Greasy Pole: Cable unconnected? (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

In those heady post-election days last May Cameron and Clegg, smirking at the media assembled in Number Ten's garden, assured the nation that Coalition would be the only remedy to the maladies which Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling had so cruelly brought down on our innocent heads. One of the most conspicuous advantages sprouting from this venture into the New Politics (a phrase with implications rather more menacing than they were ready to acknowledge) would be the governmental presence of Vince Cable, influencing official policy on the economy. With all that what could possibly go wrong?

Well just a little over six months later the answer is that an awful lot is going wrong – and not only with what are called the ordinary people who fear for their chances of surviving the cuts but also for the Coalition itself, which can hardly be described as stable and united. For one thing there is the Alternative Vote, suspected by Tories nervously sitting on wafer-thin majorities as a convenient back-door into Parliament for any thrusting LibDem. And then, more calamitous, there has been the schism within LibDem ranks over their surrender to raising university tuition fees after they had in the mass signed that pledge not to do any such thing. Even worse – leading for them on this issue has been the hitherto saintly, all-knowing, all-wise Vince Cable who had the job of working out the details of the policy and then trying to persuade the rest to go along with it.

Joke
Cable rocketted to national prominence in December 2007 when, as stand-in leader while the LibDems were electing a successor to Ming Campbell, he drew attention to the new Premier Gordon Brown's “…remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean, creating chaos out of order rather than order out of chaos”. (We should not be misled by the consequent rapturous laughter into rating this feeble effort at a joke as historically amusing – MPs are irritatingly liable to relieve their boredom in that way. Even if it had the effect of giving Cable some much needed publicity). Cable's leader Nick Clegg is not famous for making jokes – perhaps because of his sensitivity in the matter after David Cameron said he was one. But he does display a kind of infant passion to develop the necessary political cunning. Looked at in that way it is not difficult to detect a possible strategy involving Cable's allocation to defend the rise in tuition fees.

Train Wreck
It is, after all, not so long ago that Cable was a serious contender for the leadership and – after the Mr. Bean joke and Clegg's first fumbling among the front bench there was expressed regret among the LibDems that he had been so easily allowed to drop out. It could not have helped his case to have to defend the official party line in what Clegg expected to be a “train wreck” of a debate – before which Cable behaved like someone suffering from a serious head injury, apparently unable to decide whether to oppose, or support, or abstain on the increase according to whether he was talking about keeping a pledge or defending Coalition unity or what he called the national interest. In the end, of course, he gave in to blatant, self-interested ambition and held on to his wretched job by going along to the Commons where, professorial spectacles clinging perilously to the end of his nose, he mounted an emphatic defence of the policy which he was supposed to have grave doubts about.

Shell Oil
It is clear from Cable's record that he is no stranger to doubt and confusion. Beginning as a Liberal he moved to Labour then the SDP before returning to what had been re-invented as the LibDems. During this journey he experienced what must have been a seriously instructive spell in the 1970s Scottish Labour Party, including a period as a Glasgow councillor. Eventually his multiple attempts to get into Parliament yielded him the verdant, pricey seat of Twickenham. Heavily qualified as an economist, he was a university lecturer and a Treasury Finance Officer in Kenya. From 1995 to 1997 he was Chief Economist to the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell. During that period the suppression of the people of Nigeria whose lives had been devastated by the Shell operations became an international scandal as the murderous military dictatorship of Sani Abacha developed in intensity and barbarism. In an abrupt loss of his famous powers of grasping a situation, Cable denied any responsibility in, or knowledge of, those calamitous events: an interviewing journalist found him “deeply evasive and avoiding all questions”, another who later asked a spokeswoman for a comment was told “…he does not feel that he knows enough about the latest developments to be able to comment”.

Confidence
This kind of record is important in sizing up a political ruler who, with an eye to winning high office, is touting for our support. In the case of Vince Cable we have to consider his reputation for unwavering prescience about capitalism's endemic crises which enabled him to sprout into prominence with his (distinctly unoriginal) forecast of the doom which would follow the credit boom. But how usefully did he apply this? In fact he allowed his insights to languish unattended, unspoken. Asked whether he had publicised the disastrous image in his book The Storm he lamely replied: “No, I didn't. That's quite true… But you're quite right…I haven't been to the States for years and years, so I wouldn't claim to have any feel for what's been going on there.” This unconvincing blather leads us to question what gain there is for human society in putting our confidence in leaders such as Cable. How could he be any more reliable and effective than the hordes of malicious swindlers before him? What is stopping us from preferring to have confidence in ourselves to change the world as it needs to be?

Ivan

Proper Gander (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Success and money motivate me. My first word wasn’t ‘Mummy’ – it was ‘money’”. This came from the deluded mouth of Shibby Robati, one of the latest bunch of wannabes to appear on The Apprentice (BBC1). The programme brings together sixteen of “Britain’s brightest business prospects” to compete for a job with a “six-figure salary” working for entrepreneur Lord Alan Sugar. Each week, the contestants are split into teams who compete to win a task, usually to promote and sell a product. Someone from the team which makes less money is ‘fired’ at the end of each episode, until Lord Sugar is left with his new apprentice. Contestants fall into two categories: those whose ego outweighs their talent, and those whose talent is outweighed by their ego. Take, for example, Stuart Baggs, presumably an eight-year old who’s sneaked onto the show, who boasted that “everything I touch turns to sold”. Or Melissa Cohen who, with all the self-awareness of concrete, said “I’m charismatic. I’m intelligent. I’m a damned good businesswoman. I’m at the top of my game and I’m unbeatable”, before she got fired in week four.

Laying into these charm-vacuums is easy because they put themselves forward and are therefore ‘fair game’. But any criticisms should be accompanied by a little guilt, because there’s something sad about how those taking part in The Apprentice have been shaped by the business world. Even allowing for the selective editing to emphasise their faults, none of the contestants are likeable. There’s hardly any warmth on display – you wouldn’t want to go for a pint with any of them. And if you did, instead of a chat they would start pitching to you about how they would market Guinness. Sugar-daddy Alan at least has some wit to lighten his boardroom eviscerations, but who would aspire to the iciness of his co-judges Nick Hewer and Karren Brady? Unfortunately, the young contestants have fallen for a narrow, corporate definition of ‘success’, which hinges on how sharp your suit is and how many people you can trample on. The result? A winner who is 20 percent mannequin and 80 percent smugness.

Mike Foster

A Classic History Book (1968)

Book Review from the December 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Making of the English Working Class by E. P. Thompson

Thompson's excellent work, 800 pages long and first published in 1965, has now been brought out as a paperback. Applying the Marxist view that men make their own history but only out of the materials at hand, Thompson traces the formation of working class consciousness (by which he means the awareness among industrial workers that they were a separate class in society apart from the ruling landed and commercial oligarchy and manufacturing middle class) under the impact of the industrial revolution between 1780 and 1832. But this was not a passive process; working class consciousness was forged out of the struggles of London artisans, weavers, field labourers and Irish migrants against oligarchic government and the factory system.

The early working class is often seen as an ignorant rabble. Thompson exposes this myth and shows how the independent craftsmen who spearheaded the resistance to capitalism, in the Midlands and the North as well as in London, were in fact well-informed and literate with their own view of what society should be like - basically a simple and stable community with a secure place for all.

Wilkes and Liberty, Tom Paine and radicalism, the Corresponding Societies, the pernicious effects of Methodism, Peterloo, the early trade unions, the Cato Street Conspiracy, Robert Owen and Owenism are among the names and events in radical and working class history examined in detail.

Thompson's book deserves a place on every socialist's bookshelf alongside Thorold Rogers' Six Centuries of Work and Wages, the classic history of the workers in England which it (to a certain extent) replaces and certainly supplements.

