Practical Politics (2010)

From the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LB

Post-Capitalism: Parecon or a World without Money? Which way to a classless society?

SPGB debate with Z Magazine's Michael Albert at Conway Hall this coming Saturday:

POST-CAPITALISM: PARECON OR A WORLD WITHOUT MONEY?
Which way to a classless society?

Debate with Michael Albert (founder member of ZCommunications and author of "Parecon: Life After Capitalism") and Adam Buick (World Socialist Movement) about the alternative to capitalism.
PARECON
- form of money economy featuring workers' self-management and consumer councils, price-setting, and personal incomes based on effort and sacrifice not property or heredity.

"In the world you desire to attain there is, I presume, production. Likewise, I assume you agree that people will consume. More, beyond production and consumption, is there some regulation of what is produced and in what quantity? The alternative would be that anyone can produce anything, with no concern other than that they wish to. This is nonsense, but if there is regulation of how resources, energies, and labor are allocated to generate outputs, does that regulation reflect the preferences that both producers and consumers have and especially a full valuation of the relative contribution to well being and development of different choices? If it does, then to that extent it includes "money." The valuations are prices, albeit not necessarily as we have known them in market and centrally planned systems".

Michael Albert (ZCom)

SOCIALISM
- the abolition of the property-based money economy including markets, profits, rent and wages, with all land and goods owned and democratically controlled by the whole society.

"In implementing the long-standing socialist principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs”, socialist society breaks the link between work done and consumption. Rather than being “allotted” what to consume as under “Parecon”, people would be able to take from the common store of wealth set aside for individual consumption what they judged they needed to live and enjoy life, irrespective of what they had contributed to production. Every able-bodied person would be expected to contribute something, but we don’t share your bleak view that, in this event, not enough would be produced to satisfy people’s needs (that “demand would exceed supply”, as you put it) - and that therefore, not just profits, but the wages system too would have to be retained as a means of both obliging people to work and of limiting their consumption. Just like under capitalism.
Our description of “Parecon” is “post-capitalist capitalism”, i.e. not post-capitalism at all".

Adam Buick (SPGB)

Pathfinders: Quantum socialism (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Quantum socialism

Every journalist hack and indeed newspaper buyer knows that if you put ‘sex’ on the cover page you tend to sell more copies. Science magazines and TV programmes appear to have a similar trick with the word ‘quantum’. Presumably this is because readers understand as little about the one as they do about the other, and salivate in a pavlovian reflex at any false promise of enlightenment.

Since nothing in physics is sexier than the search for a ‘quantum gravity’ theory which might underpin and unite the two great arch-enemies, relativity and quantum mechanics, any book which claims some new insight into the subject will be noisily promoted by publisher and media alike. And all the more so if produced by Stephen Hawking, the one physicist that the UK public have actually heard of.

Hawking is already famously quoted from his new book The Grand Design as coming out against the God-squad: "It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going." All well and good, but readers of his earlier, supposedly populist work A Brief History of Time (1988) will know it’s probably necessary to invoke a squadron of fictitious supernatural intellects in order to throw any light on Hawking. Carl Sagan or Richard Dawkins he ain’t.

"M-theory is the theory of everything. It explains how the universe was created out of nothing in the Big Bang, and how it behaves now”, Stephen tells us in a recent Newsnight interview, as if the matter has now been satisfactorily resolved, adding that "M-theory is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find". A reasonable viewer might conclude from this that M-theory has actually been ‘found’ and that its equations really do solve the fundamental problems of physics. This however would be placing the truth of the matter into some quantum superposition in the eleventh dimension. In fact, as theoretical physicist and iconoclast Lee Smolin pointed out in his book The Trouble With Physics (2006), M-theory is a fictitious label to describe a theory which does not yet and may never exist and for which evidence is almost completely lacking. It is not a theory, it is merely a statement of intent. ‘M’ does not even stand for anything, although Hawking suggests it could stand for ‘master, miracle or mystery’. It could just as well stand for ‘mumbo-jumbo’.

The problem with string theories, whose mutual disagreements M-theory would need to resolve, is that they present us with an unattractive choice between the fundamentally unknowable and the fundamentally incomprehensible. The only way to tie up all the loose stringy ends into a neat package that can explain all those myriad annoying particles with exotic names is a formula that doesn’t just account for our universe but also 10500 other universes too (this is a 1 with roughly this paragraph’s worth of zeroes after it, some 410 orders of magnitude more than the number of atoms in the known universe). Being asked to believe that there are indeed this many universes existing in parallel, 48 quadzillion of them possibly hiding under one of your toenails, does not do much to inspire confidence. Most normal people would suggest that such a theory is no theory at all, but then perhaps normal people don’t go into physics.

Still, maybe we’re missing a marketing opportunity here. We could relabel socialism as M-theory, for Marx or Materialist, and even include our own ‘uncertainty principle’ just for those critics who think we’re smart-alec fanatics who never question our own ideas. After all, we never said we knew everything. And wouldn’t ‘Quantum Socialism’ look good on the cover?

There is also an M-theory in economics, which is monetarism, the opposite of K-theory. In the one, as we are seeing now, you grind the poor and cut services to get out of depression. In the other, you indulge in a Keynesian orgy of spending to get out of depression. Since both were tried simultaneously during the Reagan – Thatcher years and neither worked, we socialists tend to bracket them both under the grand unified theory known as B-theory. This, in case you’re wondering, is named after a gentleman’s personal appendages.

Dawkins deified

Was there a deliberate irony behind the Guardian’s decision to entitle an interview with four prominent scientists, including Richard Dawkins, as ‘Gods of Science’ (11 September)? If there was any embarrassment on Dawkins’ part he didn’t mention it. When asked who his own favourite living scientific hero was he chivalrously cited his co-interviewee David Attenborough. Brian Cox, formerly pop star, now an engaging TV presenter and photogenic professor who presents entry-level astronomy to people who aren’t sure which revolves around what, would probably by his own admission not quite qualify as a God. He cited his co-interviewee Stephen Hawking as his hero. Meanwhile, avoiding any such yuk-factor, Attenborough cited Richard Feynman, whose many sterling attributes do not include being alive. Hawking grumpily refused to cite anyone at all. Maybe next we’ll get a tour round their kitchens in Hello magazine. Celebrity chemist, anyone?

