The Roots of Islam (2015)

From the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Groups of Islamic proselytes with trestle tables piled with books and pamphlets is a common sight on our streets these days.  They join the ranks of those trying to win workers over to their ideas.  Occasionally, they might even maintain that Islam is an anti-capitalist idea.  They are right, it is, but not in a good way.

Islam as an idea traces its roots back to the specific social relations of 7^th century Arabia.  At that time the Arabian peninsula was in the shadow of two great monotheistic empires: Rome and Persia.  Monotheistic ideas had suited their social arrangements, since by their nature these empires dissolved local tribal bonds, and subordinated everyone to an emperor far away.

Both the deserts of Arabia, and its position between the two empires meant that neither completely dominated it.  At this time, as in Europe with Goths, Vandals and Germans, the nomadic Arabs had wandered to the borders of the Roman Empire, and in some cases settled and been assimilated, or used as mercenary troops for the Empire.  Within Arabia proper, most people lived lives dominated by clan and tribes, without a central state, where custom and the threat of vendetta regulated social life.

There was a basic division between groups of sedentary Arabs, who practised agriculture (usually herding animals or growing dates), and the Bedouin, who moved across the desert either raiding or offering protection to the agriculturalists.  Often relations between groups were managed by the prestige of holy men, at sites of sanctuary, known as haram, often on the borders of rival territories.  The city of Mecca was founded at such a site, and the market there grew up under the auspices of the neutral territory.  Within these spaces, the holy man might also be called upon to settle disputes, and this gave him power.

This status could be passed on through a family line, though it still required the requisite religious achievements in order to maintain it.  Other groups could muscle their way in, and take the prestigious site and office over.  A man named Qusayy, and his tribe, the Quraysh took over the haram of Mecca in the 6^th century, and it was under their control, largely, that the city grew up.  This city thus was not based on natural resources, and was entirely dependent on trade and its position on trade routes for its existence.

Muhammad was born into this tribe, and thus into its religious prestige, albeit through a clan, the Hashims, which was in declining status within the tribe.  This marginalised status was compounded in his case, when he was orphaned at an early age, leaving him dependent upon his uncle, and the clan at large.  He managed to marry well, to a wealthy widow older than himself, and spent many years in trade.  It is almost certain that he encountered Christians and Jews as part of his travels, and may have learned some of their ideas.

He earned a reputation for probity, and he must have been possessed of a degree of piety, going into the desert to pray.  It was there, when he was in his forties, that he first heard God speaking to him.  His voice of god is a matter of dispute.  His sternest critics accuse him of madness, or hucksterism.  This seems unlikely.  Certainly those around him were convinced he was sincere, and there was a tradition of divinely inspired revelation within his community already.  It seems most likely that he genuinely believed that he was hearing the voice of God, and that his own thoughts and expressions manifested themselves to him in that way.  Certainly, as time went on, some of his revelations appear to be distinctly self-serving (especially over the question of his many young wives).  That, however, is not so unusual.

The Arabs practised polytheism at that time, and Mecca was full of shrines to various gods. Allah was one amongst them, but the chief deity.  Muhammad simply began to affirm that Allah was the only god.  This affirmation, though, was a threat to the revenues of the various shrines, and to the dignity of the groups who followed the other gods.  He drew a select group of followers around him, chiefly composed of second sons and members of minor clans.  From this time comes much of Islam’s rhetoric of fairness and oppositionalism.  Naturally, the established dominant groups reacted by trying to suppress his movement.  There had been a recent (failed) bid to establish a man as king, so clearly there was political instability, and the growing city was undermining the old clan-based system.

Muhammad must have had a substantial reputation as a wise head, since he was invited to another nearby city, Medina, where he was asked to function as a mediator.  He emigrated there, taking his followers with him.  Medina was a city composed of various groups, including Jewish tribes, and he may have been hoping to recruit his fellow monotheists to his cause (however they rejected his religious advances).  Having no means of subsistence in Medina, the Muslims fell to robbing Meccan desert caravans.  This was a substantial threat to Mecca (because of Medina’s strategic location), and this led to a series of battles in which Muhammad proved (generally) triumphant, and demonstrated that he and his inner circle were competent military commanders.

Muhammad also began a process of taking control of Medina, through a series of strategic strikes against other clans and factions in the city, and through the assassination of political enemies.  The significant change that Islam made was that the Muslims would protect each other across clan and tribal lines.  This was its attraction to members of weaker clans, and part of its success in Medina, as none dare retaliate against the targeted killing.

Additionally, he instituted a principle of charity among the Muslim community.  All members were expected to contribute, and Muhammad administered the fund to support poorer members.  Non-Muslims were taxed.  The society that the Muslims established did not have a state: indeed, it was close to some anarchist utopias: a “natural leader” mediated disputes, while individuals owned their own property and were free to do as they pleased. Muhammad acted as chief, persuading followers to join him in war, and showing largess with the wealth he accumulated through his one fifth share of the booty.

The Islam of Medina took up existing Arab religious practices, such as praying at sun down and sun up.  It also had to negotiate and control the existing customs on marriage and vendetta.  Muhammad put a premium on limiting vendetta among Muslims (restricting vengeance to the direct malefactor, and sometimes paying the blood price to stop the feud himself).

Eventually, Muhammad became reconciled with the ruling elite of Mecca.  After a show of Muslim force, the Quraysh allowed him into Mecca on pilgrimage.  In return, Muhammad allowed Mecca to continue as a place of pilgrimage, so long as Allah was the only god worshipped.  The Quraysh leaders retained their positions, and indeed flourished as the Islamic empire spread.

Muhammad had to mount expeditions to defeat rival prophets who had united different Arab tribes in the deserts.  Whether they were imitators or had come to the same place as him independently doesn’t matter as much as the fact that the time was clearly ripe for a unifying leader of some sort.  Of course, once the Arabs were unified, this meant they could no longer raid against fellow Muslims, and so outward expansion became necessary.

Whereas the kings of Roman successor tribes in Europe found Christianity a ready-made tool for helping take over the Empire, for the Arabs in the south the fact that they were taking over both Persian and Roman lands (as well as encountering Jewish and Christian groups under Persian domination) meant they were exposed to ideas from different sources, and so developed a unifying religion of their own.  The abstraction of a universal god allowed them to absorb clans and tribes without racial distinction, and the policy of tolerance of other religious communities allowed them to both collect the taxes and find willing subjects in rival empires.

The achievements of Muhammad were in synthesising an Arab religion that unified and overcame tribal divisions, as well as creating an expression for individualism in terms of a personal relation with God.  Further, in insisting on writing down his revelations, he ensured their permanence and durability: even as this came round to bite him as he had later to revise pronouncements to overcome inconvenient rulings.  That, and the clear strength of the team around him allowed his religion and state to go on smoothly, even after his death.  As the Islamic state spread, and became more complex, it required new rules, interpretations of rules and ideas.