Adam Buick

Pathfinders: Engineering the Earth (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new theme has recently emerged in the debate on climate change – geoengineering. This newly coined word – literally, “engineering the Earth” – refers to the prospect of deliberate large-scale human intervention in the climate system to counter global warming. The Royal Society has a useful report online: Geoengineering the Climate (2009); popular accounts include James Fleming’s book Fixing the Sky (2010). Opponents of geoengineering have responded with a counter-report: Geopiracy: The Case Against Geoengineering (ETC Group, 2010).

Geoengineering schemes
Geoengineering schemes are numerous and diverse, but almost all fall into two broad categories.

(1) Schemes to remove CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere. Special installations (“scrubbers”) might suck air through a spray of lye – an alkali that binds with the acidic CO2 in the air, producing washing soda. Or the oceans could be “fertilized” with iron particles to foster the growth of CO2-absorbing plankton. Another idea is to use carbon-eating microbes. Planting forests also falls into this category.

(2) Schemes to redirect solar radiation – either to reflect it off the Earth’s surface or atmosphere or to deflect it away from the Earth altogether. These schemes are of three types:

(2a) Reflection from the surface. The albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth’s surface would be enhanced by such means as painting roofs and roads white, genetically engineering crops and grasses with more reflective foliage, and covering deserts with reflective polyethylene-aluminium sheeting.

(2b) Reflection from the atmosphere. One scheme of this type is “cloud bleaching”, in which an armada of robot ships equipped with giant fans plough the seas and propel water aloft to make clouds more reflective. Another popular scheme has spaceplanes continuously injecting aerosols, probably masses of tiny sulphate particles, into the stratosphere. This would mimic the dimming and cooling effect of large volcanic eruptions.

(2c) Deflection away from Earth. Light-scattering material – say, aluminium threads or small disks – would be placed in Earth orbit or further out toward the Sun, shielding the Earth from part of the solar radiation. Another idea is to use locally available glass to build a huge mirror on the Moon.

These schemes vary widely in terms of likely effectiveness, lead time, risks and costs. Many would counter global warming but create or exacerbate other serious environmental problems. Aerosols may harm the ozone layer and further disrupt the monsoon cycle – also a likely effect of covering deserts or bleaching clouds. Where would all that CO2 removed from the atmosphere go? Stored underground, it would be bound to leak; dumped in the oceans, it would soon turn them into a vast lifeless acid bath. And what if a space-based system to deflect solar radiation suddenly broke down for unknown technical reasons?

Politics of geoengineering
The most active promoters of geoengineering are corporate-funded American think-tanks. These are the same think tanks that churn out propaganda denying that global warming exists! But the contradiction is only apparent. While logically inconsistent, both these positions make it possible to argue that there is no need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, thereby safeguarding the immediate profit interests of the corporate sponsors.

Largely in reaction to such exploitation of the theme, some environmentalists reject geoengineering altogether, rightly arguing that technological fixes cannot solve what is at root a social problem. The Geopiracy report quotes Albert Einstein as saying: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Nevertheless, scientists make a cogent case when they argue that it is necessary to combine sharp cuts in greenhouse gas emissions with carefully selected geoengineering measures. Global warming has been even more rapid in recent years than predicted by the most alarming past projections. The process now has such powerful momentum that even if emissions were to cease completely and immediately – a hypothetical achievement beyond the capacity even of world socialism, supposing it magically conjured into being – geoengineering might turn out to be the only way to avert or at least minimise the catastrophes in store for us.

Cheap, quick and scary
The twin priorities of a socialist world community, if it existed, might have to be to move as quickly as possible to a technological structure with near-zero greenhouse gas emissions and to embark on a diverse and environmentally acceptable geoengineering program, if indeed such a programme could ever be found. Such a programme might comprise various Earth- and space-based elements as insurance against particular elements proving less feasible or effective than expected.

Assuming the continued existence of capitalism, the crucial criteria in selecting schemes for implementation, whether at the national or the international level, will be financial cost and lead time. Capitalists always hate spending more than they absolutely have to, even if it is for the purpose of saving the planet. A short lead time is essential because they will delay even that minimal expenditure until forced to respond to serious threats to the stable functioning of their system – the inundation of London and New York, perhaps. But then they will demand quick results.

Indeed, some analysts have already guessed what this (relatively) cheap and quick fix is likely to be – the “doping” of the stratosphere with sulphate aerosols. Unfortunately, this scheme is also one of the scariest. Besides the threats to ozone and the monsoon cycle, the filtering of sunlight will have a homogenizing impact on the regional and seasonal climatic pattern. Writers speculate about the psychological impact of the day sky never being blue, only a dull greyish white – although by way of compensation we are promised redder sunsets.

Stefan

Cooking the Books: Muddle class (2011)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“‘Triple crunch’ will see lower middle classes £720 a year worse off” read the headline in the Guardian (25 November) reporting on a study about the prospects over the next few years of those currently earning between £12,000 and £30,000 a year. Economics Editor Larry Elliott commented “once upon a time this group would have been dubbed lower middle class”. No, it wouldn’t. They’d have been called “working class” and most of them today would still regard themselves as this.

You can of course define class in any way you like, and sociologists have come up with all sorts of ways – by occupation, by income, by leisure activities, by dress, by accent. George Orwell once described his family of origin as “lower-upper middle class”. The term “middle class” is in everyday use but generally to refer to occupation rather than, as in the Guardian report, income. Even we socialists sometimes use it in this way in conversation, but the correct Marxian position is that classes are defined by their relationship to the means of production.

If you don’t own any means of production yourself you are working class because you are dependent for a living on going out onto the labour market and trying to find an employer to buy your working skills. This, whatever your occupation or income (so the working class is not confined to manual workers in industry, as some leftwing political groups mistakenly think). In a country like Britain that’s the vast majority of the population. If you own enough means of production to employ others without having to work yourself (even if you choose to) you are a member of the capitalist class.

So what about the middle class? Who are they? Or, rather, who were they? Historically, in Britain, they were rich people who were not landed aristocrats and whose income derived from the profits of industry and trade rather than the rent of land. In the 19th century they were a group that was conscious of their class interest and waged a class struggle against the landed aristocracy to further it, achieving success with 1832 Reform Act which gave them more political power and the Repeal of the Corn Laws from 1848.

When Marx was examining capitalism there really were three distinct classes defined by their relationship to the means of production: the big landowners (the “upper” class), pure parasites whose income was derived from being in a position to extort a payment from land-users; the capitalist class (the “middle” class) who invested in production for profit; and the working class (the “lower” class), who produced the wealth on which the other two classes lived.

In other words, the middle class was the capitalist class as the class between the upper, landowning class and the lower, working class.

Since Marx’s time the “upper” class and the “middle” class have merged into a single, capitalist class. So, far from us being “all middle class now”, there is no longer any middle class (the middle class of yesteryear having become the upper class). It’s rather the case that “we are all working class now” – including most doctors, lawyers and scientists. As Marx and Engels pointed out already in 1848:

“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with revered awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-labourers”. (Communist Manifesto)

A mining incident (2011)

From the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mining accidents are frequent such as the recent ones in Equador, Columbia, China, New Zealand. Many without the coverage nor with the happy outcome of the Chilean incident. A socialist who worked in the mines as a Bevin Boy in the 1940s recalls conditions there and the fear miners have of rockfalls.

In a coalmine the roof is held up – when the coal is extracted from beneath it – by posts made out of H-section steel. In the mine where I worked, Penallta Colliery in the Rhymney valley, near Ystrad Mynach in South Wales, most of the coal seams were something under five foot, so most of the posts were about 4ft 6in. They were expensive, and so were the flatter pieces of steel which went across the top of two of these posts. My lonely job was to go round and see that all these steel supports were retrieved as the coalface went forward, not merely left behind and lost. (Only about one employee in six in a coalmine is actually digging out the coal – they are called colliers; all the others are getting the coal back to the pit shaft, repairing the tunnels, moving the conveyor belts forward, building stone packs behind the conveyor belts to stop the roof at the coalface collapsing too quickly, looking after all the machinery, and doing all the other ancillary jobs.) I went most days into the “N” district (which was about two miles from the pit shaft) down the No.3 road, or tunnel. The tunnel roof was getting very unstable, as well as very low. With half a mile of rock and earth above it, the roof of each tunnel gradually sinks, until it is “repaired”, that is hacked out again to a reasonable height. In the old days, when the tubs of coal were pulled out along the rail tracks by horses (and they were horses, though they were always called pit ponies), the tunnels had to be repaired as soon as they got below about seven feet, because horses won’t crawl on their knees. You could explain how necessary it was to maintain profitability, but a horse pretends not to understand. Men, however, will crawl if necessary, so as to keep their jobs. I’m not sure what that tells you about the comparative intelligence of horses and men.

