Material World: The Caspian Sea: oil and gas versus caviar (2010)

The Material World column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The overwhelming focus of mainstream Western literature on the Caspian Sea and its environs is on their vast oil and gas resources – on controlling them, extracting them, and “getting them out” to the European and world markets. Close attention is always paid to the commercial and strategic competition between the Western powers – mainly the United States and the European Union – and their rivals for control over the Caspian region – Russia, China and Iran.

As for the people who actually live in the region, they get a look-in only insofar as they may assist or impede Western business in this worthy endeavour. Nonhuman species, of course, are ignored completely.

A unique ecosystem
And yet the inland sea that we call the Caspian is a unique ecosystem. It once abounded in wildlife, including many marine species found nowhere else (the Caspian seal, the Caspian gull, etc.). Already weakened by overfishing, untreated sewage, and other human damage, the ecosystem of the Caspian Sea – like those of the Gulf of Mexico, northern Alberta and southeastern Nigeria – is now being rapidly degraded by oil pollution.

Even though oil and gas development is still at a fairly early stage, the worst affected parts of the sea, such as the waters around Baku and Sumgait in Azerbaijan, are already devoid of life. The whole ecosystem is probably doomed. For one thing, the sea level is steadily rising – one effect of the region’s geological instability (as a landlocked water body, its level is independent of that of the world ocean). A rise of 2.5 meters since 1978 has inundated almost 800 rigs. These submerged rigs are a major and ever expanding source of oil seepage.

Recently I translated a series of papers about the Caspian issued by a Russian international relations institute. I was intrigued to discover that the Russian analysts, unlike their Western colleagues, dwell at length on the ecological costs and risks of Caspian oil and gas development.

The caviar factor
It is revealing to consider why this should be so. It does not reflect any general Russian concern with protecting the environment. Russian experts do not seem to worry overmuch about the ecological effects of oil and gas development in Siberia or the Arctic (see MW, September 2007 Socialist Standard). Some factor specific to the Caspian must be involved.

That factor is fish – but above all, sturgeon, and especially its roe, known as caviar. As Bystrova points out:

“Even comparatively recently, the Caspian was capable of an annual yield of 500-550,000 tonnes of fish, with the bulk of the catch consisting of valuable varieties (sturgeon, white salmon, etc.). In the 1970s and 1980s the Soviet Union produced 2,500 tonnes of black caviar annually, which was about 90 percent of world output... The biological potential of the Northern Caspian is about $37 billion. This sum is comparable with the value of the enormous hydrocarbon deposits recently discovered in this part of the sea. But while Caspian oil and gas will in time be used up, biological resources, if rationally exploited, are renewable and therefore practically everlasting.”

The Russian oil company Lukoil operates in the North Caspian, so Russian hydrocarbon and fishing interests are in conflict here. This makes for a certain ambiguity in Russian policy. Nevertheless, Russia is much more inclined to favour constraints on Caspian hydrocarbon development than are Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, which depend much more heavily on Caspian oil and gas. Iran aligns itself with Russia out of concern for its own fisheries (it has enormous amounts of oil and gas, but not in the Caspian).

Crossing the Caspian
The Russian literature especially emphasizes the real ecological dangers of transporting oil and gas from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan across the Caspian Sea, either by tanker or through underwater pipelines laid on the seabed. Russia itself relies on south-north land pipelines and has no need for trans-Caspian routes. However, Western businessmen and politicians seek to avoid routes into Europe through Russian or Iranian territory, so they fund projects that envision crossing the Caspian very appealing.

Western analysts never seem to mention the environmental problems associated with underwater pipelines. Are they deferring to the enthusiasm of their masters or are they just ignorant? In either case their silence is remarkable, because some of these problems cast doubt on the feasibility of using such pipelines at all. The Caspian seabed is steeply inclined in many places, consists of loose and crumbly material, and is prone to gas releases, eruptions of mud volcanoes, frequent seismic tremors and occasional earthquakes. Any of these events could easily set off a landslide that breaks and displaces a section of an underwater pipeline.

Again, Russian policy experts have no general objection to messing about with geologically unstable land masses. The Yamal Peninsula in northeastern Siberia is every bit as unstable as the Caspian, but that is never given as a reason to stop exploiting its huge deposits of natural gas.

Playing cards
As we see from this example, ecological concerns are not, after all, completely ignored in the game of capitalist politics. Like all other concerns, however, they are constantly reduced to cards in the hands of players in the ongoing competition among sectoral and national sections of the world capitalist class. Each card is played when and only when the player holding it decides that it is convenient and profitable for him to play it. And so it will go on until we gather our strength and intervene, confiscate the cards and close down the game.

Stefan

Greasy Pole: Blunt instrument of justice? (2010)

The Greasy Pole column from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

It did not need George Orwell's 1984 to make us aware that a system of privilege propagates itself through verbal distortions so that war is indeed peace, freedom slavery, ignorance strength and a Ministry of Truth conveyor-belts lies while our security depends on being watched by Big Brother. Consider, for example, this thing called “justice”. This is what people are supposed to “get” from a court if they breach the arrangements which are made to protect the pointedly weighted structure by which the lesser mass of people monopolise life's essentials and prevent access to them by the greater mass, no matter how acute their needs. A few years ago, when it was considered necessary for the long-established but mal-functioning Home Office to be split up there emerged from some part of it a new Ministry of Justice, with a number of Ministers to administer its affairs. What kind of match is there between these exalted personages and the protective concept of justice and how devotedly, effectively, do they nurture it in their work in government?

Reigate's Donkey
Step forward Crispin Blunt, since 14 May this year Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice responsible for, among other matters, prisons and probation. Since 1997 MP for Reigate, notably verdant even among Surrey's leafy constituencies. Educated at Wellington public school and Sandhurst with the inevitable commission in the Army which made him so attractive to the Tories in Reigate after they had de-selected Sir George Gardiner when his Eurosceptic ravings became too strident for them. After Gardiner, Blunt was soothingly reassuring; he was, as the chairman of the constituency Conservative Party put it, “...happily married with two children”. It was almost as if Blunt could have held that seat for as long as he wanted, growing stout and bald and querulous on the back benches – had he not revealed a tendency to become famous for particularly embarrassing gaffes. To begin with there was, even before he had been voted onto the green benches, his dismissive assessment of the local electors he hoped would put him there when he reckoned that “You could put up a donkey as the Conservative in Reigate and it would win” – tested out when Gardiner walked a donkey called Crispin along the High Street there. And after the donkey had duly taken his seat in the Commons his style of claiming expenses was shown to be not of the high standards expected of an officer and a gentleman as, after being told he could not claim for a second home because he lived there with his children he bought a larger place, claiming £16,000 for stamp duty and fees then a total of £87,728 second home expenses which included £417 for the repair of a water wheel.

Parties Inside
Meanwhile there was the work of administering the administration of justice whatever that meant. Somewhere along the line Blunt had become converted to the ideas now being espoused by his boss as Minister of Justice and Lord High Chancellor Kenneth Clarke. The theme of this is the “rehabilitation revolution” which is in fact driven by the need to manage reductions in budgets before any concern for helping prisoners to better cope with life outside the prison walls. In his first speech on the issue, Blunt outraged the tabloids by stating an intention to scrap a ban, imposed under Labour in 2008 after rumours circulated about a wild “ horror-themed fancy dress” party in a prison, on any further “inappropriate events”. Blunt described the ban in unparliamentary terms as “daft” – meaning unhelpful to the kind of “reforming” regime which prisons exist for – in theory at any rate. But in the predictable hysteria about murderers and rapists having obscene fun “at the taxpayers' expense” Blunt's intention was swept away – almost taking him with it under an effectively public reprimand from Number Ten. As a blunder it was on a par with the donkeys of Reigate. And how many more, his friends and enemies asked, would there be?.

