs. During the first three months of this year, 171,000 entered the unemployment rolls. The official unemployment rate is over 25 percent, the highest level seen in the past five years. Unofficially, it is estimated to be closer to 40 percent. A recent study completed by the University of South Africa concluded that 75.4 percent of South Africans fall below the poverty level – and almost all those poor are black. 'Persistent poverty, rising levels of unemployment and violent crime, together with the crisis in the public health sector," writes Amnesty International in its annual report, have contributed at least as much as corruption and nepotism to the often violent protests that have recently shaken South Africa.'" (Spiegel On Line, 3 June)



"PEACE-LOVING" BRITAIN

"Britain signalled a new openness on nuclear weapons yesterday, revealing that its stockpile will not exceed 225 warheads, including up to 160 that are ready for action. William Hague, the Foreign secretary, said: 'We believe that the time is now right to be more open about the weapons we hold.'"(London Times, 27 May)



CHEAPENING WORLD ANNIHILATION

"The Pentagon has now told the public, for the first time, precisely how many nuclear weapons the United States has in its arsenal. That is exactly 4,802 more than we need. Last week, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before the Senate to advocate approval of the so-called New Start treaty, signed by President Obama and President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia last month. The treaty's ceiling of 1,550 warheads deployed on 700 missiles and bombers will leave us with fewer warheads than at any time since John F. Kennedy was president. Yet the United States could further reduce its reliance on nuclear weapons without sacrificing security. Indeed, we have calculated that the country could address its conceivable national defense and military concerns with only 311 strategic nuclear weapons." (New York Times, 21 May)



BETTER LATE THAN NEVER

"Nicolaus Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer whose work was later condemned by the Catholic Church as heretical, was reburied by Polish priests as a hero yesterday, 467 years after he was laid to rest in an unmarked grave. His reburial in a tomb in the cathedral where he once served as a church canon and doctor indicates how far the church has come in making peace with the scientist whose revolutionary theory that the Earth revolves around the Sun helped to usher in the modern scientific age. Copernicus, who lived from 1473 to 1543, died as a little-known astronomer working in what is now Poland, far from Europe's centres of learning." (Independent on Sunday, 23 May)

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 151

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 151st our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1578 friends!

Recent blogs:

Much ado about National Insurance

The 'tesco-isation' of charity

Are you a wage slave?

Quote for the week:

"...the leisure which Socialism above all things aims at obtaining for the worker is also the very thing that breeds desire - desire for beauty, for knowledge, for more abundant life, in short. Once more, that leisure and desire are sure to produce art, and without them nothing but sham art, void of life or reason for existence, can be produced..." William Morris, The Worker’s Share of Art, 1885

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

They Say: “We Can’t Afford it.” (2010)

From the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The aspirations of the majority of the world’s population are being frustrated by capitalism’s economic constraints.

In May 2010, the Coalition government in the UK announced cuts of £6.2 billion in an attempt to begin to reduce the budget deficit of £156 billion for 2009/2010. These cuts will very noticeably affect people’s lives. For example, it was reported that £780 million would be cut on transport, £836 million on communities and local government and £325 million on education. Devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will have to cut back £704 million. Local authorities will be expected to reduce expenditure by £1.165 billion. Many more expenditure reductions were announced in the June emergency budget.

It is vital to realise that this economic crisis is just the latest in a series of slumps which are quite natural to the capitalist system. In the past, supporters of this system have quite mistakenly believed that politicians would be able to rid society of the detrimental effects of the trade cycle. Gordon Brown is particularly infamous for his claims to have “abolished boom and bust”. Past slumps have, of course included the Great Depression of the early 1930s, and recessions of the mid 1970s, the early 1980s and 1990s.

Reforms = Continuation of Capitalism
When confronted with the case for genuine socialism, many apologists for the capitalist monstrosity have maintained that through the introduction of reforms, political leaders would be able to establish a “fairer” and “better” society.

Let’s look at aspects of this reform movement. In 1942, the Social Insurance and Allied Services were created by Beveridge in order to aid those who were in need of help, and/or in poverty. The benefits were designed to aid the sick, unemployed, retired or widowed. When state welfare reforms were introduced after the Second World War, they did produce some improvement in working class living conditions in the UK, for example in the areas of education, housing, child employment, work conditions and social security. No doubt, one motive for these reforms was an attempt to distract workers attention way from more radical, left-wing ideas, which claimed to offer an alternative to capitalism. Such motives had been employed in Germany during the 1890s by Bismarck.

The benefits from reforms have, in reality done little more than to keep workers and their families in an efficient condition for employment. In economically developed countries, such as those in Europe and North America, whilst the worst excesses of poverty have been partially alleviated, most of the social problems of inequality, unemployment (or the threat of it), sub-standard housing etc., remain.

The reforms which are made in capitalist society, have to be reconciled with the profit-making needs of the system. These reforms will often be turned to the benefit of the capitalist class at the expense of any working class gain. This explains the limited nature of reformism as far as the workers (the majority of people) are concerned, and how many of the supposed benefits can be eroded. Take for example social security, housing and education.

Underlying the whole system of the provision of “benefit” to those unable, for various reasons, to take part in the employment process, is the suspicion, encouraged by the ruling class, that many of those in receipt of these benefits “may not deserve them”. The value of the benefits, such as Job Seekers’ Allowance, Income Support and state pensions frequently declines over periods of time, since the government insists that the previous levels “cannot be afforded”. Pressure is put upon claimants to “justify” their claims.