Paddy Shannon

Pieces Together: Modern Britain (2010)

From the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern Britain

"Nearly 54,000 children living below the poverty line will be pushed farther down the scale by cuts to housing benefit, according to figures from the charity Shelter. Their families will be left with less than £100 a week once housing costs have been paid. Of these, 33,00 children will be in families trying to live on under £50 a week." ((London) Times, 7 September)


Hunger Amidst Plenty

"India's grain warehouses are bursting at the seams and sacks of rice and wheat lie rotting in the open for lack of storage space. These government-managed stocks are for offsetting a fall in agricultural production in the event of drought or floods, but are also meant for sale to the poorest segment of the population at subsidised prices. But because the public distribution system (PDS) is undermined by bureaucracy and corruption, 60m tonnes of grain is lying in warehouses or under plastic sheeting, and, according to the Hindustan Times, 11m tonnes of it has been destroyed by the monsoons. A committee of experts appointed by the supreme court has claimed that this is nothing short of "genocide", and last month the court ordered the free distribution of the grain to the poor rather than have it eaten by rats. Since the 1970s green revolution, agricultural production has continued to rise, but not to benefit the hungry. Half of India's children aged under five suffer from malnutrition, and the rate remained stable between 1999 and 2006 despite the economic growth in those years. India is the world's 11th largest economic power but still has more people in poverty." (Guardian, 7 September)


Loaded Politicians in USA

"The rest of the country is still struggling with high unemployment amid a sluggish-at-best economic recovery -- but the wealthiest members of Congress are in high cotton. Indeed, the top 50 wealthiest lawmakers saw their combined net worths increase last year, according to the Hill's annual analysis of financial disclosure documents. Combined, the 50 lawmakers were worth $1.4 billion in 2009 -- an $85.1 million increase over their 2008 total . ...The list of 50 lawmakers spans both parties (27 Democrats and 23 Republicans) and both chambers of Congress (30 House members, 20 senators), the Hill reports." (Yahoo News, 1 September)


The Failure Of Reform

"The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty. Census figures for 2009 the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat's presidency are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings. It's unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated increase from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power." (Yahoo News, 11 September)

The Gulf Oil Spill

Cross-posted from the Imagine Magazine blog

At the time of writing, the ruptured pipe has been capped, for now, after 85 days of spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Although estimates have varied wildly, BP originally claimed ‘almost nothing has escaped’ (Toronto Star, 13/06/2010), it is now estimated that the total is around seven hundred million litres, or seventeen times the Exxon Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. It is the biggest oil disaster ever and could get worse as it is not clear how much stress the cap can take before blowing again, and relief wells needed to complete the job have yet to be finished.

In addition, Hugh Kaufman, of the Environmental Protection Agency, criticizes BP for its use of the dispersant, Corexit, and describes it as ‘the Agent Orange of the Gulf’ (Toronto Star, 17/07/2010). Seven million litres of the dispersant have transformed the oil into droplets that cannot be burned or skimmed, and thus will impact the environment for many years to come. The use of Corexit, Kaufman says, is short term gain for long term pain. Friends of the Earth’s count so far of the dead is 1 387 sea birds, 444 sea turtles, and 53 mammals.

The Exxon Valdez spill accounted for 36 000 dead birds, but the Gulf spill may have more economic impact given the amount of sea-based industry on that coast and longer lasting environmental effects because whereas Alaska has a rocky shoreline that does not absorb oil easily, the Gulf coast of sand and sediment will act like a sponge.

The spill is causing widespread failure in an already weak ecosystem. In this sense, the current spill could be more accurately compared to the 1979 Ixtoc spill of 450 million litres, 1 000 kilometres off the coast of Texas that took one month to reach the coast there.

British Petroleum Inc. is the world’s third largest energy company with 2009 revenues of $246 billion. In 2 000 it re-branded itself as the industry’s most sensitive company with an ad campaign of $200 million entitled ‘Beyond Petroleum’, sporting a new green logo similar to that of our Green Party. It committed to alternative energy systems and did succeed in reducing its CO2 emissions by ten per cent and becoming the third largest maker of solar panels. Yet its revenues continued to come ninety per cent from oil, and its record tells a very different story from its new brand.

In 2001, BP was forced to pay a $10 million penalty and spend $500 million in upgrades for violating federal clean air laws at eight US refineries; In 2005, a Texas refinery explosion killed fifteen workers and the company was penalized $87 million by the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the biggest fine in the agency’s history; In 2006, BP’s Alaska operations were found to have leaked one million litres of crude oil from eroded pipelines and was forced to replace twenty-six kilometers of pipeline; In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank killing eleven workers, due to the failure of a blow-out-protector to activate. BP’s initial response was to downplay the damage, to refuse to let scientists have access to the site to determine the flow from the well, and reporters from informing the public, and to blame the Swiss-based company from which BP leased the equipment. CEO Hayward said, “This was not our accident’ (Toronto Star, 13/06/2010). BP did act quickly to buy top Google and Yahoo! search results so that the first result for phrases such as ‘oil spill’ would yield ‘Learn more about how BP is helping’.
The above is not just a list of deadly accidents, but more a result of planned cost cutting. Former CEO John Browne (who became Lord Browne of Madingley) balked at the choice between economic growth and more careful environmental stewardship, contrary to its own advertising campaign. He stated, “If you say to people, ‘Do you want to develop the world and have a good living standard, or do you want a safer environment?’ people are terrified by the choice” (Toronto Star, 9/05/2010).

Under Browne’s term in office, an expense-paring regime figured prominently in maintenance reductions that allowed the Alaskan pipeline erosions and lax safety standards that contributed to the Texas explosion. His successor, Tony Hayward, continued with the cost cutting by slashing $4 billion from operating costs which, obviously, impacted safety even further. Internal documents show that BP itself had concerns before the blow-out occurred. In March, 2010, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of well control and in June 2009, company engineers had warned that the metal well casing might collapse under pressures at that depth, and concluded that the cement job to seal the pipe was unlikely to be successful. (Ina Urbina of the New York Times, reported in the Toronto Star, 30/05/2010). In other words, BP officials knew the casing violated its own safety standards. The blow-out preventer that was supposed to slice through the pipe and cut off the oil flow, failed. It had never been tested at that depth. In fact, BP’s performance has been so bad that confidence in the company has plunged and investment in the company is considered dead money as stocks have been stagnant since 2000 which compares badly with Conoco Phillips (up 145% in the same time), Chevron (78%), and Exxon Mobil (71%).

What are governments doing to protect the environment and ensure the safety of the workers? The answer is plenty, for the capitalist class, that is. The World Socialist Movement holds that the modern nation state, with clearly defined and defended borders, with a strong central government backed by well equipped armies and police forces, and a legal system that is their own creation, are crucial to the operation of the capitalist mode of production.

