Correspondence: Those Misrepresentations of Marx Turn Up Again. (1920)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

To the Editors.

Dear Sirs,

I have formed certain conceptions concerning the nature of a proletarian revolution which are somewhat critical to the position you adopt, and my reason for writing is to get you, if possible, to reply to, or to deal with, what I conceive to be the Marxian position concerning same, a position which opposes yours.

From my reading of Marx and Engels I find that on the question of Parliament you antagonise the Marxian position, even though you claim your organisation to be Marxian.

We accept Marx and Engels, of course, only in as far as their position can be accepted upon its merits, and I assume, therefore, that, as you claim to be Marxian, you will find me quite in order if I did a little quoting from Marx and Engels in opposition to your attitude toward this question.

Under the circumstance of your Marxian claim, how do you reconcile the following statements by Marx and Engels with your declarations, as well as those of your speakers, that Parliament is the political machine that will be used for the purpose of emancipating the workers? In the preface to the "Communist Manifesto" Marx and Engels quote from Marx's "Civil War in France" to the effect that "the working class simply cannot lay hold of the ready-made State machinery and wield it for its own purposes." Does this not run counter to your statement (to quote J.F. in last month's issue of the "S.S.") "when they"—(that is the working class previously mentioned by J.F.)— "agree with Socialism, they will send Socialists" to Parliament ? There is no statement that that mode of procedure on the part of the workers would be wrong, but rather does the writer make the terms Parliament and Power synonymous. He indicates as well what would be to him an obvious reply to his question when he asks why the workers "did not vote themselves into power" by voting for Parliament, which serves again to show that, by direct statement and inference you regard Parliament to be the political instrument for working-class emancipation.

From your conception of the political struggle one would conclude that the struggle occurs only at election times, whereas "every class struggle" being "a political struggle" ("Communist Manifesto"), the political struggle is being prosecuted now and at all times. Again, Marx wrote referring to the Paris Commune that "the Commune was to have been not a parliamentary but a working corporation," and in the same passage he derides the Parliamentary corporation by comparing how the "working corporation" operated "instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to 'represent' and repress the people in Parliament." (Quoted by Lenin. "State and Revolution.") Then again in reference to the Commune Marx says : "its true secret was this. It was essentially the government of the working class—it was the political form, at last discovered, under which Labour could work out its own economic emancipation" (ibid). I would, if the question was discussed on its merits, say that if constitutional Parliamentary action will emancipate the workers, then it will be a departure from the historic fact that there can be no such thing as a constitutional social revolution.

In conclusion I will refer you to the proud concluding passage of the "Communist Manifesto," which is quite different to "a-cross-next-to-his-name-and-into the-ballot-box-revolution." "The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of existing social conditions. Let the ruling class tremble at the prospects of a Communistic revolution." I contend that as parliamentarians you conceal your views and aims—if you are Communists ; or else you are not Communists, in which case why are you parliamentarians ?

From the Marxian standpoint there is only one conclusion, namely, that Parliament is part of the bourgeois State which stands in the way of working-class emancipation, and it follows, therefore, that during the proletarian revolution the bourgeois State machine will not be utilised but broken, and in its stead another State erected—the dictatorship of the proletariate.

Yours faithfully,

H. Dight.

THE SOCKS.

So far is Mr. Dight from having read Marx and Engels, that, as the above letter shows, he has not read even the work of Marx that he tries to quote from. Nor is his reading of Lenin's pamphlet either full or clear, or he would have seen how flatly Lenin contradicts his (Dight's) attempt at a case.

Our correspondent says that we make the terms "Parliament" and "Power" synonymous. Had he read our Declaration of Principles and articles in the Socialist Standard, he would have seen that we stated that Power is dependent upon the control of the political machinery and that Parliament is the central organ of that machinery. Hence to obtain Power, control of the political machinery is absolutely essential. How Lenin agrees with this fact is shown in the pamphlet Mr. Dight mentions—"The State and Revolution." On page 29 we read:

  The exploited classes need political supremacy in order completely to abolish all exploitation, i.e., in the interests of the enormous majority of the people and against the tiny minority constituted by the slave-owners of modern times—the landlords and the capitalists.

On page 30 Lenin says:

 The proletariat needs the State, the centralised organisation of force and violence, both for the purpose of crushing the resistance of the exploiters and for the purpose of guiding the great mass of the population—the peasantry, the lower middle class, the semi-proletariat — in the work of economic Socialist reconstruction.

On page 33 it is stated that the general lessons of history set out in the "Communist Manifesto" :

  bring us to the necessary conclusion that the proletariat cannot overthrow the capitalist class without, as a preliminary step, winning political power, without obtaining political supremacy.

When Mr. Dight has read Lenin's pamphlet that he quotes from he might compare the above statements with Clauses 6 and 7 of our Declaration of Principles.

Mr. Dight's great point of what he fancies is opposition to our policy is the statement from Marx's "Civil War in France" that the working class cannot "simply lay hold of the ready made machinery of State and wield it for its own purposes."

As Mr. Dight has not read this work he is unaware that the context of that sentence totally contradicts the interpretation he tries to put upon it. The sentence is taken from section III., which opens as follows:

  On the dawn of the i8th of March Paris arose to the thunder burst of "Vive la Commune." What is the Commune, that Sphinx so tantalizing to the the bourgeois mind? 

  "The proletarians of Paris" said the Central Committee in its Manifesto of the 18th March, "amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of affairs . . . They have understood that it is their imperious and their absolute right to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.'' But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes. 

  The centralised State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour —originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism. Still its development remained clogged by all manner of mediaeval rubbish, seignorial rights, local privileges, municipal and guild monopolies and provincial constitutions. The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern State raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France. During the subsequent regimes the Government, placed under parliamentary control—that is under the direct control of the propertied classes— became not only a hotbed of huge national debts and crushing taxes ; with its irresistible allurements of place and pelf and patronage, it became not only the bone of contention between the rival factions and adventurers of the ruling class ; but its political character changed simultaneously with the economic changes of society. At the same pace at which the progress of modern industry developed, widened, intensified, the class antagonism between capital and labour, the State power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour, of a public force organised for social enslavement, of an engine of class oppression.

I have given this long quotation from the "Civil War in France" to show how Marx has been misrepresented by the use of a phrase torn out of its context, and to show what Marx himself meant when using the phrase. Here, as even a "Communist" might have understood had he read the work, Marx is referring to the workers' position after they have seized this power.

It is when Mr. Dight attempts to quote Marx on the functions of the Commune that he shows conclusively that he has never read Marx's work. Mr. Dight says :

  "Marx wrote referring to the Commune that "the Commune was to have been not a Parliamentary but a working corporation," and in the same passage he derides the Parliamentary corporation by comparing how the "working corporation" operated, "instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to 'represent' and repress the people in parliament."

