Who The Hell Was Karl Marx? (1998)

The following piece is a paper that was presented at the Socialist Party of Great Britain's 1998 Summer School, Marxism Revisited, which was held at Fircroft College in Birmingham, England. It is reproduced from the pamphlet, Marxism Revisited.

"Prepare to meet the greatest, perhaps the only, genuine philosopher of our times, who will soon attract the eyes of all the world. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel, fused into one person - I say 'fused', not juxtaposed - and you have Karl Marx."

That was written by Moses Hess to his friend, Feuerbach, at the time when Marx was only twenty-four years of age. By that time, he had already attracted the attention of most of those people in Europe who were interested in formulating socialist ideas. He had made the acquaintance of the leading radical democrats in Germany; and, of course, he had met with the one person who, before Marx had been writing about communist ideas, had been producing work advocating a communist society in Germany, namely, Moses Hess, whose work, The Sacred History of Mankind, put forward ideas later to be adopted in Marx's writings.

That is one, very complimentary, statement about Marx. Here is another:

"Marx was the best hated, and most lied about, man of his time. Governments, both absolutist and republican, deported him from their territories. Capitalists, whether conservative or ultra-democratic, vied with one another in heaping slanders upon him. All this he brushed aside as though it were cobweb, ignoring it, answering only when extreme necessity compelled him; and he died, beloved, revered and mourned by millions of revolutionary fellow workers - from the mines of Siberia to California, in all parts of Europe and America - and I make bold to say that, though he may have had many opponents, he had hardly one personal enemy. His name will endure through the ages; and so will his work!"

That was, of course, the speech at his graveside on the 14th of March 1883 by his lifelong collaborator, Frederick Engels.

Here is just one other comment which tells you something about the personal qualities of Marx, personal qualities that are often somewhat overlooked. "Of all the great, little, or average men that I have ever known, Marx is one of the few who was free from vanity. He was too great and too strong to be vain. He never struck an attitude: he was always himself." That was William Liebknecht's comment in the biographical memoirs of Marx that he wrote.

I want to begin by saying, not simply, "When Karl Marx was born . . ." but that Karl Marx was born. In other words, he was a human being. Unlike many great figures of history and of philosophical thought, whom people gather to remember and to think about, Karl Marx is not some kind of miraculous, messianic figure who came down to earth in order to produce some sort of miraculous picture of the future. He was not someone from whom works of genius emanated because he was, himself, some extraordinary genius. He was not somebody who was out of this world; he was somebody who was of this world. He made mistakes: he was born at a certain time; he reflected that time; he transcended many of the conventions and errors of that time; and he was to make errors of his own which would contribute, to some extent, to the understanding of Marxism in our own time, and that is a very important point, because I think that, at the outset of a weekend of talking about Marx and who he was and what he did, it is extremely important that we don't push ourselves into this rather dangerous ghetto of turning Marxism into a figure of religiosity and Marx himself into some kind of extraordinary, non-human, prophetic entity.

So, Marx was born, Marx died, Marx left us a legacy of ideas that we must now build upon; and I propose to deal with those ideas (and a huge number of such ideas) in four categories. Marx started off in his writings in the 1840s by addressing himself to the problem of human alienation. Marx did not discover the alienated position of human beings in society. Human beings in property societies have always felt alienated. They have always felt to some extent separate from themselves; mediated in their social activity through the channels of property; limited and constrained in their development because of the particular class they were born into; capable only of that which was historically possible at any one time. And there has always been an element of frustration and constraint within the human condition as long as people have been divided into classes in society.

Marx started off in the group around the philosopher Hegel, and particularly the radical disciples of Hegel, who looked at the problem of society as being the expression of alienation through religion, and who questioned religion as being a means of salvation from alienation. Marx went on to produce his own critique of their anti-religious position, because what he said is that to simply secularise what had hitherto been seen as religious problems is in fact to fail to understand why a society requires illusions in the first place in order to sustain it.

Marx says, "The real happiness of the people requires the abolition of religion, which is their illusory happiness. In demanding that they give up illusions about their conditions, we demand that they give up a condition that requires illusions."

There is something fundamental in the methodology of Marx's thinking inherent in that statement. It is that illusions themselves are not simply errors of judgement. They are not simply failures to grasp what sensible people would understand. They are, in fact, the reflection of a condition in which the only way that you are going to be able to develop yourself - the only way that you are going to be able to reflect the social situation that is around you - is by building illusions that will protect you.

In a capitalist society of the kind that we have now, the illusion that, not only do we have to go to work to earn a living, but that there is some sort of innate freedom in going to work and some choice in whom we work for, is precisely a reflection of a condition in which we do not have those choices. In fact, in any society, the more that people talk about choice, the more you can be certain that choices simply do not exist. It is only a condition where there is an absence of choice that makes choice such an important part of the lexicon of self-delusion.

Marx is therefore saying that to seek happiness - and one can actually find enormous reservoirs of happiness in illusion; in self-deception; in the belief that life might be miserable, but heaven will be wonderful; in the assumption that, if you work hard now you will have a horrible time and you will be paid very little and perhaps your family and your immediate circumstances will suffer, but think of what life will be like in ten years' time when you are one rung up the ladder of wage slavery. These illusions are part of a necessary superstructure which exists to reflect a society that requires illusions in order to tolerate it.

The essence of these illusions, for Marx, is not simply metaphysical or about philosophical apprehensions of existence, but it is, in fact, rooted in the most material activity of human beings - arguably, apart from speech, the most unique capacity of human beings - and that is the ability to work. Work, says Marx, is the basis of alienation in a property society, because property is, in fact, merely the accumulation of appropriated - or, if you like, stolen - work from other people. So, in his earliest writings about alienation, Marx says:

"The worker does not affirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and unhappy, develops no free physical and mental energy, but mortifies his flesh and ruins his mind. His work is not voluntary but coerced, forced labour. It is not the satisfaction of a need but only a means to satisfy other needs. Its alien character is obvious from the fact that, as no physical or other pressures exist, labour is avoided like the plague."

And, of course, we see that today with the distinction that arises in our vocabulary between work and employment. When people say, "I hate work!" They don't hate work: they need to be physically and mentally energetic. They will very often return from their jobs to work very hard, to have hobbies, to go to places, to help other people, to do things which are going to be of benefit to themselves and those they like; but what they hate and what they regard as some sort of fearsome plague is the coercion of having to work for somebody else, of having to be employed, which after all comes from the French verb 'to be used' - to be used up - by somebody else.

Marx went beyond what most philosophers start and finish with, which is a position of human beings alienated in society, and an attempt to enquire as to the cause of that alienation. Marx said, not only is the position of human beings as, at worst, an unfree people within a productive environment which does not allow them to be free, which necessitates illusions as a source of happiness; but all of this is historically rooted.

Here is a second, broad theme of Marx's outlook in relation to human development. He sees history as a dynamic force. "In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will." The first, very important, point: people do not enter into relations with one another in society because of choice - again that important concept which is always there as a delusion where you don't have real freedom. There is no independence from ones social environment. There is not a choice about whether you are rich or poor, whether you are born into the aristocracy or whether you are a peasant. There is not a choice as to which part of the world you are born into and what kind of historical developments have occurred before you are born. These relationships are inherited as a result of the position of classes that have gone before you and the formation of society into a pattern which is independent of you. These relations of production, says Marx, correspond to a particular stage of development of the material forces of production.

So here Marx juxtaposes two approaches to production: the relations of production and the forces of production. Broadly speaking, we can say that the forces of production are the means whereby wealth is produced, services are produced. The factories, the mines, the offices, the transport systems, the communication systems - these are forces of production, and they develop at a particular rate and in a particular way; but they develop within the context of particular relationships, and those relationships are relationships of class: who owns them; who doesn't own them; who has power over them; who doesn't have power over them; who has access to the people with power; and who is disempowered entirely. The forces of production and the relations of production are the two key concepts. The sum total of these relations constitutes the economic structure or, you might say, the system of society, the real foundation upon which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond particular forms of social consciousness.

Two points here: the first one is that there is a social system. Marx is moving beyond this idea that society is simply a set of relationships which are developing independently of people's wills, and a set of forces of production which have their own independent momentum. He is saying that there is, in fact, a systemic whole; there is a structure; there is something which is beyond exit if you are going to be part of society, and that is the system of society in which you live. You cannot live as a person of capitalist society in a feudal society. You could not live as a feudal landlord in the classical antiquity of slave ownership. You are entrapped within that system of society as long as those particular relationships exist. And, secondly, Marx is saying that the ideas which support that society, the laws, the political ideologies, all of the social consciousness, is in fact an ideology. It is, in Marx's own terms, a false consciousness which is there in order to bolster and maintain and concretise those relationships of society and make them in fact appear as if they will always exist.

