The Rise of Capitalism (2011)

From the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalist system is the most productive mode of production in the history of humankind. In the space of a few centuries the world has been transformed beyond all recognition. Average life expectancies have more than doubled. Technological developments occur at a rate that would have been previously unimaginable. More food, clothing and shelter can be produced using less labour than ever before. It would seem that the material problems of survival have finally been solved.

Yet capitalism is a system at odds with itself. The need for constant accumulation is the driving force of society, determining where and in what way human energies will be used. Instead of humankind controlling the fulfilment of its own development, humanity is at the mercy of an economic system which it has itself created. It is the conflict between the need to accumulate capital and the need to fulfil human want that is at the heart of all social problems today.

Enough food could be produced to feed all of the world’s population, yet people go hungry. Why? Because those in need of food do not have the money to pay for it. Industry pumps pollutants into the environment yet less destructive methods of production could easily be utilised. Why? Because more profit is to be made this way. Vast wealth co-exists with abject poverty leading to an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. Why? Because capitalist accumulation is dependent on the exploitation of the wage labourer.

Transition from feudalism

The transition from feudalism to capitalism is often viewed as the result of a gradual and rising progress of technology, urbanisation, science and trade – inevitable because humans have always possessed “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange” (Adam Smith). However, as writers such as Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner have demonstrated, the rise of capitalism depended on very specific and localised conditions and was the result of a process that was far from automatic.

The relatively recent change from a primarily agricultural society of petty producers to a society of commodity production and market dependence required a change in the social relations at the heart of society. The central relationship instead of being between landlords and un-free peasants became one between capital-owners and propertyless wage-labourers. Such a change could only be bought about by a complete rupture with the old relations of human interaction.

By the 17th century trade, mercantilism and money lending had grown and developed in Europe but these by themselves did not undermine the foundations of feudal society. The mere existence of commodity production, merchants’ capital and money lenders capital are necessary but not sufficient conditions for the full development of capitalism. “Or else ancient Rome, Byzantium etc. would have ended their history with free labour and capital” (Karl Marx).

Only in England were conditions right for the essential prerequisite to take hold, capitalist relations in agriculture. The later industrial revolution would have been extremely unlikely without an agricultural sector that was productive enough to support it.

These changes can be explained by looking for the ‘prime mover’ in society. In capitalist societies this is the need to accumulate capital. In feudalism the need to maintain class position takes this role.

In order to maintain and improve their position as members of the ruling class and to defend it against their rivals, their underlings and moneylenders, the pressure was on feudal landlords to increase rents. In capitalism surplus wealth is extracted through economic means; it is because of the market-dependency of the wage-labourer that labour-power is sold. In feudal society, as the peasants have their own means of production, surplus must be extracted via ‘extra-economic’ methods through the real or ultimate threat of force, which explains their un-free status.

By the mid 15th century through ongoing resistance and evasion the peasantry of much of western Europe including England, were able to break the shackles of serfdom and gain their freedom. This proved a problem for landlords as they could now no longer depend on arbitrary peasant labour or duties and income from rents fixed long-term by custom, the value of which tended to decrease in the face of rising costs.

In order to counter this tendency in England, more easily than in other western European countries, landlords were able to appropriate peasant holdings that had became vacant due to a falling population. These properties were able to be leased at rates in excess of customary rent.

Another option available to landlords was the imposition of fines and levies. Charges could be made whenever land changed hands or was inherited and many landlords used these as a method for removing customary peasants from their land so that competitive commercial rents could be charged. However this process did not go on unchallenged; widespread and fairly successful peasant uprisings were a recurrent theme for much of the 15th century. This trend continued into the 16th century with security of tenure and the question of fines being core to what became know as Kett’s rebellion of 1549. If successful such events may have “clipped the wings of rural capitalism” (Stanley Bindhoff), but they were not and by the end of the 17th century around 70-75 percent of cultivatable land was under the control of English landlords.

In France the property rights of peasants developed along a different line. The monarchical state had evolved into an independent collector of tax and had the power to draw revenues from the land; it had an interest in curbing the rents of landlords, so that peasants could pay more in taxes. The state was thus in competition with the lords for surplus peasant product and for this reason often intervened to secure peasant freedoms and property. French landlords had a legal difficulty in occupying vacant peasant lots and so the majority of the land remained under customary rents. The state used peasant production as a direct source of revenue and increased its power by intervening in matters between peasants and landlords to guarantee the continuity of the system.

This can be contrasted with the form of state that developed in England during the Tudor period (1485-1603). Here monarchical centralisation was dependent on the support from landlords, evident from the growth of parliamentary institutions of the period. The weakness of the English peasantry deprived the monarchical powers of a means of generating an income independently of landlords. Powerful elements of the nobility and gentry would support the monarchy’s centralising efforts in the hope of achieving the stability and order necessary for their own economic growth. It was however these same elements from the landlord class who had the strongest interest in freeing themselves from customary peasants and replacing them with commercial tenants.

The nature of the two different states can be illustrated by the content of peasant revolts in the two countries. In England, revolts were directed against the landlords in an attempt to protect peasant ownership against the encroachment of capitalistic property relations. In France the crushing taxation of an absolutist state was the source of the peasants’ grievances.

Market dependency

English landlords controlled a large proportion of the best land but didn’t have, or need, the kinds of extra-economic powers that other European feudal ruling classes depended on. Instead they largely depended on the increasing productivity of tenants and required the state only as a means of protecting their private property and enforcing contractual obligations. In England, unlike anywhere else, an increasing amount of rents took the form of economic leases being fixed not by law or tradition but variably priced according to market conditions. For tenants this meant having to respond to market imperatives and taking an interest in agricultural ‘improvement’ and increasing productivity, often involving enclosure of common lands and increased exploitation of wage labour. Both producers and landowners were becoming dependent on the market for their own self-reproduction.

Market imperatives rather than market opportunities were the driving force of the process. Tenant farmers were specialising in competitive production for the market because they needed to in order to be able to continue leasing. This can be contrasted with the peasant who may have had the opportunity to sell surplus product on the market but, as they owned their own means of subsistence, was in no way dependent on it.

Peasants who were unable to keep up with fines or tenants that failed to compete successfully were pushed into a mere subsistence existence and eventually made landless. Some became vagabonds, wandering the roads for looking food or others became wage labourers on large farms. The landless became not only labourers but also consumers as they needed to buy goods in the market which they had previously been able to produce themselves. This was one of the reasons a healthy home market was able to develop in England.

Until 1640 the state operated in the interest of the old feudal order, restricting the full development of capitalist relations in the countryside. During the turbulent events of the English civil war the commercial classes, favouring capitalist development against the traditional rights of peasants and monarchy, managed to take hold of Parliament. The rate of change now rapidly accelerated with the ‘improving’ capitalist tenant farmer becoming typical by 1660. State-sponsored enclosure of common lands increased and became commonplace, forcing more and more peasants into becoming landless wage-labourers.

The emergence of the landlord/capitalist tenant/wage-labourer triad made the agricultural revolution possible and laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution. Growing agricultural production provided rising incomes for not only the middle but the lower classes, fuelling the growth of the home market. “Industry fed on agriculture and stimulated in turn further agricultural improvement – an upward spiral that extended into the industrial revolution” (Robert Brenner)

Worldwide market

Once English capitalism reached its industrial phase the world-wide market with its competitive pressures became the means for the spreading of capitalist social relations. Economies that depended on trade would be subject to the market imperatives of competition and increasing productivity. These market imperatives transformed social property relations leading to a new wave of dispossession and commodification of labour-power, both small agricultural and independent industrial producers faced the same fate. As more and more people were brought under the sphere of market dependence the strengths of these imperatives grew. Capital was able to remake the world in its own image.