Marriage
They did not have to wait long for an event which was more revealing – and thereby more damaging – than any blunder. Blunt's 20-year marriage must have been as comforting to the Reigate Tories as his love of cricket. Victoria Blunt is a daughter of a wealthy American family who abandoned her career as a banker to support him in his political ambitions. “She gave up everything for him” said one acquaintance “She is the perfect MP's wife and would attend every fete and garden party..” But this, as another put it, “...was all built on a lie” – which became clear in August when Blunt abruptly announced that he is gay and was leaving his family to “come to terms with my homosexuality”. In itself this was not particularly shattering but there was more to it for his stated opinions have not been noted for any relaxed attitude towards gays. He voted against giving them the right to adopt and against allowing lesbian couples equal access to IVF treatment. In 1998 he opposed a move to scrap the ban on openly gay men joining the armed forces, pronouncing that “Military ethos has been progressively undermined . Letting overt gays in is another stage in the process” and on another occasion he complained about “a much greater strand of homosexuality which depends for its gratification on the exploitation of youth”. Such views, although without any real supporting evidence, must have convinced many constituency Conservatives that they had chosen the right man to replace the reviled Gardiner.

It may be different now among the lawns and trees as around Westminster sharply dressed civil servants suck through the froth on their cappuccinos while offering the very lowest odds on Blunt being shaken out in Cameron's first re-shuffle. Blunt's wife was said to be “...completely traumatised”. Well, naturally. But did Mrs. Blunt's lucrative time as a banker not teach her anything about the ruthless cynicism essential to finance and commerce? Did her long intimacy with politician Mr. Blunt leave her vulnerably uneducated about the same atrocious features of capitalist politics? Does she now wonder about the nature of this thing called justice and why an exposed practitioner in deceit should have been in a position to inflict it on us?

Ivan

Pieces Together: Kick 'Em When They Are Down (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

KICK 'EM WHEN THEY ARE DOWN

"Disabled people will be hit with more than £9bn in welfare cuts over the next five years, a think tank has warned. Demos suggests the government's plans will see 3.6m disabled people and carers lose about £9.2bn by 2015. It said moving those on incapacity benefit who were reassessed as fit to work to jobseeker's allowance would account for half of the losses" (BBC News, 9 October).

GRIM PROSPECTS

"A million people are expected to lose their jobs in the next four years as a result of the Government's decision to cut public spending by £83 billion, according to a report out today. Nearly 500,000 jobs are likely to be cut in the private sector as the Government stops building schools, hospitals and roads and cancels other contracts. This is on top of about 500,000 job losses in the public sector as employers reduce budgets by about a third and lay off civil servants, town hall staff, nurses, teachers and police officers" (London Times, 13 October).

HUNGER INCREASES

"UN food agencies said Wednesday that 166 million people in 22 countries suffer chronic hunger or difficulty finding enough to eat as a result of what they called protracted food crises. Wars, natural disasters and poor government institutions have contributed to a continuous state of undernourishment in some 22 nations, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Somalia and Sudan, the Food and Agriculture Operation and the World Food Program said in a new report" (Associated Press, 6 October).

REFORM FAILS AGAIN

"West Africa's cocoa industry is still trafficking children and using forced child labour despite nearly a decade of efforts to eliminate the practices, according to an independent audit published by Tulane University. A US-sponsored solution called the Harkin-Engel Protocol was signed in 2001 by cocoa industry members to identify and eliminate cocoa grown using forced child labour. A child-labour-free certification process was supposed to cover 50 per cent of cocoa growing regions in West Africa by 2005 and 100 per cent by the end of 2010. But independent auditors at Tulane University's Payson Center for International Development said in a late September report that efforts have not even come close to these targets" (Globe and Mail, 8 October).

The Meaning of the U.S. Midterm Election Results

Cross-posted from the World Socialist Party of the United States website

For Republican politicians and the corporate media, the U.S. midterm election results are supposedly evidence of “a massive conservative trend sweeping the nation.”[1] Proclaiming the victory of his party on election night, top House Republican John Boehner declared that “the American people have sent President Barack Obama a message through the ballot box to change course” – and he was not calling on Obama to steer further to the left.

There has clearly been a significant decline in public support for Obama. However, there is no massive conservative trend in national opinion. The real picture is more uncertain and more complex.

The majority did not vote

One point will suffice to deflate the overblown rhetoric. The American people have sent no one a message through the ballot box to do anything, for the simple reason that the majority of the American people – 58.5%, to be more precise – did not vote.
Well, nothing unusual about that. Voter turnout in the United States is low. In fact, a turnout of 41.5% is rather above average for midterm elections: it usually lies between 30% and 40%. Turnout in presidential elections, and in congressional elections held in the same year as presidential elections, is considerably higher, in the 50—60% range, though this is still low by international standards. In the 2008 congressional elections 57% voted.[2]

How likely people are to vote depends heavily on such factors as age and income. People with higher incomes are more likely to vote than the poor, while the elderly are more likely to vote than those of working age. Moreover, these differences are especially wide when overall turnout is very low. People with higher incomes and the elderly vote disproportionately for the Republicans. That is why the Republicans tend to do better in midterm elections than in presidential election years, even when there is no real shift in public opinion.

In the November elections Republican candidates won 54% of the total vote. It is equally true to say, taking turnout into account, that slightly over a fifth of Americans (22%) voted for Republicans and slightly under a fifth (19%) for Democrats. This hardly represents a groundswell in public support for the Republicans. Due to the way the electoral system works, the votes of just 3% of citizens made all the difference between a Democratic and a Republican landslide. It is also striking that a lower proportion of Americans voted Republican in 2010 than in 2008 (25%).

“Progressive” Democrats did well

The “tea party” movement has swept many new Christian fundamentalist and other extremist Republicans into Congress. This would seem to support the thesis of a massive conservative trend. At the same time, however, there has been a marked shift in the composition of congressional Democrats that points in a different direction.

The Democrats in Congress are divided into several groups. To simplify matters, let us compare the relative positions of the groups furthest to the “right” and “left”—the “Blue Dogs” and the Progressive Caucus. The elections have reduced the number of Blue Dogs in the House of Representatives by over half, from 54 to 26. In contrast, the number of “progressive” Democrats has fallen only slightly, from 79 to 75. As a proportion of all Democrats in the House, the Blue Dogs have fallen from 22% to 14% while the progressives have risen from 32% to 40%.[3]

So while the Democrats as a whole suffered a major setback in the elections, many if not all “progressive” Democrats did quite well. To take one important example, although the Democratic Party lost its traditional hold on the once industrial but now largely deindustrialized Midwest, with dozens of incumbent Democrats losing their seats, in Ohio’s 10th Congressional District the “progressive” former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich defeated his Republican opponent by the safe margin of 53% to 44%. By distancing themselves from Obama, many “progressive” Democrats were apparently able to capture a share of the protest vote of Americans who had backed Obama in the presidential elections but were now disappointed in him.

The electoral successes of “progressive” Democrats give socialists some grounds for hope. That is not because the “progressives” are socialists or even close to being socialists: their reform program basically aims to make the U.S. more competitive in the context of world capitalism, whose continued existence it assumes. Nevertheless, they have shown that it is possible to withstand the hostility of the corporate media and find other ways to establish and maintain contact with ordinary people. If they can do it, socialists can too.

Breakup of the two-party system?

Thus, the trend revealed by the election results is not clearly conservative in nature. The change in the relative strength of the Democratic and Republican Parties is less significant than it appears. But there has been a further strengthening in the position of the extreme “right” within the Republican Party and of the “extreme left” (by the standards of U.S. politics) within the Democratic Party. In other words, American public opinion is undergoing a process of polarization.
This raises the question of the future shape of the American party system. The two-party system is deeply entrenched, but under extreme stress its breakup is surely conceivable. Both the Democratic and the Republican Party are now more deeply divided than ever before. Should one or both of them split apart over the next few years, the result could be a more varied and changeable political landscape with three, four, or even more large national parties.[4] The political process might then no longer be under such tight corporate control, placing socialists in a somewhat less constraining political environment.

Stefan

Notes

1. Reese Erlich, therealnews.com/t2

2. Figures taken from the following site

3. Democracy Now link

4. See the speculations of the activist film maker Michael Moore at following link

Slums and Slumps: Housing under Capitalism (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1942 the Beveridge Report identified five giant evils that government social policy should aim to overcome: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Idleness and Squalor. The last of these referred to housing, and more generally to town planning and the environment. The report was, by the standards of such documents, tremendously popular, selling thousands of copies. Newspapers in Nazi Germany were forbidden from mentioning it, on the grounds that it would represent an enormous propaganda victory for the enemy.

Beveridge effectively laid the foundation for the post-war welfare state and the introduction of, among other things, the National Health Service. On the fiftieth anniversary of the report, the academic Ben Pimlott assessed its success. Want and squalor still existed, he argued, with plenty of beggars and homeless people in central London: ‘for the majority, there is less hunger and disease than in the Forties, but for the millions in the minority, there is much more’ (Independent, 1 December 1992).