Islam might represent a form of romantic anti-capitalism, and be able to draw upon its oppositional rhetoric and a form of egalitarianism and mutuality under a divinely ordained destiny.  It is, though, harking back to an age before associated production, where the question was of distribution of surplus rather than the direct application of labour to transform the world.  It is an idea that socialists must oppose, not in the name of rationalism, but through the need to promote instead ideas that can aid the class struggle.  The materialist method allows us to understand both how humans come to create the ideas they hold, and how to change the world for ourselves.

Pik Smeet

Editorial: Classless Britain: a major fallacy (1991)

Editorial from the January 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

After the 1987 election Thatcher looked as impregnable as the Berlin Wall. It turned out that she was. At the Tory conference last year she told her witless followers that she and her government would create a "classless society". It turned out that her colleagues had something else in mind: a Thatcherless Tory party.

Now that the boy apprentice, Major, has taken power he is uttering as equally nonsensical promises as his deposed mistress. Major promised, in the course f the "friendly" backstabbing contest with Hurd and Heseltine, the ex-public school chappies, that he would lead Britain to become a classless society. He went further—this new "classless Britain" would be established by the year 2000.

Major's promise is undiluted nonsense. Britain is a small part of the world capitalist system. Under this system there are two classes: those who possess the means of wealth production and distribution (less than 5 per cent of the world's population) and those who produce all of the goods and services: the overwhelming majority of people, the working class. The capitalist owners live by exploiting the workers. Class exploitation is the sole source of rent, interest profit. Major and his party are fundamentally committed to the defence and perpetuation of the profit system. They are the guardians of the sacred right of capitalists to exploit wage and salary workers. They are as wedded to the class division which characterises present-day society as fleas are to a dirty dog.

When Major speaks of a classless society what he really means is a casteless society. In Britain there has always been a reluctance within the old, aristocratic ruling class to admit the newly-rich capitalists into its ranks. The remnants of feudal power who wanted to deny the industrial capitalists the right to vote in 1832 are still put out by the presence of such vulgar new admissions to the robber class as Thatcher, Tebbit or Major being in their company. The old money exploiters like Heseltine regard the New Money crowd as being in a lower caste. But Major, the lad who left school at sixteen and was turned down for a job on the buses because he could not read properly, wants a capitalist class which robs on equal terms with one another, without distinction of origin.

There is a parallel. In the USA in the 1930s there were several established robber gangs which dominated the criminal scene in cities like Chicago and New York. New gangs of Italian or other immigrant robbers came on the scene and there emerged a massive inter-gang warfare. For a time the police could just sit back while the robbers stabbed and shot one another. Similarly, in recent times the caste struggle in the Tory party has allowed the Labourite Tory reserve team to sit back and enjoy the intra-Tory warfare.

The class struggle in society is between the wealth makers and the profit takers. We are many. They are few. We have a world to win!

Interpreting the World (1973)

Book Review from the January 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

From Marx to Hegel by George Lichtheim. Orbach and Chambers £2.95

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world. But the point is to change it", wrote Marx in 1845. Lichtheim is one of those who, looking at the failure of the two great movements which proclaimed Marxism as their theory—German Social Democracy and Russian Bolshevism—thinks that the attempt to change the world having failed the point is once again to interpret it. A sort of return to Hegel.

In these book reviews written for the Times Literary Supplement and similar journals over the past ten years, Lichtheim sees himself as using Marx's method to examine Marxism and concludes that in practice Marxism has been the ideology of the bourgeois revolution in Central and Eastern Europe where the bourgeoisie was too weak or too frightened to carry through its own revolution against autocracy. A not unreasonable conclusion when you examine the practice, rather than the theory, of both German Social Democracy and Russian Bolshevism—and, for that matter, Marx's own policy of supporting bourgeois revolutions everywhere.

But Lichtheim argues that both these movements misinterpreted marxism, the former in making the case for Socialism rest solely on the operation of impersonal "scientific laws" and the latter in making it depend on the will and determination of a "vanguard party". He blames Engels as the first to misinterpret Marx by making his materialist conception of history a doctrine about the nature of matter which he called "historical materialism" and Plekhanov later called "dialectical materialism". For Marx, according to Lichtheim, dialectics was not a theory about the ultimate nature of the universe but a method of subjecting the world as it is to the critique of Reason. On this view the case for Socialism would rest on the fact that capitalism does not allow mankind to live the free rational life which advanced technology had made possible.

The evidence would seem to back Lichtheim's interpretation, though Marx was also a "materialist" in the sense of adopting the methods of empirical science in his economic and historical studies. But all this is only of academic interest. For what does it matter if Marx and Engels had differing reasons for being Socialists? In fact what does it matter what their reasons were at all since the case for Socialism does not stand or fall by what they thought?

There is also a good essay on Georges Sorel and his Reflexions on Violence.

Lichtheim is always worth reading, even though his analysis of the modern world seems somewhat pessimistic: that the most we can hope for is that philosophers can preserve a few human values in the face of the ruling bureaucrats and technocrats.

Adam Buick 

Italy and its Criminal State (2015)

From the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the run-up to the 2015 Universal Exhibition that opens in Milan this month, the mainstream media carefully resumed the image of the old mafia boss, Toto’ Riina, dispensing death sentences from his prison cell. This concealed the real criminal power of the Calabrian mafia, Ndrangheta, which has deep roots in the Italian political machinery both local and central.

During the scandal about Expo 2015 politicians of the left and right have been convicted of collusion with the mafia. They had been buying votes and doing ‘favours’ to secure the juicy Expo 2015 public contracts.  The Calabrese mafia has huge amounts of capital to re-invest. According to a convicted Lombard entrepreneur:

 ‘If the mafia sees something that works, they invest in it, no bullshit, maybe they also do other stuff, sure! I know that! However, if it’s a serious business, the Mafioso sees it just like me, in the same way. He has the means to invest and he doesn’t need to go crying for money to the Bank, because he invests his own money’ (Monzin from ‘Ndrangheta in Lombardia: in manette politico Pd, infiltrazioni in Expo, Il Fatto quotidiano, by A. Bartolini and D. Milosa | 28 October 2014).

The mafia has the cash and has infiltrated the State machinery. No wonder that Italy is a country where its President  has recently testified about the so-called State-mafia negotiation of the 1990s.

What is the mafia?

How did the Italian ruling class get so entangled with organized crime? Moreover, what is the mafia in the first place?

The mafia is not a cool young Robert De Niro gaining respect in his block among southern Italian immigrants in New York at the end of the 19^th century. Even Bill Bonanno, son of legendary American mafia boss Joseph, who had every reason to cultivate a myth of his world, said that ‘The Godfather’ film gave a romantic image of the mafia. This image, though, still influences the behaviour of some young ‘Goodfellas’. The mafia is much more complex than a strong Italian accent, a big ring and a bulldog face.

A good overview in English of why organized crime was and is so nested into the Italian political and social structure, and why the mafia system has become so successful globally is given by John Dickie in his Mafia Republic. For those who read Italian Salvatore Lupo’s Storia della Mafia is definitely a must.