As regards social housing, council house building is a minute fraction of what it was 50 or 60 years ago and the cost of having a roof over one’s head has become much greater, causing through mortgages, huge levels of indebtedness.

In the sphere of education, tuition fees and student loans have put enormous pressure on the young who are seeking to increase their knowledge and skills, in most cases, in order to make themselves “more employable on the job market”. According to the online student magazine Push, in 2009 students faced an average debt of £5,000 for each year of study. Some students in London have debts of around £30,000 by the time they finished their courses. When these students do finish their studies, they will most likely have to find a place to live, on a more permanent basis. Hence, the need for majority to take out a mortgage and build up even more debt for themselves. How much of this was foreseen by the reformist proponents of large-scale higher education and home “ownership” under capitalism?

It’s the Working Class who make the sacrifices
Most economists and political commentators are saying that the UK’s budget deficit and indebtedness will usher in a period of significant austerity. This problem is a global one, as is the economic crisis. To take just one example, the problems of Greece have been well publicised. In order to receive loans from the Euro-zone countries and the International Monetary Fund, wage freezes, pension cuts and tax rises are being introduced.

David Cameron and other apologists for the status quo claim that the whole population will have to make “sacrifices”. What these defenders of capitalism utterly and deliberately fail to tell us is that the overwhelming burden of the sacrifice will have to be made by the working class. The rich will, for the most part, as usual keep their privileges and luxurious lifestyles. Perhaps, the average multi-millionaire or billionaire will only be able to “afford” two yachts in the Caribbean, instead of the more normal, three. Perhaps, some of the wealthy will have to delay refurbishment of their opulent gated homes, for a few months etc. The reality is that capitalism can never be made to work in any other way. It always works in the interests of the rich minority and against the interests of the majority of the population, no matter how many reforms are introduced.

The socialist answer to all this is firstly to point to the absurd contradictions which capitalism presents. We are being told that many reforms and much social expenditure cannot be afforded. Yet, huge sums of money are squandered on the destructiveness of the armed forces and on the wastefulness of financial services. The society in which we live, possesses immense wealth, on a global scale. Just think of the power of modern technology, compared with the technology of only 40 years ago. Just think of how greatly the processes of automation in industry have been developed in recent decades. Also, bear in mind the huge potential of the world’s labour force which could contribute towards expanding society’s wealth still further. However, under capitalism many of these productive resources are being and will be underused or abandoned since they cannot be “afforded” (in reality, it is not profitable to employ them). All the reforming of the capitalist monstrosity is not going to make any significant difference. The problem will still be there, unless…, unless people finally realise that there most certainly is an alternative to this austerity madness.

The Socialist Alternative
That alternative consists firstly of people becoming aware that conditions most certainly do not have to be as they are at present. The majority needs to come together and to realise that instead of a small, profiteering minority owning nearly all of the planet and its resources, we, as the overwhelming majority must take possession of those resources, manage and use them in the interests of the whole of humanity, with production of goods and services for human need and, not for profit making which benefits only a small minority.

In such a society where the resources of the world are owned and controlled by the people of the world, there will be absolutely no need for the money system and its inherent enormously wasteful financial apparatus. With the democratic introduction of common ownership, will come the abolition of money and all forms of exchange. In their place, each individual will be able to make their own voluntary contribution to the production of society’s wealth and in turn, will be able to draw from the common store, according to their own self-defined needs.

In such a world, notions of “indebtedness” and not “being able to afford” things in monetary terms, will be considered completely archaic and utterly out of place.

Through the pages of this journal and of other socialist literature, and by communicating with socialists, people can become aware of this alternative. So, the next time you hear a politician supporting policies of austerity and talking about there not being enough money to do something worthwhile, think of the socialist alternative where we will not need money in the first place. Instead, the world’s people will be empowered to contribute their knowledge and skills to the common good (that of society as a whole, including themselves, as individuals). In such a system, humanity will also have, at its disposal, technology designed and frequently refined to benefit all of the world’s people.

Vincent Otter

Easy Rider (2010)

From the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The actor Dennis Hopper died on 29 May. Together with Peter Fonda he wrote the script for the 1969 cult film Easy Rider in which he also played Billy. Here’s a couple short extracts from the film:

GEORGE: You know this used to be a hell of a good country, can't understand what's gone wrong with it.
BILLY: Man, everyone's got chicken that's what happened, man. Hey, we can't even get into a, like, second-rate hotel, a second rate motel, you dig. They think we're going to cut their throats or something, man. Like, they're scared, man.
GEORGE: They're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent.
BILLY: All we represent to them, man, is someone who needs a haircut.
GEORGE: No. What you represent to them is freedom.
BILLY: What the hell's wrong with freedom! That's what it's all about.
GEORGE: Yeah, that's right. That’s what it’s all about. But talking it and being it, that's two different things. I mean it's really hard to be free when you're bought and sold in the market place. Don't ever tell anyone that they're not free because they'll get real busy killing and maiming to prove that they are. Oh yeah, they'll talk to you and talk to you and talk to you about individual freedom but they see a free individual it's going to scare them.
BILLY: Man, it don't make them running scared.
GEORGE: No, it makes them dangerous.
* * * * *
BILLY: Oh, wow... what... What’s that, man. What the hell was that?
WYATT: Huh?
BILLY: No, man, like, hey man, wow! I was watching this object, man, like the satellite we saw the other night right and it was going across the sky, man, and then it just suddenly, yeah, it just changed direction and went whizzing right off, man. It flashed . . .
WYATT: You're stoned out of your mind, man.
BILLY: Oh yeah, I'm stoned, man. But like, I saw a satellite, man, and it was going across the sky and it flashed three times at me and zigzagged and whizzed off, man, and I saw it.
GEORGE: That was a UFO beaming back at you. Me and Eric Heisman was down Mexico two weeks ago. We seen forty of them flying in formation. They've got bases all over the world now. They've been coming here ever since 1946 when the scientists started bouncing radar beams off of the moon. And they have been living and working among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about them.
BILLY: What are you talking, man?
GEORGE: Well, you just seen one of them, didn't you?
BILLY: Hey man, I saw something, man, but I didn't see it working here, you know what I mean.
GEORGE: Well, they are people just like us, from within our own solar system. Except that their society is more highly evolved. I mean, they don't have no wars, they got no monetary system, they don't have any leaders, because I mean each man is a leader. I mean each man... Because of their technology they are able to feed, clothe, house and transport themselves equally and with no effort.
WYATT: Wow!

Cooking the Books: Housing madness (2010)

The Cooking the Books column from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

A photo of a row of empty newly-built houses in Dublin was featured on page 4 of the London Times’s Bricks & Mortar supplement of 14 May. According to the accompanying article, “a recent estimate suggested that there were 345,000 empty homes in Ireland”. Why? Is it because there are no people living in substandard housing in Ireland? Or because the housing problem has been solved there? Neither. It’s because there’s no market – no paying demand – for them. The people who need better housing or to move house cannot afford to pay. It’s as simple as that.

This situation arose in classic capitalist fashion. Houses like everything else under capitalism are produced to be sold with a view to profit. They are not produced simply for people to live in. A few years ago, when the capitalist economy in Ireland was expanding, there was a strong demand for new houses, which speculative builders in Ireland thought was going to continue. In any event, they felt that they rather than their rivals would benefit from the demand for houses. So they arranged for more to be built:

“This nation of builders became a nation of developers. Massive tax incentives encouraged people to invest. You’d have been a fool not to. Buy one day for €100,000 (£86,750), sell a week later for €200,000. Nobody asked if Ireland needed these buildings or whether they were being built in the right places.”

But then came the slump of 2008 (itself sparked off by overproduction of houses in relation to paying demand in the US) and the market for houses collapsed. “Too many” had been built:

“Developers can’t get rid of them, nor can some pay off the bank loans they used to build them. The banks can’t acquire them because they are worth so much less than their loans.”

Meanwhile, the other side of the Irish Sea, banks and building societies have a different problem but still arising from the fact that houses are produced for sale and not directly for people to live in. They can’t get the money to re-lend at a rate of interest that those who want to buy a house can afford.
Banks and building societies are intermediary financial institutions which make their profits by borrowing at one rate of interest and re-lending it at a higher one. They borrow money from two sources: the money market (“wholesale”) and individual depositors (“retail”).

According to the Financial Times (22/23 May) the Council of Mortgage Lenders has

“…warned that its own members – who make roughly 94 per cent of all the mortgage loans in Britain – are facing higher costs as they compete for retail deposits to replace maturing wholesale loans. This is likely to mean that rates on mortgages may have to rise even if the Bank rate remains on hold.”

The “higher costs” are the increased rate of interest they will have to offer depositors to get these to lend them money, but, if they are to make the same rate of profit, this will have to be passed on to those to whom they lend money to buy a house. But, as houses buyers may not be able to afford the higher interest, mortgage lenders are not prepared to give them loans as they wouldn’t make enough profit, with the result that, in the words of the article’s headline, the “housing market recovery shows signs of stalling”. A neat illustration of how banks cannot just create the money they lend. A neat illustration too of how capitalism is not a society geared to meeting needs.

Editorial: The government declares class war (2010)

Editorial from the July 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ‘savage cuts’ in spending by government departments, cuts in housing benefit, a two-year pay freeze for public servants, less indexation for welfare benefits, price increases due to higher VAT, announced in the 22 June Emergency Budget, and openly trailed as inaugurating a new ‘Age of Austerity’ and ‘years of pain’, confirm that the role of governments is to run the state machine in the general interest of the capitalist class, the tiny minority of super rich who own and control the means of wealth production. That governments really are the ‘executive committee of the ruling class’ that Marx said they were.

In fact, in a throwback to the 19th century, this particular government is overwhelmingly composed of members of the ruling class (see back page). And these millionaires have the cheek to tell us that we must tighten our belts and change our way of life while – even, so that – theirs can continue.

In reducing corporation tax the Chancellor followed the advice of a fellow Tory writing in the Times (17 June) to choose “the interests of employers and wealth creators. That won’t be popular but healthier businesses – free of tax and red tape – are essential for generating tax revenues, exports and new jobs.”

Note the arrogance of these people in describing themselves as ‘wealth creators’ when in fact it is employees, not employers, who create wealth by transforming materials that originally came from nature into useful things. What employers do is organise that the maximum amount of this newly-created wealth goes to their business as profit.

But the Tory did have a point. Under capitalism the engine of growth is capital accumulation by businesses and this is fuelled by profits. In this sense, tax receipts and jobs do depend on profit-healthy businesses, even if only as by-products which are used to try to convince the general public that it is in their interest that priority should be given to profits.