And despite the decades of legislation, the ‘housing problem’ indeed remains, although its precise nature varies somewhat over time. The overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that were rife in (say) the early twentieth century are largely, though not entirely, things of the past, but housing is one of the biggest failures of the efforts to slay Beveridge’s giants and so shows how reforms cannot banish capitalism’s problems.

In some cases, government policies have been a contributing factor to not just bad housing but loss of life and other disasters. The Housing Subsidy Act of 1956 gave local councils bigger subsidies the higher the tower blocks they built, on the basis that this meant more and cheaper homes in a particular area. In May 1968 the Ronan Point block in east London collapsed after a gas explosion, and four people died. The block had been built using pre-cast concrete panels, which had the ‘advantage’ of not requiring skilled construction workers. But this method of building was intended to be used for six storeys at most, and Ronan Point had twenty-two.

There are many ways of looking at the effect that the recent rise in house prices has had. Between 1959 and 2009, for example, real earnings rose by 169 percent but house prices rose by 273 percent, making houses less affordable than fifty years ago. For many years the average house price has been around three times the median wage, but by last year it was over six times as high. Many workers are forced to rely on the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’ as a way of scraping together a mortgage and getting on the property ladder. Some take on mortgages that they will not pay off until well into their sixties, or put off starting a family because of worries about the affordability of housing. In the current recession, the lesser availability of mortgages means that more are forced to rent (though in no way are they ‘choosing’ to rent as is sometimes claimed).

The recession has also led to a dramatic rise in the number of repossessions, though in the UK not as yet to the levels seen in the 1990s. In 1991, for instance, 75,000 homes were repossessed, as against 46,000 last year. In the US, there were 92,000 repossessions in April this year alone, an all-time high. Behind each of these cases is a human tragedy of various degrees, from homelessness to far worse housing conditions, along with general financial melt-down. Landlords who went in for buy-to-let in the hopes of an easy return are turfing out tenants, sometimes changing the locks so that people are made homeless with just the clothes they are wearing (Guardian, 23 June).

In 2000 the government launched the Decent Homes programme to upgrade social housing, with the aim of this being completed by the end of this year. But deadlines slipped so that eventually 2018 was the target year. In the first quarter of this year, just sixty new local authority homes were completed, a figure which reflects among other things the impact of government policy which has emphasised and tried to promote home ownership at the expense of renting. The National Housing Federation recently warned that waiting lists for social housing are at record levels, and ‘an entire generation…would be left with little hope of ever being allocated a social home’. Recent cuts in housing benefit mean almost a million people will lose £12 a week, which is a lot for those on the lowest incomes. Some people, of course, have no trouble finding suitable homes. The W8 postcode in the Kensington area of London is the UK’s most expensive, with the average house costing £1.5million. But even that has desirable and somewhat less desirable areas, with Kensington Palace Gardens as the priciest street in the country, properties there averaging £18million.

It is often implied that there is something ‘natural’ about wishing to own your own house rather than being dependent on renting, but actual housing demand in fact varies widely across a person’s lifetime and, indeed, in different places. In many parts of continental Europe, for instance, home ownership is at much lower levels than in Britain, and far more people live in flats as opposed to houses, without this being seen as in any way unnatural.

The number of homes built goes up and down from year to year (425,000 in 1968 for instance, but just 156,000 in 2009) in a way that has nothing at all to do with people’s demands or needs for somewhere decent to live. Rather it has everything to do with the market, what property companies can make a profit from and what people can afford. According to one standard source, ‘the building industry exists to meet human needs’ (David Donnison and Clare Ungerson: Housing Policy, 1982). If only this were true! Like all industries under capitalism, it exists in fact to make a profit, which is why capitalism will never be able to provide secure and decent housing for all.

In fact it can sensibly be said that there is no ‘housing problem’ at all. People know how to build houses, there are plenty of people with the requisite skills and sufficient supplies of materials. But if you can’t afford the rent or mortgage, then you don’t really count as far as the profit system is concerned. So it’s a problem of poverty in truth, one that would not exist in a society that aimed at meeting human needs rather than making profits for the few.

Paul Bennett

Disabled or not enabled? (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism sees the unproductive disabled as a drain on profits. Socialism will promote the good life and society for all, regardless of health condition.

In feudal society, disabled people faced widespread superstition and persecution. However, the rural production process and the extended nature of the feudal family allowed many of the disabled to contribute to economic life. Extended families were able to provide networks of care for their mentally or physically disabled members. But this way of life, which had lasted many thousands of years, was about to change.

The Industrial Revolution
The rise of capitalism forced people off the land. Production for the market began on a scale small enough to be carried out in the home, and therefore disabled people could still play a role. But this gradually became harder. Larger scale machinery concentrated in factories increasingly destroyed the old cottage industries and family structures. People had to find work away from the home or patch of land.

The new factory workers could not have any impairment which would present them from operating the machinery. The profit-seeking need to have efficient machines established being able-bodied as the norm for workers. This undermined the position of physically impaired people within the family and community.

Poor Law officials and an expanding medical profession invented names for the poor who were unfit for employment: the sick, the insane, defectives, the aged and infirm. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries most of the disabled were segregated into workhouses, asylums, prisons and special schools. According to Colin Barnes, this had several advantages over outdoor relief: “it was efficient, it acted as a major deterrent to the able-bodied malingerers, and it could instil good work habits into the inmates” (Disabled People in Britain and Discrimination, 1994).

The recent past
Two world wars saw disabled people, who were previously considered incapable of factory work, play a substantial part in wartime production. Large numbers of wounded servicemen prompted legislation to encourage training and employment for disabled people. In practice this largely meant the expansion of sheltered workshops paying below minimum wages.

Medical advances led to disabled people living longer and some to carry out activities of which they were previously incapable. The disabled began to reject their labelling as deviants or patients and to speak out against discrimination. The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS) argued that disability was a social relationship of oppression, rather than a biologically determined condition:

“In our view, it is society which disables physically impaired people. Disability is something imposed on top of our impairments by the way we are unnecessarily isolated and excluded from full participation in society” (Fundamental Principles of Disability, 1976).

Contemporary capitalism, with its ageing population and technological advances is very different from its Victorian counterpart. Today the workforce is as likely to suffer from mental stress or depression as from other workplace injuries. People with mental health problems have the lowest employment rates of all impairment categories, at only 21 percent. Over one third of the total disabled population of working age is unemployed and on state benefits.

The public spending cuts include further attacks on the living standards of pensioners, who comprise the biggest proportion of the disabled, population.

Socialism
The replacement of a society based on production for profit by one based on production for needs will not of course mean the disappearance of disabled people, but it will certainly change for the better the way they are treated.

Whether someone enjoys perfect health or suffers slightly or severely from an ailment of some kind will make no difference to the free and equal access they will have to the goods and services society is able to produce.

Men and women in difference states of health will be able to contribute to the work of society in different ways. They will be in a position to balance the needs of themselves, others, the community and world society with their own physical and mental abilities and tastes.

It may be that a few diehard supporters of capitalism will suffer withdrawal symptoms and even go a bit loony in the new circumstances. Their plight will be treated with care and compassion.

Stan Parker

Planning for plenty (2010)

Book Review from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Red Plenty by Francis Spufford (Faber 2010)

This book proclaims itself to be a novel about an idea: the idea of effectively administering communist plenty. More specifically, the idea of plenty as it manifested in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s when politicians, mathematicians, cyberneticists and economists all took the idea of surpassing American affluence seriously.

The novel unfolds through a series of sympathetic vignettes, in which people living in the USSR deal with the mundane every day pressures of totalitarian government and the failures of the economic system: a woman giving birth without drugs, the poverty of a collective farm, a fixer wheeling and dealing his way through a world of business favours, the cramped living conditions that were nevertheless a step up from the old communalkas of rooms partitioned by curtains. The highly skilful prose leads us into the minds of the various actors, from Nikita Khrushchev down to a couple living in a Moscow apartment, and shares their aspirations and frustrations. The same skill is applied to the technical details of the workings of a Soviet built computer, scaling down to the electrons racing around in a pentode, up to an explanation of what a pentode is, and how they worked in computers.