Nowadays, mafia is a general term used to identify a secret organization which operates according to its own set of rules that are outside the legal order of the bourgeois State. The means that the mafia makes use of are: violence (retaliation), intimidation, extortion, corruption, collusion of bourgeois institutions. Violence is usually the prerogative of the bourgeois State, but the mafia not only uses it, but counts on it to obtain silence from its own victims (omerta’). This silence is not a cultural tradition, as is often believed.

The mafia had its origin in a bargain struck with the Bourbon rulers of southern Italy and Sicily who were too weak to maintain internal as well as foreign order, combined with the weakening of the aristocratic class. During the occupations of the Italian peninsula, first by Republican and later Napoleonic France, the Bourbons did not mind using outlaws or brigands (briganti) to organize resistance. The Bourbons also made use of field wardens (campieri) as rural police (Compagnia d’Armi) to control public order, often giving weapons and power to common criminals. These emerging henchmen, either rural, in Sicily, or urban, in Naples, kept the Bourbons’ hated enemy, the liberal bourgeoisie, underdeveloped. Times were changing fast and the old regime had to keep up. Whereas in England Cromwell’s revolution had prepared both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie to cope with the emerging capitalist system, the old French, Spanish, Austrian and Neapolitan regimes were either crumbling or struggling.

The second even greater bargain that the southern Italian mafia entered into came with the Piedmontese occupation of the South of Italy (an occupation also called the Unification of Italy) after 1860. The political role that the occupying power gave to these secret groups during the Unification was vital. It set them up in the post-Unification capitalist era. A clear example of this can be found in how Garibaldi’s regime in Naples, represented by Don Liborio Romano, police prefect of the city, administered public order, nominating as City Guard the Onorata Societa’ della Camorra, namely the head of a band made up of little tyrants, loan sharks and racketeers. As Alexander Dumas wrote at the time, ‘Camorra’s power is the only real power Naples obeys’.

Not the same today

However, it would be a mistake to think that mafias, in Sicily called Cosa Nostra and in Naples called Camorra, were what they are today. Lupo captures this very well: the mafia

‘determines…internal hierarchies, independent from the general ones of the economy and politics, but throughout the entire first part of its history it remains a minor power compared with the power of major landowners and notables… the mafia during the liberal era or during the first republican period did not think at all to determine the content of the laws, leaving this type of problem… to major notables‘ judgment or… to local lobbies’ judgment. Then, things changed…  big landownership disappeared as a political and social entity… the notable gave way to the party machine… mafia affiliates… had much more freedom to interfere with politics itself, because politics redistributes the growing flow of resources it manages, by doing so paralyzing the administrative, public security and juridical apparatuses of the State’.

The third basis of the mafia was its discovery of America, and in particular, the Prohibition years. As a result of the colonial policy of the Piedmontese in the South of Italy, to which should be added the natural impoverishment caused by capitalism (described by Marx for England and Ireland in Capital), a huge mass of peasants who could not find jobs in the very few local industries, such as the salt and sulphur mines, nor in the northern industries, had to look for fortune overseas, mostly in America.

During the USA prohibition years, Italy was ruled by the fascist regime. The main reason why fascism reached power in 1922 was to stop workers and peasants causing trouble, which had characterized the years after the end of WWI. During WWI, in 1917, a self-proclaimed workers’ revolution succeeded in Russia and in 1919, for a few months in Germany and Hungary. Worker and peasant protests were widespread over the whole Italian peninsula. There were occupations of factories, such as Fiat in Turin, and of land, and mutinies of army regiments in Trieste and Ancona. The ruling class (upper bourgeoisie, landowners and industrialists) felt the need to suppress such movements. Thus, the violent acts of fascist squads against the workers and peasants were tolerated, and often welcomed, by the national and local authorities.

These fascist squads’ actions occurred mainly in the north and centre of Italy. In the South, and in Sicily in particular, the repression of workers and peasants was carried out by the local mafias. However, when the fascist regime won executive power it engaged in a campaign to destroy the mafias. There is general agreement today that only the lower layers of the mafias were touched by this. This was because the top layer was in bed with the political elite and so untouchable. In any event, many mafia affiliates moved to the USA, where business was good. Prohibition laws became the best business opportunity ever for the American mafia. It gave the American mafia led by families of Sicilian origin the chance to become the first organized crime network in the USA and to make a huge amount of money.

The Allies’ invasion of Sicily and the consequent second post-war period meant a real triumph for organized crime in the South of Italy. As Lupo points out, it is plausible that the Sicilian mafia organized itself at the end of the fascist era round the American model of Luciano, Coppola and Genovese, who had been expelled from the USA. Lupo thinks that without this American component the Sicilian mafia would have died out. But once more, the mafias in Italy acquired a political function.

At the end of WWII fascism had formally collapsed, while the Russian bloc had not. Worker and peasant conditions were the same as, if not worse than, before the war. There was a real risk that workers would again organize the same movements suppressed by the fascists between the two wars, and bring the country to the other side of the Iron Curtain. The risk was so stark that the US intelligence service was actively organizing prevention plans (e.g. a coup d’état).

It should not surprise anyone that there was a link between freemasonry, politicians, upper class members and mafia bosses. In the South, it was common for the Allied forces to put ‘men of honour’ in charge of local municipalities. Moreover, the suppression of those backing peasant struggle was carried out by the local mafias. In Sicily, the mafia killed 4 leftwing activists in 1945, 6 in 1946, 8 in 1947,  not including the 11 victims of the Portella della Ginestra massacre. The number of killings to suppress the peasant turmoil decreased only when in the 1950s agrarian reform brought about the systematic dismantling of the peasant cooperatives. Even so, it would be a mistake to think that at this stage the mafia had a political plan. Its aim was just to gain full control over its territory.

Business enterprises

The post-war reconstruction period (Marshall plan) was a key moment in the history of mafias in Italy. The mafia ‘does not make distinctions between sectors: agriculture, construction, commercial. What is important for the mafia is its monopoly on certain activities, first of all control, it is important that this is reserved to the gang (clan)’ Salvatore Lupo, Storia della Mafia). During this period, the mafias went through changes. They become less and less linked to the rural heritage and more and more to the entrepreneurial spirit, following the American model. Where the large landed estate system (latifundium) was dying, the mafia transformed itself, taking possession of public funding for reconstruction. Although this was a parasitic entrepreneurial system, entrepreneurship became a mafia speciality. This is the time of il sacco di Palermo (sack of Palermo), where ugly buildings would appear anywhere like mushrooms. The now republican State did not oppose this criminal entity, but actually became a tool of development for the mafia phenomenon. This is captured by Paolo Borsellino’s statement:

 ‘Mafia and politics are two powers, which rely on the control of the same territory: either they fight each other or they reach an agreement. The ground on which they can reach an agreement is the division of public money, the illegal profit on the public works’.

Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) represented the ideal political party with whom to share reconstruction money. The DC-mafia machine was just perfect. It was based on the old clientelism and patronage. This machine formed in a few years a huge inflated service sector, while industrial development remained paralyzed because of the mafia regime. This was a colluded Keynesianism, where public money went to Cosa Nostraand Cosa Nostra ensured DC political domination. Now ‘the mafia associate does not camouflage himself as entrepreneur: he is an actual entrepreneur, who makes use of the additional advantage of being part of Cosa Nostra’ (Giovanni Falcone e Marcelle Padovani, Cose di Cosa Nostra).

