The Green Party's Basic Income Scheme: could it work? (1988)

From the September 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

In their manifesto for last year's general election the Green Party proposed to "guarantee economic security to each person as a right" by instituting a Basic Income Scheme involving "an automatic weekly payment to everybody, throughout life, regardless of sex or marital status, non-means tested and tax free, at different rates for different age-groups". No figures were mentioned but the manifesto stated that "the payments would guarantee an income adequate to live on, higher than current welfare benefits".

This is a scheme, then, to give every adult in Britain, whether in work or not, an income high enough to allow them to live appreciably above the official poverty line. The idea behind the scheme - guaranteeing everybody security from material need - is entirely laudable. But could the scheme work within the present economic system?

The prices-wages-profits system
The basic feature of capitalism is that wealth is proposed for sale and that people's incomes - whether wages and salaries, profits or benefits - derive ultimately from the receipts obtained from selling what has been produced. In fact the incentive to produce under this system is monetary profit, the difference between sales receipts and the amount of money originally laid out in purchasing the elements necessary to production (materials, buildings, machinery, power, labour, and so on). Maximising monetary profit is the primary objective of production and what makes the economic system function.

Out of sales receipts - or rather, to strictly accurate, out of that part of sales receipts representing the new value added in production - are paid both the work incomes (wages and salaries) on which most people now depend and the property incomes (dividends, interest, ground rent) that accrue to those having ownership rights in the means of production.

Wages and salaries correspond more or less to the cost of bringing into being and maintaining the working skills which employees sell to employers (cost of training plus the cost of housing, food, transport, and so on which employees must incur to maintain themselves and their families), while profits are the part of the newly added value left after wages and salaries have been paid. The government obtains the money to pay out social benefits from taxes which ultimately fall on profits or incomes derived from profits. Taxes on wages and salaries, by increasing the cost of maintaining employees and their skills, are eventually passed on, through the operation of economic forces, to employers in the form of increased money wages.

Where will the money come from?
What, then, would be the effect of introducing the Green Party's Basic Income Scheme into this prices-wages-profits system? If everybody, whether in work or not, is to be paid "an income adequate to live on, higher than current welfare benefits", we are talking about a massive increase in government expenditure. Which makes the question"Where is the money to come from?" wholly relevant.

We have just seen that the ultimate source of government revenue is profit made in productive industry. But if the money paid out as "basic income" is to be taken from profits -  the fuel on which the present economic system runs - there is a serious risk of reduction in economic activity and a knock-on effect leading to a slump and growing unemployment; in short, of provoking an economic crisis. In other words, the increased taxes on profits needed to finance the Basic Income Scheme would risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

Drastic fall in wages
In reality, however, all the money to pay the "basic income" would not be generated from existing profits, since a large part would come from the drastic reduction in wages and salaries that the introduction of the scheme would bring about. Employers would be provided with an extra income to compensate in part for the extra tax burden they would have to bear.

For it should not be imagined that wages and salaries would remain at their present levels if everybody, including those in employment, were paid a basic income of, say, £100 a week by the government. Such a payment would result in a fall in wages and salaries of an equivalent amount because, as we have seen, they are fixed by the operation of economic forces at around a level sufficient to maintain the employees in question and their skills.

If wage or salary earners are paid £100 a week by the government, they can use this income to maintain themselves; which means that the employer will be relieved of having to include an amount to cover this expenditure in the wage packet or salary cheque. Economic forces will therefore tend to ensure that wages and salaries fall to a level which, when added to Basic Income, will allow the employee to maintain him or herself. In other words, wages or salaries would become sufficient only to top up Basic Income to the economically determined level. Or, put the other way round, Basic Income (like Family Allowances today) would be a subsidy to employers, and a massive one at that.

Growth of voluntary unemployment
Employers, however, would not welcome the scheme because it would completely upset the wages system, under which people are forced by economic necessity to sell their skills to an employer. If people received an adequate income from the government, what would be the incentive to find employment?

This problem would be particularly acute for paid work at and immediately above the Basic Income level. The manifesto used a peculiar argument in this respect, stating that

The "unemployment trap" is created by the withdrawal of benefit when a person finds work. Perhaps more than any other measure the Basic Income Scheme would stimulate employment, since it would always be financially worthwhile to work.

It is not clear exactly what this means, but it appears to be accepting the common slur that many of the unemployed don't work because it's not financially worth their while; in other words, that much unemployment is voluntary. But this is clearly far from being the case. Most employment today arises because, for the time being, it is unprofitable for employers to invest in full production. The jobs are simply not there, and merely providing a financial incentive to work won't make them reappear.

As a matter of fact, and contrary to what the manifesto suggest, the Basic Income Scheme would probably lead to a massive increase in voluntary unemployment (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, but that's another question). Imagine a situation where people went to work for an employer only when they needed extra money to pay for some special item or, say, a visit to friends or relatives abroad. Imagine too what would happen to discipline at work if people were not there through economic necessity: they would (quite rightly) refuse to be bossed around or do unpleasant jobs. Profit motivated industry just couldn't function under such circumstances.

So, once again, the result of introducing the Basic Income Scheme would be an economic crisis. (Of course the whole scheme might be a subtle way of destabilising the present economic system, but I think rather that its architects really imagine it to be feasible.)

What's the alternative?
Our purpose in criticising the Basic Income Scheme and showing it to be impracticable has not been to defend the existing prices-wages-profits system but rather to suggest that some other way will have to be found of guaranteeing people basic material security.

The socialist answer would be to allow people free access to the common store of wealth set aside for personal consumption, according to what they themselves judged to be their reasonable needs. Other needs would be satisfied on the same basis. Houses and flats would be rent-free, with heating, lighting and water supplied free of charge. Transport, communications, health care and education would be organised as free public services. There need be no admission charges to museums, parks, libraries and other places of entertainment and recreation.

Such free access would be a much more direct way of ensuring that people were freed from material insecurity than the impractical Basic Income Scheme proposed by the Green Party. It would also involve, as a corollary, the transformation of work. Instead of working for wages to produce profits for an employer, people will be able to co-operate to produce what they really needed.

In fact such direct production for use, replacing production for sale and the profit motive, is the only possible framework within which we can satisfy our needs in an ecologically acceptable way. For, with the end of production for sale will go also the pressure for blind economic growth generated by the competitive struggle for profits. If production were geared directly to supplying needs it would eventually tend to platform off at a level sufficient to provide for current needs and repairing and maintaing the existing stock of means of production.

Adam Buick

Nowt to look forward to (2012)

Book Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited, by Stephen Armstrong. Constable.  £11.99.

In 1936 George Orwell travelled to Wigan and wrote a classic account of the extent and effects of poverty. Now Stephen Armstrong has gone not just to Wigan but also to other towns in the north of England to report his findings.

There are many similarities between the thirties and now: a recession, high unemployment and cuts in government spending, for instance. Above all, there is destitution, as many people are barely able to survive on what little they earn or the pittance they receive from the state. It is the personal accounts Armstrong provides that bring this home far more than any statistics could do.

One nineteen-year-old woman in Manchester was pregnant but she overslept and missed her first scan.  As she had no proof she was pregnant, the Job Centre sanctioned her for being late for an interview: she was taken off Jobseeker’s Allowance and had to make do with hardship payments of £28 a week. Job Centre staff are given a target of referring three people a week for sanctioning (their jobs supposedly consist of helping people into employment).

Another woman was made redundant, and now she cannot afford to heat her house in winter. She cuts Brillo pads in half before using them, has stopped buying butter since it went up 5p and uses her old clothes as cleaning cloths. One twelve-year-old sometimes eats only a bowl of cereal a day. He has never been outside Wigan. Another woman gets about £8 a day in benefits and is reduced to sleeping on her daughter’s sofa. She says, “It’s horrible, there’s nowt to look forward to, there’s nowt to fetch kids into this world. I’ve worked all my life and I’ve got nothing to show.”