It is true that the two phrases quoted above are given by Lenin (p. 47), with other matter, in one paragraph between quotation marks, thus misleading the reader not acquainted with the original into believing that Marx put it in that form. Actually the first phrase occurs in the seventh paragraph of section III., while the second one appears in the tenth paragraph of the same section. Moreover, although Lenin gives the full sentence containing the first phrase, Mr. Dight only quotes a part of it. Why? Because the second part, though only consisting of seven words, destroys the interpretation he tries to place upon the phrase he quotes. The full sentence is: "The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time." (Italics mine.)

The words italicised show clearly that the Commune was to perform parliamentary as well as the other duties imposed upon it.

Paragraph ten of section III. details the work of the rural Communes and contains the following important sentence :

  The few but important functions which would still remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally misstated, but were to be discharged by Communal and therefore strictly responsible agents.

while further on occurs the phrase Mr. Dight tries to use against our case :

 Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to represent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for workmen and managers in his business.

How the quotation from the twelfth paragraph, describing the Commune as "the political form, at last discovered," etc., helps Mr. Dight, who is opposed to political action and policy, I fail to see.

His statement that it is "a historic fact that there can be no such thing as a constitutional social revolution" merely exposes his ignorance of even modern history, for Japan carried through "a constitutional social revolution" in 1871 when feudalism was abolished.

The nonsense chattered by the "Communists" against "constitutional" action is flatly contradicted by Lenin's own words and actions. It was only by "constitutional" action that the Bolsheviks obtained control of the Duma and carried through their revolution, while on page 27 of Lenin's pamphlet "The Proletarian Revolution," where he refers to the people who control parliaments he says :

  "This, of course, does not mean that bourgeois parliamentarism ought not to be made use of; the Bolsheviks, for instance, made perhaps more successful use of it than any other party in the world, having in 1912-14 captured the entire Labour representation in the fourth Duma."

Crushing as this statement is against his own followers, it is surpassed by the views of one who Lenin himself would admit was far greater than any Russian Communist:

  "The irony of the world's history places everything upon its head. We, the "revolutionaries," the overturners," we succeed better with the legal means than with illegality and force. The self-named "Party of Order" goes to pieces upon the legal conditions created by itself. They despairingly cry with Odilon Barrot "Legality is our death," while we from this same legality gain strong muscles, ruddy cheeks, and the appearance of eternal life."

These words are from Engels' last work—the introduction to Marx's "The Class Struggle in France"—written in the year in which he died, 1895.

When Mr. Dight reads Marx's and Engels' writings, he may grasp the substance of their teaching. And when he condescends to read our Declaration of Principles and our Party Organ he will see the utter falsity of his statement that we conceal our views and aims.

Jack Fitzgerald

What about it? (1920)

Editorial from the October 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

A short while ago "Plum" Warner, the old Middlesex cricketer, bid farewell to the public, and seized the opportunity to deliver through the Press, an admonition to the miners under the title ; "Miners, play the game !" (It does not seem to strike him what a vast difference there is between the game he wants the miners to "play"and the game he has been playing the best part of his life.)

On Oct. 3rd appeared in "Lloyd's Sunday News" an article urging the workers to "Work, Produce!" and, again the incongruity of it, the writer was that indefatigable worker and stupendous producer, Lord Moulton.

A day or two ago the "Daily Chronicle" had an article headed "What Every Woman Knows," and drawing moving but obviously true pictures of what is going to be the experience of the women of the working class in the event of a miners' strike maturing, and again it is one of those people of such wide first-hand knowledge of empty cupboards and the sufferings of poverty—a lady of title—who does the writing.

It is meet to ask, at a time when your "betters" are setting you such an example of class-conscious propaganda in the class struggle, what you are doing in the same class struggle: Are you working for the enlightenment of your fellow working men and women ? Are you even studying for your own enlightenment ? Are you talking about Socialism ? Are you pushing Socialist literature ? Every word you read of the right stuff, helps, and every word you speak with knowledge and understanding. So what about it?

Rear View: Oh No, Not Again! (2019)

The Rear View Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Oh No, Not Again!

‘’Colombia was on edge on Thursday as the top peace negotiator for the country’s Marxist guerrillas announced that he was resuming armed conflict, promising to re-start the Western hemisphere’s longest-running civil war three years after a peace deal was signed’ (telegraph.co.uk, 29 August). Socialists welcomed the end of the five-decade-long war, which killed more than 220,000 and displaced millions, as well as the mendacious mass media calling FARC Marxist. But, bringing an end to one such conflict in a capitalist world where war and misinformation are endemic is like a murderous game of Whack-A-Mole. ‘Farc was formed in 1964 as a Che Guevara-inspired Marxist group claiming peasant land rights’ (op. cit.). FARC declare themselves to be Bolivarian and call for ‘Colombia for Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth and where among us all we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty’, rather than for Marx’s call for workers of all lands to unite for the overthrow of all existing social conditions. Marx during his lifetime was implacably opposed to political terrorism. Marxist socialists oppose terrorism, individual, group or state, guerrilla ‘armies’ and so-called national liberation struggles. Instead we organise for and propagate worldwide common ownership, democratic administration, control of the land, means of production and transportation and the abolition of the wages system.


Fighting the wrong war

‘Of course, there are other reasons why the West cannot get any of its adversaries to kneel. One is – that the toughest ones are left. Russia, Cuba, China, North Korea (DPRK), Iran, Syria and Venezuela are not going to run away from the battlefield’ (Suddenly, Western “Regime” Changes Keep Failing, off-guardian.org, 28 August). Andre Vltchek’s and others of his ilk continuing support for one group of capitalist countries is no doubt of great comfort to the imprisoned trade unionists in Iran, for example. Sadly it comes too late for the many thousands who have already been executed, including minors, under a theocratic dictatorship where those convicted of adultery, alcohol consumption, blasphemy, burglary, homosexuality, pornography and prostitution, along with, of course, political dissidence, as well as many other ‘crimes’, can pay the ultimate price. We must not forget the state sanctioned use of juveniles as troops during the mass slaughter that was the Iran-Iraq war or oppression of women. Add chronic corruption plus obvious class division and we can say the 99 percent certainly did not vote for this. No war but the class war!


In Space as on Earth

‘Donald Trump: New Space Command will “ensure US dominance” of final frontier. Space has become a focus for the Trump administration due to concerns over the vulnerability of US satellites to China and Russia’ (news.sky.com, 30 August). Long before the first aeroplane flew or mining the Moon’s riches left the realm of science fiction, British politician Joseph Chamberlain made this candid comment with regard to war and its economic causes: ‘All the great offices of State are occupied with commercial affairs. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones. The War Office and the Admiralty are mostly occupied in preparations for the defence of these markets and for the protection of our commerce’ (from a speech to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce in 1890). Time and time again evidence has demonstrated that war stems from capitalist struggles for markets, trade routes, sources of raw materials, and places of strategic importance.