The social changes of the 17th century freed technology and science from the shackles of feudal backwardness, making possible the advances that began in the 18th century. Yet the direction of technological development is dictated by the profit motive, the need to accumulate capital for its own sake. Could the 21st century see a further period of social change, where humanity as a whole takes control of the productive powers and where human need becomes the guiding force for a new age of technological and scientific progress?

By studying capitalism we learn that human society is not the result of some eternal logic or divine laws but is created through our own actions as we produce the things we need as use every day. The historical conditions that set in motion the social changes that have transformed the world were in no way inevitable. We must fully understand the full power of market imperatives, of the need to accumulate capital and of the need to raise the productivity of labour. We must also have a clear idea of their origins. Once we can begin to answer how and why society works in the way it does we are already some way towards understanding what could be done to change it.

Darren Poynton

Angels and Demons (2014)

From the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unlike birds, bats, bugs or any other flying creatures, of which there are numerous varieties, no in-depth study seems to have ever been carried out on the various species of angels which, according to the Catholic Church, flutter around us on a daily basis.

Our scanty knowledge of angels comes mainly from the renaissance painters and their masterpieces which indicate that there are, indeed, several kinds. The tall blond ones with what appear to be sleek, aerodynamically perfect, goose feathered wings which, in the paintings, they wrap protectively around weeping women in distress; the chubby little four-winged ones, whose wings have evolved, perhaps, to enable them to hover at low altitude and feed in mid-flight; and the biblical ones (see Isaiah 6:1-2) which have six wings, two of which they use to cover their faces, two to cover their feet, and two more for the actual job of flying. (Although, as there have been no reported sightings of these for many years, we fear they may now be extinct). Apart from this we know very little, and nothing of their natural habitat, their feeding patterns or their mating habits.

Fortunately a conference on angels has recently taken place in Rome, and one of the Vatican’s angel experts, the knowledgeable but unfortunately named Fr Renzo Lavatori has brought us up to date with the Church’s latest thinking on the subject. And he started by dropping a bombshell. ‘Angels’, he told us, ‘may not have wings at all’. They may actually be more like ‘shards of light’. ‘You do not see angels so much as feel their presence’ he reported, ‘they are a bit like sunlight that refracts on you through a crystal vase’. Well, that’s all very nice but he didn’t really go much further. What most of us would like to know, for example, is what do they actually do all day?

Fr Lavatori, who is also a ‘demonologist’ did, however, add that ‘we need them now more than ever before. This is because increasing secularisation and materialism in society have left an open door for the devil’ he explained. ‘There is a lot more interference from diabolical forces. That is why you see queues of people outside the exorcist’s offices in churches’.

Well yes, that is very worrying. It was only a couple of years ago that Rome’s chief exorcist, Fr Gabrielle Amorth, explained to us that practicing yoga and reading Harry Potter books was satanic and would lead to evil. And his predecessor, Fr Candido Amantini, was said to have spoken to, and battled with demons for 36 years. And now a Polish priest, Fr Slawomir Kostrzewa, has identified the latest satanic scare–Lego bricks.

Lego, he explained, is all about ‘darkness and the world of death’. (And there was us thinking that that’s what the Catholic Church was all about). In a move that might, we must assume, enable toddlers to unleash satanic forces against their parents Lego have extended their range of happy little interlocking characters with a series of ‘monster fighters’ one, of which, is ‘Lord Vampyre’, a Dracula-like character with fangs.

It’s their little, moulded facial expressions that Fr Kostrzewa is concerned about. They show ‘satisfaction with their evil deeds’ he says. Although to be honest, that could also be said about the toddlers who play with them. But no, this is serious. It will ‘destroy their souls and lead them to the dark side’ he insists. And in case you think Fr Kostrzewa may just be one brick short of a plastic house, rest assured. He also warned us about the spiritual dangers of ‘Hello Kitty’ and ‘My Little Pony’.

A Return to Full Employment? (2014)

From the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a speech on 31 March George Osborne  pledged ‘today I'm making a new commitment – a commitment to fight for full employment in Britain’ (www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26814423). He was, however, careful not to define what he meant by ‘full employment’.

Beveridge, of the war-time Beveridge Report, argued that it was possible to achieve and maintain the unemployment rate at 3 percent of the active labour force. Keynes and the Keynesians taught that this could be achieved by appropriate ‘demand management’ by the government. And in fact, for most of the twenty years after the war the rate was around 2 percent. This is what most people will regard as full employment, taking into account workers temporarily unemployed as they move from one job to another or from a declining industry to an expanding one.

The Keynesians – and everybody was a Keynesian then, Tories as well as Labourites – claimed that this was a result of their policies. Others offered an explanation in terms of reconstruction and an expanding world market. That they were right was shown when the post-war boom came to an end in the mid-70s and Keynesian policies proved unable to do anything about it, except by adding inflation to the  stagnation and creating a new economic phenomenon dubbed ‘stagflation’.

Reserve army

Marx pointed out that the unemployed made up what he called ‘the reserve army of labour’, a pool from which employers could draw in periods of expansion. Without it, since of course it is workers who produce everything, the expansion would be compromised by a labour shortage. In a slump, on the other hand, members of the regular army of labour find themselves unemployed too. So, unemployment is high or low depending on which phase of its business cycle capitalism is in.

Full employment was achieved for most of  the period 1945 to 1965 because this was the time of the post-war boom, caused first by reconstruction and then by an expanding world market.  When this boom began to falter in the late 60s and burst in the mid-70s unemployment began to rise, fairly dramatically. The official rate rose from the 2 percent average in the mid-60s, passing the million mark (4.6 percent) in 1975 and reaching a peak of over 3 million (11.3 percent) in 1985. Since then it has never fallen below a million, the lowest being 1.4 million or 4.7 percent in 2005, i.e. its 1975 level. In the current slump that began in 2008 it reached a peak of 8.1 percent (2.6 million) in 2011. It is now about 7.2 percent. ‘Natural rate’

With Beveridge and Keynes discredited, economists looked for another explanation for this permanently higher level of unemployment and came up with the theory of ‘the natural rate of unemployment’. This was the rate below which there would be a rise in the general price level. Which is why they also called it in their academic works ‘the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment” (NAIRU). It has also been called ‘the full employment rate of unemployment’.

Although it is based on the mistaken assumption that higher wages lead to a rise in the general price level (whereas wages are a price which rises in line with all other prices), this is not entirely an irrational or ideological concept. In a boom falling unemployment puts workers in a stronger bargaining position allowing them to extract higher real wages, which employers can afford because they are making quicker and higher profits. In fact a boom is a period of rising prices as demand, and not just for labour, comes to exceed supply.

In this context the economists’ ’natural rate of unemployment’ is the rate which would exist when capitalism is neither in a boom nor a slump. They estimated that it would be between 5 and 6 percent, at least twice as much as during the post-war boom.

Empty promises

So, what rate of unemployment has Osborne promised to target? Is it the ‘natural rate’? Or is he promising to engineer a boom in which it will fall below this? Most probably the former, as in the same speech he showed that he had learned from the mistake made by his predecessors Nigel Lawson and Gordon Brown of promising a permanent boom, when he said:

‘You can’t abolish boom and bust. There are always going to be ups and downs to the economic cycle.’

The 5-6 percent rate of unemployment Osborne seems to be promising is not full employment. In which case he will be envisaging a permanent pool of over one million unemployed workers, which exposes the hypocrisy of the government’s claim to be forcing people off disability and incapacity benefit as a prelude to finding them a job. They know most of them never will. But unemployment ‘benefit’ is cheaper.

In any event, permanent full employment is not possible under capitalism because a permanent boom isn’t either.

Adam Buick

Socialism and "The Third International". (1925)

From the March 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

(1.)

The Socialist Party of Great Britain stands for the International Organisation of the Working Class for the achievement of Socialism throughout the entire Capitalist World. It is not sufficient, however, for parties to call themselves Socialist or Communist to arouse our desires to affiliate with them. To be worthy of the name and to be useful in the struggle for Socialism, every party must be based upon a recognition of the class struggle and the line of action necessary for the workers to achieve victory over the capitalists.