Now in due course horses were replaced by engines. Every so often along each tunnel they would build an engine, which pulls a long thick steel cable (winding it round a rotating drum like a barrel), fastened to the front of a train of tubs; when the train arrives at the engine, the cable is unhitched, and another cable, running along to the next engine, is fastened to the front tub instead; and the train resumes its progress to the pit-head. (In South Wales the tub is called a tram or dram, and the train is called a journey.) But when horses were abandoned, you didn’t have to repair the road (or tunnel) so often; it could go down to about four foot high, or just high enough to let the tubs, loaded with coal, pass underneath. Men, naturally, are prepared to walk long distances bent over almost double. Human beings who have been brainwashed, or forced by economic necessity, into spending their working lives half a mile underground, accept worse than that without complaining.

If a road is not repaired in time, the great pressure (from both above and below) to squeeze it flat will take over, and the tunnel collapses. Every time I made my solitary trek along the No.3 road, the roof was more and more unstable. Little bits would fall out of the roof as you passed, and you wondered if your steel-capped boots were going to create enough disturbance to make the whole thing cave in on top of you. When a roof is on the point of collapse, any little agitation might be enough to bring it down. As you went along, bent down to get under the low roof, you would squint sideways to try and see what was happening. Shakespeare says that cowards die many times before their deaths: that was me, all right, every time I went down the No.3 road. One day I made my usual fearful way along this tunnel, and I could see it couldn’t hold up much longer. Little runs of dust or small stones were falling from the cracks. But luck was on my side, and I got through the bad bit of the road, perhaps a couple of hundred yards, to the next engine. At an engine, of course, you were safe. If an engine is destroyed it costs money to replace, while if a man dies you just get another one free of charge; so when a roof over an engine got a bit dodgy, it was made secure immediately. (An ordinary bit of tunnel is allowed to get worse and worse before the mine management finally has to take men from other work in order to repair it; you might lose money doing that too soon.) This particular day, as soon as I got to the engine, and sank trembling on the bench to wipe the nervous sweat from my brow, a great roar came from behind me, an overwhelming noise. A huge cloud of dust billowed past. I felt a great sense of relief: I almost laughed. It had missed me! Now they would have to repair the road, to allow the miners to get in and the coal to get out. I would never have to walk under that rotten roof again. Almost certainly, my progress along the tunnel, with boots kicking against the rocks and the rails that made up the tunnel floor, had been enough to tip the crumbling roof over the edge.

When the noise subsided, I took a few tentative steps back along the tunnel, and stared up at the great hole in the roof which had been opened up by the fall. Then I resumed my walk towards the coalface. Not far along, I met one of the No.3 district firemen (the name in South Wales for foremen – besides their electric head-lamps they had a little Davy lamp, with an open flame, to test for gas) coming back to see what the noise was. I showed him, so he said, “Well we’re cut off. There’s been a fall in the face between the No.3 and No.2 roads.” This sounds much worse than it was. The colliers in the face were already working to clear the fall there, and a couple of hours later you could get along the face and out of the district that way. It took them longer to clear the fall on the No.3 road, and when it was repaired, it became (comparatively) almost a pleasure to walk along it – if you can fancy strolling along a hole eight hundred metres deep in the earth, where only your cap-lamp stands between you and absolute, total, blackness.

Alwyn Edgar

Allotments are not enough (2011)

Book Review from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life Inc. By Douglas Rushkoff. Vintage Books 2010

One Christmas Eve, the media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff was mugged outside his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, but when he warned his neighbours about the crime via a community website, he received not thanks nor sympathy but a tirade of abuse. His neighbours were angry that reports of crime in the neighbourhood would drive down property prices. How did it come to this? How did our neighbours come to be more concerned with the market price of their house than with the wellbeing of the community they live in? How did people come to act more like corporations – concerned only with the value of their assets – than like human beings? Those are the questions Rushkoff sets out to answer.

The problem, according to Rushkoff, is ‘corporatism’. By this he means the rise then global dominance of big corporations, and the suppression of every aspect of life that comes into conflict with the need of those corporations to make profits. This dominance then became so total that we internalised corporate values and came to treat life itself as if it were a corporation, with no right to exist or say anything unless whatever it was doing or saying brought home the dollars. Rushkoff’s argument is wide-ranging and detailed, sweeping from the origin of the corporation in the 16th century to modern-day consumerism, the globalisation of finance, individualism, New Age spirituality and the cult of home ownership. The book is full of arguments socialists will perhaps already be aware of, but with plenty of new and interesting details, including some entertaining journalistic investigations into the attitudes of those who run corporations, and the delusions of those who are their most desperate victims. Rushkoff gives an excellent account of how the world went mad, and is particularly good at showing how an abstract-sounding historical analysis actually plays out at the level of individual human lives.

He even touches upon the concept that would have made his book better still – capital. But because he does not define or develop or investigate this key concept, his book all but ignores the most important part of the story. Like so many utopian thinkers before him, he proposes to lop off the bits of society he doesn’t like, without considering whether these might be socially necessary aspects of the normal functioning of capital – the functioning of which is to be left intact while the reformer goes about his business. In other words, Rushkoff does not consider whether the real cause of our problems might not be the corporation as such, but the circulation and accumulation of capital, of which the corporation is merely a form that has proved to be particularly useful. To use Rushkoff’s own words from a slightly different context, our problems are “everything to do with excess capital’s need for a place to grow”, with “the needs of capital”. The corporation meets those needs perfectly. Just not human needs.

This may seem like nitpicking, but the full political importance of the criticism emerges when Rushkoff comes to his proposed solutions. He says he has no problem at all with ‘commerce’, for example, and if he has a problem with the circulation of money as capital, then he doesn’t mention it. (His analysis of money in the book doesn’t make it entirely clear, but he seems to associate the circulation of capital with ‘saving’, which he sees as necessary and good, but in need of being separated from money’s role as means of circulation.) But these are the key forces that give rise to the corporation and to the problems Rushkoff quite rightly wants us to rebel against. He is therefore urging us to swim against the tide, when it might be more sensible instead to climb out of the water.

There is a strange contradiction in Rushkoff’s argument. He insists that he is not interested in building a ‘utopian’ nor a centralised, political movement for social change. Resistance to the system is, he says, ‘futile’, because the flexibility, ingenuity and sheer power of corporations will always defeat any opposition. This certainly has some truth to it: any oppositional movement must take extremely seriously the power of capital to flee – or better, incorporate and sell – rebellion. But Rushkoff proposes instead a series of measures that are equally doomed. He says we must take the power back by buying from local organic shops, patronising local cafes, growing our own veg, making our own local money, using less petrol in our cars, coaching our own children for the local football team, and so on. Every one of these acts, according to Rushkoff, is “another nail in the coffin” of the system. But he’s already shown us in the rest of the book that the wealth and power in society is concentrated in a very few hands, and defended by the state.

It’s not at all clear why the all-powerful corporations that can brush off mass movements for social change as a minor irritant should tremble and topple if we plough what little spare time we have into an allotment. Nor does he seem to realise that the very enterprises he wants us to support rely on working-class wages – wages that are earned almost entirely from working all day in big corporations or for the state – to survive at all. Never mind the clever green sales pitch: small business enterprises are as dependent on big capitalism and big corporations and state subsidy as the rest of us.