Everything is backed up by footnotes. In fact, though, the footnotes are themselves as much a part of the novel as the main text, as they explain the ways in which the author has confabulated characters, contracted time and re-jigged events to make a more convenient narrative. They also give citations and inform the reader of what really happened, and give links to websites for further information. Not only, therefore, is the burden of interpreting the text thrown onto the reader in contradistinction to the normal fictional practice of drawing the reader into the text world and allow them to swallow its reality but also the reader has to decide how to integrate these footnotes into their reading – look up after each page? Read them all at the end? Read them after each chapter? This makes the text into a critical exercise, appropriate for a novel about ideas and critical thinking.

The story fluctuates around the person of Leonid Kantorovich, a genuine mathematical genius who developed linear algebra solutions while working for a plywood firm. The problem was finding the most efficient way of assigning work to various machines in order to produce outputs in the correct ratios to fulfil the planned targets of finished goods. Although the text does not go into much detail of the precise maths (it does cite various sources that no doubt would) it does illustrate, roughly, his approach to resolving simultaneous equations with unknown variables. From which, he developed an idea of using ‘objectively determined valuations’ in effect opportunity costs, to improve and rationalise on planning. These valuations would be used to derive planned prices. Together with cyberneticist colleagues, Kantorovich tries to get this method applied to Soviet planning to supplant the complicated system of guesswork employed by the planners at the time (which is also depicted in detail).

The story shows the subtle games played between the planners and the managers of plants – up to and including cunning acts of sabotage to get the latest machinery. It also shows how the system, despite its claims to be placing the economy under rational control, in fact made it even more ad hoc and chaotic – Khrushchev ends his days fulminating over his lack of control of the political machine. It is, though, the illusion of control that means the apparatchiks eventually decide they do not want to cede control of planning to a cybernetic machine, and the project is quietly shelved, and the Soviet computer programme is closed down and the decision taken to just buy in US IBMs.

The novel repeatedly returns to the idea that even amidst the Soviet hell there was a utopian core of humane ideas that were continually thwarted by the shortages and chaos of production, the kernel of the idea of abundance. What it helps portray is the immense task of consciously planning a complex economy, and the serious and rational attempts of practical minds to make it work. It is enough to make any socialist think. Helpfully, the exhaustive footnotes and bibliography provide an excellent resource for any socialist who wants to delve in-depth into the question. This includes writings by modern day western cyberneticists who continue to see Kantorovich’s methods as a means to even surpass pricing and have an economy in kind, and continue the debate.

Pik Smeet

Not disillusioned enough (2010)

From the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is good that so many of Obama’s followers are disillusioned. But they are not half as disillusioned as they need to be.

The once fervent supporters of Barack Obama say that they are more and more “disillusioned” with his politics. And the word should be apt since so many of them were intoxicated by the illusion that one single politician could transform a rotten social system. It seems, though, that many of those who describe themselves as disillusioned are accusing Obama of breaking his promises, rather than blaming themselves for falling prey to a naïve illusion.
This seems a bit unfair to Obama, who made no secret during his campaign of his “moderate” political outlook. A central theme of his campaign, in fact, was the need for bipartisanism to counter the trend towards politics becoming too “ideological”. Those who now criticize Obama for being yet another spineless Democrat were not paying adequate attention to the statements he made during the campaign. Obama made no secret two years ago of his deeply-held principle of never sticking to any principle. He has never claimed to be anything but a “pragmatist”, which is a nicer way of saying “opportunist”.

There was, of course, that promise Obama made about bringing about some sort of change, but isn’t it a bit unfair to hold him to such a sweeping and vague promise? And things have changed – just not for the better. Over the past two years, millions of Americans have experienced the dramatic change of losing their job or home (or both).

Principled spinelessness
Those painful, negative changes might be easier for some to stomach if Obama had cracked down on Wall Street or ended the senseless wars in the Middle East. But instead he has left many Bush Administration policies intact; and even the few important policy changes that Obama has implemented have been tainted with his “principled spinelessness” (most notably, his healthcare reform that leaves the parasitic insurance companies in place and even presents them with opportunities for expansion).Yet here again Obama has more or less been true to the positions he held prior to the presidential election. Even if we go back a bit further, to his book The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, we see that he proudly displayed his essentially “conservative” politics. Far from making promises to leftwing Democrats or posing as a progressive, Obama was careful to define himself as a political pragmatist, ready and willing to work with the Republicans.
Moreover, one of Obama’s traits, as the book reveals, is a concern to not be caught in outright lies. He rarely resorts to statements that directly invert the truth in the style of Bush’s “We don’t torture” or Nixon’s “I am not a crook.” Rather, Obama likes to underscore the complexity of reality and the need for pragmatic solutions.

Wishful thinking
The idea that President Obama has broken his promises can only seem valid to those who – against all the evidence he provided – fashioned an image of him as the country’s progressive saviour. These are the people who helped make The Audacity of Hope a bestseller, but one can’t help wondering if they got past the first few pages. Anyone who managed to at least read the prologue would have encountered the following passage, which might have given them pause for thought:

“I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”

Had his readers reflected a bit on this insight, they might have questioned whether the “Obama as saviour” storyline was not simply a case of wishful thinking. But perhaps that is like asking someone in love to consider the possibility that the object of their love is not quite perfect.

Obama’s warning in the prologue might be easy to overlook, but it is followed by countless examples throughout the book where he lays out quite clearly his conservative credentials and deep-rooted affection for the capitalist system, including a prominent passage in that same prologue where he informs the reader that (contrary to what those at Fox News might have believed) not an ounce of “socialism” will be found in the subsequent pages:

“I believe in the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and think no small number of government programs don’t work as advertised…I think America has more often been a force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and competence of our military…I think much of what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture that will not be cured by money alone, and that our values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our GDP.”

Obama “thinks” a lot of things in the book, and surprisingly few of his thoughts are in harmony with the views of his leftwing supporters, who worked so hard to get him elected.

Boots on the ground
Take his views on foreign policy, for example. This is an area where the views of the “anti-war” candidate Obama were thought to differ sharply from the hawkish approach of Hillary Clinton (now his Secretary of State!), not to mention the belligerent policies of Bush and McCain. In fact, Obama made it perfectly clear in The Audacity of Hope that he would deploy US troops when necessary, because “like it or not, if we want to make American more secure, we are going to have to help make the world more secure”. Rather than rejecting Bush’s absurd and counter-productive “war on terrorism”, Obama wrote that “the challenge will involve putting boots on the ground in ungoverned hostile regions where terrorists thrive”. And lest the reader imagine that such military force would only be used in retaliation, Obama claims that “we have the right to take unilateral military action to eliminate an imminent threat to our security”. It is something of a mystery how Obama managed to convince so many that he was a foreign policy “dove” while at the same time publishing such views.
But the surprising gap between what Obama himself pledged to do and the sort of president many of his supporters hoped he would become is not limited to the realm of foreign policy. For domestic policies as well, the real Obama has turned out to bear almost no resemblance to the second coming of FDR that more than a few had predicted or expected. At this point, I suspect, many “disillusioned” Democrats would be satisfied with a pale imitation of LBJ.

Yet how can Obama be blamed for those false expectations? In his book, even while recognizing that FDR “saved capitalism from itself” through his New Deal reforms, Obama does not fundamentally criticize Reagan for setting about dismantling aspects of the welfare system. He even says that there is a “good deal of truth” in “Reagan’s central insight – that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic”. And Obama, not surprisingly, praises Clinton, who “put a progressive slant on some of Reagan’s goals,” for achieving “some equilibrium” by creating a “smaller government, but one that retained the social safety net FDR had first put into place”.

Hardly the stuff of “socialism”
Obama is not so forthright in explaining his own welfare policies, but he implies that welfare should be a bare minimum. We should be “guided throughout,” he writes, “by Lincoln’s simple maxim: that we will do collectively, through our government, only those things that we cannot do as well or at all individually and private,” leading to “a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility.” This is hardly the stuff of “socialism” – or even of West European social democracy.

But there were many, even self-described socialists, who thought that Obama, whatever his statements during the campaign, would be compelled by the economic crisis itself or a growing working class movement, to enact policies similar to the New Deal of the 1930s. This expectation allowed such leftists to adopt the stance of backing Obama in the election without explicitly supporting his politics – adopting the posture of “critical support” of which they are so fond. (I can’t help wondering, though, why such “socialists” can’t set a goal higher than once again “saving capitalism from itself”.)