That priority has to be given to profits at the expense of the living standards of working people and their dependants is confirmation that capitalism is a system that does not work in the interest of the wealth-creating majority, only in that of the profit-taking minority. Which is why it must go.

In the meantime we have to live with it. That doesn’t mean we have to take what the government has planned lying down. The precise cut in our living standards is not something the government can decree. It depends on how determinedly we resist. In other words, on the class struggle. But, since the cards under capitalism are always stacked against us, this will only be a defensive, rearguard action to try to stop things getting worse.

Yet another reason why we should be organising, not just to limit the damage, but to put an end to capitalism and usher in a society based on common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, so that production can be geared to satisfying people’s needs instead of being subordinate to making profits for the few.

The crisis: what is to be done? (2010)

From the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

We look at David’s Harvey’s latest book The Enigma of Capital.

We are living through the biggest capitalist crisis since the 1930s – a crisis with economic and ecological, not to mention social and political, dimensions. No one knows for sure what’s going to happen or what to do next. In this context, what we need as a matter of urgency is understanding. We need to know what the crisis is, why it has arisen, and what, if anything, can be done about it. David Harvey, an acclaimed geographer and professor of anthropology, points to some of the answers to these urgent questions.

The Enigma of Capital (Profile Books, 2010) opens with an account of the recent history of the economic crisis, from the first signs of trouble in the US ‘subprime’ mortgage market in 2006, right up to very nearly the present day. This account is in the style of and largely taken from the liberal and financial mainstream press. Harvey then moves on to analyse what is really going on behind this standard account. This is helpful because no economist or financial journalist has been of any use in predicting the crisis or explaining why it has happened. Harvey rejects the search for a scapegoat – Alan Greenspan, Gordon Brown, irresponsible borrowers, greedy bankers, and so on – and instead argues that crises are an inevitable and necessary feature of the normal working of capitalism.

His basic argument is a Marxian one. Modern societies are driven by the capitalists’ search for ever-more profit. Competition forces capitalists to reinvest at least a portion of that profit, again in the expectation of yet more profit. This leads to ‘capital accumulation’ on an ever-expanding scale, and this circulation process, much like the blood in the body, must keep flowing if profitable investment – and therefore the socially necessary production of goods and services – isn’t to have a scary heart attack. But as the years pass, certain scares are inevitable – and the problems get worse as the amount of capital searching for profitable reinvestment gets larger and larger.

Harvey’s analysis
Harvey identifies seven main risk factors: money capital scarcities (where’s all the money going to come from?), labour problems (e.g., insufficient supplies of cheap, ‘flexible’ labour), disproportionalities between sectors (one sector over-expands in its search for profits), natural limits (e.g., scarcities of natural resources), unbalanced technological and organisational changes (including competition and monopoly and so on), indiscipline in the labour process (workers slacking off or organising unions for example) and lack of effective demand (consumers’ ability to pay for goods and services). He argues that any one of these can be a clot in the free flow of capital. But capitalism cannot tolerate such clots for long without dying.

Like the human body, capitalism is a dynamic system that is very good at sorting out its own problems. It patches itself up, and gets going again – but always at the price of storing up future problems for itself. So, to take recent examples, a crisis of profitability in the 1970s led such figures as Thatcher and Reagan to dampen down wages by crushing unions, creating unemployment and importing cheaper immigrant labour from abroad. This was successful for a while, but created a new problem: a population of unemployed or badly paid workers does not make for the vibrant and ever-expanding consumer markets capital needs to prosper (there can be no growth without sales). This problem was solved by recklessly extending credit to ever more people, regardless of their ability to repay. This in turn led to a crisis of overindebtedness in the working class, which led to a crisis of confidence in debt instruments, starting with subprime mortgages in the US, which led us to where we are now – the supply of credit drying up, leading to blockages in the flow of capital, in turn leading to rising unemployment, the loss and devaluation of capital, and so on. The economic ‘stimulus’ measures (the defibrillator) haven’t worked, so now we are being promised Thatcher-style austerity (a fat-free diet) for the working class.

A crisis can be understood as those times when socially produced wealth returns to its ‘rightful owners’, the capitalist class, and as an opportunity for that class to consolidate its power over both the working class and the political machinery of the state (it was a commonplace in some sections of the financial press that, whoever won the general election, the government would be forced to do the bidding of ‘international investors’, i.e., the capitalist class). The capitalist class then uses that power to claw back as many as possible of the gains and reforms won by previous rounds of class struggle and political action. ‘Balance’ and health is restored to the operation of profitability, and the flow of capital can continue. Hence the necessity as well as inevitability of crisis under capitalism.

Leninist fly in the soup
So, what is to be done about all this? Harvey is right to insist that nothing less than what are usually dismissed as ‘utopian’ answers will do. The crisis is rooted in the system. Capitalist attempts to solve the crisis will mean more austerity and misery for everyone apart from the smallest minority. A systemic problem cries out for systemic solutions. In this, we agree with Harvey. True, the influence of Leninism in the book, especially in the final chapter, is something of a fly in the soup. Eating around the fly becomes increasingly distasteful as we get near the end of the meal – Harvey’s criticism of what he calls ‘actually existing communism’, i.e., the state-capitalist dictatorships in the former Soviet Union and so on, is mild to say the least, though at least he is good enough to confirm that what most people call ‘socialism’ is actually just “democratically managed or regulated capitalism”.