Ferengi-free future

If we want a future that is more Star Trek than Star Wars, we must first replace capitalism with socialism and bring about a world where war, wages and want have been eradicated. Given this it is somewhat surprising to find a Financial Times journalist describing Star Trek: The Next Generation as ‘. . . optimistic, moving and wise’ (ft.com, 28 August). Whether or not you prefer the post-capitalist society of Trek or Iain Banks’ Culture over the bucolic, craft-industry-based utopia of William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1890), our first concern should be the making of socialists. Morris put it well: ‘one man with an idea in his head is in danger of being considered a madman; two men with the same idea in common may be foolish, but can hardly be mad; ten men sharing an idea begin to act, a hundred draw attention as fanatics, a thousand and society begins to tremble, a hundred thousand and there is war abroad, and the cause has victories tangible and real; and why only a hundred thousand?’ (Art Under Plutocracy, 1883).

Pathfinders: Capitalism’s Holy Grail (2019)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s an easy question – what’s your view of censorship? If you’re a socialist and a democrat, you’re probably against it. After all, you argue, the only really effective way to combat bad ideas is to bring them out in the open and put them up against good ideas, and you can’t do that if the bad ideas aren’t allowed to circulate in the first place.The battle of ideas must be fought in public or it becomes totalitarianism.

So how fares this public battle today? Not well, actually. Everyone knows that society has changed rapidly in the last two decades. The mass-market passive consumerism of the twentieth century has given way to the individualistic, two-way street of the internet. But instead of this opening up debate it seems to have done the opposite. Very few people would include a public political meeting as part of their normal week’s activity. Street-corner debates are a distant memory for the oldest among us. Now ideas don’t normally challenge each other in large open auditoriums. Instead they exist in largely separate and closed worlds where each person sees what they want to see.

This is not to say that the concern over social media echo chambers should be overstated. Social media groups tend to reflect the organic composition of friendship networks, which don’t typically consist of one exclusive type of belief or idea. Sure, you may not be besties with a Tory, but you probably know one or two, and you may have friends or relatives who think differently from you on a lot of issues. Social networks are like Venn diagrams, overlapping each other in a multi-dimensional nest. Comfort zones they may be, but most people don’t want or expect them to be hermetically sealed. At least, not reasonable people.

But in the pressured depths of the web where reasonable people don’t go there are unmoderated groups where something quite different is going on. Here the most one-dimensional views are expressed, and there are no dissenting voices to challenge them. Here is where a macabre game of Dare is played out. Far-right bedroom trolls take over a forum and use it as a playground to make violent death threats against black people, Hispanics, Moslems, Jews, gays or some other minority. It’s just talk at first, but the feedback loop ramps it up as each participant tries to outdo the last. Finally someone ups the ante to the limit, thereby winning the kudos and respect of all participants. What is this limit? Carrying out the death threat in reality.

This is what is thought to have happened on the 8chan discussion forum prior to the shootings in El Paso in August, when 22 people were killed and 24 injured, and the next day in Dayton, Ohio, where nine people were shot dead and 27 injured. 8chan was also used by the shooter in April’s Poway synagogue shooting in California, and in the mosque massacres of Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, where 51 were killed and 49 injured, and where the shooter live-streamed the massacres on Facebook.

Let’s take a moment to revisit that ethical question on your view of censorship. Given the track record of 8chan, if it was in your power to close it down by pressing a big Kill button, would you do it? Or would you defend 8chan in the name of free speech, saying as some US Republicans did at the time, that’s the price you pay for liberty?

Of course there was no shortage of hackers keen to take 8chan down. One easy way to do that would have been to launch a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on it by bombarding it with traffic until its servers ground to a halt. But this wasn’t possible because the site was protected by online security firm Cloudflare. After the Dayton shootings however, the owner of Cloudflare finally pulled the plug, saying: ‘8chan has repeatedly proven itself to be a cesspool of hate. They have proven themselves to be lawless and that lawlessness has caused multiple tragic deaths’ (BBC News, 5 August – bbc.in/2lX1r6T).

8chan duly went offline almost immediately, however its users will certainly migrate to a different forum and continue as before. Even if you agree that ‘free speech’ has limits and such sites need to be stopped, the question is how. The internet is just too big.

Artificial Intelligence is held up as the great unbiased censor, the thing that might save society from its own worst nightmares, however the hype around AI is a good deal more advanced than the technology itself. AI is good in situations with finite options and clear rules, which is why it can beat the world’s top game-players. But ask it to make a value judgment or an ethical call, and it won’t have a clue.

Εven so, it’s good enough to ‘benevolently’ censor you. AI manages what you see on the GAFA big four (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon), sifting your data to serve up what it thinks you will like and hiding what you won’t. That’s why two people doing the same Google search will get different results. Meanwhile YouTube’s algorithms attempt to keep users on-site by serving up material on a ‘same-but-even-more-so’ basis. With an estimated 500 hours of material loaded every minute, YouTube can’t possibly keep track of its content. Thus, right-wing extremists end up being offered ever more extreme right-wing material, so that the site may be upping the ante in the same way as 8chan. Some people are demanding that it changes its algorithms in favour of more balance, while others are calling for it to be shut down altogether (New Scientist, 24 August).

There is, though, another reason to be highly resistant to any kind of censorship. What if they turn it on us? In China open dissent is impossible. People have to use secretive Virtual Private Networks to hide their identity when accessing forbidden western resources like Wikipedia. No wonder Hong Kongers are fearful. Who’s to say other states wouldn’t adopt Chinese tactics if it saved them money and created more docile populations?

What’s worrying about certain one-dimensional internet trends and also calls for more censorship is their general intention to disable the human critical faculty. They’re not interested in debate, they are engaged in whiter-than-white brainwashing, and never mind the victims or the collateral damage. In a way that’s the holy grail of capitalism too. It aims to create the perfect customer, even at the cost of the perfect storm.

Paddy Shannon

Material World: Indonesia: From Anti-Imperialism to Imperialism (2019)

The Material World Column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In August, East Timor (Timor Leste) celebrated 20 years independence from Indonesia. The 1974 left-wing coup in Portugal led to the dismantling of its colonies including what was then called Portuguese Timor. Indonesian forces commenced covert attacks, then invaded in 1975. An estimated 100,000 conflict-related deaths through the entire period 1974 to 1999, including 18,600 violent killings. Indonesia was held responsible for 70 percent of the killings.

With the armed resistance largely crushed Indonesia held civilians in detention camps where there were 84,200 deaths from disease and starvation. In 1976 Indonesia declared East Timor the country’s 27th province. Many countries looked the other way. In 1979 Australia became the only western nation to recognise the annexation of East Timor and quickly sought a treaty with Indonesia to divide the spoils of East Timor’s sea-bed so both could access the off-shore oil resources.

On 30 August 1999 78.5 percent voted for independence. Festivities were short-lived. Indonesian-backed militia groups terrorised the population. A three-week campaign of violence killed 2,600 people, nearly 30,000 were displaced and as many as 250,000 were forcibly relocated into Indonesian West Timor after the ballot.

August also saw a resurgence in the unrest in occupied West Papua with government troops being deployed. When Indonesia gained independence in 1945, the Dutch government declined to cede control over West Papua arguing that it was to be given the freedom to determine its own future. In 1961-1962 West Papua was invaded and annexed by Indonesia. An estimated 30,000 Papuans were killed up to its incorporation into Indonesia in 1969, after a sham referendum.