Most of the poor are not on benefits, however, but are employed. A particularly nasty development is zero-hour contracts, which do not actually guarantee paid work during slack periods. One man interviewed had a four-hour contract at Argos in Warrington, which made him ineligible for unemployment benefit. Things were OK when he worked 36 hours a week, but during a period of heavy snow there were few shoppers and most staff were sent home with four hours pay at minimum wage: £28. These and many others are part of the ‘precariat’ (a blend of precarious and proletariat).

As Armstrong says, ‘the poor make a lot of people very, very rich’. If you pay for gas or electricity using a prepayment meter or cards, you pay a much higher rate than those who get a regular bill. Payday loan companies and doorstep lenders such as Provident Financial exploit this ‘non-standard credit market’ and do very nicely out of it (Provident made pre-tax profits of £62 million in the first six months of 2011). Rent-to-buy companies like BrightHouse sell TVs and other goods via weekly payments which can add up to well over twice the straightforward purchase price. They have vicious late-payment charges and are not above shouting to the whole street that you owe them money. A New York hedge fund has a majority stake in the company.

Unfortunately, Armstrong spends too much time criticising MPs for fiddling their expenses, and does not look into the real reasons for the poverty he depicts, class ownership and the profit motive.

Paul Bennett

The Founding of the Trades Union Congress (1968)

From the June 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Trades Union Congress was founded in the Mechanics Institute, Manchester, on June 2 1868 by thirty-four delegates who had responded to an invitation sent out by the Manchester and Salford Trades Council. In every way the aims of the founders were strictly limited, and in some important respect those limitations are still to be found in the TUC to-day, in spite of its vastly greater representative capacity and the widening of its activities.

This was not in any sense a revolutionary body and even its structure reflected a falling away from earlier attempts to form a unified National Trade Union body with power to act in strikes. The delegates came together only to discuss matters of mutual interest. It was, as George Woodcock describes it in the recently published History of the TUC 1868-1968, no more than "a small debating society".

In the letter of invitation sent out by the Manchester and Salford Council it was called a "Proposed Congress of Trades Councils and other Federations of Trades Societies". This form of organisation was preferred because it would cost less to have delegates from Trade Councils than to have delegates from from separate unions.

Its aims were to enlighten public opinion about trade unionism, and to try to influence Parliament in the matter of trade union legislation. It was to be modelled on the area meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, with the reading and discussion of papers on trade union problems, "with a view of the merits and demerits of each question being thoroughly ventilated through the medium of the public press". Twelve subjects for papers were suggested in the letter of invitation, ranging from trade union law and the Royal Commission on Trade Unions then sitting, to "the effect of trade unions on foreign competition", "Limitation of Apprentices", "The Regulation of the Hours of Labour" and "Arbitration and Courts of Conciliation".

The immediate background of the formation of the TUC was provided by three events then much discussed. The first was a short trade depression in 1966-7 which gave rise - as it does to-day - to complaints by business men and politicians that British goods were being priced out of markets by "high" British wages - hence the proposed discussion of foreign competition at the Congress.

The second was the blowing up of a non-unionist's house in Sheffield in 1866 which led to a storm of abuse of trade unions generally. The unions were anxious to present a collective view repudiating violence, in evidence to the Royal Commission which was considering this and other aspects of trade unionism. (Actually the evidence was presented by the group of trade union officials in the London Trades Council, most of whom were no more than lukewarm about what they regarded as a rival movement from Manchester).

The last event which stirred the unions into activity was a ruling by the High Court in the case of Hornby v Close, which meant that trade union, though not criminal organisations, were still illegal and consequently not protected (as they had thought they were) by the Friendly Societies Act 1855. In particular they could not take court action to protect their funds from defaulting branch officials.

It was in these fields that the TUC claimed to have been successful in the early years of its history, in the shape of a series of amendments of trade union law, growing acceptance of the "responsibility" of trade unionism, and the extension of the franchise.

The early TUC can be seen in perspective by comparing its outlook with, for example, that of the Chartist Labour Parliament held in Manchester in 1854, attended by trade union delegates from all over the country. Marx and Louis Blanc were elected honorary delegates. They did not attend but Marx sent a message in which he expressed the view that the proceedings should be aimed at organsing the working class for the conquest of political power and taking over ownership of the means of production by the workers. The letter was read at the conference.

The TUC did not even try to put into practice what had been attempted unsuccessfully by the Sheffield Association of Organised Trades in 1866, who had called a conference to form a National Trade Union organisation to give financial and other support to workers locked out by their employers.

The early attitude of the TUC is largely to be explained by the fact that the dominant unions represented only part of the working class. B. C. Roberts wrote of this:

The TUC . . . was representative of little more than half a million skilled artisans. The remainder of the working class the millions of unskilled workers, were, with the exception of the cotton industry and a few other rare exceptions, unorganised, and for the most part barely taken into consideration by the Parliamentary Committee. Its policy reflected the philosophy of unions whose members were crafts,en, conscious of their skill, and standing in the community as worthy, respectable and independent citizens. (The Trades Union Congress 1868-1921.)

Marx referred to this in a letter to Bebel* (28 Oct. 1885), pointing out that the craft unions in the TUC deliberately kept the "unskilled" workers outside their ranks.

But do you suppose the unions ever dreamt of doing away with this silly bunk? Not in the least. I can never remember reading of a simple proposal of the kind at a Trades Union Congress. 

If anything else was needed to mark the contrast between the socialist outlook and that of the founders of the TUC it is only necessary to recall the paper Marx submitted to the Geneva Congress of the First International in 1865 (Value Price and Profit) in which he called on the unions to give up the motto "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" and adopt instead "abolition of the wages system".

Edgar Hardcastle 

*In fact, it was actually Engels who referred to this in a letter to Bebel.

Left Unity - for Socialism or for Reformism? (2013)

From the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

In March, following the relative success of his nostalgic film about the post-war Labour government The Spirit of 45, Ken Loach launched an appeal for the formation of a new left-of-Labour (not to say Old Labour) party. The ball was picked up by others and a new Left Party is to be founded at a meeting in London on 30 November.

Loach’s appeal brought in some 9000 replies, though well under  a thousand of them seem to have followed this up by getting involved in local ‘Left Unity’ groups. An appeal published in the Guardian (12 August) sets out the general aim of those calling for the new party:

‘We urgently need a new party of the left. Labour will not provide the opposition to coalition politics that the situation demands. We need to provide a genuine alternative to the austerity policies which the three main parties support. A party that is socialist, environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination.’

A meeting in May of those who had responded to Loach’s appeal decided that the new party should be an individual membership organisation. This was in deliberate contrast to a previous attempt to form a new left-of-Labour party in the early years of this century – the ‘Socialist Alliance’, which was in effect an electoral alliance between the SWP and Militant and which eventually fell apart because of rivalry between these two Trotskyist groups.

The individual membership decision was, and was meant to be, a rebuff to such groups, though their members are still free to join as individuals. Some Trotskyist groups – ‘Socialist Resistance’ and ‘Workers Power’ – have accepted this. This is likely to cause the new party problems in the future as it is a well-known tactic of such groups to ‘enter’ a bigger party, form a ‘faction’ (whether open or clandestine) within it, and breakaway away at some point with, they calculate, more members than they went in with.

But why another Left party? Aren’t there already a number of left-of-Labour parties which contest elections? Scargill’s SLP, Galloway’s Respect Party, the SWP, Militant (now calling themselves SPEW), TUSC and even the Communist Party of Britain (who run the Morning Star). The aim seems to be to form a party of a different type, one that is neither dominated by a single individual nor organised on Leninist lines; an open, more or less democratic party like, in the British context, the old ILP. Supporters of the new party cite existing European parties such as the Party of the Left in France, Die Linke in Germany and Syriza in Greece as examples they want to follow.

The general orientation of the new party has yet to be decided. That’s going to be settled at its founding conference at the end of the November. In the meantime three ‘platforms’ for discussion at the conference are circulating amongst those who signed up to Loach’s appeal.