"The mode of production in material life determines the social, political and intellectual life processes in general." And then Marx says, "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." And here, again, Marx is saying something extraordinarily important, and something that nobody had said before: that the way in which people think is not, as the idealist philosophers had imagined, the process of the production of ideas independently of the material environment within which the humans live. The mind does not have some life of its own. Ideas do not have some capacity to uproot themselves from the world around them, but, in fact, the basis of all social consciousness is the existence of human beings in a material world. And most importantly here - and here is where the concept of dialectic, very often associated with Marxist thought, is so important - the thought of human beings is itself part of the material environment. The material environment is not separable from thought. And, similarly, thought is inconceivable outside of the material environment. So, in fact, the material determination of thought means simply that ideas cannot emancipate themselves independently from the social environment that they are in. (They cannot meaningfully do so, at least. One could conceive of a situation where people fantasised within a particular material environment about that which is, in reality, materially quite impossible.)

What Marx was not saying here - and he had been frequently accused of saying this - is that economics determines everything. What he is not saying when he talks about the forces of production and how those forces of production, in developing, set the scene for particular relations of production to develop, and then break the boundaries of existing relations of production, he is not saying that there is nothing in life apart from production, and nothing aside from a rather vulgar, reductionist, economic analysis that one needs to think about. He is not saying that the music of any period or the artistic production of any period or the philosophical creativity of any period in contemplating the times in which people live is something aside from and irrelevant to what is happening in society. What Marx is saying is that there is something fundamental, there is a primacy, about the economic drive of the development of society which means that all of those other factors, artistic, political, legal, become secondary in relation to it.

Engels, in a letter of 1890 clarifies this: he says,

"The determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase."

So Engels himself, reflecting everything that Marx also wrote about historical materialism, is saying that history is something greater than economics but not extricable from the economic process.

What Marx particularly turns to in understanding the relations of production is the manifestation of these relationships in broad social terms in the class position of human beings. What is the class position of human beings? It is the relationship in which any one of us stands to the means of production. Is it a relationship of ownership and control or is it a relationship of disempowerment, of dispossession, of having to sell ourselves in one form or another physically in the form of a slave for eight hours a day and forty hours a week in the form of a wage-slave to an employer?

Marx, in the Communist Manifesto, put the position of classes as a manifestation of social relationships over and above anything else. In a very famous opening to the very first section of the Manifesto he says (and he wrote it together with Engels), "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." Straight away, that means that when you go back to that first notion of alienation: the single, frustrated, self-deluding, constrained individual in society and you look at this notion of history and forces and relations, you now have a concrete, historical picture. You start to have something which is empirically testable. You can look at history and say, is it the history of class struggles, or is it the history of great men, or evil, or moral goodness, or creative ideas, or sublime imagination, or the will of God? Is it any of those things, or is it, as Marx says and as I think the historical picture shows, the history of class struggles, between free men and slaves, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, all standing in contrast to one another.

Modern capitalist society, said Marx, which has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, has not doneaway with class antagonisms. That is very important because, bear in mind that Marx was writing at a time when capitalism was new. That is probably one of the biggest differences between Marx and us. Marx was writing at a time when capitalism was new, confident, and asserted all kinds of illusions which had yet to be tested, but which people like Marx could see to be untrue. We are at a time when capitalism is old, sterile, used up. Unconfident in its own programmes for change; lost for any kind of ideological direction; and no longer open to be tested in terms of its promises to be about liberty and fraternity and classlessness - all of the promises of the early capitalist system, from the French revolution and the American revolution onwards.

So it is a class society, capitalism, and it has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in the place of old ones. Our epoch has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps into two great classes directly facing each other: the capitalists and the proletariat, or the working class.

Is this true? Well, let us look at those excellent figures that Adam Buick produced for the Socialist Standard a few years ago which went into this in great detail, because one can not simply assert these things: one has to analyse them; one has to investigate them; one has to find out from the very authorities of capitalist economic control - the Inland Revenue, the Treasury - are these figures true or not? What we were able to show was that the top one per cent in British society - where there is a more even spread of wealth than in the vast majority of countries in the world at the moment - the top one per cent of the population owned 18 per cent of the marketable wealth, nearly one fifth. The top two per cent owned a quarter of all the wealth; the top ten per cent, fifty-three per cent of the wealth, more than half the marketable wealth so it would seem that what Marx was saying about the significance of class in understanding history is still extremely important. How could you understand the Gulf War; how could you understand the Second World War; how could you understand the conflict between one party and another, or the imagined religious difficulties between one group and another without understanding it in terms of the real underlying class conflicts?

Marx, in a letter to Annenkov in 1846, says something which, I think, helps us to move on to the next theme and helps us also to understand the very essence of why history is at the heart of Marxism: "A man who has not understood the present state of society may be expected still less to understand the movement which is tending to overthrow it." And I think that what Marx is saying there is that the movement to overthrow society is not something which stands above history, as an ideal, as a dream, as a transcendent force rejecting history because history is something too messy and horrible and divided and antagonistic. It is actually born from within history. It is a process of history. That which it leads towards is itself historical in its very essence.

Then Marx gets into perhaps the most complex investigation of his life. Perhaps the one that is overstated in relation to his historical investigation because of its unique brilliance. That is the understanding of the economics of commodity production. First of all, Marx makes a distinction between that which is produced for use and that which is produced as a commodity. A baker bakes bread all day in order to sell it. He doesn't care if it is stale; he doesn't care if it tastes good; he doesn't care if it contains all kinds of things that make people sick. And then he bakes one loaf of bread, not to sell, but to eat, for himself, to share with a friend, to pass on to somebody who is not well in hospital, let us say; and that is the distinction between the production of commodities and the production for ones own needs.

But what is it that makes a commodity have a value? Commodities derive their value from social labour. And Marx considers it important to talk about the crystallisation of social labour, not simply an individual making one particular thing in separation from everyone else, but socialised labour. The value of a commodity, for Marx, is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it. But part of the quantity of labour in any production of commodities is unpaid labour, because labour power, that commodity which the working class has under capitalism, that commodity which defines the working class, is in fact a quite unique commodity. It is the only commodity which has the capacity to produce values over and above itself. It can, by being applied to other wealth, make more wealth than it can be sold for on the market.

So when one talks about the application of capital as a relationship which is there to produce more and more and wealth (that is the function of capital - wealth which is there to produce more wealth) that is to say everything which is not part of the human labouring process in production; the fixed machines, the dead labour embodied in those machines; the electricity and other energy sources that are used; the lighting that is used during the production process - all of that is constant capital. It starts out with one value; it finishes with one value, and that value has to be embodied into the commodity that is produced.

But then there is a second form of capital, and Marx recognises the importance of this in terms of the trickery of capitalist production. That is variable capital, the human labour power which goes into the production of all commodities. And the importance of human labour power is that it produces value greater than itself and it is paid, therefore, less than the value of what it produces.

So commodities can be sold at their value, whilst at the same time labour power in being paid its own value is always producing more and more and more than that value. And the moment, of course, that labour power does not produce more than its own value it becomes redundant. It becomes dispensable. It can be thrown on to the scrap heap of unemployable labour power, as, of course, has happened to millions of people here in Europe at the moment and millions more throughout the world.

Marx then says, well, what do you do in response to this sense of being a seller of labour power, of being forced into this position where you can do nothing else but go out and work for someone else by hand or by brain - in fact, by both. What do you do in relation to all of that? And what the trade unions were saying, even then, in the early days of industrial capitalism, is that, if you constantly push up the value of labour power - if labour power which is producing all of this surplus can claw back some of this surplus - then it will be able to bring dignity to labour. It will be able to provide the full fruits of labour and fair wages and decent jobs and all of the other things which, at that time, at least seemed like a radical proposition and now seems like a rather sterile and laughable trade union demand.

Marx put an extraordinarily radical and revolutionary position in relation to that trade union attempt to keep your head above water within the market. First of all he said, do it, because if you don't do it you will be stamped on and degraded to the lowest possible position. So Marx had no argument with the need for strike action, for trade union organisation, for workers to try to get as much as they can. But he said:

"Quite apart from the general servitude involved in the wages system, the working class ought not to exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of everyday struggles. They ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the causes of those effects. They are retarding the downward movement but not changing its direction. They are applying palliatives, not curing the malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never-ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economic reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: 'A fair day's wage for a fair day's work,' they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: 'Abolition of the wages system.'"