Beside the big public funds business,  in that period the business of the century -- drug trafficking -- grew. Sicily became a central hub for the refining and distribution of drugs. This was because of their preferential channels of distribution with the American families (clans) of Sicilian origin. This huge amount of money soon needed to find laundering outlets. It was no coincidence that during this period, the ‘60s and ‘70s, financiers, entrepreneurs, and constructors emerged from nowhere. In short, this was the time for people like Sindona and Berlusconi.

Not just Sicilian

Mafia in Italy does not mean only Cosa Nostra. In the ‘50s and ‘60s we see other criminal societies emerging, such as the Calabrese Ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra. But these mafias should not be understood separately from Cosa Nostra. They already existed from the second half of the 19th century, but they too now follow the Sicilian-American model and have become modern. Even though those three mafias are fairly independent from one another, they are still interconnected.

If we analyse the last 30 years we can see three main transformations in the mafia world: the decline of the Sicilian mafia in favour of the Calabrian Ndrangheta; the capillary expansion of the mafia into the North of Italy; the infiltration into the State apparatus -- the Anti-State that becomes the State.

The myth that the mafia is a problem only in the South of Italy is indeed a myth. Mafias expanded systematically thanks also to the forced exile of convicted Mafiosi to the northern regions of the country, such as Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Liguria. This showed the poor understanding of lawmakers of the mafia phenomenon. The mafia no longer depended on the control of the poor rural territory of the South. The mafia was a form of violent and rule-less entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. The North was an ideal virgin land for them. The Ndrangheta, in particular, was very effective in this expansion, because unlike Cosa Nostra, it clones itself, looking for the same basic criminal structures as the original. For example, Lombardy is also the name of the criminal organization bound to Ndrangheta, which has the same rites, language, customs, structure and hierarchal order as the Calabrian Ndrangheta (Atlante delle mafie. Storia, economia, società, cultura, a cura di Enzo Ciconte, Francesco Forgione e Isaia Sales, Vol II).

In the North the mafia, and in particular Ndrangheta, has evolved from the criminal point of view, in its ambitions, projects of control of the entrepreneurial and economic activities; broadening its relationships with public officials and public security and becoming attractive partners to earn votes in the elections. Ndrangheta is now present on the five continents, in particular in Canada, USA, Colombia, Australia, Switzerland, and Germany. Today Ndranghetais the world leader of cocaine trafficking.

We can now see why the Italian ruling class got so entangled with organized crime. It has always been and on several occasions has made political use of organized crime to accomplish its own aims. The mafia changed itself and became an integral part of the State. It is clear that the mafia is a criminal organization that today has only one interest, profit.

So the question arises: What is the actual difference between the lobby system and the mafia system? It is the code of written and non-written laws, but these two systems have the same aim. Both are based upon exploiting non-paid work. Both systems make use of force. The mafia system, on the one hand, is less predictable, but, on the other hand, it still needs thebeneplacito agreement of the bourgeois State, which has a repressive capacity hugely bigger than the mafia itself.

Finally, will the ‘legal’ bourgeoisie be able to defeat the mafia or will it accept it as an expression of itself? The problem is not only a moral one but also an economic one. At the moment the ‘legal’ bourgeoisie has used or has collaborated with the mafia, allowing the mafia to grow and to become competitive even in the ‘clean’ sectors. Since the bourgeois State has in principle the tools to annihilate the mafia, but so far has not done it, this suggests that it does not want to; but on the contrary, that it wants to make use of it.

Nowadays, the mafia has infiltrated the structure of control of bourgeois power, so things have become rather complicated. A pure repressive action may no longer be sufficient. It is a bit like the situation that the fascist regime had to face. In Italy, as well as in other countries, destroying the mafia means also amputating a part of the bourgeois State itself. The mafias have worsened workers’ quality of life and even working conditions, and the bourgeoisie did not, and does not, hesitate to make use of it to exploit or repress worker and radical movements. Therefore, the struggle against capital means also struggle against one of its peculiar expressions, which is the mafia, regardless of the ruling class’s moral crisis. 

CESCO.

Obituary: E. Ford (1976)

Obituary from the April 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ted Ford was the oldest member of the Party and had he lived a few more months he would have been 94 years of age. Ted, till the last, was cheery, full of fun and as optimistic as ever that the day was not far away when the workers of the world would embrace a Socialist system of society.

Born in the village of Thrupp, Gloucestershire, in 1882, he neither lost his accent nor his affection for the county of his birth. He was for years a contributor to the correspondence columns of the Stroud Journal, challenging unsound views on a variety of subjects and putting forward the Socialist message. (Nobody who became acquainted with Ted for long was unaware of the Party and the case for Socialism.)

Just after the turn of the century he came up to London to become an apprentice outfitter, living over the master's shop in Upper Street, Islington (a veritable Mr. Kipps). At that time he was a keen pacifist as were his parents and others in the family. An amateur actor, he joined the local group and there met the women who was to be his life-long partner.

The SPGB had been formed in 1904 and shortly afterwards Ted's burning opposition to the injustice and violence of capitalist society led him to attend the meetings of our Islington Branch and become a member. In 1906 the branch came into head-on collision with the Executive Committee and was finally expelled by the membership, including Ted. One might say a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater! He used to say that had he been more aware of the situation at the time he would have applied for re-admission.

However, he never lost either his concern or support for the Party and always considered himself a member.

During the First World War, when his time came, he stood up to be counted, declaring himself a supporter of the Party, and having no quarrel with other workers that justified their slaughter. Like many others he found himself serving his time in both Wandsworth and Wormwood Scrubs prisons. Outside these prisons Ted's family — his sisters and young nieces with their parents — would stand singing the 'Red Flag' and the 'International' and other songs to raise the spirits of the political prisoners.

Subsequently he re-joined the Party and during the Second World War was the literature secretary of the Edgware Group — later Branch — and is well remembered as a regular seller at the indoor and outdoor meetings.

Throughout his life he was plagued with deafness which was almost complete in his latter years. Despite this handicap he retained his cheerfulness, his great interest in literature and poetry and his optimism for the future.

His cremation took place on March 2nd, which was attended by relatives and friends, amongst whom were several members. A member spoke on behalf of the family and the Party.

A.H.G.

George Orwell: War Broadcasts and War Commentaries (1987)

Book Review from the December 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

George Orwell: War Broadcasts and War Commentaries. Edited and with Introductions by W J West (Penguin Books, £4.95 for each volume).

On health grounds, his TB having been made worse by a wound received in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell was unfit for military service in the second world war. From 1941 to 1943 he was employed by the BBC, then under the control of the Ministry of Information, to broadcast to British troops and others in India. The War Commentaries though written by Orwell were mostly broadcast by others, as weekly news talks on the progress of the war.