One – the Left Unity Platform – is that of those who took the initiative to call for setting up the new party. They want a broad party that will attract any and every one to the left of Labour. In other words, an opportunist, catch-all party. They have the support of one of the Trotskyist groups, ‘Socialist Resistance’, which claims to be the genuine ‘Fourth International’ and is the successor of the old IMG of the 1970s of which Tariq Ali was a prominent member.

More interesting is the second one, called the ‘Socialist Platform’. It seems to be the initiative of one of the constituents of TUSC – the ‘Independent Socialist Network’, which caters for individuals who support TUSC but are not members of SPEW or of the RMT union. In fact the ISN seems to be on the brink of defecting from TUSC to the new Left Party.

The third – the so-called ‘Class Struggle Platform’ – can be dismissed fairly quickly. It has been put forward by another Trotskyist group, ‘Workers Power’, and just reproduces their programme. These people are nothing if not brazen. The new party has not yet been formed and they have already founded a ‘faction’ within it.

The ‘Socialist Platform’ is reproduced opposite. As can be seen, it is written in the same sort of language that we use; in fact we can agree with a large part of it, especially that ‘capitalism does not and cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority’ and clauses 6, 7 and 9. There are of course differences. For instance, clause 2 could imply that a ‘state’ will continue to exist in socialism. Clause 3 does not say explicitly that socialism has to involve the complete ending of production for the market. Clause 5 ends with a peculiar formulation on Europe (even though this is an advance on the No2EU embraced by most of the Left). Clause 8 is the real stumbling block from our point of view as it opens the way for the party to campaign for reforms.

Others, too, have noticed its similarity with what we say. A supporter of the Left Unity Platform has offered the following criticism of it:

‘There is no acknowledgement that fighting for reforms in the short term is entirely compatible with aiming for socialism in the longer term. Absent is any idea that a fight for reforms can raise people’s self-activity and point towards escalating demands; instead we are offered something approaching impossibilism. Current struggles are played down in favour of visions of a utopian future.’

If you follow the link from the word “impossibilism” it takes you to a Wikipedia page which explains that the main current exponent of this in Britain is us (see: leftunity.org/which-way-for-left-unity-the-case-for-the-left-party-platform). The author, Tom Walker, is a member of a breakaway group from the SWP. So this is a case of a Trotskyist criticising the ‘Socialist Platform’ for being too like the SPGB, a damning argument amongst Trotskyists.

One group of Leninists who have signed it are not satisfied with it, but because they see it as non-Leninist. This group, calling itself the ‘Communist Party of Great Britain’ (even though they have nothing to do with the old, now defunct CPGB) and publishing the Weekly Worker, have proposed a series of amendments intended to turn it into a Leninist statement.

For instance, where the original version says:

‘The Left Unity party is a socialist party. Its aim is to bring about the end of capitalism and its replacement by socialism’

they want to change this to:

‘It seeks to bring about the end of capitalism and its replacement by the rule of the working class. Our ultimate aim is a society based on the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities; to each according to their needs’, a moneyless, classless, stateless society, within which each individual can develop their fullest individuality.’

On the face of it this seems more explicitly socialist and of course we too want a ‘moneyless, classless, stateless society’, but what this is actually doing is introducing the Leninist distinction (which we reject and which was never in Marx’s writings) between ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. We call a moneyless, classless, stateless society ‘socialism’ (or, occasionally ‘communism’, as the two words mean the same) and this may well be the view also of some of those who have signed the original platform. For us, this is the immediate aim, but for those behind the amendment it is only a far-off ‘ultimate aim’, just as it was for the government of the old USSR. Their immediate aim is a so-called ‘workers state’ in which money, classes and the state will continue to exist.

There is no chance of the ‘Socialist Platform’ being accepted at the founding conference of the new party. The Left Unity Platform will be adopted and a new wishy-washy, leftwing reformist party will come into existence.

The trouble, for them, is that such a left-of-Labour party already exists in the Green Party. The only difference is that the Green Party does not claim to be ‘socialist’, only ‘environmentalist, feminist and opposed to all forms of discrimination’. Apart from that, the policies that the two parties will be advocating will be the same, for instance, defence of the welfare state, bringing the utilities back into ‘public’ ownership, failed Keynesian policies as a supposed alternative to austerity, against overseas military action… So, to succeed, the new party will have to replace the Green Party. Which hardly seems likely.

Then there are the other smaller left-of-Labour parties competing on the same ground. They are not going to go away. Nor will the Trotskyist groups that have decided to ‘enter’ it. So the new Left Party is likely to be a non-starter and will probably end up as just another such small party, so adding to the confusion as to what socialism is and how to get it.

The only positive thing that could come out of this is for some of those who signed the ‘Socialist Platform’ to realise that a socialist party, on sound socialist principles, already exists and is already campaigning for socialism and nothing but.

Adam Buick

Statement of Aims and Principles for the [Left Unity] Party (‘Socialist Platform’)

1. The [Left Unity] Party is a socialist party. Its aim is to bring about the end of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.

2. Under capitalism, production is carried out solely to make a profit for the few, regardless of the needs of society or damage to the environment.  Capitalism does not and cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority. Its state and institutions will have to be replaced by ones that act in the interests of the majority.

3. Socialism means complete political, social and economic democracy. It requires a fundamental breach with capitalism. It means a society in which the wealth and the means of production are no longer in private hands but are owned in common. Everyone will have the right to participate in deciding how the wealth of society is used and how production is planned to meet the needs of all and to protect the natural world on which we depend. We reject the idea that the undemocratic regimes that existed in the former Soviet Union and other countries were socialist.

4. The [Left Unity] Party opposes all oppression and discrimination, whether on the basis of gender, nationality, ethnicity, disability, religion or sexual orientation and aims to create a society in which such oppression and discrimination no longer exist. 

5. Socialism has to be international. The interests of the working class are the same everywhere. The [Left Unity] Party opposes all imperialist wars and military interventions. It rejects the idea that there is a national solution to the problems of capitalism. It stands for the maximum solidarity and cooperation between the working class in Britain and elsewhere. It will work with others across Europe to replace the European Union with a voluntary European federation of socialist societies.

6. The [Left Unity] Party aims to win support from the working class and all those who want to bring about the socialist transformation of society, which can only be accomplished by the working class itself acting democratically as the majority in society.

7. The [Left Unity] Party aims to win political power to end capitalism, not to manage it. It will not participate in governmental coalitions with capitalist parties at national or local level.

8.  So long as the working class is not able to win political power for itself the [Left Unity] Party will participate in working-class campaigns to defend all past gains and to improve living standards and democratic rights. But it recognises that any reforms will only be partial and temporary so long as capitalism continues.

9.  The [Left Unity] Party will use both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary means to build support for its ultimate goal – the socialist transformation of society.

10. All elected representatives will be accountable to the party membership and will receive no payment above the average wage of a skilled worker (the exact level to be determined by the party conference) plus legitimate expenses.

Cooking the Books: Value, Creation and Extraction (2013)

The Cooking the Books column from the March 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Writing in the Guardian (19 January) in an article subtitled ‘Talk of a fairer capitalism is just hot air unless we rehabilitate and reward the idea of value creation,’ economics professor Mariana Mazzucato quoted Big Bill Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners and later the IWW as saying: ‘The barbarous gold barons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.’

She used this as an introduction to her case that capitalism today is more concerned with ‘value extraction’ than ‘value creation’ and that this needs to be corrected to avoid further financial crises. ‘Restraining the power of value extraction,’ she wrote, ‘requires a theory of value – an area once hotly discussed in economics, but no longer,’ and went on:

‘This is because a century ago the notion that labour creates value (central to the work of classical’ economists like David Ricardo and Karl Marx, and measured by objective factors like productivity) was replaced by the ‘neo-classical’, subjective notion that satisfaction and ‘preferences’ create value.’

This is a valid point. In fact, modern bourgeois economics has gone further and dismisses the whole idea of ‘value’ as a useless concept, arguing that all you need is a theory of price. This enables it to obscure the obvious fact that wealth, as something useful to human life, can only be created by people working. In their theory labour becomes reduced to just one element, along with land and capital, of cost and so of price.