Genuine socialists with weak stomachs may baulk at this. But if so, they will miss out on some good, solid, political nutrition. Particularly interesting are three points of strong agreement between Harvey and us.

The first is the importance of what he calls ‘mental conceptions’ in revolutionary change, i.e., the importance of ideas and what is usually dismissed as ‘utopian’ politics. Without a change in what people think about the prospects for change and for socialism, as Harvey rightly points out, there can be no alternative other than a return to some form of capitalism.

The second is his insistence, somewhat against the fashion among other anti-capitalist theorists, on the importance of capturing and transforming the state. There is, he says, “no way that an anti-capitalist social order can be constructed without seizing state power, radically transforming it and reworking the constitutional and institutional framework that currently supports private property, the market system and endless capital accumulation. To ignore the state and the dynamics of the inter-state system is therefore a ridiculous idea for any anti-capitalist movement to accept”. We wholeheartedly agree.

The third is his insistence that the crisis does not mean that capitalism is ending. Capitalism is a dynamic system that has always solved its own problems in the past, and will do so again, whatever the cost to the rest of us – and the cost this time could well be environmental disaster, perhaps even catastrophic war. Capitalism will never fall on its own, says Harvey. It will have to be stopped and the power of the capitalist class ended by concerted political action. And although the prospects for such change do not seem that good at the moment, a crisis will at least tend to make the question of alternative social systems seem more relevant and urgent. In other words, good capitalists always view crises as opportunities. It would be wise if the people they rule over did the same.

There is plenty of room, then, for both agreement and disagreement in Harvey’s book. As a book, it is a bit of a loose, baggy monster – it is overlong and repetitive, loosely and sometimes vaguely written (things happen “big time”, without quantification or referencing), and seemingly hurriedly and lazily assembled from the professor’s lecture notes. His writing mostly seems aimed at a general audience, and yet technical terms and Marxian jargon go unexplained, and ideologically loaded and potentially confusing words and phrases are used without apology or caution. But most of these faults can and should be overlooked because the substance of his argument is sound and deserves as wide an audience as possible. In addition, his analysis of the importance of urbanisation and the ownership and control of land and resources in modern capitalism is an important modern updating of Marxian theory, expanding on some insightful and prescient comments by Marx in Capital.

Harvey also has an extremely useful model for thinking about how capitalism moves and changes, through the interconnected development of seven ‘spheres’ of activity, again derived from Marx, but avoiding the determinism and one-sidedness of many of Marx’s later followers. Harvey helps us understand, in relatively straight-forward English, what’s really going on behind the stories we read in the mainstream press, and therefore helps us think clearly about what it might be possible to do in the future. As Harvey says, “Questioning the future of capitalism itself as an adequate social system ought, therefore, to be in the forefront of current debate.”

Stuart Watkins

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 150

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 150th our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1571 friends!

Recent blogs:

Capitalist Money Madness

Let’s produce for use, not profit

The election: who wins?

Quote for the week:

"An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods."Ambrose Bierce

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Darwin on human evolution (2010)

From the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

150 years ago in June the famous confrontation over evolution took place between Bishop Wilberforce and TH Huxley. We begin a three-part series where we look at Darwin’s theory of human evolution and the reaction of Marx and Engels to it.

The Origin of Species (1859) was, arguably, the most shattering book of the 19th century, and Darwin’s most famous book. It was not, of course, his only book, nor was it the one in which he dealt with the evolution of the human species, even though it sparked off the “Man’s place in nature” debate. In fact, it took Darwin just over 11 years to publish his first book on the human species, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Yet it did not have the same social impact as The Origin, and it is unlikely that the same celebratory hoopla will accompany its 150th anniversary in 2021.

Unlike The Origin, there is no evidence that either Marx or Engels bought a copy or even read The Descent, as there are no references to it in their collected works. However, the fact that Engels continued to discuss Darwin and Darwinian literature, especially in the context of German socialism, most importantly in Anti-Dühring (1878), and wrote the uncompleted The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in 1876 (he broke off the work in order to write Anti-Dühring, which makes extensive references to Darwin), shows that he kept up an interest in at least some of Darwin’s later writings.

Darwin on Human Descent

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was published on the 24 February 1871, in two large volumes, at around 700 pages in length, and selling at 24 shillings (The Origin cost 15 shillings). The first print run was of 2,500 copies (compared to 1,250 for The Origin), increasing to 4,500 by the end of March, and 7,500 by the end of the year.

The Descent was the first of Darwin’s works to deal with the human species, and was followed in 1872 by The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Originally, Darwin had planned to discuss emotions in The Descent, but, as with much of his work, the material on it just piled up and required a separate volume. The only other published work dealing with humans was A Biographical Sketch of an Infant. This was published in Mind, the first psychology journal, and was based on observations of his first child, his son William (affectionately called Doddy) carried out 37 years earlier.