Orwell had been selected to conduct the broadcasts, which were designed to counter German propaganda, although he openly opposed British government policy on India which, of course, did not mean that he had a free hand to say what he liked. When governments are at war propaganda is itself an important weapon, to be controlled and directed as military strategy requires. All broadcasting was subject to censorship and Orwell, like other broadcasters, sometimes had his choice of subject or his choice of people to participate in talks ruled out by the censor. The editor of these two volumes sees how Orwell's experiences working for the BBC provided him with the background for his Animal Farm, published in 1945, and Nineteen Eighty Four, published in 1949.

Most of what Orwell said and wrote concerned incidents in the war and in the life of British civilians under war conditions but he was also able to deal with aspects of English literature. Among the writers he discussed with his accustomed insight were Shaw, Wells, Wilde, Jack London and Shakespeare.

Anyone hoping to find in these volumes evidence that Orwell had consistent political views will be disappointed. He seems to have shared the popular belief in the rosy future capitalism had to offer. In the broadcast English Poetry Since 1900 he criticised the earlier poets for their failure to appreciate the changes brought about by machinery and technology:

Every educated person knows that given a reasonable amount of international co-operation, the world's wealth could be increased, health and nutrition improved, drudgery abolished, to an extent unthinkable a few decades ago.

To a limited extent there is some improvement but nothing will prevent capitalism running into depressions with mass unemployment and, of course, into wars.

Orwell's occasional mentions of Marx and Marxists are interesting, including the unintentional humour of his remark (page 119) that "nowadays everybody has read Marx". He chose Harold Laski as a representative spokesperson on Marx. Laski's writings showed that his knowledge of Marxian economics was minimal, including a total failure to understand Marx's Labour Theory of Value. On the other hand, Orwell, rather surprisingly, did appreciate how wrong all the alleged Marxists were who believed that capitalism would collapse of its own accord, "automatically", and who attributed this erroneous doctrine to Marx.

While Orwell was carrying on this propaganda work for the BBC he received a letter of bitter criticism from the anarchist George Woodcock, which contained the following:

Comrade Orwell, former fellow-traveller of the pacifists and regular contributor to the pacifist Adelphi which he now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme left-winger, ILP partisan and defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the BBC conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses.

It may be that Orwell, in his own estimation, could see no inconsistency in his activities, but he does not appear to have answered Woodcock.

Edgar Hardcastle

Disestablishment (2015)

Book Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'The Establishment: and How They Get Away With It', by Owen Jones. Penguin £8.99

The Establishment, according to Owen Jones, consists of politicians, media barons, businesses, financiers and the police. They ‘manage’ democracy to ensure that it does not damage their interests. The Conservatives are its most natural political representatives, and the Labour Party in effect accepts the Tories’ main ideas. The Establishment shares mentalities but is not any kind of organised conspiracy. Its basic ideology is that of free markets and neo-liberalism, yet it is in fact completely dependent on the state.

Jones provides myriad examples of the connections among the different members of the Establishment. The mainstream media, for instance, are controlled by a small group of very powerful individuals, and the press and TV provide consistently misleading coverage, which often leads to people having absurdly exaggerated ideas about, say, the extent of social security fraud. Slightly awkward MPs such as Tom Watson and Chris Bryant have been subject to nasty personal attacks and may be put under covert surveillance. The BBC too is ‘a mouthpiece for the Establishment’, presenting the free-market view as an apolitical stance.

While benefit claimants are attacked in the press and people who are seriously ill are assessed by the likes of Atos as capable of working, there is a whole industry devoted to reducing the tax paid by the rich and the companies they own. Big accountancy firms such as Ernst & Young help design laws on tax avoidance and then advise clients on how to get round them. They have played a part in the increased concentration of wealth at the very top of the social pyramid.

The police, however, occupy a somewhat precarious place in the Establishment. They were needed to defeat the unions in the 1980s, especially the Miners’ Strike, and Thatcher’s government gave them a big pay rise. The police PR machine became very friendly with newspaper editors. But, with the Establishment now feeling more firmly in control, the police themselves have been subject to cuts and privatisation: in November 2012 thousands of police officers marched in London in protest against cuts.

Despite all the propaganda about free markets and freeing society from the dead hand of the state, the Establishment relies on the state machine to defend its interests. This covers not just bank bailouts but also the provision of infrastructure, support for research and development, the protection of property, and subsidies to companies via benefits for the low-paid. Organisations such as the Adam Smith Institute have succeeded in setting the framework for political debate, with anything slightly at odds with their ideas seen as completely beyond the pale. It is really only on the subject of the EU that the Establishment shows a divergence of views.

Jones gives a well-researched guide to all this and much else besides, which makes the milk-and-water nature of his own proposals all the more disappointing. In the foreword he describes the Green Party’s policies as ‘a genuine assault on the Establishment’ and in his conclusion he calls for a ‘democratic revolution’. But all this consists of is nationalisation, attacking tax avoidance, increasing the minimum wage and controlling private-sector rents. This might lead to some redistribution of wealth, but it will not truly disturb the status quo.

Paul Bennett

Sleuth (1987)

A Short Story from the November 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Grind's the name. Gary Grind. Special Investigator. Department of Health and Social Security. I hunt down the scroungers and moonlighters. Make the claimants sick, anti-social and insecure. Geddit? Sometimes this job means dark and lonely watches, staking out some dame's home to see if she's got a boyfriend supplying her champagne, caviar and designer clothes. Know what I mean? It's hard in the small hours with only a pack of Rothmans and your conscience to keep you company. Brings a man up against himself. Makes him ask - what's it all about?

I catch a lot of moonlighters through their hands. Hands tell a lot to a hardnosed, streetwise, keen eyed operator like yours truly. Clean hands, I reckon they're moonlighting - office cleaning maybe. Dirty hands, they must be moonlighting - doing up cars most likely. Hard hands, they're moonlighting - on the building site. Soft hands, bet they're moonlighting - window cleaning probably. The world's full of moonlighters and scroungers, getting benefit when they shouldn't, ruining the state, undermining civilised values. If it wasn't for dedicated public servants like yours truly they'd swamp the place.

The latest bit of moonlighting we're on to is these motor bike couriers. Means a lot of cold waits on street corners and roundabouts. It's not easy checking faces under those crash helmets and visor things. But you won't hear any complaints from yours truly. It's my job.

I suss out a lot in the pub. My local's just across the street from the betting shop. I can keep watch, see if any punter known to me is in there squandering the giro. Course, if he wins any money he's for it  -  undeclared income. The other day, got talking to this weirdo about my job. He reckoned the real scroungers will never need to apply for the social because they live off profit. Said I'm propping up the system of exploitation. Ever investigated that, he asked. Didn't like his face -  I can smell a trouble-maker a mile off. When I got up to go, I shook his hand. He looked surprised but I was only checking if he was moonlighting. Must always be on the watch.

Am I right or am I right?