The so-called Second International we long ago recognised as an anti-Socialist body, and therefore refused to affiliate with it. In the pages of the "Socialist Standard" we have exposed the opportunism and compromise of that body. The confusion and reformism exhibited in their International Congresses showed that it must be opposed and exposed, and the pages of this journal will testify to our criticism of the Bebels, Hyndmans, Millerands and Kautskys, who composed the leadership. We not merely exposed the leaders, but showed that the constitution and composition of the Second International were opposed to Socialism. We did not wait for the lessons of "wartime betrayals," but while people like Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg were active within it, we laid down reasons why it could not function for Socialists. The parties composing it were not Socialist, and the policy it pursued was therefore anti-Socialist.

The war gave added evidence to our criticism of the jingoistic and capitalist nature of it. Since the war the Noskes and Scheidemans, the MacDonalds and the Brantings have shown the entire capitalist character of this alleged Socialist International.

The fact the largest unit of it is the British Labour Party, which in no sense even claims to be Socialist, shows how little this International is entitled to be called Socialist. The German Social Democrats have supplied further evidence of the need for untiring Socialist hostility to this mockery of an International.

Those who seceded from the Second International took action following the war to form a "fighting" International—the so-called Third, or Communist, International. It is generally supposed to be a real live revolutionary body such as every revolutionary should join. We propose, therefore, to examine its claims for support. Our previous remarks about the "Second" International should be borne in mind, because it will be shown that, despite all the Moscow denunciations of the "Second International," the two bodies possess sufficient in common to make joint action between them possible, not only in conference, but as allies in government.

Soon after the conquest of power by the Bolsheviki, the call for an International Congress at Moscow was issued. It was signed by Lenin and Trotsky for the Russian Communist Party and by eight other organisations. Amongst these latter was Lenin's Secretary, Boris Reinstein, who signed for the Socialist Labor Party of America, without their consent or endorsement. Whether the other signatures had the backing of their organisations is not known.

The unsound position taken up at the inception of the 3rd International may be gathered from this call or manifesto.

"As a basis for the new International, we deem necessary the recognition of the following clauses, which we shall consider our platform and which have been worked out on the basis of the programme of the Spartacus Group in Germany and the Communist Party in Russia:-

"1. The present is the period of dissolution, and the collapse of the entire world system which will mean the entire collapse of European culture if capitalism with its unsolvable contradictions is not destroyed.
"2. The problem of the proletariat consists in immediately seizing the power of the State. This seizure of the power of the State means the destruction of the State apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organisation of a new proletarian apparatus of power." The notion that Capitalism was collapsing in 1919 permeated the entire policy of the new "International." The framers of the manifesto knew little of the actual state of affairs outside Russia, and evidently thought the end of the war was the death knell of the system. Thus the passage quoted tells the workers that the problem is the immediate seizure of the power of the State. The danger of such advice was easily proved by the small bodies on Russian lines that arose throughout the world, and adopted these mottoes of "seizing power" and "now is the time," "the revolution is just around the corner." The great mass of the workers were in no mood to seize power and would not know what to do with it if they did. The majority of workers were ignorant of their class interests, and were still saturated with the ideas of their masters. To tell them to seize power was not the message of Socialism, for before they can seize power with advantage to themselves the workers needed Socialist education—an understanding of the system under which they lived and the forces controlling it. To tell the workers of the world to seize power at once was to invite them to be crushed by the forces of the State, whose death-dealing power had so recently been shown on the battlefield.

The other idea preached in the quotation given, that the workers were to destroy the State apparatus is a further indication of the sensational but worthless policy of the 3rd International. The State machine—that is, the instrument of government and the forces controlled through it—could not be dispensed with by a class rising to power in modern capitalist countries until Socialism had been established with the abolition of classes and the consequent dying out of the State.

Engels has well stated the attitude towards the State machine in his Introduction to Marx's "Civil War in France," where he says of the State:-

"At the very best it is an inheritance of evil, bound to be transmitted to the proletariat when it has become victorious in its struggle for class supremacy, and the worst features of which it will have to lop off at once until a new race grown up under free social conditions, will be in a position to shake off from itself this State rubbish in its entirety."

The idea of the immediate destruction of the power of the State is an anarchist policy. Lenin himself has opposed it, for in his criticism of the International of Youth ("Class Struggle," May, 1919) he says: "Socialists are willing to utilise the present government and its institutions in the struggle for the liberation of the working class, and also insist upon the necessity of so using the government in the creation of a suitable transition form from Capitalism to Socialism. This transition form, also governmental, is the dictatorship of the proletariat."

The manifesto of Moscow goes on to lay down its method:-

"The fundamental means of the struggle are mass action of the proletariat even to armed and open warfare with the State power of capital." 

This became the accepted policy of Communists throughout the world, so that in a short time most of them had driven themselves underground into secret societies through such an insane programme. Some of their followers, such as the Spartacans in Germany, attempted to carry out this suicidal policy of armed and open warfare with terrible results to those concerned.

Mass action meant in Communist circles the "spontaneous upsurge of the proletariat." One of the leaders of the Moscow International, Louis Fraina, defines mass action in his "Revolutionary Socialism" (p.196) as "the instinctive action of the proletariat, gradually developing more conscious and organised forms for certain purposes."

"Organisations," says Fraina (the International Secretary of the C.P. of U.S.A.), "have a tendency to become conservative," and he relies upon the workers "acting instinctively under pressure of events."

This mass-action nonsense preached by Moscow is the very thing relied upon by our masters. The only sound action for Socialism must be guided by the workers' intelligence and knowledge. The blind instinctive actions of the workers are dangerous to workers' welfare, and are easily worked upon by capitalist orators and intellectuals in war time and peace time. Mob action is not the action to overthrow Capitalism and establish Socialism. Socialism depends upon organisation plus knowledge. Armed warfare by workers while capitalists control the forces of government is a policy both useless as well as suicidal. The advocacy of such a policy is reactionary, and provides the capitalists with excellent opportunities for butchery of the insurgents. To propose such a method as the 3rd International and its sections did, especially in view of the minority of workers in their ranks, was directly opposed to workers' interests. It betrayed the illusions which the 3rd International suffered and which still are general with that body.

A further examination of the policy of this so-called revolutionary International will be made in our next issue.

Adolph Kohn 

A Rant About the ‘Right to Food’ (2014)

From the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a report in January this year the UN Special Rapporteur on ‘the right to food’, Olivier De Schutter, claimed that, 'Most of the food systems we have inherited from the 20th century have failed.' If those systems have failed, could it not be because they were not suited to succeeding within the global capitalist system?

The report’s basic assumption is not that this system is fundamentally flawed but it's just that things have got out of kilter and need reforming to bring matters back into an acceptable state. But it's not as if there is just one particular disaster to be dealt with suddenly and immediately since world hunger and malnutrition is a disaster that has been ongoing for decades. A disaster created by the world capitalist system that requires, nay demands, profit from every transaction.

How many reports do we need to read regarding the amount of available food in the world? The amount of food dumped or wasted in countries around the world? Of food not being distributed because there is no market – ie insufficient funds to buy it?

Empty rights

The report declares the rights of all people to this and that, but this doesn't translate into people getting those rights. This is not a problem restricted to the 'underdeveloped world', the 'third' world, whatever label you choose. It is also happening in your world, my world, your country, my country – everybody's, rich or poor. Poverty occurs in all countries and is rampant in many developed countries, a fact to which the report refers (in particular food stamps and poverty in the US).