Yet in the midst of the continuing Great Recession, Obama has not budged from his belief that the solutions to the problems plaguing the United States can be found lying in the middle of the political road, so to speak, just waiting to be picked up. This is the belief he wrote about back in 2006, and his policies in office have been based on it.

An anti-Bush without Bush
Still, it was understandable that so many were drawn to Obama, despite his relative honesty regarding his own conservatism. Millions were sick to their guts of Bush and the Republicans and it was indeed “time for a change”. The cautious, compromising attitude of Obama could even appear principled compared to the reckless pigheadedness of Bush. The charisma of Obama was based on his self-presentation as the anti-Bush. Clearly, Obama appeared at the opportune time, when much of the population was desperate to believe that the country could change for the better, after eight long years when everything Bush touched turned to shit. This was the basis for the foolish – or “audacious” – hope that Obama could, almost single-handedly, set things right.

Obama’s once overpowering charisma has faded away, however. Now that few can remember exactly what it felt like to loathe the neocons, he no longer glows in the reflected light of the burning rage against Bush. Obama without Bush is a far less compelling act – like a “straightman” in a comedy duo who decides to go solo.

So people went from the naïve view that Bush is the root of all evil to the equally simplistic idea that Obama could uproot that evil. And now we have a sense of disillusionment due to the persistence of deep-rooted problems despite the election of Obama. Yet the idea that Obama has betrayed us is based on the initial illusion that he could rescue us from problems that are deeply rooted in capitalism itself. This notion, in turn, is no different from the superficial idea that those problems arose from Bush’s stupidity or mendacity. It is pointless to transform Obama from a saviour into a new scapegoat.

It is good that so many of Obama’s followers are disillusioned. But they are not half as disillusioned as they need to be! Only when millions of people finally give up the illusion that capitalism can be fundamentally reformed to somehow create a more humane world will we be on the road to real social change.

Michael Schauerte

Cooking the Books: Cable and capitalism (2010)

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

“Capitalism”, the Business Secretary Vince Cable told the Libdem Conference in September, “takes no prisoners and kills competition where it can.” (London Times, 22 September). He was of course playing to the gallery, but no minister in the Blair and Brown governments ever dared to utter such harsh words about capitalism. They were too scared even to mention the word “capitalism” for fear of upsetting the business world whose interests they knew they were there to serve.

Not that Cable is against capitalism. He’s merely in favour of government intervention to curb its excesses. As one of the Tory Prime Minister’s aides was reported as saying ,“Vince is simply spelling out what happens when you have uncontrolled capitalism”. And, as he himself said, “the Government’s agenda is not one of laissez faire”, adding “markets are often irrational or rigged.”

He – and the rest of the Con-Dem government – are in favour of government intervention to try to get capitalism to work as in theory it is supposed to, with competitive markets keeping prices down and allowing only normal profits to be made in the long run.

If, because of monopolistic practices or rigged markets, some capitalist firms are permanently able to make abnormally high profits this will be at the expense of the profits of the rest of the capitalist class. Not that this will restrain the firms in question – they go for maximum profits, taking no prisoners. So, it’s up to the government to restrain them in the overall interest of the capitalist class as a whole. It’s part of its remit as the executive committee of the ruling class.

Even so, Cable upset the business world. Richard Lambert, the current director general of the CBI, denounced Cable’s “emotional language”, saying “Mr Cable has harsh things to say about the capitalist system; it will be interesting to hear his ideas for an alternative.” A former CBI director-general, Digby (now Lord) Jones condemned his remarks as “rabble-rousing” and unworthy of a member of the government. (The London Times, 23 September) reminded him that “the Business Secretary’s principal task is to help companies to earn profits.” Even the former Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling, still loyal to business, joined in, criticising Cable for “denouncing business and the City in general” which he said was “extremely damaging to our reputation abroad” (Evening Standard, 24 September).

In response, Cable rather cleverly added to the pre-released text of his speech the words “as Adam Smith explained over 200 years ago.”

He was referring to the following passage from part II of chapter X of Book I of Smith’s The Wealth of Nations:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

While Smith provided the theoretical basis for the policy of laissez faire implemented in Britain (by state intervention) in the 1830s and 1840s – and which resulted in children being sent down the mines – he was under no uncritical defender of the behaviour of capitalists, as director-generals of the CBI might like to think.

In any event, Cable was not offering an alternative to the capitalist system and is well aware of his duty as Business Secretary “to help companies earn [or, more accurately, reap] profits”. That, in fact, is the duty of all governments.

Editorial: Class war: we’re all in it together (2010)

Editorial from the November 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The details of a long-planned offensive in the class war were finalised and announced by the Chancellor on 20 October. The millionaires who lead the government, backed by the business elite, unsurprisingly decided that the burden of the state debt should not fall onto those most responsible for it, nor those most able to pay it. Instead, it should be used as an excuse for an attack on working-class living standards. If you’re not sure if this means you, let us tell you, it almost certainly does. If you rely on the labour market or state benefits for your living, you’re working class. If you rely on investments for your living, you’re capitalist class. An understanding of this simple fact will cut through no end of political propaganda and put you on the road to the truth.

And the truth is that the capitalist class, represented for now by the coalition government and led by the Tories, has no real interest, despite the rhetoric, in individual freedom or rolling back the state. Despite the cuts, everywhere described as ‘savage’, state spending will actually continue to rise. As Lex points out in the Financial Times, the cuts are “all very radical by the standards of the modern state”, but government spending will still rise by a total of 5 per cent over the next three years. This is because the government is not daft. It knows that real-world capitalism can only prosper with the backing and support of the state. The banks and the capitalist class and the businesses that they own all rely on massive state support to survive. What is not acceptable, to them, is for the working class to rely on similar support. This is an “unaffordable” burden, to be cut out entirely where politically possible, or cut back to the bone where not.

The details of the cuts have been widely reported. They total £81bn, and include a massive £7bn cut in welfare spending, a rise in the retirement age to 66 (French workers at the time of writing are on the street to prevent a raise to 62), and cuts to higher education and council spending. Ruling-class propaganda has been so effective that the government could announce, as if everyone should be pleased and proud of the fact, that the cuts to government departments would not be as severe as expected because it had managed to be especially severe on welfare. Workers who understand their own position and interest will know that there is nothing to be gained from throwing those people who rely on state benefits, even those who really are ‘swinging the lead’, onto the labour market. Although the capitalist media does its best to whip up resentment against benefits claimants – and what a good job it does – those benefits are exactly what we might all one day have to rely on to survive (let alone live). Unless, of course, you have been thrifty, wise and hard-working enough to avoid being born into a working family, and have taken measures to ensure that in the future you will never lose your job, get ill, get injured, get old, or get blown up in one of capitalism’s wars. But even if you have taken these elementary precautions, throwing current benefit claimants onto the labour market will just increase competition for jobs, and act as a downward pressure on wages.

There is not, insists the government, any political choice about any of this: the cuts are just inevitable. To their inevitable facts of life, we must pose our own: resistance and socialist education. They started this particularly nasty and vindictive phase of the class war, and we’re all in it together whether we want to be or not. But ask not what the class war can do for you. Ask what you can do for the class war.

Profits first again (2010)

Book Review from the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agrofuels : Big Profits, Ruined Lives and Ecological Destruction. By François Houtart. Pluto Press

Whilst fundamentally an investigation into the pros and cons of agrofuels this book is, in large part, a critique of 'the dominant economic discourse' which repeatedly overlooks both ecological and social externalities – the negative effects of industrial and agricultural development etc. Throughout the chapters Houtart reveals the links which lay bare the logic of capitalism with example after example of how the profit motive gets in the way of social and environmental concerns; the incompatibility between taking care of the majority's needs and ensuring the most profitable returns; and which ensure that externalities will continue to be ignored until they impact on profits.

Early on he suggests that the 'socialist' countries of the 20th century in Europe and the USSR would have done well to heed Marx's warning that capitalism destroyed the two sources of its own wealth, nature and labour, implying that, as their model was supposed to be different from the one which dominated world economy, they should have avoided the terrible environmental degradation and social problems of which they, too, were guilty. As those regimes were just a different way of organising capitalism we really shouldn't be surprised that they performed no better.