The problems we face as a society are too big and too systemic for these kind of small-scale, easy answers, and any proposed solutions must be as inevitably political as they are social and economic. The fact that even brilliant, big thinkers such as Rushkoff fight shy of these obvious facts, even while they are forced by the reality of their investigations into all but admitting them, reveals a great deal about the ideological victories of the past thirty years – and of where the most important political battles remain to be fought.

Stuart Watkins

The cold reality of state power (2011)

Editorial from the January 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

There are plenty of reasons for socialists to be cheerful as we go into the New Year. Our class is once again on the move, fighting to protect its interests, and talking about its future. This is a very good thing. But New Year optimism always gives way in the end to the gloomy realism of a bleak January morning. It is in this spirit that we point to some worrying counter-developments.

On 3 December, Spanish air-traffic controllers walked off the job and called in sick en masse in protest at the imposition of worse working conditions and longer hours. The right of workers to take collective action to protect their interests, including withdrawing their labour, would be considered by most to be a fundamental human right. But under capitalism, the right of capital accumulation to proceed uninhibited is also a fundamental right. Between equal rights, force decides. So the Spanish state declared martial law, sent in the military, and armed police forced the workers back to their desks under threat of a six-year prison sentence. That’s the freedom of labour for you.

Meanwhile, the newspapers have been dominated over the past couple of months with revelations from the WikiLeaks website, which leaked secret communications between US diplomats and their seniors, and earlier posted evidence of atrocities by Western armed forces against civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. The real significance of these leaks is not so much their content – informed opinion was already aware of most of what was going on. It is that the leaks threaten to make ‘informed opinion’ available to more people. This is, from the point of view of the ruling class and its state, a disaster. First you give people information about what’s going on in the world. The next thing you know they’ll be wanting a say in it. That’s not conducive to flexible labour markets. And so the more extreme sections of the US commentariat called for the murder of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange; the website has been under continuous attack ever since from hackers and businesses; and Assange has been threatened with extradition to the US to face espionage charges. That’s the freedom of information for you.

Finally, a growing protest movement in the UK against the cuts in state spending on education and other vital social services, led for now by students and university lecturers’ unions, is facing increased state repression. Demonstrators, mostly young adults and children, have been provoked and terrorised by armed police, ‘kettled’ for hours on freezing cold streets without access to food, water or toilet facilities, and then savagely beaten with truncheons. No one is spared this state thuggery: a disabled man with cerebral palsy was beaten by the police and dragged from his wheelchair across a road, and one young man had to have emergency brain surgery after a beating. A death at the hands of the state thugs cannot be very far away. And yet all the talk from the media and the police is of increasing the repression – snatch squads, targeted searches and water cannons have all been mooted. That’s the freedom to protest for you.

What we’re facing is the simple fact that our class enemies hold state power, and will use it, ruthlessly to protect their interests and defend themselves from the threat of democracy. Which is why the Socialist Party argues for the prime importance of taking state power out of their hands.

All in it together? (2010)

From the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some are less in it than others.
The gap between those at the top of society, and the rest of us, is actually getting bigger. That applies throughout capitalism, and it is the case even in Britain, after thirteen years of Labour Governments – which promised to run capitalism in the interests of all of us. This inequality has even got Conservatives worried. So much so that sometimes you see an article in The London Times, the house-journal of British capitalism, which make you wonder if some disgruntled sub-editor has put it in as a joke. Michael Portillo, former Tory M.P. and indeed former aspirant for the job of Tory leader, has just made a speech about the way things are going. Anatole Kaletsky, the London Times economics expert (who, clearly, is very far from being a Socialist), complained that the inequality “is putting democracy in danger” (London Times, 10 November). Portillo (wrote Kaletsky) denounced the “greedy, irresponsible behaviour of Britain’s wealthy financial and managerial elite”.

“The chief executives of middle-sized financial companies [who of course are also large shareholders] receive average salaries of £2 million and continue to vote themselves pay increases, at a time when ordinary workers face cuts in their pay and pensions. Such disparities could prove incompatible with democracy, according to Mr Portillo.”

Reports from other countries suggest that this is a general trend in capitalism throughout the world. What about America, self-appointed world’s policeman, raising the banner of freedom and a fair society across the globe?

“Another shocking statistic quoted by Mr Portillo: inequality has now become so extreme that America’s 74 richest citizens receive more income than the bottom 19 million combined.”

David Cameron says “we are all in this together”. As usual, some are more in it than others. And what very many people are in, up to the neck, is the muck and slime at the bottom of society.

Why do Portillo and Kaletsky, both enthusiastic supporters of capitalism, fear this trend in society? It’s simple. In the end, if you take a typical worker, whose head has been filled since he was born with propaganda that the capitalist system is the best system of society ever devised by man, and is indeed the only possible system – if you take him and kick him hard enough, finally even he will turn round and kick you back. If there were a lot of extremely poor people, then a well-to-do person could hardly walk down the street without the fear of a physical attack by someone demanding money.

There is a story that in the days of Charles II a settler in the American colonies returned to London for a visit, and he brought two Native Americans with him, to impress them with the flaunting displays of wealth in the capital city. When the visit ended, he proudly asked them that they thought of the ostentatious spectacle. They were greatly puzzled. “Why”, they asked, “don’t the poor people kill all the rich people?” Clearly there were a lot more poor than rich: and since the majority could easily overcome a small minority, why did they not take such an obvious step to put an end to such manifest unfairness? The answer, of course, is the unremitting barrage of propaganda in all “civilized” societies to persuade everyone that rich people are rich because they are in some way better than the rest of us. (The Native Americans had not been subject to that kind of bombardment.)

Why is this making some supporters of capitalism unhappy? It’s simple. If you refuse benefits to someone who “refuses to take a job”, what will he do? Lie down somewhere out of sight and quietly die? Or try and knock some richer people over the head and grab their money?

If you go to South Africa, you can see what might happen. Because of government policies during the half century after the war, when apartheid regimes kept down the great majority of South Africans who didn’t have a white skin, and refused them any worthwhile education, and any equal chance in the job market with whites, not to mention any reasonable place to live, etc – because of all that there is a great gap between the richest and the poorest. Well-to-do South Africans travel along the well-constructed broad roads in their expensive air-conditioned cars, passing black South Africans who are walking along the hard shoulder, and who live often in shacks without water on tap, or electricity, or mains sewage. The result is a very high crime rate. Poor people see wealth all round them, and not surprisingly want to grab a bit for themselves.

South Africa has one of the highest homicide rates per capita, if not the highest, in the world. So you pass large houses surrounded by high brick walls, with prominent notices outside – “Armed Response”: which means that if you dare to offer any threat to the owners of the house (e.g. if you try and pinch anything), they will use guns to try and kill you. If you are driving a car in Johannesburg, you are very unwise to stop at a red light, because this will be an open invitation to someone holding a gun to step into the car, and order you out. The car is then driven off, and you can walk – carjacking, it’s called. An acquaintance of mine, who was an ambulance driver, actually lost his ambulance in just that way – ambulancejacking. Now, of course, apartheid is overthrown, and everyone can vote, but the main change so far is that the new successful black politicians, and their relatives and friends, are all suddenly (surprise, surprise) much richer; so some thousands of black people are now driving expensive air-conditioned cars, and living in houses protected by “Armed Response”. But there is still an enormous discrepancy in wealth between the richest and the poorest, along with the high crime rates which always accompany such inequality.

So the theory among some members or supporters of the upper class is that it may be cheaper in the long run, and certainly more pleasant, to keep social benefits at a level which means that rich people have less fear of being robbed in a personal attack, or of having their houses burgled.

Alwyn Edgar

Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? (2010)

From the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The right-wing Tea Party movement is, according to some commentators, turning into a mass, ‘grassroots’ movement and revolutionising politics in America. Is it?