The report points out that the 'exclusive focus' on increasing agricultural production has had severe environmental impacts including global warming. Whilst true, this clouds the reality that it is not the amount of food that is lacking but the distribution and availability of it. Remember, food is for paying customers not for hungry people. The report also mentions the unsustainable, destructive practices and the distorting subsidies of industrial agriculture. There is some emphasis on the contrast between high and low income countries regarding consumption and emissions; 'there is no doubt in the scientific community that the impacts of livestock production are massive,' because production of grains for animal feed is diverted from human needs.

Connections are made between the methods of large scale agriculture, putting small scale farmers out of business or off their land, and a return to subsistence farming or urban migration followed by forced reliance on imports. This, coupled with IMF loans or similar, has increased the indebtedness of states without stopping the impoverishment of their populations. De Schutter takes to task the 'weak accountability of governments to the rural poor' – foreign debt leading to the focus on cash crops for export, not food for locals. Note, none of these circumstances have been a result of the personal choice of individuals but of a policy imposed: cause and effect.

Limited choice

Choice in our democracies is limited. With regard to food, for those in the rich world choice should surely go beyond what's put on the supermarket shelves by large corporations. And for those in the poor world, who willingly chooses to give up their land, to be urbanised, to be tied to the market, to aspire to the rich world supermarket model? Have they been consulted? Will they ever be consulted while this money/profit system persists?

If, individually, or even collectively as a minority, one prefers the mass produced, chemically-rich foods of the major corporations, how legitimate is it to attempt to force it onto a majority too? Whose legitimacy will win out? If world trade agreements and international laws serve the corporations above the vast majority of the world’s population can they not be regarded as illegitimate? The market approach seeks to impose an alien process of food production which, for solely profitable economic reasons, completely changes the traditional way of life for many and totally disenfranchises others. The issue is heavily weighted against people in favour of capital. That is the norm in capitalism. But it doesn't make it right. And it isn't written in stone that it will always be so.

So, here we have a report from a world institution, part of the UN, dedicated to investigating (over a six year period) the problems of the world food supply, production and distribution with recommendations and demands which most of us should be able to recognise will not be acceptable to those in charge of the system we live in.                                     

In one paragraph, 'The Way Forward', there are calls for a change of strategy, different ways of organising, investing, diversifying, creating opportunities for income-generating activities and social protection schemes 'to ensure that all individuals have access to nutritious food at all times (even if they have access neither to productive sources nor to employment).' Now, this seems like a mighty big ask from a rather hazy conglomeration of trans-national entities and national states spread around the world currently immersed totally in the 'free market' principle. That is why the problems are as they are now. The best we could hope for from such a call is yet another voluntary agreement internationally which would have no credibility and no teeth.

In reality the majority of the world's population would cooperate gladly to the benefit of all – if they were only allowed to voice their collective opinion and be heard. It is those who currently benefit from controlling the methods used, those for whom the system – the capitalist system – works perfectly well, who will remain unconvinced by such arguments and turn a deaf ear to the call. It is against the logic of their system to be inclusive, to 'take care' of unfortunates, those who are deemed surplus to requirements.

The fact that vast numbers of people are involved in community-based initiatives, with a strong social participation component, demonstrates that people can and do know how to make things better for themselves and do want to live in harmony and cooperation in their communities. It also reinforces the fact that they prefer doing things this way rather than accepting the free market system of everything being a commodity.

Fatuous consensus

Apparently, there is now an international consensus in favour of making the full realisation of another abstract right, that to social security, a priority. This since 12 June 2012 when the International Labour Conference adopted Recommendation no. 202 with 453 votes in favour and 1 abstention. But again, how realistic is such a consensus? When many individual countries can't get political consensus for adequate social security in their own country, when even the richest countries of the world have many people homeless, living below the breadline, unemployed and hungry? It is far from likely, impossible even, however many delegates’ heads nod in agreement, for this to become a reality within this system.

Remember the Rio+20 Conference – 'The Future We Want'? Another talking shop. But who now believes anything they say? Who, if anyone, believes that those 'leaders' putting their names to the document actually believe they are going to do anything more about it than simply agree it's a good idea? The whole thing is totally fatuous.

It will be the same with the UN food report’s ‘right of everyone to have access to safe, sufficient and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger.'

The big question is how to move from a model in which everyone recognises the profit imperative whether they love it or hate it; profit on a large scale or small, profit from agribusiness or market stall, from pure accumulation to simple survival, from the greedy to the needy, profit which favours minority over majority in all areas. Everyone recognizes this but far fewer question the possibility, the sense, the imperative of implementing a different model, not a few reforms here and there to give temporary help to this sector or that, but one which takes into consideration the needs, aspirations, ideas and ideals of the many rather than the few.

Genuine food security involves the democratisation of food production. It has to be about meeting the self-defined needs of people, not a profit-motivated venture for corporations, agribusinesses and their boards and shareholders. Food security is about meeting the dietary needs of all people, at all times, enabling them to live a healthy life and not to be constantly in fear of the vagaries of the market. Only by eliminating the money and buying and selling element, by coming to terms with the absolute necessity of removing any profit motive from the food supply (and from every area of life) will farmers, peasant or otherwise, consumers and all the peoples of the world have the security of knowing that sufficient food is available to all, at all times and in all situations. Food security for all the world's people is just not possible in a capitalist system.

Janet Surman

The Shadow Show (1928)

From the January 1928 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx's Letters to Kugelmann (1934)

Book Review from the October 1934 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letters to Kugelmann . . . by Karl Marx. 148 pp., 3s. 6d. Cloth; 2s. Paper. Martin Lawrence Ltd., 33, Gt. James Street, London, W.C.1.

A valuable contribution to Marxian literature is the issue in the English language of the letters written by Marx to Dr. Kugelmann during the years 1862-1874. Many of the letters have appeared in various English periodicals, but this is the first issue of the letters in the complete form. With just a slight initial resentment, due to certain defects mentioned below, the book gives a final sense of gratitude and satisfaction. In the past these letters have suffered from interference by Karl Kautsky, who, when he published them in the Neue Zeit, deliberately omitted passages to suit his political purpose, and suppressed one letter altogether. This letter, written by Marx on February 23rd, 1865, exposed the political trickery of Ferdinand Lassalle. Though the Directors of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow realise the importance of this letter, no reference is made by them to the discovery of evidence that finally proved the rascality of Lassalle, and justified Engels in his detestation of that schemer.

Reference should have been made in the Foreword to the finding of material showing that Lassalle had been in secret communication with Bismarck. If one may digress, may it be pointed out that Engels always held the view that Lassalle was a humbug. On June 11th, 1863, he wrote Marx that Lassalle was in the service of Bismarck. ("Der Kerl arbeitet jetzt rein im Dienst von Bismarck." Page 144, Vol. 3, Marx-Engels Correspondence.) But to come nearer to the date of this suppressed letter, Engels, on January 27th, 1865, told Marx (letter 890, Page 219, Vol. 3, as above) that Lassalle was gradually being exposed as a common rogue. This matter of exposure had been in Marx's mind for quite a while, and the letter to Kugelmann was the result. Kautsky suppressed it, and Lenin, when he wrote the preface to the Russian translation of these letters, was unaware of its existence. Absence of comment is curious, because in the issue of selected letters of Marx and Engels, issued in Germany under the imprimatur of the Marx-Engels Institute, details are given of the discovery of the communications. (These letters are in course of translation into English, and will be published shortly by Martin Lawrence, Ltd.)

It is perhaps unfortunate that the type was set up and printed in Moscow, The translation, apparently, originated there, for the letters are now in the archives of the Marx-Engels Institute. Better service would have been rendered to the English-reading public had the entire arrangement for publication been left to competent English experts. The advantage accruing to the possession of the complete series is minimised by an insufficient regard for Marx's original text. The effort to impress the reader by the needless intrusion of italics and inverted commas, is an illusion. Marx knew what he wanted to say, how to say it, and how to express himself with simplicity. He now and again wandered off into Italian, French and English phrases. Those which were in English are not indicated, while the other "foreign" phrases are given in the original in the text and translated in footnotes. Some of the English sentences—or phrases—are neither indicated nor printed accurately. But unless such indication is given, the literary value and sting may be lost, and Marx's meaning and sense of expression nullified.