I want to say two things about that. First of all, that what Marx was saying here was that there is essentially a choice, a fundamental political choice that you have in any position confronted with any power that you don't like to be up against. One is to constantly try to drive back the malignant consequences of that power that you don't like. One is to constantly find yourself on this treadmill of resistance against the awful developing and ever more sophisticatedly original ways of making your life difficult and exploited and oppressed. But the other, and the revolutionary one, says Marx, is to actually see the system as a system; to recognise that there will never be such a thing as a fair wage, because wages are, by their inherent nature, legalised robbery. They are taking from the workers that which produces profit by denying the workers the ability to have all of the fruits of their labour. And secondly, what Marx is doing here is positing the possibility of there being an alternative to the current system. This leads to the final section of what I have to say: the necessity of revolutionary action, the necessity of revolution.

Returning to the earlier quote that I gave from the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, there is a point there where Marx is talking about how the relations of production change. He says, "At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution." Now, actually, that epoch of social revolution existed when Marx was writing. It was inherent in the very birth of industrial capitalism; the very contradictions between the ability to produce an abundance and the lack of access to wealth by so many people who were in positions of poverty; the capacity to create enough for everybody to have harmonious and peaceful lives and the inherent drive towards competition and its ultimate manifestation: warfare and mass murder; the ability of human beings to become creative and ever more intelligently in control of their environment and the crushing control of the social system as an environmental force upon people, surrounding people, entrapping people within the system. What Marx was saying is that there comes a point where these contradictions become such manifest fetters on development in society that the epoch of revolution begins. Well, we are now in the epoch of revolution. Of course, it is a very long epoch of revolution, but then all of history has been an epoch of revolution, because history is itself a constant state of motion. History is not something which is a final situation; it is a dynamic and dialectically developing process.

So to the necessity of revolution: in the Communist Manifesto, Marx says, "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The working class movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority." Two very important points, here: one is that when you come to look at the historical movements, however grand their rhetoric, however much they talked about fraternity and liberty and equality; however much they talked about national liberation and the rights of man, and so on, they were essentially, all of them, movements of minorities to take power at the expense of the majority. The significance of the development of the working class is that the working class is the first class in history which is a majority class. It is not a minority. When the working class becomes aware of its position, it becomes aware of the position of most people, and it becomes aware of the audacity, the exploitation, the oppressiveness of only a minority of people.

Secondly, the working class movement, when it becomes a movement for itself, not simply an unthinking movement but an intelligent movement, is a self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, for the immense majority. It is, in other words, a movement directed by the members of a class because they are members of a class, in order to end the system of class relations. They have understood the relations of production in which they find themselves, and they have decided to end that as a majority - not to become a new ruling class, but to end class.

Marx became involved in the 1860s, in 1864, at the very time when he was struggling with this huge economic effort of trying to produce an analysis of commodity production, with an organisation called the International Working Men's Association, which is now known as The First International. His life at this time was really divided, split between three things: first of all the struggle for his own survival that was often not an easy one with a large family, frequent problems of intense deprivation for members of his family, certainly the early death of at least one of his daughters as a result of poverty; certainly at least one of his children who died soon after he was born died as a result of poverty and the absence of health care; and the early death of his wife - all of those things Marx was struggling to deal with. Secondly, he was struggling, very much on his own, very much as an independent scholar, looking at the economics of capitalist society; and then, thirdly, he was involved in this new international social organisation of the working class, which he was desperate to try to move, politically, in the direction of understanding the economics and historical dynamic of capitalist society, rather than planning to reform that society or reconstitute it as another kind of capitalism or co-operative capitalism or more trade unions within capitalism.

In drawing up the rules for the First International, Marx sat on a committee with two other people and established as the very first principle of the working class movement internationally that the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class themselves. The working class cannot, in other words, rely upon others to change society for them, leaders to do it for us, and, above all, cannot be a movement which is outside of this idea that he puts in the Communist Manifesto of being a majority, independent, self-conscious movement.

I began by saying let's not turn Marx into a heroic suprahuman figure of history. He wasn't. He made mistakes. He didn't always apply the theories that I have outlined here to everything that he looked at practically or participated in. He didn't always manage to see what was ahead of him, and he didn't always fully understand the history of every part of the world that he wrote about, because he had an immense determination to write about countries, not only that he lived in, but that he didn't live in, and he actually taught himself languages at a speed that would certainly be beyond most of us here.

That was Marx, the man. What we are left with is Marx, the legacy: the legacy of a theory of society which is fundamentally revolutionary, which is absolutely pertinent to the kind of society we are living in today (which is still a capitalist system of society) and a theory which will simply not go away, much as it is derided or declared dead, as long as there is a capitalist society to be analysed, fought against and replaced by socialism.

Steve Coleman

Greasy Pole: Jack Straw – getting to know you (2009)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

You know Jack Straw. The one who always sits on Gordon Brown's right at Prime Ministers Questions. Composed, dapper. Careful hair, expressionless eyes. Unmoved by the rowdy disorder around him. Alone among the servile front benchers working on his papers, jotting down a note or ticking a box. The very image of a Minister of the Crown exuding confidence that after the next election he will be back on that bench – perhaps even the one responding to brickbats from the opposition. It was not always so. Old photographs tell of a different someone – a young student experimenting with a variety of clothes and hair styles, whose eyes swivelled behind thick-framed glasses. Before he apparently took advice from an image consultant to help him up the greasy pole Straw was a student activist to satisfy the most expectant lefty. His 1966 elevation into the chair of the Labour Society at Leeds University was with the support of the Communist Society there. Abruptly he was rewarded by a Foreign Office denunciation as a “...chief troublemaker acting with malice aforethought” for disrupting a student trip to Chile. A couple of years later, by now President of the Student Union, he spear-headed a four day occupation of the university in reprisal for alleged security checks on the students. And again when a passionate speech of his on a conference resolution was apologetically interrupted by the – bewildered – chair reminding him that he was supposed to be speaking for the other side. Which, without so much as a tremor of embarrassment or apology, he did. Yes – you know Jack Straw.

Parliament
You might not know (although you should have had your suspicions) that from his teens Straw nurtured an ambition to be a successful politician, using the name Jack rather than John in salute to the 14th. Century peasant leader. In 1974, after a spell as President of the National Union of Students, he began to work for Social Security Minister Barbara Castle – whose plans to restrict the unions, set out in the infamous In Place Of Strife, virtually finished her chances to be Labour's first female leader. Straw was well placed to succeed her in 1979 as MP for the safe seat of Blackburn. Conforming to the principle, popular among Labour MPs, that support for the local football team is essential to maintain a healthy majority, Straw had to wear a scarf and wave a rattle for Blackburn Rovers. Whatever this did for him on the terraces of Eward Park the impression he made in Parliament was uneven; the infinitely nasty Tory MP Alan Clark sneered “I remember 'slapping him down' when I was a junior employment minister and he was a backbench socialist 'trying' to find his way”.

But Westminster is no place to be sensitive about such slights. After a string of Shadow posts Straw's place in a future Labour government looked safe when Blair gave him the job he had relinquished when he became party leader - spokesman on Home Office affairs. The plan was that he would carry on where Blair had left off, expunging the impression that a Labour Home Secretary would be soft on crime. Quickly justifying his leader's confidence in him, Straw set about doing what had been assumed to be impossible – promoting the impression that there could be a Home Secretary more authoritarian and punitive than the detested Tory Michael Howard. To this end, at one time or another, Straw has bellowed out tabloid-attractive policies such as locking up people who have not committed any crime but who may do so because they are classified as suffering from a “personality disorder”; or curfew orders designed to keep under-16 year-olds off the streets; or drives to suppress “aggressive beggars, winos and squeegee merchants”. Unsurprisingly, Margaret Thatcher was numbered among his fans: “I trust Jack Straw. He is a very fair man” was how she put it while many others agreed with lawyer Louis Bloom Cooper that he was “...the most reactionary Home Secretary we have had”.

Biggs
Ever anxious to still any doubts about him going soft on crime, Straw recently grabbed the headlines by overturning a Parole Board recommendation to release Ronnie Biggs, the last of the Great Train Robbers. The usual reason for such a decision is that the person concerned is likely to be a danger to the public by committing further serious offences. But Biggs is said to be frail and sick, unable to walk or talk or feed himself, which is done through a tube into his stomach. So Straw had to come up with some other justification – that Biggs is “wholly unrepentant” and “outrageously courted the media” about his escape to Brazil.

Well, if we are looking for repentance we might have expected Straw to regret his ready acceptance of the government's lying excuse for attacking Iraq, with all the consequent destruction and killing, for in January 2003 he wrongly asserted that the Blix report “contains the clearest possible evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction...Several thousand rockets are unaccounted for”. Does he regret his decision to allow General Pinochet to return to Argentina, although he was wanted elsewhere for trial for thousands of people being tortured and murdered, on the grounds that the dictator was too sick to stand trial? What does he think now about his rejection of an asylum application from an Iraqi man with the advice that “we have faith in the integrity of the Iraqi judicial process and that you should have no concern if you haven't done anything wrong” ? And will Alistair Campbell have to flee to Brazil now that Straw has ruled that “outrageously courting the media” constitutes a reason for him to lock you away?