Marx’s theory of value was that a commodity (as a good or a service produced for sale) was determined by the amount of ‘socially necessary’ labour expended on its production from start to finish. By ‘socially necessary’ he meant the labour that had to be expended to produce it by an average worker of average skill working with average equipment; in other words, not necessarily the actual labour expended, otherwise a slower than average worker would create more value.

Marx was not talking just about the labour expended at the last stage of production of a good but of all the labour expended on it from start to finish.  That included labour expended on mining or growing the materials, constructing the machinery, supplying the energy, and making the semi-finished products, i.e. the past labour incorporated in the fixed and circulating capital.

According to Marx, ‘value creation,’ to use Mazzucato’s terminology, took place when workers produced a commodity. The workers transferred existing value from the raw materials, machinery, etc. to the product but at the same time created new value.  However, what they produced was not theirs but belonged to the capitalist owner who employed them. A part of this did go to them as their wages, but most went to the capitalist as ‘surplus value’. This legalised robbery (Haywood‘s ‘weird alchemy’) could well be described as ‘value extraction’.

But this is not what Mazzucato means by the term. She is not as radical as might at first seem. Her case is not against capitalism as such, but only against present-day capitalism which she sees as biased in favour of finance and against industry. Her ‘production theory of value’ is a plea for, as she put it, ‘reinvesting profits into areas that create goods and services’ instead of financial juggling.

But, as Marx explained, ‘value extraction’ occurs at the point of production. Financial juggling is not extracting value from the producers but from those who originally extracted it from them: the mining, manufacturing and service capitalists who employ them. Mazzucato is taking sides in a thieves’ quarrel.

Mixed Media: Hedda Gabler (2013)

Theatre Review from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ibsen's 1890 drama Hedda Gabler was recently staged at the Old Vic theatre in London starring Sheridan Smith as Hedda and Darrell D'Silva as Brack. The play is a plea for bourgeois liberal feminism but also a portrayal of a Nietzschean existential heroine. Hedda is in a lineage of strong women constrained by patriarchal society from Clytemnestra in Aeschylus to Medea by Euripides.

Ibsen dissects middle bourgeois family life, its morality, niceties, home, hearth and happiness which Nietzsche castigated as 'it is not your sin but your moderation that cries to heaven'. It is a place where women have a subordinate role to men and the expectation that Hedda become pregnant. In his preliminary notes Ibsen wrote 'women aren't all created to be mothers' but Marx saw that 'the bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production'. Hedda refers to 'love' as 'that glutinous word'. Alexandra Kollontai saw that 'the outward observance of decorum and the actual practice of depravity, and the double code, one code of behaviour for the man and another for the woman are the twin pillars of bourgeois morality'.

Hedda says to Brack 'I’m content so long as you don't have any sort of hold over me, subject to your will and your demands. No longer free! That's a thought that I'll never endure'. Emma Goldman wrote 'true emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in the courts. It begins in woman's soul' although Eleanor Marx wrote of women 'that the question is one of economics. The position of women rests, as everything in our complex modern society rests, on an economic basis'.

Hedda is an existential heroine in the sense of 'Vivre ? les serviteurs feront cela pour nous' ('Living? Our servants will do that for us') from Axël by Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Brack is enamoured of Hedda's feminine strength but fears her advocacy of what Nietzsche described as 'to live dangerously' and does not understand Hedda's views on Lovborg's suicide; 'there is beauty in this deed, an act of spontaneous courage to take his leave of life so early'. This is reminiscent of Nietzsche's dictum 'voluntary death that comes to me because I wish it'. However Hedda cannot meet Nietzsche's idea of 'amor fati', the ultimate affirmation of life and instead accepts a terrifying nihilism.

In socialism Engels wrote 'what will most definitely disappear from monogamy, first, the dominance of man, and secondly, the indissolubility of marriage'. Eleanor Marx concluded that 'the woman will no longer be the man's slave but his equal'.

Steve Clayton

The Spanish Civil War Revisited (1995)

Film Review from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ken Loach is a considerable film maker. He directed Cathy Come Home for BBC TV in 1966, and his credits also include the unforgettable Kes (1970), The Price of Coal (1977) and Hidden Agenda (1990) and Raining Stones (1993) - both winners of the Cannes Jury Prize. And now comes a film about the Spanish Civil War Land and Freedom (Curzon West End, Chelsea Cinema, Renoir, Screen on the Green and selected cinemas across the country from October) another Cannes winner and, by any standards, a major achievement.

Through an impressive flashback devise, Loach unifies life in contemporary Liverpool with Spain in the late 1930s. An old man collapses on a Liverpool housing estate. He has had a stroke and he dies on the way to hospital. His granddaughter, sorting out his things, finds an old suitcase with letters, clippings and photographs of the civil war. And as she reads them and reflects, her grandfather's story unfolds on the screen.

David leaves to fight fascism. He joins an international section of the Republican militia on the Aragon Front and is wounded. He is sent to hospital in Barcelona where he discovers that factions on his own side - the so-called communists - are more concerned with internal disputes than with fighting the war against fascism. david's war ends tragically. The Militia are disarmed by the Stalinist Popular Front (sic) and one of his comrades is killed.

The film works on many levels. As an attempt to tell a compelling story which captures something of the spirit of the times -  the revolutionary idealism of the Militia, the sickening poverty of Spanish peasants, the internal conflicts amongst the republicans, the unfolding story of David's love affair with Blanca and its tragic conclusion - this is a well crafted piece of film-making. But more than this Loach offers us a series of powerful political snapshots of Spain in the mid/late 1930s. He might have made an even more effective film if the dialogue had painted a clearer picture of the background to the war, but nevertheless this is a splendid film  - a substantial piece of political story telling which will have great interest for socialists.

There are perhaps three defining moments. First, a fascist-held village is captured and the villagers meet to discuss what to do with the land. Jim Allen's script and Barry Ackroyd's camera linger over the fascinating, heated discussion. The villagers are united only in their opposition to fascism. Some want to move towards common ownership of the land by collectivising farms. Others want to confiscate only fascist's land, and to divide this amongst the peasant community. Whilst a third group want largely to retain things as they are. The scene demonstrates what socialists already know: that there was no majority in favour of a socialist revolution in Spain in 1936, but rather the remnants of a coalition of anarchists, republicans, Stalinists and, so-called, revolutionaries.

Second, in the streets of Barcelona, David becomes involved in fighting between anarchists, Stalinists and revolutionaries. Later he tears up his membership card of the British Communist Party and, voice over, writes witheringly in a letter home of the betrayal of the revolution by the Stalinists.

Third, as David's coffin is buried his granddaughter gives the clutched salute of the Spanish Militia. Loach seemingly wants us to draw parallels between the Spanish Civil War and relevant actions which the working class might take in contemporary Britain. We are presumably to conclude that the ideas and actions of latter-day Spanish-style militants are relevant. Not so. The only actions which are pertinent to the working class revolutionary are those which are concerned with the enlightenment and empowerment of the class to which they belong, and the collective transformation of capitalism into socialism. Not for us a re-run of anything akin to the Spanish Civil War, no matter how heroic and well-meaning many of those who fought on the republican side might have been. We have a different war to fight: to enfranchise a socialist majority and, by so doing, to end all wars.

Michael Gill

Saying Marx Is Right, Getting Him (And Capitalism) Wrong (2011)

From the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

“God save me from my friends; I can protect myself from my enemies.”

Karl Marx’s circle of friends, or at least friendly acquaintances, has grown considerably since the financial crisis broke out in the autumn of 2008. Now, three years later and with many countries facing a double-dip recession or worse, articles titled “Was Marx Right?” (or even “Marx Was Right”) are a fairly common sight in the pages of the financial press.

Twenty years ago, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was so obvious to most that Marx had been wrong that he was subject to more ridicule than criticism—or simply ignored altogether. Followers of Marx may find it satisfying that he is now being taken seriously, but the standard used to conclude that he is “right” in 2011 is not much different from the one employed in 1991 to prove he was “wrong.”