Government is the executive arm of the capitalist system and forms the basis of capitalism with the enactment of private property laws. It is its job to maintain and revise those laws to ensure the private ownership of the means creating and distributing wealth in the interests of the owning capitalist class. The government’s collaboration with the capitalist enterprises encompasses protection of the latter’s national and international rights to operate as freely as possible through diplomacy, bribes, and even war, if necessary, and create a not-so-level playing field of economic activity, tipped, naturally, in favour of their capitalists. Sure, they are elected every few years in a quasi-democratic exercise where the largest voting block is usually the ‘did not vote’ group, but we have no choice in that the major parties with the money, organization, and clout to get elected, all vie to run capitalism in the interests of the capitalists. The Gulf oil spill provides several insights into this process of governmental collaboration.

Thomas Walkom (Toronto Star, 29/05/2010) writes that the American regulation of the offshore oil industry has been revealed to be a sham. After all that has come out regarding BP’s record, they are still in charge and have used their authority to refuse access to scientists and reporters to the site to determine and report on the magnitude of the oil spill, as noted above.

Canada’s regulations for drilling in the harsher arctic conditions are even weaker. Paul Martin’s Liberal government relaxed the rules for arctic drilling and the current Harper Conservative government has eased the rules even further. The Newfoundland government strongly supports Chevron’s drilling in the stormy Orphan Basin, 450 kilometres into the North Atlantic where a spill would be impossible to contain. Tax revenues for the province and profits for the investors must take preference over any environmental considerations. Even the Nunavut government, dominated by the supposedly eco-friendly Inuit, supports seismic testing in the Eastern Arctic. The BP oil spill has revealed the immense clout of the large economic sectors and enterprises.
Obama’s moratorium on arctic oil exploration is due to be lifted next year. Despite the hopes of Marcie Keever, spokesperson for Friends of the Earth, that this latest oil spill will trigger a public demand for an end to the era where the oil industry writes its own regulations, and will spawn a sea change in the need to get off fossil fuels altogether, the US climate bill now passing through Congress gets weakened every day with amendments, and will do little to fulfill Keever’s hopes. Some Non-Governmental Organizations estimate that Nigeria has suffered oil spills equivalent to the Exxon Valdez every year since 1969 but a compliant and corrupt government has done nothing to solve the problem over four decades (Toronto Star, 06/06/2010)

At the present time, companies operating in US territory risk a maximum fine of $75 million for oil spills which would equal less than two days’ profit for BP. The oil industry is only following a pattern that is discernable in all major sectors of the economy – pharmaceutical, food, mining, tobacco, etc. Their financial clout is used to support donations to politicians’ election funds, to produce mass propaganda to sway public opinion, to fund thousands of lobbyists whose job it is to remind politicians of their loyalties, and to refute scientific evidence that is detrimental to their industry. The top civil service jobs, particularly in the industrial regulatory bodies, and those of top executives in an economic sector are frequently swapped back and forth, creating an old boys’ club whose members inhabit the same social circles creating a smooth ride around government rules and regulations.

Many left wing and one-issue groups complain that this state of affairs came about with globalization and ascendancy of greedy multi-national corporations. To socialists, this state of affairs is simply the normal operation of the capitalist system. It has been going on since philanthropists and governments tried to alleviate the appalling conditions in factories and mines in the early nineteenth century.

In 1865, Marx wrote, concerning the attempts of the factory acts of the time to introduce safety legislation to stem the large number of industrial deaths and accidents,

“The factory owners of the time formed a “trade union” to resist the factory legislation, the so-called ‘National Association for the Amendment of Factory Laws’, based in Manchester, which collected a sum of 50 000 pounds in March 1855…to meet the legal costs of members prosecuted by the factory inspectors and conduct their cases on behalf of the Association…The factory owners promptly formed their Association, its most prominent members including many who themselves were J.P.s, (Justices of the Peace) and in this capacity had actually to apply the act…The head of the Factory Inspectorate, Leonard Horner, was persecuted and slandered by the factory-owners in every conceivable way.” (Capital, Vol. III, pp184/185, Penguin classics edition).

Rather than this type of evasion of spending for safety and environmental concerns being a modern phenomenon of globalization, then, it is, and has always been, a feature of the operation of the capitalist mode of production. It will remain so until the profit system is replaced with a common ownership system of production for use, i.e. socialism.

(This article originally appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of 'Imagine', the official journal of the Socialist Party of Canada.)

Cooking the Books: Capitalism and the Labour Party (2010)

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

“I’ll make capitalism work for the people,” promised Ed Miliband in his bid to become Labour leader (Observer, 29 August). He explained:

“Britain’s big question of the next decade is whether we head towards an increasingly US-style capitalism – more unequal, more brutish, more unjust – or whether we can build a different model – a capitalism that works for people and not the other way round.”

Apparently, “in 2008, a consensus existed that we should understand the lessons of the financial crisis, not just about regulation, but about the kind of capitalism we needed to build”.

We’ve heard this before. The Labour Party has always tried to make capitalism work for the people but, every time that it has been in office, it has failed miserably. What is new is that previously Labour leaders never admitted that this was what they were trying to do. They said they were trying to gradually reform capitalism out of existence, not building a new kind of capitalism.

Still, an open recognition of what they are trying to do can only help clarify things. It is, however, indicative of how far Labour has changed that Ed Miliband was the candidate supported by the Left in the party. Even they have bought into the idea that there is no alternative to capitalism, only a choice about what sort of capitalism, and dropped the anti-capitalist rhetoric.

Ed’s brother David, the candidate supported by the Right declared that his Labour hero was Anthony Crosland (New Statesman, 30 August). He was the Fabian Society Labourite who argued that capitalism no longer existed. Which might explain why David Miliband, and Blair and Brown before him, refuse to use the c-word.

The reason Labour – and indeed the Tories who also talk of a “people’s capitalism” – fail to make capitalism work for the people is that this is an impossible mission. Capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interest of all. It is a profit-making system that can only work as such, in the interest of those who live off profits and to the detriment of those who live off wages and salaries or, in the absence of these, on state hand-outs.

The driving force of capitalism is the accumulation of capital out of profits. When this slows down, as at present, there is a crisis. So, governments must not do anything that might discourage the making of profits to accumulate as capital; in fact, even if it wasn’t their original intention (as perhaps, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it wasn’t with some Labour governments), they have to end up doing all they can to encourage this.

Inevitably, this brings them into conflict with the wage and salary working class whose labour is the source of profits, imposing wage restraint and/or austerity on them. This is not because the government’s members are nasty or incompetent or corrupt, but because this is how they are forced to act by virtue of being the government in the context of capitalism. They fail because they can’t act in any other way.

Instead of Labour gradually changing capitalism into something else, the experience of running capitalism changed the Labour Party – to the extent that today you are labelled a left-winger if you just mention the word “capitalism”, even to support it.