You should get to know Jack Straw, for what he has promised and what he has done and failed to do, for he may soon realise his dream to stand in triumph on the steps of Number Ten proclaiming his pledges and his excuses. Then you should turn and trust yourself to do all that is needed and proper for the world.

Ivan

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (108)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 108th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1524 friends!

Recent blogs:

Oscar Wilde: the soul of man under socialism

The New Scramble for Africa

Ordinary people

Quote for the week:

" ..The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it..." Oscar Wilde, The soul of man under Socialism (1895).

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Is the working class still the agent of socialism?

Originally posted on the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog, this book review is from the February 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

G A Cohen departed this world on the 5th of August and one of his major works has been reviewed in the Socialist Standard which is worth a peruse.

If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? By G A Cohen. Harvard University Press, 2001.

In 1978 Cohen wrote a basically sound (if tedious) book called Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. In this series of lectures given in 1997 but only published as a paperback last year he explains why he now thinks Marx was wrong after all.

He claims that Marx's agency for the socialist revolution was the "industrial" working class which would form the majority of the population but that this has not come about because of the rise of modern technology which has resulted in the "industrial" working class forming a shrinking proportion of the working population. However, Marx was well aware that the development of the division of labour and specialisation would lead to the development of a section of the working class not involved in direct factory work.

When workers are trained to perform certain tasks for example, they have to be taught and instructed, and this involves teachers and instructors. The teacher or instructor can teach or instruct inside the factory or outside it in a school or college. It is absurd to regard the teacher as an industrial worker when employed inside the factory but a "middle class" professional when employed in a school or a college. The function they perform is exactly the same and so also is their relationship to the means of production – they are still teaching or training future workers and they are still reliant on a wage or salary in order to survive.

As industry becomes more complex and as technology develops there is a need for an increasing army of educators, organisers, researchers and the like. As a result the proportion of "front line", factory workers shrinks. This change in the composition of the working population does not alter one iota their relationship to the productive wealth of society, nor does it alter the fact that it would be in their interest to overthrow capitalism. There is no justification for regarding factory workers as being exploited whilst teachers, lecturers, organisers, researchers, etc are able to escape this exploitation. It is true that most of these "white collar" workers would deny that they are being exploited but so also would most factory workers.

Cohen claims that workers in advanced industrial countries are no longer exploited (not that he defines what he means by exploitation). His claim is that exploitation now takes place in the factories and sweatshops of underdeveloped countries and that only these fit Marx's description of the industrial proletariat. However, he goes on, these again cannot be regarded as the agents of revolutionary change as they do not constitute the majority of the population in these countries because they are swamped in a sea of peasants. He does not pay any attention to the fact that the "exploitation" of his workers in the underdeveloped world has led to the undermining of the incomes of factory workers in the advanced countries.

He concludes from this that there is no hope of a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society and that only a development of altruistic attitudes can usher in a better and different world. He can only come to this pathetic conclusion by either ignoring or not understanding the capitalist system.

Most liberal political philosophers who claim to strive for "a just and equal society" view modern society as being stratified from top to bottom into different income and status groups ("social classes") and that it can only be a question of redistributing wealth more "fairly" within these groups. Other political philosophers see this as posing a potentially serious problem in that it could lead to a slacking of effort on the part of the top strata as this could affect their efficiency and effectiveness "in the pursuit of the general good". In other words, that there is still a need for some inequality in order to provide an incentive for those able and willing to take on demanding, responsible positions in society.

Volumes and volumes are written on this theme and writers like Cohen demonstrate their learning and cleverness by finding loopholes in each others' theories and developing their own irrelevant versions of the same. What they have to say and write has no bearing on what is happening in the real world. For the real world is not merely made up of a population stratified into different income groups. It is true that the working class can be divided into different income groups. But between these groups there is no direct opposition, tension and conflict – they are just groups of people having different characteristics in terms of income, education and status.

The real world is a world in which the population is divided into two main groups obtaining their incomes in distinct and completely different ways. One group obtains its income from the ownership of the productive wealth of the world and the other group obtains its income from the sale of its labour power to the owners of productive wealth. The first group has to attempt to continually increase the productive wealth its owns by continually revolutionising their productive techniques and by attempting to reduce or limit the income of the non-owners. To do this they have to accumulate as much wealth as possible under given market conditions. The whole system depends upon, and is defined by, this compulsive need of capitalists to accumulate wealth. To think that it is possible to intervene or halt this process through any system of redistribution of incomes – either through taxation or "rich" egalitarian political philosophers foregoing part of their incomes – is unrealistic nonsense. The social system such philosophers wish to reform bears no resemblance to the social system they conjure up in their analyses.

Nowhere is Cohen's pathetic position more clearly demonstrated than in his belief that he and his fellow philosophers are "rich". They are not rich even by comparison with other salary earners; when compared with the incomes of the capitalist class their incomes are pitiful. What is more, like most workers they have to consume their incomes in order to survive at the prevailing standards of comfort of their peers. The individual consumption of the capitalists, on the other hand, although often colossal when compared to the individual consumption of workers, is normally only a small proportion of their income as they are compelled to accumulate most of it in order to survive as capitalists. 

Lew Higgins.

A deficit of logic (2009)

Book Review from the April 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Credit Crunch. Graham Turner. 2008. Pluto Press.

Graham Turner has made a number of appearances on BBC2’s Newsnight in recent weeks, helping Paul Mason deconstruct the credit crisis and slump.

Turner is a Keynesian of sorts and a fan of ‘quantitative easing’ i.e. of central banks flooding the financial markets with liquidity in the hope that this will get banks lending again, literally giving people more money to spend. As history demonstrates though – and Marxian economics explains – the practical effect of this is further doses of currency inflation as it is likely to accelerate the continuing overissue of inconvertible paper currency that has been going on since the Second World War.

This book is currently one of the most widely available explanations of the financial crisis in UK bookshops. But in essence it is a confused book and Turner seems to think that the reason the Keynesian remedy hasn’t worked on any previous occasion is because the policy levers weren’t pulled in quite the right order, or at quite the right time.

As an illustration of the book’s confusion, there are a large number of pages discussing in great detail what Turner apparently sees as the supposed significance of trade deficits and surpluses in various countries affected by the asset price bubble. But then he concludes, all of a sudden and for no particular or stated reason – much in line with the historical evidence but against the line of his own argument presented here – that ‘It does not matter that much whether a country is running a trade deficit or a surplus: a bubble is a bubble, and there are far too many around’. Indeed.

Though it includes some interesting and useful statistical data and graphs, after this point it was difficult to take the book entirely seriously and George Cooper’s rival explanation in the Origin of Financial Crises (reviewed in March) is clearer, more in accordance with reality and much to be preferred.

DAP

Green-lite reformism (2009)

Book Review from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fuelling a Food Crisis – The impact of peak oil on food security. By Caroline Lucas, Andy Jones and Colin Hines. (See here for more details).

Current methods of food production and distribution are having a negative effect on the environment. The facts of the case are set out in this report by Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas and the two others, on behalf of the Green Group in the European Parliament, even though the measures they offer are no more than “green-lite” reforms.

They show that the increased industrialisation of farming, particularly following the end of WW2, means that current methods now consume 50 times the energy input of traditional agriculture and in the most extreme cases “100 fold or more.” “Including energy costs for farm machinery, transportation, processing and feedstocks for agricultural chemicals – the modern food system consumes roughly 10 calories of fossil fuel energy for every calorie of food energy produced.”

The UK has developed an increasing dependence on imported food. Figures from the Department for Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) show that between 1988 and 2002 imports in tonnes increased by 38 percent and that 50 percent of all vegetables and 95 percent of all fruit consumed in the UK now come from overseas.

How necessary are these imports for the consumers? The 'New Economics Foundation', in its UK Interdependence Report for 2006, published a list of food imports and exports, showing a two-way process of similar products travelling in opposite directions being both imports and exports simultaneously: in 2004, UK imported 10.2 million kilos of milk and cream from France – and exported 9.9 million kilos of milk and cream to France. The figures traded between UK and Germany for milk and cream were 15.5 million kilos to and 17.2 million kilos from the UK. UK imported 1.5 million kilos of potatoes from Germany and exported 1.5 million kilos of potatoes to Germany. UK imported 44,000 tonnes of frozen boneless chicken and exported 51,000 tonnes of fresh boneless chicken (countries not specified).

These examples are a tiny fraction of the crazy methods of the globalised food trade which have scant regard for either environmental protection or actual consumers.