Agrofuels are discussed in detail with impeccable references for each aspect. What they are, where they are grown, the main players, world views as to their potential for inclusion in the alternative fuel debate, ecological effects and effects on populations plus their place in the newest form of accumulation, the neo-colonialisation of land acquisition. The main argument throughout is that agrofuels are like any other commodities and that capitalism's logic requires that the needs of the North subsume the output of the South.

As far as any statistics are concerned the author reveals a catalogue of horrors of ecological devastation and social destruction all in the cause of profit. However, he goes on to expound that agrofuels could have only a minor role to play in a wholly different system anyway and that the information we are being given by the companies producing them is limited, biased, way too optimistic and ignores all externalities. The true story of agrofuels is mostly one of increased emissions of greenhouse gases compared with using fossil fuels, insufficient available land, huge quantities of nitrates creating dead zones around coasts and the forced removal of untold numbers of people.

An interesting discussion regarding externalities is the individualisation of responsibilities as a characteristic of neo-liberal thought and practice. The challenges that people face in getting to work, for instance. The time wasted using public transport or the decision to use personal transport is an individual choice and, therefore, an individual or socialised problem which can't be taken into account in the financial calculations, can't be factored into business profit margin calculations and the process of capital accumulation. Similarly migrations towards towns or foreign lands are attributed to personal decisions (unrelated to loss of land or livelihood in the case of monocrops for agrofuels or other purposes) – and the individualisation of the problem thus becomes a mechanism of externality.

The capitalist way forward would be to continue apace growing more crops for the rich world's fuel, with the knock-on effect of creating more hungry people and a further degraded planet. Insisting that no global solution will be found without challenging the contemporary development model and reiterating that agrofuels are aggravating and exacerbating ecological and social problems, he goes on to state that a new philosophy of the relationship between human beings and nature is required. Use value rather than exchange value; favouring human beings over capital; human needs becoming the motor of the economy; energy becoming a use value aimed at satisfying the real needs of humans and not to serve the accumulation of capital. 'Such a post-capitalist model, which some call the socialism of the 21st century, stresses values and the qualitative aspects of life, and democracy as a means.'

Pointing out accepted socialist values of true democracy – participation in decision-making, production for need, redistribution of wealth (which for us comes about from common ownership and the abolition of money), with human beings in balance with nature – it's like a handbook for socialists just needing the final chapter explaining that the fulfilment of the ideas to this point will be brought about not by any reforms of the current system and not by convincing capitalists to be kinder, fairer or more human-centric but by the democratic self- emancipation of the working class.

Janet Surman

A Socialist visits capitalist China (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

One evening in early July, the Air China plane took off from London on an eleven hour flight to Beijing, through seven time zones. This was to be my first visit to China.

With a knowledge of Russian, one fact about the flight which particularly interested me was that a very large part of the journey would be across the Russian Federation.

Over Russia
After some snoozing in a window seat, I awoke to see the lights of St. Petersburg, 38,000 feet below, with the Gulf of Finland, to the left and the immensity of Lake Ladoga, stretching north-eastwards, to the right. When covered with ice during World War 2, that lake had played a very important role in providing the inhabitants of Leningrad with a lifeline, during the siege of the city by the German Wehrmacht.

I snoozed a little more, occasionally waking up to see the enormity of the Russian taiga (forest), stretching for hundreds of miles, past the Urals and into Siberia. When I awoke again, it was daylight and a vast lake emerged below – Lake Baikal – the world’s largest freshwater lake by volume, looking quite different, from when I had visited it at ground level in 1989. A flight to Beijing really does give an idea about the size of Russia.

After crossing Mongolia with its mountains and the wilderness of the Gobi Desert, the plane gradually descended into Beijing.

Arrival in China
Thirty-nine degrees Centigrade, with very high humidity. Almost like a wall of heat! Those were the conditions on my arrival in Beijing. The taxi ride along the highway to my hotel was rather reminiscent of urban scenery in New York or Chicago, except that the advertising hoardings were overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, written in Mandarin Chinese characters. Just this one hour journey conveyed an immediate impression of China’s very significant capitalist economic development and modernisation, at least in the eastern part of the country.

Like in Russia and other developing countries, many young Chinese are keen to meet foreigners and to practise their English. All the same, as I had realised before my arrival, the proportion of the population with a significant knowledge of English was not large. Hardly surprising really, because of China’s only relatively recent increased communications with the West. Nevertheless, around the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, there was no shortage of young guides willing to accompany foreigners around, describing the sights. This was very worthwhile and an opportunity to find out more about the way of life.

Impressions of Beijing
Attractive, neatly kept parks such as Zhongshan, with ornate, colourfully painted pagodas, gates and red Chinese lanterns. Tiananmen Square, despite its sinister connection with the events of 1989, is very impressive, particularly when the buildings are floodlit at night.

Pollution. Traffic jams in much of the city, where there are many more cars than 25 years ago. However, a large number of people still commute by pedal cycle, together with many of the young on motor scooters and bikes. Metal fencing, segregating the slower lanes for local traffic, provides some limited protection for cyclists from larger, faster vehicles. In spite of this, travelling by road in Chinese cities is stressful, like in other Asian cities, such as Bangkok and Kolkata.

Some beggars on the streets, hustlers peddling their wares. Many of the “hutongs”, or alleyways, with their old houses are being demolished in favour in modern buildings. Visit the shopping mall and street of Wangfujing, near the centre of Beijing, and you could be in almost any western shopping area, apart from the predominance of advertising in Chinese language characters. However, many signs, such as those indicating street names are transliterated into Pinyin, a form of Chinese using the Latin alphabet. In numerous places, promotion of the products of Sony, Panasonic and Samsung, etc., is visible.

Capitalism in China
Without doubt, capitalism dominates China, just as it does the rest of the world. Of course, the form of capitalism is somewhat different from the West. For many years, from 1949 onwards, state capitalism was very much in evidence. Now, the Chinese so-called “Communist” Party is still the only permitted political party. The inverted commas are certainly needed, since the ruling party is no more communist or socialist than Marks and Spencer in the UK.

A huge wave of privatisation has taken place, with commercialism nearly everywhere: on the streets, in the media, etc. Pretty much the same as you would see in the West.

Journeys on the Beijing metro turned out to be of interest. Well air-conditioned! Yes, the underground in London could learn something from this. As I stood in the carriage, I noticed that many of the passengers were looking at the walls of the passing tunnel, much more closely than would be the case in London. I soon realised why. As the train rushed between stations, electronically projected still and movie images, primarily in the form of advertising, were visible, like on a TV screen, – more of capitalism’s propaganda. As in other world cities, many commuters look fixatedly at the screens of their mobile phones and other electronic devices.

The Great Wall
A visit to the Great Wall gives an impression of how far the Chinese tourist industry has developed in recent years. The Wall is one of the world’s most memorable sights, as it winds its way across rugged mountain ranges. Reading the guidebooks had prepared me for the large number of tourists that would be there, and also for the fact that a northerly direction was the best way to go, to get away from the crowds.

All the same, as I did so, it was strange to look back and to see throngs of humanity slowly moving along the tops of the Wall, snaking in the distance, over the rising and falling slopes of the mountains.
Capitalism packages most of the world’s sights, with coach and car parks, entry fees, souvenir shops, cafes, restaurants, etc. Despite this, with a little planning, it is still possible for a person to ignore most of the commercialised tat and to marvel at what one has come to see.

Yunnan
From Beijing, I travelled to Kunming in Yunnan province. This city lies in the south-western part of the country, about 2,000 meters above sea-level. Here I met up with an English language teacher from Canada and her husband, who were spending nearly a year in China, before returning to North America.

I had talks with local Chinese students in the Yunnan University tea-room and found that they were very interested to hear about ideas from the West, since far fewer Westerners are to be found in Kunming than in Beijing.

During my stay in Yunnan, I made journeys into rural areas. Much of the province is very scenic because of its mountainous nature. In the valleys and flatter areas, much of the land is used for agriculture. Little mechanisation is used in farming, with most of the labour in the fields and orchards being done by hand. The work is very arduous, involves long hours and the income is low. That is why many younger people are migrating into the towns and cities. In some parts of the countryside factories are being constructed where the terrain is favourable.

Similarities Between China and Russia
Because of my interest in Russia, I could not help but notice certain similarities between the two countries. The governments of both have used Leninist slogans in their propaganda. The two have presented themselves, in the past as “ideological adversaries” of the Western powers. Now, they still have authoritarian regimes, with a strong emphasis on nationalism, and are frequently portrayed as political rivals to the West.