Also, the use of italics in the letters as printed is mystifying. There seems to be no regular method adopted. For example, on page 31, in the letter which Kautsky suppressed, the translator has this: -

So they want to take the circumstances as they are, and not irritate the government, just like our "republican" "real politicians" who are not willing to "put up with" a Hohnezollern emperor.

But in the German original Marx had only word in quotation marks (the German equivalent of "republican,") and only one word spaced out for emphasis (the German equivalent of emperor). Why then these further modifications?

In another passage on the same page the translator gives as his version: -

We are making a stir here now on the General Suffrage Question, which, of course, has a significance here quite different from what it has in Prussia. 

In the original Marx used no emphasis on these words, and there can be no justification for departing from what he wrote.

With regard to the failure to indicate passages which Marx originally gave in English, Marx knew his method of expression, and when he substituted a phrase in another language, it was because to him, it acquired the precise weight of expression. Therefore, it should be necessary—at least to us who read English, to know which passages Marx wrote in English, in order to gather the impressions of the moment.  

In the last paragraph on page 31 the following words were originally written by Marx in English: "Member of the Association,"—"individual member ship,"—"societies,"—"an English card of membership" (the translator gives Marx's words correctly—"the English society is public," but puts "public" in italics.

This may appear to be captious criticism, but it is a plea for accuracy, and in some cases, the modified version gives an appreciably different meaning.

Notwithstanding this we can heartily recommend the book. It contains 148 pages, printed in clean, clear type, on a very fine paper, in red cloth, with lettering in gold. All foreign phrases are translated, and there is an excellent and informative biographical index which is itself a mine of information. Students of Dietzgen will find an interesting letter he wrote to Marx, and there is a preface by Lenin in which he attacks Plechanoff for his attitude during the Moscow uprising of 1905.

Moses Baritz

What is Reformism? (1966)

From the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reformism resembles the treatment of leprosy with vanishing cream. It attacks the symptoms but ignores the virus—world Capitalism.

People see misery everywhere. Righteous indignation, protest, rebellion, humanitarian zeal, burst from some of them unceasingly. Yet this very force, this fervour to better the lot of others is nearly always diverted into futile channels. It is as if every member of the working-class had inside his head a voice announcing: "Capitalism is eternal and all improvements must take place within it." Are we poor? Let us have fairer wages. Are we to be exterminated? Let the great men sign treaties. Are we surrounded by trashiness? Let us protect the consumer.

Only a handful, the Socialists, seems to notice that this Reformist activity has been going on at a furious rate for decades and the world is nonetheless as bad as ever. We Socialists are often derided as "Idealists," but the compliment is misplaced: it belongs to the Reformists. Their Utopia is Capitalism without Capitalism's inevitable consequences. And what an astonishing, vigorous, unbounded faith they have in it, a shining devotion altogether untouched by such paltry considerations as the facts.

Let us make clear that by Capitalism we mean the system of private ownership of the means of wealth production—a system with money, wages, governments, armies, etc. By reforms we mean tinkering about with, instead of the abolition of, all these things.

The real driving force behind Reformism is the desire to stablise Capitalism and thus to retain it. In fact Capitalism needs continuous reform in order to run as smoothly as possible in the interests of the master class.

Oscar Wilde said that the worst slave-owners were the kind ones: they tended to prevent the full horror of the chattel slave system from becoming generally realised. But our case is not as weak as this. It may be true that the Capitalists would sooner alleviate a bit of suffering than have their position of privilege endangered. But in fact many reforms alleviate suffering not at all. Some, like family allowances (a trick to rearrange working-class misery) make exploitation more thorough. Others simply replace one trouble by another.

In addition, it will be found that the vast majority of proposed reforms fall easily into two categories: they are either necessary, or impossible. The first sort includes, for instance, all those measures aimed at making the working-class a healthier and better-trained beast of burden. Impossible reforms include all Capitalist measures to abolish war, unemployment, strikes, slumps, etc. Support for either kind is obviously a total waste of time from a working-class standpoint.

The Reformist presents his argument in one of three ways: He claims that reforms can solve the working-class's problems: He admits that only a social revolution can solve them, but adds: "Socialism us a long way off. People need help now. Why can't we struggle for revolution and reforms?" He claims that revolution and reform can be one and the same thing, that Socialism will be introduced gradually by the piling-up of one reform after another.

The problems of the working-class spring from its poverty. This is inseparable from the wages system, which functions by paying workers less that the value of what they produce. If workers were not poor they would not be restricted in access to the world's wealth, and if they were not so restricted they would have no motive to slog their guts out for wages. The unpaid labour of the workers produces surplus value, which is appropriated by a parasite class. Also, the bulk of production is shoddy, wasteful or destructive—because it is for profit, not for use. Production for profit leads inevitably to war, because for one thing nations must seek ever-widening markets for their products and must therefore collide with other nations doing the same thing. You cannot have Capitalism without war, poverty and universal misery.

Socialism will remain "a long way off" so long as so many people waste their energies on reforms. By trying to "alleviate" this or that source of trouble the Reformist helps to put off the day when it will be abolished, since every bit of energy spent on reform is one bit not spent on propagating revolution. The argument that we should strive for both revolution and reform is actually an excuse to shelve revolution "until society is ripe for it," but revolutionary propaganda will help to make society ripe for it, since only one thing more is needed to bring Socialism, a Socialist working class. If our Reformist actually meant that the working class should devote "a fair portion" of its time to revolutionary propaganda and a fair portion to Reformism (fifty per cent each?), he ought really to give up Reformism altogether, for at the moment more than ninety-nine per cent of political action is entirely for reforms. On top of this, History has shown that organisations of the 50-50 brand always end up 100 per cent Reformist.

"Gradualists" are at fault in their conception of the Socialist system of society, because a gradual transition from Capitalism to Socialism would mean that we could have bits of Socialism existing alongside bits of Capitalism, which is an absurdity. How could we be only partly wage-slaves? Or how could nations (with their frontiers, police, espionage, armies and governments making plans to blow us all up) only half exist? And even if this tissue of fantasy were feasible, surely our Gradualist doesn't think Socialism will come about without there being first the will for it. If it needs working-class understanding to introduce Socialism suddenly, how much more would it be needed to play the complex game of introducing it bit by bit? And if the working-class does understand Socialism, then there is nothing to stop an immediate overthrow of the existing order. But even these arguments are over-generous. It is up to the Gradualist to demonstrate that a Capitalist reform will bring Socialism any nearer, and there is just no evidence that it ever could.

Sorry, Mr. Reformist. The emancipation of the workers will take a long haul yet. Perhaps you're disappointed that establishing Socialism isn't easy, and prefer to devote your energies to what you think are simpler tasks, even if they are futile. We never said the revolution would be easy. It would be a damned sight easier of but for you supporters of Anti-Apartheid, C.N.D., U.N.A., etc, and all the other subsidiaries of Reformism Ltd.

Steele.

Old Familiar Faces (1958)

From the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

They're at it again! Take hold of yourself. Who? The lotus-flowers. The teeny-weenies with long hair. Gaiety Girls. Seventhday Adventists? No, no. Worse. The tea-shoppe Jacobins. Good Lord! You don't mean —? Listen and I'll whisper. Well I never! Left-wing intellectuals. A magazine, eh? I bet they mention Colin Wilson and Kingsley Amis a lot of times. Lots of long words. Funny bits about Marx. Professor Deutscher. And you'll never guess who else. Not—not him? Professor Cole it is. Here, take it away. February's filldyke month, isn't it? Expensive way of filling dykes, at three-and-six a time.