A report for DEFRA in 2005 on “The Validity of Food Miles as an Indicator of Sustainable Development” concluded:

“Transport of food by air has the highest CO2 emissions per tonne and is the fastest growing mode. Although air freight of food accounts for only 1 percent of food tonne kilometres and 0.1 percent of vehicle kilometres it produces 11/ percent /of the food transport CO2 equivalent emissions.” (https://statistics.defra.gov.uk/esg/reports/foodmiles/final.pdf)

Whilst the UK imports almost twice as much food as it exports vegetable and fruit imports account for over 60 percent of its food air freight. This is the upside-down world where there are, on the one hand, international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while, on the other, trade agreements to exchange foods internationally involving unnecessarily flying foodstuffs around the globe, so increasing the emissions.

Food has to be transported but all transportation is at cost to the environment. How it is transported and how far are not decisions about which the consumer is consulted. Individuals could make a difference by the choices they make using their own moral code – providing they are equipped with all the available information – but, like travel, unrestricted flying, expansion of airports etc., individual actions make little impact. Action groups can and do make differences by boycotting certain food outlets or companies to affect their stance on political, humanitarian or moral issues (apartheid South Africa, Nestlé's infant food formula sold in countries where customers had no access to clean water for mixing it, Fair Trade products) but these successes, whether small or substantial, don't address the root problem and there's always the need for yet another campaign.

Also topsy-turvy are the various goals set for using crops as alternative fuels. The authors quote George Monbiot that “It has been calculated that meeting the EU's target for 20 percent of transport fuel to come from biodiesel by 2020 would consume almost all of Britain's croplands.” Presumably, attempting to achieve this target would imply relying even more heavily on imported food with all the associated extra environmental damage, plus the damage to domestic farmland and the environment from growing a monocrop.

Then there is the environmental impact of modern industrial agriculture's use of fertilisers:

“The manufacture of synthetic fertilisers is particularly energy intensive and accounts for around one third of the UK's agricultural energy consumption. It has been estimated that 40 percent of world food protein now relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers.” “The fourth most traded bulk commodity in world shipping trade after iron ore, coal and cereals is fertilisers and their raw materials.”

Peak oil and natural gas are not seen as a problem for future manufacturing in the fertiliser industry as there are sufficient coal reserves for 200 or so years at current production levels. “The consequences in terms of climate change, however, would be catastrophic. Additionally, production of ammonia from coal is 70 percent more energy intensive than production from natural gas.” Fertilisers are both big business and big polluters. Damage is caused during production, during distribution and to soil and water post-use, upsetting natural soil balance and leaching into water sources.

The authors conclude:

“The mandatory rules of trade that promote the interests of agribusiness, industrial production and long distance transport, and that force countries to compete to produce each other's food at the expense of domestic production . . . are a disaster for food security, particularly in poorer countries, as subsistence farmers are increasingly put out of business or forced into export production instead.”

As alternatives to this environmentally destructive madness what do they recommend?

“Relocating our food systems will require a complete change of direction, away from the policies of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and the rules of the World Trade Organisation . . . Instead, the central aim of trade and food policy should be a just and environmentally sound food security programme, for all nations."

They go on to list some measures (i.e. reforms) that "would be instrumental in helping to meet the challenge." For instance,. "Production methods would have to meet key environmental and animal welfare standards, as well as provide healthy food . . . the reduction of fossil fuel use would need to be prioritised across the framework." Other proposed measures include fair wages and adequate income, national import controls as a prerogative of all countries, reduced profit margins for food processors and supermarkets, restricting the market share of individual supermarkets, promoting self-reliance and ending subsidised dumping, and rewriting the EU Treaty and the rules of the WTO.

The trouble is that each one of these reforms, or something similar, has been promoted, implemented, tried, reworked and discarded in favour of whatever is the latest fad. They are offering palliative treatment when only invasive surgery will do. As for agriculture and the environment, there is plenty of evidence pointing to how to get well and truly onto a sustainable path worldwide. Studies and statistics abound from universities, national and international farming networks, coalitions on food sovereignty, and organic farming which demonstrate that traditional intensive farming methods can out-perform industrial agricultural methods and are more beneficial to the health of both people and the environment. People may desire this change but the economic framework of capitalism won’t allow it.

"At a time when water tables are falling, temperatures are rising as a result of climate change and oil supplies will soon be shrinking the need for decisive action could not be more urgent." Without a doubt. But, whilst the authors set out a wealth of solid information, and display a desire both to improve the lot of worldwide farmers and to ensure enough healthy food for all, their focus throughout their report on the monetary costs of everything – inevitable in a capitalist world – is their downfall for it is this very element that is fuelling both the food and the environmental crises.

Janet Surman

Cooking the Books: Businessmen and opera-dancers (2009)

The Cooking the Books column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The July monthly newsletter of our comrades of the Socialist Party of Canada drew attention to a claim about Adam Smith by Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom:

“Smith argued that only labour (by which he meant entrepreneurial businessmen) created value and that government and its hangers-on added nothing” (6 June) (www.thestar.com/article/645833).

It is true that Adam Smith did argue that governments and their hangers-on did not create any new value but were maintained out of the value of those who did. It is not true, however, that he thought that only the labour of entrepreneurial businessmen created value.

He deals with this question in Chapter III of Book II of The Wealth of Nations (1776):

“There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he, in reality, costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed. But the maintenance of a menial servant never is restored. A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.”

This is clear enough. Only those who manufacture (in the original, literal sense of someone who makes something with their hands, manus being the Latin word for hand) something tangible and lasting, that can be exchanged for something with the same labour content, create value. This does not include the “masters”. Smith explicitly says that they get rich from the value created by the “manufacturers” they employ.

Smith’s concept of productive labour could even be called “workerist” in that it has to be manual labour that produces a tangible, a material, object. Even Marx didn’t go that far as he counted the non-manual work of designing and planning manual work as productive.
Smith went on:

“The labour of some of the most respectable orders in the society is, like that of menial servants, unproductive of any value, and does not fix or realize itself in any permanent subject; or vendible commodity, which endures after that labour is past, and for which an equal quantity of labour could afterwards be procured. The sovereign, for example, with all the officers both of justice and war who serve under him, the whole army and navy, are unproductive labourers. They are the servants of the public, and are maintained by a part of the annual produce of the industry of other people. (...). In the same class must be ranked, some both of the gravest and most important, and some of the most frivolous professions: churchmen, lawyers, physicians, men of letters of all kinds; players, buffoons, musicians, opera-singers, opera-dancers, etc.”

Smith certainly saw the economic role of “masters” as essential but not because he thought they alone created value while government employees, buffoons and opera-dancers merely consumed it. It was because he thought that private enterprise, laissez-faire capitalism was the most natural way to organise the production and distribution of wealth. But it isn’t. So entrepreneurial businessmen are not needed.

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (107)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 107th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1525 friends!

Recent blogs:

The theory of capitalist crisis

The Fetishism of Money

Britain: An 'Endemic Surveillance Society'

Quote for the week:

"...it is only as the workers learn that they are slaves, and clearly grasp that the essential factor in their emancipation is the control of political power, that they will build up the Socialist organisations, political and economic, necessary for the establishment of Socialism." Jack Fitzgerald (1872 - 1929), Socialist Standard, (1918).

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Howard Zinn's 'Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste' (1993)

The following is from The Zinn Reader (1997, Seven Stories Press, pp 574-578) and is reprinted with the permission of the author. It has been posted on the blog on three previous occasions.

For a long time I thought that there were important and useful ideas in Marxist philosophy and political economy that should be protected from the self-righteous cries on the right that "Marxism is dead,” as well as from the arrogant assumptions of the commissars of various dictatorships that their monstrous regimes represented “Marxism.” This piece was written for Z Magazine, and reprinted in my book Failure To Quit (Common Courage Press, 1993).

Not long ago, someone referred to me publicly as a "Marxist professor.” In fact, two people did. One was a spokesman for “Accuracy in Academia,” worried that there were “five thousand Marxist faculty members” in the United States (which diminished my importance, but also my loneliness). The other was a former student I encountered on a shuttle to New York, a fellow traveller. I felt a bit honoured. A “Marxist” means a tough guy (making up for the pillowy connotation of the “professor”), a person of formidable politics, someone not to be trifled with, someone who knows the difference between absolute and relative surplus value, and what is commodity fetishism, and refuses to buy it.

I was also a bit taken aback (a position which yoga practitioners understand well, and which is good for you about once a day). Did “Marxist” suggest that I kept a tiny stature of Lenin in my drawer and rubbed his head to discover what policy to follow to intensify the contradictions o the imperialist camp, or what songs to sing if we were sent away to such a camp?