This latter fact shows that Darwin had from the beginning included human beings in the scheme for his big book on Natural Selection (The Origin was only an abstract of this proposed big book) and it would not be something he needed to think anew for The Descent. In 1839 he had written:

"Looking at Man, as a Naturalist would any other Mammiferous animal, it may be concluded that he has parental, conjugal and social instincts, and perhaps others. The history of every race of man shows this, if we judge him by his habits, as another animal. These instincts consist of a feeling of love (& sympathy) or benevolence to the object in question. Without regarding their origin, we see in other animals they consist in such active sympathy that the individual forgets itself & aids & defends & acts for others at his own expense." (cited in White and Griffin Darwin: A Life in Science, 1995, p.248)

Publish and Be Damned!
The application of natural selection to the human species would be the linchpin in the argument against critics, and it is likely that, as with other criticisms he rehearsed before the publication of The Origin, he would be aware that any failure to meet his critics would be fatal to the future of the concept of natural selection as a naturalistic explanation. So rather than being a late issue in the debate, Darwin saw it as being a necessary foundation from the very beginning of his studies.

Nevertheless, Darwin was famously reluctant to include the human species in The Origin. Even in 1857 (22 December), he wrote to Alfred Russel Wallace about his reluctance to write about human evolution:

"You ask whether I shall discuss Man; I think I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist."

In The Origin, he famously wrote that the application of natural selection to human kind would be possible only in the far future:

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researchers.... Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” (Darwin On the Origin of Species, 1859; Penguin edition, 1968, p. 458)

But although he didn’t discuss the human species, everybody knew he did. His readers were from the very beginning eager to jump the species gap. It was the human implications of natural selection that they were keen to discuss. Whilst it took Darwin until 1871, by which time the heat of the controversy had cooled somewhat, to publish his views on human evolution in the two volume The Descent, others were not so reticent.

Unwilling or unable to defend his position, or the all too obvious implications of it, in the bear-pit of public debate, Darwin left it to his bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, to defend the theory from religious onslaught. Barely six months after the publication of The Origin, the famous British Association debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel (Soapy Sam) Willberforce took place in Oxford on 30 June, 1860. It was here that Huxley brilliantly replied to Willberforce’s snide query as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his father’s side or his mother’s side, by retorting that he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a man who misused his gifts to obscure scientific discussion by rhetoric and religious prejudice.

By the time Darwin came to publish The Descent, a number of others had already dealt with the issue of human origins: Huxley, Haeckel, Lubbock, Galton, Wallace, Tyndall, and Bagehot. But the Master had not spoken and the public were keen for him to make his pronouncements and settle the matter. Darwin dreaded this expectation. It is not improbable to think that he was glad that others has spoken first (and perhaps too hastily and without adequate evidence), but at least they had taken the first mad hail of flak. By now, some of the heat had been taken out of the battle, and there might be less anger directed his way. However, he knew he was going to be on the receiving end of some fury. As he wrote in a letter to St George Mivart, "Whenever I publish my book I can see that I shall meet with universal disapprobation, if not execution."And at Christmas 1870 he told Batholemew Sullivan that The Descent “would disgust you & many others.” But after 11 years he was ready to show the world his views on the human species. However, even the political climate seemed against him. Radicals and agitators were causing problems and Darwin feared he might be depicted as a black-caped anarchist.

Darwin’s fear of all hell breaking loose on him was not confirmed. To his relieved surprise, the reviews were muted. It seemed that the other Darwinians had successfully shifted the reading public towards acceptance of the evolution of the human species.

What he included in The Descent was to some degree conditioned by what his supporters had written earlier. In particular, unlike Huxley, who had dealt only with human physiological evolution, Darwin wanted to discuss the origins of some of the mental and moral faculties of humans in terms of natural selection. This was necessary as a riposte to what Wallace, especially, had said in his articles of 1864 and 1870. Wallace had come to the conclusion that whilst natural selection could account for human bodily development, it could not do so for human mental development and the brain. To explain human mental development, Wallace resorted to the idea that humans were endowed with mind by an unseen spiritual power. Such a position was anathema to Darwin and he had written to Wallace saying that he feared that he might have murdered their child (that is, natural selection). It was, therefore, essential for Darwin to show that natural selection could account for human intellectual and moral features, without the resort to some ineffable “unseen spirit.”

Wallace did in fact have a good enough reason to believe that the human mind had raised humans above all other animals, ensuring that they were not subject to the Malthusian hell that would later frighten and disgust Huxley in his lectures on Evolution and Ethics (1893). For Wallace it was the human ability to create objects that would compensate for any natural weaknesses in dealing with the struggle for existence. In some respects, this difference is similar to that recognised by Marx and Engels, but they dealt with it materialistically rather than by an idealistic unseen spirit. (while Wallace became a believer in spiritualism).

Ed Blewitt

Next month: Marx’s criticism of the ideology of “Darwinism”.

Hypocrisy Exposed (2005)

Book Review from the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Simon Schama: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. BBC Books

Forget Schama the TV historian - this is a solid piece of research into a sordid piece of British and American history from the late 18th and early 19th century. The European colonists in America rebelled against their British rulers, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

This was the period of slavery and the slave trade, and many black slaves (and 'free' blacks) saw through American protestations about liberty and supported the loyalist (i.e. British) side. Some black people fought on the patriot (American) side, though slaves were excluded from the American army and giving arms to any black people was anathema to many, especially in the south.

But once Britain had been defeated, the question arose of what would happen to these black 'loyalists'. Some escaped slaves were recaptured by their owners, but most managed to avoid this dire fate and were given certificates by the British commandant of New York, stating that they were free to go where they wished (i.e. they were no longer slaves and subject to the orders of their owner).