Mixed Media: Inherent Vice (2015)

Film Review from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The 2014 film Inherent Vice is a sunlit noir Counter-Culture mystery written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, based on the 2009 novel by Thomas Pynchon. Joaquin Phoenix is stoner sleuth Doc Sportello in Los Angeles in the Spring of 1970, the era of Timothy Leary when the doors of perception were wide open. The film is in the tradition of LA-set detective films where a man finds himself in a mystery he cannot comprehend or solve such as Polanski's Chinatown, Altman's The Long Goodbye, and Penn's Night Moves, although Anderson said 'Hawks's The Big Sleep is impossible to follow, but it doesn't matter, you just want to keep watching it, seeing where it goes, that's what I wanted from Inherent Vice.'

The film's title refers to a property in a physical object that causes it to deteriorate due to the fundamental instability of its components, making an item an unacceptable risk to a carrier or insurer. Churchill once said that ' the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings.'

Inherent Vice concerns property developer Mickey Wolfmann, who under the influence of LSD tries to go back on his capitalist ways: 'I spent my whole life making people pay for shelter, when I didn't realise it should've been for free.'

The blissed-out gumshoe visits a private 'sanatorium' and Pynchon refers to California Governor Reagan's 'privatisation' programme which involved the closing of state mental hospitals. Dr E Fuller Torrey inAmerican Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System writes that Reagan associated psychiatry with Communism, and 'California became the national leader in aggressively moving patients from state hospitals to board-and-care homes.' Board-and-care homes became big business in California, and owners had financial ties with Governor Reagan. He was emptying state hospitals, and capitalist firms were profiting from it. Homelessness and criminalisation resulted, and homicides committed by mentally ill individuals who were not being treated.

Richard Nixon was in the White House, and the US government began the 'War on Drugs' with Operation Intercept to halt the flow of marijuana from Mexico, and the LAPD engaged itself in 'a long and busy day of civil rights violations' (Anderson). John Higgs wrote that 'the Counter-Culture was battered by the constant repression of the Nixon government.'

In anticipation of the 1970 California gubernatorial election, LSD proselytiser Dr Timothy Leary announced his candidacy for governor with the motto 'Come Together – Join the Party.' Leary said 'I'm going to legalise marijuana...(and) eliminate money from Californian society and return to a barter system' (Montreal Gazette 31 May 1969). According to John Higgs in I Have America Surrounded, Leary promoted 'extreme libertarian free-market ideals and utopian hippy fantasies.' Higgs points out that 'the idea of 'freak power', utilising the usually apathetic hippy mass as a democratic power base, had not been tested, but there were signs that it could emerge as a genuine phenomenon' which were seen in the Aspen Sheriff election when Hunter S Thompson stood as the 'Freak Power' candidate and narrowly lost. Nixon said 'Timothy Leary is the most dangerous man in America', and Leary's campaign came to an end in January 1970 when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The shadow of the Charlie Manson Family murders hovers over the film, the trial began in LA in June 1970. Inherent Vice portrays LA as pervaded by paranoia where 'every gathering of three or more civilians is now defined as a potential cult', and one character asks 'What would Charlie do?'  'Groucho Marxist' Jerry Rubin said he fell in love with Manson's 'cherub face and sparkling eyes', Bernadine Dohrn of left wing guerrilla group Weather Underground declared 'Dig it! Offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives, far out! The Weathermen dig Charles Manson', while Underground paper Tuesday's Child had a front page picture of Manson naming him 'Man of the Year.' Hunter S Thompson wrote 'bad craziness' was taking over.

In Inherent Vice the spectre of the schooner Golden Fang is a personification of 'The Man', which could be an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel, and symbolises the global narcotics trade as the invisible hand of unfettered, rapacious capitalism. Pynchon marks 1970 LA as the moment America let capitalism fly off the leash. In 1971 the cancellation of the direct convertibility of the US dollar to gold was replaced by freely floating fiat currencies which made 'Globalisation' easier through the free movement of capital around the world.

Even USA 'Founding Father' Thomas Jefferson speaks from the obverse of a nickel coin in Inherent Vice: 'the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants', although his statements that people needed to be vigilant against any law that 'violates the rights of the individual' and 'that government is best which governs least' are more suited to the Counter-Culture.

The epigraph to Inherent Vice is ‘Sous les pavés, la plage!’ ('Under the paving stones, the beach!') from 'Les événements' of Paris 1968, to which should be added 'Soyez réalistes, demandez l'impossible' ('Be Realistic, Demand the Impossible').

Steve Clayton

Sugar: Sweet for Some (2015)

From the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down’, sang the angelic Julie Andrews to a pair of wide-eyed children in the movie Mary Poppins. Julie’s advice must have enthralled the sugar industry, and set the hearts of marketers everywhere fluttering. Children as consumers represent a massive global market, and spearheading capitalism’s drive for the minds and money of children is the sugar and related sweeteners industry. At stake is an estimated global market projected for 2017 at $97.2 billion. A large slice of the forthcoming profits will be pocketed by the Fanjul Brothers, owners of Fanjul Corp, ‘which in 2010 comprised four raw sugar mills and 10 refineries in six countries, making them the world's largest refiner of cane sugar, producing 6 million tons of sugar annually' (en.wikipedia.org/).

Perhaps even Mary Poppins would have baulked at administering 20 spoonfuls of sugar in one go, but not Sainsburys. Their Orange Energy Drink has, ‘5.9g per 100 ml of sugar – which is the equivalent of 20 teaspoons for every 500ml’. As ever there are reformers demanding activity. In February, Action on Sugar, ‘has called for the sale of ‘energy’ and sports drinks to youngsters to be banned. They also ‘warned that children were being duped into thinking that the products would boost their performance on the sports field or at school’ and that, ‘The products served no purpose whatsoever except to make children addicted to caffeine and habituated to sugars, it claimed, while in the longer term they were fuelling the obesity epidemic’ (theguardian.com/26 February).

Even doting parent and thoughtful Prime Minister David Cameron disclosed to Parliament how he was ‘trying to stop 'excessive' amounts of Coca-Cola being consumed in the Cameron household’ (Daily Mail.co.uk, 16 January, 2013). This admission, albeit two years later, seemed to resonate with Tory MP Sarah Wollaston, chair of the Health Select Committee, when she confided to BuzzFeed News that she and her committee wanted to ask experts if it would, ‘work if we had a price differential between sugary carbonated drinks and unsugary ones, low sugar? So if you’re there at a supermarket shelf and one product is 10p cheaper than the other, would it help you to think – Well, I’ll go for the non-sugary one?’ Wollaston, a onetime GP, also posed an ideological question in a sugar-coated Mary Poppins-like way when she asked: ‘Are there ways we can take calories out of children’s diets in ways that doesn’t feel like a big nanny bossy state coming in with a big stick’ (3 February)? Something tells me that the naughty corporations aren’t going to have to take any nasty medicine, even from those who supposedly wield a big stick.

The Guardian reported that, ‘an investigation by the British Medical Journal revealed that health officials and ministers had 130 meetings with alcohol and supermarket lobbyists while they were considering imposing a minimum price per unit of alcohol. The proposal was dropped in July, allegedly because of a lack of concrete evidence’. Protecting corporate profits through political connections is nothing new. ‘In 1979, Margaret Thatcher set up the National Advisory Committee on Nutrition Education, chaired by Professor Philip James, a powerhouse in the drive to improve diet. It produced a seminal report, suppressed until it was leaked in 1983, that warned the British diet was connected to the major diseases of our time. Its targets to reduce sugar, fat and salt were ignored’ (12 February, 2014).