Also, I remembered that famous statement of Marx: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total “noodnik” (there are “noodniks” all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate Das Kapital into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organising Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: “Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”

That was a high point in Marx’s life, and also a good starting point for considering Marx’s ideas seriously without becoming a Pieper (or a Stalin, or Kim Il Sung, or any born-again Marxist who argues that every word in Volume One, Two and Three, and especially in the Grundrisse, is unquestionably true). Because it seems to me (risking that this may lead to my inclusion in the second edition of Norman Podhoretz’s Register of Marxists, Living or Dead), Marx had some very useful thoughts.

For instance, we find in Marx’s short but powerful Theses on Feuerbach the idea that philosophers, who always considered their job was to interpret the world, should now set about changing it, in their writings, and in their lives.
Marx set a good example himself. While history has treated him as a secondary scholar, spending all his time in the library of the British Museum, Marx was a tireless activist all his life. He was expelled from Germany, from Belgium, from France, was arrested and put on trial in Cologne.

Exiled to London, he kept his ties with revolutionary movements all over the world. The poverty-ridden flats that he and Jenny Marx and their children occupied became busy centres of political activity, gathering places for political refugees from the continent.

True, many of his writings were impossibly abstract (especially those on political economy; my poor head at the age of nineteen swam, or rather drowned, with ground rent and differential rent, the falling rate of profit and the organic composition of capital). But he departed from that constantly to confront the events of 1848, the Paris Commune, rebellion in India, the Civil War in the United States.

The manuscripts he wrote at the age of twenty-five while an exile in Paris (where he hung out in cafes with Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin, Heine, Stirner), often dismissed by hard-line fundamentalists as “immature”, contain some of the most profound ideas. His critique of capitalism in those Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts did not need any mathematical proofs of “surplus value.” It simply stated (but did not state it simply) that the capitalist system violates whatever it means to be a human. The industrial system Marx saw developing in Europe not only robbed them of the products of their work, it estranged working people from their own creative responsibilities, from one another as human beings, from the beauties of nature, from their own true selves. They lived out their lives not according to their own inner needs, but according to the necessities of survival.

This estrangement from self and others, this alienation from all that was human, could not be overcome by an intellectual effort, by something in the mind. What was needed was a fundamental, revolutionary change in society, to create the conditions – a short workday, a rational use of the earth’s natural wealth and people’s natural talents, a just distribution of the fruits of human labour, a new social consciousness – for the flowering of human potential, for a leap into freedom as it had never been experienced in history.

Marx understood how difficult it was to achieve this, because, no matter how “revolutionary” we are, the weight of tradition, habit, the accumulated mis-education of generations, “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”

Marx understood politics. He saw that behind political conflicts were questions of class: who gets what. Behind benign bubbles of togetherness (We the people…our country…national security), the powerful and the wealthy would legislate on their own behalf. He noted (in The Eighteenth Brumaire, a biting, brilliant, analysis of the Napoleonic seizure of power after the 1848 Revolution in France) how a modern constitution could proclaim absolute rights, which were then limited by marginal notes (he might have been predicting the tortured constructions of the First Amendment in our own Constitution), reflecting the reality of domination by one class over another regardless of the written word.

He saw religion, not just negatively as “the opium of the people,” but positively as the “sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions.” This helps us understand the mass appeal of the religious charlatans of the television screen, as well as the work of Liberation Theology in joining the soulfulness of religion to the energy of revolutionary movements in miserably poor countries.

Marx was often wrong, often dogmatic, often a “Marxist.” He was sometimes too accepting of imperial domination as “progressive,” a way of bringing capitalism faster to the third world, and therefore hastening, he thought, the road to socialism. (But he staunchly supported the rebellions of the Irish, the Poles, the Indians, the Chinese, against colonial control.)

He was too insistent that the industrial working class must be the agent of revolution, and that this must happen first in the advanced capitalist countries. He was unnecessarily dense in his economic analysis (too much education in German universities, maybe) when his clear, simple insight into exploitation was enough: that no matter how valuable were the things workers produced, those who controlled the economy could pay them as little as they liked, and enrich themselves with the difference.

Personally, Marx was sometimes charming, generous, self-sacrificing; at other times arrogant, obnoxious, abusive. He loved his wife and children, and they clearly adored him, but he also may have fathered the son of their German housekeeper, Lenchen.

The anarchist, Bakunin, his rival in the International Workingmen’s Association, said of Marx: “I very much admired him for his knowledge and for his passionate and earnest devotion to the cause of the proletariat. But…our temperaments did not harmonize. He called me a sentimental idealist, and he was right. I called him vain, treacherous, and morose, and I was right.” Marx’s daughter Eleanor, on the other hand, called her father “…the cheeriest, gayest soul that ever breathed, a man brimming over with humour".

He epitomised his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can’t imagine Marx being pleased with the “socialism” of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless arguments in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the New York Times that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified “in a society glorifying in its civilisation.”

Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx’s thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the nation state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for “the enemy” abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary “Marxist” states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.

Marx had something important to say not only as a critic of capitalism, but as a warning to revolutionaries, who, he wrote in The German Ideology, had better revolutionise themselves if they intend to do that to society. He offered an antidote to the dogmatists, the hard-liners, the Piepers, the Stalins, the commissars, the “Marxists.” He said: “Nothing human is alien to me.”
That seems a good beginning for changing the world.

Howard Zinn

One Brick at a Time (2009)

From the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalist governments find it useful to get together in various ways, despite the inevitable rivalry between them. It can be helpful to avoid being at loggerheads too much of the time, whether to benefit from some temporary mutual interest or to club together against some country or bloc that is for the time being an enemy. From the United Nations to G8 to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, many capitalist alliances have proven themselves worthwhile to ruling classes.

One of the most recent such groups to emerge is known as BRIC (for Brazil, Russia, India, China). The idea has been around for a few years, but only in June did the first summit of these countries take place. They are currently behind the United States as the uncontroversial leading power, Japan and the European Union (itself a grouping, not a single country, of course). Yet, together these four states account for forty percent of the world’s population, and their political and economic influence is only likely to increase. Even in the current recession, their economic growth outstrips that of the rest of the world.

And what kind of thing do the bosses of BRIC talk about when they get round a table? They talk about areas where their countries may be able to work together, such as energy (including nuclear energy), agriculture and technology. They talk about areas where competition and cooperation are both possible (such as between Brazil and Russia in aircraft construction).

There is a possible division of labour over the next few decades, with Brazil and Russia becoming major players in the provision of raw materials, and China and India supplying manufactured goods and services. China’s economy is based on manufacturing, with cheap labour power offering an advantage for the time being. India’s strength is in information technology, with software being developed for many international companies. Russia has enormous reserves of oil and natural gas, but long-term reliance on high energy prices is not considered to be a sensible strategy. Brazil, in contrast, specialises in agricultural exports, together with producing minerals such as iron and aluminium. So there are plenty of opportunities for cooperation, with Russian oil and gas finding their way to India and China, for instance.

In June the leaders also discussed changing the global currency system, with regional reserve currencies being adopted and some transactions being conducted in national currencies. This could well be bad news for the US, with the role of the dollar as the main reserve currency being undermined. Though China, with huge dollar reserves, wishes to see the US currency maintain its current role. Even if little changes in the short term, it is highly likely that over a longer period there will be considerable reshaping of how capitalism’s global finances are structured.

It is not clear whether BRIC will remain as a forum, let alone become a more formalised association. But you can bet your bottom dollar (or yuan or rouble) that the world’s power-holders will continue to defend their own interests by cooperating or competing with whoever suits them at the time, with no regard for those who actually produce the wealth or for any concept of democracy.

Paul Bennett

Is Obama a socialist?

Those scaremongering stories about Obama as a secret socialist just won't go away.

The Guardian reports on the latest guerilla campaign from the right directed against Obama personally and against his administration. It sounds ridiculous but it appears that if a smear is repeated often enough it will eventually gain some traction.

But it has to be said that it's not just Obama's who's being misrepresented here: Socialism is also getting a raw deal.

In light of this, I thought it was an opportune moment to repost the piece, 'Is Obama a socialist?, which originally appeared on the World Socialist Party of United States website in September of last year, and which explains that, though Obama is many things, he isn't a socialist.

Is Obama a socialist?

We got a an e-mail recently from some right-wing blogger for the New York Times who asked if we considered Barak Obama a socialist and if we supported his tax plans. blah, blah, blah. We won’t pass judgement on an article which may or may not see the light of day. But most likely this was another piece attempting to get someone calling themselves socialist to endorse Obama or one of his policies. Once that confession is procured, it will be widely touted as proof of Obama being a socialist, an elitist, etc.

But is Obama a socialist? OMFno-G no.

Obama isn’t anymore a socialist than McCain is a fascist, a leprechaun or sincere. Sure, Obama wants more government control of economic matters. But as even Obama said if you put lipstick on a pig, it’s still a pig. Capitalism administered by the state is still capitalism. Duh.