Here it is, then: Universities and Left Review. Very well got up, good typography; indeed, the Abbey Press (the people who print it) are to be complimented on having a range of bold, large and display types almost sufficient to keep up with the editors' delight in Names. The cover bears the contributors' names (Isaac Deutscher, Claude Bourdet, Peter de Francia, E. P. Thompson, G. D. H. Cole, Joan Robinson, etc.) in massive black letters, their topics in small ones. The first page has the editor's names in large heavy type, underlined, across the top; there are the contributors' names in not-so-large heavy type, and the titles in type so small that myopic left-wing intellectuals presumably have to guess them.

Page three lists the names (in capitals) and achievements of the editors and contributors. Universities attended, articles accepted by the New Statesman; books published, masterpieces, intended, all four editors are writing theses on, respectively, The Novels of Henry James, Charles Dickens, the dockers of London, Bristol and Liverpool, and "the theory of alienation, from Hegel to the Existentialists." Even the Business Manager's name (in caps.), and a piece to show that he, too—"scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford," it says. Is it a Freudian urge that makes one want to write naughty additions to this portentous list? How about "Cigarettes by Nosegay-Rizla"? Ah, no—too non-U: Abdulla it must be. "Underwear by St. Michael" might do, though. Quick, turn over before the temptation takes us. But no, no! not more names, more capitals . . . 

However, there are still the articles. After all, they have trumpets and spotlights and "My lords, ladies and gentlemen" before a prize-fight, but sooner or later the boxers, left alone, must come out fighting; and tonight there are reputed champions in the ring. Did we not pay three and sixpence to come in? Alas, the bigger they are the flatter they fall. The spryest of the lot, in fact, is Professor Cole, because he was wise enough to bring his own opponent: an old guy he cobbled together years ago ("tarted-up," of course, to quote one of Mr. Amis's most charming expressions) called "What Marx Really Meant," at which Professor Cole throws haymakers until his seconds lead him away, breathing heavily but unmarked.

The rest of them are unmarked, too, in a way. Hold them up to the light: not a stain—not a shadow, nor a trace, of an original idea or a thought which has not been raked out from the rag-bag of the nineteen-thirties. Not a stain, and shining pink. Here is E. P. Thompson, arguing whether it was right or not to have fought in Spain; the Art Critic writing-up artists who "represent a menace to the very foundations of the bourgeois idea of art"; the town-planners working-out nattier, more aseptic hutches for the working class. Here is the windy, outmoded vogue-language of left-wingers a generation ago: "significant," "chauvinist," "reactionary" and the rest.

Do they realize it, one wonders? Does any of them know that it's all past tense, that the Universities and Left Review is a dodo-house? Vol. I, No. 1. Spring 1957: but for this, one would be back with the Left News, the Federation of Progressive Societies and Individuals, or The Controversialist. Perhaps they don't realize it after all: one contributor actually writes of "a new social type in this country—the intellectual." Perhaps Claude Bourdet really thinks he has something new and unprecedented when he writes:

"The rehabilitation of the French left, then, depends upon a converging action of the Socialist Left still fighting in the Socialist Party, the democratic Communist opposition fighting inside the Communist Party, the left wing Mendesiste Radicals, along with the 'new left.' Under this four-fold influence the distant prospect is the reconstruction . . . of a strong united workers' Party, mingling Christian and traditional liberal influences with a dominant Marxist one."

The star performer, however, is Professor Deutscher. Professor Deutscher writes on "Russia in Transition" in No.1. Does Professor Deutscher say anything, in fifteen thousand words? Professor Deutscher does not. The sharpest intellect could find no quarrel with Professor Deutscher's conclusions, because there are none. Every statement is hedged with "may," "seem," "perhaps" and "should it arise." It is an extended version of one of Professor Deutscher's television interviews where some news-reader almost visibly touching his forelock, seeks enlightenment:

"'Please tell the viewers, Professor, just what is happening in Russia now.'
"'Well, you see, Lenin is reputed to have said to Trotsky just before the Russian Revolution . . . '
"'Thank you, Professor. And what do you think will happen in Russia?'
"'Well, Stalin was a dictator, you know. And Trotsky said to Bogdanov . . . And, of course, there were Nichaev and Lenin's grandmother . . .'
Thank you very much, Professor. Have you a final prophecy to leave with us?'
"I think Trotsky may have been right. On the other hand, Lunacharsky may have been right. Who knows? Somebody must be right.'
"'Very grateful to you, Professor. Well, viewers, I'm sure we are all, etc.'."

There is an expectancy throughout it all that suddenly Mr. Spike Milligan's face will peer over somebody's shoulder, crooning adenoidally. It is, in fact, very much like the evening paper's football forecasts, where all results except the stone certs are predicted in such phrases as "Anything can happen." And when anything has happened, the expert remains, of course, an expert. 

What purpose, then, does the Universities and Left Review serve? Pretentious, empty of ideas, its material picked from ideological dust-heaps, it has set out to make a splash—or, as the first editorial put it, to take a beachhead. Its avowed purpose is to publish discussion on "the common ground of a genuinely free and genuinely socialist society." Its way, the editors say, is "to take socialism at full stretch—as relevant only in so far as it is relevant to the full scale of man's activities."

If that were true—"the full scale of man's activities"—it really would be interesting. But, of course, it isn't. Search the Universities and Left Review, and only in a line here and a phrase there will you find the working class mentioned. Professor Cole has a good word for them, and there is a little lofty patronage from David Marquand ("in the thirties, there had to be an effective mass movement for the intellectuals to join") and E. P. Thompson ("the experience of rank-and-file political activity enriches us and keeps our ideas on the ground"). The names in the Universities and Left Review see themselves (bear witness, the articles on art, the cinema, architecture) as members of an élite: the General Staff on that beach-head the upper crust of the "genuinely socialist society."

This is the oldest, weariest idea of all. Its resurgence just now is probably more important to the "intellectuals" than ever before, however. The present-day world has very little use for them: a young man with a First in English Literature or a prize for philosophy is himself something of an archaism when the whole structure of education is being changed to produce physicists, technologists and other atom-age men. Unless the University men can succeed as writers or get into commercial television, their doom is schoolteaching or Government offices.

Some of them, aware of the situation, have responded angrily: the Angry Young Man is a useless young man whose abilities and ideals the world won't venerate any more. For others, there is another way to take: if the ruling class doesn't want them then the working class shall have them as its guides and philosophers, if not exactly friends. That in itself might not be so bad if the "intellectuals" were thereby realizing that they had an identity with the working class. Universities and Left Review shows nothing of the kind, however. The only affinity shown is in the advertisement for The Observer inside the cover, making the position sadly clear: U cries out to U.

Universities and Left Review seeks comment from the socialist viewpoint. It can be simply made. There is not a word concerning Socialism from beginning to end of the Universities and Left Review. Reformist claptrap, yes; pretentious verbiage, indeed; chatter about how things are for the intellectuals, above all. But of the interests of the working class, the great majority of mankind—not a whisper.

The most useful left-winger we ever saw was Tom Finney. The day he scored against the Arsenal—now, that was worth three-and-six.

Robert Coster

Goodbye to the working class? (2003)

From the September 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is the working class an anachronism? Is being working class a thing of the past? Isn't the "working class" a relic from the era of outside lavatories, balls of whitewash, men-only pubs, and six pennorth of chips? The traditional signs of the working class – apprenticeships, railwaymen with pride in their jobs, Sunday blancmange and bread and butter, and a political party which professed concern for the labouring classes even if it continued to support and administer the dominant social system – are no more. Except perhaps the latter. Surely, our credit cards, our foreign excursions, individual levels of debt previously only enjoyed by the aristocracy, and the popularity of television soaps offering a slice of (realistic?) life, all go to show that the "working class" is an anthropological, superseded social group best viewed through a nostalgic looking glass darkly, or revisited through a sociology course?