And in the U.S Bloomberg’s reported that, ‘Hawaii lawmakers killed a proposed tax that would have added 17 cents to a single-serve bottle of soda. It was the second failed attempt, even though Governor Neil Abercrombie had pushed the proposed levy… PepsiCo Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and the American Beverage Association have spent as much as $70 million on lobbying and issuing ads… Efforts to enact such levies have foundered in 30 states’. Judith Phillips, a Mississippi State University research analyst who studied the issue for lawmakers,summed up how things generally work under capitalism: ‘Whoever is loudest tends to control the discussion and, generally speaking, you buy your microphone with money’ (13 March, 2012).

Addictive

Action on Sugar suggests that sugar could be addictive. Dr. David Reuben, author of Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Nutrition agrees: ‘White refined sugar is not a food. It is a pure chemical extracted from plant sources, purer in fact than cocaine, which it resembles in many ways. Its true name is sucrose and its chemical formula is C12H22O11... The chemical formula for cocaine is C17H21NO4... For all practical purposes, the difference is that sugar is missing the ‘N’, or nitrogen atom... Through heating and mechanical and chemical processing, all vitamins, minerals, proteins, fats, enzymes and indeed every nutrient is removed until only the sugar remains... During the refining process, 64 food elements are destroyed. All the potassium, magnesium, calcium, iron, manganese, phosphate, and sulfate are removed. The A, D, and B, vitamins are destroyed. Amino acids, vital enzymes, unsaturated fats, and all fiber are gone. To a lesser or greater degree, all refined sweeteners such as corn syrup, maple syrup, etc., undergo similar destructive processes... Studies show that ‘sugar’ is just as habit-forming as any narcotic; and its use, misuse, and abuse is our nation’s number one disaster’ (macrobiotics.co.uk/ 3 March).

So too thinks Robert Lustig, the University of California’s professor of paediatrics who is, ‘well-known for his research into the effects of dietary sugar. He believes that sugar is addictive. In a recent interview he said: ‘There are five tastes on your tongue: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Sugar covers up the other four, so you can't taste the negative aspects of foods. You can make dog poop taste good with enough sugar’. Lustig goes on to reveal that, ‘table sugar known as sucrose, which is a made of two sugars (glucose and fructose) chemically bound to each other, is identical to high fructose corn syrup – which he describes as a chronic toxin’ (Independent, 4 October 2014).

Like the wolf eying the lambs, children are viewed as a primary target for the sugar industry. Spinning lies to them is accomplished by just a few multi-billion dollar advertising corporations. As Juliet Schor writes, ‘These corporations not only have enormous economic power, but their political influence has never been greater. They have funneled unprecedented sums of money to political parties and officials... The power wielded by these corporations is evident in many ways, from their ability to eliminate competitors to their ability to mobilize state power in their interest’. Straight from an arsehole’s mouth comes this truism: ‘No one’s really worrying about what it [advertising to children] is teaching impressionable youth. Hey, I’m in the business of convincing people to buy things they don’t need’  - an advertising executive, in Business Week, August 11, 1997, quoted by Richard Robbins’ (www.globalissues.org/article/237).

Enough is not enough

Advertisers are simply the unimaginative lackeys for an elite that includes people such as the Fanjul brothers. They’re fourth generation sugar capitalists. Their great grandfather was reportedly the wealthiest man in Cuba. Under Batista’s dictatorship life was uncomplicated for the family. The profits built off of the backs of their workers rolled in. Extravagant parties were thrown for other parasites like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but in 1958 Castro overthrew Batista’s dictatorship under the guise of socialism. The Fanjul’s sugar empire was seized and Castro now luxuriates in one of the family’s palatial mansions in Havana. Under capitalism the narrative repeats ad nauseam: The old king’s dead - long live the new king.

Palm Beach, Florida, welcomed the Fanjuls and their money which was quickly re-invested in land, plant and labour enabling a speedy return to capital accumulation. Hungry labour usually returns fatter profits so the Fanjul brothers were quick to exploit the US governments H-2 foreign worker programme, enabling, ‘the Fanjuls to bring in thousands of migrant workers, mostly from Jamaica, to cut their cane... Only the desperately poor cut cane and, without the farmworkers program, the Fanjuls may not have been able to harvest their fields. In the Fanjul fields, workers who did not cut fast enough were labeled ‘Code One’, which means 'refused to work – do not rehire’. Code One workers were sent home’.

In 1974, sugar prices rocketed and, inevitably, overproduction resulted. But, help was at hand for the kings of sugar: ‘The government rushed to their aid, and the current sugar program of government subsidies and price supports took hold. The government guaranteed to sugar farmers a price double that of the world market and placed quotas on sugar imports. Such a policy produces a windfall for the Fanjuls at the expense of American taxpayers’(eyeonmiami.blogspot.co.uk, 29 May, 2010).

For capitalists ‘enough’ doesn’t exist in their vocabulary. ‘According to the U.S. Department of Labor (2010), sugar is produced with forced labor in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar (Burma) and Pakistan and with child labor in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Kenya, Mexico, Myanmar, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines and Uganda’.

How much medicine you, your children and grandchildren have to swallow from the Fanjuls and their class is up to you. Life couldn’t be sweeter for them - and it’s at your expense.

Andy Matthews

Cooking the Books: Cashless is Not Moneyless (2015)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'WE DON'T NEED CASH. LET'S ABOLISH IT OUTRIGHT' was the perhaps surprising headline of an article in the Times (24 March) by Ed Conway, the economics editor of Sky News. His argument was that the continuing use of cash is negating the policy of governments and central banks of trying to control the economy by varying interest rates.

The theory behind this policy is that if interest rates go up people will be encouraged to save, and 'if a recession strikes, down go interest rates, and, in theory, everyone goes out and spends.' Leaving aside the fact that this mistakenly assumes that an economic recovery can be consumer-led whereas it has to be profit-led, interest rates are now so low that this theory, even on its own assumptions, is not working.

As the rise in the general price level has virtually stopped in the Eurozone, and has even fallen, the European Central Bank has resorted to negative interest rates. The rate is now minus 0.2 percent. The aim is still to encourage spending. But it hasn't. What it has done, according to Conway, is encourage people to keep their savings in cash rather than deposit them in a bank. Even banks are not depositing their cash with the Bank of England as they normally do but 'are stacking it away on pallets in warehouses under lock and key.' If you do this you don't get any interest of course, but at least it avoids you having to pay 'negative interest'.

Conway's solution is to abolish cash altogether so as to prevent people and banks doing this with the result that their spending cannot be controlled by the central bank (not that it is anyway). It's not going to happen but, even if it did, the resulting 'cashless' society' would not be the 'moneyless' society that socialists have always envisaged.

Socialism will be a moneyless society because, both productive resources and products when they are produced being commonly owned, there will be no exchange of goods and services of equal economic value, no buying and selling, only distribution (whether through free distribution or free access). So there would be no need of money as a means of exchange, money's primary function.