Socialist Meeting in Norwich on the Zeitgeist Movement

Greasy Pole: Marshmallows are not the only sweet (2010)

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

It is to be hoped that while some people may damn the Coalition as repressive and impoverishing there will be others who happily acknowledge its vital role in educating us about human behaviour and responses. In particular government ministers have been consistently eager, in justifying themselves to us, to examine how we score in the matter of Deferred Gratification, a concept once so absorbing to sociologists, child psychologists, criminologists and others similarly seeking to explain the need for us to endure so many blemishes on what could be our enduringly fulfilling lives.

For example here is our Deputy Prime Minister outlining a most recent concept of official policy: “…this Government is committed to the long term – to making decisions today that will promote a better future: a more prosperous economy, and a fairer society. Our determination to fix the deficit is matched by our determination to create a more socially mobile society…But in five years’ time we want to be able to look back and say that the children born in 2015 are less constrained by the circumstances of their birth…that true progress was made in making opportunity a right of the many, rather than a privilege of the few”. (It is worth noting that this kind of empty drivel is not spouted exclusively by Liberals and Tories; in his campaign for the Labour leadership David Miliband assured us that he would bring about “…the redistribution of power in Britain, an assault on inequality of life chances…”)

Marshmallows
It would have been better – nearer the truth – if Clegg and Miliband had said that if we behave ourselves for the present, in the sense of controlling our urges to achieve a less perilous living standard we shall, in due course, come by our reward in the form of a society which through its social mobility is a model of fairness. This arouses memories of what has gone down in history as the Marshmallow Experiment. At Stanford University in the 1960s a group of four-year-old children were each given a marshmallow and promised that if they waited twenty minutes before eating it they would be allowed to have another. Some of them waited; the others quickly ate the marshmallow. Some years later, when they were 18, they were assessed as to their degree of social adjustment and dependability – the extent of their economic advantage against disadvantage. (It would have been more accurate to call this being profitably exploited in a job against being underemployed). The results showed the children who had stifled their impulse to scoff the marshmallow scoring significantly higher than the others. (Although more than one response doggedly pointed out that it needed only someone averse to marshmallows to score highly enough to invalidate the whole exercise). Perhaps Nick Clegg and his gang might reflect on this, while nursing their confidence about the uncritical acceptance of their pledges for “fairness” and “social mobility”.

Cameron
To forestall any impetuous celebrations at Job Centres where the staff are flooded under the current influx of claimants or on council housing estates where dilapidations lie undisturbed after financial cutbacks at the local town hall, it must be made clear that, whatever Nick Clegg may imply, social mobility is not a universally available opportunity. David Cameron, for example, would not be eligible for this benefit because his status is already high enough to disqualify him. His late father was born into a family where affluence was ingrained enough for him to describe himself as “a nepotistic heir”. The advantages in this – for Cameron Senior and for his children including the Prime Minister – were in spite of his being born with a physical handicap which would have been crucially restrictive to the ambitions of a disadvantaged family for their children's social improvement. Whatever Clegg's glib mouthing about social mobility – the opportunity for a family or group to improve their material situation and prospects – it is only rarely that they can be immune to pressures which are out of their control by being built into the fabric of this property society.

Poverty
And of these the most powerful and persistent is poverty; in this country no other factor has so devastating an effect on the life chances of people – on the likelihood of them being able to benefit from Clegg's Social Mobility. For a long time this has figured prominently in the meaningless manifestos of the capitalist parties. This was the Labour Party, asking for a second term in 2001: “A single aim drives our policy programme: to liberate people's potential, by spreading power, wealth and opportunity more widely, breaking down the barriers that hold people back.” And this was Michael Howard, then leader of the Conservative Party, in the 2005 election: “For me the heart of politics is all about people – their hopes and aspirations. People want the freedom, security and opportunity to get on in life.” Fine words for anyone who allows themselves to be so easily impressed. What has happened since then? Among the mass of evidence, a report published in January this year by the National Equality Panel (a brainchild of Harriet Harman) stated that by the years 2007-2008 income inequality had reached the most extreme level since the Second World War, with the top one percent of the population each owning household wealth of £2.6 million while the poorest had £8,800. Being poor inflicts enduring, accumulative damage to a child's education, to where they live and to their life chances: “…people's occupational and economic destinations in early adulthood depend to an important degree on their origins”.

In other words the promises about social mobility, about yet another policy to spirit away the inequality and its social damage inextricably linked to capitalist society are the empty pleadings of political leaders with nothing more original or effective to offer. So let us not be influenced by Nick Clegg and his attempts to persuade us to behave like the good kids with the marshmallows. The need for us to change society is as urgent as it ever was. And marshmallows are deceptive: just sweet and sticky with a very soft centre.

Ivan

Big Society or Little Trick? (2010)

From the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Cameron’s Vision Thing is too obvious to fool anybody.

If you are a professional politician your job, as a minister when your party is in office, whether on its own or in coalition, is to take part in managing the general affairs of capitalism in your country. Politicians are elected and so you have to win popular support. Just to say “we’re a better capitalism-management team than the other lot” is hardly inspiring, even though most people do see elections as being about choosing the least objectionable set of politicians. National politicians have even been described as the mere middle management of international corporate capitalism.

As a politician in office you also have to win a degree of popular support for the policies capitalism obliges you to pursue. It’s not enough to be truthful and say “I’m just reacting to whatever problems the uncontrollable workings of capitalism place on my agenda”. You have to give the impression that you are working towards a better life for everyone. Hence the need felt by politicians to do what George Bush called “the Vision Thing”. You must give the impression that you are engaged in doing something more than the mere routine management of capitalism. It rarely works, but politicians still try it from time to time. The latest is Cameron and his “Big Society”.

State and society
Cameron’s “Big Society” is based on a distinction between “society” and “government”, reflecting that emphasised by the German philosopher Hegel between “civil society” and “the state”. In saying he wants “society” to be big he is saying he wants government to be small (or, rather, since that would be going too far from a capitalist point of view, for it to be smaller). His scheme involves transferring some of the services provided by local councils to the “voluntary sector”, i.e. to charities and “social enterprises” (enterprises that are not allowed to distribute their profits). In other words, a continuation of the Thatcherite programme – and the permanent agenda of big business – of rolling back the state so that taxes on capitalist enterprises can be reduced allowing them to keep more of their profits.

Transferring services to the voluntary sector will save money because those working in this sector are generally paid less and have less job security than local government employees. The “Big Society”, then, turns out to be not to be a grand vision but a sordid little exercise in cheese-paring. Or rather, in so far as it is a longer-term view, it’s putting a positive spin on the New Age of Austerity announced by Cameron and his government.