According to an article in Red Pepper :

  ‘… The occupation of West Papua receives little attention in the UK. This is, in no small part, due to Indonesia’s ban on foreign journalists and its outlawing of West Papuan social movements who try to speak out internationally. However, West Papua has not been forgotten by international corporations, including companies from the UK. For them, Indonesia’s brutal occupation of West Papua provides lucrative opportunities for profit.’ 

The article by Egret and Anderson details how mining companies exploit West Papua’s vast wealth. US company Freeport-McMoRan operates the Grasberg mine in Papua – the largest gold mine and the third largest copper mine in the world. It is Indonesia’s biggest taxpayer, making billions of dollars for the Indonesian government every year. TIME stated that ‘In 2015 alone, Freeport mined some $3.1 billion worth of gold and copper.’

BP profits from the occupation through its massive liquified natural gas fields in Tangguh, BP’s biggest operation in SE Asia. Papuan communities are also being evicted from their land for palm oil. In addition, Papua boasts timber resources worth an estimated $78 billion.

Indonesia is an ethnically diverse country, made up of 17,000 islands, with around 300 distinct native ethnic groups and 700 local languages. The country’s official language is a variant of Malay. Indonesia can be described as an invented nation-state that having been subject to colonialism has become itself imperialist.

In the pursuit of profits and administrative control, the Dutch imposed the authority of the Dutch East Indies on an array of peoples who had not previously shared any unified political identity.

The name ‘Indonesia’ is derived from the Greek (Indian islands) and was employed by an 18th century English naturalist to classify the ethnic and geographic area. ‘Indonesia’ was seized upon by nationalists as a word to imagine a unity of people. By the twentieth century, the Dutch had formed the boundaries of a colonial state that became the precursor to modern Indonesia. During the 1920s and 30s, a small elite began to articulate a growing anti-colonialism and nationalism, striving to carve out a place for themselves. In 1928, the All-Indonesian Youth Congress proclaimed the Youth Pledge (Sumpah Pemuda), establishing the nationalist goals of: ‘one country – Indonesia, one people – Indonesian, and one language – Indonesian.’ After the surrender of Japan, Sukarno proclaimed Indonesian independence. The Dutch attempted to re-establish their rule, and an armed struggle ensued but in 1949, the Dutch recognised Indonesian independence.

The Socialist Party rejects nationalism as anti-working class because it has always tied the working people to its class enemy. Nationalism is the ideology of an actual or an aspiring capitalist class. It is of the practice of native capitalists that when imperialism prevents them for building their own independent capitalist state, they lead resistance against it. Sooner or later, successful anti-imperialism then becomes imperialism.

ALJO

Letter: ‘Mental Health: In a Mad, Mad World’ (2019)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Mental Health: In a Mad, Mad World’

Dear Editors

In the September issue (‘Mental Health: In a Mad, Mad World’) you seem to give some credence to the theory that mental illness arises from a chemical imbalance in the brain and that antidepressant drugs work by restoring the balance. In your version of the theory the balance that needs to be maintained is that between serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. The first two of these are neurotransmitters, the third a hormone; they perform quite different functions.

There are other versions of the theory. Often the theory is presented without specifying the substances that have to be ‘in balance’. The ratios that constitute ‘balance’ or ‘imbalance’ are never indicated. Nor is it ever explained why it is essential to maintain such ratios. Even if it were established that certain ratios among specified substances have to be maintained, no instruments exist to measure such ratios in a patient’s brain. There is no way for a physician to determine what quantities of which substances need to be added to achieve balance or check whether a drug has restored balance or just created a new imbalance.

Strictly speaking, this is not a theory at all but a poorly formulated hypothesis that is never proven but is endlessly repeated in order to convey the false impression that the biochemistry of mental illness is understood and sell the drugs that allegedly correct the imbalance.

The drugs prescribed for mental illness mess around with the brain in various complex and poorly understood ways. They may relieve distress by dulling all feelings, good as well as bad, but at the cost of serious ‘side effects’ and harm to the brain. Some drugs entail heightened risk of aggression or suicide.

Stephen Shenfield,

 (via email)

Reply:

We agree with much of what you say, and of course you’re correct to distinguish between a hormone and a neurotransmitter. But we’re not sure we’d want to throw all psychiatry – the treatment of mental health conditions with drugs – out of the window, given that many conditions, for example schizophrenia, are known to occur across family generations and therefore seem to have some genetic component. The article rightly argues that environment and biology are both factors.

The article states that mental health is the result of the correct balance of chemicals in the brain. You seem to reject this theory because nobody knows what that balance is, or even how to measure it, yet it seems to us that an optimal evolutionary balance must logically exist. We can’t see what you’re objecting to here. If there are stressful environmental factors at play, these will trigger ‘fight or flight’ hormones like cortisol and adrenaline which will in turn alter the brain chemistry. Conversely, if someone pops an ecstasy pill at a festival they’ll be flooded with dopamine and oxytocin hormones, and that will change their behaviour towards others. So environment changes chemistry and chemistry changes environment.

Of course it’s true that the chemistry of the brain is poorly understood, and that advances are achieved more by trial and error than by sound theory, but the same could be said of most branches of medicine, and even most branches of science. Some drugs have caused unexpected and disastrous side effects but that’s why the testing procedures are so long and complex, and we certainly wouldn’t want to reduce those in socialism.

The article’s larger point, with which you surely won’t disagree, is that a huge proportion of the world’s mental health problems, including epidemic rates of suicide, are caused directly or indirectly by the capitalist system itself, and that no amount of drugs is going to make that particular problem go away. 

Editors.

Marx, Engels and Science (2019)

Ray Lankester

From the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

That Marx followed the progress of natural science can be seen from the fact that chemistry professor Carl Schorlemmer and evolutionary biologist Ray Lankester were among the nine who attended the private funeral gathering to mourn the passing of an obscure economic scientist whom Engels eulogized as ‘the best hated and most calumniated man of his times.’

Engels studied mathematical physics in many sources, including the classic eighteenth-century Traité de dynamique by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert (co-publisher with Denis Diderot of the great French Encyclopédie).  However, his primary modern source for mathematical physics was the Feynman lecture course of his day, the celebrated nineteenth-century Treatise on Natural Philosophy by Thomson and Tait (popularly known as ‘T&T’).

Engels’s primary modern source for chemistry was the celebrated Treatise on Chemistry by Roscoe and Schorlemmer. Those familiar with the Marx-Engels correspondence will have met organic chemist Carl Schorlemmer as a Marx/Engels comrade-in-exile from 1848 and their trusted scientific consultant.

The two treatises that Engels primarily studied happened to be the standard university textbooks from the mid–nineteenth century right up to the First World War.

Engels adopted a field (non-atomic) approach to electricity (of course, the electron had yet to be discovered, but so too had quantum electrodynamic field theory). To deprive Marx of an atomic theory is to ignore his PhD dissertation on Epicurus in which he famously defended Epicurus’s statistical atomic ‘swerve’ (a Greek pre-echo of quantum indeterminism) for allowing ‘free will’ to arise within a primarily deterministic atomic world.