Are we not all middle class now? Where, after all, are the coalface, the car plant and the steel mill now? According to National Statistics Online, in 1981 one in ten jobs were in the financial/business services sector, now one in five are. Think how proud our working class born parents and grandparents must be that the aspirational goal of a "white collar" job, a clean job, a job with prospects, a job for life, a job with a pension, a "middle class" job, has now increased statistically.

In 1981 one in three males worked in manufacturing: today, one in five do. The decline in the number of women working in manufacturing is even more dramatic: down from one in five to one in ten. These sorts of job are dependent upon the vagaries of the capitalist system; when supply (overproduction) exceeds demand or changing markets determine that coal, steel or car production is either less profitable or can be carried out more cheaply elsewhere in the world, then comes the decline in jobs and the rise in unemployment. Capitalism's like that. When goods are produced for profit, not need, what do you expect?

What of the traditional defence mechanism of an exploited class: collective industrial solidarity? In the United Kingdom just over 7.6 million workers are trade union members, a drop of some 1.3 million over the last ten years. The decline was much more pronounced amongst men than women. Just over a quarter of workers now belong to a trade union. Public sector workers are either at a higher level of trade union consciousness than private sector workers – membership is three times higher than in the private sector (59 percent compared to 19 percent) – or perhaps they consider themselves more likely to be exploited by the executive committee of the ruling class.

The equality demanded by the feminist movement would seem to have arrived. At least, the statistics say so. Twenty years ago there were more than three million more men in work than women. Now there is practically equality with 24 million jobs spread almost evenly between the sexes. Feminists are still concerned that nearly half of the twelve million plus women's jobs are part-time ones and that, despite the few female high flyers (who increasingly seem to have to resort to legal means for redress against the dominant male culture permeating the financial sector), women still lose out in unequal wages, and unequal job opportunities. Not that equal pay and better job opportunities represent emancipation, only equal exploitation rights with men. Why not abolition of the wages system?

The suggestion that there is no longer a working class is an absurd one. Sociological definitions based upon cultural preferences, job types (professional, salaried or blue collar, waged), or number of holiday homes owned in Tuscany or Dorset, are more likely to reflect a false consciousness of one's actual class position. Whilst there are statistics, government statistics and politicians' proclamations, working class membership is easily defined. Membership of the working class is open to all regardless of race, colour or ethnic origin. Anyone with no other choice but to sell their physical or mental labour power in order to earn money which provides the means necessary to sustain living is, no matter what the difference in their salary/wages, job description/ responsibility, a member of the working class majority. This includes dependants, children, the elderly, and the unemployed.

Don't take our word for it. The Inland Revenue online figures for the share of wealth within the UK confirm that, as at year 2000, one per cent of the populace owns 22 percent of the wealth. The top 10 percent own 54 percent. The top 50 percent own 94 percent. If dwellings are removed from the calculations, the share of wealth of the top 10 per cent jumps to 72 percent and the top 50 percent jumps to 99 percent of total wealth. The value of this wealth is given as almost three thousand billion pounds (£2968 billion). Depending upon the calculation, half of the UK population own between them only 1 or 6 percent of the available wealth. But it's not only do the "bottom" half who have a vested interest in abolishing the social system which denies them better than decent housing, health care, education, and life opportunities. The whole of the working class will benefit from the transition from an exploitative class society to a classless one.

DC

Pathfinders: Harpoons and Handy Gadgets (2014)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The definition of science was briefly in the dock last month as Australia took Japan to the International Court of Justice over its continued defiance of the 1986 whaling ban under the laughable pretext of ‘scientific research’. The prosecution argued that this whaling was not ‘scientific’ in the least, pointing to the fact that while catches fluctuated all over the place, the stated scientific aims didn’t, suggesting that the harvest was the main goal all along. The Japanese retorted in court that it wasn’t for the prosecution to say what was or was not ‘scientific’, any more than they could say what was or was not art. Unfazed by this feeble bit of sophistry the Australian team pointed out that 3600 minke whales had been slaughtered since 2005 and yet not one peer-reviewed study had been published on whale stocks, supposedly the whole purpose of the ‘research’.

Not surprisingly the Japanese case sank without trace and m’Lud ordered Japan to cease whaling in the Antarctic forthwith, a ruling which left Japanese officials ‘deeply disappointed’. But perhaps not that disappointed, given that sales of whale meat in Japan have hit the seafloor in recent years, forcing the government to pump in subsidies to keep the ghost industry afloat, a fact that might explain the curiously crap courtroom performance.  

Just as you can’t claim things are scientific when they’re not, you also can’t claim things are scientifically correct when they’re not. The story last year that a Japanese team had found a simple way to stress ordinary cells into regressing to become pluripotent stem cells made world headlines, and no wonder. However the follow-up story, that the research papers turned out to contain manipulated or falsified images, didn’t get quite so much media attention. In fact you’d be forgiven for overlooking it altogether since it has mostly appeared in the form of brief paragraphs on back pages.  The Japanese researchers are highly embarrassed by this turn of events and are now embroiled in recrimination and some unfortunate vilification. Let’s hope they don’t end up hiring the Captain Ahab legal defence team.

In the larger picture however this is an example of science working well, not badly. From original claim to exposure of discrepancies took just a few weeks and other researchers were soon loudly complaining that they couldn’t replicate the test results. Imagine if politics worked the same way. No capitalist politician would last more than a fortnight. They’d all be ‘struck off’ and the Commons would be empty. Tempting thought. But then there’d be nobody to report this remarkable state of affairs as most of the journalists would have been struck off too.

Speaking of which, what became of the rather astonishing claim, discussed in April’s Pathfinders, that a study predicting global social collapse was funded by NASA? Our sceptical enquiries got not a squeak out of the Guardian journalist who was responsible for the claim. More accommodating were the Maryland authors of the research paper, who promptly passed on the text of a NASA press release that crossed our own printing date and which disclaimed in clear and unequivocal terms any involvement in or backing of the study. So, that clears that up. It’s easy to understand why a newspaper journalist might want to gild the lily for the sake of a headline-grabber, but it doesn’t help socialists or anyone else building a case against capitalism to have people on our own side of the fence dishing out bogus information.

The researchers also kindly sent a copy of their report, from which last month this column could only quote indirectly. We can make this available on request if anyone wants to read it. It’s easy to follow for the most part, though a little heavy on equations in places. The Human and Nature Dynamics or HANDY model is based on existing predator-prey models which look at how populations oscillate around lines of equilibrium. This is straightforward enough for two variables, say wolf and rabbit. If the wolf population goes up, the rabbits go down, forcing the wolf population back down, which in turn encourages the rabbit population up again, and so on. It’s like market economics with fur and teeth.

HANDY adopts the same basic approach, using human population as wolf and nature as rabbit, but it then introduces the idea of stratification by splitting population into two independent variables, worker and elite, and also splits the rabbit into two, giving natural resources as one variable and labour-derived wealth as the other. 

You can think of the model as a bit like an Etch-a-Sketch only with 4 inter-related knobs. As you turn one knob up, others are forced down. If workers are zero, wealth must be flat or falling, because only workers produce wealth. If wealth is high, nature must be low, because the one comes from the other. If elites are high, some or all of the others must be falling, because elites are the non-producing predator.

The challenge is to get all parameters into a sustainable straight line (equilibrium) but this is only possible in certain pre-set conditions (eg if Elite is set at zero).  HANDY models four main types of scenario, equating to soft or rough approaches to equilibrium (a good or tolerable result), perpetual boom and slump (not so good), and full unrecoverable collapse (definitely bad). Collapse is due either to natural resource depletion (Type-N collapse) or the labour force dying off (Type-L), but in either case all variables return to zero, the statues crumble and the desert sand blows in over the ruins.