Hegel’s “civil society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft) is often translated, especially when used by Marx, as “bourgeois society”, which in fact is what Hegel meant: the everyday economic activities of people in pursuit of their personal interest, capitalists competing for markets and profits and workers competing for job and wages. The state he saw as representing and enforcing the overall general interest of society as a whole. Marx showed that, while the state did indeed represent an overall general interest, it was not that of society as a whole but that of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, as a whole.

The state is defined not just by socialists but even by conventional academics as a institution with a monopoly in the employment of legitimate force within a given territory. But the state is more than just force. It is also the centre of social control and as such has responsibility for carrying out various administrative tasks essential to the continuation of society such as, these days, education, health care, looking after the vulnerable, town planning and many others.
It is by no means self-evident that these necessary services would be better performed by charities and other civil society organisations than by national or local government. In fact the likelihood is that in most cases they won’t be or won’t be sustainable. But that’s not the point. They will be cheaper. That’s the point.

Voluntary work
There is one interesting aspect of Cameron’s plan. Relying on volunteers to do certain things accepts that there is such a thing as voluntary work, which the ideological defenders of capitalism usually deride. According to them, people are motivated to work only by monetary compensation or by the threat of starvation. In seeking to take advantage, even if only to save money, of the undeniable fact that millions of hours of voluntary work are engaged in by people all the time, the government is unintentionally conceding an important point to socialists. People are motivated to do socially useful work by reasons other than money and so could be relied on to do this too in a socialist society.

In a sense socialism will be a “big society” in that it will be all society and no state. However, what we mean by both “society” and “state” is different from what Cameron means. By “society” we don’t mean bourgeois civil society where everybody has to fend for themselves to get a living, but one based on the common ownership of the means for producing useful things where everyone will be guaranteed a decent living by virtue of having free access to what they need. What people need will be provided by society and will not depend on their own initiative or competitive effort.

While the coercive aspects of the state – what makes it a state and which Cameron has no intention of downsizing – will have disappeared, many of its administrative functions will remain. There will still be central and local councils, though much more accountable and democratic than today and whose personnel won’t be able to allocate themselves any material privileges as everyone will have free access to what they need. In these changed circumstances there is no reason why some of the services provided by these administrations today should not continue to be. On the other hand, there will be scope for some of them to be provided by groups of volunteers. It will be up to the local communities of the time to decide. But the debate then will be a genuine debate about the best way to organise things in the common interest. Not the smokescreen to disguise cost-cutting in the interest of the capitalist class that Cameron’s “Big Society” is.

Adam Buick

Dig deeper for socialism (2010)

Book Review from the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Crack Capitalism by John Holloway, London: Pluto Press 2010

John Holloway’s previous book, Change The World Without Taking Power, was relatively popular and the focus of much debate and discussion, at least in the relatively small circles where you find anti-capitalist activists. A lot has happened since the book’s publication in 2002, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Holloway’s latest, Crack Capitalism, which makes more or less exactly the same arguments.

Holloway’s main point is basically that of ‘autonomist marxism’ and there is one great island of strength in this, which readers might drag themselves onto if they don’t first drown in a sea of verbiage. It can be summed up in a paragraph. It is that the world’s workers create capitalism by going to work. Capitalism is therefore not a thing that stands outside and over and above us, but a social relationship that we create everyday through our daily activities. If we understand this, we can, if we want to end capitalism, merely stop creating it and do something else instead. In fact, according to autonomists, this is actually happening all the time – every time we refuse work, go on strike, call in sick, or even, if Holloway is to be believed, dig our gardens. The workers of the world are always resisting their exploitation, even if only in their own, small, personal ways, and even if they’re not conscious of exactly what it is they’re doing. The task is merely to extend and expand and ‘circulate’ the struggles. Holloway calls these struggles the ‘cracks’ in capitalism. What we need to do is find the cracks, and work hard to make them bigger. “The opening of cracks is the opening of a world that presents itself as closed,” says Holloway. This is a neat way of summarising a fundamental Marxian proposition about class struggle as the motor that drives change. The strength of the argument is that it puts the power and potential for change back where it belongs and where it in fact really lies: in our own hands. The weakness, however, is a very serious one. It is that it risks evading the real difficulties that remain.

According to Holloway, the ranks of the “anti-capitalist revolutionaries” are impressively large. They include the composer who expresses his anger and dreams of a better society through his music, the worker who bunks off work to go read a book in the park, the “gardener who creates a garden to struggle against the destruction of nature”, the friends who form a choir for no good reason except their love of singing, and “the young man in Mexico City who goes to the jungle to organise armed struggle to change the world”. The key to becoming fully human, says Holloway, “is simple: refuse, disobey.” If this didn’t happen, there would be no grounds for hope in a socialist future at all. But if it was enough, then surely capitalism would have collapsed long ago – in fact, could never have got off the ground in the first place.

Imagine, says Holloway, borrowing a metaphor from an Edgar Allen Poe story, that we are all in a room. We are all in it together – some sitting on a comfortable couch, others cramped miserably in a corner, perhaps; but in it together nonetheless. There are four walls, a ceiling, but no windows or doors. And the walls are advancing slowly inwards, threatening to crush us all to death. How would we respond to such a situation? No doubt, says Holloway, some would just refuse to see what was happening and distract themselves instead with the latest offering from Disney. Some would perhaps denounce the walls, but not propose to do anything about it, while others would look forward to and dream of a day when there were no walls. Then there are those like Holloway who would instead run to the walls and try desperately to find cracks, or to create them. In an unintentionally hilarious conclusion, which speaks against his whole argument, Holloway imagines these activists banging their heads against the wall “over and over again” until the wall comes crumbling down. Holloway, for all his straining after poetic effect, doesn’t seem to realise that, in the repeated encounters between a head and a brick wall, the wall very rarely gets the worst of it.

To take another of Holloway’s metaphors, and turn it against him, perhaps the cracks in capitalism are more like the cracks in mud than the cracks in a wall – one short spell of rain can wash them away without trace. To understand this and organise to counter-act it, to get to the stage where the class struggle of our side could conceivably counter, say, capital flight to the other side of the world, or the organised violence of state power, requires exactly the kind of big-picture thinking and dedicated, disciplined organising that Holloway dogmatically opposes.

We in the Socialist Party do not of course oppose most of the activities that Holloway places his hopes in. As individuals, some of us enjoy gardening, for example; and most of us are active in trade unions and similar organisations, even if we do not take up arms and head out into the Mexican jungle. But we do not flatter to deceive, nor dodge the most difficult questions. The problem we have to face is that, in the class struggle, the odds are nearly always against us, and that to build a socialist future, we need a mass organisation of people who know what it is they want and are prepared to work to achieve it. As Engels put it, “The period for sudden onslaughts, of revolutions carried out by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where the question involves the complete transformation of the social organisation, there the masses must be consulted, must themselves have already grasped what the struggle is about, and what they stand for.” Holloway’s work is in many ways an ingenious dodging of this immense task. But the task remains and will remain as long as capitalism does. It’s time we faced it.