Volume 31 of Section of Marx Engels Collected Works MEGA(2) [not yet translated into English] lets us glimpse the extent to which Marx took an active interest in the progress of natural science. A paper by MEGA scholars Somnath Ghosh and Pradip Baksi sets out the contents of Marx’s scientific notebooks of 1877-83:

Notebook 1. On the Atomic Theory
Notebook 2. Tabular summaries of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 3. Tables of chemistry
Notebooks 4 & 5. Tables of inorganic and organic chemistry
Notebook 6. Formulae of organic chemistry

Marx’s Notebook Sources include:

• Chemistry: Lothar Meyer, Henry Roscoe, Carl Schorlemmer, Friedrich Kekule
• Modern chemistry: Marx attended August Hoffmann’s lecture course at the Royal College of Chemistry, London
• Agricultural Chemistry: Justus Liebig
• Physiological Chemistry: Wilhelm Kuhne
• Human Physiology: Ludimarr Hermann; Johannes Ranke
• Physics: Benjamin Witzschel
• Geology: Joseph Jukes
• Studies in electromagnetism: Edouard Hospitalier

Forthcoming natural scientific materials (perhaps now published) include Marx’s notes and excerpts on Physics, History of Technology, Geology, Soil Science, History of Agricultural Plants, Agricultural Chemistry, Physiology of Plants, of Animals and of Human Beings, parts of Mathematics and on the interrelationships of the Natural Sciences and Philosophy. One day we will discover just what the mature Marx actually wrote about the latter.

WJC

Cooking the Books: Not applying technology (2019)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his book Fully Automated Luxury Communism Aaron Bastani quotes the US economist Paul Romer’s definition of technological change as ‘an improvement in the instructions for mixing together raw materials’ (he meant physical materials). He summarises Romer’s conclusion as that ‘over time, as technology develops, the value increasingly arises from the instructions for materials as opposed to the materials themselves’.

This is similar to what Marx, in ‘The Fragment on Machines’ in the Grundrisse, had said would eventually happen, with general scientific knowledge becoming a more important factor in production than direct labour. As this knowledge is a social product it’s an additional argument for socialism.

According to Bastani, Romer made the further point that ‘once the cost of creating a new set of instructions has been incurred the instructions can be used over and over again at no additional cost’. In other words, these instructions, once developed, could be available to be used for free in much the same way as digitised articles, books, films and music can be.

But there is a snag, as Bastani noted. This knowledge is privately owned and only made available by the developers to others at a cost – the royalty payments for the use of the patent. Some is even kept as a ‘trade secret’. Patents and other so-called ‘intellectual property’ rights are merely a legal fiction, applicable solely because they are entirely the product of a legal enactment, enforced by the courts and, ultimately, by the coercive power of the state.

Property rights over material goods are also a legal fiction, though not as blatant, as people can imagine more easily material goods being possessed in the absence of legal backing. On analysis, however, property in land, factories and other means for producing material things is not the same as physically possessing them. The owner of a landed estate does not physically possess the land in the same way that they possess their clothes or their car; nor does a capitalist shareholder. Their property rights have also been created and are enforced by the state.

The fact that scientific and technological knowledge has developed to the point where it could be applied to produce enough for everybody to be able to satisfy their material needs strengthens the case for socialism. It confirms that, whereas capitalism has developed the potential for this, it is incapable of activating it for the benefit of all. Capitalism has solved the problem of producing enough for all, but cannot distribute it. Only socialism can do this, on the basis of production directly for use, not profit, and distribution according to needs, not rationing through the wages system.

‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’, as a description of socialism, is a deliberate exaggeration to dissociate the idea of communism from what happened in Russia with its shortages and queues. But it risks another misunderstanding – that socialism only becomes possible if there is ‘full’ automation. This would mean that it is still not really possible. This in fact is the justification that Bastani (and his fellow FALC advocate, Ash Sarkar) give for supporting the gradualism of the left-wing of the Labour Party. A better term, though admittedly not quite as snappy, might be ‘Highly Automated, Non-Austerity Communism’.

Top to Bottom (2019)

Book Review from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett: The Inner Level. Penguin £9.99.

A decade ago the authors wrote The Spirit Level (discussed in the Socialist Standard for June 2009 and December 2010). There they showed how countries with higher levels of inequality also had more problems such as shorter life expectancy, more obese people and less social mobility. In this new book they extend their analysis to mental and psychological issues (see their website www.equalitytrust.org.uk for more information).

The main claim is that problems with a social gradient (those which are more common as you go down the social hierarchy, e.g. in terms of income) are more severe in more unequal societies. Thus the incidence of schizophrenia per head of population is higher in countries that exhibit greater inequality (almost three times as high in Brazil as in France, for instance). The more unequal US states have higher levels of depression. Generally, a greater degree of inequality can result in more social anxiety, which may itself be responsible for more problem gambling and risky alcohol consumption. Higher inequality can also make people more narcissistic, with an exaggeratedly positive view of themselves, which may again be related to social anxiety. More unequal countries show more bullying by children, fewer visits to art galleries and museums, and less civic participation (belonging to clubs of various kinds).

Inequality, then, is a bad thing, but it has not been a permanent feature of society: ‘throughout most of our specifically human prehistory, we lived in extraordinarily egalitarian hunting and gathering societies, in which food was shared and goods were passed between people’. Hunter-gatherers had no dominance hierarchy, and there were social constraints on alpha-male tendencies. It was the rise of agriculture that was probably responsible for the development of inequality. The social hierarchy which exists today is not the result of natural differences in people’s abilities; rather, any such differences are a product of this hierarchy since, for instance, the number of years spent in poverty can affect a child’s intellectual development.

As in The Spirit Level, Wilkinson and Pickett argue for a more egalitarian social system, or at least one where the degree of inequality roughly corresponds to that in the currently less unequal countries, where the incomes of the richest fifth are ‘only’ about four times higher than those of the poorest fifth. They argue that co-operatives and employee-owned companies can contribute to this and to the aim of a more environmentally sustainable society, with the challenge being ‘to improve well-being without growth’. There would be an end to consumerism, which is itself driven by status insecurity, and to wasteful consumption. The demands of work would be reduced, with greater leisure and so better health, both mental and physical.

The book is very informative about the extent and consequences of inequality, but achieving all that the authors envisage in a society still based on employment and production for profit would be a real pipedream.

Paul Bennett

Unequal society (2009)

Book Review from the June 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Allen Lane, 2009.

The main theme of this book, as summarised in its subtitle, is that people living in less unequal societies almost always do better than those living in more unequal societies. This unsurprising theme is spelled out in the nine chapters in the middle part of the book dealing with the costs of inequality in various areas of life and society: community life and social relations; mental health and drug use; physical health and life expectancy; obesity; educational performance; teenage births; violence; imprisonment and punishment; and social mobility.

The first part of the book—titled Material Success, Social Failure—is an uncontroversial, even anodyne commentary on where we are now. Material success is a privilege of the minority: “the least well-off people even in the richest countries sometimes find themselves without enough money for food.”