If the ‘lame-stream media’, to steal an appropriate phrase, is to be believed, then there has been a ‘massive’, indeed ‘historic’, change in the biggest economy and the most powerful country on the planet. The United States’ mid-term elections, held last month, midway between the four-yearly presidential elections, saw the biggest swing to the Republican Party for 72 years. The Republicans now hold a majority in the House of Representatives, and fell just short of control of the Senate, only four years after voters handed both chambers of the US Congress to the Democrats. A conservative revolution has swept the nation. At least, that’s the lame-stream view. But in truth, nothing much has changed.

The Republicans and the Democrats are essentially two wings of the same party – the Business Party – and there’s very little to choose between them. During election campaigns, significant policy differences are downplayed or ignored completely – largely because they don’t exist – and which wing wins depends on which has succeeded in attracting the most investment from sections of the capitalist class, spent the most money, and delivered the most effective PR/advertising campaign.

As for what voters themselves might be thinking, the election results don’t tell us all that much, as Stefan points out on our American party’s website (See here). The truth is that most voters, and a disproportionate number of Democrat voters, stayed at home, and that the success of the more ‘progressive’ Democrats was at least as noteworthy as the success of the more-right-wing Republicans – in fact, a lower proportion of Americans voted Republican in 2010 than in 2008. In any case, as a result of the way the electoral system works, the votes of just 3 percent of citizens make all the difference between a Democratic and a Republican landslide. So much for the rise of conservatism.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the election, and the campaign leading up to it, was the growth of the so-called Tea Party movement. This is a network of hundreds of supposedly ‘anti-establishment’ conservative groups across the US, which, if nothing else, energised the Republican Party and made the election campaign slightly more interesting. No one knows just how many Tea Partiers there are – it’s not a single organisation with a membership or leadership – but it has had a significant impact on American politics, if only because the lame-stream media has obligingly given it a voice and credibility.

The relatively lame performance of the Tea Partiers in the election would seem to draw into question the common claim that the Tea Party represents a significant popular force, with a mass ‘grassroots’ following. But last month more than half of Americans in a Rasmussen poll said they view the Tea Party favourably – that’s despite the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that the Tea Party has no manifesto, no clear policies, and no clearly expressed ideas about what it would do should it win power. Instead, the party makes its stand on reducing the deficit without specifying how, cutting taxes, ‘taking back’ America from a supposedly corrupt ‘establishment’, and abolishing vast swathes of government, including such evils as environmental protection legislation, subsidised healthcare for the poor and elderly, and unemployment benefit.

To the extent that this is a grassroots movement, then, it is a movement of people organising against their economic interest. The reasons why this happens are many, not least of which is that people have been conned into it by a PR campaign funded by billionaire businessmen. But the Tea Party is also saying things – about the bankruptcy of the economy, about the rottenness of government and other institutions – that ordinary people are increasingly interested in hearing.

Why has the Tea Party risen to prominence now?
The context for the rise of the Tea Party is a profound and deep crisis – economic and ideological. Let’s take the economic aspect first. It is certainly true, as apologists for capitalism will be quick to tell you, that capitalism has continued to be very good at creating massive amounts of wealth. But whose wealth? The wealth of the nation is now concentrated in fewer hands than it has been for 80 years, says Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and former secretary of labour under Bill Clinton (See here). Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 per cent; and the top one-tenth of one per cent of Americans now rake in as much as the bottom 120 million. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is 300. That’s what they mean when they say nothing can match capitalism for creating wealth.

At the other end of the scale things are getting pretty desperate. Wages for the majority of the population have stayed flat since 1973, while work hours and insecurity have increased. And that’s for those ‘lucky’ enough to have a job. America is facing ‘the worst jobs crisis in generations’, says Andy Kroll in a report for TomDispatch.com (5 October), with the number of unemployed exploding by over 400 percent – from 1.3 million in December 2007, when the recession began, to 6.8 million this June. As a result, 11 million borrowers – or nearly 23 percent of all homeowners with a mortgage – now find themselves ‘underwater’, that is, owing more on their mortgages than their houses are worth. In June of this year, over 41 million Americans were relying on food stamps from the Federal government to feed themselves. That’s an 18 per cent year on year increase. Thirty cents of every dollar in personal income now comes from some form of government support.

In short, capitalism is in its biggest crisis since the Great Depression. This means that wealth is returning to its ‘rightful owners’, the capitalist class; the workers, meanwhile, must make do with austerity.

The American Dream
Meanwhile, the related ideological crisis is presenting itself as the ‘end of the American dream’, or, as Edward Luce in the Financial Times (30 July) puts it, a crisis in the consciousness of the middle class. Lame-stream media commentators often have lots to say about the ‘middle class’, but they will very rarely define what they mean by the term. This is very wise on their part, because it would quickly become obvious that the ‘middle class’ includes just about everybody, which would make people think about just what it is they’re supposed to be in the middle of. The ‘middle-class’ couple Luce interviews for his article work as a ‘warehouse receiver’ (he lugs stuff around a warehouse) and an ‘anaesthesia supply technician’ (she makes sure nurses and doctors have the stuff they need) – surely working-class jobs by any definition. Hilariously, Luce cannot even bring himself to describe the woman’s father – an uneducated miner – as working class without wrapping scare quotes around the term. ‘Working class’ is clearly a taboo term – the working class is not supposed to exist.

Still, it’s not a taboo socialists respect. As working -class people, with jobs, living in the richest country on the planet, and with a joint income about a third above the US median, Luce’s interviewees could think themselves not too badly off, relatively speaking. They lived in a house on a nice, tree-lined street, never went hungry, and turned on the air-conditioning when it got too hot. Once upon a time, says Luce, ‘this was called the American Dream’. Now, it’s a different story. Their house is under threat of repossession, their son was kicked off his mother’s health insurance and only put back on at crippling cost, and, as the couple say themselves, they are only ever ‘a pay cheque or two from the streets’. Who isn’t? We’re all middle class now, after all. This ‘economic strangulation’, as Luce puts it, began long before the recession – as we pointed out above, wages have been flat since 1973 – but is only now being really felt as the credit cards are cut up, jobs lost, and state spending on social services cut back.

But it’s not just that things are bad. Americans are also losing confidence that things will get any better: a growing majority of parents do not think their children will end up better off than they are, for example. Another important ingredient in the American Dream has gone off. It is this growing majority of disaffected working-class people, who had been convinced that they were middle class and doing pretty well, who are looking for answers. And unless they look very hard indeed, beyond the lame-stream, the only answers they’re hearing with any coherence at all are coming from the Tea Party.

The appeal of the Tea Party
It can’t be denied that Tea Party ideas have some superficial appeal. The Tea Party was described by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker as a collection of, among other things, “Atlas Shruggers”. No doubt McGrath could be confident that his American audience would understand what he meant by this. Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand and, according to an often-quoted American survey of readers, was ranked second only to the Bible as a book that had most influenced their lives. It was a tiny, unrepresentative and biased survey, but still, there’s no doubt that the book provokes strong feelings among its readers and admirers and is a best-seller in the US – no small achievement given the book’s length and the fact that it is explicitly a novel exploring abstract philosophical ideas. The strong feeling it provokes in most socialists is revulsion – it is a manifesto for unrestrained capitalism, proclaims the virtues of selfishness, and the characters we are supposed to look up to as models of human moral virtue are vile, self-serving monomaniacs and workaholics.

But it’s not hard to see the appeal of Rand’s ideas either. She is committed, at least in theory, to individual freedom, independence from all authority, and writes inspiringly of human achievement – in Rand, human life is not a pit of despair, but an exciting adventure, full of possibility. The best social and economic system for realising human potential, according to Rand, is capitalism. But not really-existing capitalism – more a utopian vision of what a free market, laissez faire future might be like if only people acted rationally and according to their own interest, and the state got off people’s backs. Rand was interesting, but wrong. Marx’s Capital shows that capitalism – even when it is operating perfectly well, without corruption or unnecessary state interference – must necessarily produce misery and exploitation; and that the state, far from standing in the way of free markets, was an absolutely essential tool for creating and maintaining them.