Stuart Watkins

Editorial: Red shoots (2010)

Editorial from the October 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are we beginning to see the red shoots of recovery in the class struggle? It certainly seems that way. The annual conference of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), held in mid-September, approved motions calling for ‘joint industrial action’, and union leaders have promised ‘street protests’ and a campaign of ‘civil disobedience’ to oppose planned government spending cuts. Two-day strikes on London’s Tube network have already taken place. And as the TUC met, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that America and Europe face the worst jobs crisis since the 1930s and an ‘explosion of social unrest’ unless governments tread carefully.

There’s no way of predicting with any confidence whether this expected ‘explosion’ will go off, or turn out to be a damp squib – it all depends on what millions of people think and decide to do. But the concern on the part of our bosses and rulers is real enough. The unions today may remain weak: membership has declined from 13 million in the early 1980s to just over half that today, according to the Economist, and membership is concentrated in the public sector (57 percent of public-sector workers are unionised compared with just 15 percent in the private). But, as the Economist points out, unions remain an important social movement. Its seven million members are a bigger force than, say, the four million who attend church at least once a month. Along with the concentration of forces in the public sector, this means unions can still ‘cause chaos’ – a transport strike prevents other workers getting to work, for example, and a teachers’ strike sends millions of parents home to look after their children. The Economist concludes from this that there is a vital need to keep the general public ‘onside’ in any conflict – they mean (as if it’s obvious) on the side of business and its government.

And that¹s the media’s job – to wage a propaganda war to make sure everyone’s ‘onside’, The tragedy is that their victory seems assured before the war is even begun. Why? Because alternatives to the system that got us into this mess are simply unthinkable. Even the most radical of the trade unionists, and leftwing commentary generally, did little but offer reforms that the propagandists will have no trouble portraying as unrealistic. If you accept the logic of capitalism, you play by its rules – and by its rules, savage government spending cuts are just necessary and inevitable. By its rules, to fight against cuts and for higher wages is as senseless as trying to shake fruit from a dead tree. Without a decent anti-capitalist argument, and an idea of what we are for, we¹ve lost before we’ve begun.
That’s why socialism is so important. Yes, it is, as we are often told, a ‘nice idea’. But when it takes hold of workers, it could become much more than that. It could become the fertiliser we need if the red shoots of recovery are going to take root, thrive – and blossom in a world beyond capitalism, a world fit for humanity.

Pocket Money

Cross-posted from the Socialism Or Your Money Back blog

“TAXMAN WANTS ALL OUR WAGES. We would just get pocket money” screamed the front page headline in the Daily Express (22 September). As the London Times had explained five days earlier:“HM Revenue & Customs is considering plans to deduct tax directly from workers’ pay packets before salaries reach their bank accounts”.

So what’s new? Income tax is already deducted before wages reach worker’s bank accounts, only this is now done by employers not the government. This in fact is one reason why we have said that, as far as income tax on wages and salaries is concerned, workers don’t even pay it. They never see the money. It’s paid by employers.

PAYE (Pay As You Earn) was introduced as part of the war-time Beveridge Plan to “redistribute poverty”, i.e. to try to ensure that the total wages bill was distributed efficiently, from a capitalist point of view, amongst the working class, so that no worker got either too much or not enough to reproduce their working skills taking into account their family circumstances.

Basically, it involved cutting the take-home pay of single workers or workers whose wife worked as they didn’t need to be paid to maintain non-existent dependants. Employers couldn’t be expected to do this themselves as their only concern was the quality of the labour power they purchased, for which they paid the going rate irrespective of the family circumstances of its seller. So it was done through the tax system

The Marxian theory of taxes and the working class is one of the most difficult concepts to get over. Sometimes it’s mistakenly expressed as “the workers don’t pay taxes”. The accurate and scientifically correct way of expressing the concept is that “taxes are not a burden on the working class”.

Even if workers don’t pay the income tax that is deducted from their pay packets before any money reaches their bank accounts”, workers do physically pay other taxes. For instance, workers in employment pay council tax in that they themselves have to pay this either in cash or by a cheque or transfer from their bank account.

Workers also pay indirect taxes such as excise duties on alcohol and tobacco and VAT on the goods and services subject to it. These, insofar as they increase prices, increase the cost of living and so the cost of reproducing labour power. This is passed on to employers as higher than otherwise money wages. It is in this sense that taxes on wages and on goods and services workers consume are ultimately a burden on employers.

We’re talking here about average expenditure. Only taxes included in expenditure on goods that enter into the general average cost of living are passed on to employers, not all the indirect taxes that an individual worker might pay. Just because a worker spends more than average on alcohol and cigarettes does not mean that economic forces will lead to their employer paying them a higher wage or salary.

So, yes, individual workers can be affected, adversely or favourably depending on their spending habits, by changes in the taxes they pay. Naturally those who end up worse off will complain, but this is not a class issue as an issue that concerns workers as a whole.

Whether income tax is deducted by employers or by the government is certainly of no concern to workers. What’s relevant is not the gross pre-tax figure that appears on their pay slip, but their take-home pay as that’s what they have to spend on reproducing their working skills. “Pocket money” is rather an apt description of this but surprising coming from a rag like the Daily Express.

Adam Buick

SPGB London Day School: 'Can You Buy Happiness?'

Day School

– Saturday, 25th September from 12.00 noon

Socialist Party premises,

52 Clapham High St, SW4 7UN

(nearest tube:Clapham North)

Happy Shopper

Ed Blewitt (Clinical Psychologist) will look how our understanding of happiness is closely related to consumerism. Ed’s talk on the ‘Happy shopper’ is taking a look at how the happiness industry developed in the 19th century in the form of the good life through to its modern guise of an ‘individual feeling’. This shift in the social perspective is compatible with the capitalist notion of an atomistic individual separated from society where the search for happiness is the individual’s goal in life.

Manhattan for a handful of beads

Peter Rigg (Analytical Psycho-therapist) He's titled his talk 'Manhattan for a handful of beads’ in a systematic approach which argues and illustrates how we’ve been sold consumerism in the form of cars, mobile phones, holidays, etc., in exchange for true democracy. Peter will be drawing a parallel between infantile functioning and consumer culture and between psychological maturity and democracy, besides touching on the illusion of being a sovereign consumer. In short, Peter will be putting consumerism on the couch!