A cashless society would still have an exchange economy, the difference being that the means of exchange would no longer include notes and coins, only electronic transfers. In fact this is already how most exchange transactions are done. Capitalist firms and banks have long since abandoned transferring wads of notes to make a payment or a loan. And individuals are using electronic payments more and more. As Conway notes:

'The majority of our day-to-day transactions now take place using credit cards, contactless payment and charge cards (such as Oyster cards). Internet banking means you can transfer money to someone in a few clicks.'

Notes and coins are not in themselves money, but only tokens for it. There is no reason in principle why they couldn't be replaced by something else – by, precisely, digits on a computer. These too are still tokens for money because the purchasing power they represent circulates. If, like store cards, they were cancelled on use, they wouldn't be money-tokens but this is not what happens. They are transferred from owner to owner just as cash is and are just as much 'currency'.

Socialism will involve the disappearance not just of notes and coins but also of these other, electronic tokens for money as a means of exchange and payment. It will be a 'plastic-less' society too.

Eco-capitalism is Impossible (2015)

From the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 9 March the Socialist Party and Green Party candidates for Swansea West, Brian Johnson and Ashley Wakeling, met in debate. Here is an extract from what our candidate said.

The Greens' arguments and their policies are based on the assumption that under capitalism political parties in government can do what they like, and make a positive difference for the whole of society. The motivation is good, but unfortunately, the assumption is false. Capitalism is not open to manipulation so that it benefits the majority; it's a system that is very tightly structured to benefit only the wealthy few.

Put simply, support for the Greens means not only ignoring market forces but also ignoring an obvious contradiction in their argument. The contradiction is this: with market forces essentially causing and creating a sick society how can you realistically expect those self-same forces to solve it by proposing a form of eco-capitalism?

However, the Greens have chosen to ignore this and continually assert that they can make the market system a nicer kind of capitalism. But capitalism will still be capitalism, with no fundamental change in how we live and how we could live as it will be business as usual.

We'll still be faced with the same contradiction of poverty amongst plenty, the same issues and problems related to war, the same lame excuses that are offered that the system itself is fine; it's just those greedy bankers, or the immigrants, or dictators, or tax dodgers taking advantage of tax havens; or those who insist on playing by their own rules instead of fulfilling international agreements and obligations, etc.

Capitalism is a class-divided society driven by the imperative for those who own and control the means of wealth production to make a profit. It can only function as a profit system in the interest of those who live off profits.To advocate transforming the capitalist economy on the basis of offering a reformist strategy so that “it works for the common good” which the Green Party suggests is precisely what cannot be done. It's going to take a revolution to do that.

Socialists are much more aware of what members of the working class are up against and have no intention of misleading them by suggesting that capitalism can be controlled or that a string of green reforms will be of lasting benefit.

Socialism has been possible for a very long time; the main thing holding it back has been those who have thought, after all the accumulated experience, that something could be done to improve capitalism.

Capitalism is the cause of a range of environmental issues the world is facing, but can a socialist alternative resolve these issues? Crucially, would a socialist alternative have to curtail growth or could it administer an environmentally sustainable version of growth?

Marx considered that plenty was a necessary condition for the coming of a fully developed socialist society. Whilst many argue that removing want will require growth, most Greens argue that any growth is unsustainable.

Socialists put the argument round the other way: that it is impossible to tackle environmental problems without effective global planning and cooperation, a prerequisite for which is eliminating the conflicts that result from scarcity. Socialist contend that the growth needed to remove scarcity can be green, but only if organised in the context of a democratically planned socialist economy. One where production and distribution is based on human need and not markets and profits, where buying and selling is abolished and with them consumerism and all its associated waste, where any economic growth can be constantly assessed for the impact it will have on nature and society.

Socialists further argue that not only is pollution and environmental destruction caused by the profit system but also that it is the science of ecology that explains the processes by which pollution and environmental destruction resulted from releasing waste substances into the rest of nature at a rate and in amounts that it cannot cope with; that science and technology, far from causing the problem, provide the knowledge and techniques that can be used to solve it given the right social and economic framework; and, last but not least, that this framework is a less centralised society that produces to meet human needs not for profit, which could only be done in a stateless, moneyless, communist society.

Brian Johnson

Cooking the Books: An Ambitious Politician Promises (2015)

The Cooking the Books column from the May 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chuka Umunna, Labour’s Shadow Business Secretary, is being touted as among those who may succeed Miliband as Leader if Labour lose the election. It could therefore be revealing to look at what empty promises he is making in his bid for re-election in Streatham in London.

One ‘Re-elect Chuka Umunna’ leaflet states (the obvious): ‘Too many people don’t earn enough money.’ So what is he going to do about it? Make employers pay higher wages all round? He’s not that much of a demagogue, if only because no-one would believe a Labour government could deliver it. Instead, what he promises is:

‘Labour believes that helping people get higher paying work is the right thing to do … Labour will support areas of the economy like low-carbon and creative industries which can support new high paying jobs … Labour believes that the least everyone deserves is a wage they can live off, and a Labour government will help more people get higher paying jobs.’

This is carefully crafted to suggest one thing while meaning another (note the repetition of the term ‘higher paying’). The suggestion is that a Labour government will help workers earn more money. However, this won’t be for the job they are now doing. It would only be for workers who moved to work in some other sector of the economy said to be able to ‘support high paying jobs.’ Two sectors in particular are mentioned – low-carbon and ‘creative’.  Umunna doesn’t spell out how or why these industries would be able to offer higher-paid jobs than other industries nor how a Labour government would ‘support’ them, though probably there’s a Labour Party policy paper somewhere, full of provisos and let-out clauses, explaining this.

‘Creative’ is generally used to refer to specialised legal and commercial services that are sold to overseas clients (and which are not really ‘creative’ at all since they don’t actually create any new wealth, just make a profit from capturing a share of wealth already created in some other part of the world). As to ‘low-carbon industries’, it is hard to see how they could be made profitable without government help, whether tax breaks or direct subsidies, i.e., by being subsidised from the profits of other sectors of the economy.

Wanting to earn more money is a perfectly legitimate  aspiration for workers under capitalism, but they would be better advised to pursue this through their own trade union action than relying on the promises of ambitious politicians.

Elsewhere, Umunna makes a really wild promise:

‘I want a Labour government so we can fix the root causes of the problems people come to me at my surgeries for help with. I believe we can tackle the massive problems that exist with the cost of housing and childcare, with our transport system, and with low pay and insecure work.’

Fix the root causes? Really? Since these ‘massive problems’ have a single root cause in capitalism, with its minority ownership and production for profit, a Labour government is going to do nothing of the sort.  They would just tinker around without being able to tackle them. If re-elected he and the other MPs will find people continuing to come to their surgeries for help with the same problems as before since their root cause – capitalism – will not have been fixed. To really solve them capitalism will have to be ended but Umunna accepts capitalism and is on record as standing only for a ‘better capitalism’ 

Chuka Umunna's speech on a better capitalism: full text