Then as now Marx is often treated as a nineteenth-century Nostradamus, as if his main aim had been to predict the future course of capitalism or prophesize its end. Judged on this basis, Marx has been deemed right whenever capitalism is struggling or appears to be on its last legs, only to be proved wrong again during the next economic recovery or boom. (And since many assume that Marx sketched the blueprint for state capitalism, a system still commonly referred to as communism or socialism, his critics have pointed to false predictions about a future utopia as another reason he is wrong.)

Using the word “prediction” to describe the results of Marx’s investigation of capitalism is a bit off the mark. The term is only apt in the sense that his analysis of how capitalism functions, which reveals its limits or boundaries as a profit-driven system, can serve as a basis for “predicting” what sorts of problems will arise under it. But these are more general expectations than specific predictions, and from experience we already know what sort of trouble to expect from capitalism. The significance of Marx’s analysis is that it explains why those problems – such as unemployment, war, and poverty – are permanent fixtures of the capitalist social system.

Dr. Doom digs Marx

One of the most widely-quoted “Marx was right” comments in recent months was made by the economist Nouriel Roubini, who earned fame and the nickname “Dr. Doom” for correctly predicting a messy end to the housing bubble. In a videotaped interview with the Wall Street Journal in August, Roubini said: “Karl Marx had it right. At some point capitalism can self-destroy itself. That’s because you cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without not having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand.”

And Roubini repeated the same point in an article titled “Is Capitalism Doomed?” in which he wrote: “So Karl Marx, it seems, was partly right in arguing that globalization, financial intermediation run amok, and redistribution of income and wealth from labor to capital could lead capitalism to self-destruct (though his view that socialism would be better has proven wrong). Firms are cutting jobs because there is not enough final demand. But cutting jobs reduces labor income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.”

Roubini’s praise for Marx gets his ideas on crisis wrong in two significant ways worth exploring: Marx certainly did not think that workers’ limited consumption is the real  cause of crises (or that increasing their consumption is a way out); nor did he think of a major crisis in terms of the potential “self-destruction” of capitalism.

Greedy but not stupid

The “underconsumption” theory of crisis that Roubini ascribes to Marx is in fact a position that he had harshly criticized. On just an empirical level, Marx thought it dubious to claim that “crises are caused by the scarcity of effective consumption” because experience shows that they are always directly preceded by “a period in which wages rise generally.” Thus, according to the underconsumption theory, “such a period should rather remove the crisis” (Capital vol. 2).

The more interesting rebuttal of the theory, however, can be found in Marx’s explanation of why capitalists, as Roubini laments, end up “cutting jobs [which] reduces labor income, increases inequality and reduces final demand.” Are they simply too stupid and greedy to know what’s good for them? Should they read Roubini’s latest book to figure it out?

Capitalists may indeed be greedy and short-sighted, but they are not stupid when it comes to their own interests. Unlike the advocates of the underconsumption theory, they are smart enough to remain focused on obtaining profit, knowing that to fall short of that goal can mean falling out of the capitalist class.

Raising the wages of their own workers may contribute to expanding the overall “final demand” but it cuts directly into their own individual profit. Moreover, the beneficiaries of a wage increase at one capitalist firm will be other capitalist firms, particularly those producing consumer goods. Such an act of self-sacrifice on the part of some capitalists is even less likely to occur in an economic crisis, when it is already difficult for many firms to secure a more or less average level of profit. Roubini should know that when the prospects for profit are dim, capitalists will prefer to curtail or even cease production altogether, not raise wages. He can lament the situation all he likes, but it is perfectly rational behaviour under the irrational capitalist system.

Yet the underconsumption theory of crisis, despite its inanity, has continued to seem attractive and plausible to some capitalists (and most Leftists). Marx explains how the theory reflects capitalists’ rather fond view of the workers of other capitalists: “Every capitalist knows this about his worker, that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer, and [he therefore] wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. . . . his wage, as much as possible. Of course he would like the workers of other capitalists to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity” (Grundrisse).

Roubini sees that restricted consumption limits final demand, and fancies that the solution can be found in simply reversing the situation by increasing consumption to expand final demand. He never stops to think about why consumption must be limited in the first place. Roubini views restricted consumption as the cause of crisis when in fact it is the natural outcome and also the basis of a system designed to squeeze profit from workers’ labor.

Ignoring the profit motive and its relation to workers’ wages, Roubini feels free to dispense his wisdom on how the current crisis can be overcome by means of a “return to the right balance between markets and provision of public goods” in order to “enable market-oriented economies to operate as they should and can.” Instead of imagining the “should and can,” however, Roubini would be better advised to consider the “how and why.”

A forcible solution

The other way Roubini gets Marx wrong is by saying that he envisaged the possibility that capitalism could “self-destruct” in a crisis. Alarming capitalists by pointing to this dire prediction may be part of Roubini’s shtick as Dr. Doom, but at the same time it is a fairly widespread assumption regarding what Marx thought.

Marx does describe the occurrence of a world crisis as an “explosion” or “eruption” of capitalist contradictions and antagonisms, or even as a “destructive process.” But far from viewing crisis as the potential end of capitalism, Marx describes it as a “forcible solution” or “forcible adjustment” that temporarily restores the disturbed equilibrium, and as a violent process involving the “real concentration and forcible adjustment of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy” (Theories of Surplus Value).

The capitalist contradictions or antagonisms Marx is alluding to concern things that are linked to, yet independent of, each other – such as the relation between sale and purchase, or between the production process and circulation process. These things are clearly connected and interrelated, yet they can diverge from each other. The potential for sale and purchase to diverge, for instance, is magnified greatly under our modern credit system, where an inability to conclude one transaction can unleash a chain reaction that disrupts other transactions.  

Crises according to Marx are a forcible means of bringing such contradictory (semi-independent) elements back into some sort of alignment with each other so that the system can better function. This view of crises as a solution, albeit a crude and violent one, contrasts with the outlook of Roubini, who sees the destruction of a crisis as an avoidable problem rather than an unfolding solution.

Marx seemed to have economists like Roubini in mind when he wrote: “Instead of investigating the nature of the conflicting elements which erupt in the catastrophe, the apologists content themselves with denying the catastrophe itself and insisting, in the face of their regular and periodic recurrence, that if production were carried on according to the textbooks, crises would never occur” (Theories of Surplus Value).

The entire focus for an economist like Roubini is on coming up with practical solutions to crisis, not understanding why crisis occurs or what it tells us about the contradictions and limitations of capitalism. Marx thought of crisis as a phenomenon to be understood, not as a problem that could be solved. Even if we can manage to understand the exact causes of a specific crisis and fully examine all of the contradictions and antagonisms that are “strikingly revealed” (Theories of Surplus Value) in it, we are still not in a position to solve or prevent future crises. This is because the contradictions that explode in a crisis are all an integral part of the capitalist system.

What is clear from reading Marx is that the only way to get rid of crisis is to replace capitalism with a new system, free of capitalist barriers and antagonisms. This is not a “prediction” of the end of capitalism, but an explanation why workers must bring about its end.

In his analysis of crisis and other phenomena, Marx always seeks to understand why things are the way they are, not to predict when they might disappear or how the system might “self-destruct.” The defenders of capitalism are less interested in the why of things, than in making suggestions for how they should be, as if problems like crisis could be avoided if only capitalists followed the recommendations of economics textbooks. And this fosters the misguided hope that capitalism can (some day) be reformed. It’s natural for these economists to misinterpret Marx, even when praising him: they take capitalism completely for granted, and Marx didn’t.

Michael Schauerte

A tale of two schisms (1982)

From the January 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

The International Communist Current, which has been waiting since its inception for the working class to arm themselves and "smash the state", has recently been troubled by some internal opposition - some members decided that in the absence of the long-awaited "revolutionary war" the next best thing to smash would be the ICC. In a letter to the Socialist Party of Great Britain these ex-ICC members accuse the ICC of being "a bureaucratic sect" which "cannot accept criticisms" and uses "methods worthy of Stalinism". The ex-members have formed a new group which is publishing a duplicated journal called News of War and Revolution. In it they make two criticisms of the ICC: firstly, that "it contained a permanent elite to run the organisation and take its decisions", and secondly, that most of its predictions about "events in the real world" have been proved wrong.