Socialists are more likely to be interested in what the authors have to say in Part 3, A Better Society. Wilkinson and Pickett present themselves as good people with good ideas writing of the “need to create more equal societies able to meet our real social needs.” I particularly like the cartoon they reproduce of a rich, portly father explaining to his small son, “It goes in cycles, Junior. Sometimes the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Sometimes the rich get richer and the poor stay the same.”

But the authors are really not as radical as they pretend. They like the charitable, friendly society, mutual, credit-union side of capitalism more then the openly profit-seeking side. They want a nice capitalism, not a nasty one. So when it comes to “what can be done?” they list reforms like “plug loopholes in the tax system, limit ‘business expenses’, increase top tax rates, and even legislate to limit maximum pay in a company to some multiple of the average or lowest paid.”

Stan Parker

Life Support (2019)

Book Review from the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lee Humber: Vital Signs: The Deadly Costs of Health Inequality. Pluto Press £17.99.

What determines the health of an individual or of a whole population? Is it the healthcare they receive, or is it more to do with the conditions in which they live? Humber’s answer is that it is very much the ‘social determinants of health’ that affect a person’s wellbeing and life expectancy. Biomedical models focus on a person’s relationship with disease and the expertise of the medical profession, but a more multifaceted approach also looks at factors such as polluted air, overcrowded households, diet, and the pressures of employment.

Of course this does not mean that the kind of healthcare received is beside the point. One claim is that cuts in UK government health spending resulted in 45,000 more deaths among those over sixty between 2010 and 2014. In the US almost twice as much as a proportion of GDP is spent on healthcare than in the UK, yet life expectancy is several years less. About half of Americans can only afford the most basic health insurance, and 45,000 die each year because they lack health coverage. In spite of the importance of diet, GPs rarely ask patients about it.

One chapter is a critique of the ‘inequality thesis’ as set out by various authors. Humber claims that they rely too much on subjective notions such as status and social trust, and pay insufficient attention to social factors such as the quality of food. This overlooks the fact that Wilkinson and Pickett in particular rely on inequality of income as the crucial point, and there is no reason why an inequality-based approach and one looking at other societal factors cannot be combined.

It lacks an overall theme, and does not emphasis inequality as much as the subtitle might suggest, but Humber’s book gives a good picture of the deleterious effects of what others have termed the ‘medical–industrial complex’.

Paul Bennett

Inequality: Yachts and Diseases (2019)

From the October 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Huge numbers are hard to visualize. A billion dollars, let’s say. That’s the sum you have to accumulate to get yourself listed as a billionaire in Forbes magazine and denounced by Bernie as a member of the ‘billionaire class.’

Start with a wad of twenty $100 banknotes. That makes $2,000. Then imagine a suitcase packed with 500 of those wads. That makes a million. Then imagine entering a big storeroom with 100 of those suitcases lined up on shelves. That still gives us only one tenth of a billion.

Or we can tackle the problem in another way. We can ask what can be done with a billion dollars. What can be bought with that much money? What can be achieved?

Homes and yachts

Meet Mr Mukesh Ambani – chairman, managing director, and largest shareholder of Reliance Industries Ltd., a conglomerate that owns numerous firms throughout India. He spent one of his fifty-plus billions having a home built for himself, his wife, and their three children. With the possible exception of Buckingham Palace, it’s the priciest home in the world. Named Antilia after a mythical island in the Atlantic, it towers 568 feet over the smog-laden Mumbai landscape. Its facilities include parking space for 168 cars, a car service station, 3 helipads on the roof, 9 elevators, a spa, an ice cream parlor, terraced gardens, a temple, a vast library, a dance studio, a swimming pool, a gym, yoga room, and snow room, a ballroom, guest suites, a 50-seat theatre, and accommodation for 600 permanent staff. Ample use was made of marble, rare woods, and mother of pearl in the construction.

Another way to spend a billion dollars is to purchase a fancy yacht. If it hasn’t yet been snapped up, you could buy the Streets of Monaco, a ‘floating city’ that displays a miniature scene from the fabled principality. When it comes to yachts, however, a billion is not enough to take you right to the top. That place is occupied by the History Supreme, made of solid gold and platinum and valued at almost 5 billion dollars. It belongs to Mr Robert Kuok Hock Nien of Malaysia.

Trachoma

Searching for more ways to spend a billion dollars, I came across this news item. The World Health Organization (WHO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, had declared that it could eradicate trachoma within 4 years if it had a billion dollars to devote to that purpose.

Trachoma is a highly contagious eye infection. It scars the eyelids and turns them inward, so that the eyelashes scrape the cornea with every blink, causing great pain. Untreated, it leads to permanent blindness. Trachoma is endemic in many poor rural areas and affects over 21 million people, over a million of whom are already blind. However, the bacterium that causes trachoma is known. The condition is easy to treat, cure, and prevent.

So, says the WHO, it could eradicate this scourge if it were able to allocate $250 million a year to the task for 4 years. How much does it currently allocate for trachoma? Published data do not answer this question. The WHO’s Programme Budget 2018—2019 does not give figures for any specific communicable diseases except HIV and hepatitis (which are lumped together), tuberculosis, and malaria. Trachoma is placed in the category of ‘neglected tropical diseases’ (NTDs) alongside river blindness, leprosy, trypanosomiasis, lymphatic filariasis, elephantiasis, and dracunculiasis. This is not a complete list because ‘new diseases are constantly being added to the portfolio’; all low-income countries are affected by at least 5 NTDs (Section 1.4).

The amount spent by the WHO in 2018—2019 on all NTDs was $107.3 million. Of this $42.6 million was spent at headquarters, leaving only $64.7 million for work in the field, mainly in Africa and Southeast Asia. How much of this went to treat trachoma we do not know, but clearly it must have been far below the $250million required for eradication within 4 years.

This low level of expenditure reflects the chronic underfunding of WHO programmes by national governments. As one analyst remarks, ‘the WHO is required to function on a budget equal to that of the university hospital in Geneva [Switzerland] and less than the budget of many major hospitals in the United States.’ Hence also the pitifully modest targets that the WHO sets itself – for instance, to reduce ‘the number of people requiring interventions against NTDs’ from a baseline of 1,700 million to – wait for it! –1,500 million.

‘Neglected tropical diseases’ – that is not a medical term. Rather, it describes an economic and political situation. Pharmaceutical companies and entrepreneurial physicians neglect these diseases because hardly any of the people who suffer from them can afford to buy medical goods and services. As economists say, they create negligible ‘effective demand.’ And relieving their misery evidently comes very low on lists of governmental priorities.

Implications

The contrast drawn here highlights the cruelty and waste of a social system that caters with unstinted generosity to the trivial whims of a tiny minority while brushing aside the vital needs of millions of people. Many similar contrasts could be drawn. The sum of money could be larger or smaller. Instead of yachts we could talk about private jets. Instead of treatment for disease we could discuss the supply of drinking water (although that too is a healthcare issue).