In 1783 many loyalists, both white and black, were shipped off to Nova Scotia to start a new life. But the 3,500 black settlers there were subject to appalling discrimination, being always last in line for such things as food supplies and allotment of land. Consequently, many of the former slaves travelled (in some cases, returned) to Africa, specifically to what later became Freetown in Sierra Leone.

Under the initially somewhat paternalistic regime of the Sierra Leone Company, they attempted to establish a settlement of their own where they could produce their own crops and trade with local chiefs. In principle, everything was run democratically, with each head of household having a vote, including women. Says Schama, 'the first women to cast their votes for any kind of public office anywhere in the world were black, liberated slaves who had chosen British freedom'.

But this freedom was illusory: in 1800 the black residents of Freetown rebelled against mistreatment but were savagely put down, by a Company army partly consisting of Maroons (former Jamaican slaves who now fought on the British side). Two of the leaders were hanged.

Schama effectively exposes the hypocrisy of the rulers on both sides. The British government scoffed at the Americans' pretensions to freedom while owning other human beings, and Americans condemned a system where the poorest inhabitants of British cities were little better than slaves. He also brings out the courage and tenacity of slaves and ex- slaves who fought for some dignity in their lives.

Paul Bennett

Pathfinders: Blow-out (2010)

The Pathfinders column from the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The deep-water blow-out currently gushing gigantic quantities of crude into the Gulf of Mexico threatens at the time of writing to be the biggest environmental disaster in US history, and already the blame slick is reaching into every inlet and niche of government and the oil industry.

The fact that there could conceivably be industrial disasters in socialism means that, for socialists, the big question is how we would manage affairs better. What, if anything, would a democratic, communally-managed global society do different?

In the first place, we would have to ask whether we are really so desperate for oil that we are willing to maintain an industry now recognised as one of the most dangerous in the world. In a moneyless society, who would volunteer to risk their lives, when other sources of energy remain untapped, unexplored or undeveloped? There have been 858 fires and explosions, and 55 deaths, in the Gulf since 2001, yet new drilling licences have been granted every year by the hundreds. Many of these, like the one BP got for Deepwater Horizon, are a ‘categorical exclusion’ exempting the operator from scrutiny by the Environmental Protection Agency and intended only for projects where environmental damage in the event of failure is expected to be ‘minimal or non-existent’ (New Scientist, 15 May).

Even supposing that socialism could not break the addiction to oil, a very large supposition indeed and one too great to explore here, the question arises whether as a responsible collective we would dare push the drilling technology to its limits and well beyond our knowledge and ability to recover from a catastrophic failure. What is striking about this affair is the lack of preparedness shown by all parties. The Gulf spill is at nearly twice the depth required to crush a Navy submarine, making direct human intervention impossible. The blow-out preventer failed. The huge 125 tonne containment dome failed. The robot-teams trying to shut off the valves failed. The secondary drilling shaft may work but will take another two months. The ‘plume’ problem was not anticipated. The injection of dispersant at the well-head had never been tried, and may have contributed to the plume problem. Even the amount of oil coming out has been consistently underestimated, with BP at first playing for a safe 1,000 barrels a day, then later revising this to 5,000 while independent researchers estimate between 5 and 14 times as much as this (Guardian, 17 May).

BP have been criticised already for this downplaying and reluctance to provide information, but it’s easy to see their motives. In socialism there would be no stock market share-price to consider, or corporate image to protect, or litigation to avoid, all of it leading to a tendency to talk down the scale of the disaster and be tight-lipped with information in the interests of damage limitation. BP stock prices have fallen sharply, its ‘green’ image is in tatters, and already over a hundred lawsuits in Louisiana have been consolidated into a class action which will sue BP for hundreds of millions, a figure itself dwarfed by the cleanup costs which BP are of course trying to offload onto the Swiss company Transocean who ran the Deepwater Horizon rig.

“It is incumbent upon us to inform all of our neighbours, not just the islands, but those countries that could be affected by disasters that happen within our territorial waters”, says the US State Department (BBC Online, 19 May). Perhaps pro-capitalists will miss the irony here but socialists certainly won’t. In socialism these neighbours would have been consulted, and the risks made known, before any drilling went ahead, not merely informed after a disaster they had no say in preventing.

It is also not likely that, given consultation, socialist engineers would ignore or overlook published research which anticipated all the above problems. A report in 2000 revealed that blow-out preventers (BOPs) might fail at depths of a mile or more, causing catastrophic pollution. BP and Transocean can scarcely say they didn’t know this, as they co-authored the report (New Scientist, 15 May). The problem of deepwater ‘plumes’, where oil and water emulsify into gigantic underwater columns which never reach the surface and therefore cannot be contained by any known surface collection methods, may have astonished local oceanographers in the Gulf but was already known from experiments off Norway in 2000 (New Scientist, 22 May).

It is also vanishingly unlikely that socialist society would entrust such drilling to an operational team found responsible (BP were fined $87m plus a further $50m to settle criminal charges) for 270 safety violations which led to 15 deaths in an explosion in 2005. And in another court judgment in Texas in December 2009 BP were fined $100m and branded ‘serial polluters’.

The cost of the cleanup plus litigation to BP is estimated at between $1 – 2bn , but this has to be set against the year’s profit BP is expected to make from its drilling operations of around $20bn, so even in a worst case scenario it’s still cheaper for BP to pay out for cleaning up and court costs than avoid the disasters in the first place. In fact, BP is cleaning up in more senses than one.