It is rather odd that the ICC's "permanent elite" and undemocratic structure should be a surprise to these ex-members. After all, the ICC is an avowedly Leninist organisation which claims to admire and base itself upon the Bolshevik party. Bolshevism made no claim to be a respecter of majority decisions, but is based on the principle of rule by the vanguard. Some time ago the writer was at an ICC meeting and suggested to the speaker that the only way to achieve real socialist democracy is by democratic political organisation. The speaker's reply was that the ICC is a Leninist organisation aiming for "proletarian dictatorship" and is not interested in the niceties of democracy. Those who show contempt for the democratic process - for whatever reason - will before long degenerate into the kind of "Stalinist methods" of which the ICC is now accused. The link between Leninism and Stalinism is not an accidental one. But despite the cries of indignation from those who have left the ICC, they are no more interested in real democracy that the ICC is. It is particularly pitiful that the ICC's romantic illusions about bombs and barricades have led to the traditional allegations about certain members being police agents. (This matter is dealt with in an article in News of War and Revolution entitled "ICC Uses State Terror".)

The second criticism by the ex-ICCers is that the ICC's predictions about society are wrong. Basically, the ICC believes that since 1914 capitalism has been collapsing, and that this collapse will soon lead either to world war or armed revolution. Repeating Leninist cliches about the imminent collapse of capitalism and the need to arm the proletariat, the ICC has completely failed to understand that the old insurrectionary tactics of France in 1789 and Russia in 1917 (which were capitalist revolutions) are not applicable in 1982. The pathetic fact about the ICC - and their counterparts in the other Leninist sects - is that they are preparing to fight a violent capitalist revolution which happened long ago. Those who have been wise enough to leave the ICC would do well to learn that Leninism is completely opposed to the present-day interest of the working class. But from their literature, we suspect that the ICC breakaway group are rather slow learners.

Blind Ali

Meanwhile, another Leninist sect - the International Marxist Group - is undergoing a rather traumatic experience: its shepherd has abandoned the flock and is trying to join the Labour Party. In the May 1981 Socialist Standard we reported a debate at the Central Hall, Westminster, in which Benn and Company put the case for the Labour Party and Leninist chiefs, Paul Foot and Tariq Ali put the case against. It is worth quoting the concluding words of Tariq Ali's speech in the debate:

. . . we are opposed to Labourism, that weak, sickly and pathetic political ideology which has dominated the British working class. It must be displaced if we are to move forward.

(The Crisis and the Future of the Left, p.74, Pluto Press.)

No sooner had the masses stopped applauding Tariq's rhetoric than he had filled out an application form to join the Labour Party. Explaining his decision to resign from the IMG and join Labour in an article in City Limits (27/11/81), Ali states: "I have joined the Labour Party without renouncing my political views". Now, what are his innocent followers in the IMG to make of that? At one moment they are told to oppose "the weak, sickly and pathetic ideology" of the Labour Party and then are informed that their leader has joined the Labour Party but still holds the same views. By the same logic, Tariq might tell his followers to oppose the Tories, but then to join the Tory Party in order to demonstrate such opposition. Not all members of the IMG are convinced by their ex-leader's "tactics" and rumour has it that some of them will be proving the truth of the old saying that one Leninist is "a militant", two "a faction" and three "a schism".

Steve Coleman

Beyond the fragments (1981)

From the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last March, at the Central Hall, Westminster, four left wing leaders took part in what they modestly describe as the Debate of the Decade (the debate of the decayed would have been more accurate). The purpose of the event was to try once again to unite the Left into big movement rather than its present factions, each ultimately loyal to the Labour Party, but each maintaining their own petty and obscure positions (one says that Russia is a 'deformed' workers' state, another insists that is is a 'degenerate' one and a third affirms that it has been a socialist state all the time).

Leftist followers paid up to £6 a ticket to listen to the nostalgic rhetoric of the platform poseurs. Tony Benn (Labour Party) urged the assembled to elect a future leader of the Labour Party who would be honest, principled, radical . . . had he said that the best man for the job must be a lapsed aristocrat and Minister of Industry in a government under which unemployment doubled the hint might have been a little too obvious. Then there was John Cleese of the Socialist Workers' Party who did a passable impersonation of Paul Foot, and Tariq Ali of the International Marxist Group who did an embarrassing impersonation of Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov. The Leninist followers loved it all. The fourth and final fragment to address the microphone was Hilary Wainwright, co-author of a book called Beyond the Fragments (Merlin Press).

The book presents a criticism of certain aspects of the Left which socialists would not wish to argue with. Wainwright, Segal and Rowbotham have discovered (through experience) that Leninist parties are repressive, authoritarian bodies. They pointed out that their arrogant leaderships see themselves as the personification of socialist wisdom and how this tends to reduce internal party freedom of thought or action. Rowbotham seems to understand that experience is the greatest leader and perhaps we are not being over-optimistic in suggesting that she implies Lenin was wrong when he wrote that "The working class, exclusively, by its own effort is able to develop only trade union consciousness". (What Is To Be Done?)

She may well have quoted from Marx and Engels' circular letter of 1879 to the leaders of the German Socialist Workers' Party:

When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-cry: The emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who openly state that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be freed from above by philanthropic leaders.

The fragment critics are right to reject the anti-democratic assumptions of Leninism, but we would be more convinced of their integrity had they stated at any point in their two hundred and fifty-three-page book that Lenin distorted Marx and that the place for socialists is outside the Leninist Left. Instead we get references to such enemies of the working class as the Socialist Workers' Party and the Communist Party as fellow socialists, comrades and good militants.

Secondly, the age-old Leftist of what they call 'utopianism', but which is in fact theoretical clarity, is rejected by Rowbotham:

In order to explore, we need good maps . . . We need to be able to take stock of the situation and communicate any general principles to other wanderers. We have to establish certain staging points to refuel and assess the journey. This means we have to sit back momentarily from our immediate response to the route and try to sum up the relationship of what we have travelled to the whole journey. Some of this will be from our experience, with information from other travellers' tales and from any existing maps. Some will be speculation about the way things will be likely to go. Our summation of the whole may be incomplete and imperfect, but we still need it in order to get our bearings. Even if we abandon this assessment subsequently, the attempt can still be decisive and the effort to be as accurate as we can is still vital if we are not to trundle down every dead end or take enormous detours. (pp. 54-5) 

In short, you cannot embark upon the path to socialism unless you know what socialism means. Rowbotham's discovery of this point makes it all the more disappointing that nowhere in the book is there a single definition of socialism.

Thirdly, it is argued in the book that the fragments of the Left-political factions, trade councils, tenants associations, the women's and gay movement, radical publishers - should unite. Certainly, they unite, for working class strength lies in unity. But what is to be the purpose? Once the fragments have become a patchwork what will they say, do or achieve? Beyond the fragments to where  . . . and why . . . and how . . . and when? Many questions, but our authors provide no answers which go beyond the sterile claim that we must unite to get rid of the Tory government. In December 1904 a Socialist Standard editorial applied itself to the question of 'Socialist Unity':

We are all for unity. We believe that unity of party organisation based upon unity of purpose, unity of principle and unity of method is the one thing desirable. But today we are only sure that such unity of party organisation, so far as the various groups of socialists in any country are concerned, would be at the expense of  unity of purpose, principle and method . . . Unity is an important factor in the growth of a party but it is not the most important. Better far to have a party, however small, with common principles and a common end, than a party, however large, which is bound by no tie save party interest. We, therefore, who differ from those other parties in essential principle - inasmuch as we accept the principle of class struggle while they do not - cannot consent to unite our forces with theirs. It would weaken both parties - and the weakening would be more disastrous to the uncompromising section than to the revisionist.