No one’s calling Bush a socialist because he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Because it’s not socialism. So why call Obama a sociaiist?

This election is all about two factions of capitalism competing for power with each-other.

The methods each faction uses to mobilize the working class to support them says much about the lack of class-consciousness in the US today.

The Democratic faction uses appeals for “justice” and “equality”, for tax breaks for workers even though most workers don’t “pay” enough taxes to make the breaks more than pavlovian whistles. Sure “equality” sounds nice, but it cannot happen in class society. The vast majority of people are workers for a reason - to create wealth for new rounds of capital growth. Those who benefit from that capital growth can be individual capitalists or state functionaries, but it’s workers who do the physical labor which creates the wealth. there can be no equality or justice in capitalism. Even if the capitalist class has now opened it’s membership roles to non-whites and females.

For being so slavish to Christian zealots, one would think the Republicans would “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s”. But being able to pay for such things as public infrastructure - ie highways, electric system, etc. takes a backseat to the accumulation of capital for massive investment in China, Mexico and India. So like the Democratic faction, they seek to slash public spending and taxes. Of course, underscoring their religious hypocracy, the Republicans have spent more than any other administration building US federal debts to record highs. It is fortunate that US federal bonds which pay for all that debt are held by those whose taxes were cut - the capitalists. Kaching! profit on both transactions!

Why we don’t need another Labour party (2009)

From the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Labour Party has failed, so let’s start a new one. That’s what some trade unionists and leftwingers are saying. That would be to repeat a mistake.

The Labour Party was founded by the trade unions, supported by some political groups (Keir Hardie’s ILP, the Fabians), to be a group in parliament pressing for legislation favourable to trade unions and their members. Originally called the Labour Representation Committee, it became the Labour Party after the 1906 General Election when enough “Labour” MPs were elected to form a parliamentary group.

That wasn’t the only choice before the working class at the time. Socialists within the Marxist-influenced SDF proposed another way: that, instead of aiming at reforms of capitalism to be obtained by a pressure group in parliament, the working class should aim directly at obtaining socialism – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production – as the only framework within which the problems they faced under capitalism could be effectively and lastingly dealt with. This was the policy advocated by those who broke away from the SDF in 1904 to set up us, the Socialist Party.

That was the choice: Labourism or Socialism? Unfortunately, most working class activists chose Labourism. In 1918 the Labour Party adopted a new constitution changing it from being a pressure group in parliament into a fully-fledged political party, with individual members. The declared aim was to eventually win a parliamentary majority and form a government that would gradually introduce socialism (actually, nationalisation or state capitalism, as set out in Clause IV of the constitution).

Labour in office
In the 1924 general election the Labour Party ended up with the most seats and the Liberal Party allowed a minority Labour government, under Ramsay MacDonald, to come into office. It lasted less than a year, but this was enough to show the ruling class that the Labour Party could be trusted to loyally manage the affairs of the British Empire. A second minority Labour government came into office in 1929 but was overwhelmed by the world slump that followed the Wall Street Crash and left office ignominiously in 1931, unable to stop unemployment growing (and proposing to cut unemployment benefit and civil service wages). Their leader MacDonald even went over to the Tories as Prime Minister in a Tory-dominated “National” government.

In 1945 Labour finally won a parliamentary majority. Clement Attlee took over from Churchill as Prime Minister. This time there were no excuses. The post-war Labour government did carry out a large part of the Labour Party’s reformist programme, nationalising coal, gas, electricity, water, rail, air and some road transport, and bringing in a national health service and a national unemployment, sickness and pensions scheme. This wasn’t socialism but it was a fairly radical reform of capitalism, even if motivated by the need to reconstruct British capitalism after the war as much as by a desire to improve working class conditions. At the same time the Attlee government presided over the development of the British A-bomb and got involved in war in Malaya and Korea. Despite the nationalisations and the reforms, in 1951 the electors voted Churchill and the Tories back. They stayed till 1964 when the Labour Party, under Harold Wilson, again obtained a parliamentary majority after what they called “thirteen wasted years”.

The 1964 Wilson Labour government was a complete failure. Economic circumstances made a mockery of their “national plan” to increase production smoothly and led to successive devaluations of the pound. In the end the government settled down to governing capitalism in the only way it can be: as a profit-making system in the interest of those who live off profits and against the interests of those who live off wages and salaries. Improved state benefits introduced in the first few months of the government were clawed back and “wage restraint”, even for a while a “wage freeze”, was imposed. A document In Place of Strife proposing to restrict trade union activity was drawn up. They didn’t have time to push it through but this was a factor in their losing the 1970 election.

Criticism confirmed
We in the Socialist Party pointed out our original criticism of Labourism had now been confirmed beyond doubt. It was not possible either to reform capitalism into socialism by means of a series of reforms enacted by parliament or to make capitalism work in the interest of the majority class of wage and salary earners. Instead of the Labour Party gradually changing capitalism, the opposite happened. Capitalism gradually changed the Labour Party into an ordinary alternative party taking its turn to manage the affairs of British capitalism.

But Labourist reformism was to have one more go at reforming capitalism. The Heath Tory government elected in 1970 proved a disaster, with double-digit inflation. In preparation for the coming general election, in 1973 the Labour Party adopted a policy document which spoke about a “fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families”. Denis Healey, the shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, hinted at squeezing the rich till the pips squeaked. Labour won the 1974 election, but the new Labour government (first under Wilson, then from 1976 under James Callaghan) proved unable, too, to control double-digit inflation. Instead of squeezing the rich, Healey, now the real Chancellor, had to go cap in hand to the IMF to get money just to keep normal government spending going. There were strings attached and it was low-paid public sector workers who were squeezed, leading to the winter of discontent of 1978/9. Labour lost the 1979 election. Margaret Thatcher took over and reversed most of the reforms that the Attlee government had introduced.

The Labour Party took some time to adjust to the new situation, even choosing for a while the leftwing journalist and orator, Michael Foot, as its leader. They lost the 1984, 1989 and 1992 general elections. Then came Blair. He realised that, unless the Labour Party abandoned the original Labourist project of trying to transform society by a series of nationalisations and reforms, it would never get back into office. Clause IV was accordingly abandoned. It worked. Labour – calling itself “New Labour” – won the 1997 election and again in 2001 and 2005.

The Blair Labour governments, however, were not like previous ones. They did not set out to reform capitalism to benefit workers and fail. They set out to simply manage capitalism for the capitalists and succeeded. It was plain for all to see that the Labour Party was no longer a “Labour” party, no longer a party committed to improving conditions for trade unionists and their members, but just another ordinary capitalist party like the Tories and the Liberals.

After a century of failure, Labourism no longer existed. The working class was back where it had been nearly a century previously: faced with the choice between two openly capitalist parties, not the Tories and the Liberals as then, but now the Tories and Labour.

Same choice
The same strategic choice now confronts the working class as it did in 1900. There are those who want to repeat the mistake that was then made and who want to form a new Labour party based on the trade unions. This is what Arthur Scargill tried to do with the “Socialist Labour Party” he set up in 1996. It’s what Militant, after being kicked out of the Labour Party, now propose with their campaign for a “New Workers Party”. It was what the SWP thought could happen with Respect and which George Galloway, who now controls it, perhaps still does. There is even an organisation called, again, the Labour Representation Committee.

But why? Surely one of the two main lessons of the 20th century has been that Labourism is a dead end (the other being that neither is state capitalist dictatorship as in former USSR a way to socialism). It can’t succeed. Not because its leaders are insincere or incompetent or corrupt or not resolute enough. It fails because it sets itself the impossible mission of trying to gradually reform capitalism into socialism. This can’t be done, as experience, not just theoretical understanding, has confirmed.

No doubt Scargill and the new Labour Representation Committee are sincere, though the same cannot be said of Militant or the SWP (they only want another mass party of Labour so they can infiltrate it and fish for members for their respective, and rival, vanguard parties).

But surely what is required is not a new Labour party but a party with socialism as its explicit aim and a policy of doing all it can to bring this into being. Since at the moment a majority still want or acquiesce in capitalism, in the immediate future this will have to involve campaigning for socialism, winning people over to socialism. Which is what we advocated in 1904 and what, in our small way, we have been doing ever since, despite the Labour road which most of the rest of the working class decided to take.

If the mistakes of the 20th century are not to be repeated this century the last thing that is needed today is a non-socialist, trade-union based “Labour” party. We’ve already been there, and it doesn’t work.

Adam Buick

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (106)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 106th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1523 friends!

Recent blogs:

Cartoon Karl

Who are the outsiders?

Who's afraid of the BNP?