State capitalism is no longer so dominant in China and Russia, and, like other parts of world, both have significantly embraced privatisation. Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times (8 January 2008) says:

“The new Russo-Chinese model is authoritarian rather than democratic. It attempts to marry capitalism with a large state role in the economy. It holds out the promise of western consumerism for a rising middle class, while rejecting western political liberalism. Rather than relying on democracy or communist ideology to create loyalty to the political system, the Russian and Chinese elites increasingly stress a combination of economic growth and nationalism.”

At the United Nations, China and Russia often oppose the Western policies of exerting pressure on repressive governments – in Sudan, Iraq, Iran, or Serbia. It should be added though, that in the past, a Sino-Soviet split revealed rivalries between Mao’s China and the Soviet Union. In addition, there is still a strong element of mutual suspicion and strategic rivalry, with the Russians wary of the potential expansion of China into sparsely-populated, mineral-rich Siberia.

Officials of the two countries are often ambiguous in their statements about democracy. They declare that liberal democracy remains a long-term goal – but that their countries “must be given time“. They maintain that they will be “democratic” – but they will not allow that idea to be defined for them by outsiders and foreigners.

Gideon Rachman says: “President Hu Jintao of China has called democracy ‘the common pursuit of mankind’. However, the official Chinese line tends to be that small steps are being taken towards a more democratic system – through village-level elections or contested elections within the Communist party – but that it is vital to avoid the ‘chaos’ that could be unleashed by a naive rush towards democracy”.

China and Global Capitalism
Very clearly, capitalism is a global system. More recent developments in China have shown how much that country is a part of the system. Increased privatisation is an example of this.
The Zhongshan or Mao suit, as it is known in the West, which was widely worn in the sixties and seventies has overwhelmingly been replaced by Western style clothing. Most younger people dress very much like their counterparts in the West.

One amusing instance of how things have changed was when I visited a lake land area on the edge of Kunming. Sitting on some benches was a group of elderly men. One appeared to be in his eighties and was holding an ancient Chinese stringed musical instrument. An example of the older part of Chinese culture, to be sure and yet, as I looked at him, I noticed that he was wearing on his head an American style baseball cap, with the word “Sexy” in English, emblazoned across the top.

Capitalism in China
The form which capitalism takes can vary in different parts of the world. In China, the state still has a more important role to play than in the West. Although the ruling party is the only permitted political organisation, how much longer this continues to be the case, remains to be seen.

According to Forbes Magazine (8 October 2007), in 2007 China, with 108, ranked second behind the US, in the number of dollar billionaires. Yang Huiyan, ($16.02 billion) came top of the Chinese list, while Xu Rongmao ($7.03 billion) came second. During the reform period, inequality has clearly risen terms of wealth ownership and, additionally in such areas as household income, consumption of consumer goods, and social outcomes in education and health. On the other hand, economic growth during the past 25 years has brought about a reduction in absolute material poverty. This, of course happened under capitalism earlier in history, in Europe, for example.

During recent times, many workers have lost their previous job security and subsidised housing. According to Amnesty International (Western Australian, 2 March 2007), millions of Chinese workers who have migrated from the countryside to the urban areas are “overworked, underpaid, denied access to health care, education for their children, and even the right to live permanently in the cities which use their labour, and are treated as an underclass”.

The Amnesty report continues: “They are forced to work long stretches of overtime, often denied time off when sick, and labour under hazardous conditions for paltry wages. As well as being exploited by employers, migrant families face discriminatory government regulations in almost every area of daily life.”

Conclusion
China has its own social cultures, such as “guanxi”, a system of favours, services and obligations between individuals. Nevertheless, as it develops, it has become increasingly a part of the world capitalist system.

For me, the visit to China was both memorable and instructive. Memorable, because of the sights, different culture and helpful, friendly people, whom I met. Instructive in the political sense.

In the West, much of the population has been deceived by mainstream propaganda into mistakenly believing that capitalism can only be accompanied by “political democracy”. Nothing could be further from the truth. During the Industrial Revolution, when capitalism developed in Britain and parts of western Europe, for a long time the right to vote was completely absent for the large majority of people, and trade unions were threatened by governments and employers. Privatised capitalism has co-existed and does co-exist quite comfortably, with authoritarian regimes in South America and Africa, as well as with past dictatorships in Europe, such as those of General Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. The state controlled version of capitalism emerged in the Soviet Russia and later in China. Now, Russia and China persist with authoritarian regimes, with which a more privatised version of capitalism has made a convenient accommodation.

Certainly, China never was even remotely “socialist” or “communist” in 1949 or afterwards.

Vincent Otter

Saving the planet (2010)

Book Review from the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

PLAN B 4.0 Mobilising to save civilisation by Lester R. Brown. Earth Policy Institute. W.W.Norton and Company.

The book is built around what Brown sees as four mutually dependent goals – stabilising the climate by cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020, stabilising the population at 8 billion or less (a rather contentious and difficult proposition), eradicating poverty and restoring the Earth's natural systems, soil, aquifers, forests, grasslands and fisheries. 'Plan B is the alternative to business as usual – the ambitiousness of the plan is not driven by perceived political feasibility but by scientific reality.'

The early chapters lay out the extent of the challenges he sees presented by pressures on water and land, climate change and the transition to non-fossil fuel energy, followed by chapters laying out his response to each of these areas in well documented detail. He offers plenty of evidence to show just what could be achieved in a relatively short period of time if there is the will to do it. However, in the capitalist system we live in this, the will, is what is so often shown to be lacking.

The chapters are crammed with solid information, some citing examples of good practice around the world, examples which could be followed with advantage to both people and planet. With his use of unemotional, dispassionate matter of fact language which presents the plan as realistic and rational it could be difficult for some to grasp why world leaders haven't already grabbed the concept and run with it.

It is in chapter 10, the last chapter, that, as socialists, we get what we know to expect somewhere along the line; the let-down of how we are actually expected to put this plan into practice. Up to this point socialists and non-socialists alike could agree that here is a plan about which we could largely have consensus. It would appeal to most rational thinking people who believe we have to address immediately the problems that are facing us right now. But we are about to be divided again. It is the means to the end that divides us.

Non-socialists will accept without question that there is an economic equation to be discussed and will believe that politicians will be focussed in this direction for the good of the planet, reforming taxes and subsidies to achieve the objective and if they're not then pressure will need to be brought to bear on them. This would be some of the action required.

Socialists, on the other hand, will simply want to point out that it is the use of such methods over the long term that has brought us to where we're at now and it is this very system which perpetuates and deepens the problems. Only a move right away from the capitalist profit system will suffice to save the planet. Business not as usual means removing all financial incentives, taxes, subsidies and money itself from the equation, abolishing the wages system in favour of common ownership in a classless society.

Janet Surman

Cooking the Books: Defending capitalism (2010)

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

Capitalism is indefensible (except if you are a capitalist). But that doesn’t stop people trying. One recent example is Lucy Turnbull, member of the Australian Liberal Party and former Lord Mayor of Sydney. “Capitalism is still the only system that works,” she asserted in the Sydney Morning Herald (9 August).

According to her, “price signals, fair markets and free trade are the cornerstones of the capitalist system for creating goods and services”. Prices, markets and trade certainly are features of capitalism but she manages to omit two other, key features: the class ownership of the places where goods and services are produced and production for profit. Without these capitalism wouldn’t be capitalism.

Prices may signal to people and firms what to buy, but it is profits that signal to capitalist firms what to produce. Unless prices are high enough to allow capitalist firms to realise a profit they can signal as much as they like but no production will be forthcoming. In addition, some needs don’t register at all if the person hasn’t got the money to pay to satisfy them. In which case they go unmet.

“Fair markets” and “free trade” are not essential features of capitalism but policy objectives that sections of the owning class sometimes want the government to pursue. At other times subsidies and tariffs have been preferred. Turnbull has made the mistake here of identifying capitalism with a particular policy.

She makes some extravagant claims for her conception of capitalism:

“It alone harnesses the reality of human nature – our continual striving for progress and our competitive instincts to do our best.”

No doubt people do want to do their best, but what has this got to do with competition? If it is part of “the reality of human nature”, then this would continue if the capitalist rat-race to avoid falling into poverty is replaced by cooperation to ensure that nobody‘s needs are neglected.