It is not essential that comparisons be drawn in terms of money. Instead we could, for example, compare the numbers of people employed in socially useful and in socially useless work (money-handling jobs coming under the latter category). Money is not a very good measure of human effort and other resource use, even though in this society it is the most convenient one. Thus the value of Antilia on the real estate market has risen to two billion dollars, but this does not mean that the resources embodied in its construction have changed. Conversely, money values take no account of many very important resources.

Nor is it essential to focus solely on the luxury consumption of the wealthy. Luxury consumption is a significant and growing source of waste, but several other sources of waste are no less significant. Annual world military expenditure is rising toward the two-trillion-dollar mark ($1.822tn in 2018 according to SIPRI). There is also the waste inherent in unemployment and in built-in obsolescence, the waste of the creative abilities of working people, and the destruction of goods that cannot be sold at a profit.

A gloomy picture, to be sure. But it does draw attention to the vast scale of the resources that could be redirected to satisfy people’s needs and meet the climatic, environmental, and other global challenges faced by our species, once those resources are appropriated by the human community and brought under its democratic control.

Stefan

It's capitalism (2019)

Letter to issue 1280 of the Weekly Worker

Dave Vincent returns to the issue of foreign workers, claiming that nobody has answered his arguments against controlled immigration (Letters, December 12). I refer readers to only some of my own letters on migration and let them judge: March 20 2014; April 17 2014; June 18 2015; June 22 2017; July 6 2017.

Dave asks, “Do indigenous peoples worldwide have any rights at all over unprecedented numbers of those coming into their country without their agreement?”

Competition under capitalism leads to false ideas about the burden of newcomers to native-born workers, who claim first pick on ‘our’ hospitals, ‘our’ housing, ‘our’ social security benefits. In fact, bad housing, hospital waiting lists, low pay and bad working conditions are universal problems. They are a consequence of the essential poverty of all people who depend on being employed in order to live. There was never a time when life was easy. Migrants did not create the problems. They arrive here with the false hope of escaping the same misery in their home countries, but find when they arrive here they have to share it and take the blame for it.

Since its inception, capitalism has drawn workers from poorer parts of the country and from abroad to more developed regions in order to satisfy its labour needs. And, as Marx said, capitalists require to also build up an industrial reserve army for the bosses to maintain their dominance in the job market and to control wage levels. All those people migrating are simply obeying the imperative that they must try to find a place to work. No amount of restrictions will change that fact.

The resentment against migrants is a class matter and such prejudice is inflamed by the many sections of the ruling class. Capitalism has sometimes been against immigration restrictions by promoting the free movement and availability of wage labour. But, at the same time, the capitalist social system is a fertile breeding ground for anti-foreigner policies. This may seem like a contradiction, but that is how it is, for capitalism is riddled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It cannot be a system of human harmony - division and conflict are in its very nature. Capitalism is a ‘dog eat dog’ world and will remain so until it is abolished.

The solution to the immigration crisis lies not with building fences, but with creating the conditions that do not necessitate people leaving their homes, their family, their friends and neighbours. The reality is that the solution is socialism. In the meantime, instead of undermining the ability of migrant workers to cross borders in search of work, migrants need to be unionised, uniting migrant workers alongside local workers in a collective struggle to maintain and improve upon wages and conditions. As long as workers are viewing migrants as the cause of their problems, they leave themselves divided and distracted.

The concern of working people over wages, unemployment, welfare and public services is totally legitimate. However, placing the blame on migrants does not address the causes of these problems or bring improvements to the situation. The problem is the capitalist system itself. The path to beginning to solve these problems is workers’ unity across ethnic, religious and national lines. It is vital that the trade unions make the recruitment of migrant labour a top priority.

There is your answer, Dave, as painful as it is. No worker, solely by birthright, has a guarantee to a secure, decent life under capitalism. It is wishful, utopian thinking to believe otherwise.

Alan Johnstone 

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Rear View: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’ (2019)

The Rear View Column from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’

This is the famous opening sentence of The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The original Manifesto of 1848 listed some progressive reforms, but ceased advocating them by 1872. The measures – ranging from nationalisation to a heavy progressive or graduated income tax – may have had merit in 1848 but not today. Indeed, Marx and Engels in their joint preface to the 1872 edition stated: ‘No special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be differently worded today.’ Yet this does not stop our opponents, particularly on the Right, from resurrecting ideas, long dead and buried, to besmirch socialism/communism. The Mises Institute, for example, has used them to suggest that socialism is to blame for the suffering of our class in state capitalist Venezuela. More recently, in an article titled ‘How the Presidential candidates rehash failed communist ideas’ (thedailybell.com, 15 October), Joe Jarvis writes ‘Marx would fit right in running for President amongst the current crowded field of “democratic socialists” clamoring to one-up each other with the most communist platform. For instance, Bernie Sanders’ platform includes a top estate tax–aka inheritance or death tax–of 77%.’ Later, for good measure, he adds the failings of Bolsheviks and state capitalist China to the mix. Pure nonsense of course because, as Rosa Luxemburg said succinctly, ‘without the conscious will and action of the majority of the proletariat, there can be no Socialism.’


‘Social democracy is nothing but a stinking corpse’

This is Rosa Luxemburg again, in a speech to the founding conference of the KPD (German Communist Party). This, like Marx and Engel’s spectre, was rather premature. Even Jarvis in his article notes: ‘This list included things like free public education, a progressive income tax, and a state-owned central banking monopoly. That’s all been accomplished of course.’ Socialists acknowledge that certain reforms won by our class have helped to improve general living and working conditions. Examples are to be found in fields such as education, housing, child employment, work conditions and social security. However, such ‘successes’ have in reality done little more than keep workers and their families functioning as the fundamental relationship between worker and capitalist remains unchanged. ‘Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him’ (Karl Marx, Capital, Chapter 10, The Working Day). The reforms which today’s Social Democrats and others pursue will not end war (‘Americans want an end to forever wars. But that’s not what Trump offers’ (theguardian.com, 18 October) and poverty (‘Essex lorry deaths: All 39 migrants found dead were Vietnamese nationals, police say’, mirror.co.uk, 1 November).


Gravediggers unite!

The Communist Manifesto: ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’ Don’t despair! One Dr. Rogers, researching into early societies, was once quoted in the Guardian (17 December, 1980) as saying: ‘I do not think aggression is innate. I think aggression is something that man learns. Aggression comes as soon as you get possessions’. More recently (29 October, 2017) in the same paper there is a fascinating report on the Ju/’hoansi people of the Kalahari. ‘They have always been fiercely egalitarian. They hate inequality or showing off, and shun formal leadership institutions. It’s what made them part of the most successful, sustainable civilisation in human history.‘ ‘The internet was brought about by widespread voluntary cooperation, open standards and freely-produced software. Capitalism only made it unbearable and unusable with pop-up ads, overlay ads, full-page ads, pre-video ads, autoplay videos, firewalls, data regulations and malware’ (@OfficialSPGB, 31 October). We also agree with author Arundhati Roy that ‘Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead’ (socialist-courier.blogsot.com, 2 November).