The truth is that, whatever the appeal of the Tea Party or Ayn Rand to working-class people, the ideas are unlikely to have the desired impact for one good reason: the business elite and the capitalists, who Rand and the Tea Party hold up as models of human virtue, don’t like them either. As Lisa Lerer and John McCormick put it in a cover story in Bloomberg Business Week (13 October), Tea Party ideas:

“… may sound like a corporate dream come true – as long as the corporation in question doesn't have international operations, rely on immigrant labour, see the value of national monetary policy, or find itself in need of a subsidy to boost exports or an emergency loan from the Fed to survive the worst recession in seven decades. Business leaders who favour education reform, immigration reform, or investment in infrastructure can likely say goodbye to those ideas for the short term as well.”

So there’s little danger of capitalists going too far in supporting “free market” or “laissez faire” capitalism – they understand their own business interests too well. The only remaining danger is that these ideas will continue to have a poisonous appeal for the working class, and to radical movements genuinely searching for answers to social problems. It’s up to socialists to provide better answers and get them out there. Can the Tea Party save the American Dream? Probably not. Socialists certainly hope not. The American Dream has always been just that – a dream. Now, though, the dream is turning into a nightmare. It’s time to wake up.

Stuart Watkins

Cooking the Books: Zero-sum games (2010)

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

  “Currency trading,” wrote Anatole Kaletsky in the (London) Times (8 September), “is undoubtedly a zero-sum game for the world as a whole, in the sense that every currency trader’s profit represents a cost borne by some other trader, business or consumer. Despite this, however, currency trading can be hugely profitable for Britain, if most of the profits are made in the City of London and most of the losses are borne in some other country”.

This is very true but it doesn’t just apply to currency trading. It applies to all profit-chasing.

The source of all profits is surplus value arising from the unpaid labour of productive wage and salary workers. Although this surplus value is created in production it is only “realised” (i.e. converted into money) on the market, but each capitalist firm does not realise the surplus value produced by its own workers. If this were the case then labour-intensive industries would tend to be the most profitable. In fact, however, they are no more profitable than industries which employ more machinery and less labour.

The tendency under capitalism is for the same amount of capital to realise the same profit. This comes about through an averaging of the rate of profit, the average being the total amount of surplus value produced divided by the total amount of capital invested.

As Marx explained in Volume 3 of Capital:

“Thus although the capitalists in the different spheres of production get back on the sale of their commodities the capital values consumed to produce them, they do not secure the surplus-value and hence profit that is produced in their own sphere in connection with the production of these commodities.” (Chapter 9).

In effect the whole capitalist class exploits the whole working class:

“The basic notion in this connection is that of average profit itself, the idea that capitals of equal size must yield equal profits in the same period of time. This is based in turn on the notion that capital in each sphere of production has to participate according to its size in the total surplus value extorted from the workers by the total social capital; or that each particular capital should be viewed simply as a fragment of the total capital and each capitalist in fact as a shareholder in the whole social enterprise, partaking in the overall profit in proportion to the size of his share of capital.” (chapter 12).

This is why profit-chasing by all capitalist firms is a zero-sum game. The total amount of profits that can be realised by all firms together is limited by the total amount of surplus value that has been produced. Each capitalist firm – more accurately, each block of capital – strives to secure the maximum amount of profit it can. It is in fact through this that the averaging of the rate of profit comes about as capital leaves low-profit fields to flow into fields with higher profits.

The more profit one firm realises the less there is for the others. This means that firms are competing not only against other firms in the same field of activity but against all other firms. It’s a competitive struggle for profits amongst all blocks of capital.

On the world level, as Kaletsky pointed out about currency trading, the more profit the capitalist firms in one country can secure the less there is for the capitalist firms of other countries. Which is why international rivalry and downward pressures to be “competitive” are built-in to capitalism and why world cooperation for the common good is ruled out.

50 Years Ago: Kennedy to run U.S. capitalism (2010)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Kennedy’s victory at the American polls came as the culmination of years of patient ambition and at the end of a campaign of open cynicism, such as we have come expect from capitalist political parties.

When he started his attempt to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Kennedy had several question marks against him. The principal of these was whether he could unite the trade unions, the industrial cities and the backward Southerners into supporting him. We now know how skilfully he did this, by the careful choice of his Vice-Presidential candidate and by the promises and opinions which he uttered. Such was the success of these tactics that, long before election day, many on-the-spot correspondents were prophesying that Kennedy's campaign would be irresistible.

Mr. Nixon showed a similar determination to win the presidency. Here is a man with an established reputation for single-minded ambition which has led him into some unsavoury actions. Many people will remember Mr. Nixon introducing his pet dog into a television programme in which he was offering evidence of his integrity as a servant of the American public.

Mr. Kennedy based some of his case upon an appeal to the patriotism of American workers, alleging that United States' influence abroad has steeply declined during the Eisenhower presidency. Nixon's reply—similarly an appeal to patriotism—was that it was insulting even to suggest that U.S.A. is a second-rate power.

This, then, was an election campaign of by no means an unusual kind, in which members of the working class were asked to vote on issues of personality, nationalism and capitalist power politics, none of which has the slightest effects upon their basic interest (…)

It is depressing that American workers should be impressed by—indeed be part of—slick, high pressure salesmanship and cynical drives for power. For after the shouting and the ballyhoo have died, capitalism, in America and the rest of the world, remains unscathed.

(From editorial, Socialist Standard, December 1960)

Greasy Pole: Woolas – another fine mess (2010)

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

There are limits. As Phil Woolas, until recently the MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, was confronted when the Election Court found that during his campaign in May 2010 he lied about his Liberal Democrat opponent. Rather more complicated and exciting, if the Court judgement stands there will be a succulently fascinating by-election which promises to expose the ruthless assassinatory tactics of the participating parties, including the fact that, for all their mock indignation at Woolas' methods, the LibDems are not noted for having any more scruples than the rest. It will also provide the LibDems with an opportunity to explain to their angry, bewildered supporters why, in their euphoria at being part of the Coalition, they betrayed the election pledges they made – such as on child benefit and university tuition fees. It is likely to be an ugly, if entertaining, experience in which it has to be borne in mind that the whole process, for example Woolas and his mangling of truth, happens in order to transform one of the mendacious, grovelling candidates into an Honourable Member who, for example, cannot henceforth be denounced as a liar because the worst that is allowed to be said about anyone who gets to sit on those benches is that they suffer from some confusion over reality. Those are the kinds of limits which Woolas is said to have offended against.

Lumley
There are some significant differences of opinion about Woolas' conduct of his career as an MP and a Minister. On the one hand a Labour Party member who contested for the candidature in the 1995 by-election saw him as “...a hard-working member and a decent and conscientious person”. But a political correspondent prefers “a political bruiser, not universally liked, whom some colleagues think got what he deserved at the election court...” And in the Guardian Julian Glover weighs in with “...an unpleasant authoritarian and parliament will be better off without him...” That first election campaign in 1995 was notable for the rancour of Labour's personal attacks on the LibDem candidate as being “high on tax and soft on drugs”. This designed exploitation of some nasty, deep-rooted prejudices impressed even Peter Mandelson, who admitted “...not only our opponents but some in Labour would denounce our 'negative' tactics...For tactical reasons, I felt we had little choice”. Woolas won the re-arranged seat in 1997 and thereafter rose steadily up the greasy pole until in October 2008 he became minister responsible for Borders and Immigration. It was then, in May 2009, that he was trapped into a confrontation, before a horde of ravenous TV cameras, with the popular actor Joanna Lumley to answer for the Labour government effectively refusing Gurkha ex-soldiers to settle in this country. Woolas wordlessly squirmed in embarrassment – Lumley breathes rather than speaks and was using hazy concepts like fairness and gratitude while he had to have regard for his budgets – and agreed to re-open the matter.