Setting the dials how you want, you can model what would happen if population went up and resources were exhausted in an egalitarian society with no elite (socialism, say, with its brains on holiday), an ‘equitable’ society with a modest elite but broadly equal incomes (nursery-book capitalism), and a corrosively elitist society of the type we see today. The argument the researchers are making is that the outcomes they can produce are generally descriptive of actual historical collapses and also of observable traits in the modern world, and that a model which includes social stratification can reproduce these collapses better than one without. If the model can achieve a close synchronicity to the real world it can be considered in some sense diagnostic as well as descriptive. In other words it can predict.

Are there, or could there be other ‘dials’, factors which are universal rather than historically contingent? The researchers can’t think of any and neither can we, but hey, it’s a work in progress. The equations are algorithms of ratio (eg workers also consume wealth but at a far lower rate than elites) and these may also be open to challenge or refinement. HANDY doesn’t and can’t ‘prove’ that our socialist case is correct, but what it does do is take a previously unchallenged social assumption about property ownership and elite privilege and place it squarely on the table as an item for debate and scrutiny. And that’s something everybody should be doing.

Socialist Party of Great Britain Election Manifestos (2014)

From the May 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party is contesting two regions, South East and Wales, in the elections to the European Parliament on 22 May and also wards in two London boroughs. We reproduce below our various election addresses, beginning with the one for the Wales region.

Wales Region

It’s election time again

The Socialist Party/World Socialist Movement is standing in the elections to the European Parliament on 22 May and we are presenting a full list of 4 candidates for Wales.

Our case, we are sure, you will find completely and refreshingly different from what all the other parties are offering. It should also cause you to see the world and its problems in a radically different way from anything you have come across before.

What we propose

What do we in the Socialist Party propose can be done? We propose the establishment by peaceful, democratic means (i.e. voting) of a truly direct participatory democratic society in which the majority determine how human needs are met.

This means a society without rich and poor, without owners and workers, without governments and governed, without leaders and led. Where buying and selling and money are no longer necessary.

In such a society people will cooperate to use all the world's abundant natural resources in their own interests. Production will be freed from the artificial dictate of profit and everyone will have free access to the benefits of civilisation.

It will mean an end to borders and frontiers, an end to organised violence and coercion, to waste, want and war. It really will be a civilised society where technology will be used to satisfy human needs and not profits.

A radically different way

Every few years groups of politicians compete for your vote to win themselves and their parties positions in the European or national parliament.

Yet you must have noticed that -once the dust has settled -there is no significant change to the way things are for the majority of people -except sometimes for the worse. Promises are made and broken, targets are set and not reached, statistics are selected and spun.

Any promises kept only represent minor changes to the way things are and none even touch the fundamental inequity of a society (not just in Wales or the UK but in all countries) in which the vast majority of the population have to sell their energies, mental and physical, to a tiny handful of privileged beings who effectively own the planet.

How much does it say about the subservience of most of us that we vote for politicians who support a system which keeps us exploited and struggling to survive?

Employment, one of the least democratic situations

It's said we live in a democracy, but the only real decision we are called on to make democratically is which political party will impose this system upon us for the next 5 years. Everything else is shop window dressing and the activity which dominates our lives, employment (if we can get it), is, as no one can fail to notice, one of the least democratic environments that can be imagined.

It's also said we live in a meritocratic society. But if that means anything, it means that the more dog-eat-dog, the more selfish we can be, the more we can maybe gain at the expense of others.

Despite politicians' rhetoric about us 'all being in it together', at bottom everyone knows that the reality that really applies is much closer to 'greed is good '.

Nor is that actually surprising given that the society we live in, often referred to as capitalism, is based on institutionalised selfishness, i.e. the making of profit. It breeds inequality, enmity, rivalries and, sometimes, the mass violence called war.

It’s absolutely possible

You may think socialism sounds great, but that it's a bit of a utopia. But we would say that it is absolutely possible once the idea takes hold and that the real Utopia is the belief that by supporting the conventional politicians with their old tired ideas and promises the world can be a truly better place.

One way to begin is to use your vote in these elections not to support candidates who you can be sure will give you the same old system but to show that you want to overturn it and end the problems it causes once and for all.

When enough of us join together, we can transform elections from a means of keeping a society of inequality, wealth monopoly and very limited democracy to a means of doing away with it in favour of a society of real democracy and social and economic equality.

If you agree with the idea of a society of free access and common and democratic ownership where no one is left behind and things are produced because they are needed not to make a profit, we would call on you to join with us by voting for the Socialist Party/World Socialist Movement list in Wales. In this way we can begin to make a difference.

South East Region

Make this world ours

In socialism the planet will be like the one you know, but also very different. There is no money. There is no war. There are no rich people. There are no poor people. There are no leaders. All decisions are shared. All responsibilities are shared. Instead of competing to survive, people cooperate to live.

This is Earth, under new management. Ours.

You now have no bills to pay, no rent, no mortgage, no debts. Everything is free, nothing is for sale, and neither are you. But you want to help, just like others do. There are a hundred things you could do, a thousand more you could train to do.

You might have chosen to drive a bus or a train, fix plumbing, coordinate a data network, plough a field, teach a child, organise an event, study engineering, cure a disease, brew beer, rehearse a play. You might choose to work four hours a week, or fourteen or forty. What you do makes everyone better off. That’s your recompense, and it’s better than money. It’s job satisfaction. It’s fulfilment. It’s a life on your own terms, a life worth living. It’s why you make the commitment to work.

This is Earth, as it could be in the near future. It won’t be created by the politicians of capitalism. It will created by us, all of us who now produce everything, working together. We can say ‘We want this’. Then we organise to make it happen.

Against our combined communications the billionaires can do nothing. Together we can force referendums, elections, votes and take control of nation states. Then abolish property laws and the agencies that enforce them and take control of factories, land, services. It can be democratic, peaceful, and effective. We take control. We take our lives back.

This new Earth is not Utopia. There are problems, issues, arguments, accidents, mistakes, false starts or blind alleys. But cooperative management solves the problems as today’s arrogant leaderships never did.

If you agree with this you can let others know that this is what you want by voting for the Socialist Party/World Socialist Movement list.

London boroughs

We need to change things

If you work hard, play by the rules, you’ll get on. So they say. We do all the hard work. Tidy the offices, fix the cars, file the paperwork, make the dinner, change the bed pans, teach the children. We work for the best hours of our days, the best years of our lives.

But we don’t get on.

If we’re not in work, we spend our time looking for work, training for work, applying for work. But we don’t find it.

Across Europe millions who have played by the rules to produce more and more wealth find themselves getting a smaller and smaller share of it.

Over the last four years our pay has fallen in real terms: we are being paid less for our work than we were. Yet that work needs to be done. At the same time, the people who don’t need to work, who get their money just because they are “the 1 percent“, are gaining more than ever.

We, the people who do the work, who make the whole of our society go round, are punished rather than rewarded. We find it increasingly hard to make the rent or mortgage and other household bills. We find our slight protections being taken away from us with attacks on benefits. They shackle our unions. We find ourselves last in every queue to the wealthy who waltz in to the front and get the best.

We work hard. We play by the rules.

But we don’t get on.

We need to show solidarity, and fight for a change that will enable us to get on. As long as we don’t own what we produce we will continue to be second class citizens. We need to organise to take control of the productive wealth of the world so we can use our own work to better our lives, instead of making the rich richer.

We can use these elections to show that we won’t take this lying down. That we can organise for common ownership of the world.

We can vote for the Socialist Party candidates, as a way of letting our fellow workers know: things need to change.

Lambeth: Clapham Town: Oliver Bond. Ferndale: Danny Lambert. Larkhall: Adam Buick

Islington: Junction: Bill Martin.

Elections to the European Parliament are being held the same day. As there are no socialist candidates standing in the London Region you can show you reject the profit system and want a world of common ownership and democratic control by writing “WORLD SOCIALISM” across your ballot paper.

And then get in touch to help bring an end to the system that can never be made to work in our interest.  For an information pack and free magazine, write to: The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.