Quote for the week:

"...to my mind the unattractiveness of labour, which has been the necessary outcome of commercial industry, will have played a great part in this revolution; the price which commercialism will have to pay for depriving the worker of his share of art will be its own death." William Morris, Unattractive Labour, Commonweal, 1885.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Pathfinders: Trans-Human Socialism (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s an early notification for the ‘Perfect Body Conference’, in case you’re swinging by Linköping in Sweden between October 9 and 16 and have a consuming interest in ‘transhumanism’ issues. The blurb describes it thus: "Enhancement, paraphrased as the improvement of desired characteristics, means to apply a certain focus on abilities, capacities and quality of life. These categories can be viewed and defined from different value-driven perspectives which are based upon certain viewpoints on what constitutes “normality”’.

Thinking of giving it a miss? Well, shame, because the transhumanism debate could turn out to be one of socialism’s hottest topics, after the grubby internal politics of capitalism has been consigned to the archives. At stake is the question of what ‘human’ means, now that technology promises the potential of almost unlimited physical and intellectual enhancements, up to and including immortality. At one level, you might think, what is there to debate? Who would wheeze around in an old banger of a body if they could breeze around in a macho Maserati or a female Ferrari? Why be ein dummkopf if you could be Einstein? Why put up with breakdown illnesses and debilitating corrosion if they can be engineered away, leaving you Kwik and Fit? Why die, for heaven’s sake?

The debate is raging before the technology has even developed, which is no bad thing, and much of it mirrors current consumerist paradigms, with the libertarian ‘devil-take-the-hindmost’ transhumanists at one extreme and, glaring at them from the liberal pole, the bleeding-hearts who worry (correctly) that any future Smart Toolkit for beauty, brains and longevity will only be sold in Harrods and not in Halfords. But these are only the two most obvious and energy-lite arguments, and neither penetrate far into the complexities of the issue. Others do, however, and Wikipedia provides an invaluable and entertaining list of these, including the Playing God argument, the Gattaca argument, the Frankenstein, the Eugenics Wars and the Terminator arguments. These criticisms all form points on a gradient between outright infeasibility (the Futurehype argument) and downright undesirability (Terminator). Even supposing such things become possible, hasn’t contempt for our commodified bodies already got us into enough trouble, it is argued, and won’t the rich just use the technology to make life even more miserable for the poor and oppressed, either by speciating humanity into a neo-Nazi Brave New World or by inadvertently creating a new race of uber-human which wipes us all out?

From a socialist perspective, a debate can be said to have real ‘legs’ if it can be extended beyond the context of capitalism and still have meaning in a socialist society. From this point of view, most of these arguments presuppose capitalist hierarchical principles and would not survive into socialism. Will the technology fail to serve all humanity and instead reflect and extend today’s social divisions and class barriers? Yes, probably. What else would you expect? The smart money is on immortal elites backed up by armies of supersoldiers – another reason to get socialism soon, before our working class descendants have the capability of independent thinking bred right out of them. Meanwhile disabled people, in the face of the transhumanist ideal of ‘perfectibility’, are looking nervously back over their shoulders at the eugenics movement of the 1930s and its macabre culmination in the Nazi death-camps. For them, as for other groups historically classified as ‘Other’, ‘transhuman’ carries an extra chill undertone, like the phrase ‘defect-free’ or perhaps ‘unJewish’.

But that is today’s debate, within the context of capitalism. The fear of being marginalised and oppressed by modifications to the definition of ‘Normal’ could not conceivably be exported into a society which has abolished the class basis of oppression. Nor would people, in a society without systems of social preferment, need to be paranoid about genetically engineered social elites. Where it gets interesting is when transhumanism invites one to ask even more fundamental questions which even socialism would struggle with. What exactly is a human, and what level of enhancement, if any, ought to be considered ‘enough’?

Socialist society, let it be remembered, is inclusive in its nature, which means that people are not to be judged or excluded on the basis of how pretty, young or smart they are. But what if it embraces the technology to make everyone ‘perfect’, and if so, who decides what ‘perfect’ is, and what would this say about social and biological diversity? And what of death, that ultimate motivator and engine of evolution? Would the achievement of immortality create a socialist society of incomparable cultural and technical sophistication or, conversely, a dispiriting world of torpid, plastic-faced Barbie dolls who can’t see the point of opening a book? Would the quest for perfection ultimately allow humans to conquer the stars, or make us so niche-specific that we became unable to adapt to future environmental upheavals, thus triggering our own extinction? Even given such imponderables, could any species, no matter how intelligent, ever resist the lure of this Pandora’s Box?

When the time comes to formulate the political agenda of socialist society, transhumanism will surely be right up there, because it calls into question everything that humans think they know about being human.

Is War Past its Sell-by Date?
Socialists would be the first to agree that, since war is not in our genes, it is not inevitable, and that it is therefore possible to conceive of a society without it. New Scientist thinks so too (4 July). Indeed, they point to the context-specific nature of war among primates and prehistoric human cultures to show that war is simply one behavioural strategy adopted under certain environmental or social conditions. In fact, they argue, “warfare is on the wane worldwide” due to better social conditions, so that most wars now are small-scale insurgencies: ‘the remnants of war’. Passing quickly over the question whether 4 million deaths in the Congo, for example, can be described as ‘small-scale’, we further learn that individual violence also follows the trend. According to Steven Pinker “Homicide rates in modern Europe, for example, are more than 10 times lower than they were in the Middle Ages” (although one wonders how Pinker can confidently assert this, in the absence of comprehensive records from Ye medieval Olde Bille).

And so we are brought to the inevitable Big Question: could capitalism abolish war? At this point New Scientist finally reins in the optimism and offers some caveats:

“Major obstacles to peace include the lack of tolerance inherent in religious fundamentalism, which not only triggers conflicts but often contributes to the suppression of women; global warming, which will produce ecological crises that may spark social unrest and violence; overpopulation, particularly when it produces a surplus of unmarried, unemployed young men, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

From a socialist perspective, they’ve left out the biggest obstacle of all, the war-engendering nature of property-owning capitalism itself. This omission seems all the more mysterious given their opening premise: that all the available evidence suggests that agriculture and land-ownership were responsible for warfare in the first place. Could it be that they are shirking the historical materialist conclusion that is staring them in the face, because the implication is too uncomfortable? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Or perhaps it’s naïve to expect scientists always to be scientific. One Harvard researcher offers the quaint idea that “since women are less prone to violence then men” their promotion into government ought to reduce the likelihood of future wars. You don’t need a Harvard degree to smell the logical rat there.

Paddy Shannon

Pieces Together (2009)

The Pieces Together column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A WORLD WITHOUT LEADERS

"For about 94,000 of the 100,000 years of human history, people lived and organised themselves as hunter-gatherers without a centralized leadership apparatus. Hunter-gatherers began the transition to early chiefdoms and embryonic states between 3,000 and 6,000 years ago. Only in the previous 100-500 years have there been state-level polities. The earliest human societies were acephalous: they existed without formal rulers or leaders. For this reason, they were also probably without heroes, a pattern which is starkly at odds with what has been claimed of human history generally and which also contrasts with the contemporary leadership field." Taken from the inaugural lecture on "Leadership: Its genealogy, configuration and trajectory” by Peter Gronn, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge . (Independent, 17 June)


OWNERSHIP AND KNOWLEDGE

"Ten years ago, a piece of software called Napster taught us that scarcity is no longer a law of nature. The physics of our universe would allow everyone with access to a networked computer to enjoy, for free, every song, every film, every book, every piece of research, every computer program, every last thing that could be made out of digital ones and zeros. The question became not, will nature allow it, but will our legal and economic system ever allow it? This is a question about the future of capitalism, the economic system that arose from scarcity. Ours is the era of expanded copyright systems and enormous portfolios of dubious patents, of trade secrecy, the privatisation of the fruits of publicly funded research, and other phenomena that we collectively term ‘intellectual property’. As technology has made a new abundance of knowledge possible, politicians, lawyers, corporations and university administrations have become more and more determined to preserve its scarcity. So will we cling to scarcity just so that we can keep capitalism?" (New Scientist, 24 June)


CANCER AND THE PROFIT MOTIVE

"Supplies of vital medicines, including those used in the fight against cancer, are running short because UK pharmacies and drug wholesalers are selling them abroad to maximise profits. ... The shortage is being caused by the falling value of sterling which has meant that UK pharmacies and drug wholesalers can earn greater returns by selling medicines to the continent. ... Last night leading cancer charities expressed alarm at the situation. ‘Cancer Research UK urges the Department of Health to ensure that no patient experiences any delay in getting prescription drugs,’ said Hilary Jackson, the organisation's policy manager. ‘We are concerned to hear of cases where patients have been delayed access to prescribed medication or have to find an alternative supplier. This causes extra distress at an already difficult time’" (Observer, 5 July)