Learning from the dead

Socialism, as originally expressed by the followers of Robert Owen, appeared for the first time in their Co-operative Magazine of November 1827 and meant common ownership (not nationalisation or state capitalism). Later, in 1875, at the first meeting of the German Social Democratic Party, Eduard Bernstein and others claimed that capitalism could be reformed to meet working class interests. By championing gradual, ethically-inspired reforms they rejected socialism’s revolutionary and materialist foundations and paved the way for the likes of the UK Labour Party.

Neo-Liberalism: Old Religion Repackaged (2019)

From the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

It’s not neo-liberalism that’s to blame – it’s capitalism

In Marx’s day the doctrine that the government should not interfere in the operation of the capitalist economy was known as ‘Manchesterism’ after the city in the north of England where capitalist industry was then most developed and whose capitalists wanted to be free to pursue profits as they thought fit.

Its advocates preached ‘free trade’ (the abolition of tariffs on imported goods and bounties on exported goods) and letting market forces operate freely. They even opposed laws against adulteration and to limit the hours of work of those they employed. Also known as ‘economic liberalism’, it had roots in the eighteenth century in French manufacturers and merchants who told the royal bureaucracy to leave them alone and let them get on with their business (‘laissez faire’) and in Adam Smith’s curious theory that behind market forces was some ‘invisible hand’ ensuring that these operated for the common good.

However, a practical problem soon arose over industries and services which all capitalist businesses had to make use of, such as transport (roads, canals, railways) and communications (post, telegraph). Capitalists did not want these to be in the hands of any one group of their number who would thereby be in a position to hold the rest of them to ransom and charge monopoly prices. This was why in Britain, as early as 1844, a Railways Act contained a clause providing, if need be, for state ownership, so-called ‘nationalisation.’ In Europe railways had been in the hands of the state almost from the beginning because of their strategic importance for transporting troops in times of war. In the event Britain settled for price regulation by the government, which was also a violation of laissez faire.

Economic liberalism never caught on in its entirety outside Britain as ‘free trade’ was seen, not without justification, by rival capitalists in other countries as a means of giving British capitalists a competitive advantage. They demanded that their governments ‘protect’ them from such competition through tariffs on imported British goods. Beyond that, however, they embraced the doctrine that governments should not interfere with their pursuit of profits.

Enter Keynes

Between the two world wars of the last century even Britain abandoned free trade and the gold standard. An era of government-created fiat money opened up, in which governments had to pursue an interventionist policy to manage their currency. With the financial crash of 1929 and the big slump in production that followed, governments also came under pressure to intervene in the capitalist economy to try to get it expanding again. ‘Public works’ programmes were initiated, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal in the USA and Hitler’s rearmament in Germany. In his 1936 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Income the British economist John Maynard Keynes provided a theoretical justification for such ad-hoc schemes. He argued that left to itself – laissez faire – capitalism would not necessarily recover from a slump of its own accord, as economists had preached till then, but that government intervention, in the form of a tax policy to stimulate demand was required. In the event of a boom, this could be prevented from ending in a slump, as booms had previously always done, by the government pursing the opposite policy of using taxes to discourage consumption. Thanks to government intervention, steady capitalist expansion could be engineered.

Naturally this theory, especially stimulating demand in a slump by redistributing purchasing power from the rich to the non-rich, was acclaimed by reformists as a justification for the reforms they already favoured. Those that had still regarded themselves as in the Marxist tradition abandoned Marx for Keynes.

Keynesianism was not consciously pursued as a government policy till the beginning of the Second World War. When that war was not followed by a slump, as the end of the First World War had been, but by a 25-year period of capitalist expansion with only minor ‘recessions,’ many open supporters of capitalism hailed Keynes for having saved capitalism.

But this was an illusion. Put to the test when the post-war boom came to an end in the 1970s, Keynesian policies resulted in what was called ‘stagflation’ – a rise in the general price level while the economy remained stagnant. The post-war boom had been caused by other factors such as reconstruction and the spontaneous expansion of internal and world markets.

Exit Keynes

The end of the post-war boom led to what was called a ‘fiscal crisis of the capitalist state’. Governments depend for what they spend on levying taxes, which ultimately fall on capitalist profits, and on borrowing money from those who have it. With less profit being made, there was less to tax and less to borrow. Government had no alternative but to cut their spending rather than increasing it as Keynes had advocated they should do to get out of a slump. Another economic theory was required to replace Keynesianism and justify this.

The new theory, popularised by the American economist Milton Friedman, called itself ‘monetarism’ as it advocated a tight monetary policy, i.e. cutting government spending, and letting market forces revive the capitalist economy by restoring profitability of its own accord as asset prices and real wages fell. This was not really a new theory but a revival of pre-Keynesian economic liberalism.

There is some justification, then, for calling this replacement policy ‘neo-liberalism.’ What is not justified is seeing its application as a free choice on the part the part of governments. It was something imposed on them by the workings of the capitalist economy, given the situation it was in. Governments had no choice but to apply it. In other words, capitalism was the cause, with neo-liberalism merely the political and ideological justification.

What the capitalist conditions imposed was that governments should cut their spending or, rather, cut taxing profits with the result that they had less to spend. With less to spend, ‘austerity’ was the order of the day in all countries irrespective of the political colour of their government. It was not just Reagan and Thatcher in the USA and Britain but also Mitterrand in France. Public services were cut back. ‘Welfare’ and ‘benefits’ were slashed, especially for those who for one reason or another were not able to find a job. Since the economists preached that there was a so-called ‘natural rate of unemployment,’ which could be as high as 6 percent, millions of already poor people had their standard of living reduced even further. Other reforms enacted during the post-war boom were whittled away or rolled back.

To reduce their borrowing, governments sold off state assets to private capitalist firms, who were granted the right to make profits from them in return for themselves raising the capital to finance them.

As a policy of trying to ensure steady sustained capitalist development, neo-liberalism has been just as much a failure as Keynesianism was, as spectacularly shown by the Crash of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed. What this showed is that, no matter what policy governments adopt, capitalism goes relentlessly on its way, repeatedly going through the boom/slump cycle that it has done since the 1820s. The fact is that governments do not – cannot – control the way the capitalist economy works. It is the other way round. It is the operation of capitalism that constrains what governments do; all they can do is little more than react to what capitalism throws at them. There is a sense in which they do have a choice. They could choose to try to defy what capitalism’s economic forces dictate but, if they do, they will make matters worse. As Marx pointed out with regard to banking legislation, while governments cannot make things better, they can make things worse:

  ‘Ignorant and confused banking laws, such as those of 1844-5, may intensify the monetary crisis. But no bank legislation can abolish crises themselves’ (Capital, Volume 3, Chapter 30, Penguin Books edition, p. 621).

This warning is apt because left-wing populists are calling for neo-liberalism to be replaced by government intervention to spend money to end austerity and get capitalism expanding again – a revival of Keynes’s discredited idea that could be called ‘neo-Keynesianism.’ As Marxists know, both from the past experience of such attempts and from a knowledge of how capitalism works, this is doomed to fail and would make things worse.

It is not neo-liberalism that is the problem, but capitalism. It is not a change of policy that is required, but a change of socio-economic system.

Adam Buick