The consumption of capitalism

Brian Johnson (retired Disability Counsellor) We’ve all heard the phrase, ‘Keeping up with Jones’ but rarely established how such phrases have impacted on the social relationships within the family and wider society. Brian will investigate the social drives that set consumerism in motion with a thorough analysis on how consumerism affects all classes. His talk on ‘The
consumption of capitalism’ delves into how consumerism is having an effect on our expectations and aspirations, lifestyles, perceptions of reality and much more.

Refreshments will be available during the talks. There will be a social in the evening with some light musical entertainment by Peter Rigg along with food and drink. All in all this half day school promises to be an event full of insight; engaging and entertaining.

China’s working class drives capitalist development (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The heroic and inspiring struggles of China’s working class will only lay the ground for new and improved exploitation methods – unless, that is, the struggle turns political – and socialist.

“I do the same thing every day,” said one employee at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where more than ten workers have committed suicide. “I have no future.” Many, perhaps most, workers will know exactly how he feels. But to the bourgeois mind, it’s all an impenetrable puzzle. There was something criminally stupid and sickeningly idiotic about the reaction to the suicides of Terry Gou, the billionaire founder and chairman of the company, which makes electronic parts for the likes of Apple and Dell. According to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek (7 June), Gou said that he had no idea why the suicides were happening. “From a logical, scientific standpoint, I don’t have a grasp on that,” said Gou. “No matter how you force me, I don’t know.” Another worker interviewed at the factory might have given the hapless Gou a few clues: conversation and human interaction on the production line is forbidden, bathroom breaks are kept to ten minutes every two hours, and workers are yelled at frequently and fined for breaking the rules. According to a report in the Daily Telegraph (27 May), the pace of work in China is so intense that 50,000 workers a month burn out. When the workers go home at night, their hands continue to twitch and mimic the motion of the production line. Overtime last year was an average of 120 hours per month per worker, bringing their weekly hours up to 70. And yet Gou continues to apply his mind in vain to the intricacies of science and logic in search of an answer to the mystery of the suicides. While the search goes on, the company installed netting around outdoor stairwells of dormitory buildings to prevent people from jumping. It’s nice to hear that they care so much. The desperate measures taken by the poor souls at Foxconn have succeeded, however, in making things slightly better for the workers they left behind. Foxconn has since boosted wage levels by 30 percent and promised further 66 percent rises from October – conditional, of course, on worker performance.

A slightly happier story of worker revolt comes from the Denso car parts plant in China’s southern province of Guandong. A 21-year-old worker, who had never been on strike before, told the Observer’s Jonathan Watts (4 July) that she was worried, yet excited and determined when the action began. “We started our shift at the normal time, but instead of working we just walked around and around the workshop for eight hours. The managers asked us to return to our jobs, but nobody did.” The next day this was repeated, the corporate union begging the workers to return to work. Again they refused. There was no chanting, no speeches, no violence. Nervous of a crackdown from the ruling ‘Communist’ Party, the workers have acted very cleverly. Nobody is named as a leader or organiser, leaflets are used to make demands instead of computers or mobile phones, which can be traced to individuals, and, on the day of the strike, the frustrated management had to push for the official union to organise a vote so that there was someone to negotiate with. But a quiet and dignified determination not to work until the demands for improved pay were met won the day.

This struggle, and many more like them, along with a fall in the numbers in the reserve army of labour, have improved the bargaining position of workers in China, and wage levels are now predicted to be on an unstoppable upward trend. The “spate of strikes has thrown a spanner into the workshop of the world,” says The Economist. There are lessons here for all workers, and other groups in southeast Asia and the rest of China have not been slow to learn them. If the factory down the road or just across the border has won 50-odd percent or more pay rises, and improved conditions, why not us? Labour disputes in China were 30 percent higher in 2009 than a year earlier, and Guangdong alone saw at least 36 strikes between 25 May and 12 July, according to the Economist. Several cities have raised the minimum wage by up to 20 percent. Chinese labour costs have tripled in the decade after 1995 (although this was offset, for the capitalists, by a fivefold increase in productivity). And the example is beginning to spread, not only throughout China, but throughout the rest of the southeast Asian region too, especially in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos – regions with reserves of cheap labour, and which capitalists have been eyeing up, along with inland areas in China, as possible alternative locations for their businesses if the Chinese workers get too ‘bolshy’.

But, interestingly, this is not generally seen in the bourgeois press, including the papers so far quoted, as a bad thing. This might surprise those who are used to seeing wage demands and union organising closer to home ritually denounced as silly, greedy, selfish, and so on. This is the standard liberal line of being against all wars, and in favour of all progressive movements for change, as long as they took place in the past, or are happening in another country. But there are also sound, pro-capitalist reasons for welcoming the strikes and the pay rises. The capitalists and their representatives in the press will probably have been led to these reasons more by their practical involvement in the world and their nose for profit than any deep understanding of theory. But for those of us familiar with Marxian theory, their pronouncements were entirely predictable. Look at the history of China through Marxian lenses, and the motivation behind Western capitalists’ cautious welcoming of Chinese wage struggles will become clear.

China’s textbook development

The standard view portrayed in the capitalist media is that, once upon a time, China experimented with communism. When it realised what a ghastly mistake that was, the country came to its senses and converted, at least partially, to the standard, Western, free-market system – the only system that works, as all right-thinking people know as a matter of common sense. So much for the fairy tale. The truth is somewhat different. In fact, the story of China is pretty textbook – if the ‘textbook’ we take is Karl Marx’s Capital.

Looking at China today is very much like looking back in time. The capitalism currently flourishing there is pretty much indistinguishable from the capitalism of Victorian England that Marx and Engels spent so much of their lives analysing. The historian Tristram Hunt, in his entertaining biography of Engels, compares a passage from Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England, written in 1844, with the testimony of a Chinese migrant worker in Shenzhen in 2000. They are indistinguishable from each other, and the story is the same as in the relevant sections of Marx’s Capital: 12-hour days, overtime with shifts sometimes going on for 40 hours at rush times, ‘accidents’ and loss of limbs due to the pace of work and inadequate provision for human need, no breaks for meals, low wages, the exhaustion and crippling of the human body as a sacrifice to the altar of profit-making. How did China get to this depressing state of affairs? And where is it heading in the near future? Well, let’s turn to the textbook. In abstract, Marxian terms, the recent history of China’s development goes something like this.