This is why the Socialist Party of Great Britain has preserved its independence since 1904 from all the fragments which working class discontent has thrown up. We are not hostile to them because we like being on our own or are temperamentally aggressive, but because we have a programme of uncompromising revolution which stands in total opposition to the piecemeal reform policies of the fragments. We have gone beyond the fragments. Wainwright, Segal and Rowbotham are to be applauded for having recognised the political rut which the Left is in, but the lesson which they and their fellow fragments must now learn is that until they climb out of the ditch of reformism they will never go beyond the muddy theory which obscures their political vision.

Steve Coleman

Action Replay: Close of Play (2013)

The Action Replay column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

This summer’s Ashes series was a success financially, with matches sold out, and in media terms, with lots of interest in England’s victories and Australia’s relatively weak performance. But behind the scenes cricket at the top level is encountering plenty of problems.

Essentially, Test cricket, with five-day matches that often end in draws or are ruined by rain, is losing out in popularity to shorter versions, especially Twenty20 (T20), where each side bats for just twenty overs and a game generally takes about three hours. Matches can be played in the evening, increasing their attractiveness to live crowds and those watching on TV.

T20 is also popular with many players, who can earn far more from it than from Tests. The highest-paid cricketer last year was the Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni with income of $31.5m, the vast majority of which comes from product endorsements rather than directly from playing in Tests and the Indian Premier League. But he still got $3.5m from playing. Meanwhile, top England players get at most £400,000 a year on central contracts from the England and Wales Cricket Board. Up-and-coming young players may have to make a choice between Tests and T20, since rather different skill-sets are needed for both.

It is often claimed that T20 has led to cricketers becoming fitter and more agile. But it may also be behind poorer performances at Test level, particularly from Australian players. The Australian domestic competition is the subtly-named Big Bash, or, to give it its full name, the KFC T20 Big Bash League. Like all the shorter versions, it prioritises big hitting over patience and technique, so it is bound to undermine true Test quality. Also, pitches are prepared to increase the chances of a clear result.

According to Cricket Australia, ‘The league has been successful in attracting a new, diverse fan base in its first two years with its mix of big hits, great value and explosive action… If you look at the average crowds and TV audiences over the past two years, the league compares more than favourably with other sports and has claims to being the most popular summer sports league in the country’ (bigbash.com.au).

So competition is not just among teams but among sports and indeed different versions of the same sport.

Paul Bennett

Japan: the courage of a few (1983)

Book Review from the November 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan by John Crump (Croom Helm, 1983)

Yesterday the Japanese were the "Japs", sub-human orientals who specialised in war atrocities. Today they are a congenitally hard-working race who produce quality goods cheaply and efficiently. Which image is the true one? Doubtless neither, for popular images are rarely based on truth or direct experience. Although the Japanese people, as peoples everywhere in the world, have changed and developed by interaction with their environment and the circumstances of history, they have always been seen by outsiders through the distorting lens of the interests and propaganda of those with control over the means of information. The truth is something we have to find out for ourselves. And to help us find out the truth about Japan we now have an excellent new tool. John Crump's new book (1) looks at Japanese development between 1868 and 1918 but also sheds considerable light on the shaping of Japan and its people since then.

Even in terms of the period explicitly covered, the book's title understates its scope. For apart from describing vividly and authoritatively the events and personalities of the epoch and giving a coherent account of ideas about socialism which were then in circulation, it also paints a broad sweeping picture of the whole make up of Japanese society when different social and political forces at work after the Meiji restoration started the process of capitalist development.

Japan has had to telescope its industrialisation into a far shorter period than older established capitalist countries like Britain. Most of it has taken place in the last 30-40 years. But the foundation was laid in the slow accumulating of capital which began in the mid-nineteenth century. And slow it was, for in 1902 little over 1 per cent of Japan's 46m population were industrial workers and in 1918 the figure was still only 2.6 per cent in a population of 54.7m. The slowness of the process, however, did not stop it being extremely painful for those caught up in it. More painful in fact than it had been for workers in nineteenth century Europe. Crump quotes eye-witness accounts of children of six upwards working eight hours a day for the equivalent of a few pence and cites the admission of the then President of the Industrial Bank of Japan that "the condition of labourers is to be pitied by an impartial observer". Workplace conditions were hellish for both men and women. The women, many of them girls barely in their teens, constituted more than 50 per cent of the workforce. They could be paid less for their work than men. They would labour up to 18 hours a day in the mills, drenched in sweat, in temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. They suffered illness and premature death on a large scale. Such conditions led, as they have everywhere in developing capitalism, to protests which took the form of collective action by workers to try to force better pay and working conditions from their employers - nascent trade unionism. Official trade unionism remained illegal in Japan throughout this period, so workers had no choice but to take illegal action. When they did, they were sometimes successful in their demands, but more often were driven back to work by the forces of a state incomparably more repressive than any in nineteenth century Western Europe. The violent clashes that took place between protesting workers and the police and army occasionally resulted in widespread damage to property and heavy casualties on both sides, as for example in the copper miners' action of 1906-7 and the rice riots of 1918. Many of the copper workers had been soldiers in the mass slaughter of the 1905-6 Russo-Japanese war and, although now demobilised, used their training for violence to unbargained for effect against the forces of state repression.

When disturbances like these took place, many radical minds in Japan mistakenly thought that the workers' revolution had come. They failed to see that these were little more than expressions of despair devoid of ideological content. The radicals were rarely industrial workers themselves and shut their  eyes to the most important factor of all -  that the Japanese working class was still tiny in comparison to the overwhelmingly peasant-based population. For this reason the mass consciousness needed for a workers' socialist revolution was impossible in Japan at the time.

Any changes which promised to better workers' conditions, however, tended to be referred to as "socialist'. And indeed few of the early Japanese "socialists" saw socialism as anything more than trying to make the existing system more humane through social reforms or, at most, nationalising industry under centralised state control, as was to happen later in Russia and other countries. Their notion of socialism was based on the European conception coming mainly from the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), seen as a "powerful older brother". The small groups of Japanese "socialists" that grew up even imitated the SPD in its rifts and controversies over reform or revolution - over whether to concentrate on getting into capitalist parliaments and implementing reforms or whether to go for an immediate and potentially violent revolution aimed at getting rid of parliament and private ownership of capital and establishing state control over the economy. Both these policies were, as in Europe, referred to as "socialism", whereas they were just different recipes for running capitalism. As the author of this book states: "Capital no more ceases to be an anarchic force outside of people's rational control on being collectivised than the state ceases to be an organ of repression on being given a socialist label".

The operating space allowed to these groups by the Japanese authorities was extremely limited and the state had frequent brutal recourse to the infamous "Public Peace Police Law". For the courageous few who dared to speak out, losing their jobs and social ostracism were the least penalties. For many it meant exile, imprisonment or even death. After a small street demonstration in june 1908, a number of the demonstrators were arrested. Among those taken to the police station, Crump says, "Arahata Kanson and Osugi Sakae were ruthlessly beaten up. Stripped naked, both men were dragged by their feet along the corridors, were kicked, beaten and stamped on, the police only ultimately relenting when Arahata had been beaten into unconsciousness . . . For the heinous crime of demonstrating with red flags, nine socialists received prison sentences of up to 2½ years." Particularly poignant is the case of Kotoku Shusui, one of the foremost activists and radical thinkers of the time, who died on the gallows in 1910 along with 10 other comrades for allegedly plotting to assassinate the emperor.