And what of the future, now that the US government is aiming to raise the corporate liability cap from $75m to $10bn? The likelihood is that deepwater drilling will move to fields with no such regulations. One recent find off the Falklands is a case in point, and in waters three times deeper than the site of the current spill. The mind can only boggle at what will happen if a drilling operation there suffers a similar blow-out.

Socialism, and its productive and extractive processes, will be driven primarily by consideration of human need, and the way to define and then provide that need will be one of socialist society’s most pressing debates. In capitalism there are no such concerns. It follows the money, wherever it leads, even into the depths of hell, while human society and the environment inevitably get dragged down with it.

Paddy Shannon

Socialist Meeting in London: Class struggle and climate change

Socialist Party public meeting

"Class struggle and climate change - the politics of personal consumption."

"We keep being told, these days, to reduce, re-use and recycle, to cut down on the meat, the car, the pets and the foreign holidays, to turn down, switch off, unplug and stand-by. The moral pressure-front of climate change is firmly upon us, yet when we take a look at the figures we find that the domestic share of consumption and waste is a small part of the overall picture, and that the lion's share is neither in our control nor even in the control of governments. It is in the hands of the tiny percentage of the Earth's population whom luck or inheritance have made into the super-rich. These are the people defecating on the global doorstep and then blaming the rest of us for the smell.

It's enough to make any class-conscious worker spit and say to hell with recycling. But that would be a big mistake."

Speaker: Paddy Shannon

Saturday, June 19th

6pm

The Socialist Party Head Office,

52 Clapham High Street,

London SW4 7UN.

(nearest tubes: Clapham North and Clapham Common.)

Website: SPGB

Email: spgb@worldsocialism.org

Socialism Or Your Money Back Blog

Arty capitalist (2001)

Book Review from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Supercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi. By Rita Hatton & John A. Walker (Ellipsis: London, 2000).

This book is frustrating to say the least, due mainly to the authors' naïve, sub-Trotskyite standpoint. However, it still gives quite a useful overview both of Charles Saatchi as a "super-collector" and of capitalism's ongoing relationship with art in general.

Saatchi, better known perhaps as a high-flying advertising guru, is described as someone who, as a player on the art market, "could be said to have taken control of the means of production and distribution". This indeed seems to be the case, as his influence on contemporary art is immense. He is someone with the means to buy, show, advertise and sell art in vast quantities. It can even be said that the ludicrously named "young British art" (yBa) movement (if you can call it that) "was possibly the first movement to be created by a collector". The way it all works is described thus:

"By seeking out new art before it became well known and expensive, Charles and Doris Saatchi were able to buy it relatively cheaply. If and when it increased in value they could re-sell it and use the profits to buy yet more new, cheap art . . . The beauty of the scheme . . . was that the increase in fame and monetary value of the art they had acquired was due in part to the very fact that they had bought it and—once they had a gallery of their own—exhibited it and memorialised it in catalogues" (p. 121).

Art buyers may be investment managers who need never actually see the artwork in question—the market value and the likelihood of it holding or increasing its value is the important thing rather than any aesthetic qualities. Works of art tend to hold their value well even in times of recession so they will always be a good punt for the anxious capitalist investor. The very fact that Saatchi has been seen to buy work by a particular artist is one way in which it is signalled that work by this individual is "valuable" and therefore worth buying. For producers of art then it became important to get noticed by a big-time buyer and reseller like Saatchi if their work was to become saleable. It became advantageous then for artists to produce work that fitted the profile of the stuff he and others had been buying—producing art entirely to meet prevailing market demand. Until that is the super-collector finds something else "new" and "sensational" which he can buy into cheap, exhibit and sell at a profit. The views of one art critic, Robert Hughes, are summarised like this:

"To meet the demand for so many shows in cities around the world ... fashionable artists ... are compelled to raise productivity and operate on almost an industrial scale"(p. 79).

Industrial capitalist relations between buyer and seller of labour demand industrial methods to keep up with demand for the commodity. It could be argued that this has been reflected in the sort of art that has been produced lately, especially in Britain. We hear for example of Damien Hirst's Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything; a piece of work consisting of two cows sliced into 12 parts and preserved in glass and steel cases which Charles Saatchi bought for $400,000 in 1996. No doubt abattoir workers may be wondering how the "artistic process" behind this piece differs from what they have to do day-in, day-out. This is an important point as "conceptual" art like this is just that: a "concept" thought up by an artist, who will then often hire other people to actually make it.

Piles of bricks, bits of cow or heaps of electrical goods (such as Turner Prize-nominated Tomoko Takahashi's Line-Out) are basically everyday objects which have been recycled as "art" and given a massive price tag. Essentially we all know that there is no difference between Tracy Emin's unmade bed and our own, other than that one is labelled "conceptual art" and worth a fortune and the other is an unmade bed. This sort of stuff can be produced quickly though, which is no doubt why it has proved so popular with the art market. The most striking thing about conceptual art is probably the lack of concepts. At best the ideas that inspire much of it seem to be superficial poses, and the almost total lack of any bodies of theory or ideology behind the recent art "movements" is surely a testament to this. An interesting point this book does make is that of the links between conceptual art and advertising (the two fields with which Charles Saatchi is personally associated). Both aim at instant impact, sensation or controversy and both do so to sell a product and mask a total lack of real substance or meaning.

Ben Malcolm

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain 149

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 149th our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

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