Cable
One inconvenient outcome of Woolas' electoral misdemeanour was the stimulus it gave to the pressing question of why similar penalties are not unvaryingly applied to any MP who employs false promises to smooth their way to Westminster (although if that were the case there would be very, very few bottoms on the green benches). The actual response has been worked to exhaustion by LibDems fearfully insecure of their place in the Coalition. Here, for one, is Vince Cable in the House of Commons on 12 October: “Yes I signed the pledge (on university tuition fees). But the current financial situation is appalling, truly appalling. All pledges have to be re-examined from first principles”. But this is the man who was promoted to us by his party as not just an agile ballroom dancer but an economist so deeply learned as to be able to see beyond the economic horizon to what is approaching and to take the necessary steps to avert any crisis such as the one which is now gripping the world. So it is necessary to ask: are there any other disasters which Cable has failed to see? And from the prolix depths of this ignorance did he offer any other pledges, attractive to a spellbound electorate, which he is now about to renege on?

Clegg
And what about the LibDem leader who, smugly satisfied at having outsmarted all rivals – including Cable – for the top job, felt able to patronise him as the most hopeful therapist for British capitalism? Since the LibDems slithered into partnership with the Tories Clegg has been under the most severe pressure about the party's disowned promises. This is how on 23 October he referred to child benefits and tuition fees: “I feel very bad. I have had to eat those words...this is not capricious, it is not ideological, it is not happening overnight, it is thoughtful and it is a plan over four years...” And in the Commons on 10 November: “I of course acknowledge that this is an extraordinarily difficult issue ... Because of the financial situation we have had to put forward a different policy...” But Clegg has been touted around the political scene as a hugely knowledgeable, clever operator. With such a glowing reputation how could he have been so insensitive to the gathering storm that he not only made those pledges but allowed the rest of his party to do likewise? Why should we have any confidence that he will become any more hopeful over the next four years?

Clegg and Cable now pose as serious politicians, relieved and grateful to have been put right about the election pledges which, they now admit, were recklessly ill-informed. Are their excuses really the best they can offer to cover their impotence and dishonesty? Are there any other pledges which they will betray in the hope of nurturing their sleazy ambitions? Should we, in other words, believe anything they and their like say? Is it not preferable to treat then all with the contempt they deserve while we work on for the revolutionary change in society.

Ivan

Dancing with dynamite (2010)

Book Review from the December 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dancing with dynamite. Social movements and the State in Latin America. By Benjamin Dangl. AK Press. $12.

Anarchists and anti-parliamentarists are always pointing to the overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1973 as an example of how the ruling class will not accept defeat at the polls, not even by leftwing reformists let alone by the election of a majority of socialist MPs.

They are behind the times. The last 15 or so years have seen the election and survival of leftwing presidents in a number of South American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay and even Paraguay), some of them with programmes more radical than Allende’s. There was indeed an attempt to overthrow one of them (Chavez in Venezuela in 2002) but this failed due to popular resistance and the refusal of the armed forces to back it.

Of course this doesn’t show that the ruling class might not stage a coup in the event of a socialist election victory, but it does rather undermine the argument that elections can never be a way to win control of political power.

In this book, brought out by an anarchist publishing house, Dangl examines the relationship – the “dance” – between “social movements” (in favour of land rights, legalising factory occupations, getting amenities in shanty towns) and the elected leftwing governments. He argues that the social movements should not put up candidates themselves nor let themselves be dominated by leftwing parties; instead, they should maintain their independence and continue to employ “direct action” to try to get what they want.

However, he is unable to take up a strict anti-parliamentarist stance because he can’t deny the logic of the movements preferring a government that will help them to leaving political power in the hands of those opposed to their aims. None of the movements have, as Dangl is obliged to record, adopted this stance but have voted and even campaigned for the leftwing presidents.

The case for a mass socialist movement not taking electoral action is just as weak since this would be to leave the apparatus of the state in enemy hands. A socialist movement is no more likely to do this than the present-day social movements in South America have.

Adam Buick

Marx and Engels and the 'Collapse' of Capitalism (1969)

From the April 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1786, three years before the outbreak of the French Revolution, Gracchus Babeuf wrote:

"The majority is always on the side of routine and immobility, so much is it unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic . . . Those who do not want to move forward are the enemies of those who do, and unhappily it is the mass which persists stubbornly in never budging at all."

The events of 1789 disproved his gloomy predictions but, by the time Babeuf became prominent, the reaction was already setting in. His slogan of "The revolution is not finished, because the rich absorb ail wealth and rule exclusively, while the poor work like veritable slaves, languishing in poverty and counting for nothing in the State" was not taken up by the peasants and artisans. Faced with this, Babeuf and his followers planned an insurrection in which they would seize power, constitute themselves as the 'Insurrectionary Committee of Public Safety', crush all opposition and — only then — introduce democracy. It was this method of conspiracy and coup d'etat which became the standard technique for 19th-century insurrectionaries such as Blanqui and which formed the inspiration for their innumerable secret societies and abortive rebellions.

From the start, Marx and Engels were scathing about this concept of revolution. For them it was self-evident that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself" and that, in any case, "revolutions are not made intentionally and arbitrarily" as the plotters imagined.

"It goes without saying that these conspirators by no means confine themselves to organising the revolutionary proletariat. Their business consists in forestalling the process of revolutionary development, spurring it in to artificial crises, making revolutions extempore without the conditions for revolution. For them the only condition required for the revolution is a sufficient organisation of their own conspiracy. They are the alchemists of the revolution." [See here.]

Yet, however devastating the attack which Marx might make on the Blanquists and others, in one aspect he and Engels were in a very weak position. If they maintained that it was the entire working class which would be responsible for establishing socialism, how would they square this with the obvious fact that the mass of workers still gave every sign of being as "unenlightened, encrusted, apathetic" as they had been in Babeuf's time? To counter this, Marx and Engels fell back on the theory that it was the crisis in capitalist production which would galvanise the masses into revolutionary activity.

Even in their earliest writings both Marx and Engels attached great importance to crises: but over the years their observations caused them to modify their ideas, especially in relation to the business cycle. In his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (Deutsche-Franzosische Jahrbucher. 1844) Engels mentioned that slumps occur every five to seven years, "just as regularly as the great plagues did in the past". He repeated this in Principles of Communism (1847) while, in the Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (1845), there are references to five-year and five to six-year cycles. Marx held similar views during this period. for in an Address on Free Trade delivered in Brussels in 1848 he drew attention to "the average period of from six to seven years — a period of time during which modern industry passes through the various phases of prosperity, overproduction, stagnation, crisis and completes its inevitable cycle". At the same time they both expected crises to become "more frequent and more violent" Wage Labour and Capital. Marx. 1847) and "more serious and more universal" (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy Engels. 1844).

Ten-year cycle

By the time Marx came to publish Capital (Volume I. 1867) he was writing that "the course characteristic of modern industry" was "a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations" — and adding that as accumulation advanced the "irregular oscillations" would follow each other more and more quickly. This perspective was echoed by Engels in most of his writings in the 1870s and early 80s as well. (See Dialectics of Nature. Anti-Duhring (1878), articles in the Labour Standard (1881), for example). Although Engels continued to put this line for some time after Marx's death (see his letter to Kautsky. November 8 1884) there was a new development during his last ten years in that more and more he came to maintain that an era of chronic stagnation had overwhelmed capitalism. As early as January 1884 in a letter to Bebel (January 18 1884), he wrote that "the ten-year cycle seems to have broken down" and, that same year, he made a similar point — although more hesitantly — in his Preface to Marx's Poverty of Philosophy:

"The period of general prosperity proceeding the crisis still fails to appear. If it should fail altogether, then chronic stagnation would necessarily become the normal condition of modern industry, with only insignificant fluctuations."

From then until his death in 1895 his writings were full of references to "permanent and chronic depression" (Preface to the English edition of Capital, Volume I. 1886), to the "chronic state of stagnation in all dominant branches of industry" (Preface to the English edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England. 1892) and to "chronic overproduction, depressed prices, falling or disappearing profits" (Capital, Volume III, 1894).