Kotoku was one of the few who came near to getting away from the SPD reformist-state control conception of socialism and to understanding the idea of socialism as conscious revolution to abolish the wages system by a class conscious majority of workers. But frustration led him, as it led other brave men and women, to contemplate terrorism as a means of revolution. As even the most law-abiding attempts to spread new ideas were met with rising terror by the state, so those who opposed the state became increasingly violent and anarchical in what they advocated. "The means whereby the revolution can be funded is the bomb. The means to destroy the bourgeois class is the bomb", said the journal Kakumei in 1906, and, addressing the Japanese capitalist class, it went on: "There may come a day very soon in which there will be built a large mountain of your bloody bodies". Their terrorism, it is true, was more in words than in actions, but it did not prevent the state from using its own institutionalised apparatus of terror to try to silence them. As Crump does not fail to point out, violent direct action was futile, not only in terms of its prospects of success, but also for the way it went against the fundamental idea of the need for mass public consciousness before socialist revolution could be on the agenda. So when, after the executions of 1910, Arahata Kanson, who had earlier called for the abolition of the wages system, conceived a plan for assassinating the Prime Minister and declared that "the overthrowing of the tyrants who set themselves up against civilisation and humanity is not a utopian illusion", he was succumbing to despair and forgetting that, in Crump's words, "terrorism by its very nature imposes a military disciple on those who resort to it, in place of the self-liberating and creative activity which socialism requires". Hopelessness had also made him forget that socialism could not come from "a conspiratorial minority acting in isolation from the workers whose interests they claimed to have at heart".

Crump, who is a lecturer in Japanese and whose knowledge of the language has enabled him to use original sources, has written a book which is refreshingly readable and contains none of the complicated specialist jargon often found in the work of academics. He acknowledges his debts too. In his introduction he says he "gained a great deal" from the men and women who have worked in the Socialist Party of Great Britain. "Political differences", he says, now separate him from us. Yet there is nothing in this book to indicate those differences. Crump's stated views in capitalism (2), state capitalism (3) and socialism (4) as well as his sound materialist account of the origins of radical thought in Japan all constitute a convincing advocacy of the position of the Socialist Party and its insistence on the urgent practical need for worldwide socialism. The book's dedication uncompromisingly proclaims that need: "This study is dedicated to the working class in Japan, in the hope that a day will come when (along with the workers throughout the rest of the world) they will decide to get up off their knees".

Howard Moss

References

1 The Origins of Socialist Thought in Japan, Croom Helm, 1983.

2 "By capitalism I mean a system of society where production is carried on for the purpose of sale on the market, where the majority of people  . . . are . . . forced to sell their ability to work for wages or salaries in order to survive, and where there are social classes, the state and money." (Introduction, p. 2.)

3 "Now, it is the fact that we do live in an age which has seen a succession of capitalist revolutions in Russia, China and elsewhere which explains why socialism should have come to be widely thought of as a policy of rapid capital accumulation carried out under the supervision of a strong, centralised state . . . What was more natural than that, in a world which has seen the drift towards state capitalism on all sides, socialism should have become a convenient ideological device for masking the ugliness of what has in reality been taking place?" (Introduction, p. 4.)

4 "Socialism is given the meaning of a society where production is for the direct satisfaction of human needs without the mediation of a process of buying and selling or exchange, where the means of production are commonly owned and democratically controlled, where there are neither social classes, the state, nor money." (Introduction, p. 3.)

Pathfinders: 'Smart' is the New Black (2013)

The Pathfinders Column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Put the word ‘smart’ in front of just about anything these days and you are describing the techno-savvy reality of the 20-teenies. We have, or will soon have, smart cars, smart traffic lights, smart houses and smart cities like Songdo, or maybe even the Venus Project (see ‘Tomorrow’s Cities’ ). Now schoolkids can dictate essay questions into Google on their smart phones (unless they’ve got strong regional accents which the speech algorithms can’t cope with). Pretty soon they’ll be dictating into their smart watches instead, and not long after that, via their smart Google Glass lenses. It surely won’t be long before the next horizon technology, wetware, creates reliable bio-interfaces to allow subcutaneous and perhaps even cranial smart implants, and who wouldn’t want the knowledge and communication power of biblical gods? The 20th century pioneered cyberspace, but the 21st century will pioneer cybernetics. Better, faster, smarter, cheaper, Human version 2.0, or rather Worker version 2.0 is set to superheat capitalist technological development, each individual cocooned inside an artificially-tailored personal reality, and each a uniform functioning component of the global hive.

Well, that’s one possible view of the near future. The technology news right now is breathless with excitement about smart watches, but Google Glass is just round the corner and third-party developers are secretly beavering away right now to come up with ‘killer apps’ which are supposedly going to persuade today’s young generation of early adopters to start wearing spectacles even though they have perfect vision. No more embarrassing encounters with people whose names you can’t remember – just silently run a facial recognition app while you’re standing there chatting. Can’t find that obscure little café? Pull up an on-lens GPS streetmap. Unimpressed with the forlorn pile of old stones in a famous historical site? Get an artist’s reconstruction superimposed over the real thing. Want to leave a message for your friends that that obscure little café was overpriced? Dictate a piece of rude graffiti and leave it on the front door of the café, invisible to anyone but your friends, similarly glassed-up.

Socialists and other people who are accustomed to reading beneath the hype will of course ask the obvious question: does all this smart stuff make us any cleverer? The answer is equally obvious:  no. The difference between smart and clever is the difference between technology and science. Smart is having good tools. Clever is knowing how to use them. Smart will win a war, but clever knows how to avoid the war.

There is no question that capitalism is smart, far smarter than any type of society that’s gone before. Classical antiquity was a time of remarkable sophistication in many ways, but it was rigidly obtuse in its slave-based economies and as a consequence never able to see the point of science or technology. But that doesn’t mean modern society is especially committed to science or that modern populations understand much about it or its methods. But they can appreciate the labour-saving devices and the toys. Where old societies were swamped in myth and the supernatural, we are swamped in gadgets and technobabble. We congratulate ourselves that we invented reason, and yet we’re probably no better at logical thinking than a Cro-Magnon cave painter, and probably significantly less artistically talented. But hell, we have smarts, so it doesn’t matter.

Smart is also an acronym, used a lot in businesses as a shorthand mnemonic for evaluating steps in a project. The letters are usually made to represent the following: S – Specific; M – Measurable; A – Achievable; R – Realistic; T – Time-delimited. If a step or course of action does not satisfy all these conditions, for example if it is too vague, or over-optimistic, or there is no failure condition or there’s no deadline, it is not ‘smart’ and therefore it is not worth doing (you could reverse the acronym and use ‘Trams’ instead, to stop your project going off the rails).

Capitalism is ‘smart’ in this sense as well. It doesn’t do things that don’t seem achievable within a short time period. It doesn’t do things that are not measurable with ‘hard outcomes’, which generally translates as money profit. It’s always specific in its boardrooms and vague in its parliaments. It’s realistic in its assessment of where the next profit is coming from. And its bottom line is always a deadline, the month-end, the quarterly profit statement, the annual report.

There is something fundamentally wrong with ‘smart’ targets. You can be perfectly smart and still do the stupid thing. Capitalism ‘smartly’ ignores the long term problems of climate change, resource-waste, war, global hunger and deprivation. Things that aren’t specific or measurable, like quality of life, fulfilment, self-realisation, democratic freedoms, simply don’t count. Pollution is not a measurable cost to anyone specifically, and there is no deadline to stop causing the damage.

Maybe this is why a lot of workers, forced to put up with managers at work wittering constantly about ‘smart’ targets, have learned to hate the very mention of the word. Not only are these smart targets invariably designed simply to extract more and more work out of the hard-pressed minions, suffering like crushed olives getting their third pressing, there is a strong sense that there is an overall dimension missing from the concept. If they were truly smart, these targets would make the workers happy too. And so with capitalism. If it’s so smart, why is everyone so miserable in it?

What the world needs is more swots.  SWOT is another of those acronyms, only it doesn’t evaluate a step, it sizes up an overall situation, assessing the pros and cons of a big picture. It stands for S – Strengths; W – Weaknesses; O – Opportunities; T – Threats. Before you get smart, you should be a swot. Socialists aren’t always smart, worse luck, but they are good at being swots. We recognise, sometimes better than capitalism’s own defenders, what its strengths are and have been, a global smart machine that has brought us almost to the point of expansion into space. We recognise its weaknesses better too, because we don’t dismiss them immediately as unavoidable. We see the enormous opportunity of a globally-connected, smart and (yes) clever working class to drive society forwards beyond class division, and we understand better than most what will happen to the world if we don’t. That’s why we would say, if you want to get smart, swot up on socialism.

Paddy Shannon