China’s period of state-led primitive accumulation and capitalist industrial development began under Mao (a period falsely called ‘communism’ in mainstream accounts, but differing in particulars, not in substance, from what has happened historically in all the advanced capitalist nations). This development was, in capitalist if not human terms, an enormous success. However, like all capitalist development, sooner or later it ran into barriers to its further expansion. It needed, in particular, to increase labour productivity, reform and improve the productivity of agriculture, and attract foreign capital. Reforms under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s, culminating in the massacre at Tiananmen Square, aimed to move the state-capitalist economy to a more market-based system, while at the same time destroying many of the working class’s (and peasantry’s) customary entitlements to the means of living (the destruction of the Chinese working class’s moral economy, perhaps we could call this, following the process described in EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class). This created a free labour force – free in the double sense of free to choose an employer, and free from the ownership of, or any entitlements to, the means of production or living, and hence free to starve or live in grinding poverty if you choose not to enter the labour market on capital’s terms. Further reforms in the 1990s then sought to integrate Chinese capitalism into the world market, opening China, and particularly its vast reserves of cheap labour-power, to exploitation by foreign capital.

With the creation of and access to the this free working class, global capital could then embark in earnest on the strategy of extracting ‘absolute surplus value’ – this means, in the absence of any customary or legal or moral limits to the working day, the capitalist class sweats the working class to produce as much profit as possible. The workers are made to work more and more for less and less. This was successful in China for a while – and was indeed hailed as an economic miracle by Western apologists for slavery. And a miracle it was – not only were there bumper profits to be made for the owners of capital, but the influx of cheap goods into Western economies helped to keep a lid on the value of labour power, and hence Western wage demands.

But again, the limitless drive to accumulate capital always hits up against real-world limits in the end. In the case of the extraction of absolute surplus value, the limits are real and obvious enough. There are only so many workers on the labour market, and those that are working can only work so many hours in the day without collapsing or dying. Capital, dead labour, can live vampire-like only by sucking the blood of the living. By sucking the workers dry, it destroys the basis of its own life – yet still it can’t help itself. Even if it wanted to, or began to feel moral pangs about its own behaviour, the external force of competition drives it on regardless. Enter into this picture, then, the working class itself. Unless these human beings are to meekly put up with being crippled and tortured for ever, with being beaten down into a position worse than that of slaves, worse than that of the most maltreated beast of burden, then working-class resistance is inevitable. The working class itself, then, begins to demand a limit to its own exploitation – a shortening of the working day, an increase in wages, an improvement in working conditions, and so on. Although this will, in the short term, eat into the profits of capital, and hence be bitterly resisted, in the long term, this is in the interests not just of the workers, but of the sustainability of capitalist development itself.

In fact, more than that, it drives capitalist development forward. As working-class gains are generalised, the capitalist again opens up an offensive, this time not in the direction of open, naked, unashamed, brutal exploitation, but with the more subtle and veiled technique of ‘relative surplus value’ extraction. This means that, with wages rising and profits slipping, it becomes economic for the capitalists to invest more in machinery and technology. This enables them to extract more profits not from sweating, but from improved productivity – producing more stuff in less time with fewer workers. Technological development, then, hailed by the capitalists as the fruit of their own genius, is driven by the struggles of the working class. And what should be an advance and a benefit for humanity and a cause for celebration becomes little more than a tawdry counter-attack in the class war. And the working class’s own heroic and inspiring efforts to carve out a life worth living merely lays the ground for their future, more sophisticated, exploitation.

And that’s why capitalists, even those who haven’t read their Marx, can come to welcome the demand for higher wages.

Disastrous consequences

What the mainstream press misses or downplays is the potentially disastrous consequences of this development for humanity. The first is that, as well as exhausting the worker, the development of capitalism also threatens to destroy the environment. China is facing a serious environmental crisis, including pollution and the exhaustion of its soil, which are a threat to itself, but also the emission of evermore greenhouse gases, which is a threat to us all. Rising wages also give rise to a consumer market, which in turns drives further capital accumulation, urbanisation, and pointless and wasteful and environmentally damaging consumerism. There is also the prospect of another devastating world war. This is pointed out in a very good and prescient series of articles in issues 14 and 16 of the libertarian Marxist journal Aufheben (see here). As the development of an internal consumer market and urbanisation proceed, a possible outcome is that China will move from its current position as a mere workshop at the service of global capital accumulation, to a centre of accumulation in its own right, and hence a competitor to the United States and Europe. This would of course mean that Chinese capital would develop needs and interests of its own, which in turn could easily lead to inter-imperialist conflicts over oil and other raw materials. Indeed, some argue that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were pre-emptive moves on the part of the US to win strategic control over such things from China from the start.

There is an alternative, of course, to such doomsday scenarios, and it’s one that the ruling elites are very well aware of, in China as elsewhere. This is how The Economist put it:

“As students of Karl Marx and of history, China’s party leaders will know that labour movements can begin with economic grievances and end in political revolt. By concentrating people in one place, Marx argued, factories turn a crowd of strangers into a ‘class’: conscious of its interests, united with each other and against the boss.”

And a working class organised politically could take the initiative out of capital’s hands and develop instead in a socialist direction. The Economist doesn’t mention such a possibility and probably wouldn’t take the prospect that seriously anyway. Perhaps it will be proved right to do so. But it’s where socialists place their hopes nonetheless. As a 20-year-old strike leader at a Honda plant in Foshan, Li Xiaojuan, quoted in the Guardian (30 June), says, "we must not let the representatives of capital divide us”. Workers in this country could do worse than follow developments in China very closely, and imitate their very fine example. The struggles must, however, turn not only political but socialist if our efforts are to do more than merely lay the ground for a new round of capitalist exploitation – or worse.

Stuart Watkins

Socialist Meeting in London: Hunter, Fisherman, Shepherd and Critic

One for your diary:

And the accompanying blurb:

Hunter, Fisherman, Shepherd, Critic: Karl Marx's Vision of the Free Individual

A lot of nonsense is talked about Karl Marx, most of it from people who have never read him.

Many consider his work to be discredited by the dictatorial regimes that were set up in his name. But what did Karl Marx actually have to say?

Was he in favour of dictatorship? Did he think that the state should impose dull uniformity, rigid regimentation and boring work on its citizens? Did he think that human nature and talents should be suppressed in the name of equality and altruism and for the benefit of a collectivity?

No. In fact, Karl Marx's driving passion his whole life was the free development of the individual. Karl Marx was not opposed to the capitalist ideas of choice, liberty and individual freedom. He supported the ideas, but opposed the society that prevented them becoming a reality.

He wanted to be able "to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic".

In this talk, we will consider whether Karl Marx's vision of the free individual is just an idle dream, or something that could actually be achieved. And if so, how?

Speaker: Stuart Watkins

All welcome.

Free entry. Free discussion. Free refreshments.

I'm sure it will be an excellent talk. The speaker at the meeting is an excellent writer for both the Socialist Standard, and his personal blog, Big Chief Tablets.