Parallel to this development of their ideas on the business cycle, Marx's and Engels' theories on the relationship between crises and revolution also went through a number of phases. As we have seen, in their early writings both held that the crises in capitalist production would become "more frequent and more violent". But, if this is seen as an absolute tendency, it must mean that eventually capitalism will be brought to a point where it can no longer recover. At any rate, this was certainly Engels' interpretation of the trends taking place in the 1840s and he repeatedly implied that crises would produce a revolution independently of the level of socialist consciousness reached by the working class:

Every new crisis must be more serious and more universal than the last. Every fresh slump must ruin more small capitalists and increase the workers who live only by their labour. This will increase the number of the unemployed and this is the main problem that worries economists. In the end commercial crises will lead to a social revolution far beyond the comprehension of the economists with their scholastic wisdom. (Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy, 1844.) 

The revolution must come; it is already too late to bring about a peaceful solution: but it can be made more gentle than that prophesied in the foregoing pages. This depends, however, more upon the development of the proletariat than upon that of the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery. (Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845).

Thus, although the extent to which socialist ideas had penetrated the working class might be important in influencing the revolution which Engels thought he saw emerging in England, that was the limit of their role. In both these works, it is the increase in misery of the workers which Engels stresses as the vital factor in the development of their revolutionary activity — rather than their growing understanding of socialism as an alternative method of organising society to capitalism. This contrasts sharply with some of Marx's writings of the same period, where he puts all his emphasis on the spread of socialist concepts among the working class:

"It is true that, in its economic development, private property advances towards its own dissolution; but it only does this through a development which is independent of itself, unconscious and achieved against its will — solely because it produces the proletariat as proletariat, poverty conscious of its moral and physical poverty, degradation conscious of its degradation, and for this reason trying to abolish itself." (Holy Family, 1845.)

In fact, socialist consciousness was considered of such vital importance by Marx that he grossly exaggerated its depth and extent

"There is no need to dwell here upon the fact that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historical task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity." [In 1845!]

The upheavals in France, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe in 1848, however, had a profound influence on Marx, and for a time at any rate his enthusiasm got the better of him and he was evidently prepared to suspend his former commitment to socialist consciousness. His writings of this period suggest that it is the commercial crisis and the resulting hardship of the workers which are the critical factors in inducing the working class to turn to revolution. The articles he wrote for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1850 all revolve around the axiom that "crises produce revolution", and since the revolutionary tide had by then ebbed away, that "a new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis". Naturally, Engels' earlier ideas readily accommodated themselves to this new development in Marx's thought and together they wrote:

"With this general prosperity, in which the productive forces of bourgeois society develop as luxuriantly as is at all possible within bourgeois relationships, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in periods when both these factors, the modern productive forces and the bourgeois productive forms, come in collision with each other."

This was the line they they were to take throughout the 1850s. Living in exile in London and Manchester, they anxiously searched for any signs of the next crisis — and oscillated between wild optimism and more justified impatience in time with the fluctuations in world trade. In September 1852 Engels is writing to Marx that "with the the temporary prosperity ... the workers (in France) seem to have become completely bourgeois after all. It will take a severe chastisement by crises if they are to become good for anything again soon." By April 1853, however. "Europe is admirably prepared; it needs only the spark of a crisis". (Engels to Weydemeyer). When the required spark didn't materialise he became more cautious but in 1857, when a crisis really did develop, they were both certain that "now our time is coming". As early as September 1856, Marx had recognised the symptoms of the approaching disruption in industry and had written to Engels: "This time, moreover, the thing is on a European scale never reached before and I do not think we shall be able to sit here as spectators much longer". The following year, in the midst of the crisis, he is "working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes." (Letter to Engels, December 8, 1857). Meanwhile Engels was maintaining that a really chronic crisis would be needed to stir the workers into revolution since "the masses must have got damned lethargic after such long prosperity" (Engels to Marx, November 15, 1857). When trade started to pick up again at the end of December 1857 both of them were sadly disappointed and, a year later, we find Engels returning to a familiar theme: "The English proletariat is 'becoming more and more bourgeois".

The crisis of 1857 and its failure to evoke a revolutionary response from the working class had a big impact on Marx. So when he came to publish Capital (Volume I, 1867), although he outlined the cycle of modern industry as "a series of periods of moderate activity, prosperity, over¬production, crisis and stagnation", there were no references to revolution automatically arising from this sequence. But if Marx seems to have largely shaken himself free of his former romantic notions, they remained well in evidence in Engel's writings. Anti-Duhring (1878) in particular was as outspoken in its commitment to the idea that capitalism would 'collapse' as any of his earlier works had been.

"... this mode of production (capitalism), by virtue of its own development, drives towards the point at which it makes itself impossible."

Anticipating Rosa Luxemburg, Engels wrote that "if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place" and that the working class would be "forced to accomplish this revolution", "under penalty of its own destruction". Crises, then, were still seen as "means of compelling the social revolution".

Until the early 1880s Engels's ideas on crises and revolution hardly showed any advance on those he had held 30 years before. This is made clear enough by a letter he wrote to Bernstein in January 1882.

"That crises are one of the most powerful levels of revolutionary upheaval was already stated in The Communist Manifesto and was treated in detail up to 1848 inclusive in the review in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, where, however, it was shown too that returning prosperity also breaks revolutions and lays the basis for the victory of reaction."

But after Marx's death in 1883, with Engels deciding that capitalism might well be entering a phase of chronic stagnation with correspondingly less chance of acute crises occurring, his emphasis naturally shifted from the earlier concept of a crisis-provoked revolution to the view that the capitalist system would be driven into an economic impasse. Thus in his preface to the first German edition of Marx's Poverty of Philosophy (1884) he refers to "the inevitable collapse of the capitalist mode of production which is daily taking place before our eyes to an ever greater degree". Four years later, in his introduction to Marx's Address on Free Trade, he writes that society will be "brought to a deadlock, out of which there is no escaping but by a complete remodelling of the economic structure which forms its basis".

Engels's correspondence during his last ten years is also an interesting record of his tendency to imagine that capitalism would 'collapse'. In a letter to J. P. Becker in June 1885 he assessed the political currents at work in England and concluded that "the masses will turn socialist here too. Industrial over-production will do the rest". As late as 1893, in a letter to Danielson (February 24, 1893), he is still convinced that there are "economic consequences of the capitalist system which must bring it up to the critical point", that "the crisis must come".

Yet although at times during this final period of his life, Engels was to foreshadow the determinism of the leaders of the Second International on this question, at others he came near to the position of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its companion parties. As we have shown, as long as Marx was alive, it was he rather than Engels who emphasised the need for socialist consciousness as a precondition for the overthrowing of capitalism by the working class. But with Marx dead, Engels seems to have become aware of the need to stress this himself. Although he could not free himself entirely from the ideas which had dominated his thinking on revolution for over 40 years, yet he could also write that:

"... the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed. So I should be very cautious about prophesying such a thing" (the collapse of bourgeois society). (Letter to Bebel, October 24, 1891).

When this is coupled with other statements he was to make, to the effect that "where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul" (Introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, 1895), one gets an entirely different slant from that conveyed in some of his other writings.

This study of the attitude of Marx and Engels towards crises and the concept of capitalism 'collapsing' shows, then, the extent to which they were influenced by the various phases which capitalism passed through in 19th-century Europe. If we have outlined some of the mistaken attitudes they adopted this is not to detract from the immense contributions they made to socialist thought. What it does mean, however, is that it was left to other socialists to produce a more penetrating analysis of the role of crises in capitalist production. What was most useful in their work on this topic was later summed up in the pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse which the Socialist Party published in 1932:

"Until a sufficient number of workers are prepared to organise politically for the conscious purpose of ending capitalism, that system will stagger on indefinitely from one crisis to another."

John Crump