Competition in fact prevents many people from doing their best. Capitalist firms compete to make profits by trying to keep their costs below the average for their sector; the lower their costs compared with their rivals the more sales – and profits – they can expect to make. It’s a race to the bottom with speed-up and pressures to get a job done quickly taking precedence over taking the time to do it properly.

Turnbull also claims of capitalism: “It alone is compatible with political and democratic freedoms.” Capitalism may well be compatible with political democracy but it’s also compatible with a restricted franchise (as in the 19th century) and political dictatorship (as in many countries now and in the past). Capitalism impedes the carrying out of democratically-expressed wishes to improve housing, health care, education, transport and the like as the workings of its economic laws force governments to give priority to profit-making over these. When it comes to production capitalism is undemocratic. The moment a worker enters the factory gates or the office doors they stop being a “free citizen” and become subject to the authority of the employer.

Socialism alone is capable of ensuring a genuine democracy as, with the means of production the common heritage of all, everyone will be able participate on an equal basis as nobody would have a privileged say in how the means of production are used and nobody would have a privileged share of what is produced. Under democratic control the means of production can be used to satisfy people’s needs not to make a profit for the few.

Practical Politics (2010)

From the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is pro real democracy. Real democracy can only be achieved by common ownership of resources and free access to goods and services, because only this provides political equality. The tyranny of money maintains injustice and division world wide. The Socialist Party is thus anti capitalist.

In capitalism, a minority owning class has vast amounts of extra power that it imposes by financial control. Socialists believe in people being able to do the work that they wish to do and directly for their communities, within a fully democratic system. The provision of goods and services can not only be achieved without capitalism – it can be achieved with a giant leap in efficiency. We will be freed from the shackles of the financial system, and we will be able to reap the benefits of everybody’s practical knowledge, because we will all be able to take part equally in decision making processes.

In capitalism, for most of us, the jobs that we have to do, and/or the way that we do them, and a lot more in our lives is not freely decided by us. Nor can it be decided by our elected government. So much that affects so many is decided by the minority of owners, who have the power to set up structures and systems for their limited self interest and to pressurise all of the rest of us to do their bidding.

For as long as there has been a ruling elite, there has been indoctrination simply by living in such a system, that it is ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’. This is added to by propaganda that is full of lies and distortions. In ‘democratic’ countries we have thought that we are ‘free’ – but democracy has been hijacked by the capitalist class, who, via governments, and just like any other dictators, wield the power of armies and weapons of mass destruction, whilst also controlling most of the information outlets, so they can spin all the news in their favour. Even militarily imposed business expansion with hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, is now called ‘bringing democracy’.

This is not only what capitalism allows, it is what it produces. The victories for sanity that occur are despite capitalism, because capitalism is an insane system which cannot be made fair by reform or regulation. It is a system based on competition instead of cooperation, and its only real purpose is to capitalize without conscience. If you doubt this, think about how it functions: Can’t pay? Can’t have! And: No profit? No production! Capitalism is not devoted to or intent upon supplying what we need, efficient use of resources, appreciation of beauty or being humane – its devotion and its intention is to make a financial profit. Where needs are supplied in some form this is incidental to capitalism; it happens to be necessary for the profit making.

Any benefits that are claimed for capitalism actually come from the workers, who could do a much better job without it. The rules of capitalism have been made to serve the unjust privileges of a few over the common good for people and the biosphere. It will always fix the regulations. It will always drown out calls for equitable reforms with loud demands for profit. It will always encourage us to cheat and lie and, faced with the horrors that the system creates, to not care.

As capitalism has become globally established over the last five hundred years, money has become the main controlling and deciding factor in much of our behavior. The wealthy are the ones with money to invest in new enterprises, and so capitalism generally delivers concentrations of wealth and thus power. The profit priority of the capitalist class results, amongst other things, in wages being as low as possible, and thus generally the priority for the workers is to buy the cheapest. This also leads to the dominance of big business producers and suppliers, which has profound and drastic effects on society. One effect has been a massive increase in the reliance on cars and on road, air and sea transportation of goods using fossil fuels. This is a typical example of something that is considered to be good for the economy – but is not good for communities or the health of individuals – or, as it turns out, for the environment as a whole.

The profit priority results in every form of waste and abuse; from the billions of deceptive three quarter empty plastic tubs of pills to the carnage of war. People are persuaded to buy stuff that they don’t need and/or is harmful to them, money is saved in methods of production by losing quality, by abusive treatment of workers, by cruelty to animals, by pollution of the environment and by squandering resources in manufacturing products with ‘built in obscelecence’. – Not to mention all the useless work involved in just running the financial system.

We are prevented in many ways from doing what is most beneficial and tempted into making unhealthy and unkind choices. This is very stressful - so even those with what is called a ‘good standard of living’ tend to suffer in this system. The diseases of unhealthy affluence are prevalent. At the same time, a huge and growing proportion of the world’s population is malnourished or starving and lacking even clean water. It is a measure of the unhealthiness of capitalist affluence that it is unsustainable; it is destroying the living environment that supplies it. And environmental damage is increasingly a factor in causing poverty and conflict.

This is not democracy failing us – the problem is that we do not have real democracy. What we are getting is clearly not what the majority of people want. Globally, in the twenty first century, more than ever before, war is conducted in civilian areas. More people than ever before are losing their land and communities and being forced into city slums. More people than ever before live on rubbish dumps. More people than ever before are imprisoned. More young people than ever before are imprisoned. More young people than ever before are abandoned and homeless. More young people than ever before are involved in the sex trade.

These are not just problems that capitalism hasn’t got around to solving yet. They are caused by a combination of the effects of capitalism. Neither does capitalism respond to the need to solve problems that it has produced. The issue of global warming is a prime example of this. Global warming is largely the result of the particularly polluting forms of production and organization that have developed in the capitalist system. However, for instance, large profits are being made from the production and use of oil. It is integral to the cash flow in the present situation. Because of having little choice in how our society functions, unyet having to function in it to get money - it is frequently very difficult or impossible for people to have workplaces homes close enough, or to have alternative transport arrangements, so that they do not need a car. Then society becomes arranged around car use; it fits in beautifully with big business supermarkets. Thus the whole system ferociously resists making the radical changes that are needed to protect our environment. Instead, we are taken to war to secure more oil supplies.

When it comes to creating profit for a minority, capitalism is extremely efficient. But when it comes to creating sustainable, healthy, friendly communities, capitalism is extremely inefficient. In this regard it is tragically wasteful of the abundant resources of the earth and of man made technology. - All that waste to maintain something that we don’t really want! Something that is bound to be unhealthy; the undemocratic power of a minority! This is what we agree to when we vote for any capitalist party.

By exploiting the prejudice, separation and general ignorance that capitalism breeds, the capitalist class continues to rule us with majority support. They continue to have vastly disproportionate control over how we live; to force cuts in services, to take the hearts out of our communities, to take us away from our children, to distract us from the truth, to stress us and fill us with rage that we take out on ourselves, each other and our fellow creatures, to make us depressed, to get us addicted, to wreck our environment and to take us to war – and to convince us that there is no sensible alternative! This is not democracy. This is despotism dressed up as democracy. We have to take the democratic systems that have been fought for and won through previous generations and use them to achieve our true desire.

We can change to a socialist system by using the democratic process. As socialists we do not vote for any capitalist party – and that is all of them except the Socialist Party. Other parties may have some good intentions – but in capitalism these will be lost as we have seen before. Socialism will be achieved by majority demand. The working people supply the goods and services in society. We know how to do it and we know how it can be done better, if we are not constrained by financial rules and pressures that do nothing except maintain a harmful system.

Capitalism is a perverting and corrupting influence to whatever degree it is present – and always involves deprivation, slavery and abuse in various forms. It is now in a particularly ubiquitous phase and further deterioration of the situation for humanity looks likely. Just during my life time I have seen many communities and the whole natural world becoming more and more damaged. People run gallant campaigns to help others and to protect the environment – but in capitalism, although there are some temporary successes, this is a losing battle

The battle has to be to overcome capitalism with world socialism. When we remove money from the equation, our priorities can adjust to their healthy natural state. Our priority can be to do what is good. Using truly democratic processes we can find out what is good for us and do that. Our energy will be set free to develop a healthy society and a healthy world – which is necessarily to create justice and peace.

LB